My trip to the Final Fantasy Cafes in Tokyo

Toshiya

I'm on another planet with you
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So as a few of you that have me on Facebook/social media will know, I recently made a trip over to Japan.
I thought I'd share some of the nerdiness with you :dave: as in Tokyo there are 3 (I think) official Square Enix/Final Fantasy themed cafes about, and we (me and my poor, bewildered, non-FF-playing boyfriend) visited 2 of them.

The first one, Artnia, is near the square enix headquarters in Shinjuku, and is a small cafe with a gift shop. Its not Final Fantasy themed with its decorations, but it is with its menu - heres me looking really pleased with a materia cocktail (it was frozen blue curaçao in pure gin so it looked a lot nicer than it tasted :tearjoy:). Theres also some chocobo pancakes, ice-creams with Aeris' bow and Cloud's Buster Sword in, and a moogle plushie I bought, and finally a really cool crystal decoration in the gift bit.














The second cafe is one they have in another end of Tokyo, where they make it themed entirely to do with one of their games. I was lucky enough to be there whilst it was still FF15, as the week after we left they totally re-decorated and changed the menu to be Nier themed.
Here's a few photos of the decoration etc and one of the menu. It was themed around Ignis' in-game cooking.







And we got served this on the plane home. Familiar?



Finally, for anyone who is a similar nerd level to me and/or enjoys studio ghibli stuff, heres a giant Totoro outside the Ghibli museum. And my latest tattoo... of a moogle :griin::griin: (he's new so hasn't settled down yet, he won't be that patchy when he heals. And that mosquito bite I got in Japan on my shoulder still hasn't healed :rage:)



 
:O! I'm jealous.

Those are two excellent restaurants which I would love to visit one day (the first one anyway, since the second one changes).

You say that the materia cocktail wasn't as great as it looked, but was the food in general nice? Or is it all in the display?
 
Yes the food was pretty good - in fact, the rest of the cocktails in that same bar were nice but the materia one is best avoided if you don't like gin... I mean maybe if you like gin it is good but still :lew:

The first place we went to had to had a full menu but as you can see by the photos we only had desserts - we never saw anyone ordering mains, only desserts and drinks, so I don't know if that place has a reputation of being only good for those things! Also both places were surprisingly reasonable price-wise, they could really hike the prices up but they don't seem to have.

The second, FF-15 themed cafe was the same - food quality was good, reasonably priced, and the drinks were nice. The only thing that disappointed Alex was that a few bits he would have eaten were sold out - it didn't bother me as I wanted the mother and child rice bowl anyway (surprisingly good!). Also the entrance to this one was booking only, at set time slots, and you either had to book online via an entirely Japanese system, or turn up at 8:30 in the morning and queue to basically draw a raffle ticket to see whether you got a table or not. We got lucky and drew a low number meaning we could have a time slot of our choosing, as there are 4 seats reserved in each time slot for this purpose :wacky:

Overall the food and drink was pretty good, probably better than you'd expect for cafes that cater to fandoms like that. Also the Japanese are absolutely mad for FF, and FF15 seems massively popular over there... in the second cafe it was full of big parties of giggling Japanese girls with a ridiculous amount of Noct/Prompto/Ignis/Gladio memorabilia. I think Alex was the only guy :lew:
 
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lmao, of course they had Ignis-inspired dishes. I wouldn't have been able to resist mocking the character by whipping out a notebook the moment a dish arrives and declaring that I've come up with a new recipe. :8F:

Ahaha, you essentially got lucky with RNG just to be able to dine at the FFXV cafe. That's amazing. :lew:

I love the Moogle tattoo too. The FFIX Moogles are easily the best designs in the series. The FFXIV ones aren't bad either AND I WANT THAT PLUSHIE. :rage:
 
lmao, of course they had Ignis-inspired dishes. I wouldn't have been able to resist mocking the character by whipping out a notebook the moment a dish arrives and declaring that I've come up with a new recipe. :8F:

Ahaha, you essentially got lucky with RNG just to be able to dine at the FFXV cafe. That's amazing. :lew:

I love the Moogle tattoo too. The FFIX Moogles are easily the best designs in the series. The FFXIV ones aren't bad either AND I WANT THAT PLUSHIE. :rage:


Haha yeah the dishes were a nice touch. I'd like to see how they do it with other games though, ones where parties neither cook nor eat at all :wacky: as in most FFs... I reckon for the FF12 re-release this year they'll do a theme of that, would love to go back for that :gonk:

We got so lucky :wacky: we only discovered the being-able-to-get-seats-on-the-day thing on our third to last day in Tokyo too, so we wouldn't have had chance to try again really if we hadn't got lucky. We just thought the seating was sold out and that was that.

Yes the FFIX moogles are by far the best :griin: and yes he's cute isn't he :lew:
 
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