Final Fantasy 14 has a long and funny history with food. First we had the great grape era, when fans delighted in the game's wonderfully blocky fruit. Now, people are losing their shit over a new bao animation, and boy oh boy is it impressive.
As reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, fans have taken to Twitter to bao down to the bun animation. You may be wondering why, but remember those low poly grapes? Yeah, FF14 has come a long way.
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The bao animation in question shows a character pulling it apart in their hands. The bao stretches, comes apart at the edges and then the middle, and jiggles before settling as steam bursts forth. You may be thinking, "what's so cool about that?" Well, it's really bloody hard to animate that sort of thing.
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Think about it, back in the day, and even in many games now, you rarely see characters handing things to each other. It's why game developers all looked on in awe when Ellie took off her shirt in The Last of Us Part 2. Whenever a character has to get changed they go off-screen for a bit and come back, because it's hard to animate an item of clothing separately from a body.
Fanbyte section head Michael Higham shared more details about the bun. They wrote that it is based on a siopao, a Filipino food adopted from Hokkien Chinese immigrants. "It’s not just any old steamed bun or version of bao, it’s a long-standing staple that represents our culture and cuisine," Higham writes.
As well as praising the animation in FF14, people also paid homage to one of the all-time food GOATs, the bread in Yakuza 7. It tears in such a realistic way and even looks fluffy on the inside. It's a technical marvel, just for a bite of food.
People love food in games so much that a pair of YouTubers made every sandwich from Pokemon Scarlet & Violet to see how good they tasted, Harvestella referenced FF14's low-poly grapes, and one fan even turned them into earrings.
In other, less important Final Fantasy 14 news, its next expansion will finally raise the level cap to an even 100. This is up from the previous cap of 90. Since Heavensword, each expansion has raised this by ten levels, so who knows where it'll end up?