You know the food is about to be life changing when the advertising/menu looks like this

The Mike Matei sauce might actually be the fakest you could possibly make a real product look, like I'm 100% convinced it doesn't actually exist

Space Station Silicon Valley comes to mind, as well as Army Men: Sarge's Heroes and the Toy Story 2 game

You think if they were gonna go through the trouble of adding calorie-costing sweetners in tiny amounts they'd swing for real sugar, which might be a selling point, instead of just a *little* bit of syrupy grossness

Yeah the price was a little atrocious, but what the hell, I figured it's not every day you get good quality official FF9 merch, especially not of Freya. Early Xmas gift for myself.

This just makes me wonder why I've not ever seen a PB&J bar before

Cause I couldn't really tell you at this point what towns I've even passed through, what they were called, and what was going on there beyond vague "they're dealing with the war" vibes. I understand the focus is on the Taranis/kids but a bit more fleshing out would have been nice

This has kind of wound up depriving the world of a lot of potential personality, to me, and turning it into one of those war stories where I lack a connection to the country/landscape/world I'm nominally/partially fighting for, always kind of a sad thing to happen

I think the only thing I'm still kind of disliking is the lack of focus given to the towns? When I originally saw Fuga I imagined there being a Layton-esque picture exploration concept with towns, but they're just one image and some text/shop menu options, which is a little sad (very pretty though)

I think it's just a side effect of these kinds of passion projects being made by people who are naturally very deep into the medium/field and want more out of it, in the same way fangames/romhacks are often very hard/mechanically finessed compared to original titles

People (justifiably) talk a lot about how Gen AI slop needs to fade away but honestly its been an even longer time coming for the incessant subscription-ization of literally every product in the entire world

It is so hilarious that the so called "sentient" computers that are good enough to replace everyone (except important CEOs™️) still can't deal with object permanence, spelling or consistent logic

I'll see if I can be a bit faster than 16 years between release and getting around to it for the Heroic Edition