Final Fantasy 15's In-Game Advertising Is Still The Worst

In-game advertising has been around long before Final Fantasy 15. Some games were even just playable ads, like Pepsi Man and Cool Spot, which were created to market soda brands Pepsi and 7-Up. Even McDonalds had its own platformer, and who could forget Burger King making games like Pocket Bike Racer and Sneak King – where you just walked around as the creepy mascot and stealthily handed people burgers.

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In NBA 2K there are ads for real-life companies like Beats headphones, PlayStation, and other companies that rotate on the front of the scorer’s table and on the side of basketball hoops. When you relocate or create a team, you get to actually choose which advertisements show up during games at those locations. Seeing an ad for Ruffles display on the scorer’s table while running up the court as LeBron James as I’m about to win back-to-back titles isn’t bothersome as it’s normal to see those types of ads during actual games.

However, that cannot be said for Final Fantasy 15 and its obscene use of in-game advertising. When you set up camp in the game, the gear you don’t just use regular nameless tents and folding chairs. Nope, you’re in fact using Coleman-branded camping equipment. If you look at the Japanese cover art below, you will see Gladiolus carrying the camping equipment as the group is walking and driving down the road.

Is this a video game or an ad for REI’s Summer catalog? If you walk into a shop you’ll see a window advertisement for American Express. The game even had a promotion with the credit card company in Japan where if you signed up and got approved for an American Express Gold, or American Express Business Gold card you would get a free copy of the game. The first 100 people to do so also received a Noctis figure. You’d also receive a  ¥10,000 ($73.71 in U.S. Dollars) gift card featuring the game’s characters if you spent  ¥150,000 ($1,105.60 in U.S. dollars) over the course of three months. Isn’t capitalism grand?

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But the worst of the in-game advertising within Final Fantasy 15 was probably Nissin’s Cup Noodles. Not only can you buy the nutritionally questionable snacks to feed your characters in-game, but there are also multiple advertisements dotted around, including a giant Cup Noodles-branded truck, not to mention an in-game mission triggered by a conversation with Gladiolus where you hunt down ingredients to make your own Cup Noodles. There are even parts of the game, Gladiolus, Noctis, and the rest of the gang spend good chunks of time walking and talking about the product.

There is even a Cup Noodles helmet you can get for free that drastically increases your HP recovery.

All this leaves you asking yourself: ‘Is this really necessary?’ This is Final Fantasy, not a game or studio that is struggling with sales and money. It’s understandable for companies to want to make money through in-game advertising, but Square Enix should’ve shown some principles here!

It’s especially egregious because Final Fantasy 15 is supposed to be set in a fictional world. It’s one thing to have advertisements for actual companies in sports games and games that take place in the real world because, for better or worse, that’s the world we live in. It’s normal to walk around the city in NBA 2K’s My Career and see Nike stores and Gatorade-sponsored performance centers because those are real things, but putting this stuff in fantasy worlds, and other worlds that don’t actually exist takes you out of a game and back into mundane reality.

What’s next? Are the Summons in Final Fantasy 16 going to drink a can of Coca-Cola, look at the camera, and say “Ahhh refreshing” before performing a special move? Granted, it takes place in a medieval era but the cans could be shaped like goblets or those bladders that were used to drink wine while traveling. In-game advertisements when used correctly can make a game world feel more real, but let’s leave them out of fantasy games. If developers and publishers are going to have products in-game, why not follow the GTA model and just making up names of products that riff on real ones? It makes things a bit more fun and creative rather than dystopian and bleak.

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