With Nissin’s cup noodles featured heavily in the latest Final Fantasy game, the company decided to gift Square Enix employees with a ramen donation.

As much as it might seem like a stereotype, Japanese game designers love them some instant ramen. Seriously, I’ve seen it firsthand. Instant cup noodles – specifically the many flavors peddled by Nissin, Japan’s foremost instant ramen brand – are an invariable fixture of Japanese development houses, usually in the form of a literal pyramid of instant ramen cups stacked for the taking in the corner of the office.

Maybe that’s why Nissin’s noodles are featured in a storyline quest in the newly released Final Fantasy XV. After ten years in development, it looks like the designers of the game had scarfed so many carb-laden cups of Nissin noodles, they felt the need to pay homage to the brand in the game itself. Of course, the odds remain pretty high that this in-game name-drop was the result of a partnership between the two companies, but we’ll never know who proposed the partnership to whom. Our bets are on hungry Square employees taking the initiative in hopes of scoring a couple of free samples.

If that was their plan then they surely succeeded, with Nissin recently sending over a huge load of free ramen to Square Enix, the developers of the game whose headquarters is just down the road from the noodle manufacturer’s. The FF team were apparently almost too excited about the delivery, if this photo evidence is to be believed.

Square’s employees were reportedly so excited about Nissin’s donation of their next four years’ worth of calories that they’ve decided to create a Final Fantasy tie-in commercial with the brand, to be launched at some point presumably in the near future.

Whether or not the possible new FF-branded Nissin noodles look as appetizing as their digital counterpart remains to be seen, but provided that, as delicious as Nissin noodles are, their toppings tend to resemble and taste more like lab-cultured meat-like food molecules than the fresh slices of chashu pork adorning the game’s version of the classic snack/bachelor feed, we’re not getting our hopes up yet.

Details are still sparse about how and when this epic collaboration will take place, but if the Japanese reception of Final Fantasy XV is any indication, this commercial and/or novelty instant ramen flavor will be very, very popular.

Source: Hachima Kikou
Featured image: Twitter/Nissin