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Hi there.
I'm a Japanese player playing on the North American server, struggling with English.

Today I'm going to introduce you to a place in Japan that probably isn't listed in any Japan sightseeing guidebook, and it's all about FF14!

You'd think it's just the location of the Square Enix headquarters, right?
Don't worry, there are others.
However, please keep in mind that the head office will be relocated from Shinjuku to Shibuya around November 2023, so this information is current as of the end of January 2023.

First, the headquarters.
Square Enix's headquarters is located in Shinjuku East Square, a building in Shinjuku East. I don't need to give you the address because you can easily find it with Google Maps, but the Shinjuku area is like a maze. Kabukicho, where the game was set, is also located in Shinjuku and has been faithfully recreated, so if you are interested, you should go there. (All this info about Kabukicho is about a game named YAKUZA!!!!)



Next to the headquarters is ARTNIA, the official Square Enix store. You can even get the ring that Yoshi P. is wearing. Incidentally, the building where Square Enix's headquarters is located is also home to the headquarters of several other companies, including TAITO, which is also headquartered in the same building.

In the basement of Shinjuku East Square, there is a convenience store named Lawson. I knew that Anthony Bourdain had praised the egg sandwiches at the Japanese convenience store. A friend of mine in the US Navy stationed in Japan also told me that no one in his workshop dislikes egg sandwiches from Japanese convenience stores. It's the military, so it's not just people who came to Japan because they like anime and manga and work there because they like it; there are probably a lot of people who wanted to go back to the U.S. or to another country. Considering that, I think it's seriously good for them.

By the way, music composer Soken-san seems to appear at this Lawson every day. His favorite is a pack of five small fried chicken pieces called Kara-Age-Kun. In fact, Square Enix and Lawson have a very strong connection and occasionally collaborate. I think it's mostly in the summer, sensibly. If your timing is right when you come to Japan, you will be able to eat the Karaage-kun produced by Soken-san, and you might even get a code to get a special Japanese original mount by purchasing a certain number of certain products at Lawson. I use the Japanese Square Enix system to pay my monthly fee, but apparently it is completely different in North America. So I have no idea if that item code works or not, but if it does, it's super rare, right? Hopefully the North American management team has a flexible mindset. Or you can contact the official Twitter account and they will get back to you with an answer. At any rate, I don't recall the collaboration product package stating that it only applies to Japanese servers.

Also, there is a curry restaurant nearby called SANRASA, which is frequented by Square Enix and employees of nearby Nissin Foods during lunch time. If you're lucky, you might even get to meet one of the development staff. But be warned, this restaurant is run by a curry geek, so the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity, and some menu items are only available for 30 servings a day.

Well.
Yosi-P and his crew do very casual streaming on a regular basis, and since it's not as formal as PLL, there's no interpreter. It's completely for Japanese players, but I personally wish they would put English subtitles in the archives for fairness, and I wish they would go play on the North American and EU servers to interact more with the general player population. Something I've noticed since I started learning English is that scenarios created in Japanese are a bit more nuanced in the English version. If you like anime, you'll understand if you play the game in Japanese instead of the English dub, but you'll see that the length of the sentences is totally different from the length of the English subtitles, and it's very difficult to translate. So I understand that the localization team is very busy and they have a tough job. By the way, Yosi-P and other staff members visit players' housing, join dungeons and raids in random matches and play with ordinary players, exchange opinions with ordinary players through the FF14 game screen, listen to their requests, and answer their difficult questions in a very sincere manner. He answers their questions sincerely. Yoshi-P's average sleep time is said to be three to four hours, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's going to collapse. When is his vacation? I wish he would go to Onsen Ryokan for 10 days to rest, because I can feel from them that they love FF14 players with all their heart. I know he plays FF14 while he's there because he's a heavy core gamer and he really likes to watch players having fun!

One of the restaurants they really use a lot in such streaming is a yakiniku restaurant called Tontsu in Sumida-ku, Tokyo. The nearest station is Kinshicho, which is about 20 minutes from Shinjuku station. They use this yakiniku restaurant for their "Uchi-age" after a long day of streaming, which is a term used to describe casual drinking with colleagues after work. It seems to be their favorite place, and Japanese FF14 players also frequent this yakiniku restaurant. I should also mention that the owner of the restaurant is also a FF14 player.

By the way, this restaurant has a nice atmosphere, is not too expensive, and the food is seriously good. Think of Yakiniku as Japanese or Korean style barbecue. If you look at the pictures, you can see that besides Yoshi-p, the other people who danced to Twinning's music at the 2021 Fan Fest are also in attendance.



The FF14 concept cafe is in Akihabara for Tokyo.
I don't think I need to explain Akihabara to anime and gaming nerds, but it's less of a nerd paradise these days than it was a few years ago. But still, that place could be a surprisingly nerd paradise if we were to describe it on a global scale. I'm a freelancer, and most of my work meetings take place in Akihabara. Mind you, it's on the second floor of a karaoke building, so you might be confused as to whether you're really in the right place when you enter the building. But since it is a karaoke bar that also focuses on food, the food may not be bad, but it fits the concept, and the food is exactly what is pictured on the menu. The one drawback is that it's a little expensive. You're better off thinking of it like eating at a theme park. By the way, don't worry if your kids tell you, there are plenty of non-alcoholic beverages available, and karaoke in the U.S. is quite different from karaoke in Japan. To be honest, I was a little surprised when I learned about American karaoke at Big Bang Theory.

You can make reservations through the website, so you should definitely do so. The café is a time-shift café where customers must enter at the specified time and leave at the specified time, but if you go there without a reservation on the day of your visit, it is more likely that you will not be able to get a seat for that day.

That's all for now, I would like to share with you, as a purely Japanese player born and raised in Japan, an introduction of Japanese tourist spots related to FF14 that you will never find in any guidebooks. If you ever get a chance to travel to Japan, consider it!