Final Fantasy XIV players in China are eating ludicrous amounts of food in order to get a free Fat Black Chocobo.
Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion, Shadowbringers, just came out earlier this month. Along with the new world and entirely new story-based campaign, they also introduced a couple of promos to get people to buy. One of those promos was the Fat Black Chocobo.
TheGamer doesn’t have any experts on animal husbandry, but we’re pretty sure a Chocobo with an eating disorder would make a pretty bad mount. However, Square Enix disagrees, as do many FFXIV players as evidenced by the number of morbidly obese blackbirds running around.
The Fat Black Chocobo is equally as desirable to Chinese gamers, but they have a different avenue of getting one. It’s called the KFC Black Chicken (Ultimate) challenge. Basically, everyone who orders a family package will get a code for a free Fat Black Chocobo.
On the surface, this seems pretty simple: order food, get a free code, go home happy. This might result in eating fried chicken for a week, but whatever--small price to pay for a Chungus Chocobo.
However, this deal is only available to dine-in customers. That means you have to go to KFC, order the family package, and sit down to eat it.
How much food is in a family package? Well, it’s intended for a family of four, so it includes 1 Double Chicken Burger, 1 Vegan Mushroom Burger, 1 five-piece Chicken Nuggets, 2 Original Recipe Chicken, 2 New Orland Chicken Wings, 1 Old Beijing Spicy Duck Roll, 2 large Pepsis, and 2 large Peach Oolong Teas.
If you’ve got three friends who don’t play Final Fantasy XIV and could go for some fried chicken, then there’s no problem. But a lot of Chinese players were heading into KFC solo to try and eat this monstrous amount of food. Naturally, many of them failed.
Adding to the rush of hungry gamers was an initial limit of 300,000 codes, but that limit was eliminated when KFC found out how many FFXIV players loved fried chicken. Or just wanted a Fat Black Chocobo. It got to the point where it became a meme on Chinese social media, with many FFXIV fans exchanging strategy on how to consume that much food at once.
The original Reddit post from user Cozywolf implied that the meal had to be successfully eaten to get a code, but you get the code regardless of completion. Still, Chinese custom looks down upon unfinished plates, so there are lots of folks stuffed with KFC over there.
