Does your mind get blown when you find out that the origin story of something you love is nothing like you pictured it? Like, how wild would it be to learn that the Final Fantasy series was inspired by a beverage commercial? Well, buckle up.
One of the most famous pieces of Final Fantasy trivia says SquareSoft picked that name because the company was in dire straits, knew it would be their last game, and wanted to go out with a bang. Cool story, bro; too bad it’s bunk. The original Japanese name for Final Fantasy actually translated to something closer to Fighting Fantasy in English, which immediately proves that whole story is rubbish. Also, why would a company expect to close after making a great, successful game? Final Fantasy wasn’t made in 2026, after all.
I’m reasonably well-versed in video game history, knowledgeable enough to know that many of the game development tales we’ve been hearing throughout the decades are completely fabricated, but a lot about Final Fantasy‘s origins remains a mystery, so I was pretty surprised when I stumbled upon a post on Bluesky putting forward the idea that a lot of Final Fantasy was actually inspired by a pretty silly energy drink commercial, starring Cindy Crawford, where the supermodel dons a set of armor to seemingly battle it out with an invisible enemy.
No offense to Crawford, who’s not really a fantasy knight, but her sword moves are so stiff they seem straight out of an old game. All meanness aside, even if that armor heavily resembles the outfits of Yoshitaka Amano’s era, it’s hard to tell whether the commercial itself inspired the people behind the popular RPG series. Still, we do know the commercial’s art direction was handled by the late French comic book artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, who is one of the greatest names in manga and anime. To give you an idea, the creators of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and many of Studio Ghibli’s works cite Moebius as a main source of inspiration. I find it incredibly interesting that, even if unintentionally, his stint with commercials might’ve proved equally inspiring to a completely different type of media.
So, if you’re of the mind that the French completely ripped off Final Fantasy and Japanese RPGs to make Expedition 33, well, then think again, as they might’ve just been reaping what they’d sowed over 30 years ago.
To make matters even more interesting, the same thread revealed that Cindy Crawford’s adventure with games wasn’t over after that commercial, as she’d go on to model for none other than Samus Aran in an early iteration of Metroid Prime.
I had no idea about any of this. Regardless, did the aesthetics of Final Fantasy really originate from the commercial for a drink with a name as dumb as “Pocari Sweat”? I don’t know. I do know, however, that in the 2000s, SquareSoft made an actual soda commercial starring the characters of the most nostalgia-bait-y of all Final Fantasy games, so there’s some food for thought.
There’s no way of knowing for sure, just like you can’t count just how many other cool pieces of media might’ve gotten inspiration out of such a then-peculiar ad. What I do know for sure, however, is that Final Fantasy fans sure do like a good fan theory, even ones that have been thoroughly debunked by the game’s creators—which is not the case with this one—so good luck getting this one out of your heads whenever you see classic Final Fantasy popping up anywhere.
