Naoki Yoshida, Final Fantasy 14's producer and director, has repeatedly described the MMORPG as a theme park for the series, with its wealth of distractions and references to multiple games.
If that's the case, then the Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest event is the real-life theme park: full of activities, but plagued by queue times.
This was the first in-person Fan Fest event since 2019's event in Japan, and will be followed by similar events in London in October and Tokyo next year. Fittingly this Fan Fest was hosted in Las Vegas, the theme park of America. Thousands of fans wandered the freezing, air-conditioned temperatures of the Las Vegas Convention Centre away from the sweltering 45-degree desert heat outside, like a real-life version of in-game casino The Gold Saucer.