The JRPG Taco Bell is actually located in South Dakota

It’s impossible to predict when something will pop up on the Internet. That’s what I was thinking when I saw this photo showing a lonely Taco Bell set against the backdrop of an expansive midwestern landscape. This photo had been shared via Twitter by two people with toilet emojis. Just KnowIt was going places.

It joke read, “Anybody wants something from the jrpg world map tacobell?” It blew up because it was believable, receiving over 60,000 likes, and inspiring a batch of memes where people photoshopped images of JRPG landscapes onto the Taco Bell photo.

A Jay Holmgren, a Twitter user shared this tweet original image in the summer of 2021, with the caption, “i love when hotels have a great view.” He and his fiancé, Carlyn Haffey, had been staying at a hotel outside of Rapid City, South Dakota when she decided to snap a photo of the vista and told him to post it with the joke. Holmgren, who is a professor of medicine and health policy at UC San Francisco, told Polygon via Twitter that, “Years of posting my research and my twitter legacy will forever be the aesthetic Taco Bell.”

It was uploaded by Punished Joj, on Jan. 8th 2008, many years after the original image. shared the image and compared it to a JRPG landscape. It was just right for a small. Too well, and now loads of people online are talking about the “JRPG Taco Bell.” Here is an image of Shulk from Xenoblade ChroniclesWalking through the immense plains of South Dakota is Gaur Plain.

Everybody has to have fun. There have been many people creating images on their own, as well as editing landscapes taken from JRPGs. Editing has been done by many. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 14And Monster Hunter GenerationsXenoblade, however, is the one I love most.

It’s true that you could spend all your life searching for adventure, only to discover it right in your own backyard. As a fellow midwesterner and someone who doesn’t live all that far from South Dakota, I get a lot of shit for living in a place that’s not a coast or major city. The next time that I encounter this attitude I will be able to look at someone and tell them: We have the JRPG Taco Bell.