I stumbled over a little game called "Adventure Bar Story" in the 3DS Eshop, an anime-styled game where you run a Bar by being a great chef, and you give yourself an edge by collecting ingredients in 'dungeons' (more accurately described as just outdoor locales) and fighting monsters in generic RPG turnbased combat.
I have to say though, for a game that looks so generic and so cheaply made, I've just fallen in love with it. I say that in earnestness, cause while it's individual components seem uninteresting, put together it creates a very enjoyable pace for this little game.
What ties it together is the cooking. There's 100+ dishes you can make that you need to sell, in order to make money and make your Bar a successful business, which is the ultimate goal of the game. You also need to cook dishes to level up your characters, or as the game puts it "The only way to level up is to EAT!" and goddamn do your characters need to eat alot, hucking down 5-6 pizzas a day is pretty normal. Certain foods also afford your characters temporary buffs for that day. Money from sales is random, but influenced by how prestigious your restaurant is, variety, value of the dishes, a dish's demand, and how 'stale' an item is; you can't keep serving the same things over and over again, or else people get sick of it and won't buy.
With the money you get from transactions, you can buy more ingredients to make more dishes, but also you can use spare cash for consumable health potions, phoenix downs, weapons, armor, etcetera.
So, in short, your cooking ability directly translates into your progression through the story, your character's levels and ability, your items, your buffs, and your weapons/armor. It's very unifying in how it ties together every element of the game at once.
Of course, as you progress through the game, you have to continue learning new recipes. You have dozens of ingredients, but how to put them together to form worthwhile dishes is anybody's guess! Fortunately, there's recipes everywhere in the game, you can buy them from merchants, find them in books, or from talking to people in you adventure. As you acquire more ingredients and talk to people, the game also throws 'hints' your way, which are incompleted recipes, and you can try to piece together the missing ingredients. It's extremely satisfying, in that not only do you have to spend time in the game to advance your characters, but you have to actually think and learn about the game's world in order to advance through it, otherwise you simply can't succeed.
This is one of those games where you simply can't rely on GameFAQ's or any outside help at all, relying on your own smarts is what makes the game enjoyable.
Moreover, it has a time limit mechanic, in that each day lets you do exactly one thing: You can go to a dungeon to collect free ingredients and fight monsters, or you can visit a neighboring town to purchase unique ingredients from their local stores and use other game mechanics found there. Every ten days the game is gauging your progress in a cooking competition, so you have to use your time wisely! Limited Time mechanics are things I love alot. I love it here, I loved it in Persona 4, I loved it in Recettear, and I wish more games used it. It really makes you appreciate the weight of your actions more.
I just wanted to gush real fast about this dumb little game I've found a surprising appreciation for, cause otherwise I'm sure noone will ever look at it.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3121667 times)