"Kiita koto no nai Oukoku de...ryouri taikai ga aru rashii..."
Japan is a country full of great games, but did you know that there's more to Japan than
just that? Shockingly enough, there is, as it's is also a country full of great food.
No matter where you are, there never seems to be a shortage of places to grab a delicious
bite to eat. The culinary arts are serious business here, and a lot of stress is put
on the “arts” part. Though as an obsessive gaming fanatic weirdo, it's often hard to
find the right balance between game hunting and eating right. There have been many instances
in my life where an awesome gaming haul meant going on the cup noodle diet for a day or
two...or ten. Yeah...well, anyway, when I'm at that point, I figure that since I'm not
eating the best food around, why not play some games where I can imagine I'm eating
the best food around?
In 1999, a time in gaming before touch pads, styluses and waggle sticks, and before Cooking
Mama became synonymous with food games, one excellent title on the original PlayStation
absolutely nailed the cooking game formula in an innovative way, and is most certainly
(better than mama!). Ore No Ryouri was published by Sony Computer Entertainment and developed
by Argent. Or as this old lady would say: (AH-GEN-TOH, ah ha ha ha ha). This game is
one of the few PS1 titles that absolutely requires an analog controller to play, as
a majority of actions in the game are performed by using the left and right sticks.
In Ore no Ryouri, customers will sit down at a counter or table and order food, and
it's your job to prepare, cook, and serve each and every dish. This means performing
tasks such as pouring drinks, chopping up vegetables, stirring pancake mix, and as risque
as it may sound, pounding the mochi and beating the meat. Seriously.
Story Mode is where you'll spend most of your time in the game, where you play as a nameless
protagonist who is invited to a cooking competition being held on a strange land called the Coo-Kingdom.
"Coo-Kingdom"...cookingdom. Ha, see what they did there? This competition is actually a
ruse however, set up by the antagonist, this little frog guy chef. Before the protagonist
showed up, he was the number one chef around. Sick of being stuck at second place all the
time, he hatches a plot to publicly shame the hero in an effort to get him to withdraw
from the event so he can claim his top spot once again.
Each stage in the game has pretty much the same set up—you stumble into an eatery looking
for the competition, the person who runs the place mistakenly believes you're the new worker
they've been waiting for, and it's up to you to use your excellent culinary expertise to
keep the restaurant from going under. Before the stage begins, you have the option to learn
what kind of food and drinks the restaurant serves, but more importantly, how to make
them. As stated earlier, almost every action in Ore No Ryouri is handled with the analog
sticks, so that's how you'll put prepare your meals. Take the first stage, for example.
It only has two very basic items on the menu—beer and ramen. To prepare beer, you must first
tilt the glass by pushing down on the left analog stick, then pushing down on the right
analog stick to pour the beer from the tap, returning the left analog stick to the resting
position as you pour.
Hey now, look at that! I learned how to pour beer! Pretty sweet!
Ah, fuck!
Cooking ramen is a little more complicated than pouring beer here, as it is in real life,
and first requires you to chop up some vegetables or meat by moving the right analog stick up
and down to slice while pushing the left analog stick ever so slightly to the left as you
do so to guide the path of the knife. After that, you need to put the noodles into a pot
to boil, and press the circle button to turn off the heat, the perfect time to do so is
when the water just starts to steam and boil. The final step is to pour just the right amount
of broth into the bowl by nudging the right stick down, then back up, and after this is
done, the dish is served.
Each level introduces a new restaurant for you to cook at, ranging from a fast food joint,
a family restaurant, and a place of fine dining, to name just a few. The constant switching
of locations means an ever changing menu, and you'll always have to learn how to prepare
new dishes as you go through the story mode. The complexity of these menu items increases
over the the course of the game, adding more steps in order to complete and requiring increasingly
precise movement of the analog sticks and carefully thought out, timed presses of the
face buttons. Ore no Ryouri implements a strict numerical grading system that judges how well
you perform each step in preparing your meal. The sensitive control of the analog stick
movements means that even pushing one of them just a hair too much or too little can mean
the difference between a perfect grade and utter failure. “Practice makes perfect!”
Or is that “practice makes permanent?” Or...whatever, just keep trying and you'll
get the hang of it.
But once you get the hang of it, you'll have to deal with the real challenge of this game...
time management.
Just mastering the moves of a kitchen stadium warrior isn't going to earn
you the General Tso's medal of culinary excellence here. Oh no, you're going to have to break
at least a few buckets of sweat in the process, because Ore no Ryouri is a fast-paced, stress-inducing,
panic attack of a kitchen nightmare. At the beginning of each stage, customers will slowly
trickle into the restaurant, placing their orders, for which you have a fixed amount
of time to prepare. You can take things relatively slowly the first wave of patrons, but sooner
or later you'll be bombarded with a steady stream of customers coming in and out, turning
gameplay into a juggling act of preparing food as well as possible while at the same
time racing against the clock to serve it before time runs out. Taking too long to complete
a customer's order will cause them to storm off and leave, and serving bad food will result
in unsatisfied patrons. There are also gourmand characters who are extra difficult to please...what
are these guys, yelp critics?
(Hi, yes, the steak please. I'm the, uh, Yelp Elite).
There's a meter on the right side of the screen that tracks how well you're doing in the level.
The better you do, the more your marker moves up to the circle at the top, and getting there
results in successful completion of the level. However, the worse you do, the more the marker
slides down, and hitting the X at the bottom leads to a game over screen.
With most menu items requiring multiple steps to prepare, and some also requiring extra time
to boil, bake, or fry, you can imagine that keeping the meter from depleting completely
can be a pretty tricky thing to do. Making matters even worse is that there are certain
hurdles that the game throws your way that you'll need to deal with immediately, even
if you're in the middle of making a delicious dish. These include stomping on cockroaches,
washing dishes, calling the authorities to remove people who've downed too many sake
bombs, exchanging money, and chasing down scammers pulling an eat n' run. Depending
on your luck, these distractions can potentially take up quite a bit of time, and failure to
deal with any one of them causes a mass exodus of disgusted customers.
Thankfully though, the time to make many of the dishes can be cut down drastically, since
for multiple orders of the same item, you can combine certain steps, such as frying
several prepared patties of hamburger meat together in the same frying pan. At the end
of each stage, when the dust has settled and you're ready to clock out after a busy, successful
day of work, you're always challenged by a rival chef, most of them being henchmen of
the frog guy. These boss battles play out just like the normal stage, except with a
couple of new stress factors thrown in. You'll still need to completely max out the meter
on the side, but you'll have to do so faster than your adversary, or else you lose the
match and need to start the stage over right from the start. Performing well will stifle
your opponent's progress by sending out attacks in the form of the previously mentioned hurdles,
but it's a two-way track, as you'll be under siege by similar attacks coming from the other
side...and you'll be getting them often, because the AI in this game is pretty damned ruthless.
It's tough, but I did end up beating the game ...but only on easy mode. I'll admit that
I had to switch over after spending about an hour getting destroyed in the second level
rival battle and losing patience. Easy mode is a little more lenient on the player for
making mistakes, and further lessens the difficulty by giving more time to prepare food and deal
with distractions. Unfortunately, like many other games from the era, you'll only be getting
a partial experience by playing easy mode, since the story is presented quite differently
between the difficulties, and there are only six stages compared to the nine available
in normal.
Maybe I'll try to go back and take on normal mode again someday, since I do have the official
guidebook for Ore no Ryouri, which gives a lot of advice on how to best prepare each
dish, including pointers on the ideal placement of your hands on the controller and other
far out tips. It's a really colorful, well-presented guide with a lot of interesting pictures and
some interviews, even one with the real life inspiration for the “obachan” character
that plays a role in every level of the game.
Speaking of good presentation, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the awesome
package design of the game itself, with its clever disc and back label artwork. Now that's
just genius. This game can be pretty difficult and isn't for the faint of heart, but despite
me painting the picture of Ore no Ryouri being a one way ticket to wracking your nerves and
losing your hair, I assure you that it's a ton of fun. It's a special little game, full
of the right amount of charm and quirk, with exciting, challenging gameplay, colorful,
stylized graphics, and a soundtrack that perfectly fits the mood. Aside from the story mode,
there's an omake bonus mode that lets you play several mini games utilizing the analog
sticks that probably won't keep you busy for too long, but makes for a nice distraction.
And finally, there's a 2 player mode that let's you face off against a friend in a normal
“full-course” kitchen battle, much like the boss fights from story mode, or with single
menu items via the ala carte mode. The amount of multiplayer content here isn't exactly
overwhelming, but I can say without hesitation that I've rarely had a better versus gaming
experience on the PS1 than from what I got with Ore no Ryouri.
Although the game was never released outside of Japan, it seems like there may have been
plans to bring it over to North America at the very least, since it was made available
as a bonus import demo in the Summer 2000 PlayStation Underground Jampack demo disc.
Thanks to the Xbox chef himself, The Dali Popka, for telling be about the game and his
experiences with this demo in his youth, and requesting an episode on it.
Well, that's the end of the meal folks. Did this video leave you hungry for more import
gaming treats? Well, this was just an appetizer, because there are more food video game episodes
to come in future episodes of Import Gaming FTW. Until then, thanks for watching, and
don't forget to tip the host with a comment or a share, or by checking out some of my
other videos. Anyway, take care.
Bon appetit! *sigh* What the hell am I doing with my life?