PlayStation Basement #13 - Ore no Ryouri

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on November 24th, 2018. It has been edited slightly for formatting.

It’s a gloomy Saturday here in Pittsburgh, but it’s time for PlayStation Basement. Like every Saturday, I’ll be reviewing an overlooked or odd game for the original PlayStation. As always, I’ll be using a nine-point scale where 7-9 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad.

Since Thanksgiving was a few days ago in the United States, let’s talk about food. One of the few games I could think of about food was Ore no Ryouri (meaning something like “My Cooking”). This is also one of my favorite games and the reason I wanted to get a Japanese PS2/boot disc. It was released only in Japan in 1999 and later in 2000 and 2002 under “PlayStation the Best” and “PSOne Books” lines of Greatest Hits games. The game was developed by Argent and released by Sony. Along with many others outside of Japan, I first played this game on the Summer 2000 PlayStation Underground Jampack where it was seemingly mistranslated as “I’m the Chef”. PlayStation Underground was a disc-based magazine of PlayStation demos, cheats, tips, saves, videos, interviews, and news. Jampack was a sort of sampler of the actual PlayStation Underground, about half the size of the quarterly issue. The Summer 2000 issue had Ore no Ryouri as an import, which they often included on these discs, among North American releases like Medievil 2, Tomba 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, Syphon Filter 2, and even some games that were not sequels. Though the demo of Ore no Ryouri was untranslated, the menu gave some instructions, and my friend and I were able to play the game. We played that demo a lot, just the one level. I was so happy to finally get the game over a decade later.

When I finally decided to seek out a copy of Ore no Ryouri, I was surprised by the cover art. While the game employs a cartoon style somewhat similar to Parappa the Rapper, the cover art shows a very realistic cutting board with a knife and chopped scallion. The dark background and spotlight on the food is very strange, but it works. It gives a very subdued look at a not-so-subtle game.

The in-game graphics are another story. Ore no Ryouri features bright cartoon characters and settings. The characters are somewhat chibi, with big heads and small bodies. They tend towards caricatures and change costume with each of the nine restaurants; they are always the same few customers under those clothes though. The actual foods and cooking tools look nice and are the only 3D objects in the game. There are also some FMVs that really do resemble the similar 3D cutscenes in Parappa the Rapper. The wacky and colorful style worked well with both of these games.

Just like the graphics, Ore no Ryouri has a fun, upbeat, and zany sound design. The sound effects are great, having a real depth to them. I love the chopping sound when cutting a daikon or eggplant. Liquids slosh, pans fry, and customers give their input on their food. The voice-acting is excellent with a lot of soundbites from the cashier greeting the customers to the people yelling about poor service or loving their food. The music has a range of styles from electronic to traditional Japanese music. It changes to match each restaurant. The sound designers did a great job at making Ore no Ryouri fun to play.

Gameplay itself is excellent. Ore no Ryouri is a time management simulation of minigames with simple controls that can be difficult to get perfect when under pressure. Other than confirming which customer to cook for at a time, all of the controls are done with the analog sticks, a rarity for the PlayStation (the only other game that requires them that I can think of is Ape Escape). One stick may control determining where to cut a vegetable while the other is used to control the cutting. One may control pouring ice cream into a cone while the other controls twirling the cone to get that perfect presentation. The foods change based on the theme of each restaurant, including fast food, hotel, family restaurant, carnival food stand, castle, and even somewhere that seems to be the land of the dead(!). There’s some nice rumble from the DualShock that really adds to the experience here as well.

In each level of the game, representing one restaurant, the player must satisfy enough customers to raise their rating to the top. Afterward, a boss battle commences between the player and one of the Gero-Gero Gang. During a boss battle, the two combatants try to get to the top of the chart or get the other to the bottom. You can make combos that deliver a time-wasting hazard to your opponent by cooking several foods at once (if foods are the same type, they can be cooked together). Hazards, which also appear in the pre-boss segments, include things like drunk customers, dirty dishes, roaches, thieves, and counting money. If these aren’t completed in time they will drive your customers away. It’s sort of like Puyo Puyo in this way.

Ore no Ryouri includes a versus mode for playing against friends or just playing solo to see how high of a score one can get. You can compete in challenges based on one of the many minigames or battle it out like the boss battles in the story mode. There is also a free play mode to go back to any of the levels from the story. It’s a good selection of modes all around.

Ore no Ryouri is a great game that should have got a wider release but never made it out of Japan. If you have the chance, I wholeheartedly recommend playing it. In preparation for this review, I was actually able to clear the game despite having difficulty making much progress in the past. It’s a quick and easy game, but it’s so much fun with a lot of replayability. Later games have tried to do something similar – Overcooked, Cook, Serve, Delicious, Cooking Mama – but none have done the cooking minigame thing as well as Ore no Ryouri.

Ore no Ryouri receives a rating of Good (9).

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