This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on November 30th, 2019.
Hello once again, and welcome back to the PlayStation
Basement. PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of games for the original
PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated
Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasis the review over just a number. Now, let’s go!
Thanksgiving in the United States was earlier this week. The
holiday is not without controversy, but, at its best, it is a time to share a
meal with extended family and friends and remember the things that have gone
well throughout the year. The PlayStation has a number of cooking or food-related
games: last year’s minigame fun with Ore
no Ryouri, platforming in M&M’s
Shell Shocked, restaurant simulation in Burger
Burger, bizarre shooting in PO’ed,
the infamous Pepsiman, and many more.
This year’s Thanksgiving food-related game is The Blazing Chef: Cooking Fighter Hao (Honoo no Ryōrijin: Cooking Fighter Hao), an offbeat fighting game
from Nippon Ichi Software. Nippon Ichi, commonly known as NIS, later went on to
make the famous RPG Disgaea: Hour of
Darkness in 2003, starting a huge franchise that still exists today; Cooking Fighter Hao was an early title
for the company, released in Japan in 1998. It’s a game of anime storytelling,
long dialogues, and short, shallow fights to cook all of the animals in a given
stage before the opponent does. Guessing by the décor and clientele of the
place, I don’t think this will be a five-star restaurant, but let’s order
something and see.
Cooking Fighter Hao’s
cover art gives a mixed first glimpse at such a meal. The cover has an
interesting design, a cinematic flame behind a knife reflecting Hao in the
blade. The title is at the bottom of the cover. While I think that the design
is unique, the color and quality of the image are mediocre. The blade is too
washed out, and the fire looks sort of weird, almost goopy. The odd diagonal
cut of the image is strange too. There was certainly an idea here, but the
execution is flawed.
Taking a look at the actual meal, the graphics of Cooking Fighter Hao don’t impress me
much. The game consists of visual novel-style dialogue sequences that look like
something from a PC Engine or Sega CD game. The characters stand there and move
their mouths. Sometimes flashing lights appear, but nothing is really animated.
It also looks cheap with drawings that are often lumpy, out of proportion, and
contorted. The character designs are full of anime tropes from the 80s and 90s,
resembling a mix of Mobile Fighter: G
Gundam and Igano Kabamaru. During
fights, the game switches to a Super Famicom-style top-down view that looks
like an RPG. The graphics are limited here in a different way with each battle
taking place in the same floating location with different characters, animals,
vegetables, fruits, and other foods appearing. The view is really not
particularly suited for a fighting game, as we’ll see more of later. Basically,
it can be hard to land some hits, and animations are limited as well; you can’t
show much really from a top-down perspective. The visual style of Cooking Fighter Hao is full of flashy
nonsense anime designs, but, again, the actual execution is flawed. The food
looked okay in the menu, but it’s not as good looking on the actual plate.
Thankfully, this restaurant does have a nice atmosphere. The
sound design is reasonable. Sound effects are pretty basic, again sort of like
a Super Famicom game, but the other areas are much better. The musick is good,
ranging from heroic action tunes to dramatic emotional pieces. There are even
some tracks that sound like they could have been in one of my favorite video
game soundtracks (Wild ARMs). Cooking Fighter Hao is also entirely
voiced. I can’t understand a ton of Japanese and did not grow up in any sort of
environment where people spoke that language. I can’t exactly tell if the
performances are done well or not, but they sound pretty corny. Considering the
nature of this game, a game about fighting cooks, I feel like it’s actually
pretty appropriate. The downside is that the voices and other sound effects can
be a bit repetitive during fights. Maybe everything isn’t so bad after all
really.
After getting to the main course, Cooking Fighter Hao is still a mixed-up game. As mentioned, a lot
of this game is watching anime-style dialogue scenes. After playing for an hour
and 15 minutes, an hour of that had to have been just dialogue. I can’t
understand the intricacies of the story due to my poor understanding of
Japanese, but it seems very goofy. The hero, Hao, is trying to defeat the
Flavor Demon, and he goes around to various restaurants, ending up in fights
with various people. Eventually, Hao has to contend with a group of villains
under the Flavor Demon instead of stumbling into fights. There’s a lot of
yelling, super special moves, weird poses, and powering up. In fact, dialogue
even interrupts most fights with scenes of characters glowing and what not. A
fight might go on for a minute before it is interrupted by a guy’s hair glowing
in another dialogue scene. This pervasive, invasive dialogue is like a soup
full of ingredients that haven’t been chopped down to a reasonable size. You
have to pause with each spoonful.
As for the actual fighting mechanics, they are not good. The
game is very, very limited in terms of moves available, buttons utilized, and
differences in scenarios. The Blazing
Chef: Cooking Fighter Hao only uses two buttons: square swings your
incredibly short sword, and circle cooks food. That’s it. That one attack
button only performs one attack too; there are no special inputs to launch a
hadouken or freeze someone. Each fight is about doing that one sword attack (or
whatever your character has) to knock out the various animals of a stage cook
them using the cooking button combined with a rotation of the D-pad. Once all
of the animals are cooked, the match is over. You can also knock animals into
various other ingredients scattered about the stage to increase your score (or
knock the ingredients into the animals), and you can steal meals from an
opponent by knocking them out. The actual fighting with an opponent is pretty
haphazard though, as you can basically spam them with attacks as they are
cooking a meal or trying to do something else. Since there is no defense
option, the resulting combat is pretty dull; whoever attacks first will
probably win. Going for all of the animals quickly is also a reasonable
strategy. Sometimes hitting an opponent can be tough, as you don’t have a very
wide attack. The target must be right in front of you for you to hit them.
There are complications during some fights where Hao is slowed or something,
but these don’t change anything up much; they seem to always be interrupted by
him powering up before the fight really gets underway. Overall, there’s just
not a lot here besides mashing buttons; it’s a real shame. Let’s just get the
check and see the bill.
Overall, The Blazing
Chef: Cooking Fighter Hao has some neat ideas that don’t really result in
anything truly tasty. The anime story is absurd, but it’s so full of tropes and
so long-winded. The gameplay is simple, fast, and fun but incredibly shallow
and unpolished after a few matches. There’s tons of voice-acting and good
musick, but those two things alone don’t make a game great; the former isn’t
even particularly good. Unfortunately, Cooking
Fighter Hao, won’t fill an empty stomach. You’ll be looking for more food
from a better restaurant soon enough.
The Blazing Chef:
Cooking Fighter Hao receives a Neutral.
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