Yokai Kitchen – Serving up a review from us!

Yokai Kitchen is a fantasy restaurant managing game where you will have cute yokai (japanese spirits) as your staff. What separate Yokai Kitchen from other restaurant managing game is it has RPG element twist to it. Restaurant managing can be quite a headache with there is a lot of task to take care of. Not only you have to manage your restaurant, you will need to take care of your farm and set out your staff to an adventure to gather up more items too. Without dilly-dallying, let us serve you with our review of the game!

Story

You as the protagonist have been sent to a restaurants as a wish from your dying grandfather. Your grandfather wanted you to manage the restaurant that was in his care long time ago. The problem is that restaurant is on the edge of broken down. The background story for the game is kinda generic in my opinion. But what you should focus on is the story as you progress in the game. Each land that you explored has a different story for you to discover. Each land features new yokai and their story surrounding them. I love that for the main storyline, there will be options for you to choose to interact with your staff. It made feel me connected with the staff instead of being the omnipotent boss that just order your characters around.

Gameplay

Each new land that you recently discovered has stages to complete in order to progress the main storyline of the game. You will need to battle against the monsters which is known as foodimon to complete the stage. In the game stage, you deploy some of your best staff and form a team of 5 to defeat the foodimons not only to progress the story but as well as getting ingredients and items to upgrade your staff. The more stages that you progress, the more difficult the stages will be. That is why you will need to level up your staff as much as possible.

Leveling up your staff is easy when you have enough level up items and money but it gradually becomes hard as the upgrade items will be used up a lot especially when you have a lot of staff to level up. This problem can be solved easily. After you complete the stage, you can send your staff back to the same stage for a quick battle to get the upgrade items. You can only play back the stage 10 times and it will also used up your stamina as well.

Cooking

What’s a restaurant without their food? You can get food recipes by simply defeating the monsters. Each recipes has their own set of cooking skills requirements from Saute, Stew, Fry, Roast, Steam, and Chop. The quality of the dish is based on your chef’s cooking skills that met the requirements of the dish. The quality of the dish affects your Clan Popularity, Restaurant EXP, and Coins. Every chef has their own specialty cooking skill. But you can level up their cooking skills by just leveling up and equipments.  It’s really cool to see that you have study your dishes and cooking based on your skills instead of just obtain it just like real life! I love that the chefs can learn cooking skills from each other too by interacting with one and another. I just really hope they don’t plot anything against me.

Verdict

For me, Yokai Kitchen is certainly not a restaurant managing game that you would get bored off after playing it a week. The game offers a lot of quest and stories for you to discover.  The yokais in this game are very loveable and has a lot of personality to it. I wish there were more options for functional props instead of decorations. If you guys looking for restaurant managing game that has a twist to it, I would definitely recommend Yokai Kitchen especially for those that love RPG games.