Food Fantasy is your standard JRPG for mobile. Except the concept is so whacky, it is actually beautiful. I would almost call this one a masterpiece. For a mobile game, it is so well engineered that I couldn’t help but love it. There’s nothing complicated about Food Fantasy, but perhaps getting your head around the whole idea may take a little while. So, let’s jump into this one and see what is in store.
Storyline
The game is based around the idea of these creatures called Food Souls. Though they look very human in appearance, they are not. Each food soul, represents some kind of food like Rice, for example. So, the game starts on a battlefield, where theses Food Souls are battling. Now, Food Souls are bound by contracts to people called Master Attendants; which is what you play in this game. Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure what a Master Attendant is but from what I gather you are trying to run a restaurant using Food Souls to help you in this endeavour. At the same time, you have to fight these things called Fallen Angels who are terrorising the towns and cities.
There is of course some sort of story line here to follow but I don’t fully understand it myself and trying to explain it in so many words is pretty tricky. All you need to know is: Food Souls help you to run your restaurant and fight. There are some bad people and Food Souls who are doing bad things and you have to stop them. Maybe that clears things up?
Gameplay
I am always tentative around gameplay when it comes to mobile games. Mostly because you have to think about them differently. There are so many ways to play games nowadays that reviewing each style can be difficult. Now, I have played a couple of JRPG’s before and understand enough about them to know what works well and what doesn’t. Like I said, this is a mobile game so the gameplay needs to be fairly simplistic while still engaging the player. Which I feel Food Fantasy does very well.
Run Your Kitchen
Let’s start with the restaurant business you are trying to run. You begin with the most basic of restaurants. As you might expect, you need to develop your menu and gain more fame in order to level up your restaurant so you can improve it. You gain ingredients for your recipes by completing the battle levels which I will talk about later. You can also discover new recipes as you level up yourself.
Once you have a few recipes you can start recruiting Food Souls to work in your restaurant. As far as I can tell, there are a few different Food Soul types and some have special abilities when it comes to running the restaurant. Pick the ones you think work best and get them working. Now, your restaurant will more or less run itself whilst you go off and fight to get more ingredients to make more recipes.
Recipes and Cooking Styles
When you start Food Fantasy, you can choose a cooking style you want to adopt. This will be the main style you will use throughout your gameplay but you will learn other recipes along the way. Once you have discovered a recipe, you then need to keep creating that dish in order to level it up and make it even tastier! You can also add seasoning to your dishes later on in the game once you have collected the ingredients to do so. It really is a fun aspect of the game. Especially when you are trying to learn what ingredients to put together to learn new recipes. I have had so much fun just doing this part of the game but there is so much more to it!
Battles and Deliveries
As I mentioned, there are levels you need to go through in order to gain experience to level up as well as gaining more ingredients. These obviously start off very easy and gradually get harder and harder. As you gain levels, you will find each area becomes more challenging but also more rewarding. You can upgrade cooking talents, which are personal skills for you. As well as upgrading your Food Souls abilities to make them stronger. The battles are really straight forward and require a huge amount of attention which is nice for a mobile game. Since most people will be playing this whilst doing other things.
As well as the battles, you also unlock deliveries. You need to put together other teams to send out on deliveries but these help bring in more XP and money. This is another aspect of the game that you don’t need to focus too much attention on. So, you can send out a delivery or two and then come back to check on it later. Which again is great for a mobile game, where your attention will likely be divided.
Graphics and Sound
I absolutely love the graphics and art style in this game. Food Fantasy being a JRPG obviously has that very anime/manga feel to it. The animations are simple and use a chibi style but I quite like this as it is very fitting. With the story telling, character drawings and splash screen graphics they are done in manga style. And they are beautifully drawn. I absolutely love looking at this style and I have a lot of respect for whoever created these assets for the game. They get two big thumbs up from me.
The music is beautiful and I have a lot of time for it and even some of the voice acting isn’t bad. However, when you have to hear your Food Soul repeat the same line over and over again, it very quickly becomes annoying. Suffice to say, I usually end up playing with the sound off because of this. Which is a shame.
Final Thoughts
I do very much enjoy Food Fantasy for what it is. However, it can quickly feel very repetitive going through the levels over with the same types of enemies. The story makes it feel a bit more fresh and discovering new recipes is always nice. But, there are a plethora of things to do in this game. Fulfilling orders is a big part of the game and honestly it does feel very rewarding. You get a lot of rewards just for doing the simplest of tasks. Of course, the more you do the more you get. You could always pay for more crystals to though if you wanted to buy things like skins for your Food Souls or a new theme for you restaurant.
Food Fantasy is a fun mobile game with so much going on in it. If you really want to get everything that I’ve talked about in this review, I really recommend going and playing it for yourselves. You can download it for free from any app store now. Plus, with all the new updates they are constantly adding to the game, I doubt you will ever be shot of things to do.
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Catie
I've always had a passion for games and, since I found my passion for writing, I wanted to write about them. I'll play just about anything if I can get my hands on it. I have an unhealthy obsession with all things Star Wars and my motto is "Never apologise for being a nerd."
