One Piece: Grand Gourmet review

Climb aboard, readers: the latest One Piece video game sets forth in One Piece: Grand Gourmet. Is Kairosoft's management sim adaption worthy of a meal on the high seas, or did it need further refining back in the kitchen? Our two resident One Piece superfans in Anthony Pelone and Tyler Catalano weigh in on Monkey D. Luffy's latest.

Anthony Pelone

Readers, I confess: I’m addicted, and I blame none other than Sanji Vinsmoke. Over the past several days, the curly-browed cook has locked me inside his new seafaring restaurant and force-fed me a constant assembly line of dopamine triggers. Prompts, prompts, and more prompts compete for my attention as I fulfill customer orders, craft new recipes, and construct the Baratie into a veritable One Piece theme park.

Did I mention the piles of money rolling in? All the different little numbers going up, demanding that I contribute more, more, more to the Straw Hats’ culinary conquest? One Piece: Grand Gourmet has sunk its little capitalist claws into me, and I warn fellow One Piece nakama and curious non-fans alike: underestimate its all-consuming pull at your own peril.

The latest digital narcotic courtesy of Kairosoft Games (Dungeon Village, Fashion Mall Story) One Piece: Grand Gourmet plays like the rest of their management sim fare: you’re building a massive residence (in this case, a metro-restaurant. Metrostaurant. Uh, forget I said that), assigning characters to jobs, and appropriating your ever-increasing budget as the game’s roll call of One Piece characters drop by to demand meals, furniture, room theming, and constructs of all sorts.

What’s beautiful about Grand Gourmet is that it has all the bones of a free-to-play mobile game, yet it’s completely microtransaction free. A frequent deterrent in other Kairosoft titles, Grand Gourmet dispenses with any predatory practices and instead funnels you right into the meat grinder. And what a good thing, too, because the feedback loop is immediate: you can’t serve food without any customers, so you’ll send Straw Hat captain Luffy out on expeditions to scout hungry patrons. But he might not be strong enough to tackle every obstacle, so you’ll frequently train under Roronoa Zoro to raise your level. But whatever customers Luffy met regardless will introduce other shoppers whose taste buds demand higher standards, so Sanji’s meals will need constant revisioning to suit their palates. But you might be lacking that secret ingredient to win them over, which means you’ll visit Usopp to craft meal decorations or Nico Robin for sprucing up meals to make them even tastier. But then–well, you get the picture.

Inviting customers introduces more recipes; more recipes beget permanent guests (“fans”, as Grand Gourmet calls satisfied customers who’ll visit no matter which sea you’re upon). Decorations and room themes will increase diners’ comfort levels. Higher-quality meals means more, more money. Grand Gourmet drags you in a thousand different directions all at once, and it refuses to let you go. I’m not exaggerating when I say the game’s gravitational pull had me playing for hours on end—long after I should’ve been focusing on other duties, like writing this review you’re reading now.

Sometimes, it might be a little too much. Grand Gourmet’s prompts flood the player so much that it doesn’t always remember to slow down and explain key mechanics to the player. Some, like the meaning behind the Straw Hats “recommending” new dishes, take a simple trip to the How to Play screen to comprehend. Others, like how to get rid of those weird phantom buildings you see in the above screenshot—leftovers from moving rooms and buildings around—are more nebulous, and require player experimentation to deduce. In that case, I just needed to plop down standard flooring to demolish them, but that remained a strange deterrent to placing down new stuff for a while.

But once you’ve put the pieces together, you’re off to Personalized City. From building lawns ripped right off the deck of the Thousand Sunny to spooky Thriller Bark-based diners, Grand Gourmet is a lesson in economics as much as an exercise in creativity. Customers will find themselves attracted to comfier digs and bespoke set-ups, so while players are free to build the Fish-Man Island aquarium-amusement park of their dreams, they’ll want to render the setting as authentic as possible to satisfy visiting fish-men. With two separate budgets in Berries (One Piece’s currency) and heart points, you’ll be constantly juggling requests, décor-building, and meal-crafting to earn whatever furniture and constructs necessary (or simply wanted) to keep those creative juices flowing.

Still, let’s be frank: is it realistic to expect the likes of Arlong suggesting recipes or Doflamingo happily dining with the Straw Hats? No, but the tongue-in-cheek premise is merely an excuse to shove the entire cast of One Piece into a management sim, be they be they living, dead, or fluctuating between different moments in time. Really, it’s best not to think about it too much; I mean, where else can you watch Blackbeard take a dip in the pool or Sengoku zip around on that Bubble Bike you gave him?

Point is, it’s just an awful lot of fun to play and watch: Grand Gourmet is a labor of love from the superfans over at Kairosoft, with references and easter eggs populating its charming sprite-based setting. Naturally, the many meals are directly inspired by One Piece, be they entirely lifted from the series (Water 7’s Water-Water Candy, Skypiea’s Pumpkin Juice) to simply taking inspiration from familiar series iconography. (Boy, does that Poneglyph Honey Toast look scrumptious) Incidentals you might’ve seen frequenting the manga backgrounds may zip around your restaurant, whereas more prominent guests will dine together and butt heads. (Hey, whatever makes the number go up.)

Of course, this being a Bandai-Namco anime game, we’re treated to yet another sub-par localization. Remember Pirate Warriors’ bizarre aversion to plurals? Grand Gourmet finds itself frequently absent from punctuation, and combined with the stiff dialogue and bizarre misgendering (as seen above; needless to say, any One Piece fan can tell you Whitebeard is no Newkama), it’s the one stain on an otherwise adorable presentation. It already doesn’t help that the story is overtly chatty—it’s impossible to keep track of dialogue with extraneous speech bubbles talking over the script.

But quibbles like these hardly topple One Piece’s new dining venture. Grand Gourmet may not be as flashy as Pirate Warriors 4 nor as ambitious as One Piece Odyssey, yet its unassuming appearance belies the succulent, creamy filling tastier than any modern One Piece video game. Just take care not to overeat—because once you start, you can’t stop.

Tyler Catalano

I, like many game enthusiasts, wait in anticipation for each new Nintendo Direct. So picture my surprise on the morning of June 9th when a new game was announced focusing on my favorite character from my favorite show, Sanji from One Piece. One Piece: Grand Gourmet allows you to join Sanji in the kitchen as you cook up meals for characters from throughout the series. It takes you through the One Piece world in the same progression the crew experiences in the manga and anime. Starting in East Blue and eventually entering the Grand Line and then the New World, you’ll build your ship, of which mine was named “The Albatross,” and challenge the fake Straw Hats, led by DeMarco Black. Their crew, which we see primarily during the Return to Sabaody Archipelago arc, is sailing an imposter version of the Baratie around the world, dirtying the name of East Blue's most famous gourmet dining location. It's the job of the player character, alongside Luffy and Sanji, to repair its tarnished reputation.

The main gameplay loop of Grand Gourmet centers around upgrading your ship as you progress through the seas, while also making sure to please the new customers that come at each location. You’ll also have to track down the missing Straw Hats, who were separated at the beginning of the game, with Luffy and Sanji being the first members you encounter when opening your restaurant. In each new area, you can send out a search party including Luffy and one other member of the crew to “explore” and gather new ingredients. It's with these ingredients that you can continue to progress in terms of the tastiness of your dishes, which in turn allow you to please customers more effectively.

This is the first point I would like to talk about in terms of what the game gets right: It knows its source material very well. When I first loaded up the game, I was nervous to see how third-party developer Kairosoft would handle adapting the world's highest-selling comic book series. Thankfully, I was relieved to see specific references to the story scattered throughout the gameplay. One example of this comes through the “fan” loyalty mechanic in the game. Some characters won't become fans of the restaurant until some specific action is taken. Blackbeard won’t become a fan until the restaurant starts serving cherry pies, a nod to his introduction in Mock Town during the Jaya Arc of One Piece. Koby is also another example of this, not becoming a fan until he is given the Marine Hat, which he wears in his early outfit Pre-timeskip. You can also see this attention to detail in the exploration mechanic, where rescuing new characters or pets of the series' mainstays requires having to discover their companion first. Wapol’s Hippo requires having Wapol as a customer, ChouChou the dog requires the mayor of Orange Town to be a customer, and Ms. Golden Week has to be randomly discovered in Little Garden. These are all examples of characters you meet through the exploration mechanic, and where you find them depends on the place they appeared in the series originally.

These small details reassured me that the development team didn’t just take a beloved IP and use it to give their game notoriety. However, while the developers clearly put a lot of care into representing the world of One Piece, that same level of care doesn't always translate into the gameplay experience itself. In fact, one of the game's biggest strengths, its constant sense of progression, also ends up being one of its most frustrating weaknesses. I’ll start with the positives here too. This game hooks you in and doesn’t let you go. It takes a lot to make progress throughout the seas, but the game moves so fast that it feels like you never stop making progress towards an eventual goal. That constant sense of progress is given by messages that pop up on your screen at every convenience. Someone always has a new task to begin, or a new reward for one that's been completed. This makes you feel amazing at first, like you are actually making progress towards a goal, but it got to a point where seeing these pop-ups every second felt like fighting pop-up ads on a website you aren't supposed to be on. When I just wanted to be focusing on one task, it felt like there were four other tasks vying to drag my attention back to them.

I love these characters more than anything in the world, but I swear, if Hachi asks me to build him a takoyaki stand one more time, I’m going to lose it. I'm super busy trying to learn how to make Skylobster to Enel’s liking!

And unfortunately, the constant interruptions aren't helped by the game's interface, which somehow manages to make an already overwhelming experience feel even more chaotic. The interface itself feels pretty rudimentary, and navigating through the menus can feel clunky and unpolished at times. Even the scrolling text along the bottom of the screen feels more reminiscent of a mobile game than something released on a Nintendo console, further adding to the cluttered feeling of the entire experience. I understand that Kairosoft is a smaller third-party developer, and I wasn't expecting some massive AAA experience, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a little more polish, especially when the interface only adds to the game's already chaotic nature.

Taken at face value, this game offers a way for fans to step into the world of One Piece and interact with almost any character they could want to interact with. The story and mechanics are simple enough for anyone to get a grasp of really quickly, and the experience draws you in and keeps you entertained extremely well. I found hours disappearing in what felt like minutes while playing this game. For anyone who loves this series and its incredible world as much as I do, Grand Gourmet offers another great way to experience it, even if a few frustrating design choices hold it back from being something truly special.