I’ve been meaning to play a Kairosoft-developed game for a while now. The team stays busy pumping out dozens of differently themed pixel-art management games, and while I’ve grabbed plenty of them on Steam sales and as mobile store freebies over the years, I haven’t actually played them. Despite not being a massive current One Piece fan, I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for the early days of the series. It feels like the perfect franchise to mash up with a restaurant management game, and as simple as ONE PIECE: Grand Gourmet is, it’s a successful medley of flavours.
There’s a little bit of narrative setup for why we’re here, but it’s so rushed and sloppy I do wish they hadn’t bothered with it at all. Series mainstays Luffy and Sanji have been separated from the rest of the crew, and in their search for them, they stumble upon a massive ship in need of repairs and a rival crew of doppelgängers making bank as a traveling seafaring restaurant. So, you set out to beat them at their own game, attract hundreds of hungry customers, and hopefully get famous enough for word of your restaurant to get back to your missing crew mates so they can come on through.
There are some relatively clunky bits to ONE PIECE: Grand Gourmet. It’s lacking proper sound design or even sentence-ending punctuation in some places, making things feel a bit scrappy and low-quality at times. As a console game, it’s also obvious that this is, well, not entirely meant to be a console game. Some menu navigation is a bit obtuse on controller, with certain buttons and sub-menus feeling far easier to access via touch controls.
Even touch controls end up feeling pretty choppy, though – there aren’t really any smooth transition animations between the menu items or restaurant items you select, and sometimes the clickable area of an important fixture in your restaurant just doesn’t match up with the visuals at all. I have a feeling that these are quirks that are pretty consistent across the Kairosoft catalogue, but it’s just a shame to see them present in such a high-profile collaboration game like this.
When you get past that stuff, though, the game is actually very charming and really hard to put down. It’s a restaurant management game, but you’ve got so many parallel activities happening that keep your attention focused on a dozen different little projects at once. You can send characters out to hunt for resources, and they’ll bring back items for you to craft new recipes, rumours about new characters nearby, requests for new building facilities, and more.
As customers start rolling in, you can build up their affinity with gifts and they’ll become regulars, or maybe even staff-members, or maybe even tell you about other characters they know who want to visit the restaurant. There’s an endgame you build up to after about 50 in-game days pass, but it’s really open-ended and you’re able to keep playing at your leisure or even reset with a bit of a new game+ vibe.
There aren’t really escalating difficulties or challenges to the systems, it’s more about the various activities, characters, customization options, and requests piling up as your ship grows larger and your crew grows to match it. I like that a lot, though. There isn’t friction happening that keeps me scratching my head, it’s more of a chill experience seeing my restaurant steadily grow not unlike the low-stakes build-up and expansions in something like Animal Crossing. And the extra reward of encountering some of the One Piece characters I’m familiar with, out of the 400+ possible customers, always put a smile on my face. ONE PIECE: Grand Gourmet isn’t a massively challenging or highly polished game, but it’s charming and incredibly easy to lose an entire evening to.
