Cuisineer Review (Yanfly)
This is a game that I seriously want to like, but balancing issues prevent me from doing so.
First, let's talk about the things that make this game great, which is the art and the music. The art is adorable, the colors are vibrant, the villagers are full of life, the food looks absolutely delicious even in drawn form, and I'm willing to bet that the boba sisters are going to get a lot of fanart if this game takes off. If there's a reason to buy the game, it's for the art alone. The music is upbeat, fun, and hasn't gotten old for me during my 8-9 hours of game time.
Now, let's talk about the things that are holding this game back. The balancing. It's not just numbers for combat, it's numbers of progression, side quests, etc.
Let's talk combat. Combat feels absolutely great. However, the problem lies with the numbers. Enemies are HP sponges and are able to tank lots and lots of damage. Normally, this isn't a problem if the enemy quantity is done right, but enemies are ultra-plentiful and this means that unless you're wielding huge AoE weapons, you're going be spending a lot of time just smacking enemies to death. Weapon upgrades are pitiful. They only boost damage by a few points at best and take a day per piece of gear to upgrade. This hardly makes upgrades worth it. The traits you can place onto the weapons are interesting, but are locked away behind the "Brew" system which has no in-game tutorials on how to utilize and teach you. You're forced to experiment. Normally, experimentation isn't bad... except that each brew attempt takes a full in-game day, too. What needs to be changed is to ditch the day-requirement for equipment upgrades and brewing.
Now, let's go onto the dungeons. Floors in the dungeons are way too long and large. You can enter a dungeon empty handed and fill up 40 slots worth of stuff within 2 floors. Every item in that dungeon can be acquired from each floor, which means there's really no reason to travel too deep. Sure, you can fight bosses on floors 3 and floors 6 of each dungeon, but all they do is drop a treasure chest full of the same loot items you get from fighting regular enemies anyway. But because bosses drop a chest full of the loot you can already acquire, this makes fighting bosses ultra risky as they're a lot harder than normal enemies. If you die in the dungeon, you lose a ton of your items so the risks of fighting bosses aren't worth it. There's a chance boss chests drop equipment, but all of the equipment is 1-star, and can be acquired through the town shop. There's some quests that require you to beat some of these bosses, but these bosses are largely optional as there is no benefit in clearing the dungeons outside of the first time for the sake of it or for quests. What needs to happen is shrink the floor sizes, make bosses more incentivizing to fight (ie. drop higher tier weapons and armors), and give bonuses for clearing the dungeons.
Crafting and upgrades simply cost way too many materials. I'm talking like Korean MMORPG-tier requirements. For example, early upgrades and stuff for a cooking station require 10+ of an item (and a stack of an item is usually 20). You churn through stacks of these items like no other for a single upgrade. At mid-tier, upgrades can cost 60 to 100 of an item (once again, the usual item stack is 20). This means multiple back to back trips to a dungeon just to get all the materials needed to upgrade a cooking station once. And there's four different cooking stations. And this are just mid-tier upgrades. What needs to be changed is that the required numbers need to be dialed back to maybe a full stack of items at most for a single upgrade. Not multiple stacks of items.
Quests are also pretty badly balanced though not nearly as offensive. However, I still question why a character who's looking to eat some pizza needs to eat 10 full pizzas in order to have the quest fulfilled. Or why do they need an entire stack and half of a material (like adamantine). The reward that you get for fulfilling these quests are food recipes for the restaurant. I get that these food recipes are what the game is all about, but the quest requirements are just nuts. And speaking of requirements, talking to the quest NPC's don't even tell you how many of an item is needed the first time. You gotta either go into the quest menu or revisit their quest option AFTERWARDS in order to know how much of an item is needed. What needs to change is that required quest item numbers need to be reduced as well as letting us players know what is actually needed without us needing to go to the quest menu or talking to the NPC again.
Now, let's talk about the restaurant. I would say that for the most, the restaurant mechanics are fine. However, what feels like the game is missing is the ability to hire more staff. Being able to hire some chefs, waiters, and a cashier would be great. Even moreso if they can run the restaurant while you head off to the dungeons to refill the ingredients supply. When the restaurant gets big, it just becomes a giant mess of trying to juggle everything at once. The cooking stations also suggest that they can cook multiple dishes at once, but nope, it's actually just a queue. While this isn't unmanageable, it is very misleading. When you place this on top of customers with different behaviors, from slow moving customers, to customers in a hurry, some customers demanding you bring their dishes to them, and other customers that are trying to dash out without paying, yeah, let us hire some help to manage the restaurant.
Ultimately, the game art is cute. That's its strongest selling point. However, past that, everything is hugely unbalanced and until those things are addressed, players are very likely to find this game to be ultra grindy.