Boukenmeshi features character designs from Takehito Harada. Harada is character designer for the Disgaea franchise, as well as Labyrinth of Refrain and The Witch and the Hundred Knights. Players will gather food and materials from the dungeon as they go, cooking new, weird, and delicious dishes to improve their stats and grow stronger. The game will incorporate a character generation feature, and involve a party of four characters. Various jobs are available to the party. These include Swordsman, Cook (who can improve the quality and diversity of rations), and even the “Unemployed” Job, which sounds like a Dark Souls-style Deprived character. Boukenmeshi will also involve survival-game mechanics. This will involve managing the party’s calorie and water intake. Players can cook food while in camp, but also eat ingredients while fighting in strategic battles. These confer status effects and benefits from the consumption.
Reviews View More
[Japanese version reviewed]
You could say this game is...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
undercooked.
YEEEEAAAHHH
I bought this at full price (¥7000) on a complete whim, and I regret it. I would have a better opinion of this game if it were $15 on Steam (but honestly, I’ve seen much more impressive $15 indie games).
I really dig the concept: a party-based survival dungeon crawler with SRPG combat and campfire cooking. What’s not to like? But the execution is lacking.
The default camera is garbage. It’s inverted both horizontally and vertically, and it’s on springs.
The voice acting is cute but overused, and you’ll get sick of hearing them say the same damn thing every time you loot a resource spot.
The randomly generated dungeons are totally uninspiring. They have very little personality or sense of structure or place. Give me some caves, rooms, doors, furniture… anything. As it is, they’re ugly to look at and offer almost nothing in terms of interesting navigation or interactivity. They’re just arbitrarily-demarcated spaces where monsters spawn in from the edges, and some resources are plopped down randomly on the floor here and there. And the monsters respawn endlessly, too, because fuck you.
The battle system is good. It’s like an SRPG, but it’s very fast-paced, and there’s some good class differentiation going on. The weapons and spells have their own unique ranges of attack, and it gets interesting as you try to position your team for maximum effect. Enemies also have various weakness to exploit, and the combination of maneuvering your party to deliver the most effective attacks while also staying out of each other’s way (characters can’t occupy the same square) and staying defensive is a fun tactical challenge. This is really the best aspect of the game. It reminds me of Etrian Odyssey, which is the highest possible compliment I can give.
Unfortunately, this game is a sorta-roguelike, which in this case means that it occasionally kicks you in the teeth for no reason and resets most of your progress. This is also one of those idiotic games where your party members can be killed and resurrected later, but the death of the main character results in an instant game over.
The survival and cooking aspect is the big draw, but they made a fatal blunder in that everything is just random drops. In most other survival games, you can target specific resources that you want to collect—chop trees for wood, break rocks for stone, find a river or lake for water, and so on. But you don’t do that here. The resource drops are just random blobs that could be anything. The closest thing you can do is to target specific enemy types for specific kinds of cooking ingredients.
The interface is not terribly complicated, but it’s unintuitive in places. And I don’t like how you can only feed a dish to one person at a time. You can’t, say, make a big pot of stew for everyone to share, and it’s sad when you can only cook three dishes with the available ingredients, so one of your party members has to go hungry.
The big thing is that cooking good food gives you permanent stat bonuses, which is the key to powering up and staying on top of the increasingly difficult enemies.
The problem is that, as a roguelike, you can only move forward into harder territory, or start over from lvl 1 (keeping just a few things like your current equipment and learned skills). You can’t redo a floor to grind for ingredients, and if you stay on the same floor too long, the night cycle will kick in with super-strong enemies. If you want to camp, you’re forced to advance to the next floor.
This game could have been so much better. As it is, this just makes me want to give the Etrian Mystery Dungeon game another shot.
I got as far as floor 40, utterly dominating all the enemies on the way, and then died twice to a bullshit boss who 2-shotted my main character. This sucks, and I'm not inclined to suffer through 60 more levels of the same.
You could say this game is...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
undercooked.
YEEEEAAAHHH
I bought this at full price (¥7000) on a complete whim, and I regret it. I would have a better opinion of this game if it were $15 on Steam (but honestly, I’ve seen much more impressive $15 indie games).
I really dig the concept: a party-based survival dungeon crawler with SRPG combat and campfire cooking. What’s not to like? But the execution is lacking.
The default camera is garbage. It’s inverted both horizontally and vertically, and it’s on springs.
The voice acting is cute but overused, and you’ll get sick of hearing them say the same damn thing every time you loot a resource spot.
The randomly generated dungeons are totally uninspiring. They have very little personality or sense of structure or place. Give me some caves, rooms, doors, furniture… anything. As it is, they’re ugly to look at and offer almost nothing in terms of interesting navigation or interactivity. They’re just arbitrarily-demarcated spaces where monsters spawn in from the edges, and some resources are plopped down randomly on the floor here and there. And the monsters respawn endlessly, too, because fuck you.
The battle system is good. It’s like an SRPG, but it’s very fast-paced, and there’s some good class differentiation going on. The weapons and spells have their own unique ranges of attack, and it gets interesting as you try to position your team for maximum effect. Enemies also have various weakness to exploit, and the combination of maneuvering your party to deliver the most effective attacks while also staying out of each other’s way (characters can’t occupy the same square) and staying defensive is a fun tactical challenge. This is really the best aspect of the game. It reminds me of Etrian Odyssey, which is the highest possible compliment I can give.
Unfortunately, this game is a sorta-roguelike, which in this case means that it occasionally kicks you in the teeth for no reason and resets most of your progress. This is also one of those idiotic games where your party members can be killed and resurrected later, but the death of the main character results in an instant game over.
The survival and cooking aspect is the big draw, but they made a fatal blunder in that everything is just random drops. In most other survival games, you can target specific resources that you want to collect—chop trees for wood, break rocks for stone, find a river or lake for water, and so on. But you don’t do that here. The resource drops are just random blobs that could be anything. The closest thing you can do is to target specific enemy types for specific kinds of cooking ingredients.
The interface is not terribly complicated, but it’s unintuitive in places. And I don’t like how you can only feed a dish to one person at a time. You can’t, say, make a big pot of stew for everyone to share, and it’s sad when you can only cook three dishes with the available ingredients, so one of your party members has to go hungry.
The big thing is that cooking good food gives you permanent stat bonuses, which is the key to powering up and staying on top of the increasingly difficult enemies.
The problem is that, as a roguelike, you can only move forward into harder territory, or start over from lvl 1 (keeping just a few things like your current equipment and learned skills). You can’t redo a floor to grind for ingredients, and if you stay on the same floor too long, the night cycle will kick in with super-strong enemies. If you want to camp, you’re forced to advance to the next floor.
This game could have been so much better. As it is, this just makes me want to give the Etrian Mystery Dungeon game another shot.
I got as far as floor 40, utterly dominating all the enemies on the way, and then died twice to a bullshit boss who 2-shotted my main character. This sucks, and I'm not inclined to suffer through 60 more levels of the same.