Gochi-Show! -How To Learn Japanese Cooking Game-

Before we get started just a note about this game: You will get the best experience if you actually use it to learn how to cook. That means going out and buying the ingredients listed. This will probably mean getting accquanited with new parts of your local grocery store, searching for an asian grocery store, or making intelligent substitutions where appropriate. If you live in a rural area you may have to order a few things off the internet. When you play the game actually cook along with it. The story isn't that great and probably won't hold up on its own. The game encourages you to repeat recipes. The recipes are fairly basic but as you begin to understand them you can try to change them to suit your own tastes and style. Alternatively, equiped with a broader pallete you may see something that you might like to change in something you already know how to cook. Gochi-show consists of 32 episodes divided into 4 categories: - Introduction - Washoku ( Japanese food ) Satomi - Yoshoku ( Western food ) Momoko - Chuuka ( Chinese food ) Mariko The first half of each episode is like most visual novels: the plot advances and you periodically make choices that impact the girls' opinion of you. In the second half one of the girls will teach you how to cook that episode's dish. * Story * 2/5 The story isn't the best that I've seen in a visual novel. I wouldn't consider them to be my favorite genre but I have played several amateur, fan translated, and thanks to steam official releases. Gochi-show struggles with a sub-par translation, cultural differences, and mistakes that can have disaterous consequences in the kitchen. As the game progresses the quality of the translation gets sloppier and sloppier with frequent typos and patches of missing text. I'm typically not very picky about these sorts of things but sometimes it shows up in the cooking lessons which could obviously cause problems. Error on the side of caution and try to use some common sense. I was actually shocked at how old fashioned and sexist the storyline seemed to me. I've been a closeted weeb most my life and by U.S. standards I'm hardly progressive when it comes to gender issues so this was a bit of a surprise. I'm not sure if this is due to the writers, the original audiance they were writing for, cultural differences, or if the tone was just lost in translation. I was hoping that the story would immerse me in Japanese food culture and give me some context for the meals I've seen in anime and had in Japanese restaurants. All this dull romance had to say about food is that 'it's about friends and family'. This is probably a cultural universal so it really doesn't provide any insight at all. It actually just left me with more questions. Why are these recipes so salty? Why does it taste like Hamburger Helper? Will I get lead poison from this? * Art * 3/5 Backgrounds are decent and the character designs are servicable. The actual character sprites are not especially expressive and there is no lip-synching in this game which was more distracting than I would have expected. Unlike a typical visual novel half of the artwork consists of diagrams and photographs of food preparation. These are not great but they do the job. I think I like the diagrams best though. They are useful, cute, and don't talk too much. The diagrams are my waifus. The game is low-res by modern standards and seems to be natively rendered at ~ 1137 X 640. I am guessing that it may be a few years old and that it was intended for laptops and older mobile devices. For the most part this isn't that big of a deal but the character sprites suffer when upscaled to 1080p. I hope none of you were planning to play this in 4K. * Sound * 4/5 Maybe I have a tin ear or something but it sounds pretty good to me. The voice acting isn't top notch, the sound effects are sparse, and the background music is a little repetitive. Really I have no complaints here. It may say more about my priorities than anything else but I think they did a good job given the scope of the project here. * Recipies/ Cooking Instruction * 3/5 I noticed on the store page that the developers say that the in-game recipes came from 'Shufu no Tomo' ( Housewife's Friend ) which according to Wikipedia was a Tokyo women's magazine that ran from 1917 to 2008. I would imagine it must have been something like 'Good Housekeeping' or 'Redbook'. There are a lot of tips and instructionals on general kitchen skills in the cooking segments and I really enjoyed these. Some of them were new to me like steaming my eggs or rolling cabbage to make it nice and easy to cut into thin strips ( chiffonade ). Some of them I had heard of but just never bothered with like straining scum off the top of soup to clarify it. Others were things I already knew. I really think these short instructional segments have been the most interesting and most useful parts of the game for me. The recipes themselves aren't bad but they are definately not my style. They remind me of recipes my mom would make from her betty crooker cook book or the back of a duncan hines box. I realize that they may be designed for housewifes trying to throw something together with common pantry items at the last minute. They just seem too salty and kind of bland. Like trying to cover up fewer and lower quality ingredients with low quality seasonings. * Developers * Nice. Active in comments answering questions and trying to resolve problems. Very important these days!