One Piece: Grand Gourmet Review – Recipe for Repetition

One Piece: Grand Gourmet Review

A One Piece cooking game sounds like a slam dunk. The series is quite fixated on food, so it’s a natural fit. But Grand Gourmet isn’t quite a cooking game. It’s sort of a restaurant management sim, but it’s also kind of a mobile game, but somehow not? The one thing I can say for sure is that One Piece: Grand Gourmet is desperate to keep your attention at all costs. You’re constantly being bombarded with new mechanics, characters, and inputs. Somehow, the only thing this game captures about the One Piece franchise is how overwhelming it can be.

You play as a random chef who’s been dragged into service aboard the Baratie 2. Luffy, Sanji, and the rest of the Straw Hat crew are all around doing odd jobs. Cooking, serving guests, and hunting for supplies. It’s a fun, light-hearted setup that feels perfect for this kind of base-building auto-pilot type gameplay. You’re making tables, decorations, break spaces, and attractions to bring in guests. The actual work is all done by the characters, your role is more of a manager. It’s not like you’re utterly devoid of autonomy, but it’s still a very hands-off gameplay experience.

A Well-Oiled Machine

I’m often a little frustrated with adaptations of One Piece. The manga has this unique, incredible art style that the games can’t match. Grand Gourmet is no exception. The pixel art is cute and cool, but it doesn’t quite capture that One Piece ethos that I’m looking for. Although the game is crammed with familiar characters, they don’t stand out like I’d hoped they would. You do see some people from pretty deep in the roster, though. But the art style makes them so unrecognizable I have to frequently look them up. I got the sense that while the devs are definitely fans, Grand Gourmet limits how much you can properly express that fandom.

It’s important to note that I played the Switch 2 version of this game. Grand Gourmet is structured like a mobile game, and it’s even out on iOS and Google Play. But the console version has none of the freemium restrictions that slow progress down to a drip feed. Instead, you’re bombarded with a steady stream of progress for the first 4-6 hours. It’s a straight up assault on your senses. Even once this slows down, you’re still being handed victories and progression goals at a constant rate. It feels like the people you’ve recruited are so good at running this restaurant you barely have to do any actual work.

Pretty Blistering Pace

On the other hand, the game being unburdened by gacha nonsense means you’re getting the optimal version of the game. If removing stamina mechanics and paid currency from the final design creates an experience you can smash through in less than 20 hours, than so be it. To be clear, there is no version of the game that uses these systems. It’s just that this game feels, at its heart, like it was built with stamina mechanics and paid currency in mind. The absence of these things is welcome but also quite glaring.

As much as this game plays itself, there are decisions you make and actions you take that are still fun. You’ve got to design this floating restaurant after all. You pick where every table and section is placed. It’s up to you how clean or chaotic the whole thing looks. You name your chef, the restaurant, and every dish (if you’re so inclined). You can also design the dinner sets themselves, choosing which sides, drinks, and desserts are combined into a single menu item. It’s nice, having this kind of autonomy, but a lot of that falls by the wayside pretty quickly. Soon enough you’re just smashing through menus to ensure forward progress is as smooth and seamless as possible.

More Addictive Than Fun

I love One Piece. The manga is legendary, the anime is delightful, and even the live-action adaptation is excellent. But my success rate with the games hasn’t been great. Grand Gourmet is a cool idea, to be sure. It’s full of the characters I know and love, the gameplay is intuitive, and the graphics are clean and crisp. But it mostly runs on autopilot. You’re constantly being bombarded with menu pop-ups that don’t mean anything to you, and the characters themselves are swallowed by the aesthetic and the mechanics. You’re not connecting to anyone in any way that sticks with you. It’s less of a game, and more of a digital rock garden. A kind of cheesecake factory full of pirates. It’s kind of fun, but it’s mostly compelling and coldly addictive. Purchase this one at your own risk.

***A Nintendo Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher***