Ore no Ryouri (I'm the Chef)

Released exclusively in Japan for the PlayStation 1 on September 9th, 1999, Ore no Ryouri is a fast-paced, arcade-style game where you play as a chef working in different restaurants, trying to keep up with a barrage of orders from impatient customers.

Although it never left Japan, you can still see its DNA in cooking games today, like Overcooked and Cook, Serve, Delicious!. The latter can even be considered its spiritual successor, since its creator has openly said that a demo of Ore no Ryouri is what inspired him to make it.

Fun fact: even though the full game never came out in America, a one-level demo did make it there on a PlayStation Underground demo disc.

Gameplay

In each stage, you run the kitchen of a restaurant. Every customer places an order, and you have a limited time to fulfill it. If time runs out or you mess up the inputs, your reputation drops. The goal is to keep your customers happy until the satisfaction bar reaches the top.

The frantic part is that customers keep arriving one after another, each dish takes a different amount of time to prepare, and some dishes even have more steps than others. So you need quick thinking and the ability to adapt to the situation. Sometimes, serving the customer who has been waiting the longest isn’t the best choice.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when several customers order the same dish, you can sometimes handle certain steps for all of those orders at once. For example, if two or more customers ordered pasta and their orders are all at the boiling step, you can boil everything together and save precious time.

On top of that, extra tasks and hindrances pop up at random. Tasks like washing the dishes or giving customers their change take up an order slot, so until you deal with them, you can take fewer orders and your earnings may suffer.

Hindrances are even worse, and each one causes a different problem. For example, a drunk customer may start bothering the others, making their patience run out much faster until you call the police. Or cockroaches may show up and scare away every customer at once if you don’t squash them all in time.

And of course, I can’t wrap up the gameplay section without mentioning that Ore no Ryouri is one of the few PlayStation games that require a DualShock controller. All the cooking is done with the analog sticks, and the game makes great use of the precise control that analog input allows.

Story: A Frog With a Grudge

The plot is silly. A frog chef, tired of always losing the cooking championship to the protagonist, cooks up a plan to finally beat him. This sends the protagonist from restaurant to restaurant looking for the right place, and at each one he gets mistaken for someone else and ends up working there for the day. Not only that, but he also gets challenged to a cooking duel at every restaurant.

Each stage follows the same flow. First, you learn the recipes for that restaurant’s dishes, usually around three to five of them. Then you play on your own, serving orders and keeping customers happy until the satisfaction bar is full. When that happens, a challenger appears, usually sent by your frog rival. In the final part of the stage, you face them head to head. You not only have to satisfy your own customers, but you have to do it before your opponent fills their own satisfaction bar.

When you’re facing an opponent, extra tasks and hindrances also show up more often, so things get even more frantic.

Extra Modes

The story mode is short, with only 9 stages. But because the game is so hectic, it will probably take you a while to get used to the basic flow: juggling different orders and remembering which steps can be combined. It does become second nature eventually, but expect a few failed attempts along the way. And the gameplay is so fun that you’ll probably want to replay it a few times anyway.

Beyond the story mode, there are a few extra modes that give the game more life. There’s a really fun Versus mode, time attack modes, a mode where you can challenge any of the bosses from the story, and a handful of minigames.

So I think there’s enough here to keep you busy if the gameplay clicks with you.

How Much Japanese Do You Need?

Every dish comes with a tutorial where a character explains what to do, shows you an example, and then lets you practice. They do give some tips, like “dip the shrimp in the batter until about 80% of it is covered” or “hold down for one second for the perfect amount of ketchup”. But most of the time, comparing your practice results with the example is enough to figure out what to do.

The story scenes are harder to follow, though. The plot is light and funny, but the characters speak in a very stylized way that can be tough for non-native speakers. Still, the real star of this game is the gameplay, not the silly story, so I’d say it’s very playable even if you don’t understand Japanese.

Final Thoughts

I have to admit that whenever I came across the cover of Ore no Ryouri while hunting for retro games in Japan, it never caught my attention. There are a few PlayStation “games”, in quotes, that aren’t really games at all, but educational software about cooking. There’s even one about wine. Ore no Ryouri’s cover gave me that same impression.

When I finally decided to check it out, I couldn’t believe how fun it actually was, especially since I was already a fan of cooking games like Cooking Mama and Overcooked. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement.

And that’s what I love most about retro games. Somewhere in a used game store, in a forgotten corner, there’s a game nobody told you about. You pick it up almost by accident, and suddenly you’re playing an idea that other games would build on years later. Ideas we still love today, waiting on a dusty shelf since 1999.

If you know that feeling, follow along. There are still plenty of games out there waiting to be found, and I’d love to find them with you.