Paige FTW: ‘Food Fantasy’ Serves Up Too Much
Sometimes, we all give into our weaknesses. And when I saw repeated Instagram ads for a very aesthetically pleasing mobile game called Food Fantasy that featured beautiful human incarnations of different foods, I found myself … piqued, almost against my will.
We all have our weaknesses, OK? Mine are just really dumb.
So I downloaded this game on my phone and was immediately overwhelmed.
Food Fantasy is an ambitious little game: Half is devoted to restaurant management, as you create the finest restaurant in the land, and the other to real-time, turn-based RPG combat against monsters leftover from a time of fallen angels. There’s also the free-to-play mandated gachapon element of collecting rare Food Souls.
Yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Therein lies both the game’s strength and weakness.
I love restaurant management games (I used to play this dumb Facebook game called Restaurant City), and I love that when you get done tinkering and restocking for the day, there’s a whole, deeply complex world of combat to jump right into.
Combat, in particular, is something Food Fantasy excels at: Each character has a specialization in combat (healing, melee, ranged) with special combinations that can be exploited for greater effect (like pairing Milk and Black Tea in battle), and you have your own special skills that can help turn the tide of battle.
The problem is that the game doesn’t really quite fully explain how everything works. I had my Food Souls plugging away in the restaurant, and then I notice they were slowly running out of something called “Freshness.” What does Freshness measure? How does it replenish? Why does it matter? What happens if I run out of fresh Food Souls?
I don’t know! And there’s no tutorial to read to explain those parts. I had to do my own research to figure things out.
Food Fantasy has a lot of potential — but the execution leaves much to be desired.
