I’ve been playing Cafe Nipponica, and Jebus, it’s the worst game I’ve ever obsessed over. It’s a terrible, terrible game and I’ve spent something like 30 hours on it, I can see there’s nothing but repetition ahead, and yet I am finding it difficult to force myself to stop twiddling with it.
The problem with many Kairosoft games is that the game is mostly about learning how to play the game. They’ll hide a lot of vital information you need to make basic decisions, and then you’ve either got to discover the rules by trail and error or look up the details in someone’s guide if you’re weak. Assuming someone has already done the work. And gotten it right.
Cafe Nipponica is bad enough in this way that I found a lot of people who have written about it online are giving bad advice because they have made the wrong deductions about the rules. I think. Because I can’t be absolutely certain if my understanding is the correct one.
It’s a restaurant simulation. At the start of the game you have two employees, one cook and one server, and open slots for one more of each. You can buy tables and decorations for your shop. Every stick of furniture has bonuses which increase your shop’s popularity to specific categories of customers. How popularity works isn’t clear, and no one really knows. I think what happens is that customers walk by your shop, and your shop’s popularity determines whether they go in and buy food or walk on past.
Once they come in, they sit down and buy food. You can offer up to 6 different dishes initially, and they’ll buy whatever appeals to them most. This is where the first gaping game design hole shows up: it turns out that offering choices is a bad idea. The optimal way to play is only to offer one dish, your most expensive one, so they’ll buy that. They can’t come in and say “nothing looks good” and walk back out, or be unhappy with the choices in any way. What’s worse, each dish you offer has a fixed monthly upkeep cost, so offering choices hurts you two ways: the customers pay less, and you pay more for upkeep. I really struggled financially my first game because I focused on providing a multitude of choices, thinking that would make my customers happy.
Each dish has 10 ratings: 8 attributes (healthiness, aroma, appearance, volume, texture, etc.) and two broad ratings, taste and appeal. What these do is unclear, but I believe that the higher the appeal, and the bigger the appetite of the customer, the more copies of the dish they’ll buy. They don’t come in and buy one meal. I’ve had one customer pay 5x what another pays, even though there’s only one kind of food available. I believe that the higher the taste, and the higher the rating in the specific attribute the customer values, the more points you score with that customer. I.e. Elders like food that is Healthy. Students like food that has a high “IQ boost” rating. You want customer score because 1) each customer type unlocks a one-time action when you score enough points and 2) cumulative customer ratings are part of the final score.
You can research dish upgrades. You tell a cook which dish to upgrade, and one or two ingredients to add. Ingredients are marked from “bad” to “perfect” depending on the dish. There’s some screwiness in here. I can’t speak for the majority of dishes, which are unfamiliar and Japanese, but invariably what is compatible with western-style dishes like Spaghetti is unintuitive. Garlic, for example, is not desirable for Spaghetti in Japan.
Ingredients all have their own 8 deltas to attributes - butter adds to Aroma, for example, but decreases Healthiness. Almost all seafood ingredients reduce Aroma and Appearance. An attribute can’t go below zero or above 100. You can take advantage of that, since there’s no drawback to an attribute penalty once it’s already zero. It appears that Cost, Taste and Appeal are more-or-less functions of the other 8 attributes, though there’s a lot of uncertainty in there.
If you add the right ingredient to a dish, you’ll unlock a new type of dish. Sometimes this is a bit strange, adding Lettuce to Toast gives you Salad. During the game you’ll discover recipes showing how to unlock new dishes. They’re hints, you can unlock a dish if you don’t have the recipe if you take the right action. Indeed, the game seems to expect you to keep a record of all the recipes you’ve seen so you can use them next game. Why otherwise would some pretty low-level recipes show up late in the game? Sadly, the recipe list does not carry over in-game, so you have to keep any notes outside the game.
One problem with food research is that there’s a hidden drawback. Every time you upgrade a dish, its daily upkeep cost increases permanently. Even if the upgrade kinda sucked all around, giving no price, taste, or appeal increases.
In addition to buying furniture and researching food, you can take actions. Actions cost money, and you can take each action only once. Presumably these actions represent ongoing changes, so “Clean” means you clean your filthy pig sty of a restaurant regularly from now on. Actions give a short boost to popularity, and you’ll definitely get more customers the next day, though that’s largely a wash with the cost of taking the action. The real boost is that most actions unlock a new customer, who will then pass by your restaurant regularly. Later game customers order a lot more food. The cycle then is use action -> unlock customer -> make customer happy with his kind of food -> unlock new action.
Every 3 months your employees can explore an area. This is highly abstract. Each employee will find one ingredient or small bundle of cash, and add to the progress meter for that area. Unlock the meter, and you get a “treasure.” Treasures vary a great deal, but generally are recipes or new types of furniture. Thus, the “ingredient walks” are really furniture research. Mostly. Ingredient walks cost money, and a common way to screw yourself is to end up without enough money to pay for the quarterly ingredient walk, which means you have to wait another 3 months.
You can also buy ingredients from a dealer. There’s a limited stock, and it’s more expensive than finding ingredients on ingredient walks. As time goes by you can pay to improve the dealer’s inventory.
Your employees gain experience with time. When they hit level 5 in a job, they stop growing unless they change jobs. There’s a Cooking track and a Server track, and employees can switch from one to the other at any time. There are some non-obvious permanent penalties for doing so - I had a 5-Star Chef spend some time as a server, but when he switched back to being a 5 Star Chef his cooking skill was down from 500ish to 200ish. Some jobs require experience in both tracks, notably the Ninja, Rollerskater, and Popular Staff jobs. This is hidden information - the game refuses to tell you why you can’t be a Ninja, just that “requirements aren’t met.” Yes, there are Ninja waiters in the game. I have no idea what the benefits of those are yet.
Employees keep all their experience when you start a new game, so your starting cook will be a maxed-out 5 Star Chef. Which is a huge drawback, because he also comes with a 5 Star Chef’s salary cost, and his skills don’t begin to make up for that when you’ve got only the starting dishes and starting customers. Food upgrades carry over to new games, but which dishes you’ve unlocked don’t.
There are special employees that requires “negotiation” to hire. The “negotiation” process is an absolutely crap-tastic timed mini game, where you throw salary increases and gifts at the candidate. Sometimes they’ll react positively, sometimes they do nothing, sometimes it’s negative, and there’s no frakking way to tell what to do next, so it’s a huge dice roll. Limited because you can’t afford to increase salary too many times because the long term costs will kill you. The only positive note is that you can play competitively while ignoring the special employees entirely, since they’re only more experienced, not really special.
So, the game is you buy furniture and ingredients, research food, and spend money on actions which unlock customers. In between you wait. There’s a lot of waiting, watching the restaurant run. It really tells you nothing, except in the case where you’ve got a failure because your servers aren’t keeping up with traffic, so long lines are forming at the cash register. The meta-game is that you try and do some upgrades to early dishes along the way that will keep you solvent the next time you play, since your costs are going to skyrocket with employee experience carry over.
Once you learn what you’re supposed to do, it’s mindless, repetitive, and mechanical. It’s learning how to play that’s difficult. And since research takes a long, long time, there’s the nagging progress quest aspect. I’ve played through twice, and only a couple of dishes are well researched, and I still haven’t gotten to some of the prestige employee classes. There’s so much left undone… but just thinking about doing it makes me sleepy.