I think I’ve said it several times, if not here, elsewhere online that I don’t necessarily like JRPGs, anime, or anything that Japan exports because it is a little weird. Though over the past two years or so, I’ve come closer to enjoying things like Final Fantasy, Death Note, and oddly enough Babymetal. I believe this sudden shift is as a result of this strange American game. Battle Chef Brigade is a puzzle game looking to be much like many Japanese forms of media. With an art style from a manga; the story from a JRPG, and similar English voice acting from the latter as well.

Oddly I find myself enjoying much of Battle Chef Brigade because it isn’t too weird or out there. Now hear me out: imagine mythical Masterchef Australia where you have to both go hunting for your ingredients and cook them to a standard. The sense of it being mythical makes it sound out there, but given that Australia has the ACB and big spiders, they already live in a land of stranger things.

The Battle Chef Brigade are a group of special chefs that own a license to kill mythical monsters that have taken to killing us mere mortals. Yes, the world has been taken over by radioactive cows and chickens that have taken all the steroids Bernard Mathews could give them with his cold dead hands. Only these specially trained chefs are qualified to go out into the world and slice up a venus flytrap that has eaten a pigeon and thus gained the power of flight. Remember, we’re talking about a mythical world, so that kind of madness works in someone’s mind.

It doesn’t explain why the character you play as, Mina, a young woman in her 20s, has a family restaurant she works at. It also doesn’t explain why their backyard is full of starting creatures. Surely the point is that those in the Battle Chef Brigade are meant to do the killing of all creatures, which makes the idea of local family restaurants a whole question within itself. Nonetheless, Mina is just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world, who runs away to join the brigade.

By happenstance, the brigade is trying out new chefs in the next town over as part of a a Masterchef style reality tv tournament. It seems fairly normal, as you have your green best-friend you meet there, the creepy man who thinks he’s David Bowie, and madam what’s her face from The Hunger Games. It is a colorful cast of characters, in the case of Thrash that’s literal, and the overall gameplay and story is just as eccentric.

Gameplay bounces back and forth between a Tetris-like matching game, putting 3 or 4 colored blobs together to combine them into super blobs. Though sometimes before Tetris you go out into the backyard to have a 2D brawling match with supersized wagyu beef and zombie plants. When you aren’t in the competition you are JRPGing it up, talking to friends, solving the mystery of the bird flu and mad cow disease, or sitting with friends training to solve puzzles faster or beatdown animals quicker. Nothing gets to sit with you too long as the JRPG mechanics are interrupted by Masterchef, then Masterchef is interrupted by the mystery, and it runs in circles.

The thing is, it doesn’t bog itself down in a million fetch quests as Final Fantasy 15 does. The only time you are out collecting something is to then immediately cook it, making it less of: “Go out and collect these buttons. Oh no, my bats got out trying to eat those buttons, collect the bats!” I’ll assume you get the point of that being repetitive and annoying. That being said, I slightly miss the overly redundant dialogue in this type of game.

Given Battle Chef Brigade is made by Americans, there is an intention that you might remember all the plotlines all the time in this short game. As I have been slowly playing Battle Chef Brigade for a year now, returning every few months to maybe play 20 minutes or an hour, I’m not finished. I know according to HowLongToBeat.com, it should take about eight to nine and a half hours. Though I’m happy to sit and twiddle away at it ever now and then only peeking into the world that’s made on mystery and intrigue.

In conclusion, if you are a fan of puzzle games, brawlers, JRPGs, RPGs, or anything, you might enjoy this mad game. Much like the Yakuza series, there is an indecisiveness towards what lines have a voice over and don’t; and at that, it comes off as strange. However, Battle Chef Brigade is one of the best western attempts at making a short and superficial RPG with Japanese influences. It is possibly the closest I’ll come to saying that what FromSoftware has done with Dark Souls has been achieved by the west.

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Battle Chef Brigade

$19.99 USD

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Fun and impactful gameplay.
• Beautifuly art.
• An interesting story.

Cons

• I miss being reminded what the story is after a long break.