Tales of Hearts? Ao no Kiseki? How can mere big-budget handheld games compete with the charm of a $2.99 smartphone game? Say hello to your new mobile overlord!

Adventure Bar Story is an Atelier-inspired crafting RPG from a company called Rideon Japan. It’s been (passably but not well-)translated and is available for the Android, iOS and 3DS. A free demo called Adventure Bar Story LITE is also available if you want to try it before buying. It’s a good idea to do so just to make sure it works on your phone, but if it works on my dinky old rooted (many Japanese games won’t run on rooted phones) Android 2.3.5 512 MB phone, it will probably run on anything.

I started playing it 3 days ago at Davzz’s suggestion. Right now the clock reads 8:40h, my bar level is 5, my characters are an average of level 20 and the enemies at Otts Falls are KICKING. MY. BUTT! The difficulty spike between dungeons is brutal, and since you only level up from eating food and not from fighting, there’s no such thing as “It’ll get easier as you go along.” I’m not going to run away though. A real gamer gets excited by a challenge, and at least I won’t be whining about how easy it was when the game is over (…or will I?). However it does occur to me that a quick retreat to farm some free pork, make lots of Crispy Bacon and level up at least once more might not be a bad idea. Eh, I’ll push on anyway.

Eating to level up gimmick aside, Adventure Bar Story is just an ordinary crafting RPG. The premise is that an evil restaurant owner is trying to buy out our bar, so main character Siela decides to stop him by making the bar super-popular, first by increasing sales through better food and secondly through winning food contests. Every day she goes out with her friends, fight monsters, gathers lots and lots of ingredients and then comes home to cook and serve the food in the bar. The day ends once you open the bar for business and then another day starts. Repeat until you win.

Battles are ordinary RPG turn-based battles. Attack, Escape, Guard, Item, Skill. Apart from leveling up by eating you can also equip standard weapons and armor to give yourself a fighting chance against the overpowered mobs in new dungeons. Make no mistake though, the bulk of your strength is going to come from food, so open wide!

The developers estimate about 50-70 hours for a playthrough, which means I’ve barely reached anywhere, so this is just a preliminary post to say that this is what I’m playing now and will be playing for the next little while, it’s pretty good so far and we’ll see how it goes. What I like most about it is that unlike many other smartphone apps, you can play as long and as often as you like without having to wait for some stupid timer to give you more lives. And while there are ‘jewels’ you can buy with real-world cash to spend on equipment and new recipes, there is absolutely no requirement that you do so and you can get through the game just fine without buying a single jewel. Of course this is normal behavior for any sensible RPG, but with so many smartphone games losing their way, it’s a relief to see something normal for a change.

Any negatives? Well the translation is definitely a bit wonky. Not Alice in the Hearts kind of terrible, but clearly not done by a native speaker. Plenty of sentences start with small letters instead of capital letters and end without a full stop, which is all stuff any English speaker learns in the first grade. There are also several misspellings like Cafe au Le instead of Cafe au Lait and Raison Bread instead of Raisin Bread. At one point a character also promised to send produce to a white bag in my bar, but there’s no white bag there, only a brown one. Cue several minutes spent pressing anything that looked bag-like.

The other negative is the controls. It’s probably my fault for having such a small screen (3.5 inches), but my thumbs cover a lot of the screen when using the on-screen keypad AND I make a lot of mistakes trying to move around and click on things. Using just the touchscreen to navigate was even more painful because again, small screen, big thumbs. Getting the game on the 3DS wasn’t an option for me, but if you can get that version it’s probably your best choice simply for the greater ease of navigation. Or if you have a tablet or a phone with a fairly big screen, that works too. Any further comments about Adventure Bar Story will have to wait till I’ve played a little more.

Btw, I changed my theme. Yay~. I’m not sure I’m going to stick with this one, though. The useless scroll bar on the side of each post is annoying me and I have no idea how to do anything complicated in PHP. I’m probably just going to look for something equally simple but without the bar. Either way, start getting used to a new look.