Ocean Lunch Antique is another simulation game from inutoneko, a Japanese indie game I’ve been sort-of following for years. Their games used to be Japanese only, but now you can find their more recent games on Steam with poor but readable translations. Worth a try if you like simple but hopelessly addictive games.

Having said that, I haven’t played most of inutoneko’s games available on Steam because I’m working through the Ishwald games in release order and haven’t gotten that far yet. The only one I’ve played and reviewed is Let’s Eat: Seaside Cafe, a.k.a. Kaiyou Resutoran Uminekotei. I had a blast with that one a few years ago and recommend it as a good starting point for the series. It’s also a prequel of sorts for Ocean Lunch Antique since protagonist Fill (also the protagonist of Haretari Kumottari N) is hired as a weekend cook for the Uminekotei restaurant.

During the week (really one long ‘day’) Fill can hang around doing whatever he wants and then on the weekend he puts whatever he cooked that week on sale for diners to enjoy. In theory, anyway. I read on a FAQ that the easiest way to succeed is to spend the first year doing nothing but researching recipes and shmoozing with adventurers. The more recipes you know, the more Life Points you get and the more stuff you can do. And the more adventurers like you, the more quickly they will join you and help you get high-quality ingredients. Strangely enough, you won’t get fired for not doing a lick of work, probably because the restaurant owner is hopelessly infatuated with Fill.

But let’s say we want to be honest, upstanding folks. Then the task is simple. Cook stuff, put it on the menu and let people buy it. To cook stuff, you put the required ingredients together, apply a little WP and presto. The nice thing is that the ingredients needed are very flexible. If the recipe calls for dairy products, you can use any kind of milk or cheese. If it’s seafood, you can add shrimp or seaweed or fish, it’s all fine. It just affects the final quality and a few other things.

Where do you get all the ingredients? Why, from the market of course. Specifically it seems to be a professionals chefs-only market where you don’t buy food with cash but rather exchange for them with quality points. A screenshot or two will help explain.

That’s all the ingredients you can buy. The numbers outside the brackets indicate how many points you have. 1 point = 1 product. I have 18635 points for wheat, so I can buy 18,635 wheat products. The number in the brackets show the quality of the products I can trade for. The higher that number, the better the quality of stuff I can get. Let’s take a closer look:

Here I have 12824 points worth of milk products at a quality of 6.45, so I can trade for everything from Level 1 Low-quality Milk to Level 6 Specially Selected High-Class Milk. Initially, as I said, you can use any kind of milk in most recipes, but the more advanced your recipes get, the more particular they get about ingredients.

There are also a few items like chocolate, oil and curry powder you can’t get through the market, but there are a few other ways to get stuff:

•Buy them from local shopkeepers
•Buy them from other characters like Tico and Shiva at a markup
•Have adventurers randomly find them in treasure chests. Usually they bring back ingredient points only, but once in a while you get lucky.
•Forage them yourself
•Grow them in your backyard garden
•Beat monsters for them. There’s no combat in this game btw
•Make them in the restaurant’s all-purpose processor which brews, refines, presses and does all kinds of miraculous things. You can press flowers into oil, turn honey into better honey, rice into alcohol, milk into cheese. Almost every ingredient can be processed, though a large number of them will either turn into inferior products or just plain garbage. Which you can add to your dishes as an ingredient. Sshh, not a word to the health inspectors!

So what’s the goal of all this cooking and foraging? First it was for Fill to save £1,000,000 in cash. As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve achieved that handily. Even with Eve taking a cut of sale for “management fees,” almost everything you cook is popular and profitable. Eve claims it’s because she’s already done all the work to make Uminekotei successful, and I can’t really argue since I did all that work back then.

This overwhelming popularity is actually a bit of a bad thing, because it means I can ignore many of the game’s restaurant management features and do whatever you want and still come out ahead. For example, in theory you’re supposed to pay attention to restaurant furnishings and interior decorations. Those things give Uminekotei a certain style which affects which customers come and how well dishes sell. But I didn’t bother for half the game and still made money.

There are other things you can do like sell dishes as a set combo, e.g. a burger and fries and drinks. This should make you more money by moving more product faster, but in practice every dish is sold out by 2pm every day, so the extra boost is unncessary. Same goes for special plans like All-you-can-Drink or All-you-can-eat Desserts, special summer and winter attractions, etc. If I get plan/event tickets for free I’ll use them, but I’m successful enough without them.

So anyway, I’ve achieved my first goal and Fill is now filthy rich just from cooking a few dishes on the weekends. The next goal, which will be my last regardless of what else the game throws at me, is to make 350 out of the 500 recipes in the game. I saw a screenshot from a gamer who had achieved all 500, but some people are just crazy so we won’t go there. The trickle of recipes is already slowing down this far into the game so I have to work harder to buy recipe tickets with WP or win them through cooking contests. You get a balance sheet at the end of every season showing how much you’ve earned and learned.

This is an old screenshot. Right now I’m up to301/500. Just a little more and I’ll be done.

Thoughts on Ocean Lunch Antique

I like it. A lot. It’s simple, low pressure and hard to mess up permanently. With that ridiculous amount of ingredient points, I never have to worry about running out of resources. (Except water. I’m always running out of water) You can even set cooking to automatic so you don’t have to. My long held desire to see pictures of the stuff I’m making has finally been realized, which motivates me to keep making new recipes. And 500 recipes to discover and make is huge, there’s no way I’ll be complaining about not making enough stuff when I’m done.

The Ishwald games are as much about characters as they are about simulation. Every game features some minor character progression or development, but it really is minor between games so not much has changed between Ocean Lunch Antique and Moonlight Basket, the previous game. Shio is slowly realizing she likes Fill as more than a friend, Eve is slowly getting the point that Fill doesn’t like her, Sophia is starting to realize the Helsinki does like her.

Ite/Otto and Eve still seem to dislike each other intensely despite being childhood friends. And it’s not the usually tsundere girl/clueless guy dynamic in anime and manga. These two really don’t want anything to do with each other so I have no idea how they supposedly got married in recent games. There’s also a movement underfoot to make Tico a little more pleasant and personable even to Ruvel, but I’m not falling for it. Oh, and Shiva has given up gambling. Heck, everyone in the game has given it up so they no longer drop by your house unexpectedly to challenge you to mini-games. I miss that, a bit. Just a bit.

Apart from the little story progress and the few tweaks to the production system, Ocean Lunch Antique doesn’t offer much new stuff compared to previous games. If you loved the earlier stuff (like I did) then you’ll love this one too (like I do). But since it’s more of the same, I got over it much quicker than I did some of the others, which is another good thing. Just a few more sessions to rack up that recipe count and I’ll be free!

Free to do what? I’m done with Demon Gaze (more on that next time). According to my schedule I should be giving DQVII another chance and then tackling Lord of Arcana seriously. But what I really want is to play an SRPG so Luminous Arc or Sakura Taisen 4, here I come!