When it comes to translating One Piece into a video game, developers have typically taken the action route, leaning on flashy battles and wild Devil Fruit powers as pirates sail the high seas. That makes One Piece: Grand Gourmet’s Sanji-centric restaurant builder with the full roster of characters from across the series is an inspired choice. But while I adore the premise and appreciate revisiting the major locations and feeding nearly every character, working to win over residents of the Grand Line often feels as shallow as the lovestruck chef it’s based around.
After a storm separates them from the rest of the crew, Sanji and Luffy find a restaurant ship being terrorized by a group of fake Straw Hat pirates who are posing as (and giving a bad name to) the restaurant of Sanji’s mentor, the Baratie. The duo sets sail to beat the fakers in culinary battles and clear the Baratie’s name throughout the Grand Line and beyond. Taking a chronological path from the early Romance Dawn days in the East Blue all the way to a taste of the latest arc in the manga and anime, Grand Gourmet is packed with fan service in lieu of a meaningful original story. While I wish there was more meat on the bone, I enjoy Grand Gourmet embracing Sanji’s ethos that everyone who needs food will be fed, and it turns out, everyone the Straw Hats ever met is hungry.
Seafood, They Eat It
Your floating restaurant starts small and empty, with only a kitchen, a table, and Sanji’s chef skills to cook for hungry customers. Feeding people brings in valuable cash you can use to build out the restaurant with more tables, attractions, and decorations to improve the space’s comfort. The more comfortable the accommodations, the happier the customers, and the more they will spend on food. Ironically, comfort is an unfortunate word for this metric. The crimes I must have committed to the concept of interior design have to be the most stressful and sloppy places to attempt to enjoy a meal. I love the idea of building a restaurant that pulls elements from various islands and lets you run wild with the decor, with Sanji cooking delicacies from across the globe, but that tantalizing proposition falls flat in execution.
Each new region brings a set of restaurant fixtures themed to the current story arc you’re sailing through, be that new flooring, lamps, benches, or landscaping. For example, the Thriller Bark set features horror-themed decor, plus a spot to plant the stray zombie friends who accompany the living visitors on the ship. Instead of rewarding you for making an aesthetically pleasing, well-organized dining room, Grand Gourmet doesn’t care about actual comfort. Instead, it incentivizes you to cram every square inch with lamps, benches, and shrubbery to boost stats. Neither Crocodile nor Eustice Kidd ultimately cares what their assigned seat looks like. And because of the limited space and clunky reorganization tools, these areas remained cluttered catastrophes that still somehow made a boatload of money.
Some elements also move beyond the typical restaurant vibe to make the ship a more appealing destination, but they aren’t without their own faults, either. My favorite fantastical attractions are meeting spots for giant sea kings or land crabs, which add cool elements to the ship’s deck and showcase the eccentric animal designs of the One Piece world. It’s fun to collect fish to store in an aquarium or keep the pets of visitors in animal-friendly environments. However, once you have the features and creatures in place, there’s not much else to do with them. They’re yet another money-collecting attraction that doesn’t affect their surroundings besides providing a small bump of comfort.
Meal Prep
Like the interior design, the restaurant’s food has promising building blocks but lacks the finesse to make planning a proper meal worth the trouble. Sanji draws inspiration from his fellow crewmates and restaurant visitors, letting him make everything from simple dishes like rice or spring rolls to fantastical concoctions based on legendary characters or events from the One Piece world. Piecing together a balanced meal of up to four items lets you sell products at a higher price, and you can increase it further by pairing them with other food endorsed by the same Straw Hat crew member. Except, like the design elements, it’s disappointing that someone like Jewelry Bonney isn’t picky about what you serve her; it only matters that you put the food out.
The best course of action is to serve what’s going to rake in the most cash every time, which the automatic meal tool already does effectively. I wish there were incentives for putting together a regional meal or a group-inspired platter to break up the monotony of only pairing the priciest products. This extends to the fake Baratie boss battles, which put Sanji in a Food Network-esque cooking competition, in which the automatic meals were still plenty successful. You can always put together bespoke plates of food and decorate a meal with different figures, plates, and utensils to spice up the meal-planning experience – there’s just not any reason to do so outside of having a little fun.
Learning to cook new foods is critical to building the restaurant’s reputation and fighting fake Baratie, but whether or not you’ll unlock a crucial recipe is a crapshoot. Some foods are key to turning a customer into a fan of the restaurant, which lets them follow you to new regions, but it’s nigh impossible to know who might know which recipe. Nothing points you toward who to impress and what food they are capable of inspiring. You have to be lucky enough to have the right items on hand, and the right people on board, to crack a novel recipe. Unlocking a specific food is often dumb luck, and while it can be frustrating to figure out, much of what you need falls into your lap at the right time. The moments when things don’t come together feel bad, though, especially when your favorite characters have to be left behind when the time arrives to move forward on the journey.
Pressureless Cooker
While Sanji handles the cooking responsibilities, Luffy sets out to explore with the rest of the pirate crew. The action itself is simple, but I looked forward to searching each new region because it’s one of the few tasks that enables the restaurant to consistently flourish in meaningful ways. These idle activities cost Berry, affinity points, or coins to send the crew to important One Piece islands, villages, and bases – the price is worth it, though, as exploration rewards you with new faces to visit the restaurant, giftable items to create new fans or increase profitability, and precious ingredients for new kitchen concoctions. Some rewards are level-gated while others require a specific crew member to bring them home, giving me a great reason to level up every member of the Straw Hat crew whenever possible (once you’ve found them somewhere in the vast ocean, that is).
Each crew member helps out the restaurant in a way only they can, and these are some of the best realized parts of Grand Gourmet. Sanji, of course, cooks all of the meals; Franky, the shipwright, creates new furnishings and can expand the square footage of the ship; crafty Ussop makes decorations and utensils to modify meals; and the swordsman Zoro trains the Straw Hats, allowing them to level up further for expeditions and other activities. My favorite crew member is the money-hungry Nami, who not only bailed me out financially multiple times but also negotiates a half-price discount on new amenities once a day, giving me a neat loophole to buy expensive ship upgrades on the cheap. Every member of the pirate crew brings a fun element to the ship, even if everything doesn’t necessarily help the cause of beating the fake Baratie.
Running a business isn’t cheap, especially when serving hundreds of hungry mouths in the middle of the briney deep, but I’m disappointed by the lack of pressure or punishment for spending far outside my means. Every shop, buffet, and employee hired to help the cause has daily overhead, which put me deep in financial trouble almost every day. (Don’t get me started on how much it was to add Blackbeard to the payroll.) Each sunrise, my Berry count went negative, and I had to crawl through the day. Because no friction challenged my poor financial management, I never needed to find a better way to run the company. The only time anyone cares how shallow my pockets are is when I’m spending money during the day, and even then, someone usually bailed me out immediately, filling my coffers far more than necessary.
With no reason to think too hard about the business management side of things, what has instead kept me playing Grand Gourmet (even after the close to 20 hours it took me to roll credits) is seeing damn near every single named One Piece character running around the ship and interacting with each other. It’s fun to see old comrades share a table or bitter rivals chat about characters they relate to. Some meetups are surprising and funny, like two villains discussing “work,” which may or may not involve poisoning people with synthetic Devil Fruits. There are also references to its own lack continuity, which make for interesting meetups between characters who may not exist in the same place or lifetime.
Each character has an affection rating that, when raised to a specified level, can give your staff new items to craft or more customers to invite, making them important to interact with beyond just the fun of having them aboard. Grand Gourmet looks great too, full of small details on the hundreds of character sprites that are truly impressive. Almost every character’s design is recognizable and unique, with many featuring special animations that bring each person to life, like Akainu firing up a giant magma fist while helping to create a new dish. These flourishes don’t happen often, but do inject some much-needed panache to the normally mundane way everyone strolls around.
While almost every character the anime has produced is here, it’s a shame the same can’t be said for the memorable music, voice cast, or sound effects from its long history. Instead, the soundtrack is limited to a handful of nondescript background themes on a short loop paired with a painfully small sample of sound effects, which makes it feel like an early iOS game (which isn’t a huge shock given this game is so deeply tied to developer Kairosoft’s mobile game lineage). A big part of One Piece’s appeal lies in its audio design and music, so it’s a bummer that Grand Gourmet has none of that.