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cover-Magical Delicacy

Sunday, July 21, 2024 11:52:28 PM

Magical Delicacy Review (jiugraphic)


TL;DR:

Magical Delicacy is like Kiki's Delivery Service, but you cook and cater to various tastebuds while platforming to reach customers. It's a unique addition to the "cozy game" genre.
If you enjoy cooking games and managing food orders, this one's for you. It's visually stunning, has a great soundtrack, and offers a unique take on the "cozy game" genre. However, if platforming or getting lost in a 2D side-scroller frustrates you, this might not be your game. It could use a quality-of-life update to smooth out the gameplay loop.


The Sweet Stuff

Why This Game Might Be for You
Complex Cooking Gameplay: Unlike many games where cooking is an afterthought, here you can strategically combine ingredients with different flavors to create the requested dishes. There are multiple cooking tools, ingredients, and recipes, so you can experiment a bit.
Therapeutic Gameplay Loop: For those who enjoy real-life cooking, gathering orders and ingredients this game can be relaxing for you.
Visuals and Music: The game is visually appealing, especially at night, and has a fitting soundtrack. I really like the music around the area where the tea shop is.

The Sour Stuff

Why This Game Might Not Be for You
Platforming Challenges: The platforming can be fun or frustrating. You can't hang on ledges like in other platforming games, and the controls feel clunky.
Slow Start: The game becomes enjoyable mid to late-game. Early on, it's easy to get stuck without clear guidance from objectives or quests, on how to progress.
Confusing in-game guide: The in-game guide is hard to read. I had to open guides to learn how to combine flavors correctly, since the visual in the guide didn't help. The game also didn't really explain how to fulfill orders (like what does "avoid" mean? as in no "spicy" ingredient at all, or just avoid giving a "spicy" dish at the end?).
Finding Ingredients and NPCs: You have to either open a guide, or spend hours combing the map to find ingredients and NPC locations.
Delayed QoL Upgrades: Quality-of-life upgrades come too late to be useful.
Underwhelming Gardening Mechanic: You have to fetch water and fertilizer, and get to the planting spot on time. The long growth time and the tediousness of this make it easier to just buy or find ingredients. There's also very limited space for planting.
Uninteresting Characters and Story: The characters and story lack depth, everybody is nice to everybody, even when it seems like there's more to them.

Some suggestions for the dev(s):
Ingredient Encyclopedia: This game desparately needs an in-game guide for ingredients, their flavors, and locations.
NPC Information: The character section of a guide needs more details such as their locations and completed orders.
Clearer In-Game Guide: The attempt to make the guide feel more part of the world of the game makes it harder to parse. Instructions on how to combine flavors and fulfilling orders should be made more clear.
Main Questline Clarity: There should be clear objectives on how to progress the main questline.
Enhanced Storefront: There should be more to the storefront, like idk maybe fulfilling random orders to make money on the side for upgrades.
Earlier QoL Upgrades: Make upgrades cheaper or available earlier (especially the storage containers and room upgrades ).
Flexible Item Equipping: Players should have more freedom on what they can do outside of the store. Making item equipping only available inside the store limits this.
Map Accessibility: Exploring the map to find NPCs and ingredients is already painful, so maps should be able to be opened even on moving platforms and inclines.
Gardening Improvements: Maybe the herbalist can sell a watering can and fertilizer bag upgrade to reduce the back and forth while gardening.
Cooking Tool Indicators: There should be a clear indicator of whether there is water in cooking tools.
Afternoon Naps: You should be able to nap during the day, because most potions can only be brewed at night .
Order Selection: You should be able to highlight which order you are working on while cooking. You should also be able to see if an order can be delivered, not just how many you have delivered.
Grinding Spices: A bit nitpicky, but spices should be able to be grinded or even dried. That's how you use them irl most of the time anyways.
Story Expansion: Story needs to be expanded. As it is now, it ended kind of flat.