Adventure Bar Story is a JRPG originally for mobile phones, then ported to iOS and Android, and then finally to 3DS. The game is only playable in 2D. It is a RPG with unique elements. The main distinction being that you only gain experience points to level up by eating food that you cook. While this is different and refreshing in the beginning of the game, it soon becomes a grind as you realize that the food you can easily produce and eat doesn’t provide much experience. It will eventually take days before you can raise the higher levels. The game has a calendar system where you spend each day deciding on what you want to do. Most of the time, you would want to enter a dungeon. You can only enter one dungeon a day. The main reason is because you can pick up food ingredients scattered in them, which is much cheaper than buying it from shops.
The game uses random encounters. Fighting monsters will net you points that accumulate for each character in order for them to learn new skills. The encounter rate is a tad bit too high, especially in the larger dungeons making it annoying to explore. There is a turn based battle system which is simple and functional. Characters can attack, use skills or use items. The speed of each character has an effect as well since a character may be fast enough to have two turns before the enemy has one. A nice quality of life feature for grinding (and you’ll be doing this a lot) is the autobattle option which speeds up the battle animations as well as having characters automatically use attack. The other major component of gameplay is the cooking. It has minor simulation elements since your character own their own restaurant. You decide what dishes to cook with your ingredients and what to sell based on the price and what’s currently popular. You gain recipes or you can experiment around hoping to stumble onto a workable recipe.
You will quickly settle into a routine for each day which comprises of going to a dungeon to get ingredients, buy a few things, cook, and then open the restaurant to gain money. The hardest part of the game is the beginning since you have to juggle between buying better gear, buying new recipes, buying ingredients and buying cooking methods. This is not to even touch upon deciding whether you want to sell the food you made to make money or eat it for experience points. The story is really simple and shallow. Unfortunately, what interest you may have will be quickly dampened as the plot events comes in drips and drabs. You control Siela, who owns a restaurant with her sister, which doubles as their family house. A rich noble wants to buy out their restaurant so they end up deciding to make it the best and most famous restaurant in town in order to prevent it from being taken over.
The progress, and thus the pacing, of the story will vary since it is depending on your own progress of selling enough dishes in your restaurant, advancing through the cooking contests, and clearing dungeons. In the end, it has a pretty boring story with too little cutscenes spread too far apart for a RPG. The very final part of the game does have better pacing with the quick succession of bosses and new dungeon content. You’re not confined to grind the same areas repetitively like the first 80% of the game. While most dungeons have a boss, they are pretty easily as long as you had been regularly eating and leveling up over the course of the game.
There will be times where it is unclear on how to move the story forward. You will get hints from other characters but you will be stuck a lot of the time with no idea how to move past an obstacle. The game will just keep telling you that you can’t go forward or you are not ready for it yet. The same goes for recruiting characters, with some that require an inane amount of pointless repetition before their dialogue suddenly changes. On the flip-side, there are plenty of secrets to uncover which is rewarding when you stumble across one. The game’s description boasts that it has over 40 hours of gameplay but therein lays its biggest flaw. The game is comprised of 90% of doing the same things again and again and it will benefit from a lot of streamlining. You will be entering and grinding the same dungeon again and again. There is a slow unlock of dungeons with each new one being a slight difficulty spike the first time around.
It takes around 25 hours to complete the story to the credits. However, there is a bunch of post-game content which is mainly comprised of bosses and dungeons comprised of confusing mazes. Although again, it will take effort in order to figure out what content there is because it doesn’t present it on a silver platter. Overall, despite its repetitive nature, Adventure Bar Story is a relaxing JRPG that can be played in bite sized chunks. The core gameplay is solid, with an addictive cycle of getting ingredients, cooking, eating to level up and selling to gain money. If you are prepared to play hours without unlocking the next part of the story, then the game is worth a shot.
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