By: Michelle Chiang

     With stunning graphics and anthropomorphized food items, Food Fantasy is a mobile game that is both fun and engaging. It combines aspects of two common gaming genres, RPG and restaurant management, into one game, making for a unique experience.

     The player begins as an entrepreneur looking to start their own restaurant. However, the player also doubles as a Cooking Attendant, a protector of the world who uses “Food Souls” — the anthropomorphized versions of various dishes — in order to battle monsters.

     It is unexpectedly pretty amusing sending out Peking Duck to do my bidding in battle, aided by fellow Food Souls, Black Tea and Milk. The characters are where the game really shines. Each Food Soul is voiced by a different voice actor (whose credits are given right on the character page). The voice acting brings these personalities to life, and the player can switch between English and Japanese voices.

     The gameplay isn’t tough, and involves more grinding than any real strategy, but it has an addicting quality all the same. The day I downloaded Food Fantasy, I spent five straight hours on it in one sitting. At any given moment, you can clear four separate dungeons, collect tips, fight PVP battles, and train familiars. Other features include joinings guilds, cleaning up disasters (read: monsters), and even more. All of this magic mischief is going on while you’re trying to manage a steady flow of food for the customers of your restaurant, by the way.

     However, Food Fantasy’s major shortcoming is that its navigation is tough and non-intuitive. All the controls are clustered on the main page along the top and bottom of the screen in tiny little boxes. The game also doesn’t bother explaining how to use many of the functions in the game — their so-called “guides” are next to useless. In a game where there are half a million things to do, knowing what to do and how to do it is pretty important, but ultimately, this game has no explanation on how to accomplish any of those tasks. If I hadn’t had a friend beside me who was explaining how to play, I might’ve just given up halfway through.

     But if you can get over that hump, then Food Fantasy becomes a great way to kill time. It’s not the most challenging of games, but it doesn’t need to be in order for you to have fun.

     Food Fantasy is available for download on both iOS and Android.