One Piece: Grand Gourmet trailer teases Baratie life
Bandai Namco's cooking management sim puts you in the kitchen under Sanji, and a new trailer shows the cooking, decorating and 400-plus characters on offer.
One Piece: Grand Gourmet has a new trailer, and it makes the pitch clear: you are not the pirate king, you are the new hire. The video, titled "A Day in a Rookie Staff Member's Life", walks through the loop of a game that hands you a knife, a dining room to decorate and an entire ocean's worth of customers to feed.
Bandai Namco is publishing and Kairosoft — the studio behind the Game Dev Story line of management sims — is developing. You play a rookie chef helping Sanji and the rest of the Straw Hats run a new Baratie, cooking dishes drawn from the series and using characters' Devil Fruit abilities to shortcut the more ridiculous recipes.
Between services you customise the restaurant itself, which is where the series' kitchen-sink energy really shows: the trailer previews interior design, seating and the small army of characters who wander in expecting to be fed. Kairosoft says more than 400 characters from the manga and anime appear in the game.
When and where you can play it
One Piece: Grand Gourmet launches on 23 October for Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam, iOS and Android. It follows the original manga by Eiichiro Oda, which has been running since 1997, and the television anime that has been on air since 1999 — a run long enough that a restaurant management spin-off no longer feels like a left turn.
Our opinion
Handing a licensed mega-franchise to Kairosoft is a smarter move than it looks. Kairosoft sims live on dense little management loops and the One Piece kitchen is the perfect excuse for one: recruits, recipes, Devil Fruit shortcuts and a dining room that never stays tidy. Whether it survives contact with mobile free-to-play economics is the open question — the last decade of licensed One Piece mobile games should make any fan nervous — but as a Switch 2 showpiece for the series' 27th year in print, it is the most appealing thing Bandai Namco has shown from the property all year.