Iron Chef America is the watered down, somewhat inferior version of the original Iron Chef. Likewise, Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine is the watered down, somewhat inferior version of the original Cooking Mama. Although it brings a few interesting and fun elements to the cooking-emulator scene, ultimately it fails to live up to Mama, the master of the genre, in almost every way possible.
The goal of Supreme Cuisine is to endure a marathon of cooking minigames and do well enough to defeat the Iron Chef. These fracases of fricasee can take place either in a linear career mode, or a simple quick play mode for those not interested in climbing the cooking ladder. There’s also a “school” mode where you can practice individual tasks – this came in handy for me when I couldn’t figure out why I kept failing one or two minigames. As far as multiplayer modes go, it has both a wireless battle mode, and a much more practical “pass play” mode, where more than one person can share a single DS. Unfortunately, I was not able to test the multiplayer modes for this review.
Career mode is undoubtedly the meatiest part of the game. The minigames that play out in kitchen brawls range from chopping vegetables to… chopping meat. Oh, and boiling water. In all seriousness though, the variety of activities the game has you performing is lacking, to say the least. Although it would appear that there are about two dozen different minigames to be mastered, many of them are simply variations on chopping, cutting, or cooking. It doesn’t help that, despite the introduction of a new “secret ingredient” in every round, the recipes never differ that much. No matter what the secret ingredient, one of your choices is almost always a pizza, while another is a type of lasagna, and another a sandwich or pita. The fact that the recipes repeat themselves make the lack of variety even more obvious, and you will have to chop onions for almost any dish you pick, guaranteed.
At the beginning of a battle, you must pick 4-6 dishes to make. Each meal lists the steps needed to complete them, which is helpful if you find that you’re particularly unskilled at say, grinding meat. Once the battle begins, you begin playing the minigames, but in an order I didn’t expect. I assumed you would complete one dish before moving on to the next, but instead you do the first task for each dish, than the second task for each dish, etc, etc. At first, I liked this, as it helps you feel like you’re preparing them all at once like the TV show. However, I grew to dislike it at times because often, the first step of each meal is the same or very similar – I once found myself playing the same exact minigame four times in a row in the course of one battle thanks to this (the final nail in the “variety” coffin).
Setting aside the lack of variety though, it is mostly fun to play through a battle. Cooking Mama is entertaining, but there’s never a sense of competition or urgency. Here, everything is a bit more intense. Two bars on the top screen show how close you and your opponent are to finishing your tasks, and it’s fun to try and stay one step ahead of the competition, even though in the end it seems to be pointless.
In fact, it’s at the end of the battles that things seem to fall apart a bit. Once finished, you and the Iron Chef are graded by judges (that must be annoyingly introduced every single time), the outcome of which determines the winner. Out of your possible 6 dishes, only two are judged – your best meal and your worst. Because of this, the judges ALWAYS rave about one meal, and denounce the other, even if you only messed up once. So ultimately, more than half of the minigames you just slaved over meant absolutely nothing. And to add insult to injury, the way you’re judged doesn’t really make a lot of sense. You’re scored in three areas – Taste, which I THINK is based on how quickly and accurately you completed the tasks; Plating, which is basically a gimme because all you have to do is place things on a plate correctly at the end of a battle; and Originality… which I have honestly have no idea how they grade at all. You can check and see how well you performed every minigame, which offers only a small amount of insight into the puzzling system. In the upper tiers of career mode they seem to penalize you for no reason whatsoever at times, as I often found that i had been given a 75 out of 100 on a minigame I knew I aced. The sheer randomness of the scoring makes the final level of career mode maddeningly difficult.
What also adds to the difficulty, however, are the sketchy controls. Supreme Cuisine demands that your stylus swipes and swoops be ridiculously precise at times, which leads to frustration due to the game not recognizing your commands. Slicing, rolling, grinding, and dunking all suffer from this unfortunate control choice. I often found myself swiping my stylus up and down dozens of times before the game recognized me doing it even once. If your stylus is off the mark even slightly, or your circles aren’t circular enough, the game will penalize you. And in a game where speed is the most important aspect, precision should be graded a lot more leniently.
Another thing I did like though is that, unlike in Cooking Mama, your chef will not only earn a higher star ranking from progressing through the game, but numerous ribbons and medals that act as achievements for chopping X number of vegetables, or beating X number of chefs. You can view your earned prizes at any time from the menu.
The music mainly consists of the Iron Chef theme played over and over and over. It’s not a bad song, mind you, and certainly makes things feel epic. However, it’s so over-played that you’ll soon be turning the volume down in favor of the radio or your own music collection. The chairman will occasionally shout commands at you, but curiously only does his trademark secret ingredient announcements in the list of recipes off the menu. Better somewhere in the game than not at all, I suppose.
The chairman sounds a lot better than he looks, however. Much of the Iron Chef America cast is here, including the chairman, three of the more famous Iron Chefs, and the announcer that my girlfriend thinks is adorable. However, they’ve all been mutated horribly into deformed, cartoonish versions of themselves. Whoever chose this style might want to rethink his/her art career, because the character portraits are simply grotesque. The food looks okay, though not like something you’d actually want to eat. The food graphics are recycled as often as the music, however. All of the lasagnas, for example, look practically identical. Overall, the graphics just seem like a lazy afterthought, and they only exist because without them, there wouldn’t be a game.
I know I had a lot of negative things to say about this game, and in the end, it’s certainly not going to win any awards. However, if you’re a fan of the TV series or cooking games in general, it is worth checking out. While it lacks variety, the competition aspect of it makes it much more exciting than Cooking Mama could ever hope to be, and even though it still has some kinks to work out, it’s a solid effort. ALLEZ CUISINE!
