General RPG Minigames 13: Suikoden 2's Cooking Contest

It’s true that most of the times when I have spoken about minigames in RPGs, it hasn’t been especially positive, and the rants I’ve specifically done on them have by and large been highly negative.  I cannot deny this fact.  I think, however, that if you will for a moment recall the objective fact that minigames are by and large an agonizing cancer that act as a pestilence constantly debilitating the entire genre’s immersion and enjoyability, you’ll find that my attitude toward them is forgivable.

Nonetheless, no matter how vile something may be as a rule, there are always bound to be exceptions.  I mean, in general, the prospect of consuming vomit is not very appealing, but we’re happy enough to make an exception for bee barf, and hell, we’ll wear whale puke.  And much like honey, and ambergris, and that flavoring agent that we harvest from beavers’ butts, there exist a few RPG minigames which are not just bearable, not even just okay, but actually good.  And among them, Suikoden 2’s Cooking Contest deserves special recognition.

Why is the Cooking Contest so laudable?  For a number of reasons, really.  First and most importantly, it’s actually a decent storytelling entity in and of itself.  This sustained series of culinary battles contains its own side-story of loss, intrigue, and heroics, independent of and unbeholden to the story of Suikoden 2 itself.  This is a full-on sidequest complete with its own story as Hai Yo attempts to thwart the aims of a shadowy underground organization by stealing their prized weapon and keeping it safe from their attempts to reclaim it.  The Suikoden 2 team took time and put effort into writing a story of Hai Yo facing off against the evil organization that killed his lover and proving to the world that his and their craft is at its most powerful when used for the good and joy of others, rather than one’s own ambitions.

Most RPGs with long-term minigames make the mistake of thinking that the minigame itself is capable of maintaining the player’s engagement.  You play Chocobo Hot and Cold a lot over the course of Final Fantasy 9, for example, but there’s not really any plot associated with it, nor for that most heinous and reviled of evils, Dark Cloud 2’s Spheda, in spite of it being a constant companion through the game’s full course.  The most you can usually hope for is a very, very minor little bit on the side with a minigame as with Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad, which can involve a small pseudo-sidequest of finding and challenging the game’s top players to prove that Squall’s the true king of the game.  But just as a character defined solely by a desire to be better than everyone else at 1 single solitary skill/game is a flat and boring entity, so is a minigame story that’s just about being the best at that minigame bland and unappealing.  Suikoden 2’s Cooking Contest, though?  There’s an actual running plot, and while competition over who’s the true master of the game is a factor, it’s not an end in and of itself, but a vehicle for the true purpose of a story of heartbreak, courage, and conviction.

...A story of heartbreak, courage, and conviction, all told in relation to culinary competitions.  Yeah, that’s the next fun thing about the Cooking Contest: it’s greatly amusing tongue-in-cheek stuff.  You know how 1 of the reasons I love Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden is for the fact that it hilariously keeps a straight face about its story of despair, redemption, parental love, cyberpunk stuff, sacrifice, and all this other serious jazz even while being an utterly ridiculous sequel to Space Jam where basketball is some kind of dangerous super-power?  While not as gloriously sober-absurd as BSUaJG, Suikoden 2 still pulls off an admirable and very amusing blend of the severe with the ridiculous as it tells Hai Yo’s story of a man fleeing and then fighting to stop a corrupt, powerful clan...of chefs who want to use the ultimate recipe to rule the world, somehow.  I mean, the minigame side story’s protagonist says it all himself, really--Hai Yo is a man carrying the loss of his beloved, the burden of turning against his comrades, the struggle of being the only man who will champion the just and responsible use of his art as a source of joy rather than ambition...and this is what the guy looks like.  Tell me that’s not funny.

Smart, too.  In a game whose plot possesses such weight and emotional power as Suikoden 2, having such a different, amusing aesthetic to its side story makes the Cooking Contest’s tale manage to stand out, rather than getting stuck in the main story’s shadow.

Aside from the fact that this minigame has an actual story, and that said story is filled with a deftly constructed dissonance of SERIOUS BUSINESS and over-the-top theatrics based in absurdity, this minigame is also beneficial for another narrative reason--it provides a little smidgeon of character development for the majority of the cast.  It’s certainly nothing much, of course, but having over 60 members of the cast able to sit in as judges, each with their own food preferences and introduction (as well as a few of them even having a line of dialogue to say for said intro), fleshes out the large cast of Suikoden just a little bit more and adds to their personalities.  Suikoden 2 has a lot of small touches of character rounding to its grand cast, and while individually they don’t amount to much, the sheer number of little quirks and details that are gleaned about each of the 108 Stars of Destiny from side content like the Cooking Contest is a great alternative method for making a cast that feels real and personal, without having to dedicate entire side stories and character arcs to them all.  Additionally, a major draw of the early Suikodens is their ability to create a sense of community and camaraderie through the army that the protagonist raises, looking at and portraying large-scale conflicts as social entities as they do so, and having half the residents of the castle get involved in this side story, even just in a small and silly role as cooking judges, helps build that communal aesthetic for the cast.

While those are the qualities that make me particularly fond of Suikoden 2’s Cooking Contest, it’s also worth applauding just how much effort went into this minigame.  True, from 1 perspective, this minigame is exceptionally simplistic mechanically--all the player does is choose which courses to serve, and then mash the X button to make them.  You can make the argument that this is as mindless a task as drinking soup with Ayla in Chrono Trigger, arm wrestling in Final Fantasy 7, charging a Guardian Force in Final Fantasy 8 or your next attack in Saturday Morning RPG, or any of hundreds, probably thousands of other minigames and minor combat mechanics that incorrectly equate rapid button-tapping with entertainment.

However, even if it’s technically facile in 1 regard, it’s impressively coded in another.  Consider this: there are over 60 different characters from whom the game randomly selects judges, each of whom has relatively individualized tastes* and so has been programmed to respond with different levels of favor to every possible dish, of which there are, when you account for seasoning combinations, a total of 240.  Even if my suspicions that most judges fall into an archetype instead of being totally unique (I theorize, for example, that 1 lover of sweets will give the same scores as another lover of sweets), that is an absolutely insane commitment of time and effort to make for programming a completely optional minigame--or even a mandatory one.  And keep in mind that the scoring system isn’t just a Yes-No situation for whether a character did or didn’t like the food--they judge on a scale of 1 to 5, so those 60+ characters have been programmed to respond with 5 levels of preference regarding those 240 dishes.

Meanwhile on the other side you’ve got Xenogears acting like it’s hot shit because it figured out how to code Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Breath of Fire 3 acting all proud that it can throw some NPCs into a couple corners of the map and call it Hide and Seek.  Yeah, Wild Arms 1, I’m sure the programmers who coded the thousands of potential scoring outcomes to Suikoden 2’s Cooking Contest are really impressed by the fact that you simulated Whack-A-Mole.

Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge that beyond the ways in which the Cooking Contest is an unexpectedly fun experience for a minigame, it also avoids some of the pitfalls that minigames frequently suffer from.  It doesn’t really require any specialized and frustrating outside skills that have nothing to do with the rest of the game, as minigames so frequently do, for 1 thing--yeah, I guess button-mashing could be called an outside skill, but I feel like that’s simplistic enough that it shouldn’t count, and even then, the required competence at it for success in this minigame is pretty minimal.  And secondly, while it’s not content that you would want to miss, it’s always, always, always a good thing NOT to make your minigame mandatory to continuing the main game, so I can appreciate that the Cooking Contest is entirely optional.

Now, in the end, what does this all amount to?  Not much more than a cute, enjoyable, but mostly negligible little extra quirk to the game.  Suikoden 2 would certainly not feel less complete, nor, really, any lesser as a whole, were it to have never included the Cooking Contest minigame and its little story arc.  Still, though, ANY minigame that exists as anything more than a stupid, frustrating burden upon the game it inhabits is a happy exception, and the fact that this one is actually an outright positive experience, not to mention made with actual care and work, makes it deserving of some recognition, I think.











* Although admittedly those tastes are not always consistent.  When Icy Brian played through this sidequest, he discovered that just because a judge is said to like Japanese dishes,** that doesn’t mean they actually WILL give them a good score.  Hell, 1 character outright requested a specific dish in his intro, and then gave it a 2 when his wish was granted.  The preferences stated for the judges are usually reliable, but there are a few gaffs here and there.


** How the hell do people in the Suikoden world know what cuisine is Japanese, anyway?  Or French, or Chinese, for that matter?