Finally time to talk about this hidden game for the switch, one that slipped me totally by until a few weeks ago when i spotted a random booster pack on amazon japan and followed the trail back and discovered something amazing. Now i'm all in, as i try and get the whole lot before supplies totally dry up however i'm already too late for one series of the booster packs (series 4) as they are totally sold out everywhere i can't find a single place online in japan or the west that has any left.
So what is it? It's basically a toy based switch game, it pulls no punches in pretending it's anything else. It was created to sell toys & goes along with an anime show to build the world the game & show are set in however it's no cheap half assed cash in it's actually really well put together. It's a bit different though to something like yokai watch where it spawned millions of spinoff toys & merch that were their own thing, with tabe-o-ja all the items are specifically designed to work with the switch game. There is no physical game to buy with these been the addons, you can't get the game unless you buy the starter set (i'll explain later)
The story is pretty fun, in a world where a long time ago there used to be cooking warriors known as tabe-o-ja. Chefs of such skill that they had the ability to summon living gods from the dishes they created. These gods were known as tabegami, sort of like pokemon but all food based with really cool designs (these totally won me over). A living embodiment of the spirit of the dish, Tabe-o-ja used these gods to battle demons that plagued the world known as hungry eaters, creatures that possessed people and gave them insatiable hunger, only a dish with god levels of deliciousness could satisfy them and in doing so defeat them. This is how the story of the game plays out you play as the main character Taberu who eventually finds out he's a descendant of the tabe-o-ja and the story goes from there, that's the basic jist of it. The switch game takes these animated parts and adds them into the story mode so it's like watching a show then you get to battle as it goes back to the game.
There are 2 ways you can get started with this game, you can either buy the starter set that has enough to get you going, or there is a mini size version of the starter set for those who don't yet know if they want to go all in. The mini size set is just a single booster pack with fixed contents it has 2 god lite recipes in card form a plastic god recipe and a cardboard guide to slip on the joycon to help position the joycon properly when scanning the recipes it also comes with a code on a card with a cut down trial version of the full game. This is the main set, you get 2 proper god recipes the ojagear and an expotion, 4 lite versions of the god recipes and a download card for the full version of the game. You can't find the game on the eshop by searching you can only get it if you have the code to find it.
In case anyone wants to try here's the code i have no idea if it's single use or not.
The main parts of the game mechanics all revolve around several key items. Firstly is the ojagear a strange device that's a bit like a henshin device from power rangers/kamen rider it's used by a tabe-o-ja to summon a tabegami from a god recipe. Your right joycon locks into the shell and become the main control for the game but you also use a left joycon too in a pair.
The next part is the god recipes themselves they come in 2 forms, the lite versions are just like trading cards, these you get from the starter set as well as the mini size version of the starter pack but you could also find them packaged in tabe-o-ja wafer snacks.
There are also normal god recipes that come from a variety of items, some are in the starter set but the main form of getting them are in booster packs. They vary in colour & rarity depending on the series but the rarest always have some form of metallic accents on them, the artwork on them is fantastic i love the design of them. The pic on the left is the dish that summons them and the tabigami is on the right. The stars indicate rarity, one star is normal, 2 stars is rare, 3 stars is super rare & 4 stars is ultra rare.
There are currently 5 series of booster packs which come in boxes of 10 with a single recipe in each pack it seems so far there are no doubles in a single box and you are guaranteed to get a ultra rare in a sealed box but there's a lot of them so it will take a lot of boxes to complete each series. Normally you'd trade but i'm kind of screwed as nobody is playing this or collecting it over in the uk lol. Anyone wants to buy spare recipes off me then hit me up. There's also 2 large extra packs that were released as fixed sets that contain a set of 6 powerful god recipes you can use to build a single deck, so far there's only been 2 of these but they do contain exclusive colour recipes that don't appear in any other set.
There's also a cheapy binder you can buy that holds 24 recipes per binder, not the best but it's cheap and comes with a bonus recipe. Might be able to scan them while they are in the binder but i haven't tested yet.
In the game when you scan a recipe you then have to go all cooking mama and complete a series of cooking minigames to complete the tabegami summoning, the better the grade the stronger the stats of the tabigami made. You can't add any tabegami you scan to your collection till you have completed the summoning minigame to create it. It's pretty cool how the joycons ir camera is used in this function, you line up the ojagears nozzle in the little nose indentation on the recipe so it's prefectly aligned and far enough away from the QR code, while the qr codes are hard to see in person the ir camera seems to see them totally fine.
The final part of the ojagear is the expotion there's several types in the world you can slot in your ojagear but you start out with one called Pepper Ripper from the the starter set it's kind of like a sentient navi guide during the story but in battle it also has special effects once you fill up the gauge. There's 3 more you can buy as booster boxes that come along with 2 more bonus god recipes there's Dr Ghorra, Stinger BB & Salty Golem all of them have different effects and you can swap them out for another if you scan the nfc chip onto your joycon to let the game know you have swapped one out. They are really well made and look pretty cool.
So what is the game actually like? It's basically a tower defence style game mixed in with cooking minigames, you and your opponent have a cooking station at opposite sides of the battle arena which has to be protected at all costs if it's destroyed then you instantly lose the match. On each side of your cooking station are statues called kitchen guardians they will fight off your opponents tabegami but if they are overwhelmed and their energy bars depleted they will eventually get destroyed leaving you exposed. You can create a deck of 6 tabegami to battle with and they all fall into one of 4 different groups. Fighters tend to target single opponents, Crushers tend to do larger areas of damage, Trickers use a lot of status effects and Healers are your backup help. You can't just use your strongest tabegami to create some killer deck as each recipe has an add cost so you have to balance your deck well, there's a lot of strategy in balancing your deck as certain types are weaker or stronger against each other. To summon the tabegami from your deck you have 4 spaces free on your cooking station as time elapses a gauge will fill each time you use a card it will deplete that summon gauge. When you summon you have to quickly complete a cooking minigame depending on what you summoned from your deck like pouring curry into a bowl or grating some wasabi for sushi or cheese on a pizza or stacking scoops of rice/ice cream if you complete the minigame perfect your tabegami will be summoned ready for you to deploy, if you mess up the summoning minigame it will still appear but it will be a janky low stat version. There's more to it but i don't want to go into every tiny battle detail as lets be real not many are going to be playing this.
Outside of the story mode that you play in chapters, eventually when you get far enough into the story more places unlock in the street that works as your main menu. There's the event section where you can play new dlc events some are permanently added as you upgrade the version of your game but some have a time limit before they vanish. The time dependant ones have an exclusive tabegami you can get from completing them i have no idea if once a event ends it's gone for good so i'm making sure i try to complete it but man i need to put the work in as my starter team got destroyed. There's also a bit of paid dlc in the form of premium events there's the oriental mart where you can purchase & play these ones, so far not many and not extremely high priced i think the most expensive one is 900 yen but there's only 3 of them at the moment.
Theres also a lottery shop where you can scan god recipes to unlock cooking ingredients you can fuse these with your tabegami to make them stronger there are also rare items that can actually evolve your tabegami if used, haven't gotten far enough to be able to do that yet but i have seen pics on the website showing it. Thankfully this isn't some paid mobile gaming gatcha thing you if you own any god recipes you can basically scan them and the items of random rarity will come out. There's a dial to the left that has the 4 tabegami types as well as a rarity chance if you scan types that the dial is pointing to you have a higher chance of getting the really rare stuff. The rarity also flutuates each day, the max i have seen it so far is at 3 stars. You get 10 chances each day to scan for items using your god recipes then it resets the next day and no you can't trick the game by changing your system clock i tried & it knows lol. There's also 2 more options in the menu for gold scan chances where you can get the equivalent of 2 or 3 recipe scans at a time but these you don't actually need recipes to scan in. You get a couple of gold tries when you first start your game but i'm guessing they will be rewards for completing certain quests guess that option was for people that didn't actually buy many physical god recipes so they could have a decent chance of getting stuff too. I haven't seen anywhere indicating paid in game currency thankfully.
The final section of the street is the battle menu for challenging friends you can either do local wifi multiplayer or you can battle online. I haven't tried much of anything in there as i'm concentrating on the main story and getting that time dependant event completed. Aaaand that's pretty much it, for a toy based kids game it's a lot of fun and it's been really well thought out. It's quirky and fun with really cool looking creatures. At some point i really do want to get the other 2 games that are like this that are collecting toys that happen to be switch games too.
This is the official website that has a lot of content on the game i didn't go into.
And this is one of the super cheesy real life summonings, they really did make a huge effort for this game. There's more on the website.
The Babel burger
So what is it? It's basically a toy based switch game, it pulls no punches in pretending it's anything else. It was created to sell toys & goes along with an anime show to build the world the game & show are set in however it's no cheap half assed cash in it's actually really well put together. It's a bit different though to something like yokai watch where it spawned millions of spinoff toys & merch that were their own thing, with tabe-o-ja all the items are specifically designed to work with the switch game. There is no physical game to buy with these been the addons, you can't get the game unless you buy the starter set (i'll explain later)
The story is pretty fun, in a world where a long time ago there used to be cooking warriors known as tabe-o-ja. Chefs of such skill that they had the ability to summon living gods from the dishes they created. These gods were known as tabegami, sort of like pokemon but all food based with really cool designs (these totally won me over). A living embodiment of the spirit of the dish, Tabe-o-ja used these gods to battle demons that plagued the world known as hungry eaters, creatures that possessed people and gave them insatiable hunger, only a dish with god levels of deliciousness could satisfy them and in doing so defeat them. This is how the story of the game plays out you play as the main character Taberu who eventually finds out he's a descendant of the tabe-o-ja and the story goes from there, that's the basic jist of it. The switch game takes these animated parts and adds them into the story mode so it's like watching a show then you get to battle as it goes back to the game.
There are 2 ways you can get started with this game, you can either buy the starter set that has enough to get you going, or there is a mini size version of the starter set for those who don't yet know if they want to go all in. The mini size set is just a single booster pack with fixed contents it has 2 god lite recipes in card form a plastic god recipe and a cardboard guide to slip on the joycon to help position the joycon properly when scanning the recipes it also comes with a code on a card with a cut down trial version of the full game. This is the main set, you get 2 proper god recipes the ojagear and an expotion, 4 lite versions of the god recipes and a download card for the full version of the game. You can't find the game on the eshop by searching you can only get it if you have the code to find it.
In case anyone wants to try here's the code i have no idea if it's single use or not.
The main parts of the game mechanics all revolve around several key items. Firstly is the ojagear a strange device that's a bit like a henshin device from power rangers/kamen rider it's used by a tabe-o-ja to summon a tabegami from a god recipe. Your right joycon locks into the shell and become the main control for the game but you also use a left joycon too in a pair.
The next part is the god recipes themselves they come in 2 forms, the lite versions are just like trading cards, these you get from the starter set as well as the mini size version of the starter pack but you could also find them packaged in tabe-o-ja wafer snacks.
There are also normal god recipes that come from a variety of items, some are in the starter set but the main form of getting them are in booster packs. They vary in colour & rarity depending on the series but the rarest always have some form of metallic accents on them, the artwork on them is fantastic i love the design of them. The pic on the left is the dish that summons them and the tabigami is on the right. The stars indicate rarity, one star is normal, 2 stars is rare, 3 stars is super rare & 4 stars is ultra rare.
There are currently 5 series of booster packs which come in boxes of 10 with a single recipe in each pack it seems so far there are no doubles in a single box and you are guaranteed to get a ultra rare in a sealed box but there's a lot of them so it will take a lot of boxes to complete each series. Normally you'd trade but i'm kind of screwed as nobody is playing this or collecting it over in the uk lol. Anyone wants to buy spare recipes off me then hit me up. There's also 2 large extra packs that were released as fixed sets that contain a set of 6 powerful god recipes you can use to build a single deck, so far there's only been 2 of these but they do contain exclusive colour recipes that don't appear in any other set.
There's also a cheapy binder you can buy that holds 24 recipes per binder, not the best but it's cheap and comes with a bonus recipe. Might be able to scan them while they are in the binder but i haven't tested yet.
In the game when you scan a recipe you then have to go all cooking mama and complete a series of cooking minigames to complete the tabegami summoning, the better the grade the stronger the stats of the tabigami made. You can't add any tabegami you scan to your collection till you have completed the summoning minigame to create it. It's pretty cool how the joycons ir camera is used in this function, you line up the ojagears nozzle in the little nose indentation on the recipe so it's prefectly aligned and far enough away from the QR code, while the qr codes are hard to see in person the ir camera seems to see them totally fine.
The final part of the ojagear is the expotion there's several types in the world you can slot in your ojagear but you start out with one called Pepper Ripper from the the starter set it's kind of like a sentient navi guide during the story but in battle it also has special effects once you fill up the gauge. There's 3 more you can buy as booster boxes that come along with 2 more bonus god recipes there's Dr Ghorra, Stinger BB & Salty Golem all of them have different effects and you can swap them out for another if you scan the nfc chip onto your joycon to let the game know you have swapped one out. They are really well made and look pretty cool.
So what is the game actually like? It's basically a tower defence style game mixed in with cooking minigames, you and your opponent have a cooking station at opposite sides of the battle arena which has to be protected at all costs if it's destroyed then you instantly lose the match. On each side of your cooking station are statues called kitchen guardians they will fight off your opponents tabegami but if they are overwhelmed and their energy bars depleted they will eventually get destroyed leaving you exposed. You can create a deck of 6 tabegami to battle with and they all fall into one of 4 different groups. Fighters tend to target single opponents, Crushers tend to do larger areas of damage, Trickers use a lot of status effects and Healers are your backup help. You can't just use your strongest tabegami to create some killer deck as each recipe has an add cost so you have to balance your deck well, there's a lot of strategy in balancing your deck as certain types are weaker or stronger against each other. To summon the tabegami from your deck you have 4 spaces free on your cooking station as time elapses a gauge will fill each time you use a card it will deplete that summon gauge. When you summon you have to quickly complete a cooking minigame depending on what you summoned from your deck like pouring curry into a bowl or grating some wasabi for sushi or cheese on a pizza or stacking scoops of rice/ice cream if you complete the minigame perfect your tabegami will be summoned ready for you to deploy, if you mess up the summoning minigame it will still appear but it will be a janky low stat version. There's more to it but i don't want to go into every tiny battle detail as lets be real not many are going to be playing this.
Outside of the story mode that you play in chapters, eventually when you get far enough into the story more places unlock in the street that works as your main menu. There's the event section where you can play new dlc events some are permanently added as you upgrade the version of your game but some have a time limit before they vanish. The time dependant ones have an exclusive tabegami you can get from completing them i have no idea if once a event ends it's gone for good so i'm making sure i try to complete it but man i need to put the work in as my starter team got destroyed. There's also a bit of paid dlc in the form of premium events there's the oriental mart where you can purchase & play these ones, so far not many and not extremely high priced i think the most expensive one is 900 yen but there's only 3 of them at the moment.
Theres also a lottery shop where you can scan god recipes to unlock cooking ingredients you can fuse these with your tabegami to make them stronger there are also rare items that can actually evolve your tabegami if used, haven't gotten far enough to be able to do that yet but i have seen pics on the website showing it. Thankfully this isn't some paid mobile gaming gatcha thing you if you own any god recipes you can basically scan them and the items of random rarity will come out. There's a dial to the left that has the 4 tabegami types as well as a rarity chance if you scan types that the dial is pointing to you have a higher chance of getting the really rare stuff. The rarity also flutuates each day, the max i have seen it so far is at 3 stars. You get 10 chances each day to scan for items using your god recipes then it resets the next day and no you can't trick the game by changing your system clock i tried & it knows lol. There's also 2 more options in the menu for gold scan chances where you can get the equivalent of 2 or 3 recipe scans at a time but these you don't actually need recipes to scan in. You get a couple of gold tries when you first start your game but i'm guessing they will be rewards for completing certain quests guess that option was for people that didn't actually buy many physical god recipes so they could have a decent chance of getting stuff too. I haven't seen anywhere indicating paid in game currency thankfully.
The final section of the street is the battle menu for challenging friends you can either do local wifi multiplayer or you can battle online. I haven't tried much of anything in there as i'm concentrating on the main story and getting that time dependant event completed. Aaaand that's pretty much it, for a toy based kids game it's a lot of fun and it's been really well thought out. It's quirky and fun with really cool looking creatures. At some point i really do want to get the other 2 games that are like this that are collecting toys that happen to be switch games too.
This is the official website that has a lot of content on the game i didn't go into.
And this is one of the super cheesy real life summonings, they really did make a huge effort for this game. There's more on the website.
The Babel burger
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