One Piece: Grand Gourmet: Kairosoft gets the licence and makes a restaurant game

Some announcements should not work on paper, and make you grin from the first line.

Kairosoft is making a One Piece game.

Out on 22 October, at 19.99 euros. No score today.

Why that name matters

If Kairosoft means nothing to you, it is the Japanese studio behind Game Dev Story and a long run of pixel-art management sims that colonised phones worldwide.

Their signature is highly recognisable: a top-down view, tiny characters, dense menus, hidden combinations to discover, and a progression loop that holds you for three weeks without your knowing why.

These are people who know how to make management games that create dependency. And they are rarely people who work under licence.

Seeing their name on a property as vast as One Piece is the sort of improbable meeting that produces either a commercial disaster or something perfectly suited.

The idea, and it is well chosen

One Piece becomes a restaurant management simulation.

You are a new staff member, working alongside the Straw Hat Crew to turn the second location of the Baratie, the renowned floating restaurant, into the greatest restaurant of the seas.

For the readers: the Baratie is one of the series' founding locations, a restaurant on the water where the cooks fight with as much energy as they cook, and it is where Sanji was trained.

Choosing that setting rather than yet another fighting game is an excellent decision. One Piece is a series where food genuinely matters: the characters eat constantly, meals seal friendships, and the cook is a full member of the crew.

What you do

You get inspired by the characters' ideas, you choose your ingredients, and you cook with Sanji.

Then you arrange meal sets by adding your own flourishes, and you adventure out to find more recipes.

The announced catalogue mixes series staples, including Water-Water Meat BBQ and Sea King Penne Gorgonzola, with special creations that harness the powers of Devil Fruits.

That last idea is the best of the lot. In One Piece's universe, devil fruits grant absurd powers to whoever eats them. Turning them into cooking ingredients is exactly the kind of liberty only a management studio could take.

What I am watching

Kairosoft depth. That is the whole question. Their best games rest on hidden combinations between elements, discovered by experimenting for hours. If Grand Gourmet carries that over, with ingredient pairings to find, twenty euros pays for itself fast. If the licence demanded a simpler, more guided game to reach children, it will be pretty and short.

The price. Twenty euros is markedly above the studio's usual mobile rates. That is justified by a PC release and by the licence, but it shifts expectations.

And the relationship with readers. A licensed game lives or dies on the details only the faithful notice. Seeing specific dishes from the series in the official list is a good sign. The rest will be judged on how many nods are genuinely built in rather than displayed.

What I like about this announcement is the logic of the choice.

Enormous licences nearly always produce the same games: action, arena, open world. You take the strongest character and let people hit things.

Taking One Piece and making a game where you choose ingredients with Sanji is choosing what the series is about rather than what it shows. And it hands the work to a studio whose job that precisely is.

It could fail. But at least nobody made the lazy choice.

We will come back with a score on the 22nd.

Your favourite One Piece dish? There is definitely an answer, and it probably involves meat on a bone. Say it on the InsertCoins Discord.