And also Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I was making real progress on until I hit an annoying roadblock (White Cometite, if you know, you know), but more on that another day.
Happy Dessert Cafe and My Sushi Story are two idle games from the same company (Miya Games) with the same premise (running a café/sushi restaurant) and very similar gameplay at the beginning, though they diverge significantly after a bit.
Happy Dessert Cafe has a much cuter aesthetic and generally feels more “pleasant” to play, but My Sushi Story has much more to do by way of regular events, mini-games and things to unlock, so it’s definitely my preferred experience. It’s also the game I originally set out to play, only adding Happy Dessert Cafe into the mix when I ran out of stamina and started getting withdrawal symptoms. I can’t remember how I heard of either one, though. Might have been a random Google Playstore recommendation.
Story
Somebody or the other left you in charge of a dilapidated restaurant/café, and now you have to get it up and running again. That’s where the story stops in My Sushi Story, but in Happy Dessert Cafe, there’s a little more to it: coffee isn’t well-known in the country you’re in, so you have to introduce it to the folks, overcome resistance and misunderstandings, and win over rivals and critics by building up their affection through bribes gifts.
Dammit Kitty, what do you want from me?!
Gameplay
Merge ingredients to create better ingredients to unlock new recipes to serve to customers to get money to upgrade your staff and facilities. Phew! It’s a simple gameplay loop once you get the hang of it. The idling comes from waiting for stamina to refill so you can merge more ingredients, letting the restaurant/cafe run offline so it earns money for you, and waiting for deliveries, performances, exploration, etc. to end so you can collect the rewards to reinvest in business development.
Just merge the same items over and over again
The last part about deliveries, performances and exploration only applies to My Sushi Story, which has a number of things to do outside of the main sushi part. There’s this mini game where you make sushi to order and send it out for delivery. And there’s another minigame where you have a sailing ship, for some reason, and you go exploring for treasure and diamonds and even do some fishing while you are at it. And later on you unlock a first floor where you hire performers to entertain the VIPs for extra dough.
And on the third floor… Hang on. Come to think of it, what’s on the second floor? Let me check… Oh. There IS no second floor. Due to a poor French localization, there’s a lobby, a first floor (premier étage) and then suddenly a third floor (3ème étage). We don’t talk about the second floor.
And yes, I’m playing My Sushi Story in French because it’s help… helping… me…? learn French? I dunno, I fear I might be learning weird things or bad grammar instead, because some of the things they write don’t make sense. Like this:
This item translation is pants.
What kind of food is “denim de style japonais”? Even Google was stumped. That said, I have picked up a lot of cooking vocabulary from it (especially seafood names like hareng, carassin, poulpe, loup de mer, thon, etc.), but I’ve been second-guessing myself ever since I saw this crazy translation. If you hear about the mad foreigner demanding jeans in a Paris café… yup, that’s probably me ^^;;
As for why I’m (re)learning French, I did mention in my resolutions that I wanted to pick up a language to keep my mind sharp, and I’ve been giving it my best shot with French (disclaimer: I’m not starting from scratch). That doesn’t mean I’m playing or doing everything in French though, e.g. I kept Happy Dessert Cafe in English because my brain can only take so much.
Happy Dessert Cafe does have its fair share of minigames and things to do or unlock, but nowhere near as many as My Sushi Story. If you play for a while, you can unlock a cat cafe on the second floor, where you get to play the most annoying minigame ever: clipping a cat’s claws.
No, Kitty will not hold still while you do this. That might make this fun.
This was definitely designed by a cat owner who wants us to feel her pain.
Events
The main reason why I say My Sushi Story is superior to Happy Dessert Cafe is the frequency of events. Granted I haven’t been playing either game that long, but My Sushi Story has had two events: one summer festival, and on ongoing Tanabata festival event, both with new recipes and other rewards to win.
Happy Dessert Cafe, on the other hand, wasted my time with a month-long photo album campaign where it was blatantly obvious from that start that the album couldn’t be completed without paying real money, and even that would be iffy because the photo fragment drops were random. The whole thing positively reeked of F2P despair. There’s been nothing since then, and TBH I’m kind of wondering why I’m still playing it now.
Sushi-making minigame in My Sushi Story. Kinda pointless tbh
Overall thoughts
I’m on an idle game kick recently, and My Sushi Story strikes the right balance between being an idle game and having stuff for me to do and/or upgrade when I want to. Happy Dessert Cafe focuses more on the pure idling side, which isn’t bad but doesn’t quite do it for me. An idle game should still have a strong game component, IMO.
Criticisms: First, too many ads. If I hadn’t set my phone to block ads, I would definitely complain about ads, because both games constantly try to make you watch ads to get more rewards or double the ones they are giving you. Can’t fault them for trying to make a buck, but I hate watching ads, and I would have quit ages ago if I had to watch them.
The various packs are too expensive as well: $18.99 for a monthly pass that barely does anything is ridiculous. In fact, I don’t like monthly passes in general, but at least some of them have reasonable prices and benefits to make it worth your while. Both My Sushi Story and Happy Dessert Cafe make their ads super obnoxious to push you to get the monthly pass, but at that price, I bet most people will uninstall instead.
Box-packing minigame in Happy Dessert Cafe.
Lastly, it gets to a point where you’re stuck at the same level for a long time and have to wait ages to unlock the next level. This is relatively normal for an idle game, but I wish they had broken it down into smaller goals with easier unlockables to maintain the same feeling of progression as in the early stages. For example, the Chapter of the Sun stage in My Sushi Story has three levels, and each takes weeks to unlock. They could break that down into ten, or even fifteen, so that each level can be unlocked in a few days instead.
Again, the goal is likely to frustrate the player into spending, but again I’ll just quit if it gets too annoying. There are other fish in the sea other idle games in the Playstore… or so I thought, but…
Other Stuff I Tried
Since I’m enjoying these two games, I tried a couple of other games in the genre, but it turns out to be harder than I’d expected to find something I like and can stick with. These three just didn’t work out.
My Hotpot Story: The original game (?) that these two copied (?). A rather ugly affair that lacks the charm and polish of the later games and just looks and feels dated. The restaurant and staff were not attractive and the one minigame I played was not fun. Easy delete.
Fairy Village: I thought it would be a raising sim or a village management sim or even a home decorating sim, but it’s none of the above. It’s a “click something every couple of minutes and maybe something will happen” sim, easily the most boring thing I’ve played in a while. There’s nothing to do except tap the screen and buy a few decorations once in a while.
It’s also very disorganized with no proper tutorial outside of “build a house and go exploring offscreen.” Plus right off the bat, they wanted me to wait 24 real-life hours for a building to be completed before the game could continue. Delete delete delete.
Whole lotta nothin’ going on.
Good Pizza, Great Pizza: Nice presentation, but it requires you to manually “make” the pizza when a customer asks for it. Roll the dough, add the sauce, add the toppings, bake, cut, box. It doesn’t seem like a bad game, to be honest. For example, it might be good for players who want a game that actually simulates the food-making process, instead of having food appear out of nowhere in front of the customer. That’s precisely what I didn’t want to experience, however (also I don’t really like pizza), so I deleted it after a few minutes.
What’s next
I can’t believe it’s already time for Epic Seven‘s 7th anniversary! And indeed I checked just now and the last Epic Dash event began in September 2024, so it’s a lot earlier this time, maybe because it’s their epic seventh anniversary. Either way, I can’t miss out on free rewards, so I’ll be reinstalling for like the tenth time.
Smilegate can get me in the door, but they can’t keep me because they don’t have enough non-PVP content for me to do on a regular basis. Not only that, but they’re actually removing PVE content like Nightmare Raid even though it took me forever to get the right teams to do it. I’m sure they’ve run the numbers and checked the metrics and know what modes make them the most money, but I don’t think PVP will ever be my thing. For now, I’ll just see what they’ve got cooking with the latest anniversary event.
