You know, I love food. I love eating it, I love looking at it, I love smelling it, I love making it. But there’s one thing I just can’t stand about food, and that’s when it comes to life and tries to kill me.
Remember in the last post where I talked about that Nintendo Entertainment System emulator my friend gave me, and how I cheated at MegaMan? If you don’t, let me expound: My friend gave me a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator and I cheated at MegaMan on it.
One of the other games he recommended to me, on a later date, was Panic Restaurant. Peculiar sounding name, I know. Japan really likes the word Panic, I’ve come to learn. Panic Restaurant is an oddity among classic platforming games. Nothing about this game is really that standout-ish. The concept is silly enough, I suppose, but things like the characters are entirely forgettable and boring. Look at it this way: Mario has a moustachio’d italian plumber, and a giant turtle dragon. Sonic the Hedgehog has an absurdly fast, blue hedgehog, and a goofy mad scientist man, Megaman has a robot boy with a gun for an arm, and a bunch of other robots with guns for arms..And then there’s this game: Our hero is a short, chubby, old chef, and our villain is a tall, thin, purple skinned (???) chef. Not exactly the most amazing cast of characters.
What makes Panic Restaurant a hidden gem, however, is not it’s interesting, lovable characters, but just the good old fashioned fun you have playing it. It’s a very addicting and very fun game. It has its problems, yes, and it is incredibly difficult, (I know, however, that I did beat this one legitimately when I was young >_<) but holy cow is it a fun game. Platforming at its finest, if you ask me.
The game starts off with our unnamed hero, who we’ll call…uh…Bill. Bill is taking a nice stroll down the sidewalk when suddenly food starts falling from the sky. Take that, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, someone else did it first. We’re then introduced to our villain, Ohdove. Why he has a name and our protagonist doesn’t, I don’t know. He tells us that he’s taken over our restaurant, because why not? Look, this game isn’t fun because of its story, alright?
One of the first things that caught my attention when playing this game again is the graphics. They’re fantastic, in all honesty. I was never a huge fan of 8-bit graphics, I’m more of a 16-bit person, but these graphics are incredibly colorful and detailed for the time.
After this wonderfully crafted introduction to our story, we’re given a map screen, showing us our 6 stages of the game, Appetizer, Soup, Salad, Fish, Meat, and Dessert. As you find out later, none of the levels actually have much at all to do with their titles. Our first level is Appetizer, and I swear that 
tomato is flipping the bird. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened in a Nintendo licensed game.
The first level is pretty short. It starts off outside on the street, because where better to grow carrots. No, I’m serious, there are carrots in the ground here. When you get close, they jump out of the ground and start moving around. I don’t know how the Japanese grow vegetables, but I know for a fact that asphalt doesn’t make the best fertilizer.
Our basic attack is using a cast iron pan to smash things, and while this sounds fun, it’s also annoying. The range on this weapon is incredibly short, and half of the time I ended up getting hit because I attacked too early. Luckily, there are plenty of different weapons for you to pick up in the levels, my favorite of which being a gigantic spoon, because who doesn’t want a gigantic spoon? This weapon works much like the pan, except the reach is doubled. I just love watching our friend Bill swing this thing like a dang baseball bat, it’s just all kinds of awesome.
On top of walking chickens (cooked ones, might I add) and bouncing bread loaves, we have a boss enemy. Every level has a boss, and all of them are equally strange. I’m not entirely sure what this one is. It’s some kinda pan with…Popcorn in it, I think? I have no clue, but every time you hit it, it starts swelling up, and then suddenly it bursts open and spews something that looks like popcorn everywhere.
I don’t know.
After every level, you’re given a little slot machine minigame to play and try to get 1-ups, points, and more health. You have to spend coins that you pick up after beating an enemy. I have no doubt that this stupid thing is rigged, because no matter how much money I had, I only managed to get one or two wins.
The second level is soup, and from here on, the levels get a lot more challenging, and longer. Also, look at the little soup monster, isn’t he ADORABLE?!
Level two is the dining area I guess. Even though this level is called “Soup”, you never see any soup. Nope, just Pizzas, Souffles, and exploding apples. Obviously.
In this level we find another new weapon, a giant fork. Now, this sounds great, but the way Bill uses this weapon is absolutely absurd. If you ask me, I’d use it as a spear, but Bill here uses it as a giant pogo stick. You have to hop onto enemies in order to hurt them, and this is REALLY badly programmed. You end up hurting yourself more than anything. I also forgot to mention that if you have an upgraded weapon and you get hurt, you go straight back to your dinky little pan.
The boss for this level is probably one of the stupidest bosses I’ve seen in a video game as of late. It’s a giant oven that eats chickens (That for some reason look like they’re wearing sunglasses?), and then spits them back out at you. How horrifying. What I’d like to know is how this thing is even managing to hop and fly around. How did Ohdove manage to animate a kitchen utility? These are the real questions that need answering.
Oh well. Onto level 3, I suppose. Salad, the level where we find nothing that even comes close to relating to salad. That’s a trend you’ve probably noticed by now.
This level takes place in a kitchen. Not just any old kitchen, though. A kitchen for GIANTS. How the heck did Bill even cook anything in this place? He’s the size of an ant in this kitchen. Did he get shrunken to the size of a pea by Ohdove? Or did the developers just not think this through when designing the level? Plot holes, people, plot holes.
This level is really where things start getting hard. Where I started to do the unthinkable….I got….ANNOYED :O
Not that it’s very hard for me to get annoyed, that is.
This level has one of the most irritating enemies in the entire game, maybe next to one or two others. These stupid toasters. They just sit there with their stupid toaster eyes closed, acting like they don’t see you, and then BAM! Toast flies out of the toaster and starts hopping towards you. These enemies take up about 3/4ths of the level, and the pattern and speed at which the toast hops towards you is both annoying, and difficult to avoid. You can kill the toast (I can’t believe I just said that) but they move so fast that it’s difficult to actually land a hit on them.
Something I forgot to mention earlier were the mid-level minigames. There are these ladders here and there that basically lead into the ceiling (Let’s just say they lead to Restaurant Heaven or something), and they bring you into these little minigames that you can play for points. They’re not very..Uh..fun. There’s only two of them in the game: One involves you catching fish with a big extending hand thing, while avoiding little torpedo fish, and the other involves you catching eggs in a pan that birds drop from their bums, while avoiding birds that lay…Bombs..? Okay. Forget the entire game, forget the ridiculousness that is Panic Restaurant, forget everything you’ve ever known. WHY ARE THESE BIRDS LAYING BOMBS EGGS?!
This game has crossed into the realm of insanity, and it only goes up from here.
The third level boss is kind of annoying. It’s this angry looking bowl with legs (because bowls have legs, didn’t you know?) that runs around on a platform and makes live shrimp fall from the sky. The shrimp fall in a completely random pattern and bounce around a bit before they go off screen. Some of the shrimp will fall into the angry bowl–or maybe it’s a pot. Idunno. When enough of the shrimp fall into the..thing, it’ll start spewing the shrimp out in random patterns, except this time they’re cooked. Morbid. I really hate video game enemies that don’t have actual movesets, and instead just run around randomly and attack randomly. You’ve already heard me rant about that in the Megaman post, so I’ll spare you.
Level 4, AKA “Fish (Also not having any fish present as enemies)” is probably my least favorite out of all of the levels. It’s a shame, too, because the level has quite an interesting design. It takes place outdoors rather than in a kitchen setting, I guess like an outside dining area. In this level, we have some chairs to fight. Yeah, you didn’t have a stroke and misread that, I said chairs.
And then there’s those *DANG* SHISH KEBABS how I hate them so. There are these kebabs that just…float in mid air, and when you come within a certain range, they’ll fly towards you at lightning speed. These things are the bane of my existence, more so than half of the banes of my existence from Megaman.
Later on in the level you end up jumping over pits with giant knives sticking out of them. Freaky. Exactly who on earth designed this sadistic restaurant? Bill probably gets lawsuits on a daily basis.
The boss for level 4 is a giant hamburger that jumps around and acts generally annoying. This boss gave me the most trouble out of all of them. It has this attack that you have to duck to avoid, the problem being is that I kept forgetting that you even could duck. Guess that much was all on me.
It’s a bit confusing to me that the boss for the “Fish” level is a hamburger, whereas the boss for the next level, “Meat” is…well..You’ll find out in due time.
Speaking of Meat, our next level has nothing to do with meat. Wahay.
Level 5 is our ice level for the game. It includes more pizzas, and ice skating ice cream cones. Maybe the ice cream is that weird Bacon Sunday from Burger King. I can’t believe that exists. This level employs plenty of spike traps, below and above, due to the fact that you have no traction. The ice physics in this game really confuse me. Instead of feeling like you’re slipping around and have no control, it feels more like you’red getting sucked in whichever direction you were walking in last. This caused plenty of issues for me. Mostly in the form of me getting stuck on a wall because the game keeps sucking me into it.
I actually forgot to mention this before: This game has a FANTASTIC soundtrack. This level definitely has to be my favorite in that regard. Honestly, the music is my favorite part of this game. It’s the only thing that keeps me from crying when I’ve died for the 9 billionth time.
Okay, so, are we ready for the big bad boss of the “meat” level? ICE CREAM CON-wait really? Come on. Couldn’t they have saved that for the next level, entitled “Dessert”? Was that really so hard? Good grief.
Could they have not themed their levels a little better? It’s almost like they did it on purpose to mess with people. Maybe it was some sort of translation error. Maybe I should stop obsessing over it. Yeah that’s probably a good idea.
This boss is interesting I guess. It shoots it’s ice cream blobs at you until it only has one left, then it starts using it’s cone as a drill or something and breaks parts of the floor, only to reveal spikes. Glorious. I found that the hit detection on this boss was a little off. I’m not exactly sure where you have to hit it, but sometimes I’d attack center mass and it wouldn’t register anything, making this fight take way longer than it should’ve.
Then we have our final level. Dessert. This level is an absolute pain. Fitting for the final level, I suppose. I feel as though level 5 would’ve made a better dessert level though, not even because the boss was a giant killer rocky road cone, but also because there were ACTUAL DESSERTS IN THAT LEVEL. OH AND ALSO IT TAKES PLACE IN A FREEZER.
This level, however, takes place in something I can only describe as not a restaurant. More like a Zelda dungeon. Complete with rocky floors, walls, ceilings..And waterfalls. Duh. The map screen implies this is the basement of the restaurant, so that’s a bit weird. Does Bill have a secret laboratory somewhere, too? Enemies include flying jack-o-lanterns, fish (FINALLY SOME ACTUAL FISH) and french fries. The french fries are completely obnoxious. The little french fry cups jump up and shoot their little french fries at you at varying altitudes, making it next to impossible to jump over them, all you can do is hope and pray you can smack them out of the air with a well timed attack, but they move so fast it’s not very likely.
The boss, of course, is Ohdove. Yes, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: The fantastic duel with our pink-skinned Dr. Wily ripoff. The first thing that caught my attention, though, was the fact that there’s a giant teacup with a balloon attached to it in the middle of the room, smiling wickedly at us. Comforting. Ohdove verbally assaults Bill, and then takes off on his flying..thing.
Of course, Bill must give chase! After all, this monster has ruined our restaurant! So he finds the nearest..Er, frying pan? As far as I can tell the thing looks kinda high. Bill flies off after Ohdove, and confronts him in the sky. Ohdove, of course, says some nasty things to us and how pathetic we are, and then the fight ensues. Yes. The final boss fight takes place on a blank, sky colored background.
This fight is an absolute joke. Like, really, for the final boss, not only was it the easiest, it was the most boring, too.
You’re armed with eggs that you have to throw and try to hit Ohdove’s balloon attached to his teacup of terror. You hit it enough and it starts deflating. Problem is, he can re-inflate it, too. So, basically, you have to kill him quickly, which isn’t exactly a walk in the park. No, it isn’t actually challenging, it’s just that the random pattern at which Ohdove flies around and the slippery controls make it more a chore to hit him with your 
eggs. Speaking of which, where the heck is Bill keeping these eggs? You know what, don’t answer that, I don’t want to know.
After a few tries, I got lucky and managed to hit the balloon like 10 times in a row and sent Ohdove down to his doom within 3 seconds of the fight starting. I felt dissatisfied with life after that.
And then suddenly Bill’s stoned flying frying pan gives out and he starts plummeting to the ground! But then he catches a balloon so it’s okay. Actually wait, where did that balloon come from, exactly? We popped Ohdove’s balloon. Oh whatever. Bill lands on the ground safely and all is well with the world again. Bill gives us the ol’ peace sign and we get a nice “You won” jingle. And it stays that way. Forever. Until you turn off your console. I always feel empty on these screens. Oh well.
Panic Restaurant, overall, is a very goofy, original-ish game. The enemy placement can be obnoxious, but the controls are tight (excluding the ice mechanics), the music is fantastic, and the level design is interesting and varied. I sounded a bit harsh in this article, but I was just playing up my frustration for laughs, this game still has a special place in my heart, and I would recommend it, if you’re willing to deal with a challenge that is present in most video games of this era.
Moral of the story? I don’t know…Cook your food all the way through, or else it may try to come to life and kick your butt.
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