Let's first talk about why it was so popular at the time. As for the graphics, the setting of food personification was really new around 2017, turning desserts and dishes into handsome men and beauties. The quality of the vertical drawings is the best among domestic mobile games, especially the gap between the vertical drawings before and after the awakening of food souls (those food anthropomorphic characters). At that time, many players were attracted by the contrast between "raising a big lobster" or "treating desserts as wives". Coupled with the voice actor lineup of Suzuki Tatsuo, Hanae Natsuki, and Sakura Ayane, as soon as the Japanese dubbing started, the two-dimensional concentration was directly full, which was a precise blow to the ACG audience at the time. In terms of gameplay, it combines restaurant management and combat systems. You can open a restaurant during the day to make money, and lead a team to play dungeons at night. The rhythm is quite fresh, especially the "touch before battle" mode. To put it bluntly, you use your finger to draw lines on the screen to trigger skills. It has more operational feel than pure idle mode. Although the depth is not deep, in the early stage it does make people feel like "I am playing a game, not watching a video." Coupled with the development lines such as restaurant decoration and recipe collection, the feeling of hanging up is not so strong and players have something to do, so the popularity was really good when the server was launched.
But why did it get cold later? The contradiction between krypton gold and gameplay depth is the first one. On the surface, it is a business development, but the actual probability of drawing cards and the development of fragments are very poor. The gap between UR and SR is not even a little bit numerically. You did not draw a powerful food soul at the beginning, and the progress of pushing the map will make you doubt your life. And you can only upgrade stars by drawing duplicate characters. Star upgrades add attributes and skill effects. This directly leads to a huge gap in combat power between civilian players and krypton players. In the middle and late stages, an ordinary player cannot beat a low krypton player. This is not a technical problem, but purely a numerical crushing. Moreover, the stamina system is particularly tricky. It seems to offer a lot of benefits in the early stage. After three days, it enters the stage of "five minutes after being online and all stamina is exhausted". If you want to continue playing, you have to wait for time or grind. This kind of experience really cannot attract people in an era when mobile games are rampant.
Social aspects are also a flaw. Although unions and restaurant visits are added, the essence is still single-player grinding and card drawing. There is not much content that requires cooperation between players. For example, there is no multi-player boss or real ranking list. The so-called "arena" is to compare who has higher combat power, and there is no strategy at all. After playing for a long time, you will find that the social aspect of this game is to add friends to give each other energy, which is better than nothing. The restaurant system is said to have a business feel, but later on when the menu is full, the customers only have a few lines, and no one comes to see the decoration no matter how beautiful it is, and it becomes a purely personal counter.
Let's talk about the fatigue in the later stages of gameplay. Touching before the battle sounds novel, but the novelty cannot last more than two weeks, because your operation is actually "crazy swiping on the screen within a limited time", and the skill triggering is confusing. Sometimes the swiping is too early and is not triggered, and the swiping is too late and is interrupted. The feel is not very good. In the later stage, automatic combat is more efficient than manual operation, so everyone hangs up, and the meaning of this mode is only to "watch the vertical painting and move it twice". In addition, the levels are extremely repetitive, and there are more and more monsters that change skins. The plot text is not small but it is clichéd, and you will get bored after watching too much.
Another fatal point is the operating rhythm. In the early stages, there were frequent activities and the benefits were acceptable, but in the mid-term, various limited-time recharge gift packs, soul coupons, twilight coupons and other payment points suddenly began to appear. It became increasingly difficult to reach the full character collection rate. New characters were released one after another, but old characters could not wait to return. Players were exhausted chasing versions. In addition, server optimization is average, dungeons are slow to load, and crashes occur occasionally, which consumes a lot of players' patience. This feeling of "I have to suffer even after charging money" directly dissuades a group of medium and heavy users.
Of course, it's not without its highlights. In my mind, its art and voice actors can be given high marks, and the daily lines in the plot are also quite interesting. For example, having a burger personified say "I can't steal the spotlight with the French fries" can really make people smile. As an early explorer of the food anthropomorphic theme, it provided many references for subsequent similar games. But the problem is that it turned its early attractive selling points into gimmicks and did not continue to delve into the playability and fairness of the gameplay. Its operations also excessively pursued short-term revenue, which ultimately led to the loss of players. Looking at it now, it is basically cool. Occasionally, old players come back to miss the vertical painting, but there are not many people in the server anymore.
To sum up, the "hotness" of Food Contract relies on the differentiation of art, voice actors and themes, while the "coolness" is due to the collapse of numerical values, insufficient depth of gameplay, weak social interaction and gradually ugly operation. It is suitable for Buddhist players who have a strong desire to collect specific anthropomorphic characters and don't mind watching the plot alone later. If you are a player who is pursuing competitive balance, a sense of continuous growth, or real social interaction, then it is really not a good choice. My rating for it is: 7.5 for graphics, 5.5 for gameplay, 4 for gold, 4 for social, and an overall score of 5.8. A game that had its own characteristics but failed to survive in the long term. It left a good page in the history of mobile games, but it was just that page. 😮💨