maiji: Cooking Master and the extended Seafood Battle commentary (Second Story R)

[image: Screenshot of Claude in the elaborate Cooking Master stadium under spotlights, festive banners, and an audience as the challenger. He faces a penguin, the host Yarma who looks like a white-haired bearded demon king in long red robes, and a short-haired chef in denim overalls. Yarma, Demon Food God announces him as the competitor, describing him as "Claude, leader of the Youth Seafood Chefs' Team!" The rest of the party sits in the audience watching.]Star Ocean 2 has a very well-deserved reputation for its in-depth and ridiculously addictive item creation system. This system is leveraged in its Cooking Master minigame, a super blatant/obvious tribute to Iron Chef, down to an over-the-top host (here, Food God Yarma taking the role of Chairman Kaga) who waxes poetry over the ingredients. Any playable character who has learned the Cooking specialty can enter, and they all get, and react to, funny chef titles (I previously posted the old PS1 ones for Dias, Claude, Rena and Leon here. I prefer the original PS1 translation in this situation because I think it's funnier than the new one... at least in part because its stilted-ness makes it sound even more amusing to my ear).Little me extra loved it because this was during the heyday of Iron Chef’s glory in North America. Star Ocean 2 was released in English in North America in 1999, and coincidentally Iron Chef was picked up and dubbed by Food Network that very year. So my sister and I understood all the references when we played it. We have so many fond memories of things like the two of us crying with laughter over Dias screaming “How?! Can it be!!” while dashing around the Cooking Master stadium making wilted salads and rotten sashimi and whatever. (Sadly Second Evolution onwards changed/dropped the Item Creation failure lines, and honestly SO2R makes success so easy now that my characters rarely fail anyways. Suffice to say I miss watching Dias screaming “How?! Can it be!!” while churning out failure items in general.)In SO2R, they made a ton of things easier, but they actually made Cooking Master harder. Instead of it being simply an extended Item Creation (going into the menu and selecting/combining ingredients), it’s now a rhythm game. At first I was incredibly dismayed because I (me, the actual human player) have next to no sense of rhythm. This meant that it didn’t matter how powerful my characters’ Cooking skill levels were, or how talented they were with Sense of Taste and whatnot - because my timing is terrible, I kept missing and my poor people kept failing and they were all getting stressed out and panicking and buckling under the pressure of the competition. I looked online for tips and there are actually a lot of players crying/complaining about it and people saying stuff like “turn off the sound and just stare” lol. I was in despair. I thought never again would I defeat Food God Yarma and take my place in the halls of the Fun City Cooking Master Arena!! Also I was annoyed I wouldn’t get the achievements/missions related to Cooking Master, including Ashton’s new ultimate weapon. Then about a week or so ago I realized three things. There are actually shortcut buttons to select ingredients really quickly so you don’t lose time which they don't tell you about, you have to look and spot the little text below the character when they’re standing at their cooking battle station;  I can hit the circles better if I’m looking carefully at the screen combined with listening to the little dings of the ingredients popping up onto the screen and mimicking the sound pattern; and I forgot that the Courage skill actually is useful for this mini game. (Courage is essentially a skill that - to my memory - did nothing except give you access to the Pickpocketing specialty.) So characters with maxed out Courage stress less and don’t freak out/freak out much less at every little thing, including when they’re actually doing well.   So armed with my new powers I blasted through Cooking Master. Claude kicked butt with his steak-making prowess and he defeated all his opponents and triumphed over Food God Yarma to become Cookery Master once again. Yaaaay.Here’s Claude absolutely destroying Puffy in Slime Battle with his slime-cooking skills.[Screenshot of Surprise Entry Puffy VS Leader of the Youth Seafood Chefs' Team Claude. Puffy has maxed out pressure and she's sweating like crazy. Claude has no pressure whatsoever and is in the midst of his idle animation, so he looks like he's giving her side-eye from his end of the kitchen arena. The screen reads "Pressure KO" in giant white letters glowing with a blue halo.]Look at all the cheese Claude made in this Meat Battle! Lol (I actually managed to catch the Perfect Bonus text here). Anyways if me with all my timing thumbness could do it, I hope this gives someone else hope, haha.[Screenshot of Restaurant Boss Gantz VS Claude. Gantz has a small pressure bar while Claude has known, and is surrounding by a ring of successful cheese dishies that say "Perfect Bonus".]I even had time to sashay over to my opponents’ side to hassle talk to them. I like how impressed Yarma is when you do this.[Screenshot of Claude talking to Food God Yarma in the middle of a Full Course Battle competition while they're both grabbing ingredients. Yarma is saying, "Oho! What splendid chutzpah you have, to be talking to your opponent in the midst of a match!"]I also gave all my other characters a turn at winning as well. Which leads me to the actual reason I wanted to make this post: The extended Seafood Battle commentary!I encountered something that existed since the original PS1 game, but I don’t remember seeing, because I never had the exact combination of characters sitting in the audience during a Seafood Battle to trigger the full thing. Again, another example of how you can play this game a bajillion times and still see new things.Non-competing party members watch the battle from the audience. For a few battles, they will actually talk. Slime Battle is the one all the fans remember because a random Expellian party member will yell something indignantly, and then all the non-Rena Nedians will go "..."The other main one is the Seafood Battle. It’s actually a multipart conversation that progresses depending on who’s in your party. Here’s what I had documented back many many years ago. PS1 translation. [Seafood Battle] Food God and Prince of Darkness Yarma: Among the natural bounty of Nede, this is the most esoteric ingredient!! The bounty of the sea, grown along the shore. For me, this food also brings back few but fond memories. O the sweetness of ganze sea urchin!! O the texture of abalone!! It brings back memories of the smell of the salt air from the days of my youth … As time passes, the cuisine that you two will create today using your culinary skills, will certainly be recreated as wonderful memories!! [If Rena is in the audience]Rena: (?) What is this 'ganze'?[If Claude is competing, that's as far as you'll get. No one replies to Rena and the battle starts. But if Claude is in the audience, he'll answer her.]Claude: I think it's a kind of sea urchin. [If Ashton is also in the audience, this next part then triggers]Ashton: (lightbulb) Is it like the morning star?Claude: (sweatdrop) Yeah, that's right. And that’s as much as I’d caught and transcribed back then. In SO2R, I also had Precis in the audience (I didn’t bother transcribing Yarma again, you get the idea):[Screenshot of the in-game log overlaid on the Cooking Master competition scene showing the text transcript as follows.]Rena: What’s an abalone?Claude: I think it’s a type of mollusk.Ashton: So kind of like an oyster?Claude: Um, yeah, more or less.Precis: Rock on, Mr. Science! You really know your stuff.Claude: Aw, it’s nothing. My mom happens to like them, although I’m not that big on them. Neither is my dad.Since it’s completely random which ingredient you get for the challenge and you can't change your language settings during the competition, I had to hack and slash my way through Cooking Master a bunch more times just so I could see the entire Japanese of this convo. My translation attempt (as usual aiming for more literal so you can compare with the official translations): [Screenshot of the in-game log overlaid on the Cooking Master competition scene showing the Japanese text transcript as follows.] Rena: ...ガンゼってなに？What’s ‘ganze’? Claude: 「うに」のことじゃないかな。I think it means "uni". [edible part of a sea urchin] Ashton: モーニングスターみないな奴？Something like a morningstar? Claude: そ、そうだね。Ah, yeah. Precis: 博学じゃん！！さっすが。Super well-read aren'tcha!! As expected. Claude: ...いや、母さんが妙に好きでさ。ぼくも父さんも別に大して...。... Not at all, my mother oddly likes it. Me and my father aren’t really big on it... Again, you can see that original PS1 translation is more technically accurate; SE/SO2R translation sounds more natural.This seems to be the full conversation chain, unless another party member I didn't recruit this time around creates an additional link. It can't be Opera, Ernest or Bowman, so it's either Celine or, highly unlikely, Dias. Or no one else and this is the end of the conversation. The last option seems most likely.I thought this was a very cute little piece of lore! So Ilia likes uni (or abalone depending on the translation...), Claude and Ronixis don’t, haha. Uni does tend to be an acquired taste. You can definitely taste the ocean...