Yakiniku Bugyou

Yakiniku Bugyou Instructions

Yakiniku Bougyou is, of all things, a game about meat. Specifically the grilling of said meat (with the occasional vegetable) and feeding it to hungry customers at a Japanese BBQ joint. So sit back and join me on a journey through what promises to be the PSN’s greatest barbecue game. 

Menu translations(top to bottom)

1-player Mode: Send your aspiring BBQ artisan through 6 stages of meat-flippin’, face-stuffin’, barbe-cuin’, artery-cloggin’, customer-satisfyin’ grill-based action!
2-Player Mode: Grab a friend and go head-to-head in a master grill-off. Endless Mode: Test yourself against a rotating array of customers, grilling until you drop.
Ranking Mode: Check out the top grillers.

Controls

• Control Pad: Move selection (in menus), move chopsticks (in-game)
• X Button: Place Food(on empty spot), Flip food(on already-placed food), Move Food (Hold X and use Control Pad)
• Square: Serve to Left Customer
• Triangle: Serve to Center Customer
• Circle: Serve to Right Customer

How to Play

The main thing to do in Yakiniku Bugyou is to feed your hungry customers. Your current three customers are shown at the top of the screen, along with their current craving (in green), dislike (in red), and level of satisfaction (the bar below their picture). Exactly HOW satisfied they need to be depends on the mode you’re playing in, but in general you want to have the bar at LEAST half-way filled at all times.

The bottom portion of the screen is mostly taken up by the Grill, a 3×4 grid of meat-searing flame upon which you work your barbecue-ful magic. Move your chopstick-shaped cursor to the spot where you want to place the next to-be-grilled delicacy and press X to place the item on the grill. Once the item is placed it will start grilling.

Different cuts of meat (or the occasional not-meat item) each cook at different speeds, and the speed at which an item is cooked depends on where you place it on the grill. The two squares in the center make the food cook faster, the others not so much. Press X with the cursor on top of a placed food-item to flip it.
In order to get the maximum satisfaction out of a given item, it must be EVENLY grilled, so flipping is important if you want to get the highest score. You can also move an item from one place to another on the grill by holding the X button to grab it, moving the cursor to an empty space on the grill and releasing. Do this if there’s something that needs to be grilled NOW and there’s an empty spot in center-grill or you need to make room center-grill for an object that one of the customers actually WANTS.

Any food items that you leave on the grill too long will become burned and unservable to your customers. In order to clear the offending item from the grill, just leave it on there for a while to allow it to thoroughly carbonize, then tap X repeatedly to break it up.

Upcoming grillables are randomly-determined, however you can tell what’s coming up by checking the left side of the screen next to the grill. The right side of the screen will either give you the time remaining in the current level (1-player mode) or how many customers you’ve managed to fully satisfy (endless mode).

When a customer is fed (done by pressing the button shown on their character portrait), their level of satisfaction will either increase or decrease. Exactly how much it goes up(or down) depends on WHAT food item you send their way, and how well-done (or rare, as the case may be) it is.

Sending them the food they’re craving will give you a bigger satisfaction boost than any of the other items, and serving them what they’re specifically asking you NOT to give them is a guaranteed satisfaction hit no matter HOW it’s prepared.

You also have to consider how cooked an item has become. Items that are undercooked or overcooked will not give as big of a boost to satisfaction, and if you try and serve something that is too close to ‘raw’ or ‘burned’ for the customers’ taste, their Satisfaction will take a hit. Satisfaction will also gradually decrease as your customers go unfed. If ANY customers’ satisfaction hits zero, at ANY point, that’s it. Game Over.

The single-player mode is a fairly straightforward thing. You grill your way through six levels of hungry customers en route to proving your skills to the master BBQ chef. In order to pass to the next level, you need to last until the timer runs out while making sure that all three of your customers are at least 50% satisfied when the timer hits 0.

The first six levels give you a group of three pre-set customers to satisfy with a few repeat customers in the 5th and 6th levels, whereas the final level is a one-on-one grillo-a-grillo showdown pitting your meat-searing skills against the gourmet palette of the grillmaster. Making HIM a happy customer will take all your skill and THEN some.

The endless mode gives you three randomly-selected customers. When a customer hits maximum satisfaction, you gain bonus points and the customer will leave, replaced with a different randomly-selected customer. This mode has no time limits, no specific Levels, you just need to keep your customers from hitting zero satisfaction for as long as possible.

Tips & Tricks

This game was actually sponsored by a real Japanese grill restaurant chain known as Gyu-Kaku. Their logo pops up throughout the game, but don’t expect a location to open up near you.

The difficulty menu pops up just before the start of each game in the 1-player and Endless modes. Easy Mode is at the top, then Medium, then Hard Mode.
When a customer announces a changing like or dislike, you can interrupt them and stop the change by feeding them before the text-bubble disappears.
Sending off multiple food-items to customers in rapid succession will start combos. Food served as part of a combo will net larger Satisfaction Bonuses and higher points.