YMMV / Battle Chef Brigade

• Game-Breaker:
  • Equipment: The Slow Cooker (which promotes taste gems) and the Crystallizer Oven (which clones them). They're especially useful in multiple-judge rounds, since they make it possible to "set and forget" a dish to build itself up while you work on another one.
  • Ingredients: Lantern Fruit in the cavern level (before the May 2018 patch), consisting of four second-level Fire taste gems that can be quickly matched into top-tier gems. The tradeoff, their extreme fragility, doesn't matter if you drop them into the pan on top of one another without stirring. Nowadays, though, they're made up of mixed Fire and Water gems in a formation that makes it nigh-impossible to make use of all four gems without breaking some down to first-level or using a tool to repair them.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • This wasn't the first time that a game combined cooking and beat-em-ups together.
  • A number of people have dubbed it a pretty good Toriko game.
• That One Boss:
  • Lt. Knife, especially before the patch. The theme ingredient is Dragon, one of the toughest monsters in the game. Since there's only one judge, the time is very limited. This also means that the Slow Cooker and Crystallizer Oven have less time to work. And Knife's dish will have a much higher score than the opponent in the previous Dragon battle. Compounding this, the dragon itself is blighted this time, which makes it a much tougher fight and require the player to deal with the dragon having blighted and fragile gems. And all the time spent fighting the dragon to get the absolutely necessary ingredients is time not spent efficiently cooking.
  • The final duel of the game with Rixal is damn tough too, with three judges to cook meals for, and your opponent scores much higher than what you'll have grown used to by this point. Previous three judge battles could reliably have your opponent present one dish that clearly didn't get as much attention as the rest. In this one? All of your opponents dishes are high quality, easily scoring in the 300 point range. Anything less than the very best in response will result in defeat.