Follow TV Tropes

Following

Video Game / Marenian Tavern Story: Patty and the Hungry God

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mareniantavern.png

Marenian Tavern Story: Patty and the Hungry God is a roleplaying/business management game developed by Rideon Software and published by Kemco, released for the Nintendo Switch, Play Station 4, and Xbox One in 2019. It's the sequel to Rideon's earlier 3DS game, Adventure Bar Story, and set in the same universe as their other "Story" games.

Patricia "Patty" Maggiola, her little brother Gino, and their butler Romano are on a trip to visit their father one day when Gino accidentally knocks over a statue on their path. After making sure that he's OK, Patty and Romano are shocked to see a strange white creature behind the rubble of the statue. Gino, being the kindhearted boy he is, offers the creature some of his food. The creature, as it turns out, is really the God who lived in the statue! As thanks for Gino's kindness, he decides to bless Gino's family.

Unfortunately, he's the God of Poverty. And his "blessings" cause their family's highly successful tavern to go out of business and gets them thrown out on the street. Worst of all, Patty and Gino's father goes mysteriously missing after his tavern is seized.

Despite the situation they find themselves in, Patty refuses to give in. The god, Coco, has a weakness for good food, and his powers weaken when he's stuffed. She also happens to have inherited her father's culinary talent. She gets the mayor of the small village of Cookoro to lend her an old, closed-down tavern, and she plans to turn it into a thriving restaurant—both to earn her family's money back, and to make enough food to stuff Coco so full he won't hold sway over her family any more.

The game is a combination of Role-Playing Game and Simulation Game, where the player must both explore dungeons to collect ingredients for cooking and then use those ingredients to whip up dishes to serve at the tavern. Each in-game day, you can travel to either a dungeon or a nearby city; dungeons contain combat, while cities have unique items and ingredients for sale that you can't buy elsewhere. Dungeons contain numerous gathering points from which you can collect vegetables and grains, while the enemies that roam there can provide meat and other useful items (such Dryads providing wood chips for making smoked dishes).

After exploring, the player returns home to use their ingredients in the tavern. There's an extremely wide range of dishes to make, and different dishes will sell better based on the time of year (with things like soups selling better in winter and ice cream selling better in summer), their cost, and which things the locals are just plain tired of buying. But you'll need to make much more food than you can sell in your tavern, as eating food is also your primary means of leveling up as well, and provides important battle buffs. And of course, Coco is hungry—very hungry—as well...


This game provides examples of:

  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: In real life, most restaurants have a few signature dishes that are always available and always sell well. In-game, your patrons will get bored of any dish after a while (even simple things like ice water), but doing so makes for more compelling gameplay.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: When you take the item rewards for a Trophy or one of Coco's rewards, the game will ask you if you're certain you want to take them if it's more than you can carry. You also can't take crops harvested from the Farm at all if you don't have space in your bag for it.
  • Bait-and-Switch: When the party gets ready to enter the Amiella village for the first time, Bellatina warns them that Amiella don't like humans and that they should expect a frosty welcome. When they actually go inside, the Amiella are nothing but cordial to Patty and co., baffling Bellatina until their elder reveals that none other than Patty's father came through a few weeks before and showed them all that humans could be good. It's Played for Laughs, however.
  • Blessed with Suck: The plot kicks off because Patty's family has been "blessed" by the God of Poverty, causing them to lose their business and all their money.
  • Bonus Dungeon: White Cave. You first enter it in pursuit of Jewel Rock Salt, but you get that from beating up a Salt Golem who waits just past the entrance. To actually explore the dungeon, you'll need to come back with the pickax you get in the postgame. Its gathering points contain every type of ingredient in the game, and it ends in an Optional Boss.
  • Boring, but Practical: Slashing Down, a physical move learned by more than half your party members, is a basic blade skill that causes enemies killed with it to drop more items. Since you need all the ingredients you can get your hands on, it ends up being very useful for one of the first skills you learn.
  • Boyfriend Bluff: During one event, a recently-dumped customer tries to hit on Patty after she reassures him he can still find love. You can choose any of the male employees to pretend to be her boyfriend, and they're all flattered for it. A later event implies that whoever you choose started developing feelings for Patty afterwards, but she's oblivious to them.
  • Bubblegloop Swamp: Verde Swamp is a hot, jungle-like swamp.
  • Cooking Mechanics: Each dish is composed of up to four different ingredients, along with a utensil; so simple things like rice balls can be assembled with just your hands, while cakes and pies must be cooked in an Oven and fried foods need to be fried in a Fryer, for example. In order to get around the four-ingredient and one-utensil limit, some recipes first require you to make advanced ingredients—so pizzas, for example, need Pizza Dough made from olive oil and flour, while hamburgers need Ground Beef first prepped with a Blender.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance: If you keep serving the same dish in the tavern, people will get tired of it and stop buying it, no matter how popular it otherwise is. Rotating your menu is key to keeping your sales up.
  • Divided Deity: Originally, before being split in two, Coco was the God of Luck. The Final Boss is Coco's other half, Toto, which, unlike the friendly Coco whose power causes bad luck even if he doesn't want it to, and isn't bitter about being sealed away for about five centuries. Toto hates the world for sealing him away for over a millennium, his powers cause calamities, and he fully intends to destroy the world with his powers. In the end Patty and her party defeat Toto, and he and Coco reunite and become the God of Luck once again.
  • Easy Evangelism: Played for Laughs. It turns out that Patty's father's cooking is so good that it instantly convinced the Amiella to put aside centuries of prejudice and become accepting of humans. Patty and co. are baffled, but grateful.
  • Elves vs. Dwarves: The dwarves don't get along with the Amiella, who are elves in all but name.
  • Family of Choice: Some of the tavern's employees have blood relations they're close to (like Patty and Gino) and some of them don't, but it's nonetheless shown that all of them develop a family-like closeness by working together. Elias views Gino as the little brother he never had, Varl looks after the younger members like a father would, Stella and Bellatina love teaching the others their unique skills, and everyone cares deeply about everyone else.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: Your first three party members are Patty, Erika, and Dante. Dante is a Fighter with high physical stats who starts using two-handed swords. Erika is a Thief who's speedy and can steal items from enemies. Patty is a Jack of All Stats, but she learns magic earlier than her other companions, making her the first mage. Your first additional party member, Elias, is also a Mage to the letter.
  • Food Coma: You have to induce this in Coco, as his powers weaken when he's stuffed and content. Feeding him tons of dishes weakens him enough that your tavern can level up.
  • Gender-Equal Ensemble: The six employees who join Patty's tavern consist of three women and three men. Including Patty herself swings the balance slightly towards women.
  • Green Hill Zone: The first dungeon, Pecora Plains, is a swathe of farmland inhabited by monsters too weak to even bother livestock.
  • Hidden Elf Village: The Amiella live in a secluded village deep in the jungle. One NPC there even calls herself "the not-going-outside champion."
  • Impossibly Delicious Food: Before he can leave Gino, Coco needs to eat Mystery Soup, a strange dish that requires four incredibly difficult-to-find ingredients to make. In this case, it's less that it's unearthly good and more than it has a truly one-of-a-kind taste you have to experience to understand. Once you make it, the whole tavern ends up enjoying it, however.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: Each day, you can explore one area, be it a dungeon or distant town, and open your tavern. You also have a small farm that produces crops and animal products every few days. Seasons change as you go through the game, and the most popular dishes will change based on the season.
  • Item Crafting: Making food is a huge focus of the game. It's both your main source of money (via your tavern), and your only source of level-ups, as battles don't give experience. You can experiment to find your own recipes, purchase recipes in stores, or find recipes in the world. And some NPCs will give you "hints" that reveal part of a recipe to you, charging you to figure out the rest yourself.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: In one event, Coco tries to give the tavern a good blessing for once, only to cause a bunch of people to show up demanding free food. Patty, being hospitable, decides to honor their request. Later, however, a man comes back and decides to thank her for kindly feeding him... by giving her 99 Broth, one of the most basic ingredient items in the game. Most of the employees are baffled, but Patty rolls with it.
  • Male Might, Female Finesse: Your first two party members, Erika and Dante—Erika is speedy, and can steal items, but is physically weaker than Dante the fighter. Averted with the rest of your party members, however—Varl's another thief whose physical attacks are only so-so, though he can use many useful status skills, and Elias is closer to a Magic Knight who's great at attacking lots of enemies at once, but with weaker spells. Meanwhile, Stella has very high magic attack and the most powerful single-hit spells in the game, while Bellatina is just a brutal physical powerhouse whose lack of finesse is even a character trait.
  • Missing Mom: Patty and Gino's mother is stated to have died at some point prior to the game.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Gino was nice to the God of Poverty, who decided to offer Gino and his family his unique variety of blessing in thanks.
  • No Hugging, No Kissing: Despite the Gender-Equal Ensemble, there's no romance between any of the main cast at all. In fact, when one of Patty's employees is implied to develop feelings for her after being chosen as her fake boyfriend, she's shown to be too oblivious to accept.
  • Non-Combat EXP: The only way to gain experience in the game is by eating food. The more complex the dish, and the rarer its ingredients, the more EXP it's worth.
  • No Hero Discount: Erika explicitly tells Patty that she can't give her a discount, even though they're friends. Patty understands completely—she's a businesswoman herself, after all.
  • Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: You get Trophies for certain achievements in the game, such as the enemies of a certain type defeated, your total levels, or how many dishes you've sold at the tavern. However, these all unlock things, ranging from just large stacks of ingredients to permanent upgrades for your tavern.
  • Offerings to the Gods: Coco refers to the food Patty gives him as "offerings."
  • Optional Boss: After beating the game, many of the dungeons gain bonus bosses, usually hidden behind rocks you need the pickax to break.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: They love mining and booze, they readily get into scraps, and they don't get along with the Amiella.
  • Our Elves Are Different: The elves here are known as Amiella—they're a fair, long-lived race with pointy ears that usually lives in seclusion. Notably, their long lifespans are attributed to a rare fruit, without which they'll grow ill (if young) or die (if elderly in human terms).
  • Permanently Missable Content: Several bosses have unique equipment you can only get by stealing from them, which only Erika and Varl can do. You'll need to bring at least one of them to every boss fight if you want to collect all the equipment.
  • Palm Tree Panic: Marino Strada is a beautiful seaside beach dungeon, where Patty and co. can catch large numbers of fish for the first time.
  • Playable Epilogue: After reuniting Coco and Toto and turning them back into the God of Luck, you can keep playing. Heath gives you a pickaxe you can use to finally break those cracked rocks you keep seeing everywhere, certain ingredients become more common in the shops, and a Bonus Dungeon opens up.
  • Powerup Food: Eating food gives your teammates battle bonuses, such as increased MATK or elemental resistance, until they eat another food that overrides it or they get knocked out.
  • Returning Big Bad: Gustav, the villain who claimed Patty's family's tavern, was the main villain of Adventure Bar Story as well.
  • Ribcage Ridge: Dragonbone Hill, as its name suggests, is full of dragon bones sticking out of the walls.
  • Socketed Equipment: Equipment comes in two varieties. "Normal" equipment has two empty slots in it to which you can equip Orbs, which offer a variety of useful effects. These Orbs can also be removed from it later, though it requires a special item (Aqua Regia) to do so. Special equipment has pre-existing effects built into it, which can't be removed, but those effects are usually much more powerful than what the Orbs you have available at that time could do.
  • Status Effects: The four status effects are Poison (take damage every time the character rolls through the Action Meter), Blind (reduces accuracy), Silence (prevents using skills), and Paralyze (prevents taking any action at all and "freezes" the character on the action bar). There's also Delay, which pushes enemies back on the Visual Initiative Queue.
  • Status Infliction Attack: Bows and Hammers specialize in these. Bows can inflict Paralysis and Poison on enemies via skills, while Hammers can inflict Silence and Delay.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Dawn Ruins, the place Toto was sealed away. Its enemies consist of dragons, golems, and demons—the last of which doesn't show up elsewhere in the game—and there are no ingredient gathering points.
  • Video Game Stealing: Erika and Varl can steal from enemies. In addition to rare ingredients, some enemy steals give you new recipes, and most bosses have a unique steal that you'll miss out on if you don't bring them to the fight.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds:
    • Erika and Dante are childhood friends, and know each other well enough to argue openly. Beneath their sniping lies a rock-solid friendship.
    • Gino and Coco, by the end of the game. Gino constantly complains about Coco, and Coco bemoans his lack of respect, but when Coco's blessing is gone and it looks like he's about to leave, Gino can only just conceal his tears.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Status effect spells are considered their own element, Spirit, which enemies can be weak to or strong against like any other element. However, you can't see an enemy's weaknesses the first time you fight it, meaning you'll be flying blind against bosses. In addition, bosses are more evasive, may resist individual status effects, and hit very hard, meaning it's hard to spend time using status skills against them when you need to spend more time maintaining your health and buffs.
  • Visual Initiative Queue: The game shows each player's turn order on the bottom of the screen on a bar.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: One of the recipes you need to explicitly learn—and which you likely won't unlock until about a third of the way through the story—is ice water.

Top