The item you get here is awesome, and it should’ve happened earlier.
They say that food is a universal love language, and that’s a statement taken in different directions in Dosa Divas, the latest game to come out of Outerloop Games of Thirsty Suitors fame. Much like Thirsty Suitors before it, Dosa Divas is a quick romp with nods to other great games, but the story in this game is a more personal one connected to food. Unfortunately, once you figure out the game’s core loop, it becomes easy to coast no matter what flavors the story throws at you to spice things up.
The narrative in Dosa Divas is one of many factors that contribute to its charm. The game follows estranged sisters Samara and Amari (along with their trusty, colorful mech, Goddess) as they set out to visit their parents in the distant resort of Port Zest. On the way, they’re constantly harassed by a fast food empire run by none other than their sister, Lina, who has ransacked every neighboring community to succumb to “LinaFoods'” fast food offerings. Lina’s propaganda and brainwashing has resulted in a world where people no longer cook because they believe that there’s no value in it. Their sustenance sadly comes in the form of what are pretty much flavor tubes. Luckily, Samara and Amari are here to save the day with their love of cuisine and knack for flavor, one dosa at a time.
The game utilizes a Paper Mario-like battle system. For those unfamiliar, while taking your turn to attack, you can inflict more damage with a timed button press. The same goes for defense; as you’re being hit, you can tap a button to reduce damage or neglect it completely with the right timing. This makes combat gameplay feel more active, and the addition of the mechanic on defense feels great–especially after all those tough and drawn-out battles in People of Note.
Combat is the best part of Dosa Divas, but when you start to walk around aimlessly, they become a chore too.
Dosa‘s combat also borrows a couple features from Octopath Travelerthat does a real solid job of adding a layer of strategy to each battle. Every enemy you’ll fight has a weakness to certain types. In Dosa Divas, the weaknesses are to flavors. Your attacks can be spicy, sweet, sour, savory, or salty, and if you hit an enemy’s flavor weaknesses enough times, they’ll get “stuffed” and can’t do anything during their turn, making them ripe for an attack. You also have the ability to boost your attacks to create combos and inflict even more damage. And lastly, there’s an Ultimate gauge that’ll build up as you give and receive damage. There isn’t a point in the game where battles are too difficult, but there will be a time when you really have to pay attention to certain aspects in battle, and I found that to be a nice twist towards the end of the game.
Food fights aside, at its core, Dosa Divas has the DNA of a JRPG. You arrive in a new town, help solve problems by fighting in turn-based battles, do a few sidequests, and it’s time to face the boss. It’s all formulaic, and for me, this is where the game started to run dry. While it was great discovering the three vibrant villages, they felt like generic set pieces that quickly outlasted their welcome, especially in the game’s second area.
When it comes to solving problems and doing the sidequests in every village, they usually revolve around you cooking the right dishes for the residents. To do that, you need to gather the ingredients for the dishes that everybody wants. At least on the main path, you’ll be running around the map trying to find the right ingredients, cooking dishes, and eventually, it just gets boring. You also need specific items found in each area to exchange for certain items at a pop-up store, and that’s where the fetch quests become even more cumbersome.
I didn’t have very much fun in this area at all.
As cool as each area is visually, they just don’t offer much to really explore. Running around like Naruto with your mech is cool, but the gimmick dies pretty quickly. The mech has a double jump ability, but the platforming segments almost feel optional, and it just feels like the ability to jump is just there.
Canopea, the second area talked about earlier, is sort of a mining village where the primary method of transport is through these wind tunnels that don’t make their destination obvious. Think of those caves like the warp pads from Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow in the Silph Co. dungeon or the gym in Saffron City. If you’ve played those games, you’d know the struggle of memorizing what warp pad led to where, and I spent maybe six hours aimlessly running around, ending up in battles I didn’t want to fight and cooking dishes I didn’t actually need. It wasn’t enjoyable, and while the dishes all looked tasty in their own right, they just felt like more of a means to progress than they were a treat for the senses.
There wasn’t any point in the story where the dishes seemed special. I was hoping for a deeper appreciation of culinary art through such sentimentality, especially given all the flavors and variety that Indian cuisine is known for. These are feelings that I really got in games like Venba and Fishbowl, and while Dosa Divas really goes for the jugular after the third area, when you really find out why the journey is actually necessary, the big plot points just didn’t hit me the way other games that have explored similar themes did.
Cooking takes a minute to figure out, and once you do, the game purposely makes it frustrating… just cooking in real life!
That finally brings us to the cooking, which left a lot to be desired. Cooking in Dosa Divas works very much like the way it does in the modern Like A Dragongames. Making a dish consists of a few microgames of “easy” tasks that the game just tries to make difficult and random. Some are as simple as trying to keep a cursor centered while it gets forced to move (which might actually be the hardest microgame available), and there’s another one where all you have to do is press a button at the right moment on a timeline. Each of these are simple tasks that just aren’t explained well and don’t work well enough to a point where a lot of them seem broken, but if I were to guess, they were intentionally made that way because dishes don’t always go the way you want them to go. Some stoves are different from others, some families use inferior knives, some egg shells are weaker than others when cracked–the “perfect” dish takes time and experience to frequently, and even the most seasoned people struggle with it. And if that conclusion is right, cool, but it doesn’t make it fun–I know, cooking isn’t always supposed to be fun either.
At the end of the day, while Dosa Divas has a lot of cool things going for it, namely in its story, especially as someone who truly appreciates the role food has in the lives of people in the ANHPI community, as well as a funky soundtrack and colorful visuals, there just wasn’t enough here to completely envelop me into the experience. The plot is good, but it takes too long to get to that point where you feel like there are any real stakes, and while the combat is also fantastic, the exploration and gathering aspects of the game take too long to get interesting.
The reason this review is being published a week later than I wanted is because it’s best enjoyed in short chunks–heck, if I wasn’t reviewing the Switch 2 version of this game, I probably wouldn’t be done with it. There’s a lot of good here, and despite the game’s roughly 10-hour length, this is one I wouldn’t recommend binging. That said, if you take your time to really appreciate and enjoy Dosa Divas for what it is–a turn-based RPG about how cooking can connect people (and nothing more than that), there’s a lot to like here, especially on a Switch or Steam Deck.
They say that food is a universal love language, and that’s a statement taken in different directions in Dosa Divas, the latest game to come out of Outerloop Games of Thirsty Suitors fame. Much like Thirsty Suitors before it, Dosa…
The item you get here is awesome, and it should’ve happened earlier.
They say that food is a universal love language, and that’s a statement taken in different directions in Dosa Divas, the latest game to come out of Outerloop Games of Thirsty Suitors fame. Much like Thirsty Suitors before it, Dosa Divas is a quick romp with nods to other great games, but the story in this game is a more personal one connected to food. Unfortunately, once you figure out the game’s core loop, it becomes easy to coast no matter what flavors the story throws at you to spice things up.
The narrative in Dosa Divas is one of many factors that contribute to its charm. The game follows estranged sisters Samara and Amari (along with their trusty, colorful mech, Goddess) as they set out to visit their parents in the distant resort of Port Zest. On the way, they’re constantly harassed by a fast food empire run by none other than their sister, Lina, who has ransacked every neighboring community to succumb to “LinaFoods'” fast food offerings. Lina’s propaganda and brainwashing has resulted in a world where people no longer cook because they believe that there’s no value in it. Their sustenance sadly comes in the form of what are pretty much flavor tubes. Luckily, Samara and Amari are here to save the day with their love of cuisine and knack for flavor, one dosa at a time.
The game utilizes a Paper Mario-like battle system. For those unfamiliar, while taking your turn to attack, you can inflict more damage with a timed button press. The same goes for defense; as you’re being hit, you can tap a button to reduce damage or neglect it completely with the right timing. This makes combat gameplay feel more active, and the addition of the mechanic on defense feels great–especially after all those tough and drawn-out battles in People of Note.
Combat is the best part of Dosa Divas, but when you start to walk around aimlessly, they become a chore too.
Dosa‘s combat also borrows a couple features from Octopath Travelerthat does a real solid job of adding a layer of strategy to each battle. Every enemy you’ll fight has a weakness to certain types. In Dosa Divas, the weaknesses are to flavors. Your attacks can be spicy, sweet, sour, savory, or salty, and if you hit an enemy’s flavor weaknesses enough times, they’ll get “stuffed” and can’t do anything during their turn, making them ripe for an attack. You also have the ability to boost your attacks to create combos and inflict even more damage. And lastly, there’s an Ultimate gauge that’ll build up as you give and receive damage. There isn’t a point in the game where battles are too difficult, but there will be a time when you really have to pay attention to certain aspects in battle, and I found that to be a nice twist towards the end of the game.
Food fights aside, at its core, Dosa Divas has the DNA of a JRPG. You arrive in a new town, help solve problems by fighting in turn-based battles, do a few sidequests, and it’s time to face the boss. It’s all formulaic, and for me, this is where the game started to run dry. While it was great discovering the three vibrant villages, they felt like generic set pieces that quickly outlasted their welcome, especially in the game’s second area.
When it comes to solving problems and doing the sidequests in every village, they usually revolve around you cooking the right dishes for the residents. To do that, you need to gather the ingredients for the dishes that everybody wants. At least on the main path, you’ll be running around the map trying to find the right ingredients, cooking dishes, and eventually, it just gets boring. You also need specific items found in each area to exchange for certain items at a pop-up store, and that’s where the fetch quests become even more cumbersome.
I didn’t have very much fun in this area at all.
As cool as each area is visually, they just don’t offer much to really explore. Running around like Naruto with your mech is cool, but the gimmick dies pretty quickly. The mech has a double jump ability, but the platforming segments almost feel optional, and it just feels like the ability to jump is just there.
Canopea, the second area talked about earlier, is sort of a mining village where the primary method of transport is through these wind tunnels that don’t make their destination obvious. Think of those caves like the warp pads from Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow in the Silph Co. dungeon or the gym in Saffron City. If you’ve played those games, you’d know the struggle of memorizing what warp pad led to where, and I spent maybe six hours aimlessly running around, ending up in battles I didn’t want to fight and cooking dishes I didn’t actually need. It wasn’t enjoyable, and while the dishes all looked tasty in their own right, they just felt like more of a means to progress than they were a treat for the senses.
There wasn’t any point in the story where the dishes seemed special. I was hoping for a deeper appreciation of culinary art through such sentimentality, especially given all the flavors and variety that Indian cuisine is known for. These are feelings that I really got in games like Venba and Fishbowl, and while Dosa Divas really goes for the jugular after the third area, when you really find out why the journey is actually necessary, the big plot points just didn’t hit me the way other games that have explored similar themes did.
Cooking takes a minute to figure out, and once you do, the game purposely makes it frustrating… just cooking in real life!
That finally brings us to the cooking, which left a lot to be desired. Cooking in Dosa Divas works very much like the way it does in the modern Like A Dragongames. Making a dish consists of a few microgames of “easy” tasks that the game just tries to make difficult and random. Some are as simple as trying to keep a cursor centered while it gets forced to move (which might actually be the hardest microgame available), and there’s another one where all you have to do is press a button at the right moment on a timeline. Each of these are simple tasks that just aren’t explained well and don’t work well enough to a point where a lot of them seem broken, but if I were to guess, they were intentionally made that way because dishes don’t always go the way you want them to go. Some stoves are different from others, some families use inferior knives, some egg shells are weaker than others when cracked–the “perfect” dish takes time and experience to frequently, and even the most seasoned people struggle with it. And if that conclusion is right, cool, but it doesn’t make it fun–I know, cooking isn’t always supposed to be fun either.
At the end of the day, while Dosa Divas has a lot of cool things going for it, namely in its story, especially as someone who truly appreciates the role food has in the lives of people in the ANHPI community, as well as a funky soundtrack and colorful visuals, there just wasn’t enough here to completely envelop me into the experience. The plot is good, but it takes too long to get to that point where you feel like there are any real stakes, and while the combat is also fantastic, the exploration and gathering aspects of the game take too long to get interesting.
The reason this review is being published a week later than I wanted is because it’s best enjoyed in short chunks–heck, if I wasn’t reviewing the Switch 2 version of this game, I probably wouldn’t be done with it. There’s a lot of good here, and despite the game’s roughly 10-hour length, this is one I wouldn’t recommend binging. That said, if you take your time to really appreciate and enjoy Dosa Divas for what it is–a turn-based RPG about how cooking can connect people (and nothing more than that), there’s a lot to like here, especially on a Switch or Steam Deck.
by Danreb Victorio
