With its sparse content, performance issues, and tepid dialogue, Everyday♪ Today's MENU for EMIYA Family is a bad game even by the standards of low-budget anime tie-ins. To be fair, it's not like I had no fun with the game at all; it's an interactive supplement to the anime, and I would have appreciated it if it had been bundled as a Blu-ray extra to the series. However, its story doesn't provide anything new to series fans, and as a game in its own right, it just isn't worth the US$50 it costs to download.

The scope of the game is extremely limited by design. The entire story mode takes place in the kitchen, and only four characters ever make an appearance: Shirou, Saber, Sakura, and Rin. The others are merely mentioned through the dialogue. The cooking itself consists of a series of short mini-games, of which there are exactly eight varieties in total. This means that throughout the course of the game, you'll be repeating the same mini-games a lot, especially when you take into account that the same 15 dishes are shared across each of the three character routes. (Each girl gets only one unique dish.)

Let's start my complaints with the performance issues, because a game this simple has no right to chug this bad. The framerate can get choppy, especially during the recipe debriefing screen and the boiling mini-game. Neither of those sections are particularly complex on a graphical level – one just involves a 3D model of Shirou folding his arms and speaking to the camera while the other shows a pot of food with basic steam effects. These issues were noticeable even when the Switch was docked, and they were even worse on handheld mode. Worst of all, the game crashed on me entirely on three separate occasions, forcing me to reload.

The substance of the gameplay is repetitive and tedious. The lack of variety in the mini-games is the biggest problem, not just in the number that can be played but in how static they are throughout the game. Once you've played a mini-game once, you've seen all there is to it. Although there are three character routes, the only difference between them is that the tempo of the games gets slightly quicker, which is a half-assed way of doing difficulty scaling. Sakura is described to be good at making western dishes, while Rin is good at Chinese food, but these characteristics don't factor into the gameplay at all.

All of these problems could perhaps be mildly forgiven if the cutscenes were interesting, but as cute as it is to see Saber try her hand at cooking, most of the conversations are painfully dull. The lack of characters and the restricted setting dilute a lot of the story's appeal. Even past the novelty of seeing the Fate characters in a peaceful setting, it was interesting to see different sides of them come out depending on the food and theme of the episode. However, the game strips all of those ingredients down to the bare essentials, turning a story rich with subtle tastes and sensations to something that is ultimately flavorless. There's no wit or spark to the conversations when all they're doing is talking about cooking methods or how much they all get along with each other.

The inexpressive 3D models and stiff animations also do little to sell the characters. Despite the fact that there are only four characters in this damn thing, the animation had frequent clipping issues. The fact that most of the rewards for clearing dishes are just still images taken from these terrible cutscenes only further rubs in just how pointless this game is. At least the bonus illustrations by manga artist TAa which you get for full-clearing the character routes are very pretty. Unfortunately, the cutscenes you get with that are literally just the characters doing voice-over in front of the images, and it's mainly explaining the context you could already grasp just from looking at the image.

Are there even any good things to say about this game? Well, you do get the full recipes for each dish if you want to try making them in real life. Those recipes are quite detailed, and even include notes about how to avoid common pitfalls, common substitutes for ingredients, and other little tips for bringing out the flavor. It's neat, but these are also things that Google or a knowledgeable cooking pal could have told you. Overall, playing this game just made me yearn for the beautiful 2D art and animation in the anime, which delivered all the same ideas but in an utterly superior way.

Conclusion: Don't sleep on the anime, but do sleep on the game.

Played on Nintendo Switch. Review copy provided by Aniplex of America.