 Joe Aniki, which stands for Super Big Brother, is a series of bizarre games that rarely left Japan, usually staying within the horizontal shooter genre, incorporating the same wacky, non-secular humor and bright colorful settings that are similar to what you might see in a Perotius game. Unlike that series, however, Joe Aniki did venture away from shoot-'em-ups, eventually getting into RPGs, one-on-one fighting games, and beat-'em-ups like this one here for Super Famicom, titled Gourmet Sentai Barayaro. And yep, you guessed it, in this game you walk to the right and mash buttons and pound all sorts of enemies into submission. There's three different characters you can play as, and they're all done up in that classic Joe Aniki style, meaning there's lots of flesh showing, and a gratuitous amount of flexing and posing. There's even a button dedicated to it, you press the A button, and your character sits there and poses. I have no idea if this even does anything, you just sort of stand there, and yeah. Okay, so you might think that's this game's hook, that's how it's trying to stand out, right? All these wacky, sprites and colors and bizarre enemy design and all that, but no, that's not all. In Gourmet Sentai Barayaro, you get one life and no continues. There's no weapons, there's no health replenishment. In fact, your health doesn't even come back to 100% to start each level. Wait, what? That can't be right? That sounds ridiculous. Ah, but there's a method to this game's madness. You'll notice that when you defeat an enemy, they'll drop something that resembles food, and you'll see everything from tomatoes, garlic, onions, roasts, all sorts of stuff, but you don't use them to replenish health, at least not yet. At the end of each level, all the food you collected is listed for you. You pick two ingredients to create a meal, and that's how you get your health back, hence the Gourmet in the title. The thing is though, each character has their own tastes. Some combos will work really well for one character, and not so well for another. This sounds like a cool idea in theory. I mean, hey, it's a typical beat-em-up with cooking elements added. That's one way to spice up an old formula. The problem with this idea, however, is that it's pure trial and error. I have no idea what this game considers to be a good combination of ingredients, or which character likes what. There's not even anything on Game Facts. There is an English patch available for this game, but again, I'm just guessing at what works. However, I was lucky enough to talk to longtime viewer LHC Greg, who owns this game complete in the box. They put a scan of the manual online, and a member of the SNES Drunk Discord, Wired Crackpot, was able to translate a bit, so I've put some of his notes in the description that will hopefully be helpful to some of you out there. Also, I should mention, unlike in a game like River City Ransom, where this sort of thing would give you other kinds of stat boosts, there's no stats here other than health. So that's all you boost with this cooking thing here. I should mention though, they did manage to incorporate all the cooking stuff into the game's story. Evidently, you're trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world and some evil organization named Bath is hoarding the world's protein for themselves, and a resistant group has built three powerful robots to go out and collect as much as they can. Named Bonjour, Mademoiselle, and Trébien. Yes, to really hammer home the cooking motif, your characters are given random French words and phrases. Okay. The actual gameplay here is as simple as most other beat-em-ups. It's just wide a punch, beat a jump, and hold the R button to execute an explosive attack that will set your enemy, or possibly yourself, on fire. There's also a way to stick your enemy's head into the ground and do a special move from there. This game is two player co-op, but even if you're playing this game's single player, there is one item you can obtain that gives you a partner to help out. It's almost like the dev team realized that this game would be freaking impossible for one player to complete on one health bar, so they gave you an automated partner to try and help you out. Anyway, yeah, Gourmet Sentai Barayaro really swings for the fences with its intensely strange art style and the cooking mechanic, which is admittedly pretty cool, but the move set here is just too plain, and the cooking stuff just isn't fleshed out enough. It's a cool idea, but there's just not enough meat on the bone there. And hey, if you like what you see, Pico Interactive actually published an officially licensed US cartridge earlier this year complete with the English translation, titled Gourmet Warriors, so go check it out that way if you can. This game definitely isn't bad, but the difficulty and the unforgiving structure may make it a stay-away for some people. Still, it's got some funny ideas and some funny visuals. I mean, you can see for yourself how weird some of these enemies are. So if you want to check this one out just for a quick laugh, then you won't be disappointed in that regard. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.