Cooking Mama is the definition of Japanese niche game.

In Cooking Mama you prepare food dishes according to Mama’s orders. Mama is a wonderful person when you do everything right but she turns into the spawn of Satan if you screw up. Burn a piece of meat, mix too fast, cut too slow, or even drop ingredients on the floor and Mama’s eyes will turn to fire and she’ll give you a bronze star for your efforts. So in essence Cooking Mama puts you directly into the role of a child fighting for his or her mother’s affection by creating very Japanese meals of top chef quality.

Food dishes are made in steps which require you to use only the touch screen. Each step is a sort of cooking mini-game where you perform such tasks as cutting, mixing, kneading, chopping, and peeling to name a few. When you enter a task mini-game a counter will count down from 3 to 1 and then you’ll have a limited amount of time to perform whatever task Mama tells you to do. When you’re finished or time runs out Mama will give you one of three medals for your efforts.

You then proceed on to the next task and so on and so forth until the dish is finished. While making certain dishes, Mama will ask you if you want to make the dish a slightly different way. Depending on your choice, new mini-games and ingredients will be presented thus one dish becomes many. When a dish is all finished Mama tallies up your score and gives you a grade from 0 to 100. If you’re above 60 you get a bronze, above a bronze you get silver, and at 100 exactly you get gold. If you medal at all you’ll then have the chance to unlock new dishes to prepare.

This may sound like it might get old really quickly but it doesn’t due to the fact that there are so many mini-games. It’s not a case where you play the same games for every step of every dish; there are literally at least 50+ mini-games throughout the 76+ dishes you can make. And what makes this variety even better is the fact that you use the touch screen in unique ways for almost all of them. You’ll be tapping away at the screen to chop, moving up and down to slice, moving in circles to stir, moving all around to crack eggs on the side of a bowl, and in all sorts of directions to prepare a squid.