ODIN SPHERE: Healthy cooking for the coming apocalypse

I am knocking on the end of this game, but I have encountered the dreaded endgame grind that I once thought would be confined to the various Fantasies Final. The occasion of needing to power-up the various characters of Odin Sphere leads me to use a system that I only rarely visited during the normal game. There are two parts to it actually; The Pooka Kitchen and The Pooka Cafe.

I should explain what a pooka is first I guess. A pooka is a little rabbit-person who once used to be an actual human but was effected by the "Curse of the Pooka". The entire nation of Valentine was afflicted with this curse through the machinations of it's mad king. Valentine is not a very nice place to be at the moment, but the Pooka still live there underground. They get involved in various plots to heal their land, mainly trough the Pooka Prince and Velvet, the princess of Valentine. This underground village is where the cafe and kitchen are located and all the characters gain access to this place eventually, but some much later than others.

Now once you have access to the village you can start cooking, and cooking is all about hit points. Each character has two levels instead of one, one level rank for your psypher weapon and another level rank for your hit points. You get experience for your psypher by killing foes and collecting the phozons(little purple firefly like things) that appear when they die. You get experience for your hit points by eating food. There is no other way. You often find various food items in the course of battle, and often seeds from which to grow more food as well. These seeds eat the aforementioned phozons to grow into trees or vines that give fruit. When you eat the food whatever it is you get an immediate healing effect, which fills your current total of HP, but you also get an about of xp that goes towards your HP level. The higher this level the higher your maximum hit points will be.

This is why cooking is so important; the food you cook in the pooka village (kitchen or cafe, they both work the same way) gives WAY more xps than the food you find laying around or grow from seeds. They have complicated recipes as well, which you find in the treasure left behind by enemies. One of the oddities here is that you actually need to bring the food you want to cook to the pookas, instead of just buying it when you get there. Times are lean for the little guys I guess. At any rate, one of my favorite recipes is for Yogurt Stew. Doesn't sound so good, eh? Well remember that what we want is levels, and this particular dish has good xp for not too much trouble. The recepie goes like this, one carroteer, one yogurt, one portion of chicken, and an ariel coin(one of the various coins featured in the game). The important part of this particular recipe is that most of the ingredients can be manufactured without too much trouble.

Yogurt is easy to get from milk, and milk is available from many shopkeepers in the game. The carroteers can be found in the ground in certain places, you just need to know where to look. The chicken comes from eggs. This makes sense, right? Well, in Erion the process for getting the chicken is most curious. First take your egg and place it on the ground, after a bit a little yellow chick will hatch from it without any help from a mother hen. This little chick will wander the level, eating whatever plant seeds it finds. Once three seeds are eaten it will quite magically transform into a big grey hen. It then becomes your job to beat on the poor thing until it once again magically transmogrifies into a chicken bone with meat attached. This parody of agriculture could only be more ridiculous if it actually changed into a bucket of KFC original recipe.

I like to get the components for four of these dishes before I trek to the kitchen. It takes a little time but it's worth it, seeing as four stews will double your max hps if you're anywhere near the 300 mark. I haven't found the need to balloon my max hps in this way until this point, but it is an interesting little system. In a way, if you had the necessary components and access to the village you could shoot way past the intended hit point totals needed for where ever you are in the game. I suppose the investment in time is good deterrent, but there isn't anything really stopping you from grinding previously visited levels and getting fat on HPs.

It should be mentioned that the ingredients for the more complex dishes aren't available in most stories until after the midway point. So those are harder to abuse, but it isn't like phozons where the only way to get them is by slaying enemies. Is it the devs allowing the player to ratchet their own level of difficulty a bit, just some fault-tolerant design? With the heavy twitch-factor involved it might have been a stroke genius to include the kitchen and the cafe, but it is obvious that by the point I am at now I was supposed to have been using them much more.