Meshi Quest: Five-star Kitchen is the latest mobile title from Square Enix, a famous Japanese publisher known for their Final Fantasy universe. This time, Square Enix brings us an exciting cooking game for mobile devices in which your goal is to open new restaurants and unlock new recipes. You have to prepare dishes as fast as you can to satisfy your customers, especially during later levels.
Meshi Quest: Five-star Kitchen is based around combining the right ingredients and cooking different meals to get as many coins from customers, which you invest in upgrading your current cooking equipment as well as increasing your profits and buying more time to serve customers. The game starts easy, giving you more than plenty time get the hold of it, learn how to prepare meals, and which ingredients are more important than others.
While unlocking new levels, you’ll occasionally receive a new recipe, meaning the game just got harder. Each new recipe involves more complex ingredient combinations, something that could make your focus easier to trail off while serving customers. So, over time without an effective strategy, you could start earning fewer points, and fewer coins. More importantly, you’ll take more time to unlock new ranks, an important part if you want to be successful since ranking is the primary source of diamonds, Meshi Quest’s premium currency.
Luckily, we spent a solid number of hours inside Meshi Quest, finding out which strategies to use in order to keep our profit margins high. Getting three-star ratings is also quite important since more points per level on average means higher rank and more coins and diamonds as well as unlocking new restaurants more frequently. You may learned a few neat tips and tricks in our first Meshi Quest guide, but if you want to score high and your restaurant to have an army of faithful customers stay with us and read our ultimate guide.
1. First Things First, Let’s Learn How To Take Orders Efficiently And Decrease Time Needed For Serving Customers
In order to be able to manage your clients’ requests on time, a few rules must apply. Firstly, learn which ingredient is the main one, most frequently used. Rice in the first restaurant, for example. Then, always make sure to have that component available at all times. So, make sure to boil rice, cook meat, or whatever you’re using as a base for all dishes and make sure always to have at least one piece available.
Then, make sure to have enough plates. When upgrading your restaurant you should improve plate number as well as upgrading the appliance used to cook dishes (rice boiler or barbeque, or hot plates), and that should guide you safely through the early levels. So, always have enough dishes ready (three is enough for most levels), always boil or cook ingredients. Last but not least, it is generally advisable to upgrade all parts of your kitchen capable of reducing the time for making dishes, like improving the hand rolling speed in a sushi restaurant.
Next, it’s time to buy yourself some extra time for later levels where your restaurant became famous, and you get swarmed with new customers.
So firstly, improve waiting time. Just pick the most affordable piece of furniture and upgrade it (out of those that make your customers wait for more), and upgrade it a couple of times (around extra 4 seconds should be enough for a start).
And if you want to earn bigger tips, increase the time your customers will be ready to give you a high tip and it could make you a couple of dozen of coins on each level.
2. Do Not Spend Your Coins And Diamonds On Profit Increase, At Least Until You Fully Equip Your Restaurant
More coins do sounds nice, but the investment is lower than the gains, so you should pass on increasing your prices, at least at the start. Improve your kitchen first, so you can serve customers highly efficient, and think about higher profits when you reach levels with lots of customers (more than 15 or 20). Only then your investments in coins and diamonds can give you a substantial profit over time.
3. It’s Not The Perfect Servings That Get You The Most Points, But The Highest Combos
You may think that getting all the perfect servings, meaning that you have lots of customers who got served after 3 seconds or less is the best way to collect lots of points. Well, that isn’t really the case. While managing to have perfect serving times can be of help, it is better if you manage not to break combos instead of having lots of perfect scores.
Having your combo undamaged will give you more points, so it is important for you to upgrade customer waiting times. This means that you will have more time to serve them their orders while they have green timer over them. Once they become dissatisfied (and the orange timer appears) finishing your order won’t increase your combo score, and you won’t manage to collect the highest possible score.
4. Manage To Find A Perfect Flow While Playing The Game
Some of us like when our hands are busy at all times, others are more comfortable when they have a second or two to just look at their kitchen, to have a couple of seconds to see what they are cooking. So, just find a playing style and tempo that works the best for you and stick to it.
Maybe you like always to have something roasting, or maybe you want to see each and every customer and their order before starting preparing dishes. We are all different, and all of us will prefer a different play style while cooking in Meshi Quest, so it is up to you to find out how you the game plays best for you and then improving on that strategy.
5. Getting New Ranks Is Better Than Unlocking New Restaurants
While opening new restaurants is the ultimate Meshi Quest goal, it is better to stick to first couple of restaurants. You see, harder levels give you more points, more points mean you will reach new ranks faster, which ultimately means you’ll get more coins and diamonds to upgrade your diners.
Because of this fact, we advise you to slowly building your food empire, instead of buying newly unlocked restaurants as soon as they become available for purchase. Each new restaurant features levels that gradually become harder and harder, equipment that’s more expensive to upgrade with each new restaurant, but you won’t start earning more money by buying new restaurants and playing their levels. So it is better to clear each diner’s levels than to buy new restaurants each time you unlock a new one. This way you will earn more money and will be capable of buying all necessary upgrades.
6. It Is Okay To Restart A Level If Things Don’t Go Your Way
You see, it is better just to restart a level once you make a couple of mistakes (especially during harder levels) than to continue playing the game, ultimately earning a lower score. You see, Meshi Quest is a game where one tiny mistake can create a snowball effect, and after just a couple of seconds, you may have a full restaurant full of customers with orange timers over their heads.
This is because of the game’s quick pace. Once you start making mistakes, it is harder and harder to get on the right track because with each new mistake our focus is weaker and weaker and we have harder and harder time to keep with new orders. We cannot manage our cooking as fast, and ultimately will end a level with less than the perfect score that won’t give us lots of coins or lots of stars.
Instead of continuing the game after you make a couple of wrong orders, or after your customers become dissatisfied, it’s better to simply restart a level once you start losing the pace with new orders. You’ll have more time to finish levels and will be able to rest a bit and restore your focus before trying a level for the beginning.
7. Getting Three-Star Rating Isn’t As Important As It Seems At The First Sight
While almost every game asks you to collect stars in order to unlock new levels, this isn’t the case with Meshi Quest. Instead of asking a particular number of stars for unlocking new levels and new restaurants, you unlock new stuff by earning new ranks. And new levels are unlocked by having high scores, and not by having three-star ratings on each level. This means you will be able to unlock new levels even if you aren’t the best of the best, only it will take a bit more time.
This is great because you don’t have to replay levels you are lousy at over and over again until you get a perfect, three-star score. Instead, just do your best and try scoring as high as you can in order to unlock new ranks faster.
Ok, guys, that’s pretty much it. You must upgrade your cooking equipment in order to earn better scores, but finding a perfect playing tempo is also pretty significant. And it is all about little things you can improve that will give you more time to finish orders and less chance of making mistakes. Thanks for reading and happy gaming!