Shokuyoukei Shoujo (食用系少女) Review

A while back I saw a story that caught my eye: a Taiwanese game called Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü got rejected from Steam for having too much porn and other objectionable content.

Not exactly breaking news, really. Everyone and their dog wants to get on Steam these days, including a whole lot of straight-up porn games and stuff that’s just skirting the line. Steam is a US platform run by white dudes, so that kind of child-endangerment material was always going to get the hammer.

So I looked into this Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü thing, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected…

It looks like softcore, but the game itself isn’t a visual novel… or at least not that kind of eroge-style text game. There’s actual stuff to do.

To put it bluntly… it’s primarily a management sim. Which actually made me interested in it.

The dev is Taiwanese, though, and their official site banned all mainland IPs, and since Steam won’t take it, the game’s only sold on physical disc. I had no idea how I’d even play it…

But with a buddy’s help, I got my hands on a copy, so I started playing.

The setup is dead simple. The protagonist gets hired as a consultant for a Taiwanese food street and has three months to help it earn good marks in various evaluations—otherwise a real estate developer swoops in and buys the whole place out.

It’s a management sim, but the systems are stripped down to the bone. The food street is pared to three shops, each with its own girl: Lulu selling braised pork rice, Madoka selling bubble tea, and Hikari selling fried chicken. Your job is to run all three, hit the evaluation targets, make enough money, and survive three monthly reviews to reach the ending.

At first I figured this’d be easy, but one session in and it’s actually pretty rough…

• The game opens with three difficulty levels. On “medium” (well-off), if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re broke immediately.
• Each shop has three stats: Popularity, Cost, and Quality. Daily income = Popularity × (Quality − Cost).
• Each month has a specific evaluation target—C rank the first month, B the second, A the third. The ranks correspond to concrete popularity/quality/profit numbers.
• Every week someone comes to collect rent. It starts at 50000 and later scales with your popularity—the more popular you are, the more rent you owe.
• Of the three shops, only the braised pork rice place is really profitable. Fried chicken is second. Bubble tea is the worst—huge costs, terrible popularity, and it loses money out of the gate.
• After each day’s settlement there are random events. Each girl has a different personality and different flaws: Lulu plays too many games and tanks food quality, Madoka picks fights with customers all day and tanks popularity, Hikari is careless and loses money. All of it makes your life harder.
• Meanwhile the game keeps throwing absurd little events at you—surprise health inspections, a reporter wanting an interview, sketchy ingredients you can choose to buy, whether to enter a contest, etc. Pick wrong and you eat the financial loss.
• There’s a shop where you buy various support items—boost popularity, cut costs, raise quality. Each girl can equip three items, but you can only unlock slots by raising affection.

Put simply, on normal mode the first playthrough is basically a survival run.

Because hitting each month’s targets is just that hard…

When you take over, the bubble tea shop is bleeding money every day, and the owner’s constant bickering with customers drives traffic down (which at least means smaller losses). The braised pork rice place makes a pitiful amount, and its owner is too busy gaming to maintain food quality. The fried chicken shop brings in decent money, but the owner keeps botching the books and eating extra losses. Once you pay the first week’s 50000 rent you’re flat broke—never mind all the other stuff hitting you up for cash, from drunk customers to stray cats running wild to health problems…

So all you can do is clear the review thresholds by the skin of your teeth.

My recommendation: boost the braised pork rice income first. Buy a few cost-cutting and traffic-boosting items, equip them on the pork rice and fried chicken shops, lock in your profit, and make sure you have rent before the next week hits.

Then fix the bubble tea shop’s quality, stop the bleeding, and… give up on the bubble tea shop. Just give up. It’s not worth it—as long as it stops losing money, fine.

After that the basic strategy is to milk the braised pork rice shop for big profits, funnel the best items to it, and grind Lulu’s affection—ideally max it out, since her affection events massively boost her earning power. The fried chicken shop is also worth developing since it brings in cash fast. As for bubble tea, just don’t lose money.

When the random events come up—including “someone wants to shoot a promo with you”—consider investing, since a successful special event can raise your evaluation and maybe even get you an S rank.

Basically, there’s no way you’re romancing anyone in the first playthrough. Surviving three reviews and getting the Normal End is already a win.

Second playthrough, go Lulu’s route. Beating the game gives you Lulu’s exclusive items, and some shop stock that only unlocks on NG+ gets handed to you for free—especially the “increases training speed” one. With that, you can max Lulu’s affection fast, which unlocks even more shop items…

So basically the game is a grind across multiple playthroughs: see different ENDs, unlock more shop items, and everything that was impossible becomes easy.

My rough read on difficulty: Lulu < Hikari < Madoka. Yes, the bubble tea one—without strong items you flat-out can’t romance her.

And if you want to beat the final boss, you need to farm “info” points. That’s unrelated to routes and probably even harder—you’ll need more exclusive items. Not impossible, just more grinding across playthroughs…

Anyway, this game plays a lot like those little “Beijing Life”-style sims I used to mess with—not a rigorous management sim, just a small-scale diversion. What’s special about it is basically that they slapped some pretty girls on top to sell a vibe. Underneath it’s a simple little game…

And if you actually try to take it seriously, there are plenty of problems:

• The male lead is supposed to be helping the three heroines, but none of them look like “shop managers”—they don’t even wear cooking clothes. Guess they didn’t have the budget for uniforms or casual outfits.
• No bank or trading system. I’d suggest adding stocks and bank interest to bump up the play value—otherwise your money just sits there doing nothing, and you can’t even invest it to make more. A lot of the time it’s just boring.
• Random events repeat way too much and the answers are always the same. Once you know them, you basically never get fined.
• Not much challenge. Just clear one playthrough for the strong items, and with those you can push further on the second. It feels more like a grinding game…
• The characters use something like 3D Emote tech, but a lot of them look unnatural. The only one who looks natural is… Sakura, the cameo.
• The game’s made by Taiwanese devs, so Chinese should be the first language, but the Chinese dialogue is cringe as hell to read. I switched to Japanese… and it reads so much better. The voice acting is Japanese too—Lulu is voiced by Inori Minase, which is honestly pretty generous. Though you have to patch it from the official site to get the voices.
• The monthly evaluations have to be calculated by hand against the chart, with no quick self-evaluation tool. It’s exhausting and stressful, since several stats keep dropping.

Another thing: the game is brutal to newcomers. If you don’t know how it plays, you’re strapped for cash immediately and the money never stretches. Then the game tempts you with “want to use sketchy ingredients to cut costs and make money?” and players slide right down the dark path and never look back. With funds short, you’re facing health inspections and every other cash sink, so you cut corners wherever you can—you might as well be the villain all the way down. You end up a full-blown “capitalist who’ll sell any principle for money”…

Of course, once you know the actual mechanics—item usage, Sakura’s special reward events—you don’t need to go down the fallen path and lose more than you gain. Just gotta pay your tuition first…

All that said, the game is decent enough—just with plenty of room to improve. Hope the team keeps at it and gets it onto Steam soon…

Oh right, speaking of which: I genuinely didn’t find anything “unsuitable for children” or “softcore” in this game. So why did Steam force it off? Compared to something like NEKO PARA it’s practically wholesome…

Is it because the game keeps luring players onto the “dark path” in the first playthrough?

By the way, heard today that NEKO PARA VOL4 got nuked by Steam too. Nice work!