when you decide to play cooking mama, you know what you're getting and this one isn't really any different.

there are a total of 60 dishes in the main gamemode, dojo/time trial levels upon silver medal completion, and 31 minigames that are not always cooking related (completing a dish unlocks a new minigame every so often). i played through every single minigame and main dish, and 100% gold-medaled all the main courses. i played some courses in dojo mode, but ultimately it was just doubling my time with this game for no reason so i stopped.

the main courses are OK. they are classic cooking mama, and are fun for a while before you realise there are a handful of techniques/cooking games they cycle between. there is a big issue with some unclear instructions or shoddy inputs that mean going for 100% is tedious. i discovered a trick in which if you know you are going to get a bronze/silver on a step during the dish, you can press start and quit and try the step again with no consequence on your score as long as the finished sign doesn't pop up which helped a lot. i think without it, i would have given up on going for full golds just because of how long the recipes get later in the game. if you enjoy cooking mama, this is no different. its fun, but after the first 10 recipes it really wore me down.

the minigames are... there? they exist? i dont know why they do, but they are definitely in the game! there are 4 separate categories of minigames being: help mama, harvesting, help mama's shop, and... studying? there are studying minigames where you solve basic arithmetic in thrilling gameplay like "1 + 1 = ?" and u are asked to fill in the missing numbers. this is a kids game, so i guess it makes sense to have them, but even for a child they are just so boring. there isn't a fun caricature of mama, it's literally just math problems on your ds. the other minigames are mostly fine like in the mama's shop portion, which has minigames like scooping ice cream for customers, taking orders and being a waiter, etc. they are a lot like old flash games, and are genuinely not bad. in help mama, you do household chores for her like sorting her thread spools, feeding her pet fish, and nursing baby birds to health. idk. its fine. the harvesting ones are about the same level of quality as the mama's shop games, and are pretty okay. playing catch to harvest fruit, sorting out green and red apples, collecting seafood from enemy crabs. they're okay and i played them all once or twice. the only real reason to play them is for what they unlock which is : decorations for mama's backdrop during the main courses and the main menu screen. that's... it. you don't even unlock the fun decorations after beating it/getting a perfect score. you have to get a perfect score on the minigame i think 3 times??? before you get a prize. its supposed to incentivize playing the minigames more, i understand, but it is so tedious if you DO want to unlock everything that there isn't really a point. the minigames are just kind of stupid. i didn't like their existence but i'm also probably not the target audience so who really cares in the end.

the final part of this game comes from the dojo or the time trial editions of the main recipes. once you beat the main recipe with a silver or gold, you unlock the dojo version of the dish. this mode means making the dish under a much tighter time constraint that generally doesn't allow for mistakes, which is actually a fun way to play the game. it is a lot more stressful, and definitely more annoying to 100% because of the timer aspect, but i liked playing a few levels of it. i already know that some recipes will be hell if you wanted to do it because of their tedious steps (the entire chicken tender/nugget recipe) (the step where you have to measure out foil/wrap for the food that brought nothing but pain and annoyance because of how sensitive the ranges are), but it was really fun. im not sure if this mode has a set of unlocks, but i beat a dish with a gold medal rating and it gave me nothing so... im going to assume you dont get any prizes. this was more fun for me than the base recipes, but it is also the same exact thing. i like challenges, and some of these levels were genuinely difficult with the close timings of them, but it was great! easily the best part of the experience for me.

so why did i play this game. did i even like it? to answer: i have no real clue. i like cooking mama, but actually beating everything was a chore. 60 recipes and their respective dojo levels AND the 30ish minigames on top of that is a lot to do, with little variability in the core dishes. you will experience the same egg cracking minigame a thousand times and it will be 0.1% less fun every time after that. i had a blast with the first 15 recipes, and then i thought "i must be halfway done." then i kept unlocking, and unlocking, and unlocking. maybe don't be like me and try speedrunning completion.

my rating of this game is: Just O.K.

The game modes of Cooking Mama 5:
-Cook the food
-Cook the food again, but faster
-Perform menial labor harvesting supplies on Cooking Mama's industrial-sized farm or preparing meals in Cooking Mama's various fast food restaurants, one of them located in a tropical resort, in a way that makes you question just how vast Cooking Mama's enterprise truly is, to the point that Cooking Mama's antics stop feeling cute and start to take on a sinister edge as you consider the possibility that she's a ruthless billionaire strangling smaller restaurants out of business and ruining indigenous island communities similar to resort industries in the Caribbean
-Second grade math
-Feed the animals