I step outside my restaurant, flip the signboard to “open” and pull out my charumera horn to play a tune that echoes throughout the neighborhood — the best fake ramen shop in the world is open for business. You stock your shop with an increasingly diverse array of ingredients, hire staff, serve customers and gradually expand your business from a single counter to a multistory restaurant. To those unfamiliar with the simulation genre, where real-world activities are painstakingly rendered into virtual entertainment, watching even 30 seconds of “Japanese Ramen Simulator” will seem ridiculous.
You start the day preparing for service based on predetermined recipes — placing orders for ingredients on a laptop at the back of the shop (the ingredients arrive immediately by drone), organizing your kitchen or doing some renovation by adding seats, removing decorations, etc. — and then you open the shop. Customers enter, you take their orders, you make their ramen with variations of toppings and side orders like gyōza (dumplings), chāshū-don (pork rice bowls) and more. And then at 10 p.m., you close up.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
