Topic: My Problem With Battle Chef Brigade's Story

Note: Currently playing through Chapter 5, haven't completed the game yet.

First of all, I love this game. Everything from the art design, colorful cast of likeable characters, music, surprising amount of voice acting, and fun, unique gameplay makes this one of my favorite indie games in a few years. That's why chapter 5 is such a noticeable weak point in the game's story.

You go back a few days before Mina joins the Brigade and play as Thrash. He gets a letter and finds out his wife is gravely ill, and goes to the Darkrealm to get three hearts from a boss to make an antidote and cure her. That night, bandits steal the hearts and you have to challenge one to a duel to get more information on them. This is where it annoys me. After winning the duel, the bandits give you one of the three hearts and tell you that you have to win two more duels to get the rest. That means two more days, one duel a day. This man's wife is dying and instead of holding these bandits hostage or beating the tar out of them until they give up three hearts, he just goes along with their terms. I'm not a violent person, but if my wife was dying and a couple of goons were holding the only known cure to her sickness hostage, you can bet that I'll do whatever it takes to get it from them. ESPECIALLY since they stole them in the first place!

The only real reason for this, of course, is to pad out the game. Two more days of doing the three jobs, two more duels. Thrash is a big dude and could easily intimidate these crooks into giving him back the rest of the hearts, but instead just waits two more days and hopes his wife doesn't die so you, the player, will have more game to play. This is the kind of bad story pacing I've come to expect in an open world game, not an extremely linear puzzle/side scrolling brawler.

I still love the game, but I hope Chapter 6 isn't like this.

I'll bite. Generally in hostage situations you don't want to risk agitating those that hold leverage over you less you put the hostage in danger. Thrash could certainly threaten or even beat up the thieves....and they could destroy the hearts...after all they owe him nothing. It just so happened that the things they stole were what his wife required. Now of course these are paper tiger villains and the audience knows that, but Thrash isn't going to take that risk. He wants to throttle these idiots, he wants to go home, but if playing along gets him a guaranteed cure vs a rash action dooming his wife to die, most people are going to take the possibility that has the best outcome and the least amount of risk. If we are trying to attempt to treat this as a realistic scenario, going one orc army isn't a good idea.

Of course story wise her sickness lasted long enough for him to get the notice that she was sick, to find her cure and to have it made and to go home to administer it to her....which in real life would have been less likely to have worked in the first place. I agree that the pacing can be jarring but not because Thrash doesn't choose to break the thieves in half, but rather because it is almost out of step with the rest of the flow of the story.

I am surprised to see people seriously discussing the story.
I loved the game aswell for its unique concept and the lovely artstyle, but never thought the story was a major selling point or even "feature". It mainly just existed to explain why they combined a hack'n'slash with a match-3-puzzler and why you even risk your life cooking at all.
I didn't even remember that part of the story at all.
The story doesn't continue that side path, I think. The competition continues and you will have so solve some sort of evil scheming as far as I remember.
The story wasn't a major weak point in my opinion neither, it just kind of served the purpose.