Shokugeki no Souma

Souma Yukihira has been cooking alongside his father Jouichirou for as long as he can remember. As a sous chef at his father's restaurant, he has spent years developing his culinary expertise and inventing new dishes to amaze their customers. He aspires to exceed his father's skill and take over the restaurant one day, but he is shocked to learn that Jouichirou is closing up the shop to take a job in New York.

Rather than tagging along with his father, Souma finds himself enrolling at the prestigious Tootsuki Culinary Academy, where only 10 percent of its students end up graduating. The school is famous for its "Shokugeki"—intense cooking competitions between students often used to settle debates and arguments. Jouichirou tells Souma that to surpass him and survive the next three years at Tootsuki and graduate there.

The academy's brutal curriculum and fiercely competitive student body await the young chef, who must learn to navigate the treacherous environment if he wants to stand a chance at realizing his dreams. But is skill alone enough to let him rise to the top?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yukihira, Souma Main

Matsuoka, Yoshitsugu Japanese

Nakiri, Erina Main

Taneda, Risa Japanese

Tadokoro, Megumi Main

Takahashi, Minami Japanese

Nakiri, Alice Supporting

Akasaki, Chinatsu Japanese

Isshiki, Satoshi Supporting

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Kurokiba, Ryou Supporting

Okamoto, Nobuhiko Japanese

Mito, Ikumi Supporting

Ishigami, Shizuka Japanese

Yukihira, Jouichirou Supporting

Koyama, Rikiya Japanese

Aldini, Takumi Supporting

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

Hayama, Akira Supporting

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Kawase, Kouhei Producer

Maruyama, Hiroo Producer

Matsukura, Yuuji Producer

Hashimoto, Ryuu Producer

Reviews

Sep 2, 2024

ggol

Recommended

TLDR: A Cooking anime that is worth a watch, but it does fall off toward the last few seasons

I'll be putting all the season in this one review, 9/10 for the whole series

Story 9/10
The story is about the main character wants to take over his fathers restaurant. However, inside his world he only knows the cooking in his local area and hardly anything that is outside of it. Therefore, one day his father introduced him into a Prestige cooking academy known for all the professional chefs around the world who graduated from this academy and is only for the best of the best to improve ... his son's cooking skills. As the series goes on it does fall off because most of the tiny details they added in season 1 were mostly taken out. Later on the story becomes more predictable and the pacing of the anime gradually starts to lose its track.

Characters 7/10
The characters in this series is quite likable, but the biggest problem is that not every character had enough screen time, and worse of all some of the most noticeable supporting characters didn't even have any interaction with the main character. This is a huge missed opportunity, but the animator did try to give more character screen time compared to the manga which is respectable.

Animation 8/10
The animation for the first season was great, they added a lot of small details like a few second screen art and post-credit scenes. However, as the series went on, the anime focus more of quantity over quality which heavily impacted the small detail that was added in season one. It's still good animation that had no flaws, but is a shame to see it not added in.

Conclusion
Overall, is generally a good series, it had a strong start but gradually fell off as the season goes on due to its primary focus on quantity over the quality aspect of the anime. The little details of the animation was good at the start, but removed out of the anime as the series goes on to the end. Most of the characters didn't have enough interactions and is a huge missed opportunity for those that didn't have enough screen time.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 13, 2024

OtherFritz

Mixed Feelings

Food Wars is an anime focusing on ambitious chefs-in-training as they vie for dominance at an elite culinary school, a premise that should surely appeal to culinary enthusiasts while also promising a high degree of competition, as is only appropriate for a shounen anime. The show's lead characters, Soma and Megumi, are likable and compelling enough, if somewhat basic, with goals that easy to understand and root for. The cast in general has enough quirk and personality to entertain, though the show does expect the audience to be invested in even the less developed characters with decidedly mixed results. The visual style of Food Wars ... is consistently pleasing, with appealing character designs and lovingly detailed close-ups of the food.

The meat of the anime, so to speak, is the cooking, which I suppose is to be expected. A typical episode follows one or both of the leads as they are placed in a scenario in which they must either outperform an opponent established to have exceptional skills in a particular field of cooking or meet the standards of a seemingly unpleasable judge, usually illustrated by a succession of nameless extras presenting their own unsatisfactory meals. Whenever a named character's dish is being eaten, the eater will, without fail, squeal and convulse in nigh-orgasmic delight, then describe the taste and cooking technique with purple prose so thick as to make Lovecraft blush, accompanied by some kind of illustrated simile. This style of presentation may appeal to the technically minded, but grows tiresome and repetitive over the course of the season's 24 episodes. It's hard to be impressed with the main characters' skills when just about every dish is treated like Manna from Heaven and one can expect to hear terms like "umami" and "depth of flavour" thrown around ad nauseum. For this reason, Food Wars works best when the leads are forced to come up with creative solutions, focusing shifting the focus away from sensory spectacle and more on to problem solving.

As a story, Food Wars walks a well-trodden path, focusing first and foremost on Soma's ambition to reach the highest echelons of Tōtsuki Academy and surpass his father in terms of culinary skill. Despite the school setting, characters are rarely shown learning or training, instead preferring to throw its leads from one sink-or-swim challenge to another, trusting the audience to assume that they already have the necessary skills with maybe a flashback or post hoc explanation as to how the characters developed them. This isn't an invalid method of storytelling per se, but it's easy to see how some people could be turned off from the show because of it. Characters that play antagonistic roles will generally show some combination of smugness, elitism and outright corruption, to the point where one starts to wonder if Tōtsuki is even that good of a school. For example, in an early episode, the character Erina Nakiri oversees the school's entrance exam and refuses to admit that she enjoys Soma's cooking, causing him to fail. In another, an instructor attempts to expel Megumi for altering a recipe, despite having only done so to compensate for the deliberately poor produce that she had been forced to use. As such, the show ends up fighting an uphill battle when it inevitably attempts to portray these characters in a more understandable ore even sympathetic light.

To conclude, much as I may gripe, Food Wars is generally an entertaining anime. While it struggles to stretch its premise out over a length of 24 episodes, its makes a valiant effort throw new obstacles at its lead characters and provide a range of competitive cooking scenarios for the audience to enjoy. Fans of all things culinary will likely get more enjoyment out of the series than most, but for a more conventional shounen-watching audience, there are certainly worse ways to make use of one's time. Those who prefer a more ambitious storyline to spectacle or have little patience for repetition, however, may wish to give Food Wars a miss.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jan 7, 2021

Rixxrdo

Not Recommended

Funny

Look, Shokugeki no Souma is not for everyone and it certainly isn't for me. The basic storyline is a cooking school we follow soma as he gets better at cooking blah blah, this anime is just trying to appeal to the horny boys, like me at the time, but the truth is I don't want to be horny all the time I want to watch an anime that I can laugh at and enjoy but this is just not right, and I'm pretty sure food doesn't have an effect where it rips all your clothes off and makes you orgasm. To be honest, I haven't ... completed every season of this "anime" and maybe it gets better but I highly doubt they change the storyline much it's just going to be new opponents and new tasks that have to be completed in a certain way all the while everyone's on enjoying the food as if they are going to die afterward. Also, I found it very difficult to eat during this anime, seeing as the people in it were eating divine food with fragrant smells and textures and whatever, whereas I'm eating a bag of chips, just makes me feel depressed. I guess they did a good job seeing as it is a more popular anime and it could be difficult to think up new ideas seeing as every other anime these days is just an isekai with the exact same story but they definitely could've come up with a better idea than sexualizing the whole thing. I can't give any ideas on how to improve nor do I think you even care about this review but this is just my interpretation of this anime.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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