Rata2ouille: The Perfect Dish

"IF WE WISH TO TASTE OUR FUTURE,
WE MUST RECALL THE FLAVORS OF OUR PAST."

Rata2ouille: The Perfect Dish (AKA Funny Ratgame) is a satirical, freeware indie platformer, social simulation, full length role-playing hybrid game. Following the events of Ratatouille for Wii and its sequel Ratatouille PSP, a new adventure unfolds after a series of events leads to the protagonist discovering a mysterious world known as the Food Network. Partnering up with an odd naked mole rat named Twinkles (pronounced twink-lays), the protagonist forms the Rodent Risers, braving the Food Network to find the mythical Perfect Ingredients and defeat the brutally evil rat Knox. Along the way, the player will have to develop Companion Syncs with both coworkers and customers, craft and obtain Persona to wield in combat, manage their restaurant, cook food that will assist them on their journey, and more.

• Unravel a grandiose conspiracy involving the amnesiac Twinkles, the evil rat Knox, the mysterious Food Network, the labyrinthine Hyperstream, fast food delivery apps, and an impending visit from the food critic Guy Fieri that could make-or-break your restaurant!
• Fight intense battles with Shadows that you can also wield as Persona. Use them to best your enemies and rivals, like Ratatoing!
• Form various Companion Syncs to deepen your bond with important figures in your life to unlock skills and gameplay perks!
• Date various cute boyfriends! Only one girlfriend included.
• Over 100 characters from various different media properties appear as customers in your restaurant, including... Sans Undertale, Peter Griffin, Yu Narukami, Kazuma Kiryu, Joseph Joestar, Bayonetta, and many, many, many more!
• Customize your hero! Set pronouns and unlock over thirty unique costumes that appear both in cutscenes and gameplay!
• Obtain all seven of the legendary Chaos Emeralds by succeeding in target breaking minigames hidden throughout the Food Network!
• Difficulty adjustments and options, such as the “Skip Battles” pog item that can be equipped to skip all battles and focus purely on the story! Perfect for players that do not care for combat.
• Create your own “My Food Network” where you can set your own favorite song to play, choose your color palette, create a food exhibit, and set posters that can be unlocked using points earned from in-game achievements!
  
• Super cool players that 100% the game can view a Secret Ending that plays upon clearing the epilogue or talking to a certain friend in My Food Network...

This game is in no way, shape, or form an actual Disney, Pixar, or Atlus product. It is an independently developed satirical game. It is parody and no profit is being made from it.

Check out the game's tumblr blog or the Twitter page to stay up to date! 

Q: Is this really a full-length Persona style RPG? 
 A: Yes. I’m sorry, I don’t know why. It’s about 60 Hours long.

Q: How long did this take to make?
A: About two and a half years, though I took many breaks from working on it due to being a full-time college student (after some gap years) and having other projects I’ve been working on.

Q: Who made this? What kind of person makes this? Can you tell us about yourself because I need to know what’s wrong with you???
A: Someone very hot, goth, and androgynous. I truly hope that makes the game more intimidating for you.

Q: If this is a heavily Persona inspired game will it be re-released with a single new dungeon in a few years with a new marketable character tacked on?
A: Buddy if enough people find this funny and enjoy playing it, you know it! That and if enough people would like to help me add full blown voice acting in a re-release, which would be one of my major focuses for an enhanced version.

Q: Why did you make this?
A: I was really bored during the worst stretch of the pandemic. Originally this was a small crude gag game I was making years and years and years ago that I scrapped, but I completely revamped it into something much more elaborate and surreal as a little distraction to keep me busy while quarantining. It sort-of functioned as a low stake testing ground for less facetious games I plan on releasing in the near future. There’s also an underlying commentary on how obnoxious and outlandish unnecessary sequels to self-contained and subdued stories are, which can be seen in how ridiculously unhinged the game is with constantly recontextualizing various minute-details of the original movie and retconning things as if it was all deep foreshadowing. 

Q: Why are you acting like Ratatouille is some kind of game series?
A: In the past, in the really early beginnings of making this game, I had this whole elaborate ARG thing I would often joke about with friends where I would insist the movie was just a really bad faithless adaption of a video game series developed by Platinum Games and published by Atlus. There were jokes about the name “Remy” being a “dumb movie adaption thing” and that Ratatouille is in fact the proper name. The implication was that the “Disney movie adaption” was so bad it killed off the game series until this sequel came out well over a decade later due to “vocal fan support.” This eventually died down a bit, but some of the ironic ARG stuff has lingered.

One part of the ARG was originally going to be that there were two people working on this game instead of one and that they’d have a messy public falling out on the game’s tumblr blog, but this was scrapped because it felt too explosive lol

Q: What do you mean by this being a sequel to Ratatouille for Wii and Ratatouille PSP? Aren’t those the same game?
A:  While the Ratatouille tie-in game on most consoles was just a movie adaption, the PSP version was one of those weird tie-in games that takes place after the movie. I never beat the game but the plot entails Chef Skinner stealing all the recipe cards from the new restaurant around the time of their grand opening, and Rem- Ratatouille having to retrieve them. This is recited as some sort of major, melodramatic event in Rata2ouille. Ratatouille PSP has a lot of scrapped side-characters from the movie appear (such as rats named Celine, Dodo, Twitchy all of whom were meant to appear in the movie and were in the official art book) in addition to very odd new characters such as Teen Rat, who is seemingly a Sonic the Hedgehog pastiche that challenges Remy to races. These game-exclusive characters are all treated as if they’re established characters from the movie that we should know and recognize so when I discovered they exist halfway through development, I retroactively added a bunch of them into this game and treated them exactly the same here. I did a lot of deep diving into the production of the movie and its tie-in material while making this game and referenced a lot of niche stuff -- in order to be as bizarre as possible, I also needed to be as “authentic” as possible.