Gosh, if there is something more awful in games than finding chests and doing quests only to receive materials for crafting - it is getting tomatoes for a recipe that will temporaryly boost your attack stat by 2%.
Every single modern game has some sort of cooking stuff. Besides, every journey is a gourmet adventure.
It does not matter if you are in a post apocalyptic world or if war is raging and human existence is cheaper than dirty: you WILL be eating beef borguiguon, a slice of layered cake and fucking ice cream after going through that desolated desert.
Then there is also a high chance a character won’t shut up about their passion of food and how they want to be the best cook in the land of children soldiers fighting for a right to exist.
Cooking is mechanically boring, bloat the game with useless collectables and also presents filler concepts on games that are already lore dense.
And then we have something like Pokemon Scarlet that made the whole game be about it, to the point of making cities revolve ONLY around this mechanic.
Do you enjoy this kind of thing? Or are you tired of it as well?
That little jingle that plays while cooking in BotW/TotK fills me with much joy.
Do I ever use the food for more than healing and extra hearts? No. But I’ll be damned if I don’t spend a good hour just throwing my hard scavenged food items in a pan just to hear the jingle.