BODY: When a mobile game adds a scenario built around ramen, most fans reach for a screenshot. 4Gamer's Tetsuya Onishi reaches for a stockpot.
In the latest installment of "My Collab Cafe" (Ore no Collab Cafe), the monthly column that runs every fourth Saturday, the working chef takes inspiration from games he loves and cooks up an unofficial, imagined recipe. Entry number 090 is themed around a newly implemented scenario in Uma Musume Pretty Derby—one where ramen takes center stage.
Onishi's target this time is a "gattsuri buta ramen"—a hearty, unapologetically heavy pork ramen. The Japanese word gattsuri signals exactly the kind of bowl that fills you up and then some: thick with pork, rich with fat, and built for appetite rather than restraint. It's a style closely associated with Tokyo's famously indulgent ramen culture, so the "Tokyo representative" framing in the original title is doing real work.
Rather than approximating the dish, Onishi commits fully—"honki de," or dead seriously—to recreating the kind of bowl the scenario evokes. The column's charm has always been this collision of fan enthusiasm and professional kitchen technique: a chef treating a game tie-in the way he'd treat a restaurant menu item, complete with a proper recipe readers can attempt at home.
For Uma Musume fans, it's a playful nod to the franchise's willingness to lean into food-centric side stories, which have become a reliable source of lighthearted flavor in a game otherwise about horse-girl racing.
The insider take
Ramen-as-content is deeply Tokyo. In a city where entire magazines and TV segments are devoted to ranking shops, a game scenario about a big, greasy bowl reads instantly to local players—and gattsuri buta ramen is shorthand for the maximalist, pork-piled style that dominates neighborhoods like Ikebukuro and around Waseda. That 4Gamer pairs it with an actual chef's recipe, rather than a store recommendation, reflects a very Japanese media instinct: fandom isn't just consumed, it's cooked.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).