Suikoden x Raku Spa Cafe Review
Hi guys, I was fortunate enough to pay a visit to the Suikoden x Raku Spa Cafe so thought I'd share a review.
For some background info Raku Spa Cafe is a collaboration Cafe which hosts various collaborations, they have a few locations across Japan, some are Bath houses with a Cafe and some are just Cafes, they are doing a Suikoden Star Leap collab until the 20th of October.
I visited the Shinsaibashi location on Tuesday 6th October around midday, this location is just a Cafe so there was no bath facility.
The Cafe is on the 4th floor of the 心斎橋日光 building in Shinsaibashi, a popular fashion district of Osaka, there wasn't much signage so it was a little difficult to find but once you walk in you can see the signage on the floor guide next to the elevator.
After exiting the elevator you will immediately be at the reception desk, there's actually two cafes here so I told the staff I was here for the Suikoden Cafe and they gave me a table number and QR code then showed me through to the left. On the way to the cafe there is a little merch stand and some visuals from the game.
Upon entering the Cafe I noticed it was completely empty, I was the only customer and there wasn't even any staff, the Cafe is self service, meaning you order via QR code and pick up your meal from the kitchen window when it's ready.
The cafe decor is pretty minimal, just a few banners of the main characters, some character bio's and a life size cutout. There were TV's playing a few scenes from the game on a 10 minute loop. Overall not very impressive.
Every item ordered comes with a random coaster of one the characters, also their face portrait tag on the item itself, the coasters come in a blind bag.
We ordered Flik's Potaf and Humphrey's Stew Hamburg as well as a Hero's Crimson Squash. The taste was OK, I've been to a lot of collab cafe's in Japan and I'd rank this slightly above average in taste but below average in creativity / presention. I know it's basically the standard but face portrait tag on food item is low effort.
After the meal I returned to the merch stand and grabbed a basket to fill up, theres keychains, badges, acrylic stands and other miscellaneous things, mostly standard offering.
For an additional 1100 yen you can get a random mini towel, 1 per person who spent over 1000 yen at the cafe
I picked up 3 stands and a keychain as well as two towels, total for the food and all my merch came to about 14,000 yen, I got 3 washi style stickers for free and they even gave me some of the leftover Star Leap manuals from TGS last month which I was really happy about.
Overall I had a good experience and was really happy with all the merch I got. I did try to go to the bathouse in Toyashi a couple days later but unfortunately my partner fell ill so I had to cancel it but I was already satisfied from the Cafe.
Thank you for reading the review I hope it was informative :)