[REVIEW] Little Dragons Cafe

 I’ve never hidden the fact that I quite enjoy a lot of simulation games, and even moreso when there’s some sort of fantasy aspect to them. So when a friend brought Little Dragons Cafe to my attention, I immediately thought it would be something I’d enjoy. Finding out that it was headed by the person who brought us such simulation gems as Harvest Moon and Rune Factory, I expected that I would be in for a fantastic treat with this game.

 
MY MOM IS A WHAT?!

Little Dragons Cafe starts out with cute animation and an identity crisis for two siblings. You pick whether you want to play as the male or female sibling, go through a very basic tutorial for harvesting crops and cooking food, and then suddenly your mother falls into a coma. Bam! Just like that! According to the wise old wizard man who shows up equally out of nowhere, this is because she’s half dragon, and her human and dragon blood and sort of fighting it out within her and causing conflict. How can two young kids (probably young kids; they could be anywhere from 8 to 16, judging by the animation style; it’s really not that clear) help their mother get back on her feet? Why, by running the cafe in her absence, of course!

Oh, and also raising up a baby dragon to full adulthood. That will also help.

Also, who is my dad? Where is he? Are my sibling and I also fated to have dual lineages duke it out in our blood when we grow up? Did we hatch from eggs? What even is this story?!

Anyway, your task is to run the cafe alongside your sibling, as well as a host of others who join the staff as the story progresses. Because there is a storyline to this game. Multiple storylines, really, each divided into chapters during which a new character makes their way to the cafe, reveals they have a problem but don’t want to address it, the problem is addressed by food and emotional revelations, and the character leaves to carry on with their life. The characters you encounter are all sorts of weird, ranging from an obnoxious ghost, a snobby witch, a little boy who wants to be a hero and who fights with a giant spoon, and so on. Each chapter plays out the same way: the personal details all change to match the new character’s particular problem, but the scaffolding upon which their story is built is identical to everyone else’s. It’s just a matter of seeing it to completion, all the while trying to keep your customers happy and your dragon friend healthy.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE FOOD

 
While money doesn’t come to play in this game, you still have the task of keeping the cafe’s customers happy throughout the day. This involves preparing a varied menu of tasty and high-quality foods for them to order. In between the cafe’s open hours, you and your dragon friend head out into the wilds to gather ingredients and recipe fragments, both of which acting exactly as you’d think. Get enough recipe fragments and you can make a new recipe for the cafe. Get the right ingredients and you can make the food. Food is made by completing a rhythm mini-game, as seen above. The more accurate you are, the higher the quality of the food.

Now, the food you make yourself, you get to keep in your inventory, which plays into something I’ll discuss in a moment. As for what customers in the cafe are served, that gets made by your chef, and served by you, your sibling, or one of the two servers, the three of whom all do various tasks around the cafe. Or at least, they should, but every single staff member is prone to slacking off. You’d think you could leave the cafe in their capable hands while you go out and forage for more ingredients, but no. You have to be right there, telling them off when they start slacking. Neglect this and orders get missed, customers leave unhappy, and the cafe’s popularity decreases.

Frankly, this is frustrating. The cafe is open for lunch and supper rushes, and the rest of the time you’re free to roam and ingredient-hunt, but that means a very limited time before you’ll get notified that you have to head back and tell people to do their frickin’ jobs. This has to be balanced with the fact that ingredients for the food run out over time. It’s a constant battle between trying to keep the cafe stocked (or re-making recipes so that they use ingredients you have more of, even if that means a lower-quality meal) and essentially being a manager. In the beginning, with few customers, this isn’t too bad, and is an easy balance to keep. But as the game progresses and more customers come pouring in and more of the world opens up for you to explore, managing it all just becomes as massive pain, and detracted from my enjoyment of the game. I understand the concept of difficulty curves and all, but the final few chapters of the game get so tricky to balance and involve so much fine-tuning that I stopped thinking of the game as a fun and chill experience and more as a source of stress that I really did not need in my cute colouring-book style game about a fantasy cafe.

OUR DRAGONS, OURSELVES

 
Your dragon friend, whose life is tied to your mother’s and whom you need to raise up big and strong in order to cure her, grows up gradually throughout the game. You can’t rush it, the growth cycles are predetermined. But as your dragons grows up, it gains and loses new abilities. As a little baby, it can crawl into animal dens and bring out meat for you. As an adult, it becomes far too large to keep doing this, but instead you gain the power of flight, allowing you to reach islands in the middle of the ocean, or traverse regions full of tall cliffs. By the time you get new abilities, you really won’t miss the old ones, as what you gained from them can be obtained far more easily in other ways and in other areas of the map. It’s a clever way of staggering exploration and preventing the player from prioritizing one thing at the expense of everything else, and it adds to the excitement of being able to explore new areas and use new abilities when your dragon reaches a new stage of maturity.

So you can’t influence its life cycle, but you can influence its appearance. Whenever you cook food, it goes into your inventory, and from there you can feed it to your dragon. Doing so recovers any lost stamina, and over time, the sort of food you feed it will have an influence on its colour. Feed it foods marked with a red symbol and it will become more red. Feed it foods marked with blue and have it change to blue. And so on and so forth. It’s not an either-or thing, either, since feeding it a mix of red and blue foods, for instance, will give you a lovely purple dragon. It’s actually kind of neat to be able to customize your dragon companion in that way. I had fun with that aspect, at least.

FRIENDS TO THE END

 
I’m not going to lie here: I did get pretty invested in some of the character arcs of this game. Though all of the stories followed the same formula, there were lessons to be taught and learned in each one, lessons that can resonate just as well with adults as they can with younger people. Coming to grips with the loss of a loved one while still remembering them fondly, learning that some people are important enough for you to want to become a better person, understanding that stories sometimes look different from the other side, dealing with the guilt of succeeding where others failed… There’s a lot in here that can resonate with all sorts of people, and I like that a lot. Some of the character arcs were a little cheesy and easy to see the end of (the snooty witch who believes herself to be better than everyone else eventually learning that maybe other people are worthy or respect after all), but sometimes the journey to that conclusion was the most touching part.

Sure, a lot of the characters were tropes, but that’s not always a bad thing. It all depends on how those tropes are handled. In this regard, I think Little Dragons Cafe did a pretty decent job. The familiar character archetypes, combined with the game’s particular art style, brought to mind a sort of “Saturday morning cartoon” feel, and appealed to a youthful side of myself that doesn’t get to come out very often. It was relaxing, familiar, and heartfelt, and it’s not always easy for video games to accomplish that. So, credit where it’s due.

Advancing the story enough to actually see the end of the character arc, though, was occasionally an exercise in frustration or boredom. The storylines themselves were fine enough, but sometimes the advancement was seeing a short cutscene in the morning or early afternoon, with characters struggling with a thing over and over… for days. Wake up, see cutscene, tend to the cafe, go to bed, do the same thing the next day. You know it’s going to culminate in a character wanting to try to recipe that you need to gather recipe fragments and ingredients for, but for much of the arc, it’s just story beats being fed in drips and drabs while you wait for that moment when you can actually do something. All watching, no participating. Early on that was fine, because I had plenty to explore and to try out and the customer demands weren’t overwhelming. Later on, though, when combined with my frustration over how tedious and nigh-impossible the game was to balance properly, I just ended up longing for that sweet moment when I could bring the character’s storyline to a close and move on with things.

 
There is a good amount of fun to be had in Little Dragons Cafe. It just felt at times that the better you were toward the beginning, the more you were punished for it later. A game being marketed mostly to kids doesn’t mean adults should have their skill held against them, and being better at the rhythm mini-game early on meant better offerings on the menu, which meant more customers, which meant more ingredients running out more quickly, which meant trying to balance that with having to take orders, serve meals, wash dishes, and also knock my cook out of his depressed funk so he kept making food to serve. Given that the cafe’s reputation can also only advance so far per chapter, I actually would have had an easier time with the game had I slacked off, or had I held myself back, because reaching that reputation cap happened within days of a new chapter starting. Make poorer quality recipes early on, reduce the amount you’ll need to do later. When you have to deliberately hold yourself back in order to make a game more fun in the later stages, it’s a sign that the game isn’t balanced particularly well.

And I won’t let, “it’s mostly a game for kids” be an excuse here. There are plenty of games out there that are primarily intended for kids or that can be enjoyed by all ages, that still hold good amounts of challenge and fun for all levels of skill.

I did find an interview on IGN where the creator said that almost 70% of what he wanted for the game had to be cut, and while a lot of those things might be fairly insignificant when it comes to gameplay (like seeing characters dancing in the cafe during the cooking rhythm mini-game), I can’t help but wonder how many of those original intentions would have made the game more balanced in comparison to what we got.

Little Dragons Cafe is a game I can recommend but with caveats. I did have a lot of fun with it, especially the first 3/4 or so. It was cute, exploration was a whole lot of fun, and finding and making new recipes kept me searching all the nooks and crannies of a slowly-expanding world. But it’s definitely not without its frustrating elements, a good number of which came from a lack of balance and lack of options to make cafe staff just… not suck at their jobs. There was a fair bit I felt could have been improved upon, and quite frankly, had I known about some of the frustrating elements before starting, my game would have gone differently because I would have known in advance how to not end up in such tedious situations. I could have enjoyed more of the most enjoyable parts. So, I think it’s worth playing, but not more than once, and definitely with some advance knowledge going into the game.

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