Genre: Simulation, Management
Developer: Toybox Inc
Publisher: Aksys Games
Release Date: Aug 24, 2018
Edited by Eden
Little Dragons Café is a simulation game where you need to manage a cafe and raise a dragon to save your mother. This is somewhat of an odd premise, but considering that this game was created by Yasushi Wada, most well known as the father of the Harvest Moon series, I decided to give it a chance.
You begin the game by choosing between a boy and a girl character and giving them names. Whichever character you do not choose will work alongside you in the cafe. The game goes through a tutorial where your mother teaches you how to gather ingredients, cook a basic dish and deliver it to a customer of the cafe. This is followed by a few cutscenes and then more tutorials. The game is very tutorial heavy in the beginning and you will likely still be receiving tutorial pop-ups for at least an hour.
Soon into the game, it starts to explain the story. Your mother falls to sleep and won’t wake up. A wizard appears and explains that this is apparently because she’s a half human, half dragon hybrid, much to the character’s surprise. The solution to this is to take a dragon egg and raise it well by feeding it delicious food. The wizard does not explain why this is and suddenly decides to move into the house, spending most of his days watching your sleeping mother in her bed. The children are convinced to run the cafe in the meantime to keep it going for when their mother is cured.
The start of the game is not the only odd part of this simulation game. As you continue, you will find the extra staff to help run the cafe, including a dine and dasher whom you press into service, a cafe obsessed girl with severe anger issues and a flamboyant and very colorful Orcish chef. These characters all have to be managed or else, they’ll start slacking off. While you could let them do all of the work, to make sure things run smoothly, you will be pitching in, too, with all duties of the cafe when things get busy. For the most part, I came back to the cafe for the busy times and was outside at all other times.
The game explains that the cafe will be successful or not based on its reputation and customer satisfaction, which can be improved by cooking food with higher skill in a rhythm game and using better ingredients. You will get a report at the end of the day, which includes these as well as other factors, such as the best dish. In theory, this means that the game’s story will progress based on this. Realistically, it seemed to progress equally slowly regardless of how I played until it was ready to proceed.
As well as managing the cafe, you will spend quite a lot of time gathering food and exploring the nearby land for recipe fragments to learn to cook new dishes. I personally found that I never ran out of food. As well as the abundance of food nearby, next to the house, there is a field where you can grow and harvest any vegetables, spices, fruit or meat I had already found. I’ll clearly say here, writing meat was not a mistake. I’ve harvested bacon from that field, alongside carrots, sugar, and potatoes.
The dragon you are raising is quite useful for exploring. They can enter caves to fetch meat and as they grow bigger, help you with removing obstacles and fighting enemies. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much to the raising aspect. You can change the dragon’s color by feeding it certain foods. You can give it food or pet it to raise its stamina. That’s mostly it.
Unfortunately, I do have to point out graphical issues with this game. While the storybook-drawn aesthetic of Little Dragons Café can look quite nice at times, there do appear to be framerate issues with the game noticeably skipping frames on occasion. In addition to this, there is quite a lot of texture pop in. You can often see a rock, a tree, a shadow or whatever else suddenly appear as you get slightly closer. It’s rather distracting.
Loading screens are quite a severe issue with the game too. You will see a loading screen before each cutscene. You may see them in the middle of a cutscene. You will see them when leaving or entering the cafe, which you do quite often. These loading screens can take over ten seconds at their worst.
I should note here that I am playing the Nintendo Switch version of this game and as such, cannot confirm whether these issues apply to the PlayStation 4 version or not.
Outside of the technical issues, the game felt very repetitive and never-like progress was being made. I say this as someone who enjoys Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. The main draw to this game seems to be the story and amusing character interactions rather than the gameplay itself. For me, running the cafe and exploring was more of a means to an end.
In the end, I find it difficult to recommend Little Dragons Café, even as a fan of the genre. There’s certainly some worth in the comedy of the game, but it falls short when compared to similar titles and is brought even lower by the various technical issues.
Pros:
• Amusing characters
• Tells the story well through cutscenes
Cons:
• A variety of technical issues
• Repetitive
• Very light on the dragon raising
• Awkward controls at times
• Far too tutorial heavy
Eden gives Little Dragons Café a Drastik Measure of 3 out of 10 (30)
