Gather ingredients with your new dragon to manage your café and help a colorful cast of characters.
Little Dragons Café
Developers: Aksys Games and Toybox Inc.
Price: $59.99
Platforms: Switch (reviewed) and PS4
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review.
When your mother falls into a magical sleep, a wizard appears to tell you that if you want to wake her up, you’ll need to raise a dragon. With your baby dragon by your side, you and your sibling rise to the challenge of raising it to adulthood–while managing your family’s café at the same time. Little Dragons Café lets you choose which of the twins you want to play as, although since they become a silent protagonist, it’s largely just a choice of playing as a boy or a girl. Three more entertaining characters soon join you to help run the café: a slacker musician, a hot-tempered young woman, and a narcissistic chef.
Gameplay is largely divided into two sections: gathering ingredients and helping at the café. To gather ingredients, you’ll explore outside the café and pick up items from gathering spots. Jumping can be a little clunky, but the controls are otherwise decent, including the flight controls once your dragon is big enough. There is no farming, although you have a garden that will automatically provide you with ingredients you’ve already gathered once some time has passed (as well as a hatchery that serves the same purpose for fish). You’ll also find boxes that contain recipe fragments. Once you have four recipe fragments, you’ll be able to cook that dish if you have the right ingredients. At first, the area you can explore is quite limited, but new areas open up as your dragon grows.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much to do in them. There are several beautiful environments, and it’s exciting to reach a new place for the first time and see all the boxes you can open and new gathering spots to try (gathering spots have set appearances, so you can tell what ingredients you’ll find just by looking), but in the end you’re left with nothing to do but interact with gathering or fishing spots, or command your dragon to attack monsters for meat. Your simple set of actions means the initial excitement of a new area wears off fast.
At the café, you can cook meals through a short rhythm mini-game. The quality of your ingredients and your success at the mini-game determine the meal’s quality. Once you’ve cooked it, you can add it to the menu. Surprisingly, you don’t actually cook meals for customers. Your chef handles that, while you help with taking orders, bringing customers their food, and cleaning up. All of these are simple tasks, with no need to remember orders, which makes it a bit boring. You’ll also need to keep an eye on your staff, because they occasionally decide to slack off and stop helping. At the end of each day, you’ll see your café’s stats and customer satisfaction.
In theory, building customer satisfaction is important to attract new people. In practice, the story is so linear, it barely matters. Each chapter features a special customer who will stay at the café while dealing with personal difficulties, from a boy who wants to be a warrior to a troublemaking ghost. Their story will progress each day, until they finally reveal a special meal they want to eat. Once you find the recipe and prepare the meal for them, they’ll resolve their troubles and the chapter concludes. These stories are entertaining and heartwarming, and they’re one of the game’s highlights. Watching the main characters develop over the course of the game is also nice.
However, since each story follows the next, your customer satisfaction bar freezes until you resolve the current chapter. The rest of the customers have fairly generic dialogue, with no interaction between them. And since your dragon’s growth–and therefore your exploration–is also gated by story progress, you’ll often find yourself with nothing to do except performing the same repetitive tasks at the café, visiting your favorite gathering spots to replenish your supplies, and waiting for the next story scene. Little Dragons Café is cute and has a good cast of characters, but the segments in between story progression end up unfortunately monotonous. At least the story scenes, when they come, are usually enjoyable.
The Final Word
Little Dragons Café has many funny moments and enjoyable character stories, as well as a beautiful island to explore. However, the game doesn’t quite meet its potential. So many features could have broken up the monotony–farming, less linearity, more character interactions–but it doesn’t have those things. It’s a cute, charming game and the characters are lovable, but the sheer amount of repetition makes Little Dragons Café best-suited to short bursts of gameplay.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
