Little Dragons Cafe - Release Thread

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.

Which version of the game are you picking up?

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ChocolateKisses
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Kikki wrote:I didn't play yesterday. Seems like any time I go a day without playing it at all, I lose any motivation to pick it back up and have to do so by will power, lol. :/ It's a sweet game, but not compelling. My sister has also lost quite a bit of her interest in it (she plays very slowly and is still on chapter 5 even though she put in more hours than me). Well, I had started chapter 8, so at least I know there's no problem wrapping it up before the Torna DLC comes out. It's pretty easy to do a chapter per day.
lmao im feeling the exact same thing. I was enjoying it a first but now im just forcing myself through it so i can finish it. I just want to get it over with so i can sell the game, tbh. I feel I wasted 60 dollars with this game when so many other good ones are coming out.
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Kikki
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ChocolateKisses wrote: lmao im feeling the exact same thing. I was enjoying it a first but now im just forcing myself through it so i can finish it. I just want to get it over with so i can sell the game, tbh. I feel I wasted 60 dollars with this game when so many other good ones are coming out.
I like it pretty well when I'm playing it, and I don't feel like I wasted my money, it's just that it doesn't have anything so fascinating about it that I feel compelled to dive back in after I set it down for a bit. It's a very pleasant, cute game, it's just not exciting, challenging, or mysterious in any way, at least not for me.
Dragloon
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Ronin19 wrote:
Dragloon wrote:I completed the game already. Solid story.
Currently trying to get the rest of the recipe fragments but I've triple checked every area and I can't find any more.
So I don't know what to do now.
Have you talked to your staff? Between chapters, the sibling gives you fragments and sometimes the others will give full recipes.

I have talked to the staff over the course of the game, I can't get any more fragments from them :/
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RopeMaidenKirie
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Kikki wrote:I didn't play yesterday. Seems like any time I go a day without playing it at all, I lose any motivation to pick it back up and have to do so by will power, lol. :/ It's a sweet game, but not compelling. My sister has also lost quite a bit of her interest in it (she plays very slowly and is still on chapter 5 even though she put in more hours than me). Well, I had started chapter 8, so at least I know there's no problem wrapping it up before the Torna DLC comes out. It's pretty easy to do a chapter per day.
This is where I'm at as well unfortunately. I like the story, don't feel like I wasted my money or anything, but I feel like it's one of those lost potential games, where it could have been absolutely great with some fairly simple changes and additions. I do hope it sold well enough to become a series though because it has some great potential.

If anything, this game has made me want to create a Bokumono + Cafe/restaurant indie game lol
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Ronin19
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RopeMaidenKirie wrote:
Kikki wrote:I didn't play yesterday. Seems like any time I go a day without playing it at all, I lose any motivation to pick it back up and have to do so by will power, lol. :/ It's a sweet game, but not compelling. My sister has also lost quite a bit of her interest in it (she plays very slowly and is still on chapter 5 even though she put in more hours than me). Well, I had started chapter 8, so at least I know there's no problem wrapping it up before the Torna DLC comes out. It's pretty easy to do a chapter per day.
This is where I'm at as well unfortunately. I like the story, don't feel like I wasted my money or anything, but I feel like it's one of those lost potential games, where it could have been absolutely great with some fairly simple changes and additions. I do hope it sold well enough to become a series though because it has some great potential.

If anything, this game has made me want to create a Bokumono + Cafe/restaurant indie game lol
I am now getting to that point too where I just want to do something else. My money definitely wasn't wasted, but things needed to be added to make this game truly great.

It's making me nostalgic; I'm going to play A Wonderful Life after this.
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Kikki
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Even a few additions and improvements would have made this game more compelling for me.
  • Add a monetary system
  • Allow us to use the money to expand/customize the cafe
  • Better character movement, so the character isn't always getting stuck, pushed by other characters or not able to jump properly, etc
  • Add instant transportation spots in each major area of the island once you reach that area and activate the spot...the forest, the purple hills, the yellow hills, the rocky pillars, the teal area...etc...to make foraging for specific items easier
  • Remove the 'slacking' feature or tweak it so that it can be better controlled and not a constant interruption to exploration and ingredient gathering.
  • Use the garden to let us control what foraged items we get more easily...maybe different types of fertilizer to increase yield, or different patches of the garden produce different types of goods and more of them. Maybe one section all fruit, one all veggies, one all condiments, one all meat...etc.
I feel like those things would make both foraging and taking care of the restaurant more fun.

But what I really wanted to post is that they've added a world map for the game to the Japanese LDC site. It's nice-looking and it does break the world into sections which sort of makes it easier to keep track of. One version is just the image, and the other shows labels for where you can find specific huntable animals. Both versions of the map are available here, if you'd like to have either one.
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Bluie
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Alright, I finished it last night. I did enjoy it for what it was, but it seems like it could've been so much more. The character interactions were great, the story was fine, cooking minigame fun, and exploring a mixed bag. Once your dragon is fully grown, exploring is a breeze, but before then it's janky and a mite frustrating at times. Also, the best way to grow your Cafe's reputation is to just ignore it completely. Whether the staff is slacking or not, they'll pull through without you and the bar will still raise at the end of the day even with a 'dissatisfied' rating. Trying to manage the obscene amount of customers late game is nigh impossible, especially when there's slacking and your employees would rather clean up dishes than deliver food or take orders.

Anyways, I liked it for the most part. The style is beautiful and should be a standard for the upcoming Bokumono (not the textures really, but the beautiful character models). I took a ton of screenshots while playing so i'd like to share some of them. Spoilers of course.
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Kikki
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The reputation bar is confusing. I find it ONLY increases at the end of the chapter, or between chapters, or however I should say it. (Whenever the 'story' menu option tells you to raise the cafe's reputation, at the end of a chapter or the beginning of the next chapter.) So that's the only time I ever bother serving at the cafe, and then I just do that all day and don't bother exploring on that day. I never go back for slacking. Sometimes I only get an 'okay' rating but even with never going back it often ends up as 'satisfied', so...yeah, it seems like the slacking and reputation stuff is all automatic anyway. Not sure if there is a boost from helping out or not...kind of seems like there's not, or if there is, then it's pretty small.

It definitely seems tied to story progress anyway. I don't think it's possible to get your reputation bar to rise past the equivalent position to where you are in the story, if that makes any sense. It's a weird part of the game, and it feels like the whole cafe thing is really only there for show, since you don't actually have to pay any attention to it. Except to continue to stock it with ingredients and occasionally change the menu to manage your ingredients, I guess. (I assume your bar wouldn't progress if you literally ran out of enough ingredients to make anything, though I haven't actually tried that to see, lol.)

PS: I took two of the exact same screenshots as you, Bluie :) Most of my screenshots were centred around Billy antics :)
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ryume
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I played and finished. I agree with ChocolateKisses to an extent about the money I spent, but let me say it like this to anyone on the fence: read through this thread and perhaps wait until it's on sale/get a used copy if you decide it's not an absolute must play for you.

I won't reiterate what everyone else has already said. I honestly think the pros and cons were pretty unanimous among all of us.

I just adored Huey and Billy. In that order. Luccola definitely had the best bedroom, though!
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Cherubae
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Dragloon wrote:I completed the game already. Solid story.
Currently trying to get the rest of the recipe fragments but I've triple checked every area and I can't find any more.
So I don't know what to do now.
There is a hidden area that you can only access by water if you haven't found it yet. It is under the eastern edge of the island, in between the orange rock pillars. When I found it there were about 6 fragment boxes inside, and another one popped up in there when I started chapter 8.

I'm still trying to figure out why they have hole-in-the-wall foraging locations in areas that you can only get to once you have the dragon at adolescent size, when it can't pull things out of hole-in-the-wall foraging areas anymore because it's now too big. I would like to see an encyclopedia in the game so you know what ingredients you've located so far and which one have fresh/rare/shiny varieties.

I still have a ways to go - started chapter 8 yesterday, 121/160 located ingredients, 280/400 recipe fragments, and 59/100 full recipes.
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ChocolateKisses
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ryume wrote:I played and finished. I agree with ChocolateKisses to an extent about the money I spent, but let me say it like this to anyone on the fence: read through this thread and perhaps wait until it's on sale/get a used copy if you decide it's not an absolute must play for you.
Yup. Now im debating if to either sell the game rn while the price is still around 60-50 USD or wait to see if this game becomes like those super-rare games that collectors look for because they only made so many copies. Or if its price is just gonna drop cuz is mediocre and nobody will care for it in a few months. Like hometown story which you can literally find for like 5 dollars.
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Kikki
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Dunno if anyone is interested, but Part 3 of the 'making of' videos featuring Wada himself is up, now. HERE. It talks about the characters and what he meant by them all being 'losers'. I actually thought it was interesting that he says that everyone is both a winner and a loser, and that at LDC, each character was in a 'loser' phase in their life...and he wanted to show it this way to cheer everyone up. :)

It was also interesting (to me) that the interviewer said that each character in the game seemed like someone who could each have their own spin-off game and asked why they'd been written that way. He's right...each of the characters have enough meat to them that it's easy to imagine whole lives and situations around them. For me, anyway.
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Ronin19
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I just finished it. The story and characters are really the highlights of the game while the controls, performance, and the cafe management system needed more time. When I got to the last chapter I just didn't care at all about the cafe management system; I just wanted the story to continue. Having one cutscene per day really stretched the game out farther than it needed to be. Getting the cutscenes didn't feel rewarding at all since nothing was tied to them other than, "Wait until the next day," or, "go to sleep." I don't know how PS4 users played the game, but it seems that the 30FPS hurt the game on the Switch; jumping and other various actions out in the field just wouldn't respond at times, so it's hard for me to recommend getting the game on the Switch. I didn't mind the framerate since that wasn't the problem, but what was the problem was the jumps not responding whenever I hit the A or B button on my pro controller. For a game that surrounds managing a cafe, it was easily the worst and least effective part of the game since all it's good for is progressing the story. And once you got to chapter 6, it gets impossible to please every single customer that walks through those doors, especially when the staff continuously slacks off or would rather do another chore instead of waiting on the customers. If this is to become a series, it needs serious work and to learn from this game. Is it peaceful? Yes. Are the story and characters engrossing? Yes. Is the gameplay great? Yes and no; exploration and gathering are great, but everything else that involves gameplay with it is terrible and doesn't work well.

In the end, I'm giving the game a 3.5/5. If you like an engaging story with wonderful characters and can ignore what you need to do for the game, I'd say grab it and you'll have a great time because when I was watching the cutscenes and interacting with the characters it was the highlight of the game just watching the characters grow. Afterwards, I would go outside and gather ingredients. The downsides to the game I found were just yelling at my staff for continuously slacking off and at my dragon and character for not jumping when I was pressing the button. If I were to give suggestions, I'd say wait on a sale and probably get the PS4 version if you can.

And may I say that Lanche is easily my favorite character while Dr. Zeff is my least favorite character. The dragon steals the show though for being so gosh darn adorable!
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ChocolateKisses
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I really wanted to like it, I really did but I just don't think I would recommend this game to anyone right now. The story alone doesn't really save it for me, since I found some of the stories to be super boring and i would just go to sleep as soon as the cut scene was over so i could hurry up and get the person out of my cafe. I honestly think the exploration part was the most enjoyable part of the game as I loved flying on my dragon and overseeing the area from high places because it was honestly beautiful. And discovering new places was such a treat! I LOVED it.... But I did NOT care for the cafe aspect at all as it got boring after chapter 5 and apart from Billy, Huey, and Liche all the other characters were "meh". The cat idol girl was cute but her story just made me eyeroll.

I can definitely say this game was aimed for younger audiences, as it teaches life values and not to judge a person and bla bla. Maybe a kid would have enjoyed it more since they can see the game with simpler eyes. But to me, its just not worth it. If i wanted to play a game that was good just on its story, I would play The World Ends With You on my DS. You can find that game for like 15 dollars and get a good story, visual, music, characters, battle system, etc.

To be honest, the frame drops and clumsy controls didn't even bother me. It was the lack of activities that made this game super flat. There is NOTHING to do apart from gathering/seeing the character's stories. No quests, no money for cafe upgrade, no list or anything to see what ingredients you have/dont have, no town to visit, no garden or something where you could plant things, just...nothing. There werent even enough wild animals to interact with! It was literally just 3 (if you count the chickens) and all they did was change the colors.

I had to push myself to finish the game and once i finished it, i put it up for sale on Mercari as I prefer getting my money back so I can invest it in another game that I can keep playing for longer, like dragon quest or smash, for example.

No I DONT regret buying it, it was a nice experience and if they make a sequel that introduces more activities for you to do, i will gladly pick it up. But I dont want to keep this game in my shelf collecting dust as I know i will never again play it.

And well, that's my point of view! Sorry for being so negative or if you feel im bashing the game. Nah, it doesnt change the fact that its charming and enjoyable just....Yeah just wait for the price to go down. Not worth it atm
Dragloon
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Cherubae wrote:
Dragloon wrote:I completed the game already. Solid story.
Currently trying to get the rest of the recipe fragments but I've triple checked every area and I can't find any more.
So I don't know what to do now.
There is a hidden area that you can only access by water if you haven't found it yet. It is under the eastern edge of the island, in between the orange rock pillars. When I found it there were about 6 fragment boxes inside, and another one popped up in there when I started chapter 8.

I'm still trying to figure out why they have hole-in-the-wall foraging locations in areas that you can only get to once you have the dragon at adolescent size, when it can't pull things out of hole-in-the-wall foraging areas anymore because it's now too big. I would like to see an encyclopedia in the game so you know what ingredients you've located so far and which one have fresh/rare/shiny varieties.

I still have a ways to go - started chapter 8 yesterday, 121/160 located ingredients, 280/400 recipe fragments, and 59/100 full recipes.

I've found those fragments in the hidden cave already, no others seem to spawn there.
As for the hole in the wall in higher locations, you actually can access those when you get 4 new recipes post-game.
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