Growing up I’ve played my fair share of Harvest Moon games, but sadly they wouldn’t keep me interested for long. Even with games such as Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons I couldn’t find why I should keep playing. Now fast forward to the Nintendo Switch and Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons creator, Yasuhiro Wada brings us the game Little Dragons Café. Little Dragons Café is also being published by the team at Aksys Games. For some time now I’ve had the chance to play Little Dragons Café and boy do I have some things to say with this game.
Let’s find out why you should pick this game on either on Nintendo Switch or the PlayStation 4 in the review below.
What is the game about? You’ll first start the game itself learning that you happen to be a fraternal twin, which you’ll have the option of either being the Male or Female character. You and your twin happen to be learning to cook and manage a small café with your mother. What seems like a good start for any game quickly turns into something completely different in terms of where the story goes soon after the prologue. All is going well in the cafe until the morning that the twins’ mother doesn’t wake up. To make things even stranger, an old man appears to inform them that the only way to save their mother is to “take this egg” and raise the dragon that soon hatches. Now, in addition to running the cafe (including collecting all the ingredients for their recipes), the twins must complete quests, wrangle a growing dragon, and manage the odd employees and other people they encounter.
During each chapter of the game you’ll meet unique characters, which can range from a ghost, a little warrior and while I’d like to name a few others I’ll leave that for you to find out. In every chapter you’ll learn more about these characters who happen to visit while they stay at your café that happens to double as an Inn as well. Every new day in-game you’ll obtain another glimpse into the lives of the guests visiting. After so many days have passed and you’ve learned and helped your visitor you’ll be given a quest to create their favorite dish. Now the task for this will require you to adventure out to find the fragments that can create the recipe. After doing so you’ll meet up with the old man who appeared. His main task throughout the game is for you to bring your fragmented recipes for him to repair and make whole once more.
As for the controls of Little Dragons Café, it’s quite simple. The only unique controls to the game are when you happen to create your dishes. The game goes from managing your cafe into a quick mini rhythm game. These mini-games of sorts only last around 10 seconds. The better you do, the better your dishes will come out. As I’ve already stated you will need to keep an eye on your ingredients in your inventory as you are limited to those for the dishes you cook. When it comes to the dishes themselves you can substitute ingredients by replaying the mini-game to create the dish.
When it comes to the art throughout Little Dragons Café, you can clearly tell a lot of work has been put into the game. Examples include: the hand drawn feel of the characters, the scenery outside in the world as well as the dishes you serve to your customers who visit the café throughout the day. This was an interesting approach to take for art. It was very pleasing to the eyes, no matter what area of the world in-game you were located. Another cool feature when it comes to the art style is that the foods you feed the dragon affect what color your dragon may come out as. The more red, the redder it’ll be. When playing, you’ll see many foods grant a possible different color outcome. My advice is if you’d like a unique color try mixing it up a bit. The audio within Little Dragons Café is quite pleasing to the ears. The instrumental choices go along side the style of the game, which keeps me wanting to play even more. As I’ve stated above about the mini-game, you’ll hear a few different style of genres depending on the dish. Even the non-music sound effects blend nicely with the games atmosphere.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed my 120 plus hours with Little Dragons Café. The last time I put in this much time into a game it was something I still play till this day. If you happen to be a fan of Yasuhiro Wada’s work and games that keep you busy multi-tasking.Then Little Dragons Café is the game for you. Those of you that are on-the-go you’ll totally want to grab this game for the Nintendo Switch.
(A copy of this game was provided by Aksys Games for review purposes. Fore more information on this game head on over to https://littledragonscafe.com/)
