Little Dragons Café is made by the same creator of Harvest Moon – Yasuhiro Wada, for PlayStation®4 and Nintendo Switch™. This is an adorable simulation single-player role-playing game that will be loved by many young children! In this game, you learn about harvesting crops, cooking food, raising your very own dragon and keeping your café alive!
In this game, you are pretty much doing the same routine over and over again, but Ms C loves it and hasn’t grown tired of it yet. Every day there is something new and a simple task for her to fulfil. She loves a straightforward game that does not offer too many challenging tasks.
The story places the player in the shoes of a young brother Ren or sister Rin whose mother runs a little café with their rooms above. Ms C, of course, chooses to be the twin sister, who she named Rose instead. One day, their mother has fallen into a deep sleep and won’t wake up. Suddenly, a strange wizard appears to inform them that they must raise a dragon named Draco in order to save their mother. The player has to work together with three quirky café employees, to figure out how to wrangle a dragon and manage the family business while finding a way to save their mother.
The game is quite a slow start as you have to learn the basics of how to manage your café, explore the world and raise the dragon. As their mother has taken ill, the children have to learn how to run their café by preparing tasty dishes, serving customers during peak hours, and managing a colourful cast of eccentric staff and visitors. Each day you will learn a little bit more about them and their story.
First, you have to explore the place and try to gather as many ingredients as possible. For the first few days, there are very limited ingredients that you are able to collect. For example, you can only get one egg at a time as you only have one Egg Bird in your pen. Day by day, you slowly capture more Egg Birds and soon they will give you lots of eggs to use. It might sound very unchallenging and lacking motivation, but Ms C loves the pace of this game.
Explore this world that is filled with wildlife, secrets, and dangers and collect ingredients from crops (flour, sugar and salt etc.). The crops grow back daily like clockwork and all you need to do is to fertilize it with dragon manure which will help produce more rare ingredients (important for making great quality recipes) or hastens the time to harvest for the farmland and fishing hole you have.
Once you have collected the ingredients, you then go back to the café to prepare dishes and serve your customers. Luckily, there is a button that takes you straight to the café rather than having to trace back your footsteps!
Back at the café, Ms C did struggle to hit the right notes/ingredients with the cooking mini-game, until Mr K pointed out her error! It’s all about timing and using the correct buttons (blue JoyCon with arrows)! First, you select the recipe you want to make, and you will then play the short rhythm game (music is different for each recipe you make). The higher your accuracy, the better the quality of the outcome. Trying to hit everything perfectly is harder than it looks. So far, they only managed to get a 4-star dish (5-star is the maximum). This will also increase the café’s reputation. There are 160 ingredients to find and most recipes require ingredients like meat, vegetables, and seasoning and it is up to you to mix them. You also unlock 100 recipes to make and options to customize it further with higher quality ingredients that can be found in more remote reaches of the island.
Whatever dishes you made, they can be found in the menu which you can use to feed your dragon. Some dishes contain colours. The more you feed your dragon with the coloured dishes, your dragon will change into the colour of the dishes. It does take a lot of dishes to make him change his colour! It is not an easy job!
After hours of gaming, Draco is still a very small baby dragon and Ms C is carefully looking after him. She even watches YouTube videos to try to get tips to get Draco to be a fully grown adult so that she can train and ride on him and explore the world together! It is painfully slow in between dragon upgrades, as you essentially do the same routine. Nevertheless it still fun for Ms C.
The ultimate goal of this game is to raise the dragon and save their mother. Ms C can’t wait to do so! She is hooked on this game and enjoys her time playing with it. Not only that, she also loves to read the cut screen story. The conversation is in simple English phrases and she is able to learn at the same time. This game is definitely not a fast adrenaline game but a slower, simpler and fun game to enjoy. It will be available on PlayStation®4 and Nintendo Switch™ from 20 September 2018. For more information, please visit: http://www.risingstargames.com/eu/.
Storyline:
- Chapter 1: A Strange Person
- Chapter 2: A Small Warrior
- Chapter 3: The Witch
- Chapter 4: The Rain Bride
- Chapter 5: Welcome, Maurice!
- The Dragon’s Growth
- Chapter 6: Pop’s Dish
- Chapter 7: The Troubled Kitty
- Chapter 8: A Mother’s Memento
- Chapter 9: The Fortune Teller
- Chapter 10: The Old Young Lady
- Chapter 11: Huaman? Robot?
- The Dragon’s Growth
- Chapter 12: To the Volcano – The End
Disclosure: We received the early access Nintendo Switch sample code for the purposes of writing this review, however, all thoughts and opinions remain our own. Images used with permission.