Little Dragons Cafe Reviews
The concept of Little Dragon's Cafe is genius, but its execution is a little sloppy. Many of the game's tasks feel like actual chores instead of the streamlined management of Yasuhiro Wada's past titles. Despite its clear flaws, the food, characters, and world are too gorgeous to ignore.
The more I navigated my way through the game I realised that I can’t steer these characters into any kind of direction which would require me to dig myself out of a hole or to build my way back up. There’s very little peril and it makes the entire experience really rather uneventful.
There is almost nothing here to recommend.
Little Dragons Café's adorable premise of owning a pet dragon can only distract from the slow pacing and repetitive gameplay for so long.
Little Dragon Cafe falls far behind any other game in the genre by miles. There just isn't enough here to keep people engaged long enough to make it worth the money.
Little Dragons Café is an extremely tedious exercise in repetition. There's kind of an initial thrill to the idea of managing a café and picking out the recipes that it'll use, but eventually you realize that you don't do much to help out other than providing the basic ingredients and occasionally bussing tables. The only real reward for slogging it out day-to-day is a handful of character focused cutscenes that don't really feel like a meaningful accomplishment. Add in some truly awful field controls and a constantly skipping framerate, and you've got a true recipe for disaster.
I just have a really hard time recommending this. Even if you really like sim games like this, there’s so much better options out there. Even for a child, a lot of the game is so repetitive, and the game is so long that I don’t think it would hold their attention. For older folks looking for perhaps more robust games out there, I’d give this a hard pass. That’s especially considering the game is $60, which is far too much for a game this lacking. The game is pretty long too, probably about 30-40 hours, but it has such a paltry amount of content. There’s far better out there for far less money.
Ultimately, Little Dragon’s Cafe is worth pushing through its overly-lengthy tutorial because once it completely opens up to you, it is genuinely a joy to play. Is it for everyone? Maybe not, especially when you consider the performance issues and the price. Little Dragon’s Cafe is a $60 game, and may not be worth the cost of admission to those that are simply “interested” in it. A game like Stardew Valley can scratch a similar simulation experience itch for a much lower entry fee, albeit in a different way (2D farming and combat vs 3D dragons and cooking). It’s really going to boil down to what you favor gameplay/aesthetic-wise as to whether the game should be a “buy now” or “wait for sale” kind of thing.
Watching the shop grow and working towards the end goal of reviving the kids' mother is absolutely worthy of your time. It's just a matter of how patient you can be towards Little Dragons Café's hiccups and blemishes.