#Little Dragons Cafe

[appelsider]

Trails x Little Dragons Cafe - Tita

for @/Roel4nd on twitter!

[ask-the-oc-children]

(Updated intro 2.0)

Hello, Foxtrot here to introduce y’all to my OC children for asks! Here they are!

Theo: “Ohhh hi! I’m Theo! It’s nice to meet y’all!”

Fizzy Pop: *hiding behind Theo* “… Uhm.. hi… I’m Fizzy Pop.. my siblings call me Fizzy.. (but you can call me that too if you want)”

Darwin: “I don’t think you need to hide, Fizzy, I think they’re friendly! Hi, I’m Darwin!”

Maxwell: *jumping up and down* “I’m so excited to meet you guys!! I’m Max!”

Manaphy: “Mana mana! Phyyy!!”

Theo: “Oh yeah, that’s Manaphy! He can’t talk quite yet!”

Draco: *happy roaring*

Toxolotl: *happy trilling*

Darwin: “And Draco and Tox can’t talk at all.”

Theo: “So yeah, that’s all of us! Just send us questions, anything at all, and we’ll answer them as soon as we can!”

[echoedfoxtrot]

I decided to draw a picture that included every one of my OC children! From left to right, we have Maxwell (OC), Theo (OC), Manaphy (from Pokémon), Fizzy Pop (OC), Darwin (OC), and Draco (from Little Dragons Cafe)! I love them all so much!

[beanbowlbaggins]

I got my partner and my father to go to a pinball convention with me. It was an hour away and ran until midnight, and it was really worth it. There were 300 pins, and even brand new ones to try out. I got to play the Mandalorian pin, and it was super cute. (and I got to wear one of my favorite graphic tops out since I can barely wear them what with work dress codes, and Little Dragons Cafe was my first switch game)

[mitchiehano]

New sunday game~ 🐈‍⬛️💜

[dballzposting]

Uh Oh . It looks like our young TRUNKS and SON GOTEN have found themselves in an INDENTURED SERVITUDE down at PAPA’S FREEZERIA on CALYPSO ISLAND. Now they have to run the damn place open-to-close 7 days a week with only the strength of their CAMARADERIE to carry them through.

Well, it’s a decent SUMMER JOB for the two, and I’m sure that they’re making memories. Better to get some work experience in rather than running around being unpaid SUPERHEROES!!

What sort of shenanigans will they get into NEXT?

[hug-kiss-marry-kill-farm]

The games I am collecting characters from are:

Harvest Moon (Marvelous and Natsume)

Story of Seasons

Sun Haven

Coral Island

Rune Factory

Littlewood

Stardew Valley

Fae Farm

My Time at Portia

My Time at Sandrock

Palia

Sakuna of Rice and Ruin

Little Dragon's Cafe

Roots of Pacha

Harvestella

Are there any other games you would suggest? Please note that if the game is sprite only and the characters do not have some sort of portrait or art I will not include them.

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Plays: Little Dragon Cafe

Very cute, but annoyingly short of the mark.

I want to love this game. You play a child struggling to run a cafe with their sibling and raise a dragon, with extra flavour thrown in by the wide cast of guest characters, all with their own problems that can be solved through the magic of a good meal.

There are some great elements: the aesthetic is cute and cozy, the dragon is adorable and does a lot to help and support you, the island is really well designed to give you a lot to explore in a relatively small space and the soundtrack is way better than it really needs to be.

The problems start when you realise that the game isn't quite sure what it wants to be. You are encouraged to be physically present at the café to help during rushes (and stop the staff from slacking) and failure to step in will lose you customers because after long enough waiting they will leave in a frustrated huff.

If you spend too much time not gathering ingredients, however, you will inevitably run out of ingredients for your dishes. In fact, towards the late game, even if you spend all your time foraging, you will likely run out of ingredients and have to swap dishes around in your menu - it's just mathematics. If you get 25 customers in a day, and each one orders a dish with three ingredients, that's 75 ingredients used. (You can choose to use up to six ingredients in a recipe, which would obviously deplete your ingredients faster) Which means you need to gather at least that many ingredients per day. The ingredients are somewhat randomly generated at gathering points, so even if you keep the numbers up, you might not get the specific ingredients that you need for the dishes you currently have on your menu. My best attempts at efficiently foraging result in under 120 ingredients in a day and that involves completely ignoring the cafe and any reasonable bedtime for a small child, gathering from dawn till midnight - or beyond. In fact, you don't have to sleep at all unless plot demands it - there's no passing out and being carried back home, there's absolutely no penalty for simply staying awake and gathering ingredients. Which I like as a game mechanic, but given you are controlling a small child, feels very odd and at odds with the cozy aesthetic. Just don't sleep and work yourself into the ground for the sake of your cafe feels like the wrong message to send, somehow...

The actual act of helping out in the cafe feels very cramped and clumsy, which doesn't help matters. You have to run around taking orders, submitting the orders in the kitchen, delivering the food and cleaning up the dishes afterwards, plus interrupting anyone who decides to slack off - and they will, frequently. Everyone gets in the way of everyone else, the little galley to clean up dishes is a particularly bad spot for getting pushed around by NPCs as everyone tries to get in and out of the small space.

Still, you can ignore the actual act of running the cafe with little penalty. Your approval never actually drops as far as I can tell, not even if you decide to skip the day to trigger the next bit of plot and go straight to sleep at 7am and have no customers for the day (because for some reason, the cafe is only operational while you're awake, despite your sibling being somewhat capable of running the place when you aren't there). This at least means you aren't losing ingredients that day, but it does present the best way of completing the game as...not actually engaging with the game and skipping as many days as possible as being the most rewarding way to play.

The perplexing part of the cafe is that the 'customers' don't actually pay for their meals. There is no currency in the game nor a shop to spend it in, so that makes some sense. One of the staff characters starts working for you to pay off his bill - he was just going to dine and dash - but apart from that one scripted mention of money, there's no actual exchange of money you see as the player. Which makes the bad reviews and frustrated customers really funny - like guys, you are literally getting a sit down dinner for free, maybe be nice to the kids?

The other half of the game is exploring the island with your little dragon companion, which does at least feel more relaxing and fun. There is a bit of an issue with the jump mechanic - occasionally the button will be unresponsive and occasionally you'll catch on ledges and not be able to get the full jumping height, which is mostly only an issue because there are so many little steps and ledges to jump up that you will run into both multiple times a day. Once your dragon grows a little, you can ride him to traverse and he can thankfully jump much better than the human kids. The dragon will also help gather some ingredients, and randomly emote around you and he's genuinely a delight to be around.

There are also monsters and egg-birds. The monsters will 'attack' you but given this is a cozy game, they'll only steal meals from your pockets - there's no health to lose. They can be hunted for their meat, which is a gamble (the dragon sometimes gets distracted and doesn't hunt the monster the first time you ask) or you can lure them into running headlong into a rock which also results in meat. The egg-birds must be collected and then they will live near the cafe and produce an egg a day you can pick up...for a few days. Then they'll return to where you got them from. Which feels like annoying busywork for no reason - you already know where the bird is, you just have to go back there every so often to get them back.

You do have a small garden that will produce ingredients as time passes, or instantly if dragon manure is used, but you cannot choose what it produces or how much, it will just randomly generate anything you have already gathered from elsewhere. Including meat, oddly enough. There is a fish hatchery that does the same. This is the best way of getting a lot of ingredients all at once, but in order to get dragon manure, you have to feed your dragon, and the larger it gets, the more food it needs to produce manure. And you need to cook every dish manually using a small rhythm mini game - no batch cooking. It kinda feels like the game just wants me to spend an hour cooking lots of dishes, then force-feeding my dragon to get the manure to spend on speeding up the garden to get the ingredients (which I am also spending on the food for the dragon, so the game is incentivising me to use as few materials as possible to maximise returns). That feels like no fun so I'm not going to batch cook 30 single scotch eggs (using just egg, no meat or breading here) and force-feed him eggs until he poops...at least not for very long.

There are also some short stories revolving around some guest NPC characters who usually show up with an emotional problem, stay in the cafe for a few days, open up about their issues, need a particular dish cooking for them to resolve their emotional conflict and then leave, leaving a space ready for the next character to come and stay. These are actually pretty well written compared to other cozy life-sims like Harvest Moon and the characters are really charming and relatable.

To be honest, it wouldn't take a lot for me to love this game. Like, let customers pay for their meals and then give us a shop to buy upgrades for the cafe or the staff (so that you wouldn't need to personally intervene when they start slacking, for example, or that they would slack off less often) or let us buy 'basic' ingredients like flour and rice, but still have us forage for more exotic food and the upgraded ingredients. That would help take the big pressure out of trying to forage more ingredients than you use daily. Otherwise, tweak forage spots so they give multiple ingredients per interaction, which would save time, or give us more options in the garden. Say, use materials to upgrade the amount the garden yields, or let us choose what types of ingredients we would like the garden to produce. Basically a little more customising in general and a little automation would turn the grindy chore bits of the game into something a little more interesting.

Because there isn't really a penalty for failure, there also isn't a reward for doing well. The game will mostly chug along at its own pace regardless of how well or badly the cafe does, only requiring an increase in customer satisfaction between NPC story episodes and that can usually be achieved in a single day. This is probably by design - to avoid frustrating younger players - but it does make mid to late game feel like a grindy chore that you don't actually need to deal with. You can progress quickly by skipping most days, only sticking around to trigger the scenes and then going straight to sleep. But at that point, why bother to still play the game?

[bokujo-monogatari]

sometimes i forgot how wild little dragons cafe is but then i go through my screenshots

[the-weary-traveler-cafe]

Hey. We're a couple of adventurers looking for work. Hear any rumors around here that might lead to treasure?

Greetings Travelers,

Lets see work for two able bodied Adventurers? Well you'll need these!

*Pulls out two little bands of metal*

My wife made them for Adventurers, should you ever be in dire need just give them a tap and say Weary Traveler Cafe and pop you're safe and sound here!

Now as for jobs, Ive got a mission in mind if you don't mind a bit of Mountain Climbing? On the top of Ever Snow Peak there is a frozen lake, underneath the ice is a special type of plant called Winters Maiden, and it helps make some of the best delicacies for the Summer time. I could use three bushels of them!

[a-final-fatal-livejournal-entry]

I am bored out of my mind. My arthritis is flaring up and I can't really move around much. I'm thinking of buying a game, but I don't know which one. Should I buy Bioshock Collection, Untitled Goose Game, Portal Collection, or Slime Rancher? I've never played any of them except Portal, which I played fifteen years ago and didn't finish. Or is there another switch game cheap or on sale I should get?

[echoedfoxtrot]

I drew a picture of all my kids hanging out together! I wonder what they’re talking about? OwO

[plow-and-propose]

out of context Little Dragon’s Cafe

[ladies-of-fiction]

Ladies of Little Dragon’s Cafe

Rin, Ipanema

Chou Chou, The Mother

Celis, Rosetta

Lanche, Miere

[xrainbii]

some of the ending shots with the entire cast.

[skittidyne]

sucks that i can’t blaze reblogs