Little Dragons Café is a title by Yasuhiro Wada, creator of the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons and Hometown Story games. It was released on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 on August 24, 2018.
The story starts with a brother and sister learning to cook while working at their mother's café. One day the twins notice that their mother has fallen into a deep sleep and cannot be awoken. An old man appears and tells them their mother is actually half dragon and her dragon blood is not reacting well with her human blood. To wake her up, they must raise a dragon. Working together with three other employees, the siblings must find out how to save their mother while also keeping the café afloat.
Little Dragons Café is similar to its sister-series in several ways. You can grow your own produce and fish in the local rivers to have optimal ingredients to cook with. There is also the dragon husbandry aspect where you raise your own dragon. Like the previous series', you can also interact with customers and help them with their problems.
Little Dragons Café contains examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The dragon's color will change depending on what types of food the player feeds it.
- Deep Sleep: The protagonists' mother is stuck in a deep sleep.
- Dragon Rider: Once the dragon reaches adolescence, the player can ride it. The dragon runs faster and can fly to reach high-up cliffs.
- Eating Solves Everything: Many of the customers' problems are solved by eating a hearty meal.
- Fantastic Racism: Celis, a witch, despises humans and considers them greatly inferior to witches. Interestingly, she calls all races unable to use magic "humans", including orcs and elves.
- Fetch Quest: Advancing the main storyline often involves finding and gathering page fragments to reassemble recipes.
- Fishing Minigame: You can fish for ingredients.
- Funny Background Event: During story cutscenes, the dragon often has the opposite attitude of everyone else. For example, when Ipanema is causing carnage and scaring everyone, the dragon is seen prancing and singing. When Maurice starts headbanging to heavy metal music (which everyone else finds unpleasant), the dragon has a happy face with musical notes as though it's humming along.
- Game Hunting Mechanic: You can find random meat around the island but the main way to get meat and poultry is by hunting. You can coax Zucchi into hitting rocks, killing them and turning them into Cartoon Meat. Your dragon can also hunt Zucchi after it ages into child form. When it comes to the flying Yaki birds, the protagonist either jumps up and "headbutts" them or can headbutt them while riding an adolescent or adult dragon.
- Half-Identical Twins: The twins have similar faces and eye colours, but the male has dark red hair and the female has light red hair.
- Invisible Wall: Used in places to prevent the player from going to locations that have not yet been unlocked in the game.
- Kid Hero: The twins are rather young.
- Lazy Bum: Billy wanders into the café and tries to dine-and-dash, but agrees to work off his debt. He proceeds to sit around doing nothing until Ipanema blows a fuse at his laziness.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: There are many loading screens, as every talking scene is a separate cutscene and the game loads whenever you enter or leave the house.
- Mini-Game: Cooking involves a rhythm mini-game.
- Rapid Aging: The player can cause plants to ripen faster by applying dragon fertilizer.
- Theme Twin Naming: The Canon Names for the protagonists are this. Rin is the sister and Ren is the brother.
- You ALL Share My Story: In the final chapter of the game, all the customers that were given their own Story Arc play an important role in awakening the twins' mother.
