The majority of my issues with Little Dragons Café could be summed up in the same way a parent would reprimand a kid for staying out too late. I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.
But let’s back up a bit. Little Dragons Café is the latest project worked on by Yasuhiro Wada, a major contributor to series like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory, the forerunners of the “cozy games” lineage that I particularly enjoy. It felt like all the elements were in place for me to love the crap out of Little Dragons Café. But as much as I tried to I just couldn’t find myself getting a handhold on the game in any enjoyable way.
One of the most pressing issues is what the game chooses to focus on in its design. Unlike other farming-centric titles, Little Dragons Café doesn’t care so much about the growing process of ingredients for recipes in the game’s titular café, instead focusing on various methods of foraging over farming. Your days are primarily spent scouring the land for different ingredients, or waiting for your (non-customizable) small garden to grow until it is harvestable (which will yield you a semi-random assortment of ingredients based on what you’ve already found on the island). The mechanics do not encourage or allow the player to tend to their garden or customize their space, one of the hallmarks of games like Harvest Moon or titles inspired by it like Stardew Valley.
This isn’t to say that Little Dragons Café is a bad game, it’s just not the game I was looking for. Little Dragons Café is, to distill it to its most basic elements, an exploration and foraging game wrapped around a central, very linear story that is progressed through time- and material-gated checkpoints. The elements of exploration are, too, gated mostly by your progression through the storyline, as your companion dragon will be able to take you more places when they are larger and can move items, fly, or otherwise maneuver you to more areas on the island.
