Reviews - CAFE 0 ~The Drowned Mermaid~ Game

Aug 11th, 2012 1 person agrees 0 people don't

I've got mixed feelings about this game: the demo had decent enough art and an interesting premise but I didn't like it much in the end.

After getting a couple of endings it becomes obvious that the way to get one of the main endings is to grind and only visit one of the two male characters to pursue either their bad or good ending. There is one more thing to do to get the real ending, and it's different from what I've seen in most OELVNs, but I can't spoil it here.

The narration is very bare-bones - there isn't much time spent for any significant character development and as a result the few hints about what happens at the end are very obvious and it's very easy to find yourself knowing how the story ends and curse the protagonist's inability to figure it out herself yet while you have to play the game another 3 times before you can even unlock the real ending.

Another round of proofreading would have helped - there are several awkward phrasings that read like they've been written by a non-native English speaker and this – coupled with the artwork in the CGs, which is sometimes really bad – makes scenes which are supposed to be eerie or moving become just ridiculous. Considering how at least some of the sprites at the beginning were actually quite nice, a lot of the CGs and backgrounds really suffer from some glaring anatomical and perspective errors and rather flat colouring that make me wonder whether these have been drawn under a very harsh deadline.
The music and dubbing seem decent enough, but they didn’t really add much to the game in my opinion and I didn’t feel I got much out of the additional few pounds I spent.

All in all I’d say this game has an interesting premise but it could do with more polished narration and artworks and with a less forced path through the story.

May 11th, 2012 0 people agree 0 people don't

Somehow I don't remember visual novels being so text heavy. Thankfully they put in a skip button, just be careful with it, cause selecting the option to be able to skip new dialogue just because you've done played day 1 in the demo means it can skip new dialogue after day 1 too. And if you don't deselect skip before the 'Day X' screen it'll continue skipping when you select the character for the day. Thankfully, if you think to save at the day selection screen you can load from there and the skip function will be deselected. Also, for anyone wanting the voiced special, it's spoken in the programers' native language, just fyi. Other than that, if you can't understand the language, but still need to know what happens, just purchase the normal one, you won't be missing out on anything special in the voiced version, and it'll save you money.