Adventure Corner ~ Café Enchanté

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column, we take a look at otome gem Café Enchanté on Nintendo Switch.

Café Enchanté

The isekai genre has grown in popularity over the years, as it provides an escapism from the current world climate. Isekai stories are about ordinary people being whisked away into extraordinary worlds, such as the anime and manga series Restaurant to Another World, or in the case of the otome genre, we get games like Café Enchanté, where it may seem cozy on the surface, but becomes anything but as players work through each storyline.

Café Enchanté begins with the heroine, Kotone, inheriting her grandfather’s café. She soon learns that the cafe is a meeting place for mystical beings who need their own space to unwind and solve problems. These beings include a demon king, a fallen angel, and even a headless knight. However, when government agencies begin to investigate the happenings within the cafe, it is up to Kotone to protect these special individuals and offer them refuge. It’s a crazy world, but Kotone is up for the task.

There are only five character routes in Café Enchanté, with one locked until the other four are completed. There’s Canus the headless knight, Ingis the sexy beastman, Il the nerdy fallen angel, government agent Ringo with his spoilery secret, and finally the charismatic debonare demon lord Misyr. There’s no bad route in the game; all the love interests are interesting, have unique personalities, and, above all, have chemistry with the heroine. While all the routes are fantastic and well-paced, our headless knight Canus has the most wholesome story of the bunch, with the least amount of angst, and an ending that will have “awwwww” escaping from one’s lips. Canus is truly the sweetest good boy of the cast.

I am a Canus stan.

Part of why the stories in Café Enchanté work so well is the game’s protagonist, Kotone. Kotone is a wonderful heroine, with such a charming personality that it’s easy to see how all of the male love interests would want to be with her. Kotone is empathetic, kind, and ultimately just wants to help every individual who comes through the doors of the café. While many otome heroines tend to lack personality because they are a stand-in for the player, that is not the case here, as Kotone stands up for herself and always tries to see the good in others.

It also helps that the game does a great job of providing the player with mostly slow-burning romances that have strong endings. For example, Rindo’s story in particular takes a unique and unexpected turn in the latter half, and it’s so easy to sympathize with him when he must cope with a secret that puts him in a rather frightening position. Misyr, similarly, has a great route where we see constant contemplation of what it means to be a demon lord, and whether such a being can love an ordinary girl? Otome games will always have a bit of cheesiness in them, but Café Enchanté does such a great job of bringing the layer back for a second, third, fourth, or even fifth helping of romance.

While romancing mystical beings in a magical cafe is a great hook, Café Enchanté suffers from a very long Common Route before getting to all the delicious romance. Thankfully, after completing the Common Route once, players can skip the text and move to the next decision. Unfortunately, the localization has moments where it reads very stiffly, and there are some typos littered throughout. One very noticeable and problematic issue is in the form of instances where dark text is on a dark background, making the story difficult to read at times. In those moments, it would have been great if a slightly lighter colour for the text were utilized.

So many fantasy boyfriends to choose from!

Café Enchanté only offers players a happy ending and a few bad endings for each love interest. Trying to get every single ending and special CG image will easily take thirty to forty hours for completion, though a single playthrough through for one love interest is around three to five hours, depending on the character. There aren’t many extras in the game either, with the few offerings being event CG replays, as the offerings are merely being able to see event CGs, a Q&A, and the ability to watch the ending movie. It’s a rather paltry offering compared to many other otome titles, and while it doesn’t significantly denigrate the main game, it is disappointing.

All the voice work is in Japanese, and the actors do a great job portraying their characters. Further, the art direction and UI design are stunning. Anytime food appears, it’s so realistic that it’ll make one’s mouth water. The soundtrack is also quite lovely, and the ambient café music makes one feel like they are hanging out, drinking a coffee, and catching up with a friend. Otomate put so much thought into both the game’s sound and visual design, and from the pastel colours to simple sound effects, the game oozes style.

I absolutely adored my time with Café Enchanté. The game offers such a fun cast of characters, some interesting romantic plotlines, and a great heroine to follow. Although the game has some smaller issues in its localization and the lack of extra content, it’s a wonderful game where it’s easy to lose time while playing it because it wants you to get to know everyone in such a deep and intimate way. This is definitely one café worth hanging out at and spending time in.