VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2020

Café Enchanté shares a lot of its staff with the team behind my favorite otome, Code:Realize, including one of the writers, so I ended up looking forward to it a bit more than I would have otherwise considering its low stakes premise.

Kotone Awaki inherits her grandfather's cafe after he passes away, and the cafe itself sits on a dimensional gate leading to other worlds. Because of this, the cafe's customers are almost exclusively non-humans (though with human enough forms that romance does not look out of the question). The regulars are initially dismayed over the death of Kotone's grandfather, who had been a valued friend and father figure to all of them, even those who are much older than him in terms of sheer age, but they quickly get behind her when she decides to continue running the cafe in her grandfather's stead.

Though each of the regulars is extremely powerful compared to the average human, and in most cases are important people in their respective homeworlds, the cafe is a place where they can relax and get away from expectations. Canus, the headless knight, isn't shunned for his association with death. Ignis, the demon beast, doesn't have to constantly brawl in battles for superiority.

In keeping with the cafe being a place to hang with friends, the story is low key and episodic (up until the route split). There's no overarching quest that must be resolved before the end of the game, though there are certainly seeds planted that can crop up again on individual routes, but it's not like reaching the World in Norn9 or Cardia's search for the truth about herself and her father in Code:Realize. One chapter will be about learning to run the cafe, another will be about a particular incident that happens at the cafe, and so on.

I particularly like that Kotone's grandfather, Souan, continues to be relevant beyond the game's introduction as the cafe regulars mourn his loss in their own way, and we get to hear stories of what their interactions with him were like.

Kotone, though young and inexperienced as a proprietor, throws herself into her work with gusto, and though she has no powers herself, she manages to be a proactive protagonist on the majority of the routes. Admittedly I was worried when I watched the opening movie and most of the images of her show her looking shocked or uncomfortable, but it's more like the movie editor primarily chose images where looking shocked or uncomfortable made sense, rather than the images where she looks happy or at least neutral. Kotone is a nice person who wants to be helpful, but she's willing to put her foot down (and does, multiple times) when necessary.

When the game finally splits to a particular character's route it feels more like the route is the start of another day in the life of the cafe rather than a culmination of what has come before. Kotone's narration even wraps up the end of the common route with a bookend narration that feels very much like the end of a TV season.

This episodic storytelling works both for and against the game. On the one hand, it's refreshing that Kotone doesn't have personal baggage that must be resolved by the end of the game, and it allows her wants and desires to be flexible according to the chosen route. On the other hand, there's minimal plot build-up, no anticipation for what happens next, because each chapter prior to route-split tends to be relatively self-contained.

This isn't helped by the fact that Chapters 4-8 are also very obviously designated as showcase chapters for the different love interests, complete with character specific artwork for the chapter panels. I actually thought I'd entered route lock at first because that's not normal for an Otomate title.

At first it was novel getting to know Canus a bit more (since he's Chapter 4) and I loved Rindo's chapter (Chapter 5) which I thought built really well on what we learned from Canus's. But Ignis's (Chapter 6) had little to do with anything we'd learned before, and by the time I got to Il's (Chapter 7) I was tiring of the character episode treatment, because by then the pattern was fairly apparent. Misyr's (Chapter 8) picks up with signs of larger problems that make things exciting again (though it oddly seems as much about Rindo as Misyr), but none of those really matter until you're on his route, which is locked behind completion of the other four.

While the showcase chapters are nice for getting to know the individual characters and what drives them they can be a little too focused, with the rest of the cafe regulars falling too far into supporting roles. While they're never absent entirely, and in some cases you can make choices that favor them, the character focus felt less like a natural outgrowth of the story and more like this is [insert name]'s turn to shine because everyone needs a chapter.

This hurts some characters more than others. I really liked Canus in the beginning, but by the time I got through Misyr's chapter he'd dropped out of focus so much that I'd actually moved most of my emotional investment on to Rindo (who does a better job of staying relevant in chapters other than his own).

It also made it incredibly awkward when my first playthrough ended up pairing me with Canus. I didn't mind once I got on Canus's route, and I was quite happy with what I got, but it just felt weird at the beginning of it because he was no longer the primary love interest in my head by the time his route started.

Normally I'd have put up a spoiler warning near the start of this article because this game is less than a year old and I'd want to talk about deeper themes or the overall story, but in this case, there isn't much in common between the different routes and most of them do not tie together in any way. I will say though that the game is not as light-hearted and fluffy as the opening movie would suggest. Aside from possibly Canus's route (which for that reason I think should be played first), the others are substantially more grim, and I've heard fans use "bittersweet" more than once to describe the true nature of Café Enchanté.

Before going on to the character specific routes, there are two specific things I'd like to bring up. The first is that this game surprisingly has a non-binary character in Vennia. In their own words they do not identify with a gender and the English translation uses they/them pronouns for the entirely of the common route.

However, because they don't care about which pronouns are used for them, Kotone eventually settles on referring to them as Titania's little brother in Canus's route, likely because Japanese uses gender-specific words for elder vs younger siblings and the gender neutral word for sibling does not specify birth order. Once that happens, Vennia becomes he/him not only for Kotone, but in the narration and the dialogue for every other character for the rest of the route. I was disappointed in that since Kotone's personal decision shouldn't immediately impact everyone else.

The other issue is the editing quality. I really don't like bringing up text issues in a visual novel, because I'm a writer. I know how typos slip in and the longer the work, the more likely it is that something will pass through the spellchecker because it's perfectly spelled but it's the wrong word. But even for a visual novel, Café Enchanté's error rate is on the high side. It's not Collar x Malice level egregious where one translation flat out didn't make sense and text strings got scrambled in Aiji's route, but it's a fairly consistent typo here, typo there, missing a word here, using a similarly spelled but incorrect word there, and given that the translation has a professional level of polish when it's not tripping over itself, it feels like Café Enchanté was done in a rush without any time for proofreading.

Probably the biggest sign that the game needed a proofread is that there are multiple instances of names and terminology being translated differently. For instance, Vennia is called Venir (a legitimate alternate way of writing the character's name) in one particular chapter and the sea beasts are sometimes called paku depending on which route you're on and whether you're looking at the in-game glossary.

What likely happened is we had at least two translators working on the game and there was no cross-checking between them to see whether they were translating things differently, and those two examples are just a couple of the instances where names and terms didn't line up. This becomes really apparent if you open the glossary every time a new entry unlocks in the narration and dialogue, because the term that triggers the entry will often not match the title of the entry itself.

All of this should have been caught and addressed before release, and the fact it wasn't leads me to believe it was a rush job to meet the manufacturing deadline. The game isn't unplayable, I still enjoyed it, but it's definitely a lower quality of translation than I'd normally expect.

Next week I'm going to talk about Canus's route.