VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 2: Canus

Canus was my first route in Café Enchanté and this entry and the posts to follow in this series will have spoilers.

As I mentioned in my overview, I ended up with Canus as my first route in a bit of an accident. I actually did like him a lot in the beginning. He's a character who takes himself so seriously it's funny, but because he also has the best of intentions, you don't knock him for it. In fact, I found that part of him rather endearing.

And as far as supernatural love interests go, a headless knight is fairly unusual, but the lack of a visible head doesn't mean a lack of expression. Canus has ghostly flames that emerge from his neck and they change color and intensity based on his mood. The game does not spell out what all the colors mean, though when the flames turn floofy pink it's not hard to figure out that he's flustered.

Canus's route deals mostly with his role in the fairy world of Medio and how it goes against the kind of person he is. We know from the common route that fairies are born into their purpose, and he's shunned by most of the others due to his position as the Fairy of Death, but no one at the cafe asks him why he's known as that, not even Kotone who notices his loneliness during her first visit to his world.

Medio is one of the realities that has had repeated contact with the human world (which is why humans have fairies in folklore) and their world is dominated by the giant tree Yggdrasil, but we learn that Yggdrasil is not a benevolent tree so much as a invasive species from Earth that has grown wildly out of control in its new habitat. So even though it forms the homes of the fairies and their queen resides in its heart, it doesn't care anything about them. It might be magical, but it's still a tree.

And it's a very big tree that needs a lot of sustenance in order to survive. As it turns out, Yggdrasil eats fairies. If it's given the soul of a dead fairy once a month it remains in a dormant state where the rest of Medio gets to go about its business. If it wakes up, well, that's really bad news, and the last time Yggdrasil got wound up, only 10% of the fairy population survived.

This is where Canus comes in as the Fairy of Death. The Fairy of Death is responsible for culling the fairy population so that Yggdrasil remains dormant. It's a sucky job, but someone has to do it, and Canus was literally born to do so. (Fairies don't have children. If there is a need, a new one is born. So Canus was born after the last Fairy of Death died.) Being a kind-hearted soul, Canus is unhappy that his job requires him to kill in order to preserve the greater good, and though it's not directly spelled out, it's pretty obvious that he cherishes his time in the human world because it allows him to be the noble and helpful person that he wants to be.

Canus is ridiculously popular with the humans who live, work, and go to school around the cafe (thanks to Misyr's magic preventing them from thinking too hard about the helmet he wears wherever he goes) and he's all too happy to help them with any issues they're having. No job is too small.

Being a straightforward person, Canus's story doesn't have much in the way of surprises. Kotone starts visiting Medio more often and becomes better friends with Queen Titania and her irritable sibling Vennia, and that's when she happens to catch a glimpse of Canus doing his job. Unable to reconcile what she saw with the Canus she knows, she eventually confronts him about it, and, well, Canus doesn't take it very well.

Though he certainly understands Kotone's concern, he doesn't want to explain himself and doesn't want to get her involved. He can't change his job, so he distances himself in the worst way possible; telling her that it's not her business to get so involved with a customer. Her grandfather was never this much of a busybody and that's the kind of relationship he wants with the cafe. And then he stops going there.

Of course, even if he's going to sulk, everyone else at the cafe knows Canus is being stupid and encourages Kotone to have a heart to heart with him, which she eventually does. And I love that she absolutely takes him to task for his terrible communication skills. She gets through to him that she's not her grandfather so she's not going to run the cafe exactly like he did, and she's worried about him, which breaks down Canus's barriers so he becomes willing to speak honestly about how he really feels.

It's pretty adorable how he lists all the things he loves about her cafe, not the least of which is her.

But that confession is actually in the second to last chapter rather than the end of the story, because there's actually a second plot going on involving Vennia and Yggdrasil. In addition to the dead fairy a month, Yggdrasil feeds slowly off a single fairy who is connected to the tree via a "throne" that allows her a limited ability to command it. This fairy is known as the World Tree Bride (a fancy title given in acknowledgment of her sacrifice) and is currently Titania. Vennia, being a devoted younger sibling, doesn't want their sister to die to feed a tree, and hasn't given up on saving her even though a previous attempt by their eldest sister to kill Yggdrasil failed.

Once Vennia sees that Canus is in love with Kotone, they put their plan in motion and manage to swap Titania with Kotone. Since Kotone is now one being drained, and she's not a fairy who can properly bond with Yggdrasil, Canus is forced to take on a rampaging world tree (which has woken up and gone crazy due to a wormhole damaging its roots) that is wildly killing fairies left and right.

There's a nice moment when the rest of the cafe gang shows up and helps evacuate all the fairies in Medio by leading them through the gate to safety. This leaves Canus free to rescue Kotone and ultimately kill Yggdrasil, ending the cycle of feeding the tree for good. It wasn't a plot twist of an ending, but was pretty much what to expect with a headless knight who serves as the muscle of the group.

The epilogue was sweet if a little more forward than I expected. The fairies start rebuilding Medio and Canus (who's a hobby gardener) has been helping new plants grow, so he wants to eventually become known as the Fairy of Life. (Cheesy, but I get it.) He also proposes marriage to Kotone, in a delightfully Jane Austin style speech where he highlights his own faults, but also his desire to be with her. It was a lovely proposal, but my issue with it is that we didn't really get to see enough bonding moments between the two for marriage to seem the natural next step. They obviously like each other, but barely moved past the being friends stage before Vennia's plan went into motion.

I can see Canus proposing, because it's established that marriage is a foreign concept to fairies and he has no way of gauging that he could be moving too fast, but Kotone's acceptance feels like it's more the need to tie off a happy ending than something she should be jumping into.

Aside from that though, it was a decent enough route and I enjoyed myself. But it's overall one of the weaker options in Café Enchanté, which only becomes evident after playing the other routes. Because of that, I really recommend playing it first as it would likely be disappointing if played after any of the others.