VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 4: Ignis

Ignis is a fun character, but generally not the sort that's my first choice to romance, which is why he was my third playthrough. He's the tough talking jock with a heart of gold that he pretends not to have. Ignis is also the closest in age to Kotone, making him a fairly recent patron of the cafe, compared to the others who arrived while she was still a child.

It probably sounds better in Japanese, but Ignis is a demon beast, to make it clear that he's not simply some mindless animal, but a beast that has a human-like form and powers. Specifically, he's from a clan called the Firewolves. (Or Vinitar depending on the translation, since his route was clearly worked on by different people who did not coordinate with each other, making the in-game terminology for the various beast tribes a hot mess.) He comes from the world of Bestia, which is a frozen wasteland where beasts vie for dominance over each other, and survival of the fittest is taken to the extreme, with stronger beasts frequently slaying the weak for little reason aside from sport.

Ignis is the strongest there is, and he wants to change his world by remaining the strongest while not killing, so he often looks out for weaker beasts and even when he gets into supremacy fights with tougher beasts, he only beats them up enough to incapacitate them. Never to kill. So it's unsurprising that his route chooses to look at what makes Ignis unique among his kind and how Bestia came to be so warped to begin with.

Though there are definitely more than a few hokey deus ex machinas by the end, I found Ignis's story to be well paced and better written than the previous two I'd played. I felt like Canus and Rindo's routes really needed another chapter for the romance to play out, but Ignis's never felt forced, never felt rushed, so even when friends upon friends pop up at the end, I just shrugged and ran with it, because thematically the fact they did was so on point it was forgivable.

For one thing, his route doesn't beat around the bush that he and Kotone could be a couple. Dromi brings it up almost immediately after route split when he sees the two of them together in town and asks if Kotone is Ignis's mate. Ignis being Ignis though, immediately denies that he could ever possibly be interested in her, saying that she's just the cafe owner, and Kotone, not really thinking about romance, amusingly tells Ignis that once he gets himself a girl he should totally bring her to the cafe to meet everyone.

But despite the romcom gaffes, the early chapters of his route make it clear that the way to Ignis's heart is through his stomach, and Kotone, being the cafe owner, is filling that bottomless pit better than anyone. Ignis is a ridiculous pig, and though his enormous appetite is something of a joke, it's also growing, and, it turns out, is part of the story.

Ignis's route builds off of the Minotaur incident in the common route when the group tries to go to the aquarium. His friend Dromi has been investigating in Bestia and discovered that the Minotaurs are jumping through wormholes to the human world, causing them to appear in the town around Enchante. Wormholes are a one way trip, unlike the gate at Enchante, so it's rather baffling that the Minotaurs are taking the plunge, and it's even more baffling that all the wormholes are taking them to the same place, specifically in a ring around Enchante once the GPM manages to put all their data together.

Since Dromi's not the reliable sort, Ingis decides to do some investigation on his own and Kotone accidentally joins him when someone kidnaps her and leaves her for dead in frozen Bestia. After being rescued by a weaker demon beast who picks up Ignis's scent on her, Kotone learns more about what Ignis's life is like, being both powerful and unwelcome in most of his world. But despite his world's value on might, he looks after a tribe of weaker demon beasts so they're comfortable living close to his Firewolf tribe, even though historically the Firewolves have been both feared and ostracized and now live pretty much on the edge of habitable land (such as there is here).

Even among his own tribe, Ignis is not particularly welcome as the result of going berserk during a previous attack on his people that caused him to fight friend and foe alike. Feeling guilty about it, Ignis is fine with the status quo, even though he still protects his tribe and has a somewhat cordial relationship with his uncle.

The key thing that upends everything is the discovery of an ancient history regarding the wolf Vanir, ancestor of the Firewolves, who woke up and devoured just about everything he set eyes on. This kicked off Bestia's obsession with being the strongest, because every other beast needed to be strong just to have a chance of surviving a confrontation with Vanir.

What made Vanir unique among demon beasts, aside from his power, was the fact he could eat. It turns out that nearly all creatures of Bestia are born with the amount of energy they will spend throughout their lives, so eating is not natural for them. Most don't have digestive tracts. And there's a part of me that wished this interesting bit of world building had been carried out a little farther, because generally when something like this happens in our world, the energy comes from the mother who does eat. But if the mothers don't eat in Bestia, and they are similarly constrained in that all the energy they have is limited to what they were born with, either successive generations would get weaker or the energy babies are born with comes from somewhere else. It's not really important to the story, but the biologist in me wants to know!

In any case, there is one known exception to the nobody in Bestia eats that happens to be a Firewolf; Ignis, who we also know has been developing a tremendous appetite.

So of course it turns out that Ignis is teetering on becoming Vanir reborn, and it happens that his friend Dromi is actually not a very good friend and has been planning to push him over the edge for years. It doesn't really make sense to me why Dromi would do that because his wish would not only decimate the stronger beasts that pick on him, but likely get him killed as well. Still, he seems okay with it. And Dromi morphing from comic relief to insane villain was definitely a transition I did not see coming. He's completely ruthless once the secret's out, getting all of Ignis's tribe killed by Minotaurs just to trigger him into fighting so much he can't help but lose control.

Worse, when Kotone sees him in his battle lust, he does not break out of it and he actually tears a chunk out of her arm and devours it. Though he eventually snaps out of it, Kotone is not unexpectedly terrified of what happened and Ignis doesn't protest when Misyr and the others lock him up inside a barrier so he shouldn't be able to harm anyone.

Except Dromi intervenes, kidnapping Kotone and trying to feed her to Ignis who admittedly found her pretty tasty in his bloodlust. Dromi fails in that respect, but does get Ignis to transform fully into a giant fiery wolf that is completely out of control and willing to devour anything in his path, which sets up the finale in his route.

Though the finale is pretty much "giant flaming wolf beaten by the power of friendship," it works because of the legwork beforehand. Ignis's cafe friends come to the rescue, of course, but also many of the weaker beasts in Bestia that Ignis had been protecting over the years. Now that he's the one in need, they're willing to risk their lives to help. Even the extremely silly "final blow" delivered by Kororo's herd of sea beasts, is not out of line considering that he rescued Kororo when he was crying and alone.

Everyone working together allows Vanir to be beaten enough for Ignis to comes to his senses and for Kotone (now over her fear) to approach and forgive him, letting him turn back into his old self.

The only thing I was a little disappointed with his ending is that Ignis stops eating! He only started when he discovered the cafe, since eating was a foreign concept in Bestia, and it seems like he only got hungry because of all the fighting he was doing. With Bestia largely united and becoming peaceful with his defeat, Ignis doesn't need to fight anymore and without fighting, he doesn't hunger. While that's a good thing, I really liked the earlier scenes with Kotone constantly cooking and packing meals for him, and I'm a little sad at the thought it's no longer going to be a thing.

In the end, I ended up liking Ignis's route much more than I thought I would going in.