Doraemon is one of the most iconic, influential cultural icons in Japanese entertainment history. It’s a blue robot cat with a pocket that contains everything, and he and his human pals (Nobi and co) have gone on so many adventures that it’s almost impossible to count. The manga came first (in 1969), then the TV series, and then the flood of other things, including no fewer than 40(!) films. And now Kairosoft, the prolific developer of hyper-casual simulations, has had its turn with him with Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story.
If you’ve got a Switch, then hopefully you’ve already experienced Doraemon through the excellent collaborations with the Story of Seasons series of farming sims. Those gems really captured the essence of Doraemon, with the warm, wholesome, pastoral, small community and earnest work vibe. Best of all, they both told stories that are authentically Doraemon and therefore contributed to the overall body of work.
I’m not sure anyone will say the same about Kairosoft’s effort. It’s not that it’s not charming. Every one of Kairosoft’s games is inherently charming. It’s just that this is very much a Kairosoft game that has a brush of Doraemon splashed over the top. Unfortunately, that means it’s not really doing Doraemon any favours.
So what do you do in this? The idea is explained to you in about five seconds flat at the start. Doraemon’s favourite food is Dorayaki – a kind of pancake with red bean paste in the middle. Conveniently, there’s a store opening, so off Doraemon and Nobi go to get some tasty treats… only to discover that the proprietor is unable to work anymore. Rather than let the excellent shop go to waste, Doraemon and Nobby roll up their sleeves and decide to get baking.
From that point, you’ll enjoy many of the standard tropes of a Kairosoft game. You’ll create something (in this case, pancakes!) and then one of your characters will infuse it with their skills, causing the end product’s stats to increase. Then it’ll be taste-tested and rated. The better the rating the greater the reward, the more people that will be attracted to your shop, and so on.
Meanwhile, you can send your characters on little journeys through Doraemon’s Dokodemo Door (Anywhere Door), to all parts of the world and universe. There they’ll find new ingredients for more tasty pancake recipes and meet some of the many friends the crew have made over the last few decades.
And then you can also dress up your café/restaurant with entertainment and places to sit and eat. If all of this sounds familiar, then that’s because you’ve played some Kairosoft games in the past. Dorayaki Story is an amalgamation of everything that this studio has done best over the years, with very little effort to do anything different. It’s still functionally impossible to fail and if there is a “lose state” I have no idea how to get to it. Hyper-casual simulations where you can’t fail are fun in their own way… but at the same time, it’s hard to become too invested when there’s so little avenue to make mistakes or face consequences.
But I went into this knowing that would be the case and it’s a little difficult to criticise a game from such a well-liked developer that sticks to what is clearly popular. A bigger problem is that the one thing the developers tried that is a little different (at least as far as I’m aware, from the Kairosoft games I have played) is that there are story cutscenes built in. It’s easy to understand why the developers did this – they’re working with characters that are famous for their narratives, after all, but sadly storytelling is not a Kairosoft strength.
For one thing, the narrative bits are excessively truncated, which is often fine in the context of mobile games where “story bits” are just there to add a bit of flavour, but in comparison to the Doraemon Story of Seasons game – which is itself a casual simulator, remember – this is very lacking. It doesn’t help that the English is downright broken in places, like it was machine translated.
The Doraemon sprites do look good in the Kairosoft pixel style and there’s a default charm to them, but overall this isn’t a great use of the license. Nor is it a particularly great Kairosoft title. It’s very busy, especially early on in the game, where Kairosoft at its best lets you ease into things at a comfortable pace. There are also perhaps a little too many things going on at once when, again, Kairosoft tends to be better when it’s focused on a single idea.
The problem with Kairosoft games is that they’re inevitably good fun and even compulsive for a while. Once you sit down to one fresh you’re inevitably going to get hooked for a while, be that a few days or a few weeks. But soon after you’ll put it down and completely forget about it. You’ll come across it at random a few years later and then get very briefly hooked again, but again you’ll soon get tired of it. Kairosoft games are pure consumption, no meat, and while they’re fun – and this game is fun too (I hate coming across as overly critical of Kairosoft!) they are junk, and Doraemon deserved better.
