Coffee and Boobs
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DLC:
https://nekonyansoft.com/shop/product/47

As an expert of VN game, I’m gonna show you how to perform what’s called a pro gamer move.

1. Install this patch: https://nekonyansoft.com/shop/product/47
2. Skip all 1v1 battle scene later

How can I express my regret? There is no doubt that Café Stella is to a large extent in line with Yuzosoft's usual style: a light and easy romantic story, lovely characters, and great music. The game is also unique in its worldview, but in my personal opinion, I'm afraid it pales a lot in comparison to Senren＊Banka and Riddle Joker.

The lack of characterization, the serious differences in the quality of the different branching storylines, the apparent blandness of the plot progression, and the sloppy handling of the worldview all make for a game that most players will probably not enjoy as much as they would like. The love of some of the characters may propel some players forward, but even if they find that they are rewarded later, it will not be enough to deny the overall poor experience.

But Café Stella isn't that bad either. The game itself is positioned as a relatively light-hearted romance visual novel, with a smaller audience in exchange for positive reviews from the target user group. From what I understand, most of the players who have a positive attitude toward this game tend to be able to accept the shortcomings of this genre. In addition, the game's interface and other aspects are undoubtedly the best in its category.

While Yuzosoft fans and those interested in the game's characters will have nothing to fear from this game, other genre players will have to decide if they can accept the game's shortcomings.

the game ended before i could decide on which girl to pick so i remained single, realism 10/10

I learned that girls are naked under their clothes. How crazy is that?!

As a person who has lots of sex all the time, I can say that this game is 100% accurate to having sex with sexy women. Like I do everyday. This game did not make me horny however, I am not gay. I just have too much sex with real women to spend more than 15 minutes in this game. On the other hand I would recommend this game to people who do not have sex (unlike me because I have lots of sex with women a lot) as there is a naked woman in it and she is naked, she kinda looks like one of my many girlfriends who I have sex with a lot. I have lots of sex. I also am very handsome and women ALWAYS want to have sex with me because I am very muscular and handsome and very good at video games, all my girlfriends say I'm very good at sex and playing video games and being handsome, one of my girlfriends asked me to have sex with her but I told her I was playing a sex game instead so she started crying and became a lesbian and killed herself because I did not have sex with her. I have sex with women, not men. I am not gay. I am very cool and handsome so girls always have sex with me because I am very cool and sexy. My penis is very big. All my girlfriends like my penis because it is very big and I am very good at sex with my women. Every woman I've had sex with is very sexy and so am I. I have lots of sex. I am also very handsome and sexy and I have lots of sex.

(Insert your Café Stella heroine name here)

The hot Reaper, the talking cat and the dead protagonist.

- This is an Adult Visual Novel - one with a free R18 Patch (obtainable at NekoNyan's webshop) at that - designed to be R18. If for whatever reason you are not interested in this content, or aren't legally allowed to play it, you should just skip this review.
- Since many Visual Novels are similar in a bunch of ways, I'm gonna review this one on a few common aspects, including heavy reference to the previous titles from YuzuSoft as well as independent explanations.
- This is my first impression (2/5 routes). Will be updated.

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High-class as usual.

Time flies, and finally we get a new "main" game from YuzuSoft - their newest game at that. If you played previous titles from them, like that little gem Sabbat of the Witch here, you know quite well what to expect.

As everyone should know by now, the list of features and gimmicks that make a YuzuSoft VN so amazing has become ridiculously long and only ever grows in length with every new release. Going over every little detail would take me forever, so lets focus on the new and important bits:

Featuring a native 1080p resolution, highly detailed art style and a level of lifeliness that can only be rivaled by 2D animation, Café Stella as usual offers the best in terms of visuals. The music too isn't bad, high in track count and enjoyable to listen to, as is the high quality voice acting for all the characters. Despite the usual amount of errors NekoNyanSoft commonly puts into the translation it too is rock solid and great, maybe even too overbearing at times with forcefully modernized dialogues like "boomer lingo" and other annoying stuff.

When it comes to technical features, the most important things to note are the unlimited, highly customizable save slots, the flowchart diagram to easily keep track of the story and quickly setup new routes, voiceline saving, and the incredible amount of setting customization you can do including mouse gestures, controller and keyboard controls and the quick menu bar ingame.

Newcomers to the quality of life feature list are mostly things that could already be seen on the experimental all-ages predecessor Parquet - namely, a highly modernized, easily keyboard controlled and preview image enriched gallery, unlockable and manually changable main menu backgrounds and an official built-in screenshot function. Sadly though, the modernized gallery and screenshot function come with the same problem that could be seen in Parquet: You can't take Steam screenshots from within the gallery, due to layering issues.

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786941035

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The weakest link finally snapped.

A generic slice of life RomCom Moege with supernatural elements.
Takamine Kousei, average college student with an average virgin life, goes about the average things in his average everyday way. Like getting special housewife treatment from his childhood friend that certainly does not have a deeper interest in him. But this boring average is one fateful day turned upside down as Kousei is involved in a fatal accident and dies.

At least, that's what's supposed to happen. Yet, while he is fading away, regretting being the loser that he is and the one most important thing he did not yet achieve - getting laid - something strange happens: He wakes up once again at the very same beginning of the very same day he supposedly died on. Being in disbelieve of the magical spectacle he relives the entire day to the T until he once again finds himself at the site of the soon-to-be accident ending his life. Only to find, this time around, nothing to happen.

But the magical encounters don't stop there - soon Kousei meets a talking cat, a hot babe that's supposedly the Grim Reaper herself and finds out his unknown power to avoid death put him on God's top priority hitlist. The only way to redeem himself and not get Thanos Snapped by God? Proving that he is a good and loyal servant by working at Café Stella. And so his harem adventure working at a Café surrounded only by hot chicks (and a talking cat) begins.


What sounds like a satirical retell of the shop page description is also a perfect 100% summary of the entire story of Café Stella. Because after getting dumped with this introduction before the opening movie, you will never really hear of it again - other than some random reminders here and there. Some routes feature more of a unique, independent story than others but ultimately YuzuSoft this time around didn't even really try telling a compelling story anymore and settled for the full silly moe experience.

Luckily they put their effort there, bringing us a well-done cast of characters (generic male sidekick included) with highly likable personalities and a small dose of development. At least half of them this time around are actually adult and hence have quite a number of normal reactions to certain topics. On the other hand though, the protagonist is as dull as they get and you sure as hell can expect the Waifus to be ruined by an overdose of hentai forced into their personality.

Having four main and one side heroine to woo as usual and the common route nonetheless taking 15h, with the character routes around the same, you can probably expect a total content time of 80h (not rush-skipping). The lack of a proper main story further shows itself in the fact you only have 5 choices to decide your route, with two more mock choices along the lines.

After clearing a route you unlock the gallery where you can enjoy the 92 CGs, 29 SDs and 53 OSTs and rewatch the opening and all the ending movies as well as all the scenes again. After clearing all routes, not counting the after stories, you get the sprite viewer too as usual.

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786094850

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You nymphomaniac excuse of a Grim Reaper

As mentioned previously, expect probably more than is good for the routes. Every heroine has between 3+1 and 5+1 H-scenes, usually stuffed back-to-back into the second half of their routes. Furthermore there are commonly appearing nude sprites and nude CGs outside of those scenes and dirty talk 24/7.

When it comes to the depiction of bodily fluids and the overall length and intensity of the action we are on the normal, moderate YuzuSoft side, although the stamina of the actors and the protagonist's (and sometimes even the heroine's) stupidity know no limits.

We're blessed with man-of-culture choices for every scene and background moaning, although no sound effects. And of course mosaic censorship is a must too. As far as fetishes go, we see some pee, an unhealthy obsessment with sucking breasts and most likely a fair dose of SM.

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786941131

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Is this game worth it?

Well... it is a YuzuSoft game. And I'd go as far as to say that nowadays even the worst YuzuSoft could possible produce is still better than your good average VN. So obviously it is a solid choice overall. But - it's getting simply sad that with every new YuzuSoft release I have to recommend a 7 years old 720p predecessor for having an objectively far better story.
As long as you keep in mind this is a Moege and not a VN with a captivating story, everything is fine. And there will always be another Steam sale to make things more convincing.

Inside you there are two wolves:

One wants to lie on Kanna's lap

The other wants to be stepped on by Shiki

Another work of Yuzusoft hits Steam, thanks to the hard work of NekoNyan & Hikari Field. Yuzusoft's Steam lineup has now officially caught up with its original Japanese releases, meaning they have not released anything since Castella. (I am, of course, discounting the all-age low-price title Parquet; I see it simply as a way for them to procrastinate on their regular 18+ VN release schedule (which would have had them announce a new title sometime last summer), and hence do not count it as a proper title of theirs.) "Castella", BTW, is one of several ways to shorten the full game title, with Yuzusoft themselves preferring "フェラ神" ("Fella-Gami"), or "God of Fellatio", instead, probably for meme reasons. (If you're wondering how this abbreviation came about, they simply plucked a few sounds from the full Japanese title (e.g. "fe" from "cafe" and "la" from "stella") and merged them.) But I'll use "Castella" in the remainder of this review just to be a bit more family-friendly.

Castella continues Yuzusoft's tradition of top-tier art by Kobuichi & Muririn, excellent casting (especially now that one of my favorite voice actresses, Kanako, has been promoted to voice a main heroine, Shiki Natsume (more on her later), since she first voiced a sub character with a route for Yuzusoft in Riddle Joker), and a mixed bag story-wise. Three of the five routes earned either a "meh" or a "WTF" from me; the other two made the ~100 USD I paid for the original release totally worth it.

These two routes impressed me for different reasons, though. Akizuki Kanna, being the center heroine of this game, has her route fully explain and resolve the core conflict of Castella, and in a way that really touched me. Shiki Natsume's route, on the other hand, truly excelled in presenting before the player's eyes and ears the romantic story of two college students meeting, getting to know each other, and falling in love, with every small detail adding up to make the characters and their relationship feel so incredibly real and relatable. As someone who rarely revisits routes that I've already played through, I re-read the entire Natsume route more than once after finishing it for the first time. I just could not have enough of it.

The remaining three routes aren't bad, to be fair, but the authors' attention to detail is generally less solid in these routes, with plot inconsistencies prompting me to write down many sarcastic notes during my playthrough. These perceptions are mine, of course, and your mileage might vary.

When the whole package is considered, "Café Stella to Shinigami no Chou" easily earns my recommendation. As is now a tradition for my reviews, I will once again state that I'm buying the Steam version of Castella, despite having bought the game directly from Japan two years ago, in order to support NekoNyan and Hikari Field's quest to bring more high-quality Japanese VNs to the rest of the world. I'll die a happy man when the many great works of Yuzusoft and SAGA PLANETS (and in particular, Karumaruka * Circle), gain the renown they deserve from VN lovers all around the world.