Thoughts on the Demo

[Dark]

Positives:
-Very stylish and pleasant vibe.

-High quality sprites and animations,

-Excellent music that adds to the atmosphere.

-Nice female character designs and feels authentic to anime since you also have a loli with Kurumi.

-Unique main character design that fits the theme of the game, looks cool.

-I like that this is hookah since we can kinda imagine this as being without drugs.
(Personally it would feel trashy and gross if it was explicitly drugs and tobacco)

-Similarly I like that the ingredients are all innocuous sounding to keep the vibe.

Questionable:
-English localization may be incorrectly labeling the main character with they/them as they often do with otokonoko/femboy characters.
Not really a big issue as long as this isn't referenced strongly or comes up a lot as this could make this feel more like a Western game and inauthentic to the genre.

Negatives:
-The mixing gameplay is interesting but feels a little empty. Could be improved with adding stats/attributes to ingredients.
Ex: Maybe a character is nervous and needs more of a soothing ingredient rather than their usual preferences. Or you have to balance these sorts of attributes with the flavors and ingredients that they normally enjoy.

-Lacking any sort of profit mechanic or cost of ingredients and such.
Would add more to the game if a little bit of basic profit and inventory management were involved. For example to get the bar as nice looking as it does in this demo perhaps it would be through upgrades earned through profit. Lighting, posters, decorations, etc to further boost profit.
Would feel great if the bar started out very basic but ended up like it does here after playing for some time.

-The characters ages are a bit high for an anime game. Although it is somewhat understandable for how sensitive Steam has been about this, but I think making Kokoro 27 pushes it a bit too far lol.
Stuff like this can give an inauthentic feel to anime games and isn't very necessary since this is all non-drug hookah.

[PudgyMango]

It does say in the game that's It's tobacco

[Dark]

Originally posted by PudgyMango:

It does say in the game that's It's tobacco

Ah didn't notice that from the demo.
I'd assume that would go terribly with those ingredients lol.
Non-drug hookah is an actual thing so I could just pretend I guess.

[Pekora]

Originally posted by Dark:

-English localization may be incorrectly labeling the main character with they/them as they often do with otokonoko/femboy characters.

-The characters ages are a bit high for an anime game. Although it is somewhat understandable for how sensitive Steam has been about this, but I think making Kokoro 27 pushes it a bit too far lol..

Damn, I was really interested in this game, but this is where i drop it. not gonna support a dev who uses "localizers"

[Dark]

Originally posted by Pekora:

Damn, I was really interested in this game, but this is where i drop it. not gonna support a dev who uses "localizers"

Well all games use localizers in some form but some localizers are worse than others.
From what I saw in the demo it seemed on the alright side.
Would have to see more to be sure but it didn't jump out at me at all other than the steam page character description.

[v1ckxy]

After reading the post, now I realise why I didn't fully understood the text.
When I was reading the text (that 𝔣ucking word) I thought it was referring to the boy and someone else, "the team", "he and his boss" or something like that.


Now we're going to need to decompile the assets and fix the text?
For God's sake... (－‸ლ)

[Zeblackcat]

Originally posted by Pekora:

Damn, I was really interested in this game, but this is where i drop it. not gonna support a dev who uses "localizers"

Chill out, it's not people that are the problem. It's these activists that are the problem.
I'll take a DeepL translation over this though. This is not the developers fault. Considering they left the Japanese text intact, they probably don't even know.

\Which does make this localization team extra scummy./

Originally posted by v1ckxy:

After reading the post, now I realise why I didn't fully understood the text.
When I was reading the text (that 𝔣ucking word) I thought it was referring to the boy and someone else, "the team", "he and his boss" or something like that.


Now we're going to need to decompile the assets and fix the text?
For God's sake... (－‸ლ)

Let me know how that's going, I love to play this, and curious to see how much it changes.