Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Nekopara – Catboys Paradise is Cute, but Feels Like an Intro

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Jul 162021
 

Yesterday saw the release of Nekopara – Catboys Paradise, the free otome entry in the Nekopara series.

Catboys Paradise started as an April Fools’ joke, but it got such a positive response that they turned it into a real visual novel. So, what is it like?

You play a young woman who recently inherited a café and needs to learn how to manage it along with four catboys who are there to help her, all of whom are eager to win her affections.

If you go into it expecting strictly a gender-swapped Nekopara, that’s not exactly what you’ll be getting. Instead of the animated sprites that always impress me in Nekopara, this one features regular still sprites (so no, you can’t pat your catboys’ heads whenever you want to). It is also split across four routes, with a common route leading up to a single choice where you need to pick which character’s route you want to follow.

Instead of the harem setup of the main Nekopara stories, Catboys Paradise instead has you focus on one catboy to get closer to in his route, with a few comments that suggest a true harem is impossible (although it’s also emphasized that the protagonist wants all four to be her “housecats” eventually).

Each of the four heroes is entertaining and loveable, and it’s a really cute story with some pretty funny moments. However, it feels more like an introduction to a story than a complete story in its own right.

You learn a little bit about the characters and grow closer to them, but it never makes it all the way to romance and ends feeling like it’s the prologue to your story with these characters. I hope that means they intend to make a full catboy Nekopara game if this is popular enough, because I’d love to see more.

If they do, I hope they reverse their decision to have a silent protagonist. Unlike the Nekopara protagonist, who gets his own dialogue, the Catboys Paradise heroine only communicates through nods and emotes.

And that gets really awkward in conversations, since the catboys have to repeat whatever she “says” so the player knows what it is, and more involved conversations mean they’ve got to repeat quite a bit. She’s a silent protagonist in a story that wasn’t written to support a silent protagonist.

It’s still a cute story, and Nekopara – Catboys Paradise is worth checking out if you want a free, cute catboy otome. I just hoping it’s leading to a more complete experience later down the line.

Nightshade: A Ninja Romance After My Heart

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May 102021
 

While I was reviewing romance visual novels during this year’s romance month, one highly recommended to me was Nightshade, an otome available on Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

So when it went on sale, I got it!

(I played it on the Switch because I like reading visual novels handheld.)

Nightshade is set during the Sengoku Period and follows Enju, a young ninja-in-training who is set out on her first mission. It should be a simple enough assignment… but then everything goes terribly wrong and Enju finds herself in great danger.

Of course, she’s not on her own – depending on the choices you’ve made up until that point, one of the men in the story will help her out as they start to fall in love.

The setting and plot premise had me hooked from the start, although I ultimately found the story to be a little disappointing. It’s one of those stories where past events and answers to the mystery change depending on whose route you’re on, which isn’t my favorite thing. I prefer to have a cohesive set of events, where your choices only change what happens next.

However, the romance routes themselves more than made up for it!

There are five different romance options in the game, each with a good ending and a bad ending. Whenever you make a choice, it indicates right away if you earned affection points with a particular love interest, so you don’t have to question if you’re on the right path or not.

I loved four out of the five routes in Nightshade. I really liked the characters themselves, their individual stories were exciting and filled with twists and turns even if they didn’t form a cohesive whole, and the romances were good. Including the, ahem, darker one.

The only route I didn’t like had two major points against it: he’s her first cousin, and they’re barely together in the route. I did enjoy his route at first (while ignoring the whole “blood relative” part) until I played the others and realized how bland it felt in comparison due to his lack of involvement.

Unlike some of the visual novels I’ve covered, I wouldn’t recommend this one if you’re only interested in the plot and don’t care about the romance, because the romances are what make Nightshade great! A love for ninja stories might be enough to catch your interest too, though.

It’s the sort of visual novel that makes me hope for a fandisc just to see more of the characters and their time with Enju… but for now, it seems I’ll be left waiting.

London Detective Mysteria: Great Otome, Where is the Sequel?

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Mar 312021
 

During my big visual novel buying spree a few years back, another otome I picked up was London Detective Mysteria.

London Detective Mysteria follows a young noblewoman named Emily who gets the queen’s blessing to attend an academy for young would-be detectives. There, she meets characters who are largely descendants of famous fictional detectives (and other related characters), like Sherlock Holmes’s son and Miss Marple’s granddaughter.

At first I thought this was just a way to avoid using the actual characters, but that’s not the case at all. Most notably, the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Herlock (yes, they actually named him Herlock Holmes) is an important part of his story and motivations.

That gives the story a neat “second generation” sort of feel that I didn’t expect when I started.

The common route deals with Emily and her classmates encountering various mysteries, and the game even provides a special journal feature to let you save any line of dialogue to check it later while trying to figure out a case. There’s only a handful of times when that’s actually useful, but it was a nice thought.

Based on your choices, you end up on one of several character routes.

I liked all of the love interests, and each route had a fairly interesting story that ties into the overarching story about a sinister organization and Emily’s personal investigation into her parents’ deaths. Once you see every ending, including the bad endings and non-romance routes, you unlock the “grand ending” that follows up on that.

Unfortunately, the grand ending route feels underwhelming compared to the individual character routes. It’s clearly intended to build up to a sequel – in fact, the grand ending epilogue actually ends with an outright teaser for the next game.

There has been no word about the London Detective Mysteria sequel, but I hope it’s still being made. This was a fun otome and an entertaining mystery story, and I’d really love to see it continue.

So if you like visual novels, romance, and mysteries, London Detective Mysteria is worth checking out… as long as you’re okay with it ending on a cliffhanger that might never be resolved.

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