5.4 hours played
Written 15 days ago
[h1]Is this game worth it without the 18+ DLC?[/h1]
I would say so.
More specifically, I would say the game had enough of a plot (or at least a series of random though somewhat related events that appeared in sequence, but in a fun way) and the characters had enough personality to them to enjoy for its own sake, and there is some meaning to this besides [i]just[/i] being an excuse for naughty moments.
[h1]My personal random ramblings[/h1]
Enough of me pretending to be helpful to other players, now it's time for me to vent about my experience playing the game. You may as well stop reading here, because the rest of this review somewhat doesn't matter (though I guess it does mildly touch upon certain things that happen in the game, but honestly the main takeaway here is just "Playing without the 18+ DLC doesn't mean it's suddenly family friendly, it's just more like 17+ instead").
So, to start with, the way I even heard about this game in the first place was that occasionally I'll check old forum threads where people are recommending games in categories I'm interested in or I'll look through interesting curator lists and stuff looking for new ideas for games to play, and a name that kept popping up over and over was Nekopara, Nekopara. The title alone didn't seem that interesting at first glance, so I just ignored it, but the name just kept popping up over and over in different places, Nekopara, Nekopara, and this was mentioned far more than most games to the point where I finally decided to see what it was everyone was going on about, and I look and, eh, it's just some catgirl game, nothing that special, really.
Still, there's a demo, so I may as well try it out just to see what all the fuss is about, and normally I'm the kind of guy who plays a demo for 90 seconds and if the game hasn't captured my interest by then I just quit and move on, but this time I was going to take it super seriously because this was a big big demo in my mind, not just for this random game that the entire "young lonely anime obsessed male" population seems to adore, but also a demo for essentially the entire "Because you don't have a girlfriend, here's an anime girl instead" (not that I'm trying to be unkind to the playerbase here, but it's certainly true that I don't have a girlfriend and I played this game, and that should say enough) visual novel genre as a whole, because looking into the genre, a lot of other games looked vaguely as interesting as Nekopara but didn't have demos and so if what I assume is one of the most popular and therefore likely best games in the genre didn't seem interesting I'd just forget about those other ones too.
So, I'm playing the demo, and it's good or whatever, I guess, and then I get to the end (equivalent to the end of chapter 1 in the full game) when Chocola is telling generic protagonist that she wants to stay with him, and I admit I rather enjoyed that scene and I thought the backstory when the catgirls were younger was cute and I thought it was really really sweet the way Chocola loves her master so much, and, yeah, it was a bit heavy handed and they didn't have to say 700 times that these were her true honest feelings, but still, it was probably better to go too heavy than too light there and so I enjoyed it and so fine game you win and I'll wishlist you.
A little later I eventually get around to buying the full game, and I'm playing it without the 18+ DLC, and I must say my general impression with adult games (mostly because I'd heard about a couple of RPG's where it's apparently possible to do a pure run, but I guess maybe I shouldn't generalize that sort of thing) was that there will often be a choice to watch a naughty scene with little impact on the plot or just skip it, and I thought I had even noticed a point in the demo where such a choice might occur, because there's a point where the catgirls are asking generic protagonist to take a bath with them and he says no without any input from the player but I had figured at the time that maybe if you were playing the full game and had the 18+ DLC you'd have the opportunity to say yes there for a naughty scene if you'd like, and I just figured the whole game would be like that with mostly normal goings on interspersed with random smut occasionally, but then actually playing, uhh... no, that's not the game at all, and the smut is baked into the main plot here and most noticeably a whole big thing is made out of the catgirls going into heat and desperately needing a partner as a flimsy excuse for generic protagonist to say "I guess it can't be helped" and heading off to satisfy them, and without the 18+ DLC we don't actually see this happen but the game just skips to them lying in bed afterwards, but it's still implied, and honestly it was personally a bit of a disappointment for me because I'm the kind of guy who when they care for a character wants to see them stay pure and innocent, but at least my girls seemed happy about it, I guess. I just hope generic protagonist continues to take good care of them.
More than that, though, I was surprised by how much stuff made it into this game even without the 18+ DLC: There's a scene of generic protagonist washing off the catgirls after an incredibly forced situation to get them dirty that any idiot should have seen coming a mile away and that generic protagonist should have known to stop well in advance, but my point is the girls are totally naked here and there's a full illustration for it, and, yeah, due to the angle and some convenient steam and stuff nothing "interesting" is visible here, but it was still really hot and I enjoyed it anyway and I still wouldn't want my mom to see that image as my desktop background.
Also, there's weirdly a scene of one of the catgirls, well... "having a good time by herself", let's call it, and I have no idea if that scene might be more explicit with the 18+ DLC or something, but as I saw it, there was no special illustration or anything but just the usual character model with its arms extending beneath the bottom of the screen suggestively and some obligatory moaning and whatnot, but that was still more than I was expecting here.
Also, there's a scene of two of the characters talking about reproduction, which mostly centers around plants, but one of the characters is getting way too into it and drooling at the thought and stuff anyway.
Random thing, but generic protagonist's little sister kept making weird inappropriate comments to him, and it wasn't a major element to the story and I don't [i]think[/i] she was serious, but I still thought that felt weird, not just without the 18+ DLC, but just in general because although I realize that we who are into brother-sister stuff are not an insignificant group in the lonely young guys community, I also realize that there are plenty of people who aren't and such a taboo tends to be rather strong (not to mention she's specifically referred to as a kid at least once), and so I thought it a strange choice to include that in the game for such little reason and potentially alienate some of the players who were just here for the totally normal human on animal action (seriously, a fairly big deal is made about how catgirls are seen more as cat than girl, and I noticed in the Japanese text at least once them being referred to with a counter for animals, and it seems strange to me that if you wanted to have relations with catgirls that you would do so with a mindset that focuses more on the cat than on the girl) rather than the somehow less normal brother on sister lack of action (because for the record, generic protagonist isn't into the stuff his sister says, but he'd rather she knocked it off).
Also, there's a gratuitous double panty shot.
Anyway, near the end there's a scene where the catgirls are threatened with arrest while trying to help their master, and I thought their dedication to him was sweet there too.
