NekoPara Vol. 1 Review

Title: NEKOPARA Vol. 1
Genre: Visual Novel
Publisher: NEKO WORKs
Developer: NEKO WORKs
System: PC
Release Date: 30-12-2014

A short doujin eroge about catgirls working in a cafe, with much hype surrounding its release due to it being a trilingual launch. That’s right, a visual novel where you can toggle between Japanese, Chinese, and English! You can also display two languages at once.

The story begins with a simple scenario. The protagonist, Kashou, left his house to start a patisserie named La Soleil. Upon stepping into his new store, he notices two suspicious boxes lying on the floor. To his surprise, they were two of his family’s cats, who had ran away from home to go live with him.

By “cats” I really mean catgirls, because in the story’s setting, humanoid catgirls are commonplace in society as pets or even partners to humans. They look like humans with ears and tails, and understand human speak, but the influence of the cat genes run strong and they act very much like normal cats with their inability to resist cat toys.

NekoPara, due to being a low-priced doujin eroge, is thin in volume when it comes to the story. A couple of hours is all you should need to read through it, but it still manages to have some drama in the beginning where Kashou is hesitant in taking in his cats because he was sure that they’d be able to live a better life at home with his sister who was the one who took care of the cats. After that, it’s mostly fluff until the end, where they stick in a rather forced 5-minute conflict. If you’ve been used to story-centric eroge, it’s better if you don’t go trying to look for something deep because that will be a futile effort.

The main appeal is seeing catgirls do cute and silly cat-like things, and the highly-polished artwork by popular artist Sayori, whose illustrations are of a higher quality than the average commercial moege, let alone doujin software. There are also 3 h-scenes to look forward to, of course, but if you prefer to not see those then there’s an all-ages version of the game you can buy from Steam, which is around half the price of the R18 edition from DLSite.

It’s the type of eroge that you can probably predict whether you’d like it or not based on first impressions, because it’s really just about cute catgirls. More specifically, Chocola and Vanilla, the two catgirls who followed Kashou to his store. The other four cats his sister owns make an appearance, but the focus is on the main two. Since there’s that vol. 1 in the title, I presume that future installments will provide some h-scenes with characters other than the main two.

As for the catgirls, Chocola is the happy-go-lucky one whereas Vanilla is the more laid-back one. I ended up liking the latter the most, despite preferring the former’s twintails at first. But hey, Vanilla has twintails too, so all’s good.

The production values, like the art, are great for a doujin game. The sprites are animating using the E-mote software, so they’ve got mild movements to make the scenes look more lively. If you move the game window, they sprites will actually jump in the direction you dragged! The h-scenes are animated, and there is a slider for how much you want the chests to jiggle, to add to the novelty. It’s quite nice to see sprites that aren’t completely still, especially since I’ve only played a few eroge that actually use E-mote to animate their characters. Things like head tilts are pretty cute. Most of the animations don’t look too natural compared to 2D sprites animated frame-by-frame, but they’re fun to watch for the novelty.

I don’t think I need to say this again, but NekoPara is to be played for cute catgirls and maybe the lewd parts. That’s pretty much it’s main appeal, so the enjoyment depends on whether that lands in your strike one or not. It’s a pretty average work for what it sets out to do, so the main hype behind it is the art and trilingual release.