It’s another demo today, and once again it’s not a new game, so I’m not sure what utility this post will give to anyone. But it’s okay — this site has always just been my form of public therapy (and I can think of a few real writers who seem to mainly write for that purpose too.)

So then, so what if nobody needs this post? I’m still going to have a look at the demo for Maid Café on Electric Street. This maid café management/coffee brewing/dating/life sim takes place in Osaka’s Den-Den Town in the Nipponbashi district, according to my research the Akihabara of western Japan. Sounds pretty nice, and apparently it’s less crowded than Akihabara, that being the far better known nerd neighborhood.

What better place then to quit your horrible office job that makes you wish for death every day, even on your days off? About two minutes after the game begins, the protagonist walks out on his asshole taskmaster boss as he’s applauded by the rest of the office, who probably just stayed behind to keep working while talking about how cool that just was.

Freedom is nice, but it’s also expensive, and it sure as hell means you can’t afford a table at this trendy maid café. Time to find new work.

After looking for and failing to find any available positions in the businesses on your street, he ends up at the far smaller, more modest maid café at the far left of the neighborhood, where he lives through his own episode one of an anime that I swear I’ve seen at least a few times over. It turns out this café is currently closed, shuttered after its owner left the country and put the one remaining maid/waitress there in charge of finding a new manager. And hey, here’s protagonist and he needs a job, and best of all he gets a free apartment just above the restaurant to live in. A one-minute commute? I can only dream of that.

I was about to call this guy a lucky bastard, but he does get a pretty serious challenge to deal with in return.

Very soon, you’ll have a couple of employees to manage and rely upon, and I’m guessing two others as well, since there are four total maids featured in the Steam preview video. Most days will be taken up by café management, during which you can help around the place in your capacity as manager, helping Shiro and co. take and serve orders (though if I went to a maid café, I probably wouldn’t want to be served by the manager.)

Turns out it’s also another VA11-HALL-A-inspired game: you can also learn to brew custom drinks that you’ll need to serve to certain special guests.

Thankfully, you also get some leisure time in the evenings and on days the restaurant is closed, and here the social and dating sim elements come in. Electric Street and the surroundings have plenty of other restaurants, shops, arcades, theaters and other distractions to enjoy, and some of them sell items that are obviously the “give this to the lady you like” variety, all Persona style (though it’s probably a far older game mechanic even than that.)

Pretty sure Honoka is also dateable as one of the obviously recruitable maids, and she looks real quirky, so I may have to go with her.

As for the environment, I imagine this place is heavily modeled on some part of the real-life Den-Den Town — there are a couple of real businesses featured here like Suruga-ya and Sofmap, though you can only enter the Suruga-ya and about half of the other storefronts on the street. Maybe these guys were in partnership with the publisher? It would make a lot of sense considering the audience for this game and the clientele of Suruga-ya is about one for one.

They probably weren’t sponsored by McDonalds, but then again you need to give your fictional clown burger chain that WcDonalds treatment, it’s such a joke by now.

The presentation in Maid Café is beautiful — I love the attention to detail, the character designs, and especially the backgrounds and day/night cycles that make hanging around and living in this part of Osaka feel a little more real. Some of the BGM is also very nice, though I could really do without the happy happy super-positive ukulele/clapping bullshit music that plays during the café management sections. Miserable fuck I am, that kind of music is like touching acid to me. But then we were really all drowning in that awful stuff for years. If I pick up the full version of this game, I hope I can change up the soundtrack — seems like something the manager should be able to do.

I could spend hours in a place like this. Comic and card shops around here have a completely different feel (not to mention stock.)

Sure, I guess it’s been established after 12 years of writing this shitty blog that I’m a big weeb. And I guess I probably will buy Maid Café on Electric Street, since I think I’m squarely in the target audience. Especially being here in the US, since that means I can’t easily get over to the actual Den-Den Town to get served a fancy overpriced sugary drink by a woman in a frilly outfit, so I have to do it electronically. Until next time!