Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 56 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

When Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story released on Nintendo Switch in 2024, it went for the second of these styles, managing a business and catering to customers while choosing your shop’s layout and wares, with this game’s shop focusing on Japanese confectionary sweets like the titular dorayaki, which is kinda’ like a pair of pancakes sandwiched around sweet red bean paste.

And as the title indicates, this game also adds another ingredient into the mix in the form of the popular long-running Japanese manga and anime series, Doraemon, working in both characters from that franchise as well as elements like the pink “Anywhere Door”, with brief text-based cutscenes telling the game’s (largely disposable) story about Doraemon and Nobita helping a dorayaki shop owner after he injures his hand, along with various other wacky adventures.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, and it’s nice to see these popular Doraemon characters rendered in Kairosoft’s signature retro style.

So I’m doing something kinda’ unique for this review. Thus far, I have been basically reviewing the Kairosoft games in order of original release, to get a better feel for how the developer has progressed over time. Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story is an exception here, with this game only having released in the West within the last month or so at the time I’m writing this review. So perhaps you can picture my curiosity at seeing what changes a 12-year jump in the developer’s games has brought.

And honestly… this game is a hot mess.

Okay, let me back up a sec and explain. I don’t think Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story is a bad game, and in fact, I see a lot of the common issues from earlier Kairosoft games addressed here. While there are still gameplay elements that could do with better explanation, this game is generally decent about conveying information to the player. And players are given numerous ways to improve their products and in turn drive up their profits and popularity with customers. What’s more, this game adds a lot of variety and different ways to focus your energies, whether it is in exploring for ingredients, improving your staff’s stats, rearranging your restaurant for optimal performance, and so on.

The problem is, where earlier Kairosoft games could go at a lazy pace that could be frustrating, this game has the opposite problem, and all of this stuff is thrown at the player rapid-fire without giving them a chance to process anything. The moment you’re done learning how to make new recipes, you can’t experiment with this information because you’re off to the next thing. You’re taught how to inspect customers’ desires to get recipe ideas but before you can even do so you’re whisked off to the next task. For a few hours straight, it just felt like a non-stop assault of new things coming up to try to grab my attention.

Another issue I noticed was that the localization in this game is really sloppy, probably more so than any other Kairosoft game I’ve played. This is undoubtedly due to the greater amount of story in this game, and it did lead to amusing moments like a taste tester commenting that my latest dish was “An ally of the commons”, but outside of fun silliness like this, it did make it hard to follow along with what was going on, especially with this game’s breakneck pace.

In the end, I still found Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story to be enjoyable, but I really wished there was a way to turn down the game’s pacing (I checked, there isn’t – there’s only a way to speed it up after completing the game once), and I wish the localization team spent more time smoothing out this game’s English because as-is it’s really rough. If it wasn’t for this issues, this game could have been one of the best games Kairosoft has yet released, as there’s a lot of content and variety here. It’s just a shame that the game doesn’t really give players the time or space to enjoy any of that content before rushing them on to see the next thing.

tl;dr – Doraemon Dorayaki Shop Story is a Management Simulation where players manage a Japanese confections shop, deciding which sweets to cook, arranging the restaurant, and trying to appeal to customers, featuring characters and story elements from the long-running Japanese Doraemon franchise. This game has a good amount of variety and can be quite enjoyable, but it plays with an absurdly rushed pace that refuses to give players time to absorb information before they’re rushed onto the next thing, and the game’s terrible localization is a problem too. Overall, there’s a good Management Simulation here, but the game is too hurried to let you enjoy it.

Grade: C+

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