There’s a very good chance that DoraKone will feel nostalgic, but for a very specific time period. That’ll be the summer of 2016. It’s when Pokémon GO launched, and it felt like everyone (including us) wandered, zombie-like, around towns and villages, spinning PokéStops and hunting for Nidoqueens. It feels like roughly three years ago, but Sweet Pikachu it’s seven.
Instead of using Pokémon GO, which would have received a swift cease-and-desist letter, DoraKone switches it out for a game called Dragon Connection. It’s all the rage in the world of DoraKone, and everyone is hunting the city for rare dragons. Groups are hanging around Dragon Connection gyms, battling each other. The local ice cream shop, which sits on the equivalent of a PokéStop, has banned people from coming into the shop without buying anything.
Dulce, the main character of DoraKone, is a couple of weeks late to Dragon Connection. Her phone wasn’t capable of playing it, but now she’s got a new one and it is on like Flareon. So, out she goes, pounding the streets of the city, looking to build her collection.
On her travels, she meets other Dragon Connection players. There’s Brin, who’s in it for the battling, and is the competitive sort who wants to win at all times. Rayen is the opposite of Brin – a demure completionist who couldn’t give a monkeys about battling. And finally there’s Honoreé, who has a rich family, so she gets to travel the world and pick up the rare region-specific dragons. It gives her the experience she needs to squat on all the Dragon Connection gyms, denying Brin the ability to win them (Dragon Connection is about as identical to Pokémon GO as the developers could get).
All of this takes the form of a visual novel. You view a simple map with the characters’ decapitated heads floating over locations like a Plaza, Mountain and Ice Cream Shop. Then you choose where you want to head, meeting and greeting the people who are there. You have a nice chat, make some dialogue choices, and invisibly, somewhere in the engine room of DoraKone, the characters increase or decrease their appreciation for you.
There’s a second invisible bar too: the likelihood that you will place first in the upcoming Dragon Connection tournament, coming to your hometown. Because you are not only getting to know (and even romance) the three girls of DoraKone, but you are working towards a finale where you might even become a champion. For the best endings, and the largest achievements, you will want to do both: get the girl and the spoils.
There’s a dark, nerdy part of us that wants to go “but aksherly” to some of the Pokémon GO stuff in DoraKone. There’s no way that Dulce could arrive as late as she does to Dragon Connection and still win a major tournament. But we will stop being dicks and embrace DoraKone for what it is: a likable visual novel that doesn’t need that kind of energy, thank you very much.
How can you not like a visual novel dating sim that uses Pokémon GO to keep its plot moving forward? There’s something endearing about watching the four girls of DoraKone focus so single-mindedly on their hobby. Almost all of the chat is filtered through Dragon Connection: they chat about the best elemental match-ups, the optimal places to find dragons, and the latest updates to the game. Often it can feel like you’re eavesdropping on some enthusiasts on the bus, as they chat energetically about their interests, and it’s hard not to get swept up with them.
You could argue that DoraKone could have dropped the Dragon Connection stuff once in a while. You do get to know the different girls – Honoreé is partial to some steamy literature, and you can help Rayen get over her social anxieties – but mostly you are chatting about the game. With a limited playtime (DoraKone isn’t much longer than an hour), there’s an argument that not enough of that hour is spent getting to know these characters. It’s a minor blemish, but a justifiable one.
It helps that the writing is well done. Coming off the back of Weeping Willow, a less-than-great graphic novel, the comparison is night-and-day. There’s immense care here, when Weeping Willow was sloppy and mistranslated. The characters are strongly entrenched in their own personality quirks, yet they’re great fun to spend time with. We would have happily trebled the playtime of DoraKone as we wanted to see if Honoreé could ever drop the narcissism, or Brin could mellow a touch.
There’s a fair amount of branching to be had, too. For a game that’s over in the space of a few Pokemon battles, it manages to cram in enough choices to create four endings per character. You can romance the girls, or you can develop something more platonic. You can win the tournament with them (Dragon Connection has a doubles tournament built-in), or you can spectacularly lose. We will be honest, we didn’t necessarily need the romancing aspect: very suddenly we were smooching, when we thought we were just getting to know our duelling partner. But there aren’t exactly a surfeit of lesbian dating sims on the Xbox, so DoraKone will be gold dust to a number of players.
Once we reached the end of DoraKone, snogging on the first place of the Dragon Connection podium, we were kind of sad it was all over. As mentioned, this isn’t a long or substantial visual novel, and while that should never be enough to criticise a game (short games are games too!), we did feel like there was more to say. Like shutting down Pokémon GO while rare Pokemon are still about, it ends prematurely.
We were on a run of some rather naff visual novels, so praise be for DoraKone. It’s short but sugary sweet, and its writers and designers have taken great care to make sure the hour-or-so of gameplay is endearing and polished. Plus, it’s a lesbian dating sim that uses Pokémon GO for inspiration. How could any visual novel enthusiast say no?
