Community Visual Novel Book Club - Coffee Talk

[Exzyleph]

Welcome to the 13th MetaCouncil visual novel book club!

For this book club we will be reading Toge Productions's Coffee Talk, a visual novel about coffee-brewing and listening to other people's problems, set in a modern world of elves and succubi, werewolves and vampires. Bookclub participants can obtain Coffee Talk on Steam, on GOG, and on Itch.io. The novel is short length according to VNDB and a completionist play-through is estimated to take 8 hours on HLBT.​

This is an informal book club, so there is no fixed schedule; you simply read the novel at your own pace, and share your thoughts along the way or when you are done reading. Just remember to use spoiler tags liberally. For general information about past and future book clubs, please see the main MetaCouncil Book Club thread. The main thread also includes a preliminary schedule for the rest of 2020, and suggestions are very welcome both for 2020 and beyond.​

The Story

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Coffee Talk is a game about listening to people’s problems and helping them by serving up a warm drink out of the ingredients you have in stock. It is a game that depicts lives as humanly as possible, while having a cast that is more than just humans.

Immerse yourself in the stories of alternative-Seattle inhabitants, ranging from a dramatic love story between an elf and a succubus, an alien trying to understand humans’ lives, and many others modern readers will find strongly echo the world around them.

[Taken from Steam]​

Walkthrough

Coffee Talk is a mostly linear game, with two endings and a number of missable events tied to achivements. This guide describes how to obtain all of those.​

Next Month

Next month is the Spooktober Visual Novel Book Club and the scheduled visual novel is Yangyang Mobile's The Letter (VNDB), a visual novel inspired by classic Asian horror films, Ju-ON: The Grudge and The Ring. The Letter that tells the tale of seven people trapped in a cursed mansion and the lengths they have to go to in order to survive.

Like last year, the Spooktober bookclub will also include suggested readings for people who prefer something a little less spooky.
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[FeedMeAStrayCat]

I'll join again! I'll try to post some thoughts along the way this time, unlike The Silver Case where I completely forgot about the thread

Speaking of which, still need to write up my thoughts on that..

 

[Mutant Strawberry]

I keep thinking I own this but I'm confused with Necrobarista and Va11-Ha11-A. Visual Novel bartending games are becoming quite the niche.

 

[Exzyleph]

I keep thinking I own this but I'm confused with Necrobarista and Va11-Ha11-A. Visual Novel bartending games are becoming quite the niche.

Yeah, and at some point we'll also get the sequel to VA-11 Hall-A: N1RV Ann-A.
But it is kinda surprising that it has taken so long for similar games to pop up.
From what I remember, VA-11 Hall-A is one of the best selling VN on Steam, so you'd think it'd get more copy-cats.

But if you are interested in joining the bookclub, then Humble currently has the game at 20% off:

Buy Coffee Talk from the Humble Store

Coffee Talk is a game about listening to people’s problems and helping them by serving up a warm drink out of the ingredients you have in stock. It is a game that depicts lives as humanly as possible, while having a cast that is more than just humans. Immerse yourself in the stories of...

www.humblebundle.com

 

[Exzyleph]

Read a few days of days in Coffee Shop and it has been a bit of a mixed experience, for some smaller and some bigger reasons.

Sep 22nd to Sep 25th

On the bright side, the game looks great, it has a really nice sound-track (though not Garoad tier), and it uses simple animations and camera movements in way that helps make the story feel alive despite the fixed viewpoint. On the less positive side, the game is perhaps trying to ape VA-11 Hall-A a bit too hard and the Coffee Shop feels more like a bar than a place that serves coffee, despite not serving alcohol. The strange opening hours felt the same way, even with the game's attempt at lamp-shading those. There is also the obvious question as to why everyone friends their barista on not-Facebook. It made the whole thing feel somewhat off to me.

One area where the game differs from VA-11 Hall-A is that the main character is nameable. But they don't really come off as a self-insert character to me. There are hints of a background story that has not yet been revealed (assuming that I am not just reading too much into it) and I have to wonder if it would not have made more sense to have a player character with a more fixed identity.

Where VA-11 Hall-A had the bartender (Jill) take the lead in most conversations, Coffee Talk instead employs the store regular Freya. Freye is trying to write a book and stumbles over the idea of getting her ideas from the stories the Coffee Talk customers tell. This of course raises some rather touchy questions about privacy, that do get mentioned in the game, but the game then quickly glosses over that. We are just to take for granted that Freya is spying on every conversation she isn't a part of and that too feels a bit off.

In addition to introducing the barista and Freya, day one (the 22nd) introduces us to the couple Lua and Baileys, an elf and an a succubus who are having problems with their families. Elves look down on succubi, so Baileys marrying Lua would mean cutting off his family. Yet, somehow, the immortality of elves is tied to their families, so doing so would also mean becoming mortal. When this conflict is brought up again, the loss of immortality was seemingly not mentioned, which made me wonder why the developers made it an issue in the first place. It was as if they really wanted to emphasize the cost of cutting off your family, but it didn't feel necessary. It'll be interesting to see if that is ever brought up again.

Day two, the 23rd, introduces Jorji, the friendly neighborhood cop, who his shift drinking coffee instead of working. While Jorji is a sympathetic character, both in this chapter and in the next chapter, recent events means that there is an underlying tension between his presence in the narrative and the game's overt attempt at showcasing racial conflicts through the lens of urban fantasy. We are also introduced to Gale, a werewolf, and Hyde, a vampire. Werewolves, it seems, have a day a month where they run amok, and each werewolf tries to control this rampage in different ways. Hyde, on the other hand, is trying to go "vegan" by only drinking synthetic blood. Speaking of poor timing due to real-life events, the daily newspaper introduces us to a zombie epidemic that has just reached Seattle, where the coffee shop is located, and we learn that Gale, who works in a hospital, is very busy because of this ..

Day three, the 24th, gives us a curt introduction to a female Orc with dreads, as well as a catgirl (Nekomimi) named Rachel. Rachel is out late because she fought with her father over her show-business line of work, but is talked down by Jorji. We later learn that she lives in "Nekotown", which together with the Japanese name for her race made me wonder if it was meant as a Chinatown analogue. At this point I would not be surprised if this intends for Nekomimi to represent Asian people and for orcs to represent black people, the latter being a rather common trope.

Day four, the 25th, starts with a newspaper entry in which a werewolf was arrested for using illicit drugs to control their rage. And obvious parallel here would be the use of marijuana to self-medicate. Freya and the barista talk about her Freya's ideas for her book, in which Freya ponders a world with only humans, the twist being that there is still racial discrimination despite there not literally being different species of people. This came off so incredibly ham-fisted that it made me go back and re-consider what the game is doing in a lot of places in a less positive light. Using fantasy races as placeholders for different human groups is of course nothing new, but this conversation made me feel a lot less optimistic about the game being able to hand this trope in a decent manner. Lua returns after that and clashes with Hyde over her unwillingness to ask Baileys to give up his family for her, something that she confesses to not being able to do herself.

I'm not sure where the game will go from here. I expect that I will enjoy the moment to moment scenes, but at this point I am skeptical of how it will handle its characters and their conflicts.

 

[Exzyleph]

I had planned on making a few more posts, but I ended up reading the rest of the game in one sitting. Overall it was an enjoyable read, but it also felt way too shallow for the themes it dealt with and frequently too on the nose with how it presented those themes.

The gameplay elements also ended up feeling a bit off-putting. You start with an mostly empty book recipes, and have to discover the rest. However, the well crafted atmosphere made it feel kind of weird to have to fart around while in the middle of serving a customer. Weirdly, the game would seemingly not remember drinks that you discovered, but didn't serve, making screenshots a handy tool to remember what you discovered. It would perhaps have worked better if it was more focused on finding an appropriate drink for the customer, as opposed to guessing at the ingredients and their order.

However, despite these complaints, I still liked the characters, the art, and in particular the music. To be honest, I am probably going to be recommending the soundtrack over and above the game itself and for me VA-11 Hall-A remains the top bartending VN on the market, though I have yet to read Necrobarista.

Sep. 26th to end

Since I ended up reading to the end, I'll skip talking about the individual days, and instead just talk about the characters.

Neil shows up on the fifth day and quickly won me over. However, their role was mainly just to comment on how tricky interpersonal communication is and how hard it is to get laid. They also serve to trigger the brief introduction of FIRE, the game's equivalent to ICE, which was one of the many moments that made me roll my eyes at the game.

Myrtle the orc and Aqua the Oceanic (creative naming, there) are a nice couple, with both supporting each other in various ways. You could read a romantic subtext into their story-line, but the game itself leaves their relationship open to interpretation. The introduction of the "MAX West" con was yet another cause of eye-rolling.

Hyde and Gala is another nice couple, but is also an example of how shallow the game treats the issues it touches upon, Gala's trauma from being a veteran in particular.

Lua and Baileys relationship problems were solved, I guess. The solution was seemingly just to have Lua let Baileys do what he wanted to do in the first place, namely leave his family. Okay?

Rachel and her father, Hendry, was another big what the fuck for me. Hendry quickly establishes that he is exactly as overprotective as Rachel alludes to. The story even has Jorji do a background check on Rachel's manager at Hendry's request, which straight up abuse of power. Yet the game never comments on that and ultimately presents Hendry as being completely in the right, even presenting him as the innocent victim after he attacks Rachel's manager's bodyguards (due to them talking crudely about Rachel), at which point he gets a beating in return. It is only Rachel who has to reconsider her beliefs and ultimately submits to her father's wishes. There is no such reckoning for Hendry.

Another major issue I had with the game was that it put a paper-thin veneer the present-day USA (ranging from racial workplace discrimination, to ICE, PAX, and even Neil Gaiman), yet failed to meaningfully engage with any of the real-world subjects it alluded to. Instead it just felt like the authors were constantly winking at the audience.

At the end of the game we learn that the barista is something akin to Neil, not a human and somehow outside of time. Replaying the game introduces a few short segments where the barista gives away that he is know aware of what is going to happen. However, this felt fairly crude, with the barista straight up just spilling facts and getting caught by Freya. It didn't read very convincingly. At the end of this second play-through, we learn that the barista is the god of coffeine .. because why not? Just another poorly utilized plot point.

That's it for me this time around. I'll post again when the next thread goes up.

 

[Exzyleph]

The 14th VN Book Club thread is now up!
Since this month it is Spooktober, you have the choice of reading The Letter with me, or reading any other Spooktober themed visual novel of your choice:

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Thank you to everyone who joined in reading Coffee Talk!
This thread will of course remain open, and I hope that you will still share your thoughts if you are not yet done reading Coffee Talk or if you find this thread at a later date.