About
Nekopara is a kinetic visual novel by doujin artist Sayori based on a hentai doujin by the same artist and released on December 29th, 2014. Following its release, the game’s appeal and use of an E-mote System managed to gain a lot of praise on Steam and other sites.
The novel follows main protagonist Minaduki Kashou as he moves out of his parents’ place to start a patisserie while he also unwillingly has to take care his two pet catgirls, Chocola and Vanilla. Kashou attempts to raise the duo with the help of his sister and their four other catgirls, all while a romance between the three is slowly developing.
History
Nekopara[1] is based on a hentai doujin titled Neko Para (shown below) by doujin artist Sayori,[3] which was first released on August 11th, 2013.[2] Although the doujin was released in 2013, Sayori already created original character content of the title’s due, Chocola and Vanilla, as early as 2008, with the earliest tracable piece on the English being found on Danbooru from April 15th of that year.[5] However, the main website of Sayori’s studio, Neko Works,[4] was already created in February 2003,[6] making it unclear when the characters were first created.
On November 11th, 2014, an unannounced trial version of Nekopara was released to the public.[7] The next month, on December 29th of that year, the complete version of the game was released and made available for purchase. Although the main site[1] featured the complete game, other areas, such as Valve’s Steam store,[8] only offered a version with the explicit content removed.
Reception
Following its release, the game was met with a large amount of praise. 3 weeks after the release, the game had a positive feedback of 97% out of more than 1,500 reviews on Steam.[8] Gametactics[9] gave the game a score of 7.3/10 and HardcoreGamer[10] reviewed it at 3.5/5. The game stands at a Metacritic[11] score of 7.5 as of January 19th, 2015. The doujin also has a score of 7.58/10 on MyAnimeList[2] and more than 3,200 favorites on Fakku.[12] A game feature that was quickly made fun of was the “chest bounciness” option made available through the game’s E-Mote system (shown below), which allowed its players to determine how often the chests of the female cast would bounce.
Fandom
Prior and after the game’s release, fanart of the characters was already shared on image sharing websites. The game features more than 40, 55 and 70 images on Danbooru,[13] DeviantArt[14] and Zerobchan[15] respectively, although most of these images are official artworks such as CG art and wallpapers. The official DeviantArt page[16] for Neko Works, which was created in September 2010, has more than 430 members and 68,000 pageviews as of January 19th, 2015.
Search Interest
External References
[1]Nekopara.com(NSFW: Explicit Content)
[6]Who.is – Sayori.sabori.com
[7]Tsundere.me.jp – Nekopara Trial
[9]Gametactics – NekoPara vol. 01 Review
[10]HardcoreGamer – Review: Nekopara Vol. 1
[11]Metacritic – Nekopara Vol. 1
[12]Fakku – Neku Para 01(NSFW: Explicit Content)
[13]Danbooru – Search: ‘Nekopara’(NSFW: Explicit Content)
[14]DeviantArt – Search: ‘Nekopara’
[15]Zerochan – Search: ‘Neko Para’
[16]DeviantArt – Neko Works FC