With their Master gone for the day, the catgirls pass their day together. Join them as they wake up, eat together, go out, and then head to sleep in NEKOPARA vol.0.
NEKOPARA vol.0 is a visual novel that covers the events before vol.1. Of course, I’ve never actually gone through vol.1, so I went into this without knowing who they were. NEKOPARA vol.0 doesn’t go into any introductions, so despite it happening before vol.1, it’s probably best to go through that one first.
NEKOPARA vol.0 follows a day in the lives of Shigure and the 6 catgirls of the Minaduki household. Their master isn’t there when they go to wake him up, so they just go about a daily routine. You’ll go hour-by-hour as they have breakfast, clean, order lunch, go out for the afternoon, get coffee, make dinner, take a bath, and then go to sleep. This is all compacted into around an hour of storytelling.
You can also “interact” with the girls if you wish through a “Pet Mode”. What this basically allows you to do is click on them and have them react as if you’re petting them. This also goes for Shigure, the little sister of the bunch and the only human you’ll see in this story. If you want to get the achievements then you’ll want to do this once with each girl. You can also try moving your window around, as the game will actually react to that too. Considering I hardly ever see anything react to you moving your window around, this was sort of neat. Granted, I doubt you can do this in fullscreen mode, but at least you can freely change between the two.
While from what I gather of vol.1 is that there was an uncensored version available to find for those who wanted it, vol.0 doesn’t have one. I wouldn’t say it’s completely clean though as there are definitely more mature references – albeit a bit cleaned up – and you can also change how much the breasts move.
The writing was overall fine, though I did spot a few spelling mistakes. Mostly just a repeated word or a missing letter, but I did spot some bad grammar on occasion. Considering the length, the existence of some is a little annoying, but at least there isn’t an abundance of them. You also have the option of changing between English, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese for both the text and the subtitles. Why both are needed, I don’t know, but hey I guess if you want to see it in two languages at once you can. All of the voice work is in Japanese though, so I suppose the subtitles is useful for that. It’s still weird though considering you can just put the text into English.
For $3 you’re getting an hour long VN. I’ve seen more asked for less, or even the same. It definitely feels fairly priced for the length, though considering you probably want to go through vol.1 before this, the price is made up for there. It was still an interesting little VN to go through, and I will say I am a little curious to know more about the characters.
NEKOPARA vol.0 Review Score
4/5
NEKOPARA vol.0 is available now on Steam.
I would like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy for review.
