Ahh, to be surrounded by ikemen who serve you in a fancy mansion. I’m pretty sure that’s most girls’ dream scenario. And that’s exactly what Devil Butler With Black Cat have to offer us! Sit tight as we’re about take a trip to a fantasy world where ikemen butlers are ready to serve you well.
The story of Devil Butler With Black Cat begins when you find a mysterious black cat coming out of nowhere. The cat give you a gorgeous golden ring, which suddenly transports you to a place you’ve never heard of before, the Devil’s Palace Manor. You’re then puzzled (and rightfully so) and keep asking the butler Belmer whether it’s a dream or not.
As you progress through the story, you’ll meet the 13 different butlers that take care of the mansion. All of the butlers are assigned to different floors of the mansion and each is distinguished with their unique yet quirky personalities.
In exchange however, the butlers ask for your assistance in defeating the angels, a mysterious group of enemies that suddenly starts attacking humans. By tapping into your power, you grant the butlers the power to hurt the Angels’s holy soul, and that is so far, the only way to do so. Why are the Angels attacking? Why are you the chosen one? And why is there a black cat suddenly involved in all this?? All shall be answered in the story.
In Devil Butler With Black Cat, your butlers will take care everything of your daily life, from informing you the current weather and schedule, to supporting you working and doing chores.
From time to time, unique conversations will be triggered upon booting up the app or when you tap the butler. Sometimes, you might even catch your butler off-guard, because the game treats you as absent to the members while the app is closed.
Your butler can inform you what schedules are on your phone’s calendar, as well as the current weather…but there are a few problems with the latter. You see, the weather report function is a huge hit or miss whether it works or not, possibly because the game wasn’t designed to deal with data of cities and countries outside Japan.
In my case, it either gave up completely with an error message, or simply gave me a random location in Japan. And unfortunately, booting the game from a VPN will not help. You will have to somehow trick your weather app into thinking you’re in Japan, and that is not very convenient for more oversea players.
The scheduling does work normally however! Your butler will grab the information from your phone’s calendar and then tell you all of the appointments you have set. Pretty nifty, if I do say so myself! …Though, I’ll admit I’m not exactly the type to keep my appointments on my phone’s calendar. Judge me if you want.
▍Your Butler Is Always By Your Side
Even if the Devil Butler With Black Cat app is closed, your butler will still periodically send out push notifications informing you about the weather forecast, and your current schedule.
You can also perform routines with him! There are three routines you can perform: Walking, Stretching and Resting.
In Walking, you set a timer from 30 to 90 minutes, and the game will then start tracking how many steps you took, and how many calories you’ve burnt in your “jogging” marathon. The tracking is woefully inaccurate, however. I feel it could’ve been a lot more accurate if it tapped into the information from Google Fit, a Google application that is regarded as accurately tracking that sort of data.
In Stretching, the game will select one out of five stretching routines, and will instruct you on how to do each one. Just follow the on-screen prompts to the rhythm. It doesn’t actually track if you’re doing it right or not, but hey, it’s always good to stretch at a good pace so you don’t strain yourself.
And finally, we got Resting. If you feel you cannot sleep, the routine will walk you through a fairly common process to go to sleep, and that is slowing down your breath and emptying your mind out of thoughts. Who knows you may sleep way better under the butler’s soothing voice!
▍Dress Up the Butler in Your Style
By default, each butler dresses according to their personality. But you can also obtain new accessories and clothes to dress your butler with, and share your styling on social media!
In order to obtain more clothes and accessories, you either pull on the gacha or from time to time, Mu the cat will randomly appear on your home screen, and give you a random accessory. You can also purchasing it in the Shop.
▍Get to Know Your Butler More
You might be wondering: What is the Gacha for, anyway? The Angel fighting occurs only in the story, and there’s no mode where you set up a deck or anything. Well, the answer to that question is…do you want to learn more about the butler? All gacha cards in Devil Butler With Black Cat comes with an individual story of the butler!
Each card has a unique 3-chapter story of the butler for you enjoy, and every time you pull a card, you also earn a full set of clothing for your butler.
That being said, the Gacha does feature an interesting mechanic. If a banner has four SSR butlers in the rate up, it will ask you to choose which of the four you want a higher rate up than usual. So for example, if there’s a specific one you want, you can select him for the remaining banner’s period, and the butler you choose will have a 1% rate up increase.
▍Final Thoughts
Devil Butler With Black Cat is admittedly an odd-ball in the otome game industry, but it does everything so good, so well. I enjoyed interacting with the 13 butlers and the story was pretty interesting, with a colourful cast of characters in every chapter. The butlers’ interactions on the home screen, as well as their individual stories were all a pleasure.
Of course, I wish there was more to do in the game. Once the novelty of the aforementioned features wore off, you’ll naturally ask fro more. More importantly, after finishing the main story, I end up closing the app for days as there’re really not much you can do. Unless the developers add more content down the road, this game might have a bumpy future in the long-term. I give this game a 3.8 out of 5.
