YMMV / Pokémon Café Mix

• Broken Base: A large point of discussion in the game's relatively small community is whether or not the overhaul that came to the game with the rebranding the Cafe Re Mix ruined the game. Those who disagree with this view point out the more rewarding features of the game, the increased numbers of Pokemon giving you more options to clear the stages, the levels being made easier, and adding far more things to do. Detractors point out the increasing number of people dropping the game due to the update, the addition of aggressive monetization items (including a gacha system), the increased difficulty in grinding acorns, the lives system being more strict, and the removal of the game's ability to be played offline (which was helpful to players who played the game while outdoors). It is worth noting that most players stick to the disagree camp since most of those whom agree chose to simply drop the game.
• Demonic Spider: Some gimmicks can ruin your day if you don't have the proper Pokémon to clear them.
  • Popcorn. Like the equally-mobile whipped cream, popcorn takes three hits to clear. Unlike whipped cream, these three hits must be done consecutively; if you manage to hit a popcorn once or twice but fail to do so in a following turn, the popcorn will reset to its undamaged state, forcing you to try hitting it three times again.
  • Bubbles. Not even a proper Pokémon is going to help you against this extremely bouncy threats that will flee to the other side of the board when you try to make a combo to burst them.
  • Tomato and Milk. Both need to be brought to specific locations (baskets at the bottom of the board for tomatoes, each other for milk), so get ready for a lot of grief as all sorts of random things will conspire to block your way preventing you to force these gimmicks to where they're supposed to be.
• Difficulty Spike: While the main stages are by no means easy towards the end, Master Café Mode kicks things up a notch; turn limits are significantly tighter, many of the returning stages now have much harder requirements, and the new stages can get downright devious. Clearing without items or burning Acorns can be extremely challenging.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Leah’s Cheer Rush, available only for short periods of real-world time, provides bonus effects based on consecutive cleared orders. After clearing two orders in a row, a free extra move is allowed for every order until the player fails to clear one on the first try, in a game where one move can be the difference between a clear and a fail. And with at least three orders cleared in a row, a free Cafe Skill is granted at the start of every order, allowing either immediate clearing of almost any particularly troublesome gimmick or being able to generate a powered up skill which could clear a large portion of gimmicks on the board after only needing to create one more Cafe Power icon.
  • Introduced in the Remix update is Mew, who is capable of clearing out everything instantly, with its only offsets being items that require combinations and skills, and even they get reduced to the point that they can be cleared out easily, and that it needs a lot of combinations to create one skill.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Scorbunny's skill clears Pokémon icons and gimmicks to the left, and specializes in Small Plates. On paper, this sounds like a Small Plates version of Minccino's skill. In practice, however, the range on the skill is puny, no longer than the megaphones that drop in if you don't power it up. When you have the likes of Squirtle in the staff, who clears in a cone towards the right, Scorbunny's not going to see much use. The Remix update fixes this by giving it twice the range as well as the addition of being able to create megaphones in its wake.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Starting orders over can be a bit more time-consuming than it probably should be: If you have no chance of clearing a board, don't have Acorns to spare, and decide you just want to cut your losses and start the order over, you'll find that there is no option to immediately restart the order from a menu without either going all the way back to the cafe or just fudging your remaining turns. Made arguably worse in Remix, where you are given no retry if you fail to 3-Star the order and it finishes so long as you have the base order completed.
  • If you lack the right staff member to clear a specific order, failing multiple times on said order will have Leah suggest you to use the Pokémon... you lack. This can prove frustrating as you may not have enough stars to convince them to join the staff through invitations, which in turn randomize 2 Pokémon to invite at a time, meaning you may end up using Golden Acorns to land the one you want to recruit. Otherwise, just burn through your items.
  • Cafe Skills that rely on megaphones can get very annoying due to how the megaphones summoned go by a random direction. Even if the Cafe Skill unleashes more than one megaphone, there's no telling which direction the megaphone is pointing at, which may cause unnecessary grievances when trying to aim for obstacles like nuts or ice.
  • The delivery system. You send Pelipper off for a whole day, unless you spend 3,000 acorns to expedite the process in exchange for one item. You can only get more than one by spending a grand total of 30,000 acorns. This was made even worse when deliveries were overhauled. Prior to the update, the worst you could get were the tarts used to quickly raise experience points - boring, but useful. After the update, the lowest prize you get are "outfit upgrades" that raise a Pokemon's puzzle score...but an outfit can only be upgraded 4 times. Maxed out Pokemon stay in the item pool, however, and you get a single, rather pathetic "exchange point" to spend on a selection of less-than-impressive prizes if you get an upgrade for a Pokemon you can't improve any more. So it's perfectly possible that experienced players can drop 30,000 acorns trying to get the newest limited-time Pokemon and have next to nothing to show for it.
  • ReMix is particularly devious by giving you your daily Happy Bonus, a 15-minute period where you receive extra Exp from Training and extra hearts from recruiting Pokémon, only when you have almost or already exhausted your stamina. This means that if you don't have a stash of unused stamina shards ready at moment's notice and you don't want to waste acorns and eventually money, the Happy Bonus benefits will invariably be lost and wasted.
  • Recruiting new Pokémon via orders comes with several grating problems:
    • Every time you start an order, you are presented with three Pokémon, and you may get a Pokémon you haven't recruited (in which you try to earn hearts), those you have recruited but haven't obtained sufficient cookies to max out (in which you earn their specific cookies), or those you have obtained max cookies already (in which case you get milestone cookies that serve as Literal Wild Card). The game doesn't care how many Pokémon you still need to recruit or max out, so after a while you will repeatedly run into Pokémon you've maxed out, which in theory shouldn't be too bad since milestone cookies can be used in place of any Pokémon cookie... except that while you can only earn up to three milestone cookies per order, the exchange rate for regular cookies is atrocious: You start from 20 milestone cookies per regular cookie and it goes way, way up from there (up to literally hundreds of milestone cookies per single regular cookie). You can refresh orders to find Pokémon you actually need, but you get only one free refresh per day, further refresh costs you acorns, and after you get far enough, every time you clear an order you are given the option to repeat order on the same Pokémon, but this costs you more acorns thus limiting your option even further.
    • If you're in the middle of collecting hearts to recruit a Pokémon but then receive that Pokémon via delivery, all those hearts you painstakingly collect will be just deleted without compensation. This makes pulling Pokémon from delivery a Paranoia Fuel since you may be just one or two hearts away from recruiting Pokémon, maybe having spent some Heaping Helping tickets, and then bam, all that effort is completely wasted.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: The concept of the game is that you’re running your own cafe with several adorable Pokémon, including your Eevee. You recruit new Pokémon by either catering to certain customers, making new dishes, or completing events. Each Pokémon also gets their own unique uniforms with additional colors unlocking as you level them up.

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