Adell

There's something to this game. For all the faults I'm about to list about why it isn't really a game that's worth your time, all the people who feel "seen" by its mere existence as a commercial product on one end versus a western critical apparatus on the other whose members will never deign themselves to play any game like it, no matter how well made or historically important, all the dryness of an English localization that does its cause no favors, and for so, so much else about it, there's something to Bunny Garden. Something to this humble little talk-'em-up from small-time, yet fairly prolific Qureate, a game that takes place almost entirely in a club perhaps best described as a modern maid cafe run by Hooters, minus the chicken wings. I have another dating sim essay in the works that I should be trying to polish up in-between work rounds, and yet—and YET—I cannot get this flawed thing that barely passes for an actual dating sim out of my mind. So I'm going to talk about this game and if this thing ends up being some of the only serious writing to ever emerge on it in English from someone who's played a game or two or three like it (there's three of them it's riffing on, the answer is three), then so be it. I will bear this horniest of crosses and you all can watch me rhetorically nail myself to it, if you like. I don't mind an audience.

Bunny Garden is a game whose premise is fairly straightforward to understand in isolation. Do you like talking to anime girls? Do you like the idea of sharing drinks with those anime girls? In fact, do you like the idea of buying those anime girls drinks as they hang out with you? If you've played a Yakuza game or VA-11 HALL-A or any number of games inspired by the latter, you probably have a decent idea of what this game is trying to do. Go to a club staffed by a couple of prodigiously busty girls in bunny outfits every weekend, treat those women to food, drinks, and gifts to show them your appreciation, talk to them about their lives and yours, perhaps engage in a spicy minigame, pay your bill, spend your week making ends meet, and, if you have enough to go out, repeat the process until one of them eventually falls for you.

It might sound like a transactional depiction of relationship building, a criticism that can be laid at many of its genre counterparts to varying degrees of validity. But, as with maid cafes and hostess clubs in the real world, nobody visiting the garden is under the illusion that this is an altruistic operation. These girls are paid to offer their time, company, intelligence, and a sympathetic ear insofar as they feel comfortable, largely within the bounds of the establishment. If a lasting bond forms between them and a guest, all the better for every side involved. But in a society like Japan where people, especially working professionals, are often prone to feeling isolated and struggle to connect with others for a whole host of social and cultural reasons, venues like it can offer a real outlet for a certain kind of soul looking to be heard and understood.

What games like Bunny Garden tend to offer, few as they are, is the classic fantasy surrounding such clubs that cater to both men and women alike: what if that cute person on the other side of the counter, or the one sitting on the couch with you as you clink wine glasses, developed genuine feelings for you? What if you were actually able to cross the line that inherently typifies patronage at such places, that defines the relationship between you and the professional in commercial terms no matter how amicable, and that something you swear the two of you had persisted once you both walked out of the door and went back into the real world? If the cliche in the western world is the aggrieved patient who scandalously seduces their therapist into transcending the doctor-patient dynamic, in Japan, its equivalent has long been the well-to-do salaryman or samurai wooing the doting geisha. Or, in more recent decades, the paying customer winning the heart of the sincere, attentive maid cafe sweetheart or, indeed, the cabaret hostess.

Sharing a beer with Amane at the beginning of a session in Dream Club.

Yet while Bunny Garden can be quite easily compared to a number of other games that are increasingly familiar to western players, if indirectly, at its heart, it exists to fill a particular void left by the decade-long absence of another dating sim: Dream Club. Qureate's leadership itself once hailed from D3, the publisher of Dream Club, making their new game less of a tribute so much as an unofficial attempt at a baton pass. Considering how little much of D3's output is actively studied overseas beyond tentpoles like the Earth Defense Force franchise and a smattering of entries in its venerable Simple line of budget releases for the first two PlayStations, it's probably worth spelling out Dream Club's premise for the uninitiated. Initially, it might sound pretty familiar. You regularly attend a hostess club, albeit one far more heavily staffed than the trio found in Bunny Garden, with each game allowing you to spend time with around a dozen unique hostesses. While there, you pay for food and drinks for both yourself and them, get up to many a discussion and perhaps some occasional drunken karaoke or minigame mayhem, pay your bill, and from there, be on your way for another work week.

At first blush, the rabbit-eared apple might not seem to fall far from the ribald tree and, to an extent, it's true with Bunny Garden. A lot of the tricks it has up its sleeves to try and stand out as a contemporary dating sim owe a significant debt to Dream Club. The girls are fully rendered as polygonal models, navigating their environments for added immersion. Sometimes they'll lean in really close to your first-person camera once you two become rather friendly, a healthy dose of liquor in you both helping to grease the wheels. They each have preferences when it comes to food and drinks, the alcohol itself also varying in potency. The minigames are risque without going into full-on eroge territory (although Bunny Garden is hardly shy about its panty shots, something which Dream Club itself shied away from). The club has a private room you can be invited into for some more intimate conversations, provided you have the money to spare, of course. You can even engage in some off-hours gambling if you find yourself short on cash between visits.

Bunny Garden is not ashamed to be a Dream Club clone in much of how it looks, feels, and acts in the same way that, say, Duke Nukem 3D has always been upfront about the game to which it pays its dues. If scores of Japanese players and particularly vtubers seem taken with the game, it may well be simply because Dream Club always existed in the periphery, a niche in the already shrinking twilight years of the Japanese dating sim as the genre was on its last real legs, never to garner much in the way of mainstream attention. (The fact it began life exclusive to the Xbox 360 for a time also likely did it few favors in the long run.) Even the most popular, polished dating sims between the late 2000s and early 2010s attracted diminishing audiences with every year. So to a younger generation of players, it's easy to see why Bunny Garden comes across as novel. In all likelihood, they were either too young or simply missed out the first time around. It's been a while since we've had a game like it, even here in Japan.

Job hunting in Dream Club.

But a closer examination of the Dream Club games as that foundation quickly reveals just how modest of a hand Bunny Garden really has to play and, ultimately, how little of it actually congeals into something that can be called a bona fide dating sim. Much of what D3's series brought to the table that made it legitimately unique among its peers was left behind by Qureate and Bunny Garden is a shallower game for it. Take Dream Club's calendar system. Like many dating sims dating all the way back to Konami's original Tokimeki Memorial, Dream Club imposes a time limit for finding love. Membership to the eponymous club lasts only a year and gameplay unfolds in weekly increments. The strategy belying all of this comes by way of the individual hostess' work schedules. Just about everybody working there takes at least a day or two off every month, which you know in advance. As money is fairly hard to come by and your visits only become increasingly lavish and expensive, a day off for your favorite hostess can be the perfect opportunity to make some extra cash knowing you won't be sacrificing bonding time with her. Or, it can instead be a time to get some gift shopping in for her. (You may even run into her while you're out and about!) Or, you might still want to visit the club anyway that week to talk to a different hostess. As professionals, not only are they not prone to jealousy should you explore your options, naturally, they're also friends with one another. You can glean some key insight about who you're really after if you talk to one of these friends, details that they're all too happy to divulge once you get to know each other well enough. While Dream Club might not be the most hardcore, demanding of dating sims ever conceived, its systems still expect you to experiment and make the most of the resources you have available to romance the apple of your eye, and that includes her fellow coworkers. It's an intelligently conceived, thoughtful loop. For a developer whose dalliances with galge typically lied in other genres, Tamsoft certainly did their homework on what makes a traditional dating sim tick and executed on the fundamentals quite competently in each of the three main games.

Bunny Garden has superficial recreations and riffs on a lot of these systems, but they lack much in the way consequence no matter if or how you choose to engage with them. Each of the girls still regularly take time off, yet you pretty much always make enough money to cover the basic expenses of a routine visit and you regularly receive promotions over time, all but negating the need to ever dabble in gambling or side jobs so long as you avoid going broke. You can talk to the other girls during those absences, but they rarely offer anything insightful about your current favorite; doing so simply costs you time and money currying their favor instead, which offers no benefits outside of the dedicated harem route. The minigames are cute and mildly inventive on paper, but one-note and fail to harmonize with the other systems like how, say, Dream Club's karaoke segments sound humorously different depending on the girls' sobriety beforehand. You can buy gifts and treat the garden's denizens to their favorite victuals, but they'll enjoy just about anything you offer them, discouraging experimentation to learn their individual tastes and preferences. The list of things that are analogous to facets of Dream Club is extensive, though in execution, the resemblance in practice is skin deep.

In a word, then, Bunny Garden's systems are perfunctory. They exist to facilitate, to get you to the ending you and everyone else is here to see, A to B to C and so on and so forth with little fuss. You go through the motions of fulfilling that core fantasy with their help, but you don't get to savor the turns by making them yourself, correctly or not. To some degree, it all comes across as an exercise in self-restraint. Dream Club remains so singular as a dating sim series when it comes to its structure, mechanics, and flow that while Bunny Garden's developers were surely aware of ways to make their game deeper and more substantial, they only have one immediate source of inspiration to consult. Past a certain point, adopting some of Dream Club's most defining features—or at least, their proven formula—likely risks flying uncomfortably close to the sun, if not so much for legal reasons than optical and business ones. Nevertheless, without more justifications and answers in place as to why these systems exist beyond mere aesthetics and set dressing, Bunny Garden finds itself in the same position as virtually every game like it released this past decade, few as they are: rudderless and mistaking a lack of meaningful friction as player empowerment. It presents the idea of a dating sim about hostesses without the courage to actually be one. Courage to make players learn the ropes of swimming in such precarious waters through systems and structures. Courage to teach through the cause and effect of decisions they make in navigating the politics of love and relationships in a setting brimming with teases and ambiguities. Courage to tell players to do better, to demand more of themselves because these heroines deserve the best version of your character that you can offer; they're not here to settle for you or anyone else. Courage to simply have teeth. Not even necessarily sharp fangs like the primordial dating sims of old. Just teeth of any sort. Teeth and trust in players to accept and respect them in exchange for a more fulfilling ending.

And yet—and YET—Bunny Garden isn't a game without its moments. Fleeting, yes, but moments all the same. For as much as I, perhaps one of the Internet's only English-speaking Dream Club afficionados, wish it genuinely had something, anything to hang its mechanical hat on in earnest, it isn't completely bereft of charm, either. Play it in its native Japanese (and again, you really have to play it that way to get the intended atmosphere) and you'll find a game whose heroines are well-acted and make for surprisingly capable flirts. Their personal arcs still might leave much to be desired in the way of cohesive narrative through lines, but the chemistry in individual scenes is tangible at times. Even putting aside the copious fanservice sure to bring many in through the door, Bunny Garden's writing is comfortable in its horny skin, a surprisingly rare feat for such frisky games outside of the PC eroge space, fans of which often truly do come for the metaphorical articles first and the centerfolds second. Whereas many recent dating sims bet on contrived scene setups at the expense of the scripts themselves, Bunny Garden understands that a hostess club is only as good as the conversations and companionship that their talent can deliver and deliver it does on the regular. When nothing else otherwise gave me the motivation to keep playing, at the very least, I could always count on another round of fresh, entertaining banter waiting for me whenever I chose to persist and kept playing against my better judgment. Though plenty of older games also outclass it in this regard, if ever there was dialogue in search of a richer game among the dating sims released in the past decade, it's without a doubt Bunny Garden's.

That's why I struggle to come down completely hard on it, on this ostensible homage that almost ticks too few boxes to call itself a dating sim, let alone a claimant worthy of succeeding Dream Club. I won't sit here and tell you that this is a game worth your time and all the buzz on the Japanese Internet. This is not the dating sim the genre so desperately needs to revitalize a space so suffocatingly stagnant and reeking of timid mediocrity. Bunny Garden is not the game that's going to make dating sims make sense to a wider public that's either lost touch with them or was never in touch in the first place. But I see in that dialogue and in the framework and its few original ideas the makings for a game that could go somewhere if it tries again. In light of its surprise success, impressively reaching number two on the overall Japanese eShop charts, not just download exclusives, I want Qureate to try again. I want them to take another crack at it with a game that's mechanically meaningful and offers more than passing, naughty thrills from time to time. A game with as much care put into the moment-to-moment experience of playing it as has clearly been invested into its writing and characterization. I don't like Bunny Garden all that much now, but I want to love whatever it becomes in the future. For better or worse, when Qureate rolls the dice on another one of these games like I imagine it will, once again, against my better judgment, I'll give it a chance. And if that time comes and there's finally something to it at last, something to one of these new dating sims, I hope you'll give it one, too.