Bunny Garden [still] has no Metacritic score, so here's a pro datesimmer's thoughts on a kinda sorta dating sim taking Japanese vtubers by storm.
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2024/5/3 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability.
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There's something to this game. For all the faults I'm about to list about why it isn't really 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 who 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 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 a 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 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 again, 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, including your own character. 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, often confess 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 could actually cross the line that inherently typifies patronage at such places, that codifies 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 back into the real world? If the cliche in the western world is the woebegone 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 times, the paying customer winning the heart of the sincere, attentive maid cafe sweetheart or, indeed, the cabaret hostess.
Yet while Bunny Garden can be quite easily compared to a number of other games that are increasingly familiar to western players, 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 that game's publisher, D3, making their new work less of a tribute so much as an unofficial attempt at a baton pass. Considering how little much of D3's output is studied overseas beyond tentpoles like the Earth Defense Force franchise and a smattering of entries in the venerable Simple line of budget releases, it's 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 doesn't appear to fall far from the ribald tree. To an extent, that's exactly 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 greasing 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 steered 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 wears its lineage on its sleeve. 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 in its time, 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 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.
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 congeals into something that can be called a full-fledged, bona fide dating sim. Much of what D3's series brought to the table that remains unique among its peers today 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.
Since money is fairly hard to come by and your visits only become more lavish and expensive over time, a day off for your favorite hostess makes for the perfect opportunity to earn some extra cash. After all, you won't be sacrificing bonding time with her to pad out your wallet. 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 friends with their fellow coworkers. 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. 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 at your disposal 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 regularly receive promotions, 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, granting you 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 sobriety system humorously impacts how its women perform during karaoke. You can buy gifts and treat the garden's denizens to their favorite victuals, but they'll enjoy just about anything you offer, discouraging experimentation to learn their individual tastes and preferences. The list of facets that are analogous Dream Club runs deep, yet in execution, the resemblance is skin deep.
In a word, then, Bunny Garden's systems are perfunctory. They exist to facilitate, to get you to the ending you're here to see, A to B to C and so on with little fuss. You go through the motions of fulfilling that core fantasy with their help, but don't get to savor the twists and 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 that while Bunny Garden's developers were surely aware of ways to make their game deeper and more substantial, they only have one direct 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 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 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 cause and effect the politics of love and relationships in a setting brimming with teases and ambiguities. Courage to simply have teeth, to tell players to do better and demand more of themselves because these heroines deserve the best version of your character that you can offer. 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 gameplay experience.
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 aficionados, wish it 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 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 sensuous skin, a surprisingly rare feat for such frisky games outside of the PC eroge space. Whereas many recent dating sims bet on contrived setups at the expense of the scripts themselves, Qureate's game understands that a hostess club is only as good as the conversations and companionship on offer and deliver those things 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 awaiting me whenever I chose to persist and kept playing against my better judgment. Though plenty of older games still outclass it in this regard, if ever there was dialogue in search of a richer game among the dating sims released during their current slump, 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 it's 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 a sequel 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.
