In contrast to the realism of Emmy (Kogado, 1985) and Tokyo Nanpa Street (Enix, 1985), Cocktail Soft’s Can Can Bunny (1989) opts for a slightly more fantastical approach. The game opens with the protagonist Takeshi (タケシ) wallowing in his loneliness when he is suddenly visited by Arisu (亜理子), a fairy-like bunny girl who offers Takeshi a solution to his troubles: a notebook containing the information of five heroines he can woo. They include Asami Watanabe (渡辺 麻美), a 24-year old office worker; Kaori Shiratori (白鳥 香), a 22-year old a homemaker; Marina Kawai (河井 麻里奈), a 20-year old university student; Miki Morimura (森村 美貴), an 18-year old motor biker; and Yui Nakahara (中原 唯), a 15-year old high school student.1
Can Can Bunny expands on the systems of its eroge predecessors, Emmy (Kogado Studio, 1984) and Tokyo Nanpa Street (Enix, 1985). While the game still revolves around progressing through conversations and retains the statistics present in Nanpa Street, it also brings with it a few additional mechanics, introducing a stamina meter (POW) which dictates how many articles of clothing Takeshi can remove from a character. Succeed in completely undressing a heroine but have no stamina left and Takeshi returns home without ever actually having sex. Here, money is not actually used to go on outings but rather to buy gifts and other items, including a vitamin drink that immediately gives Takeshi a full bar of stamina. Additional money can be earned by gambling at a slot machine whose reels also offer the opportunity to win an extra CG of the shopkeeper herself.
From Takeshi’s room, players can decide on which heroine to visit, heading over to their apartment with a single click. Despite opening with a panorama of the city, geography here has been entirely erased, the goal merely being for the player being to puzzle out the quickest way to have sex with their desired character. Upon arrival, the game of seduction begins, notably in real-time with slow responses resulting in characters losing interest. Takeshi can talk about himself, or other topics, such as films, music, and sports; ask questions; look at a girl’s specific body part or around her room; give a gift; take off her clothes; touch or kiss; and finally, go home.
Taking action will either raise or lower the “love” meter and undressing specific articles of clothing will lower the pow meter. The flow of the game is to thus engage in the correct order of activities so as to raise the love meter, undress the girl, and have sex before Takeshi tires out. The heroines each have their own backgrounds and interests which consequently informs how players will interact with them. For example, Miki’s preference to discuss sports presumably is a result from her background as a biker. Players must thereby approach the dialogue methodically, puzzling out the specific topics and advances that heroines will positively respond to. Simply choosing actions at random will only result in the love meter ultimately decreasing. A sensible enough strategy to open with is running through every choice, noting the responses, and deciding on the appropriate step afterward, a tactic that will easily raise the love meter and clue in players on how to best proceed forward.
Despite bearing aspects that would influence or be recalled in later dating-sims, Can Can Bunny lacks the dramatic elements of its successors. While the game’s core systems center on dialogue, this is not a narrative where players will come to deeply know the heroines. In other words, if Can Can Bunny, alongside ELF’s Pinky Ponky trilogy, demonstrates the evolution of nanpa games before its transformation into the dating-sim, then the genre was still finding its footing. Can Can Bunny is less about exploring the dramatic arc of a relationship and more so on recreating the fleeting experience of a one-night stand.
As for the actual process in which the heroines are seduced, each successful act of undressing results in a new CG, meaning that while there might be a lack of narrative elements, Can Can Bunny instead draws out the dramatic arc of sex itself, emphasizing foreplay. On this point, the game also encourages sex play. As Takeshi undresses a heroine, he can employ a combination of techniques and various tools. This includes pinching, licking, the use of a feather and even a candle. Players do not need to engage with these mechanics but their inclusion points towards how developers were thinking of how to adapt sex within a game beyond the mere inclusion of nudity. One can easily imagine a more complex version of Can Can Bunny where the logic of the dialogue is applied to sex. That is, just as the heroines positively respond to specific topics of discussion, there would also be specific sexual techniques that each characters prefers. Players would still have to manage Takeshi’s stamina, but the love meter would also indicate the heroine’s own sexual pleasure. 2
I bring up this last point as part of a set of broader questions regarding the sexual mechanics in eroge and subsequently why eroge need to be eroge, who their target audience is, and what does that audience want from a pornographic or even romantic game. By this point in time, if Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School (Square, 1987) did not prove that romantic games need not be pornographic, then surely the later Tokimeki Memorial (Konami, 1996) and Sakura Was (Red Company, Sega CS2 R&D 1996) did. Of course, the answer to this question might simply be that players desired to see characters nude, but if these eroge lacked mechanical and narrative depth, the interests of some developers was perhaps instead in the artistry of computer generated images, hence Can Can Bunny‘s attention to detail in its CGs. In other words, this was an era of first and foremost computer imagery which could no longer be considered a novelty. For example, Technopolis published guides and ran contests centered on CG, and the same year that Can Can Bunny released also saw the first annual DoGA CG animation contest. By the end of the year Oh! X began publishing showcases on animation created using the DoGA CGA System designed for the X68000.
Eroge, such as Can Can Bunny, were just one avenue for illustrators to explore this artform. Beyond a focus on (sexualized) imagery, the appeal of such images in the first place can only result from the characters themselves, a trend that would later dominate the bishōjo and otaku culture of the next decade. In short, if we understand the development of a genre such as RPGs ultimately being about the evolution of combat, dungeoneering, and role-playing, these eroge may not even be about the ludic exploration of sex itself so much as they are about establishing an affective relationship between players and heroines.
- Can Can Bunny’s release was still three years before the establishment of Sofurin (ソフ倫), Japan’s adult games regulating body. In 1997, Cocktail Soft remade Can Can Bunny as Can Can Bunny – 1 Primo, making several gameplay and story changes, including changing Yui’s age from 15 to unknown, hardly a change especially when the character still remains a high-school student who Takeshi now tutors. These changes—or lack thereof—points towards how these nanpa games and later dating sims were/are constructed both around regulations and moe elements with the juvenile high school girl being one. ↩︎
- Alas, as far as I’m aware, the expansion of sexual mechanics is not something that later eroge take a deep interest in, instead placing emphasis on the presentation of sex itself. ↩︎