Week of Love: The Rub Rabbits! (DS)
When it comes to making a video game about a developing romance, something like a visual novel or a dating simulation are the obvious routes, but Sega decided to go down a different path with The Rub Rabbits! The tale of love told here is done by way of a series of minigames that draw on the touch screen and DS microphone for play, and since Sega was already going for a somewhat odd route for portraying a budding romance in video game form, they decided to go all in on being unusual. In The Rub Rabbits!, the player will engage in goofy games while trying to court the female lead, fighting off giant robotic animals, shooting down skydiving rival suitors, and luring deadly piranhas away from your date.
The Rub Rabbits! has around 40 delightfully weird minigames to punctuate its story of a man and woman falling in love, but the story starts off quite simply. The two main characters just happen to pass on opposing escalators one day and the male lead is immediately smitten… but so are around 12 other men who are now all competing to gain the attention of the leading lady. There are no real names given and everyone has a deliberately basic silhouette body save for the clothing used to mark the main characters as separate from the crowd, but there’s a third character who comes into the picture and complicates things. While you aim to court the leading lady through unusual minigames, a lady from the main character’s past reemerges, her own sights set on stealing him away from his romantic interest. She also happens to be an incredible genius, and she uses a series of unusual inventions and tools to try and force the protagonist into loving her. The player will have to fight off her advances while also trying to win the heart of the female lead, all of this is expressed wordlessly without any names to latch onto, although the goofiness of the situations is certainly more of the main focus than trying to make a strong story or anything like that.
The minigames you’ll play as part of The Rub Rabbits!’s unusual tale come in quite a lot of forms but all of them are focused on using the DS touch screen or microphone for play. Sometimes, to make that work, you may even have to turn your game system sideways or upside down, and there’s definitely a level of creativity in concept on display that justifies such strange demands. Things start off a little simple, the first game being about running up an escalator to catch the lady before she goes away, but the escalator is incredibly long and crowded with sumo wrestlers and cane swinging gentlemen who block your path up. Things definitely get weirder from there, like holding a rose to your girlfriend’s nose as she does yoga, having to dodge nasty food and only eat the good stuff served to you, tossing your girlfriend into a tree to snag fruit, and slapping your rival suitors awake when they’re at danger of dying from the incredible cold you all find yourself stuck in. Some games are closer to theme of actually romancing your lady, such as ones where you flirtatiously poke each other or even rub her to keep her warm, but nothing ever really pushes past the game’s Teen rating of course.
Control is pretty simple for all these games and most of them, save for the longer ones, are presented in five round structures,the player needing to overcome slightly more difficult variations of the game to move onto a new one. Despite sometimes being about unicycling across girders and riding giant snowballs, The Rub Rabbits!’s set of minigames are more conceptually exciting than they are exciting in practice. Part of it no doubt comes from their simple nature, the touch screen games usually focusing on one or two actions that can sometimes be mildly challenging to complete, but for the most part are quickly learned and quickly completed. Some like the rose yoga game can be completed without much trouble as can games like closing virus windows on your girlfriend’s laptop, but there is a small counterbalance present with games like a frisbee game and snowball fight game that require you to aim at least so it’s not just a matter of putting in the time to complete those games. Minigames that are actually difficult can sometimes be hard more because of control issues than the game design, things like needing to really scratch the touch screen or blow properly in the microphone not testing skill so much as your ability to control the game. Nothing really leans too hard into being so easy its dull or so difficult its frustrating though, meaning that overall its a serviceable package of minigames connected by some kooky story telling.
There are some boss minigames as well that do actually manage to push the player to be a bit more involved. Control still doesn’t get very complicated, but the robot animals you’ll fight in these sections have attack patterns to overcome and your attacking methods are limited to where sometimes there is a bit of strategy to the battle. The game perhaps leads with the worst though, the mechanical bull boss having a segment where you need to rapidly tap hearts it shoots out in a game that normally doesn’t require such tightly timed screen tapping, but the bull’s bigger flaw is that it’s not that strategic compared to the later battles where you need to balance your movement to avoid damage and plan the moments you attack. The boss battles are probably the most interesting minigames because they require the most active engagement to overcome, but all of the minigames do get a bit of a boost when played through the Memories mode instead of the story. Memories lets you pick a minigame to play exclusively, the rounds going on longer and getting harder than they do during regular play, but the effectiveness of the extension of play depends on the game its drawing from. A slow game or one with finicky controls won’t be better here, but some of the easier ones can push their design to be a little more challenging in this mode.
The Rub Rabbits! does have a few extra modes to participate in outside of the main story, although playing the main game is how you unlock the activities for the other modes. For example, the oddly named Maniac mode lets you dress up your date, and unlocking clothing options can be tied to the hidden rabbits you can find by touching certain areas during cutscenes. You also earn hearts during minigames based on your performance during them, these unlocking more outfit options, but for most of the extra unlockables you just need to complete certain scenes in the story to unlock time trial versions of the games or their multiplayer variations. There are some more unique modes here, such as a short second story that admittedly just recycles a few games and makes them slightly tougher, but then you have games meant for couples to play together. There’s an oddly named Baby-Making mode on the main menu, and considering this game’s Japanese name means “Where Do Babies Come From?”, one could certainly get the wrong idea about what it entails. What it actually is is a fairly basic compatibility tester where two players answer a few questions and then work together to try and cut a cake, a baby appearing from inside it that is meant to represent what your child would look like if you had one. Most of the extra content doesn’t really meaningfully expand the core play of The Rub Rabbits! though, and besides new difficulties to unlock and the Memories mode, there really isn’t much that helps the minigame playing be more engaging, the game quite clearly just a collection of DS gimmickry at the end of the day.
THE VERDICT: The Rub Rabbits! cooks up some wonderfully weird minigame ideas for its wordless love story, but most of the enjoyment comes from the wacky concepts rather than the actual play. Avoiding the love potions of a girl you’re not interested in or fighting off rival suitors with the most intense game of rock-paper-scissors ever are fun ideas, but the play just asks for some light engagement with the DS touch screen or microphone more often than not. Reflex and strategy can crop up in things like the boss minigames, but at other times it’s just going through the motions, which isn’t really something you’d want out of a budding romance. The games could have been more attractive if they pushed their designs further, but instead most of them feel too plain and simple for a long term engagement.
And so, I give The Rub Rabbits! for the Nintendo DS…
An OKAY rating. Like most minigame collections, the average quality of the minigames is what’s going to make or break the experience, and most of them fall into the middle range. While there are some that don’t control too well and others that focus too much on gimmickry to put up a good fight, many of them just require a basic level of attentiveness to overcome, not really losing the player because of the speed of completion but only a few games like the boss fights really having the design complexity needed to stand out and really make the player think or react quickly during play. Some of the extra modes give a few more games the room to grow, but a tepid first run through a game isn’t really redeemed by having to push through its early variations to get to the legitimately challenging versions. Having such an oddball array of minigame ideas and a strange story backing things up does make the game interesting to experience as a whole, but the moment to moment play consists of a lot of passable DS experimentation rather than well-defined game concepts.
Simplicity isn’t a bad idea for a minigame collection, and The Rub Rabbits! helps avoid being a worse game because it recognizes that serving out a series of quick to pick up minigames has its perks. To be more interesting or involved though would require evolving play or adding some other twist to the experience, and while there is some difficulty increase between rounds of a game, most games stay pretty tame and don’t push their design concepts beyond just giving you a little task to do with your stylus or the microphone. The weird concepts for the games ending up being the reason most minigames are memorable, The Rub Rabbits! needing more than just kooky situations to make the games more exciting.