Waku Waku Sweets (Switch)

I had a hankering for a cooking sim, and Waku Waku Sweets caught my eye with its saccharine visuals and what looked like plenty of pastry baking minigames to satisfy that hunger. However, if you come into this game expecting a robust cooking simulator, you will walk away disappointed. That is because, despite appearances, Waku Waku Sweets is really more of a life simulation, the player needing to worry more about their daily schedule and personal relationships then what they make in the kitchen. While food prep is certainly a big part of the game still, the emphasis is definitely placed more on the characters you interact with and how you manage your time.

Waku Waku Sweets, the name essentially meaning Exciting Sweets, stars a young girl who dreams of making people happy with her cooking. While she does manage to get a job at a prestigious local bakery that will help her achieve this goal, it is the appearance of a strange bunny fairy named Puffee that truly kicks things off, the fairy promising to grant the girl’s wish if she can generate enough happiness in the area. It’s essentially a self-fulfilling wish if you scrutinize it, but Puffee serves as the player character’s constant conversational partner, able to give the protagonist a person to talk to even when she’s not with the many people she’ll be interacting with over the course of the game. While the game encourages you to customize your chef, she does have a built-in personality, and while she is definitely friendly and generous, she has an interesting edge to her that allows her to be a bit more fun than a generic hero. She can be mischievous when she wants something, she’ll bluntly make her dissatisfaction with certain situations known, and some of the people she talks to like a flirtatious fellow chef and a middle-aged chatterbox do get actual negative reactions from her quite often. She’s not too deep a character, but she has enough of a personality that seeing her interact with others is a two-way street rather than player needing to rely on everyone else to keep chats entertaining.

While you don’t play a big role in how your chef interacts with others, you are responsible for furthering her personal relationships by balancing her time appropriately. You can only do a few things a day, and the available activities will change depending on the day of the week or what you’ve done so far. Most days you can go into work where you only need to make one food item, the player only able to earn cash by actually doing their job. Money can then be spent buying new recipes so you can broaden your available options, but it can also be spent on customizing your chef’s appearance or her home. However, the customization stuff is so expensive comparatively that it’s hard to justify the expenditure, especially when the recipes can sometimes be vital to how you interact with the people of the town.

By selecting locations with exclamation points above them, you can spend some of your time interacting with whoever is there. Each person has a personal narrative that is spread out across multiple interactions, but to make progress in these side stories, you’ll need to constantly provide them the right foods to keep them talking. Some people have broad requests, others ask for very specific meals, and one character even phrases her requests almost like a riddle, but whatever food they need, you must go cook it at home and find them again if you want them to move on to the next part of their personal plots. You essentially have no influence over these stories besides helping them continue and the game does technically reward you for pursuing them by having them hand over recipes at different points in their plots, but the real appeal of Waku Waku Sweets is perhaps the substance of these tales. While some are fairly plain like the boy studying for a variety of exams or vapid like the girl who is just really clumsy, your fellow chefs at the bakery all have surprisingly complex stories that can be moving or outright tragic. Some townspeople have cute stories like the mom who is disastrous in the kitchen but wants to use food prep as a bonding experience with her kid, others have bittersweet tales like an old woman reflecting on her time with her husband, and others you just want to see what the payoff could possibly be like the romances you are facilitating with your food contributions. Much like the bright anime visuals and happy music, the tales are pretty much designed to leave you feeling good in the end even if they have some sad element to them, and perhaps appropriately enough, making the townspeople happy with your food is as gratifying for the player as it seems to be for the protagonist.

However, while the social interaction side is simple and full of small but enjoyable plot lines to follow, they are all tied back to the cooking. The good news about Waku Waku Sweets’s food prep is that it’s not really bad per se. The actions you need to perform are responsive, at least if you’re using the buttons since it has trouble accurately detecting the motion controls, but the problem is making food is far too easy. There are many points where you literally can’t make a mistake even if you wanted to. You can only perform steps in the baking process when the prompts appear, meaning in some places it is literally impossible to mess up and you can’t do things like take food out of the oven early, add the wrong ingredients, or mix up the order you execute the instructions. No matter what you’re making, you need to follow the prompts, and while there is some room for error when you’re doing things like filling an eclair with creme or squeezing out batter for cookies, it’s pretty easy to get the amount right thanks to clear indicators of how much is needed. There is essentially no difficulty to making the food, and even though the game features a food contest mode where you compete against three other chefs to make three randomly picked meals, it’s pretty hard to score low enough to lose to them even at its highest levels.

Making food is necessary to the plot in many ways though. Progression is gated by the need to reach certain skill levels achieved by winning the contests, and while those are simple, they at least have a story side to them too as you repeatedly go up against your blue-haired rival Mint and that relationship develops along the way. However, to have the contest available requires making new recipes, hence why buying them and acquiring them from townsfolk is so important. You’ll need to make many different foods to get to the end of the game’s main plot as well as making any the townspeople want, and while you can kill two birds with one stone sometimes by making a new food that a resident requested, there is inevitable repetition as a few citizens will ask for the same thing. This almost makes the negligible nature of cooking more bearable, the player not at risk of failure and thus able to quickly cook up what’s needed to keep pursuing the life sim aspects of the game. The game does track how many in-game days pass, but you don’t need to rush to try and please everyone within a time limit. There are multiple endings based on how happy you’ve made the townspeople by the time you’ve achieved a certain chef rating, but if you’re diligent enough getting the best ending is pretty attainable.

The cooking side of the game is definitely oversold in the marketing though. The game boasts about having over 100 recipes, but these are definitely padded out to look more impressive. There are a few different categories of treats you make, many falling under the banner of bakery but you also prepare things like ice cream and parfaits. Cakes, cookies, donuts, crepes, eclairs, and even Japanese Wagashi sweets like dango and yokan are among the foods you’ll be making, but to make the number more impressive, the game considers many flavor alterations to foods different recipes. Macarons come in eight varieties and all are prepared in a fairly similar manner, but you never do every step that would be required to make the dish in real life. This is a blessing to avoid these from dragging on but it can be odd how different shapes of cookies will arbitrarily pick if they start with egg cracking of flour sifting and never include the other step. There are definitely some quick foods that can be made for quick cash at the bakery, but you get paid more at work if you make the more complex dishes like pies so there is some incentive to not just go for the lazier options all the time.

The actual actions taken while cooking do make some degree of sense, but as mentioned before, they don’t really have any interesting failure options or complications. Almost every action has the annoying requirement that you hold a shoulder button to start them, but after that you’re performing very simplified versions of typical cooking tasks. Mixing, dipping in batter, spreading frosting over top, and other common pastry and bakery making steps crop up often, so it can be a bit of a surprise when you make something that deviates from the formula. A lot of the Wagashi options involve red bean cooking and feel different for it, but some items require you to make a small batch of the treat, meaning that making a tart can become a bit tedious even though it could have otherwise been a break from other more familiar food prep methods. Once the food making process becomes more automatic though, it becomes a mostly inoffensive means of interacting with your life sim activities, and the rare recipe that does shake things up is interesting for being novel even though it’s still just as easy to complete as everything else.

THE VERDICT: Waku Waku Sweets is a game all about cooking even though the actual cooking is its worst part. Making treats is far too easy and shallow to be enjoyed on its own merits, but that simplicity allows it to work as a negligible means of experiencing an adorably saccharine life sim. The personal plot lines of the characters you cook for can be surprisingly emotional or enjoyably silly, and the protagonist has enough of a personality to make these relationships about more than just listening to people speak as you hand them the baked good they requested. The emptiness of the actual cooking does make Waku Waku Sweets more like a bland cake that’s been punched up with sweet frosting though. The whole meal could have been delicious here, but it still provides a decent treat if you view that boring cake base as a means of experiencing the tasty topping.

And so, I give Waku Waku Sweets for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. I must once again caution against anyone who thinks this will provide an enjoyable cooking experience. The baking steps are all far too basic to be enjoyed on their merits alone and the repetition will certainly wear down anyone who just came to the game to cook. However, if you focus on the life sim aspects of the game instead, the food prep is just a somewhat dull means of making progress through the many fun personal interactions you’ll have, all while needing to make sure you optimize your activities properly to get to the interesting chats as often as possible. The actual process of making a chiffon cake is pretty boring, but when viewed as a time expenditure in a game where that effort is then rewarded in some way, it’s far more palatable. It definitely didn’t need to be so dull and Waku Waku Sweets would be much better if it could have the brisk baking process while also making it engaging or challenging, but it’s priorities certainly seem to be on the character narratives and they’re a fine enough motivator to ensure that Waku Waku Sweets isn’t dragged down by its failure to make the cooking enjoyable.

Your enjoyment of Waku Waku Sweets will definitely swing based on whether you value the cooking gameplay more or the life sim aspects like schedule management and relationship growth. It’s pretty much a bad cooking game stapled to a good life sim, and while that won’t always average out to an average game, here it feels like the story and style of the game are good enough to keep things afloat while the cooking isn’t so terribly repetitive that it could drag them beyond being able to sustain the game. This genre mix certainly wasn’t done well, but it’s still possible to leave with a sweet taste in your mouth if you can stomach the moments of bland gameplay.