Trimming bonsai trees is a relaxing and meditative practice, and considering that WiiWare has multiple fireplace simulators and virtual aquariums, a game about the simple task of tending a bonsai would not totally be without precedent. However, Bonsai Barber does not go with that route, and I’m quite thankful for it. A virtual bonsai tree to trim has its place certainly, but Bonsai Barber’s cute cartoon visuals and goal oriented gameplay add a more traditional kind of fun to the practice of pruning plants.

Starting you off as an amateur barber who just came into town, Bonsai Barber has you taking on the task of trimming the “hair” of the town’s plant population. That’s not me being colorful with words, these plants enter your barber shop and request specific hairdos for their leafy branches, each one having a different personality quirk to make them into charming and silly characters. You’ll find characters like a gruff Texan cactus, a British secret agent banana, and a mad scientist strawberry dropping on by to have their foliage cut, the character making idle chatter as you work on their branches and leaves. The customers are one of the biggest appeals of the game I feel, with simple but fun personalities to actually make you happy to see your favorites drop on by. There are other little bits of color about their lives as well, with the vegetation sending you postcards from their vacations and giving you little gifts if you cut their hair to perfection.

The trimming is fairly responsive, with the Wii Remote standing in for your barber’s tools quite well. In your arsenal you have a pair of scissors for snipping branches, some trimmers for removing only leaves, a comb for pushing branches around, a paintbrush for dyeing leaves, but most importantly, the game is merciful and gives you a spray bottle that you can use to regrow branches and leaves just in case you made a mistake. This does divert from the careful nature of pruning a bonsai, but besides a tiny tree you’re given to practice on, this game is more about the barber side of things and it would be unnecessarily punishing if that spray bottle didn’t exist. When a customer comes in, they usually have a good idea of what style they want their leaves to look like, and there’s a surprisingly solid amount of them on offer. Once the cutting begins, an outline of the chosen style will appear over the current customer, but it’s not quite so easy as quickly snipping things like you’re cutting a coupon out of the newspaper. The branches of your patrons have different arrangements, meaning that a wrong cut can remove a lot more leaves than you expected. The tools and controls are up to the task of working around this though, but it’s likely you’ll find a few customers to be consistent problems due to weird branch structure.

While you don’t have to do much to please your customers on a basic level so you can move on to the next plant, there is a rating system that plays into almost all the rewards and progression the game has on offer. You can settle for a sloppy job, but there’s a star rating system that goes all the way up to 5 stars, the rating updating on-screen for you to see as you gradually get closer and closer to the desired design. Here is where the game both makes itself incredibly interesting and potentially frustrating. With some styles and customers, a 5 star trim can come easy, but once you get into more complex designs and ones that require color, the game’s own design seems to work against you getting that highest rating. Even slow, thoughtful work isn’t guaranteed to help you when the more detailed designs come in, as the game seems to be incredibly picky even when your work seems to match the outline perfectly. I was working on a rabbit shape cut into the hair of a corn cob for an hour just trying to get it to tick over from 4 to 5, making small adjustments, restarting, combing, anything I could do to push it over that edge, but nothing seemed to please the game, and I had to settle for a rating that wouldn’t earn me anything extra. The shapes are far more lenient than coloration though. The painting tool in this game is much too sloppy for the expectations Bonsai Barber puts on it. If a hair style is all one color you’re fine, but the game brings in mixes that require precise stripes and shapes with their colors, but since paint can only be applied to leaves rather than just a general space, you can never really hope to match that kind of image. Praying for the game to recognize those annoying tiny yellow shadows on the otherwise orange pyramid style really stands against the calm nature the rest of the game seems to encourage, and the fact that the plants will often sway slightly while you work on their leaves is just a recipe for further woes with the overly precise styles.

These frustrating moments are not as common as the haircuts that are fun to do, and there are some that just require you learning certain tricks. One thing the game hides from you for far too long though is if you rotate your Wii Remote properly you can shrink your tools, making it easier to get into the more precise cuts that it gives you before it even bothers to hint at that feature. Your patrons will also give you hints to help you out on what you need to fix about their current haircut, but not enough info that it will save you if you’re straddling the delicate line of a 4 and 5 star rating. Saying “the paint is all wrong” when only a few more leaves need to be changed is not the kind of feedback that will save you, but it does help when you’re trying to get out of the lower star ranges. Again, this issue mostly just crops up on a few problem cuts, and save a particularly bad day, your customers will usually be pretty nice and lenient, sometimes even letting you decide which hairdo to give them.

One of the more interesting features of Bonsai Barber plays a little into the idea of gradually tending a bonsai tree over a long period of time. Only a few customers will come in each day, although you can influence a few to drop by if you set up appointments. After you’re done with them though, you need to wait until the next real world day to cut more plant hair… or you can just change your Wii’s internal clock and get the next day going if you’re not into bite-sized gameplay. Both approaches seem to work fairly well though, since as you progress through the week, small events can crop up that keep things from being too simplistic. It might rain or snow in your barber studio, you can end up with wasp or spider infestations, or face other little changes to the formula that add an extra layer to the day’s challenges. There’s usually some way to deal with the problem so its not persistent and there are photograph rewards for setting up unusual circumstances and snapping a picture of them, but the game throws more substantial challenges at you as well with things like competitions with unique contest-only hairstyles. Bonsai Barber, whether you’re playing it the way that’s intended or constantly pushing the calendar forward a day to see more, has quite a long life thanks to its small shifts to the trimming process, but you will eventually drop out since its structural choices means it can’t put its hooks too deep into you. It is designed to last a few weeks at least, so it certainly isn’t something that will shrivel up too quickly.

THE VERDICT: Bonsai Barber, despite sharing its name with an art that requires precision, isn’t put together as well as it could’ve been. The cute characters and fun atmosphere make it delightful on the surface and most of the leaf trimming can be interesting, but the game has a few hair styles that stick out for having conditions that don’t match up well with otherwise stellar controls. Don’t let that completely turn you away from Bonsai Barber though, as it is a mostly relaxing and interesting experience with quirks to make it memorable and enough depth of progression that you have quite a few manageable goals to work towards.

And so, I give Bonsai Barber for Wii…

A GOOD rating. When Bonsai Barber works, it works excellently. You’ve got everything you need to prune a plant and a lot of fun characters and unusual styles to work with, but every now and then something will crop up that doesn’t seem to gel with the game’s design. If the game would tell the player what’s wrong instead of leaving the line between a 4 and 5 star haircut vague than maybe it could fix that small percentage of frustrating cuts, but even then your paint tool almost never seems to be able to match the style card on more intricate patterns. The game technically will let you by without performing those cuts perfectly, but doing so is how you earn special rewards, win contests, and earn nice trinkets, so you are punished if a haircut just won’t work with you. Thankfully, the segmented approach, things that shake up the formula in a good way, and other little touches makes Bonsai Barber enjoyable for the most part, and while it is a unique game concept that was executed well enough, it’s not as good as it could have been.

Even when I knew I might see the dreaded Easter Egg or Sailboat hair styles the next day, Bonsai Barber was drawing me back with its easy to pick up approach. Coming back every day (before I just pushed the days ahead manually) was a treat and seeing just how much the game had to do made it worth returning to face whatever small challenge would spice up the process of pruning talking plants. While not as artistic or contemplative as trimming a bonsai tree, Bonsai Barber is at least a cute, enjoyable, and accesible twist on the same idea.