Girl's Garden is a 1984 video game that was released exclusively in Japan. Developed and published by Sega for their SG-1000 console, the story revolves around a simple country girl named Papri as she attempts to retain the love of her boyfriend. In this respect, Girl's Garden has been cited as an early example of a dating sim. It was the debut work of Sonic creator Yuji Naka.
In order to prevent her boyfriend Minto from going to another little girl named Cocco, Papri must collect ten different flowers and return them to her boyfriend's house. Flowers must be caught in full bloom so that the number of flowers in her possession will increase; catching flowers too early will consider the flowers to be wasted and flowers caught too late will be wilted. Wilted flowers will ruin the bouquet, causing the player to lose half of the flowers.
Bears have a taste for honey and cause the player to lose one of two hearts if one of them attacks the player. However, the honey can be dropped in order to render the bear temporarily harmless to the player. Bees appear as the player's ally, giving her bonus items occasionally and extra honey if the player catches it on a flower.
After every other round, the player competes in a bonus round where she has to jump as many bears as possible to get a good bonus score. Successfully clearing twenty bears results in an additional bonus for performing the bonus stage perfectly.
Girl's Garden was the first game developed for Sega by programmers Yuji Naka and Hiroshi Kawaguchi. After Naka joined Sega in April 1984, he was asked by his supervisor to try developing games for girls as part of his initial month of training. Naka collaborated with Kawaguchi, another new programmer to Sega, and showed their progress on Girl's Garden to their supervisor after about two months. Their boss decided it was good enough to be worked into a full game and sold for the SG-1000.
Naka continued with Sega and went on to become one of the most renowned programmers in the gaming industry. He is most well known for programming Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and heading Sega's Sonic Team division. Kawaguchi went on to become a music composer at Sega, writing music for arcade games like Hang-On (1985) and Out Run (1986).
Leave a Comment / Review: