Girl's Garden

Maybe a quick one for today. I slept through most of Valentine’s Day, but I figured fuck it, I might as well play some kind of romance-related game today. And I read somewhere once that Girl’s Garden is considered the first dating sim, even though it’s not even remotely a dating sim. Actually, in retrospect, I’m not sure at all where I read that. It is themed around romance though, so there’s that. It also is annoying to pick a genre for, because I don’t like saying “arcade” or “action” are genres because they feel too generic, but this game spits in the face of my taxonomy standards by being those in its purest form. I guess you could call it a maze game, if by maze you mean random objects that are randomly placed.

This game was made because Yuji Naka was new at Sega and was told to make a game for girls, as a training exercise apparently. Because he doesn’t know what women are but he’s read about them in books, he made a game where you pick up ten flowers to give to your boyfriend while avoiding bears by distracting them with honey, otherwise (if the time limit runs out) he’ll go to some other girl instead. I dunno, maybe this guy’s just an idiot and not worth your time, why does he live in an area surrounded by bears anyway? Luckily, the time limit never really comes into play. The bears are the issue. Falling into the water also kills you. The flowers also wilt, and if you pick up a dead flower, you lose flowers that you’ve already collected, because… I dunno, I guess they had to think of a penalty. Also you can’t pick up flowers that aren’t ripe yet… ripe? Is that the word? You don’t eat them. Fully grown, I guess you would say. Sometimes a bee comes along, and you almost expect that to be an enemy too, but it just drops bonus items (or a skull, which kills you and makes you lose flowers) that give you more time or points or extra honey.

So, it seems like a decent enough premise. It’s fun enough for a while. But it all falls apart when you try to play it for too long, which I wouldn’t have bothered doing except RetroAchievements thinks that you need to get to level 15 to beat this game, even though it’s endless and level 15 isn’t anything special and a multiple of 4 (if they insist on not just ending at level 4, which I would recommend for not-achievement-hunters if you need something to aim for) would have made more sense because you get different flower sprites every round (repeating after 4 sprites) which I guess are supposed to be seasons. Also a multiple of 2 would have made sense, because you get a bonus round every 2 rounds, where you jump over bears, except fuck that bonus round because it’s stupid and bullshit and the hitboxes were programmed by a moron (I guess Yuji Naka), or it’s probably because the SG-1000 is not exactly the most powerful system in the world. Mostly same hardware as the MSX1 and ColecoVision, I guess it’s okay, though it’s not winning any awards, and you can see it when you go to the side of the screen and it doesn’t have proper scrolling.

But I digress. This game is hard! Sometimes there are just an extremely unreasonable amount of bears on screen that block all possible passage back to the idiot’s house. Sometimes you’re out of honey. Sometimes you literally are screwed, unless you find out the nonsense ways in which bears can move (slightly slower when going diagonally, can’t go through other bears who are reating honey, can’t go through ripe flowers for some reason…) or you manage to escape the other way and despawn the bears and then get lucky enough to not have more bears reappear when you go the other way, but doing that requires getting the hang of how scrolling works in this game, because it’s not just going to always scroll to keep the girl in the centre of the screen. Wouldn’t really work on the SG-1000. Also, if you die, you respawn right where you are but with all the bears off the screen, which sounds like a good thing at first but it means you can’t just death warp back to the house with a full bouquet. Meaning that if the RNG hates you, and it does, more bears might spawn in to stop you anyway. So don’t die.

The other option is that you simply lose and keep playing and I guess that’s what you can do, or you use rewind, because fuck it. I have other things to waste my life on that aren’t playing a game like this over and over. Still not really a fan of whoever named it “softcore” mode, the only softcore is the porn your mum stars in, or something like that. And then you manipulate the RNG like Yuji Naka manipulated the stock market. At some point it feels like (other than continually retrying) the only choice you have is to just keep retrying moving one step over to scroll the screen until you get the lack of bear spawns that you need, and sometimes the bears hate you and they just stay there instead of going towards your honey (but they still kill you), and sometimes the bee just drops stuff right at the bottom of the screen, and this one time I tried to catch it right as it fell and it just so happened to be a skull… well, you get the idea. And then (likely due to technical limitations) the collision detection for the water is sometimes just absurdly finicky, and you think you can sneak around a corner to avoid a bear, but you cannot. The game becomes Fuck You: The Game at that point.

Is this game fun? Only for a few minutes at a time. Is this an important piece of gaming history? Not really, unless you really wanted to see what Yuji Naka’s first game is (and also Hiroshi Kawaguchi’s first game, except he was the other programmer and not the composer, but credit where credit is due). Otherwise it’s like… meh. If you insist on playing it, don’t be afraid of the ROM being Japanese, it doesn’t really have text anyway.