Girl's Garden is a peculiar and charming oddity in the SG-1000 catalog, because at a time when most games on the console were about shooting and jumping, it attempted a completely different theme. The player guides a girl named Papri, who is trying to gather enough flowers in the forest to keep the favor of a boy named Minto. The goal is expressed through a meter that steadily counts down, so the game plays out like a race against time. Flowers appear across several connected screens full of grass, ponds, and trees, and the girl collects them by walking through, having to regularly carry her full armful back to the boy for it to count toward the goal.
Bears stand in the way, relentlessly chasing the girl, and the only defense is a thrown candy that stuns them briefly. On top of that, you need to cross bodies of water by jumping and keep track of which part of the forest is worth moving through. The combination of collecting, dodging, and managing limited resources gives the game an unexpected tactical layer, even though visually it's a very simple affair built from basic sprites and flat colored backgrounds. The sound consists of light melodic loops that suit the theme and give the whole thing a fairy-tale touch unusual for consoles of the time.
Girl's Garden is remembered mainly because it was one of the first projects at Sega that Yuji Naka worked on, later associated with the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The title's historical weight is therefore greater than its gameplay scope, which is understandably modest. Still, it's worth trying: it shows that even in the early eighties there was room for games aimed at an audience other than the traditional arcade player, and its simple loop of collecting and dodging works today too as a short, undemanding episode you can finish in one sitting. Anyone interested in the history of the Japanese game industry will also appreciate the chance to see with their own eyes what the earliest steps looked like for people who, a few years later, would be behind games with worldwide reach.
Game 4 of 13 for SEGA SG-1000
