Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
The train pulls into a mountain village, and Grandpa is supposed to be waiting outside. First you have to find your ticket. Then you have to find Grandpa. By the time you meet a girl in a purple yukata near the river, your first summer trip on your own has already gone a little sideways.
Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori is a storybook adventure built around looking, talking, and deciding where to go next. You can stop to ask a fisherman about the river, play menko with the local kids, or listen to an old story about the woods. The village has a summer festival coming up, and the more you ask around, the more you want to know about that girl.
Nintendo released it in Japan in July 1999 through Nintendo Power, a service that let players have games written onto rewritable Super Famicom cartridges. It never had an official U.S. release. Nintendo later brought it to the Japanese Wii and Wii U Virtual Console. Retro Replay’s English patch gives it the title Forest of Beginnings. Nintendo’s release history
This is a public alpha, so the English is still in its first rounds of editing and playtesting. We’ve worked through dialogue, menus, and the diary screens, but there are routes we haven’t played in order to check that the conversations make sense. Your choices can bring up lines we haven’t seen together in the game yet.
If a conversation suddenly stops making sense, a word gets cut off, or you can’t move on, please tell us in the Retro Replay ROM Hacking forum. The patch version, the in-game day, and the choice you picked just before it happened will help us find the scene. A screenshot or BizHawk save state is especially helpful if you have one.
Get the English playtest patch. You’ll need a clean Japanese Nintendo Power ROM. Apply the patch in your browser or grab the ZIP and load the patched game in BizHawk. Once you’ve settled in, see where the path by the river takes you.
