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Cocona World

Published 2025-06-15

Synopsis

Meet Cocona Tea! She's a magical princess who left her home on Pineapple Star to study magic. Now she stays in SOFEL's Forest along with her animal pals. She's new to living all by her lonesome, so you'll have to be her new caretaker. Help her practice her magic to protect herself from baddies, go shopping for food at the farmer's market, visit the hot springs and the seaside, play Bingo and tell your fortune, and finally go to bed after a long day of work and play.

Developed and published by Japanese software development firm SOFEL in 1987, Cocona World is a unique potion, a mix of 1970s magical witch shows such as Mahoutsukai Chappy and Majokko Megu-chan, a dash of influence from The Legend of Zelda and the Hydlide series, and infused with the freeform nature of playing make-believe with a doll set.

The resulting concoction is a pioneering achivement. It paved the way for virtual pets and raising sims, both practically non-existent genres at the time of release. It also experiments with asynchronous multiplayer concepts later popularized by Animal Crossing through its various minigames. Although Cocona World didn't quite stick the landing and faded into obscurity even in its home country, its innovations certainly deserve it another look from a modern perspective.

Changelog

2026-04-28 - Revision 2

This revision fixes some translation errors and typos.

I've received several reports that the patch doesn't work with their dump of Cocona World. FDS games are, unfortunately, a bit of a pain to properly create a patch for due to differences between headered/unheadered dumps, as well as copy-specific metadata that makes generating a checksum nearly impossible. Given that this is a nearly 40 year old commercial failure from a company that is no longer involved in the games industry, I think it's okay for me to just offer the game pre-patched on this website.

Work is (slowly) in progress on a source code release. (I need to convert my binary patches to proper ca65 syntax, and then develop the tooling to extract and recompile an FDS image.)

2025-06-15 - Revision 1

Initial release.

Downloads

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