Early GL/yuri/lesbian games, Part 2: The console era

Continuing from Part 1, we're now in the 1990s and will take a look at the videogame boom of home consoles, at a time when it was still difficult to find games where you could be a girl at all—let alone a girl who kisses others girls. Nonetheless, there’s a few early cases of lesbian feelings portrayed to varying degrees of overtness, and in fascinating ways (I ended up writing an entire mini-essay about SaGa Frontier below). [A screenshot from SaGa Frontier for the PS1. Asellus, a green-haired woman in regal purple clothes, is discussing with Zozma, a wild-looking warrior.](https://files.transmom.love/yurige-pt2/asellus-m.jpeg) Zozma, from SaGa Frontier (PS1): “Surely the fact that you are so devastated only shows how much you love the Princess?” Asellus: “Yes… as a friend! She was like a sister to me!” Denial is a hell of a drug—but Zozma won’t be having any of it…

It is a curious consequence of marginalisation that it’s much easier to find lesbian characters in porn stories than in non-erotic content. Without the titillation appeal, all you're left with is human relationships, and homoexclusive affection is a bigger taboo than sex; straight people can conceive of queer sex as a sort of fetish or deviancy, but to marry a woman and be happy without a man? Why, this threatens the very fabric of (a shitty) society! On the one hand, this dooms 90s console GL to the realm of mask-and-signal, not unlike old Hollywood movies, never able to put into words the love-that-shall-not-be-named; on the other hand, the focus on relationships allows treating emotional issues that might not feature at all in the earlier, sex-oriented games. (One of the first console games to have an overtly lesbian-identified character whom you can date is, rather appropriately, the Utena game from 1998). However, we do not have in these games any representation of actual Japanese queer culture or how real-life queer people live; rather, we have fantasy explorations of gender expression and sapphic attraction beyond normative boundaries, many of which struck a chord with queer gamers at the time.

SNES games

Eien no Filena (1995)

RPG adaptation of a fantasy light novel and anime. The main character is the princess of a destroyed kingdom, raised in secreted and disguised as a man in the gladiator pits. In one memorable scene at the beginning, Lila, one of the servant-women who tends to the fighters—many of them will lend sexual favours to the men about to die—falls in love with the dashing mystery warrior, and is shocked to learn that she's a woman, too; a surprise that doesn't stop her from falling utterly for the princess anyway. Filena eventually warms up to her and decides to marry Lila to protect her from sexual exploitation by the other gladiators; or maybe to help maintain her own disguise as a man; I mean that's the excuse, but she's waxing lovingly about her dear wife quite quickly.

The full anime OVA is presently on youtube. It is generic fantasy, and rather heavy in tone. I like the fact that it doesn’t shy away from having the protagonist deal with being physically weaker than the male fighters; she has to rely on a combination of grit and trickery to survive, which makes her loathed by the crowd. In keeping with the times it had a convoluted etiology for the lesbian situation, but as usual with this type of mask-and-signal media, there's all sorts of little hints for the queer eye (before her encounter with Lila the protagonist already frequented a strip club with the boys, for example). Filena is introduced to us depressed and nihilistic to the point of suicidality, and Lila's love is as much Filena's saviour as Filena's bravery saved her wife.

The rather comedic setup scene in which Filena shows her body to Lila to dissuade her advances is, amazingly, preserved into the SNES game, in glorious 16-bit RPG sprite form. I don't know how they got away with it. I haven't played or watched the game long enough to know if there's any more romance than that scene in the game narrative, though; most of it is a pretty average SNES RPG plot.

PS1 games

Shiritsu Justice Gakuen (PS1, 1997)

A very fun fighting game by Capcom, set in the same universe as Street Fighter, but with high school students. A few characters eventually were brought into modern games, like the USA pro-wrestler girl Rainbow Mika or the delinquent girlboss biker Kazama Akira. There was a sequel in 2000.

This is a team fighter, and you can do paired supers with the offscreen teammate. It is also a dating sim in the Tokimemo tradition; you can create a 3D avatar and experience student life at the fighter's school, interacting with the main characters freely and picking up their moves along the way, as well as developing your own fighter's physical build through your choices. Eventually you graduate and get to use your custom character in the arcade/versus modes. I had a blast with this and I feel sorry for USA people who never got to experience it (the dating sim mode was cut out of the localisation).

You can play as a girl and have romantic moments with the other girls, which makes of this one of my first yuri experiences (along with SaGa Frontier, below). Sadly it does the “BFF” trope (Japanese “Class S”), where bringing a homoromantic relationship to max status stays short of spelling out that they're dating, giving you just an ending illustration about how you're now the bestest of gal pal roommates forever (marginalising queer relationships from straight pairings, which get an explicitly romantic ending). This is probably not the first ever dating sim with Class S yuri pairings, but it may be the first high-profile one, in something as mainstream as the Street Fighter franchise. Even today, when even Nintendo games like Fire Emblem have had overt lesbian couples (or, indeed, Street Fighter itself, with Marisa)—this type of plausible deniability is still a staple of mainstream Japanese games, in titles like Rune Factory etc. But it is still unambiguously queer-coded, with romantic scenes and blushing confessions and generally pushing the envelope as far as you can without without having to admit the L-word before the censors.

One fun activity I liked doing in this game was to play a cute queer boy and teach him Rainbow Mika's team super, where she jumps at her fighting partner and French-kisses them deeply and intimately, restoring some HP in the process. This way you'd get a boy who would deep-kiss boy partners indiscriminately. Of course, Mika already did that to girls canonically if you paired her with any female character. (It's normal for girls.)

SaGa Frontier (PS1, 1997)

My first yuri game. Was a formative memory for many women my age. Notorious for being one of the first yuri games with a female writer, Shōda Miwa 生田美和 (is this the first non-porn yuri videogame written by a woman?). Shōda has also written the celebrated Jewel Thief (Sandra's) arc in Legend of Mana.

SaGa is Squaresoft's odd cousin to the celebrity series, Final Fantasy. Like other entries in the series, SaGa Frontier is ambitious and creative with its game systems—seven distinct but interconnected stories; open world exploration; level-less powerup system where you grow in battle by perfecting the skills you actually use; four different species with fully distinct mechanics, etc. Like other entries in the series, SaGa Frontier fails at its ambitions and is not, like, a good game. But it fails in interesting ways, and it succeeds in evoking a distinct, otherwordly atmosphere. The gameplay systems are baroque, mystifying, and for all their iconoclasm not really particularly engaging or fun; the open world concept was not technologically feasible yet, and the various worlds feel small and constrained, like theatre sets; the lack of linearity in a plot-oriented game makes the pacing end up all over. Moreover SaGa Frontier is rough at edges, rushed and unfinished, with many elements that go nowhere; doors that are clearly meant to be interactive but never open, worlds you can never visit, strange characters you meet once and never see again. By accident, this reinforces the haunting ambiance and atmospheric appeal. (Much of this unfinished content has been restored in the remaster; I'm not sure if that's for the better.) I do not recommend this game to modern players, with so many better RPGs to play. But the game is still mechanically interesting enough that I do recommend playing through Asellus' scenario for yuri fans interested in lesbian representation history.

Each of the seven scenarios in SaGa Frontier is written by a different author, and has a different mood—Blue is an evil wizard in a high-fantasy quest; Red is a tokusatsu superhero; Emelia is a cop in a thriller setting, etc. Asellus, the character written by Shōda, is a gothic-romantic genderqueer shōjo drama in the Takarazuka tradition of Rose of Versailles. I think the game came too shortly after Utena to have been influenced by it, but it's, at the very least, drinking from the same sources, and there's many parallels to Utena/Anthy in Asellus/White Rose's relationship.

At the beginning of her story, Asellus, an average human girl, dies horrifically after being ran over by a carriage with big black horses (this is based on a nightmare of Shōda's). She wakes up in a gothic-renaissance-alien castle-city, Fascinatoru, home of the immortal energy-vampire folk, the Yōma (“devil-fae”, “elf-demons”; translated rather boringly as “Mystics”). The yōma have blue blood and can absorb their enemies/victims (bodies? souls?) to become stronger. Asellus was accidentally killed by the King of Yōma himself, Lord Orlouge; a decadent, hedonistic tyrant with a sprawling harem of Princesses he keeps in stasis and calls at will. “Princess” here translates 寵臣, a favoured retainer; this is explicitly clarified to be an euphemism for 寵姫, mistresses, concubines. Orlouge is attracted to the human girl and resurrects her, by feeding her his own blood; that turns Asellus into a singleton type of creature, a purple-blooded half-yōma. She can both absorb powers like yōma, and also grow her own abilities like humans. Furthermore, her blood makes Asellus immune to the supernatural charm that Orlouge has over women; in fact, it gives Asellus the same charm. Her arrival shakes things up at the castle and acts as a catalyst for rebel yōma and subjugated humans to take action against their opressor.

There are two romantic interest characters for Asellus, both women: Gina, a human tailor who lives beneath the castle, and Princess White Rose, one of the pearls of Orlouge's harem, assigned as her chaperone. Gina, who narrates some of the story as a framing device, is powerfully attracted to Asellus at first sight; we are not explicitly shown her taking measurements for Asellus' courtly yōma outfit, but together with her lavish purple-prose praise of Asellus’ beauty, the off-screen scene is quite sensual. White Rose is a gentle soul and is moved by Asellus' sense of justice; she's been ordered to stay with Asellus and because she cannot break Orlouge's mind control, follows the half-yōma upon her escape from Orlouge's palace; eventually she becomes devoted to Asellus rather than the king.

In the old days it was very difficult to know anything about the people who made videogames, but in the era of Internet, Shōda Miwa has come public online: – Note – Old blog – Bluesky – Website

She clearly sees Asellus' scenario as a high point in her career; but Shōda has denied she meant to write a lesbian relationship, saying she’s glad if players benefited from reading it that way but it was not her intention. This is a kind of amazing claim, given how overt and textual Asellus/White Rose gets. At some point Asellus insists to her yōma ally Zozma that she loves White Rose “as a sister and a friend”, and the guy just explicitly calls her out to come out of denial already (“just admit your real feelings! isn’t your entire quest about becoming free?”) The type of noncommital answer that Shōda gave was common in the 90s, but I would expect in modern Japan people would feel more comfortable talking openly about queer rep. Shōda says her concept for Asellus was to write about strong women able to make their own way without men; as I'm about to discuss, the power, influence, and example of men weights heavily on Asellus' character development, which makes this story unambiguously feminist.

The convoluted lesbian etiology in this game is of course in the matter of Orlouge's blood. Asellus agonises over not being a human anymore, and grieves for the normal human life she has lost. She cannot adapt to the aloof, inhuman yōma society either. A half-creature neither here nor there; the queer reading of her condition is obvious, and made textually explicit by the gender dynamics—at some point she worries about having become a half-man, due to the attraction she now exerts over women and, implicitly, the sapphic attraction that she herself feels.

Asellus has three possible endings, with very interesting overtones. If you refrain from using the yōma's vampirism powers at all, remember to visit the tailor girl Gina even though this has no gameplay or plot benefit, and eventually go on a sidequest to save her from danger, Asellus rejects her yōma transformation and, after defeating Orlouge, goes back to a human life, marrying and having children and grandchildren. If you embrace her yōma powers and leave the human girl to die, Asellus defeats Orlouge only to take his place as the new Queen of the Fae; she resurrects Gina as an immortal, turning the tailor into her first Princess, and vows to outdo Orlouge by building a harem of over 200 Princesses. This is supposed to be the bad ending for some reason. (I'm joking; Queen Asellus is another cruel tyrant; but her evil queen laugh is a delight…) What is coded as “true ending”, as in many Japanese games, is the middle path: embrace the yōma powers but also save Gina. In this case Asellus becomes a wanderer with White Rose and a couple of her (male) yōma polycule allies. Gina lives a normal human live and marries and has children and grandchildren and grows older and older; an immortal Asellus and White Rose visit her once a year. Gina explicitly describes these visits as meeting with the love of her life. Asellus feels envious of Gina's human life as a grandmother, but says at least she'll never be alone with White Rose forever at her side; I do not think it's a stretch for me to see envy in the other direction, too, in Gina’s reply that “you are lucky to have such good friends”.

In this way the fantasy drama of her mixed-yōma blood acts as an analogy for queerness; being human is consistently equated with heterosexual marriage and the cycle of life, reproduction, death; but the beautiful, artistic, and gender-bending yōma exist outside of this flow of time, and do not reproduce save by transformation of humans like Asellus and Gina, pulling them outside of the hetero cycle. In the timeless, decadent gothic world of the yōma, heteronormativity and monogamy rules do not apply. Yet gender and class dynamics still have hold, with Orlouge's harem being decidedly objectifying and nonconsensual. Like many a budding butch player, Asellus find herself suddenly irresistible to the women she's now attracted to, only to recoil at the horror of having become “half a man”, of acting like the most toxic of male fuckboys, King Orlouge; she can lose herself by forgetting to care about Gina's feelings and turn predatory, or she can go back into the closet and live a boring life; by choosing neither path, she becomes a new, better type of being, both empathetic and free.

Ayakashi Ninden Kunoichiban (PS1, 1997)

To investigate: – The Utena game (1998); It's an interesting choice to make the protag customisable but always a girl, for an anime that also features BL pairings. Talk about the “corrupt” endings here and especially Juri as an out lesbian. – Lain game? (plural alt dating? Everybody in this game is a girl—Lain, Tōko, Misato—and obsessed with one another; at the end of the day we all love Lain; since you the player as a voyeur is investigating Lain just like Tōko, aren't you one more girl in the Lain list?) (1998) – Class S relationships in Star Ocean: The Second Story (1998) – Little Witch Parfait (1999)

If you have any suggestions of games for this list, or the PC-88 list, or if you've played sapphic games back in the day and want your experiences to be shared, do send me a note!

A card illustration showing Asellus from SaGa Frontier embracing Princess White Rose very suggestively. Asellus is dressed like a prince in a fancy yellow-blue outfit, a red rose on her chest. White Rose has a hair address full of white roses and a very short, skin-tight white minidress, its hem also trimmed with white roses. In true butch style, Asellus has one hand on White Rose's cleavage, the other on her leg. In true femme fashion, White Rose is holding Asellus' hand atop her breast, signaling consent. This exceedingly provocative illustration of Asellus and White Rose was not drawn for the SaGa Frontier game itself, but it was official artwork in the gatcha card games like Emperor's SaGa (2012). This is symbolic of Square-Enix's have-its-cake-and-eat-it-too queerbaiting attitude to the lesbian characters; at the same time as it denies or effaces the original game's more-than-subtextual relationship in strategy guides and public statements, it also sells artwork like the above, or adds sapphic fanservice to the remaster, or does stuff like this. For a larger version of the illustration click here.