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 essay about SaGa Frontier in particular, now split into part 3.

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 most of 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. (One of the first console games to have an overtly lesbian-identified character whom you can date is, meaningfully, the Utena game from 1998). On the other hand, the focus on relationships puts emphasis on emotional issues that didn’t feature at all in the earlier, sex-oriented games. 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-world explorations of gender expression and sapphic attraction beyond normative boundaries, many of which struck a chord with queer gamers at the time—and still today.

A screenshot from "Eien no Filena" for the SNES. It's in classic top-down RPG graphics. It shows two women, a blonde warrior with a headband and her brown-haired housewife, in a small but comfortable brick house. Lila: “Filena, for as long as you live I will be your wife…! Ah, that sounded a bit lewd, please don't mind me.” At this era, homosexuality was often treated as a sexual fetish, so layers of deniability are common; note the chaste bedside table separating their individual beds. From Eien no Filena (1995).

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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 secret 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—is infatuated 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, with technological elements like Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star, only rather heavier 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 the arena, which makes her loathed by the crowd. I don’t think it will be in anyone’s top 10 fantasy anime, though the anachronisms are vibey in a 90s OVA way; I love the part where Filena is forced to tragically kill her own swordfighting master in the gladiator arena, and in his death throes, proud of his disciple, he gives her as a final token of inheritance a… magneto-optical mini-disc video document. At home Filena hangs up her sword, gets comforted by her wife, then pops the disc into her VR deck. She puts on a laser headset and press “play”, the buttons big clonky satisfying switches, like on a tape deck; the immersive simulation shows her that she's the last princess of a lost kingdom…

In keeping with the times. Eien no Filena has 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 greatest delight of this anime for me were the scenes in between the plot beats, when the two women are just hanging out at home in marital bliss, Lila cooking for Filena, Filena softening up to dance in the living room with her wife, etc. I feel like whoever made this anime was using this complicated setup to get away with depicting married women being happy. This joyful, fully-mouthed way that they keep saying out loud the W-word (“Filena! It's me, Lila, your wife!”).

The somewhat comedic first meeting scene, in which Filena places Lila's hand on her own breast to show that she's a woman in a (misguided) attempt to dissuade Lila's advances, is, amazingly, preserved into the SNES game, in glorious 16-bit RPG sprite form. In some ways it's even more suggestive—Lila actually “embraces” Filena in bed and the screen fades to black, before coming back with comedic surprise upon her discovery of soft breasts. Sadly, I don't think there's much more than that in the game narrative, though; from the little I've watched, most of it is a pretty average SNES RPG plot, and I get the impression that once the main quest is on rails the interesting parts are left behind; not a lot of domestic slice-of-life scenes in SNES RPGs, we do get the house complete with housewife but soon the focus of the plot moves away from it. From a queer lens, the most interesting part of Filena for me is the way it signals the things it doesn't say; at a certain point, for example, several characters are watching the sunset at sea after a battle. Filena and Lila are facing one another rather than the scenery; the only other characters doing that are the group's pet dog, who is facing a female mate he's just found. In this way the dogs act as an analogy to signal that Filena and Lila's marriage is more than a performance. That kind of thing.

I wonder how the queer themes were handled in the original light novels; with 9 volumes, they have a lot more space to explore married life than a 6-episode OVA or a game cartridge.

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 the activities you choose to engage with. 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). In fact it achieved some notoriety for giving you full freedom to play it as a gal game, otome, BL or GL—that is, you can pick your gender and date whoever, which is rare for the VN market even today, let alone in 1997. 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)

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 a lesser-known RPG series by Squaresoft, and in SaGa Frontier we have 7 interlocked stories, each by a different writer and in a different subgenre. Shōda is the author of Asellus' scenario, and she set out to write a feminist tale heavily inspired by the Takarazuka/Rose of Versailles tradition of yuri—courtly intrigue, decadent luxury, Proustian-invert handsome soft-butches… The results are fascinating even discounting the era and context in which this game was published; when you weight that in, I consider the existence of this character nothing short of miraculous.

Asellus is a normal human girl who is ran over by a carriage drawn by enormous horses, and wakes up to find herself a hybrid creature, a mix of human and yōma—a human-like, immortal species with traits similar to vampires and to the fae. Moreover, Asellus was infused with the blood of the King of the Fair Folk himself, Lord Orlouge, whose powers give him supernatural charm over women. So she inherits the same power. Gay shenanigans ensue.

This story touches on many themes that are ahead of its time, from representation of carnal sapphic desire beyond “pure-hearted female bonds”, to the dangers of reproducing patriarchal abuses within a butch identity, to open criticism of the queerbaiting of “Class S”. I could talk about Asellus from SaGa Frontier all day; in fact I did, it's already evening now and her section has passed the mark of 5555 words, so Asellus has become part 3 of this series. I hope you enjoy reading my overthinking of this old videogame as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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) is very overt