Atma Games: Eternal Filena

[atma]

I recently played an old, obscure SNES JRPG called Eien no Filena/Eternal Filena. I beat it this morning before I went to sleep and I liked it. A lot.

It's about the titular Filena, a gladiator of the slave race/caste who fights for the entertainment of the evil empire, winning freedom and striking back at the empire at the behest of those enslaved and Filena's grandfather. Raised since birth to fight, Filena comes across as pretty awkward but not unfeeling, gaining a whore/concubine wife in the process and meeting a really weird cast of characters. Everyone in this game is kind of a huge asshole and nobody is entirely righteous.

Sounds basic, but here's what got me interested in trying it.

Filena is a woman raised as a man.

This game is based on a series of novels by the late Takeshi Shudo, the guy who would go on to create Team Rocket's motto amongst other things. Filena is a genderbending lesbian love story at heart and actually treats the subjects with a great deal of respect.


Filena and her wife, Lila

It's very much a basic JRPG, turn based, you get a few different weapon slots you can switch between for different skillsets in a battle but otherwise it's very straightforward. The enemy sprites are huge and detailed. It's also not a hard or long game. My file had about 15ish hours on it and that's from overplaying/grinding. Most people finish within 12-14 hours. There's some terrible experience curving in this game so leveling up and overleveling just sort of happens; enemies are very very generous in how much money and exp they drop while difficulty never really spikes so unless you're trying to lose you'll probably do just fine. I died all of twice but it was mostly because I was trying to screencap it during end game fights. My only real complaint is the encounter rate is fucking insane. There's an autobattle option, thank fuck, but there's an absurd amount of fights no matter where you go.

I honestly have no real strong complaints about the story or how Filena's gender or Lila and Filena's sexuality is presented. The only small problem I had is people usually find out Filena is a woman only by accidentally bumping into her chest, but that only happened a few times and Lila got mad every time it happened so it's not presented positively. Everyone's reaction to this all and Lila's insistence on being her wife though is presented as "Okay, that's cool, wanna go kill some badguys now?"

I saw this game on the translation patch page here years ago and saw the premise of the story. It sounded neat. Hey, at least it has a female protagonist! That's rare enough! But it took me forever to actually getting around to trying it. I just called it "that lesbian gladiator game" and put it off until now. Kind of regret waiting, it wound up being much better than I thought.

If you don't want to play it yourself but want to check it out there is an LP of it by the guy who translated it. Hell, the reason he translated it was so he could LP it. The patch has a couple unfinished parts but it is otherwise entirely understandable and fully playable.

I wish game companies would look back on this game, no matter how obscure or niche it is, and take some lessons from it about writing queer characters and female protagonists. I don't know if that's how it was originally meant to be seen, but from what I hear the game is extremely faithful to the books, so I wouldn't be surprised if it just happened to be some book about genderbending lesbians toppling an empire. The books seem to be pretty fondly remembered in Japan, too, for what it's worth. There's also a short OVA of it but fansubs don't seem to exist and I hear it's pretty bad, anyways, and that most recommend the game. While it adhered to a lot of genre cliches it also bucked a lot and subverted a lot of gender stuff, and it was refreshing from a JRPG standpoint too.

Next time you're looking for an odd, short game or something gay or just something with a good heroine, give Filena's magical sapphic genderfuck quest a try.

I think you'll be as glad as I am that you did.

(Just mute the game's sound if you do.)



Though in the end, my biggest complaint is this is so obscure that there's no way I could ever scrounge up enough art, official or fanart or otherwise, that I could make a good Filena RP journal set out of them. Weh.

Comments

[fiver]

Yep, need to play this.

Also, you should commission someone to draw icons for you. I know at least one person who was doing really reasonably-priced and well-drawn iconsets at one point, I think she might still be.

[flyingthesky]

You could do all text icons! Or even like. Is there fanart for the books? :0

But for srs, I might actually need to play this game at some point it sounds like of badass.