The game's story begins with Filena, a girl raised as a boy by her grandfather Zenna. Filena is raised as a boy because the Empire ruling the country forces girls into prostitution and turns boys into gladiators. After turning 16 Filena prepares to make her debut in the imperial coliseum, however before the battle she and her fellow gladiators are assigned concubines. Filena ignores her assigned bedmate, Lila, but Lila forces her way into Filena's room and learns the truth about her gender. Filena later fights through the gladiator ranks and discovers that their battles to the death are all scripted by behind-the-scenes writers. Filena then sets off with Lila on a quest to bring down an empire and reclaim her rightful place in a lost kingdom.
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This is a very Final Fantasy V type of game. The artistic style is almost exactly the same, and it even has its own crappy version of an Active Time Battle system. That being said, it’s based on an anime or something, and it involves a girl who pretends to be a guy, I’m not sure why though. Okay.
(editor's note: it's so she can be a gladiator and not get sold into slavery)
This is a japan only game and I can see why, the story at that time is probably deemed too dark for the American audience, there are plenty of dark theme in this game, like slavery, forced death match, human experiment, death, prostitution, death, and more death.
The story itself seems to be pretty simple at first and then it gets more interesting the more you play, it's about Filena, a girl that is forced to grow as a man so that she can avoid being sold as a slave, but instead she have to fight in a gladiator match to the death until she eventually die there. Except... she escaped, with her wife. Yes, wife, it has lesbian, add that to the list why this is not localized.
The battle is standard turn-based, although a bit more involved because you need to know (GUESS) what enemy is weak to, you can equip 3 weapon at a time and there are 3 or 4 weapon types, good luck guessing which one is the enemy weak to. There is no indication. But then again, the game is really easy, all boss fight ended up with me picking my character strongest attack and spam A, with occasional healing.
The main downside of this game is, as I mentioned... the encounter rate. The dungeon design is pretty simple but you can be stuck there for hours just because of all the fight you get into. Strangely enough, I never use fast forward at all in this game even though the emulator is capable of it.
Another downside is on the latter part of the game, close to the ending, it's padding. Not by difficulty but by backtracking, and with the high encounter rate, it became torture, especially if you don't know where to go. They also pulled an FFIX kind of thing as the final boss which is a bit disappointing, but doesn't really damage the great story that much.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game and the relationship between Filena and her wife is just cute.