I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

The Property

Eien no Filena (Eternal Filena) is a fantasy light novel series from Takeshi Shudo: a writer on many anime TV shows, most notably the original seasons of Pokémon. It follows the eponymous heroine Filena, the former princess of the kingdom of Filosena. Filosena was destroyed by the Devis Empire during their successful attempt to conquer the known world and Filena is raised in secret as a boy and trained to fight in the Empire's arenas, such is the fate of many male slaves. Her mentor and trainer is Zena/Zenna, a soldier of Filosena, who prepares her for a life of endless battle but eventually informs her of her birthright which prompts her to seek out her lost kingdom and her namesake sword, passed down through the royal family and left with another of the kingdom's few survivors. The novels were released in nine volumes between 1985 and 1994, and it's towards the end of that run that the world saw a six-episode OVA adaptation and a Super Famicom tie-in RPG.

Since this is the penultimate episode of Game OVA and I'm planning on finishing this inaugural "season" with an anime franchise I've been meaning to watch for decades, I wanted to squeeze in some fantasy-adjacent nonsense because it's the one genre I've neglected so far (besides slice-of-life, but the game adaptations for those are... well, not thrilling) and I was curious to try its RPG, since it's one of the many released on SFC that we in the West know precious little about. Of course, there may well be a good reason why no-one's going off about this "lost classic," but all the same it's worth a glance. (My runner-up choice for this slot was Slayers by the way, but I suspect that's a very known quantity at this point and it has like 100 TV episodes and five movies besides. My second was Hameln no Violin Hiki, but I've already written about its SFC game before.)

Notable Characters:

• Filena: Being raised as a boy, on top of being a slave and a warrior, has given Filena a certain fatalistic stoicness that doesn't improve once she's forced to murder other slaves in the arena to stay alive. She recalls her happier days growing up with her "uncle" Zena and finds a similar rock in her "wife" Lila later in the story. Her combat ability is remarkable, but as someone with a lighter frame she cannot rely on strength and must outmaneuver and outwit her opponents.
• Zena/Zenna: A soldier of Filosena tasked by the King to raise Filena in secret and protect her identity from the Empire. He's torn between wanting Filena to have a normal, happy life as her mother requested or raising her to be the type of warrior and ruler that might reclaim her kingdom. In the end, he leaves the choice of Filena's destiny to her.
• Lila: In a grunchy twist, all Battlers on the night before their first fight are given a bed-mate - a female slave, who don't fight in the arena and are forced to sleep with those that do. Filena spurns the young Lila's advances and in private reveals to her the reason why, letting her be the only person besides Zena to know her sex. They later have a sham marriage to maintain Filena's cover and protect Lila from other Battlers. Lila becomes Filena's staunchest supporter and closest confidante, and there are definite hints that she's looking for something more from their relationship.
• Nest: A "Battle Writer," someone who plans and scripts out the fights in the arena to inject them with drama that entices the crowd. Nest is more compassionate than his colleague and friend Baraba, but is still aloof and prone to drinking excessively due to a tragedy in his past. In another lifetime he was an Imperial soldier that demonstrated skill with engineering gadgets, creating his own powerful ranged weaponry.
• Baraba: Another Battle Writer and one who has a certain negative obsession with Filena after she defied all expectations by surviving her first fight. His casual cruelty, setting up fights that are designed to crush Filena's spirit, is borne from the same tragedy that drove Nest to drinking, though he later turns around on Filena and tries to help her escape the Empire. He doesn't appear in the game.
• Milika: The widow of a man Filena is forced to kill as part of her Battler "story." She swears unholy vengeance on Filena on behalf of herself and her infant son, Fis. Later, she's able to comprehend the circumstances that led to the death of her husband and instead joins Filena's struggle.

The Anime

The Eien no Filena OVA features six episodes each around thirty minutes in length, and covers up to the point where Filena escapes from her life as a slave. It aired between December 1992 and February 1993, with two episodes released every month, and was created by Studio Pierrot. Pierrot's one of the biggest Japanese animation studios around, at least in output: Naruto, YuYu Hakusho, Bleach, Urusei Yatsura, Tokyo Ghoul, and (one of my favorites) Great Teacher Onizuka are just a handful of the anime properties they've produced. They've also worked with video games, animating the cutscenes for Keio Flying Squadron and its sequel as well as creating the Blue Dragon anime tie-ins.

Honestly, after watching a few episodes of the OVA, I wasn't sure I was going to cover this one as it seemed a little too dull, too overly serious, and too familiar a premise of fighting an evil empire from the depths of a slave arena - King Colossus (which I played recently), Final Fantasy Adventure, and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands are just a few others off the top of my head with a similar premise. However, the anime featured something I have a deep affection for: fantasy posing as sci-fi, and vice versa. I grew up watching the likes of Star Wars and Krull during quiet weekend afternoons, and neither could decide which genre they preferred to be at any given moment. The anime introduces Filena's world as one where "man never learned to fly," suggesting a level of civilization just short of the airships of Final Fantasy, but then it's shown that the Empire has technology quite beyond its otherwise familiar ancient Roman setting, including but not limited to tanks, laser weapons (making all the sword fights feel kinda anachronistic), and a functional version of the internet. It's like that one episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "Bread and Circuses," where Kirk and the crew are abducted by the soldiers of an Ancient Roman-like planet and forced to fight in an arena, with the battle being broadcast via television to the planet's populace. I recall that episode vividly because it suggested that the Roman civilization - that is to say, the Earth one we're familiar with - only fell because of the advent of Christianity and the moral lessons it imparts, which is a real ballsy move from a sci-fi show that would later find god in the middle of the galaxy and kill it.

Anyhoo, here's an episode-by-episode rundown along with my notes:

Episode 1 has the thankless job of establishing the world and Filena's place in it. We begin with the collapse of Filosena as the soldiers Uto and Zena are given, respectively, the royal sword Filena and the infant princess Filena for safekeeping. The palace then sinks into the sea, taking most of the Empire's forces with them. Cut to sixteen years later and Filena is facing her first fight in the arena as a fully-trained Battler, recalling the lessons of her mentor and "oji-san" Zena. Narrowly beating her enormous rivals, though not without great physical cost, she rallies after remembering the events of the previous evening when she is "assigned" a female slave as a bed-mate, but rebuffs her due to her unique circumstances. Lila, the female slave in question, instead becomes her supporter and has her promise to survive the following day's battle.

So, I'm not sure if it's because it literally has a character named Zena in it, but I'm getting some Xena: Warrior Princess vibes from the central relationship between Filena and Lila here. It's evident Filena has no immediate interest in Lila, mostly because she's more concerned about her bleak and no doubt short future as a gladiatorial slave, but it seems Lila's not quite as resistant to the idea of being with another woman. I'm curious how far this relationship goes in the light novels, given how conservative Japan was (and still is) regarding sympathetic LGBTQ+ characters back in the '80s and '90s when the novels were written. (That's not to say yuri/yaoi wasn't a thing outside of hentai back then, but it seemed pretty rare? I guess there were still plenty of cases like Revolutionary Girl Utena, or Sailors Neptune and Uranus, if you dig far enough.)

Episode 2 begins with Felina in recovery and Lila taking care of her as she gets back to fighting shape. Before her next fight, she and Lila are given a home in the slave quarter of the nearby city of Dorah. We're also introduced more thoroughly to Nest and Baraba, a pair of "Battle Writers" whose job it is to dramatize the fights to increase audience interest. Nest is the kinder but less enthusiastic of the two, preferring to spend his days idly drinking, so Baraba puts a plan into motion to turn Filena into a heel by having her fight her mentor, Zena, to the death. Filena is kept in the dark about this: she is isolated to prevent her from hearing rumors, and fights a masked Zena in the arena. She immediately identifies him by his fighting style and, to her regret, manages to defeat him in combat. With his dying breath, Zena hands her a Zip Disk containing a VR program and message that informs Filena of who she truly is, allowing her to choose between her destiny of either defying the Empire to rebuild Filosena or living incognito as a Battler for the rest of her days. Since she needs to reach the Empire's capital, Bor, to retrieve the Filena sword from Uto, she decides to win enough matches to qualify as the highest ranked "Main Battler" as they are the only ones to fight in Bor's arenas.

This is the fun genre-mixing stuff I was talking about earlier. I figured Zena had left some way to inform Filena of where she came from, but seeing her insert a disk into a ZIP drive and put on a VR headset was not what I was expecting after all the swords and sandals business so far. Then again, the clues were there even from the first episode as the Empire's tanks rolled over Filosena and Filena takes down a colossal Battler wielding a chainsaw by shooting lasers in his face with her sword. It reminded me of when I watched Iria: Zeiram The Animation for this feature back in its sophomore episode, where the tech planet-side looked semi-plantlike as if it was sourced from natural magic rather than cutting-edge engineering. Nest and Baraba are interesting characters too, as we'll later find out: two men finding very different ways to live in an immoral society dealing with their own personal tragedies, with one taken to alcohol and the other emotionally closed off to the suffering he causes.

Episode 3 sees Filena's resolve tested as she's forced to fight the mostly harmless Fikos, who is set up by Baraba to be Filena's long-lost brother. In truth, Fikos is a fellow slave sentenced to death for the crime of starting a family with another slave, the dancer Milika. By fighting Filena, win or lose, he guarantees the safety of Milika and their infant son, Fis. Pushed into a corner when Baraba threatens to have Milika executed for her crimes, Fikos attempts to assassinate Filena after their match is over and falls to her blade, with Milika swearing revenge on the man who killed her husband. A clearly shaken Filena is cheered up by Lila, but reconsiders her plan of becoming a Main Battler if every fight is going to be as emotionally scarring.

The Fikos battle is a turnaround for Filena's original plan to be the best Battler she can be in order to get closer to reaching Uto and recovering her birthright. It's evident the Empire's not going to make the path easy for her, and instead of giving her more challenging opponents to fight they seem determined to sap her of her humanity, turning her into an irredeemable villain in the hearts of many in the process. I appreciate that there's a certain story divergence fomenting at this moment that only makes itself known later: after all, in every one of these "gladiator escapes to defy the Empire" narratives there's a point where it's evident they can't progress in their plans any further just by fighting in the arena. I'm less impressed with Milika's characterization here though, since she was steps away from the gallows when Fikos is forced to rescue her with a suicidal attack on Filena. Filena had already declared the match over after humiliating the weaker Fikos, so it's evident she did all she could to save him. However, we need another villain with personal stakes for Filena to overcome, so I guess Milika just wasn't paying much attention. Her declaring bloody vengeance on behalf of a peacefully asleep baby Fis was kinda funny though, in a twisted way. It's like in Kill Bill Vol. 1 when Copperhead's daughter shows up after The Bride just killed her mother, and The Bride is all "some day you might seek me out if you're still raw about this, and I'll be ready for you" and the kid's just standing there like, "Wut? Lady, I just learned what a triangle was today, I don't have the wherewithal to comprehend any of this."

Episode 4 is a flashback episode that tells us how Nest became a useless drunk and Baraba a heartless opportunist: Baraba's sister Eltena, who was also Nest's fiancée, was determined to follow her dream of becoming a sculptor despite "useless" artists being treated little better than slaves in the Empire's caste system. Due to her health issues and the conditions of her living quarters as a lower caste member, Eltena passes away after producing one last statue of herself which Baraba keeps on his estate as a memento. Baraba is more obsessed than ever with Filena and her surprising string of victories, and unwisely has his slave assistant Sara dig deeper into her mysterious origins for further dirt despite all the classified info warnings they keep receiving. Sara's discovery of the Empire's ruthless sacking of Filosena incurs the wrath of the secretive Black Demons, the secret police tasked with maintaining the Empire's secrets, who disintegrate her and destroy Baraba's villa.

The show has an impossible job trying to humanize Baraba (and to a lesser extent Nest, who's been depicted as too apathetic to really be much of a villain) since he's the one who had Zena and Fikos killed at Filena's hands. His obsession with Filena isn't hinted to derive from anything more than the embarrassment about being wrong about her winning her first match, and he's an exceptionally hard man to read because he doesn't emote much except when Nest is needling him about Eltena. Sara clearly dotes on him, even beyond her obligations to him as his slave, but you don't get the sense he thinks of her as much beyond furniture, at least until a later episode clarifies their relationship as being a little deeper. Eltena's tragic fate is one I had to glean from subtext, since the show wasn't as explicit about her journey: the whole "artists are treated like a lower caste by the Philistine-like Empire" detail is actually something I picked up later from the game, so I guess either the anime didn't have time to mention it or did it so quickly in passing that I didn't pick up on it. That Eltena meets her end in a dark and crowded common area lead to my conclusion that it contributed to her poor health.

Episode 5 resumes with Nest heading to Filena's home to inform her of Baraba's next idea for a personal match: setting Filena against a relative of Lila's to "test their marriage." Not wanting Lila to suffer for her sake, Filena agrees to Nest's plan to divorce Lila and have them live separately, a plan that Lila herself is not happy with. Filena's ulterior motive behind this decision, however, is to avoid any more fights against innocent slaves by escaping Dorah alone and making her way to Bor as a fugitive. Filena's plan almost succeeds but for Milika vindictively blinding her with poison as her revenge, yelling to inform the guards at Dorah's walls of an escaping slave. Filena bravely holds her own against the guards even without her sight but eventually takes some hits and falls into the river surrounding Dorah, carried off by its strong current. A proactive Lila hears of what happened and decides to look for her at the lake where the river ends, finding her half-dead in the shallows. Baraba, curious about Lila's sudden departure, follows the pair as they leave the lake towards the nearby forest and decides to visit them later.

Filena suddenly dumping Lila and making a break for the border is a twist that the show does a good job foreshadowing without tipping their hand early, such as needlessly including a scene where Filena has some internal monologue about "everything sucks, I'm blowing this popsicle stand." It reads like a spur-of-the-moment thing, but we know that it only could've happened because of how upset she was after her match with Fikos and how she no longer had to worry about dragging Lila towards certain doom along with her. The show also doesn't go too deep into how Filena's such an effective fighter even when blinded but the game makes it more explicit (and possibly the novels too) that she's just that innately gifted a warrior.

Episode 6 starts with Baraba finally discovering what happened to his villa (and, by extension, Sara) and makes a decision regarding Filena. Finding her and Lila at a cave that Zena used as a hideout to give Filena a proper education beyond knowing how to fight, Baraba and a group of loyal Battlers (including Milika, curious if Filena was as culpable for Fikos's death as she was lead to believe) promise to help her escape, figuring that she presents a threat to the hated status quo that caused his sister and Sara to die. Nest arrives at the same conclusion, reaching Filena and Lila with a modified space bazooka from his soldier days just as a squad of Black Demons descend upon the group. Slaying all of Baraba's Battlers, as well as Baraba himself, the Black Demons are fought off by Filena and Nest, with Lila and a now-chagrined Milika in tow as they attempt to elude the Empire's elites. As the nearby Battler Academy burns to the ground in an effort to eliminate any trace of Baraba's digging, the group of Filena, Lila, Nest, and Milika make a narrow escape from the spreading fire by leaping into the lake. The OVAs end here, with a blinded Filena more determined than ever to ensure the Empire pays for its crimes.

I think this was a good place for the OVAs to end, seeing as the full story would've probably taken an entire series of television or two. We have a sad but fitting conclusion to the heel-turned-face Baraba's arc and to a lesser extent Nest and Milika, and the future for Filena and Lila is left wide open beyond that they're going to be inseparable from now on. Sneaking into Bor to get her sword back is going to be a lot tougher to pull off now, but it's evident that Filena has entirely forsaken - both through her choices and the choices made for her - the possible branch in her future that would've seen her become a champion Battler.

On the whole, the show's a little dull and it has plenty of shortcuts in its animation - it's real fond of the dramatic repeated zoom-in on a static shot of a shocked or angry character as a shorthand for a dramatic reaction to something - but it's not terribly put together on the whole: its combat scenes were relatively spry, the characters had some depth thanks in part to their literary source, and those three hours passed by relatively quick. I would've liked to have seen more of the Empire's tech - there's some real showy stuff in the game, suggesting that the technology commercially available to its citizens is quite far removed from what the Empire's higher-ups have access to - but seeing dudes and ladies in togas get off buses and check out Yahoo News on their desktop PCs was plenty surreal enough, especially in 1992 when the internet wasn't really a thing beyond BBSes and Usenet groups (to my knowledge at least; most of my computer literacy back then came from futzing around with TOS on my Atari ST to make boot disks work).

At any rate, there are no other Eien no Filena adaptations on the anime side of things to look into, but we do have a single game to feature:

The Game(s)

Eien no Filena is a 1995 Super Famicom (SNES) RPG published by Tokuma Shoten, the media giant that also published the original light novel series. It's unclear who the developers are: it's either a contract developer who didn't receive a credit or a small in-house game studio within Tokuma Shoten itself. Eien no Filena is very clearly modeled on the SNES Final Fantasy games, in particular Final Fantasy IV and V for their overall look and "active time battle" system and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for the perspective used in its combat screens. Unlike the OVA, it contains the entirety of the light novels' story rather than just the first few chapters, albeit in an abridged and simplified format. It was fan-translated to a near-complete state by Satsu in 2006: the only Japanese characters I've seen so far have been in menus (and I think I can work out what "aitemu" means) but I have run into at least one odd game-breaking memory error that can sometimes occur with localizations. Overall, though, the fan translation has been pretty good if not quite the E-rated script Nintendo would've insisted upon had it been official (no lines like "I bet she fucks like a tiger" from that one infamous Tales of Phantasia loc, at least).

Eien no Filena is by most metrics a regular-degular turn-based JRPG of which the SNES had dozens upon dozens, though it does have a few aces up its sleeve. The first of those is that it's based on a light novel series, so it can weave a fairly detailed plot in comparison to most of the grindy, narrative-light RPGs already on the system; Illusion of Gaia, for instance, benefitted greatly when Quintet brought on the sci-fi novelist Mariko Ouhara to draft its story outline. Filena was also released fairly late in the SNES era, just two weeks before Chrono Trigger (I don't imagine that did its sales any favors), so it has a few quality-of-life conveniences you probably wouldn't see in earlier 16-bit RPGs. However, unlike Chrono Trigger, it still suffers from that most ubiquitous of JRPG maladies: an obnoxiously-high random encounter rate. Graphically it's aping Final Fantasy as previously stated, so there certainly worse inspirations, though I can't say I think too highly of its music. The main battle theme, for instance, is fairly unpleasant to listen to for long stretches due to some wonky instrumentation (or, I suppose, the synthetic approximation thereof).

I'll try to highlight some of its cooler ideas with the screenshots below, as well give you a general feel for the game's tone, look, and atmosphere:

Since we're now caught up with the anime, I'll be bouncing ahead in the timeline for these last few screenshots:

Does it do right by the anime? Probably the more pertinent question here is whether it does right by the light novels, and I unfortunately have no idea. I wasn't planning on reading nine novels in a week on top of everything else. It does carry over a some of the more interesting visuals from the anime, though, like the ominous Darth Vader "Black Demons/Devils" (which still feels super weird to type) and the absurdly huge opponents Filena's forced to take on in her first battle. The whole "sci-fi tech juxtaposed with fantasy" aspect feels a little more old hat in the game than it does in the anime, seeing as it's a common aesthetic quirk in the Final Fantasy games also. I wouldn't say you should rush out and download the game version of Eien no Filena, but you get the sense from its relatively late release - a year after the novels concluded, and three years after the anime - that the developers figured they could take their time with it, and I think that mostly worked out for them.

As a coda, there's quite a few story differences from the OVA, which made me think they probably only drew a few aesthetic choices from that adaptation but otherwise kept to the novels:

• Filena's original opponents are fought simultaneously in the anime, but since it was a free-for-all she didn't have to defeat every one of them herself. In the game they're fought one after the other (excepting the last two, who are fought together in a two-on-one match).
• Filena is forced to fight Fikos first, the man supposedly her brother, before she fights Zena and learns the truth about her ancestry. This lends a little more drama to the Fikos fight since she's not totally certain he isn't somehow her brother, at least until Nest quietly lets her in on the ruse.
• Fis, Fikos's son, is a kid rather than an infant in this one. He's kidnapped by the Empire to force Milika to attack Filena, something she didn't mind doing on her own in the anime, and trying to get him back becomes her motivation for joining the group. I haven't seen Milika come back, but I did briefly meet Fis again so I'm wondering if he won't have more relevance going forward.
• Both the books and game refer to Filena's slave caste as "Clechia" or "Crechia". I don't think this word is uttered once in the anime, though that might've been the translated subtitles simplifying things.
• Baraba's long gone, but "Barabba" is the codename the Black Devils use, as you can see. Maybe he was invented for the show? Perhaps as a way to absolve Nest of being the one to force Filena to kill her own mentor?

That's going to do it for now, however I am still planning on completing the game since I've already made it some six hours in (which, according to HowLongtoBeat, is past the halfway mark). Many events happen between when the group departs the starting town of Dorah and when Filena finally makes it to Bor, and much of it feels like standard RPG dungeon filler that I can't be too sure came from the books or not. I might edit this with a post-script if I feel like there's anything worth pointing out.

When Game OVA returns towards the end of August we'll have our final episode for this season and then I'm switching over to my Autumn programming. I am excited about the subject material for this last one, though I'm fairly sure I'm late to a party everyone else has already been to. Just don't expect anything too on the obscure side, is all I'm going to offer as a hint.