Shoujo Horror Games: Now You, Too, Can Scream Like a Little Wussy Girl!

by Nora

A recent CNN article pointed out what most of us "in the field" have known for several years: girls and women are a huge and growing subset of the videogame-playing population. We've already seen some of the fallout of this growth, as companies have scrambled to produce material that appeals to us double-X-chromosome carriers. While many games which aren't targeted at women have become popular with female players---Quake, anyone?---the truth is that the biggest blockbusters in the field, particularly in the console realm, have been games with content intentionally designed for girls.

When that "girl content" is stupid, the games have flopped, a la the Barbie games mentioned in the CNN article. But when the content's spot-on, the fans can't seem to stop talking (and dj-ing, and fanficking, and blogging) about them: the Final Fantasy games, the Suikoden series, the Devil May Cry games.

In my last gaming article, I pointed out one interesting side-story to this trend: the appearance of games with BLish content. But for several years now, game companies have been mining the shoujo landscape for ideas. Most of these shoujo games haven't made it over to this side of the pond because they're sometimes a little too girly for the macho Western audience. (So we'll probably never see the Angelique games here. Alas.)

But horror is another story. Horror games have a peculiar kind of crossover appeal that fits right into the Western cultural psyche. Guys can play them and feel pleasantly macho for overcoming their fear. Girls can play them and feel pleasantly feminist for overcoming their fear. Everybody wins, except the ghosts/zombies/monsters/psychos one has to kill along the way.

So here's a look at three shoujo horror games (well, two shoujo horrors and one that could probably squeeze itself into the mould). A brief warning to the inexperienced (hell, experienced players too): girly or not, these games are unbelievably scary.

FATAL FRAME
(Available on PS2 and XBox)

This is as classic as shoujo horror gets. In Fatal Frame, you play Miku, the female half of a pair of twin siblings who go into a haunted Japanese castle. Mafuyu, her bishounen brother (whom we don't see for long, sadly), goes in first, hoping to rescue his mentor, a writer trying to unravel the mystery behind the castle's curse. When he disappears during the game's uber-creepy prologue (which is rendered in black & white to make it even more atmospheric), it's up to Miku to save him and solve the mystery. As she ventures into the castle, she's immediately set-upon by visions and unquiet spirits. The visions she has to decipher, since they give clues to the terrible romantic tragedy (a shoujo story in itself) which threatens to drag the whole world into hell. The spirits she has to "capture", using her only weapon: an antique camera with spirit-powers of its own.

What makes Fatal Frame really special is how shoujo it is. IMO, the shoujo elements really make it a whole different (and better) animal from the other "survival horror" games that have become popular in the West. Most of those games let you ease your fear by giving your character the symbolic equivalent of a teddy bear---usually in the form of a rocket launcher. Fatal Frame targets the fears that afflict the characters in shoujo manga, against which even a rocket launcher is pretty useless. Stuff like... being different (the twins are latent psychics). Losing a family member (especially the sole male heir in a Japanese family). Facing impossible odds with nothing but your courage as a weapon. Being forced to choose duty over personal desire. Watching someone else suffer while being helpless to stop it. It's complex, cerebral stuff. The ghosts are scary, but they're really the least of it.

I guess I'm not the only one who loved it; Fatal Frame 2 is due out September 18th. There's even rumors of a movie.

SILENT HILL 3
(Available on PS2 and PC)

Okay, this is the borderline one. I say that because, compared to blatantly shoujo games like Clock Tower 3 and Fatal Frame, the Silent Hill series has fewer of the complex, cerebral shoujo-specific scares and more of the boy-type scares that make you want to snuggle a rocket launcher. Still, compared to the Resident Evils and Dino Crises of the world, SH is downright balletic.

The latest incarnation of the series digs deep into the stuff that oozes out of the Freudian Id, or the Jungian gestalt consciousness, or whichever freaky mental place you prefer. It's a little different from the first and second game in that SH3's main character is a teenaged girl, and the game is a little surprising in that it's pretty tightly-tied to the first game's plot---which means I can't really reveal any of that plot to you without spoiling the entire series. Sorry. It's too complex to summarize easily anyway.

Which is where the shoujo-ness comes in, though in some quintessentially Western ways. The thing that makes the Silent Hill series scary isn't the bizarre and often grotesque creatures which jump out at you---though those are damn scary---it's the emotional punch. The first two Silent Hills touched on the sorts of things that scare men: single fatherhood, marital decay, becoming a widower. The latest incarnation of the series goes for the girly punches... and they're all below the belt. We've got a teenaged girl in danger---not just from the monsters, but also from the secrets her overprotective father has hidden from her. We've got a scary old guy stalking the teenaged girl. We've got betrayal by a (female) best friend. We've got none-too-subtly-symbolic rape imagery, right in the opening movie. We've got unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. We've got monsters called "insane cancers" which are vaguely humanoid shapeless blobby things... but which somehow manage to suggest breast tissue.

Yeah. It's that bad. But also that good, in that it tries things I've seen in no other game, and it pulls them off with surprising (if macabre) artistry. If you want a good shoujoesque scare that makes you think--- and if you're not squeamish---this may be the one for you.

CLOCK TOWER 3
(Available on PS2)

Okay, so maybe "insane cancers" delve a little too deeply into the feminine psyche. The idea is to have fun, not incur years of therapy, right?

Clock Tower 3 is somewhere between Fatal Frame and Silent Hill 3 in theme, and a little lighter on the scare-factor. A little. The premise is again pure shoujo: Alyssa, a young girl in an English boarding school, is told to stay away from home until well after her fifteenth birthday. Naturally circumstances manipulate her into going home on the day before that birthday, where she discovers that she's the latest in a long line of female warriors whose job it is to save the tormented spirits of people killed by possessed serial killers. These warriors' power is strongest on the cusp of womanhood, which is (surprise!) age fifteen.

Okay, it sounds corny, but the presentation isn't. Alyssa has one weapon to use in her struggle: a mystical bow-and-arrow which only appears when her spiritual power peaks. Not surprisingly, this happens only during boss battles. So throughout most of the game, Alyssa has to run like hell whenever the serial killers come after her. She can hide, or sprinkle holy water on them to slow them down, but that's it.

On the surface it's a clone of Fatal Frame, except the main character wears a British schoolgirl outfit instead of a Japanese one. There are even some similarities of plot; Alyssa too must save a family member (her mother), accept an onerous burden of duty, and unravel a bizarre mystery. CT3 has a totally different feeling from FF, however. That's probably because the serial killers are nowhere near as scary as the ghosts of FF; they're so manic, so over-the-top and weird, that they'd be funny if, er, they weren't trying to kill you.

Even more interesting is that Alyssa's Western "girl power" contrasts sharply against Miku's equally strong (but far more subtle) Japanese "girl power". Both girls must overcome their own considerable fear; both must literally face down the wrath of hell. But they use astonishingly different methods to achieve similar goals. Miku in FF is terrified but rarely shows it. She never screams, never freaks, just stays quietly calm despite the increasing creepiness and danger around her. Alyssa cowers and blubbers and has to gradually work her way up to courage. In fact, her tendency to freak out under pressure is actually built into the gameplay as an obstacle to overcome; if she panics when a killer is chasing her, she starts running wildly and falling down, which allows the killer to catch up to her. When Alyssa finally does find her courage, it's a climactic big deal---a Buffy moment, or maybe an Utena one. Cheesier than FF, yes. But in some ways (and here my Western bias shows) just a little more fun.

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So that's the roster, but not the whole one. I've played other horror games with a distinctly shoujo sensibility---Shadow of Destiny, the Parasite Eves, one or two obscure others. These are just the best of them, IMO.

I could probably use these games to make some sort of sweeping, profound observation on expressions of womanhood in Japan and America, but I won't. Granted, games are like any other media/art form in that they reveal an astonishing insight into the minds of their creators, and the culture which produced them. And granted, horror games especially lend themselves to this kind of insight because the things that scare us are atavistic in nature, striking at the very root of our psychology and culture, and in this case gender.

But I could do a whole article on that sort of thing, and frankly I just don't have time for it. Haven't finished Silent Hill 3, you see; can't beat this one boss.

Gotta go.

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Images taken from IGN.com and Gamers.com.