The Princess Is In Another Castle, or How I Learned that I Should be Rescued

I’m going to be completely honest right up front. My knowledge of video games ends with Final Fantasy X for PlayStation 2. So as you can tell, it’s been a long time since I’ve played a video game consistently. It’s not that I am soured on them, but after the personal experiences with FFX, I just haven’t gotten a gaming system. It’s a long story that could really be its own post, so I’ll save that for another time. Instead, I want to look at my formative years of gaming and how they shaped my idea about the role of female characters in video games.

My earliest memory of gaming is playing Donkey Kong. For the unfamiliar, the premise of the game is that a lady has been kidnapped by a giant ape and Mario needs to scale the fire escapes to rescue her all while the ape hurls barrels at him. It’s a pretty simple story and premise. In the earliest forms of the game, she didn’t even have a name. Later versions named her Pauline. When you look at the game itself, there is really no purpose for the female character to even be in the game. She is simply a device to add a plot to pretty simple game. However, Donkey Kong was innovative in that it was the first example of a narrative arc being introduced in a game with cut scenes employed to advance the plot. There were also moments throughout the game when text bubbles would appear for Pauline in which she would yell, “Help.” This type of narrative would set the stage for future video games. 

The next game that would shape my ideas about video games was Super Mario Bros 3. Of course, I played the other two games, but this particular version was the one that I spent the most time on. Even when I played the game years back with a friend’s 8-year-old son, it was just like muscle memory. I still instinctually knew where every warp whistle or secret stash of coins was hidden. Like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros 1, this game involves the character of either Mario or his brother, Luigi, working to rescue the Princess from Bowser in order to bring peace back to Mushroom World. Throughout this game, you do encounter various kings who have been turned into creatures by the Bowser’s children (Larry, Morton, Wendy, Iggy, Roy, Lemmy, and Ludwig). In game play, you must defeat the Bowser child and return the magic wand to the king. Upon doing so, you finish the level of the game and receive a letter and gift from Princess Toadstool to continue on your journey to rescue her. 

As a pre-teen and teenager, I love to play more RPG-like games for the NES system like Dragon Warrior and the first Final Fantasy game to be released in the US. Although I played FF, I didn’t really become obsessed until Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV in Japan) was released for Super NES (SNES). In this game, you play as a collection of characters, but the main focus was on Cecil. In true epic fashion, Cecil is a warrior and works to save the Blue Planet from total annihilation by Zemus and his agent, Golbez. The only two female characters in the party are Rydia and Rosa. Rosa is Cecil’s love interest and at one point a focus of the quest as Cecil and his group try to rescue her from Golbez. Rydia is a young girl, who Cecil protects after having been ordered to destroy her village as part of the Red Wings and inadvertently killing her mother. Of all of the female characters in the game, Rydia, has the most complex backstory and narrative arc within the game. While Cecil and his friends (including Rydia and Rosa) eventually defeat Zemus’ resurrected form, Zeromus, to save the planet, ultimately, the game ends with Rosa and Cecil marrying and becoming King and Queen of Baron. 

While FFII/IV’s female characters have more robust narrative arcs than previous games, they still are only part of the game as plot devices to serve the hero’s story. It’s a common theme in early video games. Hell, even Zelda is a subordinate character in most games within The Legend of Zelda series. The game is literally named after her, and she’s not a playable character in the first game. For that matter, she wasn’t a playable character until the 2009 Spirit Tracks, the 15^th game in the series. Female characters have long been subordinate in video gaming. Gaming has been part of the male domain for so much of its history. It’s not that video games couldn’t be played by girls and women. It’s just that they weren’t always designed with female stories at the center of the narrative.