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This month marks the 30th anniversary of the classic game, Sakura Wars. In a society that assumes everyone must be straight and cisgender, it’s not uncommon for dating sim games like these to be assumed to be for straight guys hoping to win the hearts of a cute girl character.But what about the anime girl’s own hearts and desires? As a queer gamer based in Japan, I explore the ways in which lesbian relationships are baked into gaming systems and their significance for my community.
For nearly thirty years, Sega’s Sakura Wars (1996) has been celebrated as a classic dating sim game. It is remembered as a glamorous, steampunk-infused anime simulator, where players command steam-powered robots by day and romance a diverse troupe of beautiful stage actresses by night. On the surface, this combination might appear to be the ultimate playground for male desire. However, on the edges of the fandom and for people like me, there’s a different story to be told. Beneath the boisterous and comedic interactions of the Imperial Combat Revue’s Flower Division (Hanagumi) is a narrative and clever gaming architecture that actively resists the straight gaze.
The secret to seeing this queer love story is to look past the mechanics of “conquest” in dating sims. That is, we need to look beyond romancing a character for the sake of winning a specific storyline, and instead consider what the girls themselves want. The system itself wants us– an assumed male protagonist– to win the heart of the girl who catches our eye; that’s the mechanic. But beneath the system is a secret: heroine Maria Tachibana and Imperial Combat Revue vice-commander Ayame Fujieda are in love.This is a structural constancy that lies beneath the game’s mechanics, and we have to read between the lines in order to make ethical decisions about. To me, this is interesting because it reflects what queer women in Japan face everyday, under what is called compulsory heterosexuality. This means the assumption that all women must be straight and available to men.
As a cisgender woman and lifelong Japanese otaku, I always felt alienated by media that framed heterosexual romance as the ultimate happy ending. When I played Sakura Wars, I discovered a sanctuary for non-heteronormative survival and genuine female solidarity.
On the surface, the story of Sakura Wars presents a classic, “royal road” heroic anime fantasy. To the average player in 1996, the narrative arc was simple: you play as Ichirō Ōgami, a young navy lieutenant who must lead the female theater troupe, the Flower Division, to defeat demonic forces while deepening his romantic bonds with six beautiful heroines.
Midway through the game, a tragic twist occurs: the villain Aoi Satan brainwashes the elegant Vice-Commander, Ayame Fujieda, transforming her into the demonic boss Kouma-Ayame. In the final, climactic battle, the Flower Division marches into the enemy’s lair to restore peace and bring Ayame back. Although they cannot save her physical life, the defeated Ayame’s soul transcends into the archangel Michael, granting the team her holy power to vanquish Aoi Satan once and for all. With peace restored to Tokyo, the Imperial Combat Revue returns to their daily routine of theater performances, and the player is rewarded with a romantic, heterosexual ending with their chosen heroine.
For thirty years, the accepted “official” canon of the game has been a beautiful, tragic heterosexual romance: a steeled maiden sacrificed for the greater good. Yet this tragedy may itself function as a form of narrative misdirection, obscuring a more non-normative structure beneath the surface. The franchise’s women are consistently strong and self-determined in ways that unsettle the romantic and gender norms of mainstream 1990s Japan. This resistance to conventional hierarchies extends beyond the characters themselves to the organisation of fandom. Unlike contemporary media franchises and mobile games that turn financial investment into status, rankings, or privileged access to performers, Sakura Wars has historically resisted making money a measure of fan value. Special event privileges, for example, have been distributed through random ticket lotteries rather than awarded to the highest bidders.1 Similarly, theatrical practices such as ohineri conceal both the donor’s identity and the amount given. At the July 2026 live show, organisers provided uniform sheets of paper for wrapping contributions, preserving the theatre as a space relatively insulated from competitive displays of individual wealth. Taken together, these practices suggest that Sakura Wars’s non-normativity lies not simply in its characters or its romantic possibilities, but in its broader refusal of conventional hierarchies of gender, intimacy, and economic value.
Unravelling the “Compulsory Heterosexuality Genre OS”
Let us introduce our two central figures. Maria Tachibana is a nineteen-year-old heroine. Having fought as a child soldier in the Russian Revolution, she was scouted by Ayame to join the Imperial Combat Revue. A firearms expert, she never goes anywhere without her custom-modified pistol. Ayame Fujieda is a co-founder and the vice-commander of the Revue, who traveled the world to recruit every single member of the Hanagumi. Although she is the protagonist Ōgami’s first unrequited love, she is not a romanceable heroine, making her character ending structurally impossible.
While I explicitly state that Ayame and Maria are lesbians, their respective designs—Maria’s cross-dressing, masculine elegance and Ayame remaining unmarried at the age of 23—serve as silent testaments to their shared resolve. In both the game’s 1920s setting and Japan’s media landscape of 1996, such choices marked them as radical outsiders to the compulsory family trajectory. Importantly, their romance is never expressed through overt confessions or kisses.
Instead, the developers carefully scattered clues throughout the game. When we piece these clues together to establish their romantic bond, a beautiful picture of their hidden daily lives begins to emerge.
As depicted in the game, the Flower Division members are notorious gossips; Sumire, Kanna, and Kohran are constantly eavesdropping behind doors to get the scoop. To protect their love not just from the player but from these well-meaning neighbors, Ayame and Maria had to hide. Even the player’s creepy attempt to peek into Maria’s shower is physically and systemically blocked by Ayame, who steps in to guard her partner’s bodily autonomy from the heterosexual gaze.
This explains the spatial fractures in Maria’s dialogue. During the New Year’s event, Maria claims she wants to visit a cafe-bar at Yokohama she has “never visited” before. Yet, she instantly betrays her own lie by describing its cozy layout with intimate familiarity—revealing it as her and Ayame’s secret getaway in Yokohama, thirty kilometers away from Ginza. Furthermore, prior to the final battle, Maria is the only person who immediately recognizes and gazes longingly at the secret aerial battleship Mikasa, whispering about its completion before even the chief engineer is aware.2 Deep underground in Ginza, within a half-built secret warship, they carved out a quiet, private sanctuary where they could truly exist together.
Sakura Wars shows a significant lesbian relationship between two characters that the (presumed male) player can seemingly romance. But through narrative, and other clues such as song lyrics and dialogue, it becomes clear that the player is faced with two queer women in love, that the game system compels the player to “make straight”. The player has to read between the lines to detect their love, and in turn makes their own ethical decisions.
When a player boots up a dating sim game, they unconsciously install what I call a ‘compulsory heterosexuality genre OS.’ By this I mean, they are looking for clues that the romanceable characters might be crushing on them. Every sigh, blush or nervous stammer is read under this gameplay as ‘straight’ and definitely meant for the male lead, Ichirō Ōgami.
What I love about Sakura Wars is that it turns this very bias against the player through a brilliant series of narrative misdirections. The most tragic and violent of these is the fate of Ayame Fujieda. Mid-game, Ayame is physically seized by the patriarchal villain Aoi Satan, who violently transforms her into the demonic “Kouma-Ayame”.
While the Genre OS filters this as a classic, tragic heterosexual romance of a woman returning to her “past man” (Satan’s human identity, Yamazaki), the physical and clothing semiotics tell a story of submission. Kouma-Ayame is forced into tight, black thigh-high boots. In Japan, these boots are associated with BDSM, and I was interested to read that in fashion studies they’re thought to signify this idea of submission and dominance in how they make you walk. If we also consider her costume design in general, we can see reference to earlier succubi figures in anime and manga.
But Ayame’s authentic self, consistently color-coded in green, resists this reclamation. In her solo character song, “Night Samba” (Yoru no Sanba), which plays during her demonic encounters, she embeds a cryptogram. Maria’s color is black, and in the song Ayame sings of a “black flower” (kuro no hana) and “black flame” (kuroi honoo). To me, this is referencing part of the main story, where Maria is described as,” she who runs through the battlefield like a black flame.” Interestingly also, the kanji used for flower in these lyrics is not the standard, but instead stylised to reflect the Imperial Combat Revue’s name. This can be read as coded lyrics sung by an imprisoned Ayame for her beloved Maria.
Material Sanctuaries: Custom Handguns and Hidden Lockets
To protect Maria and Ayame’s love from the straight gaze, the creators embedded physical and material cryptograms directly into the game’s environment.
Consider the locket event in Sakura Wars 2. When Maria purchases a new locket “to support myself,” she states she has already said her final farewells to her deceased male commander, Yuri, at his grave. Through a process of elimination, the photo she places inside cannot be Yuri, nor is it Ōgami. It is the deceased Ayame.
When Ōgami realizes this, he does not react with anger or try to “overwrite” her grief. Instead, he says: “I’m sorry. I have made you speak of a painful subject.” In this moment, Ōgami relinquishes his male privilege to possess the heroine. He becomes an ally who shields Maria’s queer sanctuary from the player’s gaze.
This complicity is built on a history of shared material secrets. In Chapter 9, Ayame entrusts Ōgami with a custom pocket handgun. Setting guides note its origin is unknown, but its visual design is identical to Maria’s highly customized “Enfield Custom.”
Maria, the firearms expert, personally customized this gun to protect her lover. The two women also shared exclusive clearance regarding the secret aerial battleship Mikasa, visiting its halls as a private sanctuary long before the rest of the crew even knew it existed.
The Auditory Answer Key: DecryptingGekiteiandKuruisake
While these environmental clues require close in-game inspection, the ultimate proof of “AyaMari” was hiding in plain sight—or rather, plain hearing—for over two decades. It was woven directly into the franchise’s musical DNA, beginning with the iconic 1996 theme song, “Gekitei” (Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan).3
“Gekitei” is structured around a meticulous antithetical couplet in its verses.
心まで鋼鉄に武装する乙女”
Kokoro made kōtetsu ni busō suru otome
A maiden who arms her very heart with steel
This line serves as a portrait of Ayame, capturing her self-disciplined, traumatic sacrifice as the vice-commander who steeled her heart to build the Revue.
In the second verse, the lyrics mirror this line with an exact structural and rhythmic counterpart:
“暁に激情を照らし出す乙女
Akatsuki ni gekijō wo terashidasu otome
A maiden who reveals her hidden passion to the dawn
This represents Maria Tachibana, who was rescued from her despair by Ayame, carrying a secret love in her soul. At the very center of this massive pop hit, the creators embedded the intimate, defiant bond of these two women.
The absolute “answer key” to this musical cryptogram was delivered twenty-three years later in Shin Sakura Wars (2019) through the theatrical song “Kuruisake Teito ni” (Madly Blooming in the Imperial Capital). Formulated as a counter-melody designed to be sung simultaneously over the top of Gekitei, the two songs sync up.
In the exact matching positions of the verses where Ayame and Maria were originally paired, “Kuruisake” inserts their tragic fates. Over Ayame’s “arming her heart with steel” verse, the counter-melody sings:
命までこの闇に捕らえられし者”
One whose life is captured by this darkness
directly marking Ayame’s demise as Kouma-Ayame. Over Maria’s “passion in the dawn” verse, it sings:
心までこの悪に捕らえられし者
One whose heart is captured by this evil
marking Maria’s structural confinement within the Gento (Phantom Capital).
This structural pairing across a quarter of a century proves that “AyaMari” was never a headcanon. It has always been the unyielding basso continuo supporting the architecture of the franchise.
The Database and the Invisible Code
How did this queer concealment succeed for thirty years? To explain this, we must look to Hiroki Azuma’s theory of “Database Consumption” alongside Sonoko Azuma’s sociological analysis of Communication Codes. Azuma’s “Otaku Database” accounts for the different types of anime girls characters fans like to collect. According to his theory, characters consist of commercially attractive tropes, such as “tsundere” or “tomboy” . This “database” mindset allowed the audience to reduce Maria’s cold distance to a mere consumable aesthetic, ignoring her actual subjectivity. If we consider this alongside what Sonoko Azuma terms “communication codes”, we can see how compulsory heterosexuality is also at work. For example, in Japan, male-female interactions are often interpreted through the lens of heterosexuality and romance, to the detriment of people everywhere. On the other hand, two women in love are interpreted as “just friends”. We see this in the ambiguity of yuri manga and classic “S-narratives” in Japanese literature today. These social attitudes not only shut down the experiences of lesbians– unable to be friends with men, and in ambiguous territory with their crushes– they also close down opportunities for relationships everywhere, and I think an important part of queer resistance is to challenge these stereotypes.
Under the hegemony of the Genre OS, the audience simply could not register a female-female romantic code, leading to two distinct pathways of heteronormative erasure.
For Maria, her intense, current-tense passion—which she carefully kept nameless—was anchored to Yuri. The audience automatically assumed her longing was merely the heterosexual melancholy of a maiden mourning her deceased male commander.
For Ayame, the erasure was even more violent. Her character song, “Night Samba”, which actually carries her authentic, suppressed desire for Maria, was never read as a genuine love song. Instead, because the song plays during her demonic transformation, the audience dismissed it as the maniacal expression of her evil alter-ego, “Kouma-Ayame” . Any ambiguous passion in her lyrics was then forcefully reclaimed and attributed to her captor, Aoi Satan (Yamazaki), framing her tragedy as a submissive return to her “past man” rather than a cry for her female partner.
Conclusion: A Sincere Response in the Thirtieth Year
The release of Sakura Kakumei （launched on December 15, 2020, and ended service on July 20, 2021,lasting only about seven months) offered a striking reversal of the original Sakura Wars system. By allowing female protagonists to romance heroines, it made explicit something the earlier games had kept hidden: women could desire women. Yet the game’s short commercial life also showed the limits of making this possibility explicit within a market built around the assumptions of the dating-sim genre. What Sakura Wars had quietly hidden within its story was harder to sustain when brought into the open.
But Sakura Wars has never depended entirely on its games. Across thirty years of karaoke gatherings, “Rogue Archives,” fan practices, and live shows, fans have continued to keep the world of the franchise alive. For queer fans who grew up with compulsory heterosexuality, finding the relationship between Ayame and Maria is therefore about more than proving that two characters were in love. It is about recognising a kind of queer intimacy that was always there, but that the game’s systems taught us not to see. Even Ayame’s call to “arm my mind with steel” has taken on a life beyond the game, becoming a language of resistance for people dealing with difficult and exploitative workplaces.
This is what makes Sakura Wars so meaningful to me at thirty. It shows how easily we can be taught to overlook women’s desires. The dating-sim system asks us to see heroines as objects of romance and conquest. The database reduces them to familiar character types. Compulsory heterosexuality teaches us to read intimacy between women as friendship. Reading Ayame and Maria differently means refusing these assumptions and asking instead what the women themselves want.
It also reveals a wider ethic running through the franchise. Sakura Wars repeatedly creates spaces that resist possession, competition, and conventional ideas about gender and intimacy. The private spaces shared by its characters, the hidden messages in its music and objects, and the communities built around the games all point toward relationships that cannot be reduced to winning or ownership. Thirty years later, the point is not simply to prove what Sakura Wars was “really” saying. It is to ask what becomes possible when we stop reading women through the assumptions of the system and take their relationships seriously on their own terms. Ayame and Maria’s sanctuary has survived because players continue to read between the lines, recognise forms of love the system was not designed to see, and make space for them anyway.
- Proving the absence of ‘pay-to-win’ or auction mechanics back in the 1990s is tricky since those aggressive monetization systems didn’t exist in Japan’s anime scene yet. However, this observation is grounded in both historical and current ticketing practices of the franchise—such as the recent July 2026 live show, where tickets were distributed exclusively through standard, equal-opportunity random lotteries (e.g., Animate online https://sakura-taisen.com/info/2026/20260415_01.html ) rather than tiered financial bidding or spending-based perks. ↩︎
- This moment occurs directly in Chapter 10 of the original 1996 game during an animated cutscene. When the secret aerial battleship Mikasa is revealed underground, Maria stares at it with deep familiarity and murmurs, ‘So the aerial battleship Mikasa was really completed…’ (空中戦艦ミカサが本当に完成していたなんて…). ↩︎
- This is backed directly by the series’ composer, Kohei Tanaka, in his official blog and posts on X (Twitter).
He explicitly confirmed that ‘Kuruisake Teito ni’ (2019) was composed as a counter-melody/structural counterpart to ‘Gekitei’ (1996), even commenting ‘Correct!’ (‘正解！’) on X to fans who analyzed how the melodies and lyrics sync up to reveal the hidden narrative layers:
Official Blog: https://ameblo.jp/kenokun/entry-12565495305.html
Official X post confirmation: https://x.com/newsakurawar/status/1275024319555330051?s=20↩︎
