To my knowledge, these are all the classic games you can play as a sukeban or girl yankii character:
Sukeban Deka II (Master System, 1987) (but she’s a cop)
Sukeban Deka III (Famicom, 1988) (but she’s a cop)
Kunio-tachi no Banka (SFC, 1994) (for part of the game)
…and that’s it. Right in the middle of the delinquent boom, there’s this big gap on console libraries that is perhaps less mysterious when you remember how rare it was to have female protagonists in the first place.
In my country I played on all three of these consoles, and we got access to Japanese games generally, but life never brought any of those titles to child me.
I still remember the first time I saw a sukeban-coded girl, some background or one-off side character in 80s tokusatsu; a schoolgirl carrying a while shinai dashing on a staircase, maybe in Changeman or Maskman or Sharivan or something. I never found her again, but the image of the sailor uniform girl with a bamboo sword on her shoulder was burned into my brain forever. (She’s probably the reason I got into kendō, subconsciously.) But I could only be a sukeban in River City Girls (2019), which I immediately found to be unplayable because both protagonists only, talk, about, their, boyfriends, all, the, time. They read like women write by men, in the worst sense. Finally, in RCG2 (2022), after literally three decades of waiting, I can be a delinquent schoolgirl and beat up people all day.
Which is to say, “Sukeban: Delinquent Detective” for Windows, macOS, and Linux plugs precisely into a gap that my childhood left in my heart. It’s a game that I should have played on my Phantom System in 1991 and obsessed about while not understanding anything and then I’d have written ten-pages nostalgic essays on insert credit dot com when I rediscovered it 15 years later. I’ve played this multiple times and it’s perfect. Thank you.
(I wish there was a Japanese “original” too, but I don’t trust my Japanese enough to write it myself. I’m still glad I got to play the “translation”.)
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Realising I never left a comment on this game.
To my knowledge, these are all the classic games you can play as a sukeban or girl yankii character:
…and that’s it. Right in the middle of the delinquent boom, there’s this big gap on console libraries that is perhaps less mysterious when you remember how rare it was to have female protagonists in the first place.
In my country I played on all three of these consoles, and we got access to Japanese games generally, but life never brought any of those titles to child me.
I still remember the first time I saw a sukeban-coded girl, some background or one-off side character in 80s tokusatsu; a schoolgirl carrying a while shinai dashing on a staircase, maybe in Changeman or Maskman or Sharivan or something. I never found her again, but the image of the sailor uniform girl with a bamboo sword on her shoulder was burned into my brain forever. (She’s probably the reason I got into kendō, subconsciously.) But I could only be a sukeban in River City Girls (2019), which I immediately found to be unplayable because both protagonists only, talk, about, their, boyfriends, all, the, time. They read like women write by men, in the worst sense. Finally, in RCG2 (2022), after literally three decades of waiting, I can be a delinquent schoolgirl and beat up people all day.
Which is to say, “Sukeban: Delinquent Detective” for Windows, macOS, and Linux plugs precisely into a gap that my childhood left in my heart. It’s a game that I should have played on my Phantom System in 1991 and obsessed about while not understanding anything and then I’d have written ten-pages nostalgic essays on insert credit dot com when I rediscovered it 15 years later. I’ve played this multiple times and it’s perfect. Thank you.
(I wish there was a Japanese “original” too, but I don’t trust my Japanese enough to write it myself. I’m still glad I got to play the “translation”.)