Nintendo wasn't brave enough to put lesbian fox girls in Super Mario Bros. 3, so this new Japan-inspired platformer has taken matters into its own hands
Aug. 2, 2024Kitsune Tails is filling a niche I didn’t know existed
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If you played Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World back in the day and thought to yourself, “Hey, this is great and all, but it would be better with queer fox girls in it,” boy have I got incredibly specific good news for you. Steam just gotKitsune Tails, a Mario-inspired platformer featuring fox girls who will be remembered as good friends by historians.
Kitsune Tails looks about as close to Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can feasibly get without risking a letter from Nintendo’s legal team. It’s a 2D platformer with elemental worlds, haunted houses, outfit-style power-ups, and minigames for collecting coins. There’s even an “optional true-to-life CRT filter for maximum nostalgia,” which I know one of my retro-savvy coworkers would appreciate.
This will come as a surprise: in Kitsune Tails by Kitsune Games, you play as a kitsune – a fuzzy-eared, bushy-tailed fox spirit messenger girl serving Inari, the Shinto god of rice, tea, fertility, and a few other things, I gather. Japanese mythology bleeds into plenty of levels and characters, too, from temple and outfit designs to various other yokai. Our heroine has a cute sorceress on one arm and a cute childhood friend on the other, and the creators – with this being a collaboration with co-publisher MidBoss LLC – aren’t shy about the love in the air. It’s all very sweet, and the pixel art is a dead-ringer for the SNES era. There seem to be robust design tools for making custom levels, too.
The devs seem to have polished their platforming skills judging from Kitsune Tails' 99% positive Steam reviews, with 248 reviews at the time of writing. That, or – let’s be honest, and – people really like queer fox girls. Here’s my favorite user review, from olivvybee: “Everyone should get a free day off work to play the sword lesbian fox girl game.”
Mega Man meets Shovel Knight in this new retro platformer “where almost anything goes,” and Steam reviews are already glowing.
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