File Girl

The file girl as she appears in Yoshitaka Tamaki's guest illustration in the Shining Forceː Rebirth of Light and Darkness fan art book by DateNaoto.

The file girl (ファイル姉ちゃん, fairu nēchan) or read-it girl (読んで娘, yonde musume) is a young elf with either bright pink or orange hair who acts as a framing device for the stories of Shining Force, Shining Soul, and Shining Soul II. The file girl is so named as she operates the title menu of Shining Force by presenting the game's save file select.

Starting with the old man in Shining and the Darkness, it has been a Shining series convention to use a storyteller to introduce the setting of each game as a legendary historical account read from a book.

Name and Characterization

The Japanese fairu nēchan (ファイル姉ちゃん) uses a katakana transliteration of the English word "file" and the Japanese nēchan, which literally means "sister" but is used to mean "girl" with a familiar connotation.

The file girl is referred to as such by the character's creator, illustrator Yoshitaka Tamaki, in the Sega TV Game Key Art Gallery. Tamaki writesː

I'm pretty disappointed that not a lot of people got the significance of the file girl who shows up at the beginning.

はじめに出てくる 「ファイル姉ちゃん」の存在 意義を理解していてくれている方が少なかった のが、少々残念でした。

The narrator from Shining and the Darkness is the file girl's grandfather. Image from the Japanese manual.

Tamaki is likely referring to people missing the Shining Force file girl's relationship to the narrator of Shining and the Darkness, who is implied to be her grandfather. The English release of Legacy omits the reference to her grandfather present in the original Japanese, but it is restored in Resurrection. She also mentions waiting for her grandfather in Shining Soul.

Although she is never given a proper name in the Japanese games or their associated media, she is known to most English-speaking players as Simone, a name invented by the English localizers of Shining Force.

When asked about the character in an interview published on Sega's Japanese website in 2003, Tamaki stated the following.

[Interviewer] Does the girl reading a book at the openings of games in the Shining series not have a name?

―― “シャイニング” シリーズのオープニングにいつも登場する、本を読んでいる少女には名前はないんですか？

[Tamaki] No, she doesn't have any particular name.

玉木■特に名前はないです。

Her first appearance was in Shining Force, and since the theme concerned war, I wanted to evoke a sense of tragedy.

最初に登場したのが「シャイニング・フォース」で、テーマが戦争だったので悲壮さを出したかったんですよ。

The image I had in my mind was a child who doesn't know anything about war saying something while reading a book about war . . . But we ended up taking it in a slightly different direction. (Wry laugh.)

戦争を知らない子供が、戦争の本を読みながら何かを語りかけてくる……みたいなイメージだったんですが、ちょっと違う方向に行ってますね（苦笑）。

Without giving it too much thought, I was just calling her "the elf-looking girl from the opening", but on a forum somewhere I saw someone call her the "read-it girl", and I thought, "Oh, that's simple. That's good," so I've started calling her that.

僕は「オープニングのエルフらしき女の子」なんてテキトーに呼んでたんですが、どこかのＢＢＳで 「読んで娘」 と書いてあって、「あ、なんか都合いいから、それいいや」 というかんじで、以後そう呼んでます。

Since she's the resident of a setting from a different time in a different world, I intentionally didn't give her a name. The idea was, "Wouldn't it be more mysterious that way?"

時間も次元も違う所の住人という設定なので、あえて名前のない方がミステリアスでいいかな、と。

This second moniker, "read-it girl", uses the Japanese continuative form of the verb "to read" (読んで, yonde) to suggest a light command in the style of the character asking the player to read the story to her. The second word, musume (娘), denotes "daughter" but is used in the sense of any young woman.