Yuri game meaning: what the term covers, where it comes from and how many exist

A yuri game is a game whose story centres on relationships between women. The word is Japanese, 百合, meaning lily, and it came to games from manga and anime. In games it names a theme, not a genre: a yuri game can be a visual novel, a role-playing game or a puzzle game. What makes it yuri is who the story is about.

The term is also looser than it looks. Wikipedia’s article on the genre says lesbian themes are common but the genre also covers emotional and spiritual bonds between women that are not necessarily romantic or sexual. That is why a yuri game is not automatically an adult game, and why the usual databases tag the romance and the sex separately.

This page covers the meaning and origin of the word, its history, the related terms, who the audience is, and how many yuri games exist, using data from VNDB, the Visual Novel Database, queried on 20 October 2026.

Key points

• Yuri means lily. The flower symbolised purity and beauty in women.
• It names a theme, not a genre. Any kind of game can be yuri.
• It is not the same as explicit. Wikipedia says yuri rarely shows graphic sex.
• Girls’ love (GL) is a near synonym. Japanese publishers adopted it in the 2000s.
• The audience is mixed. Women and men, in varying proportions.
• Yuri visual novels are growing fast. VNDB shows releases rising roughly tenfold between 2010 and 2024.

Where the word comes from

According to Wikipedia, the lily symbolised beauty and purity in women in Japanese literature of the Romantic era, and became the genre’s symbol. The word’s use for women’s relationships has several documented steps.

• 1976: Itō Bungaku, editor of the gay men’s magazine Barazoku, used yurizoku, “lily tribe”, for the magazine’s female readers.
• 1983: The men’s magazine Allan ran a personal-ad column for lesbians called Yuri Tsūshin.
• 1990s: The term became tied to sexually explicit manga about women, and in the West was first used mainly for adult material aimed at men.
• Mid-2000s: It became the standard name for works about intimacy between women, after dedicated magazines launched.

Korea and China later adopted the term as a loanword.

A short history

Wikipedia traces the genre’s roots to early twentieth-century Japanese literature, and the key steps are these.

Related terms

Girls’ love (GL). Japanese publishers adopted this term in the 2000s as a counterpart to boys’ love. It is generally interchangeable with yuri, though Wikipedia notes it occasionally denotes sexually explicit works, as with a 2011 anthology.

Shōjo-ai. Western fans in the 1990s used it for non-explicit yuri. Wikipedia notes that in Japan it refers to something else and is misleading there, so it is best avoided.

Lesbian fiction. Wikipedia describes the link between yuri and lesbianism as loose in Japan. Yuri focuses on bonds, and characters’ sexual identities are often left to interpretation. Japanese lesbian magazines such as Anise and Carmilla existed separately from yuri in the 1990s.

Who the audience is

Yuri began with female readers, in shōjo and josei manga, and now reaches men as well.

• A 2008 Ichijinsha survey found women made up 73% of readers of Comic Yuri Hime, while men were 62% of the readers of the male-targeted Comic Yuri Hime S.
• A 2011 study by Verena Maser, with 1,352 responses, found 52.4% women and 46.1% men.
• By 2017 the ratio was reportedly about 6:4 men to women, according to Wikipedia.

These are surveys of manga readers, and the proportions for games could differ.

Yuri games

Wikipedia gives examples of visual novels and indie games that have marketed themselves as yuri, including Highway Blossoms (2016) and Heart of the Woods (2019) from Studio Élan, and MangaGamer’s releases of A Kiss for the Petals and Kindred Spirits on the Roof. The review site Okazu keeps an archive of yuri game coverage, and itch.io has a yuri tag.

How VNDB tags it

VNDB has no single tag called yuri. It separates the elements.

The split is the useful point. VNDB’s own description of the romance tag says it does not necessarily mean there are any sexual scenes, and points to the sex tag for that. A game can carry either tag, both, or neither.

How many there are

A query to VNDB’s API on 20 October 2026 returned:

The share is higher among well-known titles than among the whole database. The tag-page counts in the earlier table differ slightly from these query counts, and we did not establish why.

Growth

The number of games released each year with a girl-only focus has risen sharply. Counting titles with the romance-only tag by release year:

That is nearly a tenfold rise in fourteen years. Some of it reflects the general growth of visual novels, including the rise of Western indie development with free engines, and some probably reflects better tagging in recent years. The data cannot separate the two.

The most-voted titles

Among romance-only titles with at least 200 votes on VNDB, the most-voted include the Japanese series Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke o (2006), FLOWERS (2014 and 2015 volumes), Okujou no Yurirei-san (2012), SeaBed (2015) and Highway Blossoms (2016). Several are Japanese series that began in the 2000s, and some are more recent.

Yuri is not an age rating

Because yuri names a theme, it says nothing about whether a game is suitable for all ages. Yuri games run from entirely wholesome stories to adult games. The relationship to the rest of the vocabulary is explained in the adult game terms glossary, bishōjo game meaning and what adult games are.

For readers who want to check what a particular game contains, the safest approach is to use the tags rather than the label. A game tagged girl x girl romance without the lesbian sex tag is a romance. Both are searchable on VNDB.

Finding yuri games

1. VNDB. Filter by the Girl x Girl Romance tags, and by the Lesbian Sex tag to include or exclude adult content.
2. itch.io. Its yuri tag lists a large number of indie titles, with sensitive-content flags on adult ones.
3. Okazu. The long-running review site covers yuri games and other yuri media.
4. Game jams. VNDB’s Yuri Game Jam tag lists 312 visual novels made for a jam focused on the theme.

For the genre’s neighbours, see dating sim vs visual novel and otome game meaning.

What is still unknown

• Whether tagging has improved. The growth figures mix real growth and better tagging.
• The proportion of yuri games that are adult. VNDB’s tags overlap, and we did not compute the intersection.
• The audience for games. The survey figures are for manga.
• Counts outside VNDB. itch.io and Steam tag counts change daily, and we did not record them.

How this page was put together

The definition, etymology, history, terminology and audience figures come from Wikipedia’s article on the yuri genre, which cites the original research. The counts and growth figures come from VNDB’s public API, queried on 20 October 2026, and the tag descriptions from VNDB’s tag pages. Resources for finding games are listed from the sites themselves.

This page defines a term and does not review any game. To report an error, see the corrections standard.