The Japanese Saturn library dwarfs both Western sets by a factor of 5; for every game in the North American or European library, there were roughly five games released in the land of the rising sun. Aside from a considerable list of triple-A exclusives, amazingly, there were also entire genres that never made an appearance out West. Dating sims? Visual novels? Plentiful in Japan. Absolutely non-existent in English-speaking parts of the world.
In retrospect, this is not surprising. Unlike today, the Western video game market was still confined to a relatively narrow demographic. Every publisher had to weigh the cost of localizing any given title against the potential profits its western sales could generate. If the math made sense, they went ahead. Most companies were wisely conservative in this respect, with only some taking moderate risks in the titles they brought over. 3D was clearly the future, and corridor shooters and fighting games were THE popular genres at the time. Visual novels and dating sims, on the other hand, were a complete non-starter. They had none of the 3D appeal, and… what 18–34-year-old male would want to play through a 2D visual novel or go on virtual dates when there were zombies to blow away or baseballs to hit out of a stadium? Besides, many dating sims and visual novels were based on popular Japanese IPs that, at best, had super-niche recognition in the West… The potential payoff for localizing such a title was so very low; the risk unacceptably high.
Ultimately, none of that mattered for Revolutionary Girl Utena: Story of the Someday Revolution, simply because the title released in Japan at the end of May 1998. By then, the international Saturn market had largely collapsed. So… a blend of genres that no one cared about in the West, based on an anime no one had watched, and on a console that time had just passed by? What slim hopes may have existed for official localization swiftly – perhaps even rightly – crashed down to zero.
Party like it’s… 2015!
Fortunately, this isn’t 1998. Nowadays, multiple brave souls are translating various Japanese Saturn titles for English consumption, and one of the first games to make this after-market jump was SEGA’s Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Itsuka Kakumei Sareru Monogatari (少女革命ウテナ いつか革命される物語); in English Revolutionary Girl Utena: Story of the Someday Revolution. Translated by Endless, Dallbun, Ayu Ohseki, LuxLustravi, Loki, and Josh Breitbart, the patch was released in September 2015.
A bit of an introduction to the IP is required to properly evaluate the Saturn game.
The Revolutionary Girl Utena IP consists of a manga (1996), an anime (1997), and finally, a feature film (1999), with a derivative Saturn game (1998) and even three live theater productions (1997, 1999, 2000). First was the manga series written and illustrated by Chiho Saito, under the collective pseudonym Be Papas, spanning 5 volumes in total. 1997 saw the debut of the 39-episode anime directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara (Sailor Moon) of studio J.C. Staff. Although the manga and the anime were produced during the same relative timeframe, the plots of the two aren’t congruent. The anime’s 39 episodes are further sub-divided into four main arcs, each a season of sorts with specific scenarios and threads that arise and are settled before the beginning of the next saga. The overall storyline is eventually resolved at the conclusion of the anime.
The Revolutionary Girl Utena anime arcs:
- Student Council Saga (episodes 1-13)
- Black Rose Saga (episodes 14-24)
- Akio Ohtori Saga (episodes 25-33)
- Apocalypse Saga (episodes 34-39)
The Saturn game is a narrative that takes place in between the anime’s eight and ninth episodes; part of the Student Council Saga. The Saturn story is not canon with the anime per se but is cleverly integrated in such a way that fans of the show will feel right at home with how events unfold; it compliments the anime’s storyline smoothly without ever breaking it.
Some plot and character spoilers ahead; this is necessary for a feature on a game such as this one, otherwise it won’t make as much sense as it should.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is the story of pink haired Utena Tenjou, orphaned at a young age but highly influenced by an encounter with a mysterious prince in her past. So profound was the prince’s impact on Utena that she has decided to become a prince herself, dressing and acting in a tomboyish manner as a means of expressing this desire. She comes to Ohtori Academy and is quickly drawn into a series of saber duels to protect fellow student Anthy Himemiya, only to learn that Anthy is the Rose Bride. As the Rose Bride, Anthy is pledged to the current dueling champion and holds within herself the power to revolutionize the world. As Anthy’s Engaged, Utena must fight duels to defend her champion status, with events being controlled by the shadowy antagonist End of the World. Protecting Anthy puts Utena in many situations that serve to advance, and eventually resolve the storyline.
Ohtori Academy is a prestigious school into which the protagonist – you! – transfers. Your parents both attended Ohtori as well, and your father gives you his saber to take with, hoping you will join the fencing club. Upon arrival, you befriend Utena Tenjou and her bride Anthy Himemiya, and learn of the duels that take place there. Dueling can only take place between bearers of rose signet rings, which denotes them as aspiring princes. Utena received such a ring from the prince in her past, and most Student Council members seem to have them as well. A duel consists of a rose being clipped onto each duelist’s chest; to win, one must remove the rose from their opponent in combat. Matchups appear to be coordinated by a mysterious character known only as End of the World, and his wishes are communicated via letters to the Student Council.
With the background set, it is also important to understand the major characters of the game:
Protagonist: This is YOU! One of two original creations for the game, the player chooses the protagonist’s name. You are a young schoolgirl transferring into Ohtori Academy.
Utena Tenjou is the pink-haired, blue-eyed protagonist of the anime. She sees Saionji mistreat Anthy when she arrives at the Academy and challenges his behaviour. Saionji happened to be the dueling champion at the time, and when Utena defeats him, she becomes champion and wins Anthy as her Rose Bride.
Anthy Himemiya is the dark-skinned Rose Bride. Also a student at the Academy, she is pledged to do as the victor of the duels wishes.
Touga Kiryuu is tall with flowing red hair. President of the Student Council, he is the one who receives letters from End of the World with instructions on who is to duel whom. Arrogant and somewhat manipulative, but not completely uncaring. Older brother to Naname.
Saionji Kiouichi, Vice President of the Student Council. Long green wavy hair adorns a chiseled face that hides pain and rage for never being as talented as Touga. He longs for the Rose Bride as someone he can control, and is not himself since losing Anthy to Utena.
Juri Arisugawa is the captain of the school’s fencing team. Respected by students, she holds the most potential to become a true Prince.
Miki Karou An exceptionally gifted piano player, Miki is the youngest duelist. Unlike his Student Council peers, he does not crave power. In fact, he tends to be shy around Utena and Anthy.
Chigusa Sanjouin Is an original creation for the game, and is written in as joining the school at roughly the same time as the player. Chigusa is an interesting write-in for the game as she serves as the main antagonist – clever, as players will not have any back-story as to her motivations.
There are other important characters, but the above are sufficient to understand the plot and this feature.
The game’s story takes place over four consecutive days and involves a series of events in the life of the player schoolgirl avatar, as she integrates into the Academy, makes friends (and enemies), and learns that a tragedy may befall her on the fateful fourth day. It is interesting that SEGA chose to make this schoolgirl as the main character rather than the obvious Utena; this allowed the freedom to create an original situation and to watch events from the show unfold without doing anything to break canon. In a way, the game has been paced to work like an interactive episode of the show. The game’s story wraps up after the four days with one of many possible endings, depending on choices made during gameplay.
Gameplay? Ah yes, the visual novel genre…
Perhaps another reason this genre was never brought on to the West – ‘gameplay’ consists solely of making certain choices at key moments in the narrative, in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book. The game is like a slideshow – the story progresses, static scenes change, and characters speak with the player avatar. The gamer’s only interaction with the game is pressing the C button to advance the text. If it can be believed, the game has even less interaction than Myst – at least in Myst, the player chooses where to click to advance the slideshow. Not so in Utena. Instead, the game merrily takes you along an exact pre-determined path with zero deviations. To be clear, there is no overworld town to freely explore, there are no character sprites, no items to find or equip, no hit points to keep track of. The entire game is a narrative-driven slideshow… but in a good way.
Be the schoolgirl you were meant to be!
A game sequence often flows as follows: a static scene is displayed accompanied by a sound clip and sound effect from the anime. If the player avatar comes into a classroom, she will see rows of desks, students chatting, etc. with unintelligible chatter as the sound effect. Often, this is followed by a text box where the player’s avatar character may be ruminating on something – and this is both written out in text (patched in English) AND spoken out loud, in the original Japanese. To differentiate speaking from thinking, both of which are voiced, the text is then in brackets.
Next, a character from the show comes on to converse, and their portrait is displayed large, just above the textbox and over the background. When they speak, it is again both written and voiced. As their mood changes during the conversation, so does their portrait. Animation is limited to moving lips and blinking eyes. Sometimes, another character may join the scene as well. Characters departing the scene are marked by their portrait disappearing, and usually, the sound of their receding footsteps. The scene then changes to a different background, and the sequence repeats. That is the very essence of the game, and of the visual novel genre as a whole.
If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without truly being born. Smash the world’s shell… for the revolution of the world!
Ohtori Academy Student Council President Touga Kiryuu reciting the council’s motto
The slideshow-like story is occasionally interspersed with short anime FMV sequences to denote important scenes, and this is integrated seamlessly with the static scenes. One such recurring scene is the elevator ride up to a Student Council meeting: whilst Touga recites the Council’s opening motto, the anime FMV depicts a first-person view of the inside of the elevator, ascending to the top of Ohtori Academy’s white tower. This is taken directly from the anime, where it appears in almost every episode. Generally, art and music assets are also taken directly from the show, and it is clear that SEGA went to great lengths to ensure the game feels just like the anime. From repeating shots of various buildings around the Ohtori Academy done in gorgeous watercolor style to the rose-symbol picture frames anytime a new character is introduced to the various music assets, everything is taken directly from the show and feels exceptionally authentic.
The game’s music is worthy of mention. Done primarily with classical instruments, Japanese anime composer Shinkichi Mitsumune (Yu-Gi-Oh!) makes heavy use of violins, organs and piano to weave themes that are sometimes airy and at times grave. Again, the game benefits from full access and use of the anime’s assets. The score is very good overall – check out this piano rendition of The Sunlit Garden, a theme that plays often during the game. Or how about Invisible Roses – playing often during scenes of intrigue. Excellent.
Applying the translation patch turns all in-game text to English whilst spoken lines remain in Japanese throughout the entire game (an option to disable the voiceovers is available). This is excellent as English voice acting in the 1990s wasn’t always stellar; this way, the player experiences the voices of each character as they were in the show whilst reading the story in English. The original voice actors from the anime were brought on to voice the game, creating yet another layer of integration.
The dating sim element of the game is somewhat limited. During the narrative, the player is presented with the occasional choice to make, and these choices influence the characters around her. The goal isn’t to find love as much as it is to increase each character’s ‘nobility’, as that will protect them from Chigusa’s evil influence. Some choices are quite obvious – you need to go shopping for school supplies; you select whom to ask to go shopping with – and some are more opaque – in one soccer scene, antagonist Chigusa is charging at Utena and you have the choice to slide and interrupt the charge, or to get out of the way. Consequences for your choices are then occasionally displayed in what the game calls ‘Heart’s Nobility’ – a sort of ‘esteem meter’ where character portraits are displayed along with five roses. The more these characters’ nobility rises, the more these roses will ‘bloom’ and become bright pink. As in real life, it is possible for characters’ nobility to completely fail, in which case they are ‘lost’, and susceptible to Chigusa’s control. This has important consequences on the conclusion of the game. It’s a neat twist on ‘love points’ usually found in dating sims, but the concept is the same.
The state of the translation appears final, as no new versions have been released since the 2015 drop. As it stands, the game’s text is fully translated, as are most of the large / important user interface components. What remains un-translated is character name tags, which sit atop each text box, likely due to them being part of the image as opposed to editable Japanese text. This won’t affect those familiar with the show but will sure make things a bit more confusing for newcomers to the Utena universe. The sparse FMV sequences are not subtitled and remain in Japanese. Lastly, the Student Handbook, which can be accessed at any time by pausing the game and serving as an information resource on the school, students, and especially the Heart’s Nobility section, has only partially been translated. The patch files do include instructions on where to find the correct files to complete translating the final few elements, for those so inclined. It is unclear why the original team did not finish.
The game is a 2-disc set, likely owing to the copious amounts of excellent recorded voice it contains. It should also be mentioned that the game can create a single save file either in on-board or cartridge RAM (or both) requiring 42 blocks, but luckily each save file has room for up to 9 save points. If using both the system RAM and the cartridge RAM, the 18 save points are more than enough to save at all crucial points in the game.
Tighten your Bras, Gamers. We’re Going In.
Without any prior knowledge of the Utena universe, the game is enjoyable, albeit in a limited way… the player will often be making many blind choices. Without having watched the anime, choices such as ‘who should I speak to next?’ are meaningless if the player doesn’t know the characters. In writing this feature, about halfway through my first playthrough, I felt I needed to immerse myself in the anime to do the game justice. So, I watched the entire first saga – the Student Council Saga, episodes 1-13 – of the show. Replaying the game again after watching the show was infinitely better, and all the ways in which SEGA took care to be faithful to the source material were clear and delicious. My choices were now based on what I knew of the characters and their personalities, motivations, and so on, and the experience was consequently much more satisfying. It really made a big difference. During my first playthrough, all the Council members fell to Chigusa save for Touga, and he was not able to overcome that deficit in my hour of need. Utena had my highest Heart’s Nobility score at 42%, which is still low. Still, I will never know how she fared in her duel with Chigusa because I Game Over’d before I could find out. Yup… first playthrough resulted in the worst ending possible. In subsequent playthroughs I did better, reaching the many ‘good’ endings, and earning badges for my Student Handbook. Each good ending was based on which character I had the strongest Nobility scores for, and badges won carried over into subsequent playthroughs. Rumours persist of secret characters and Nobility scores that I have not yet uncovered.
Someday, we will have Revolution!
Overall, Revolutionary Girl Utena is a very good visual novel game that stays faithful to a very good anime. But… will YOU like the game? That depends. Fans of the show will adore the game for how true it stays to the source material whilst weaving a very interesting original narrative. Hardcore Saturn fans will appreciate it, if for nothing else than the chance to experience a Saturn visual novel in English. Anime fans will also likely enjoy it, as it really does unfold like an interactive anime episode. That said, those three groups are a rather small slice of the Saturn playing population… Casual fans, and especially the original Western Saturn demographic from the mid 1990s, will probably think it a colossal waste of time without any ‘gameplay’ at all. The lack of context from not experiencing the anime will be an absolute turn-off. So, overall enjoyment will really rest on what kind of entertainment you are looking for from your Saturn and what how familiar you are with anime in general. Still, the game excels at what it set out to do, and is one of the better exemplars of the visual novel / dating sim genres to be had on the Saturn.
SHIRO! Challenges:
- If the game sounds even remotely fascinating and you are considering playing it, do yourself a favor and watch the first saga of the anime. Both subbed and dubbed versions are easily found on YouTube. Each episode is roughly 22 minutes in length. It will make playing the game infinitely more enjoyable, and you’ll watch an excellent anime to boot!
- Play through the game multiple times and try to see as many endings as you can. Even though the overall game’s story remains the same, different decisions will spin you off on different tangents. It takes many playthroughs to see all that there is to see in this game.
- There are extra badges to collect, aside from the initial ones. Some unlock rather… steamy extra content (expectations down, people. It’s not THAT steamy).
- Once you’ve watched the anime, read the manga, and played through the Saturn game, go out there and… BRING THE WORLD REVOLUTION!!
Universe of Utena
The Utena IP started life as a manga before being produced as an anime series, a feature film, and finally, stage productions. Enjoy these stills from each medium La Fillette Révolutionnaire has graced, and dive into the sources of these images for more Utena content!
Themes of Utena
Revolutionary Girl Utena is noted for being full of allusion, symbolism, hidden meanings and exploring social constructs. Through the series, Utena asks us to consider abusive relationships, (homo)sexuality, the messy business of growing up, learnt helplessness, and a host of other paradigms. This is part of what gives the show its appeal; it is more than ‘just another anime’. In the beginning, Anthy’s relationship with Saionji is very harsh, with the green-haired young man slapping Anthy around and demanding unquestioned obedience, which Anthy tries her best to live up to. Utena’s subsequent relationship with Anthy slowly morphs from purely platonic to something more emotional and romantic, hinting at a sexual relationship between the two young women. Indeed, the game makes no gender distinctions when it comes to dating and love, rightly treating homo and hetero unions as completely equal. Anthy’s Rose Garden conservatory is in the shape of a birdcage, touching upon the theme of being a prisoner in a relationship. Jealousy and growing up is explored as illustrated by Nanami and her drowning a live kitten, because her brother Touga paid it more attention than her. And the Saturn game’s original story of the protagonist’s parents (spoiler, highlight to read) forming a sexual union between teacher (her father) and student (her mother), and the effect this had on a secondary female student (Chigusa). It is not always easy to spot each allusion, but the themes are there for those who wish to find them.
Missing Truth and Forever,
Kissing Love and True Your Heart
Opening lines of the anime’s theme song – the only lines in English
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