Revolutionary Girl Utena (Saturn) Translated Playthrough - NintendoComplete
A playthrough of Sega's 1998 license-based adventure game for the Sega Saturn, Revolutionary Girl Utena: Story of the Someday Revolution.
The formal release title is 少女革命ウテナ いつか革命される物語 (Shoujo Kakumei Utena Itsukasareru Monogatari).
Since the game was a Japanese-only release (and a Saturn exclusive, to boot), this video was made using a fan-made patch that translates all of the dialogue scenes to English. It shows the best ending.
If you are interested in patching your own image of the game CDs, check out this link: http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?pid=269092
Utena was a late 90s anime that was quite popular here in the states when it was first released. I liked it quite a bit at the time - despite the way it looks, it was thematically far more adult than most at the time were. While on the surface the entire thing revolved around teenagers going about their lives at a boarding school, there is a ton of metaphor running through the entire thing. It's loaded with dark and twisted concepts (murder, betrayal, rape, incest, identity, gender roles, subjugation, piety... you name it) underneath its pretty characters with impossibly bright hair and pointy noses, so it is pretty engaging to watch as an adult or as a 7-year-old girl.
Well, except for that super-cringey opening musical number. I believe that was animated specifically for the game - does anyone else know? It's so creepy - especially the nipple-zooms on the guys at the beginning :0
The game was handled by Sega (who were actually sponsors of the original TV show), and stays extremely faithful to the anime. Using the original voice actors and much of the art and music, it keeps the feel going quite well in its suitably adapted visual novel format. There are several different paths and endings to see, and the writing is all spot-on, thanks in no small part to the quality of the translation. There are even special "Sega" logo screens voiced by the VAs - I put one at the beginning, and included the rest at the end of the video.
If you like anime or visual novels, this is an example of one done extremely well. If you don't like reading and can't understand spoken Japanese, the Saturn has games far better suited to the action crowd than this one.
Side-note: The game makes fairly heavy use of clips from the show to transition between segments. I ended up having to cut 4 minutes or so of these clips so that the video didn't get nailed for copyright infringement. None of it was important to the story, but unfortunately the best song had to be cut (the one about the apocalypse when Utena is walking up the spiral stairs to the dueling arena, just before she pulls the sword from Anthy's chest).
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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