Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Itsuka Kakumei Sareru Monogatari
Based on the 1997 anime, Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Itsuka Kakumei Sareru Monogatari tells an original story which is set between episodes eight and nine of the TV series. The main character of the game is an original character who transfers to Ohtori Academy. The game is in the style of a visual novel with strong dating sim elements. The major characters each possess a statistic called "Heart's Nobility" which the player affects through dialog choices that appear sporadically during play. Each character's level of Heart's Nobility determines how the game will end. The special endings available for characters that end with particularly high Heart's Nobility represent the game's dating sim element, but because it is set within the larger plot of the TV series the relationships are usually somewhat platonic, or one-sided affections on the part of the main character.
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This was all for the best and helped the pacing of that last arc immensely: the version of Juri who appears in the show, for example, is probably a stronger character than the slightly less taut version of her which existed in some character design document. The rarely-mentioned fact of her having aristocratic tastes or being feared by the school's faculty wouldn't have added much had they come up more often.
Itsuka Kakumei, in adding flesh to these characters, makes their skeletal nature a little more clear. With a little more time to himself it becomes clear that Saionji's drawing off the same archetype as your Goemon Ishikawa XIII or your Tatewaki Kuno. It's a necessary pulling-back of the curtain that doesn't really take away from the quality of the show, only from the notion of its authoriality.
None of this characterization feels too fluffy, and it leaves the cast a little more well-rounded. It's good to know that Juri manages her agonies not only through fencing practice and solitary wallowing but by whipping ass at Gear. The focus on a thematically-tangential plot with two new characters is to its benefit: Chigusa's got great charisma and could fit in very well with the Oniisama e girlies of old.
I was more impressed with its implicit critique of dating sim mechanics before I realized how close they were to Tokimeki, but it's still impressively tied-in to the ideas of the narrative. Its ultimate conclusion does a decent job of wrapping things up thematically, but does so in a very sparing way, probably as a consequence of just how much route overlap's present in the game. Protagonist-chan and Chigusa were absolute freaks and I feel robbed of a thirty minute epilogue giving closure to their relationship: the eternal curse of the serial yuri reader.
None of the endings are super substantial but the meat of the game is good, and everything still feels like it wraps up fairly well despite it.
*the manga being worse than the anime is kind of forgivable considering everything (in the known universe) is worse than the anime