That's the best ending we've gotten yet.

satyreyes wrote:

I have no idea how much "direct involvement" Ikuni had in the series, either -- you say he chose not to direct his own show's finale, so I have to wonder -

As far as I'm aware, there's always a distinction between "series director" and "episode director" in TV anime. Ikuhara was the series director for the whole thing, but he wasn't the episode director for any of the episodes. (Apparently he did do storyboards for episode 1, though.)

Anyway, agreed! I think the game is a lot of fun and has lots of interesting bits, even if characters seem to pass around the idiot ball liberally in regards to the main plot. (And there clearly needed to be more communication between the scriptwriter and character designer about the whole "Chigusa looks masculine" thing. Yeesh.)

I think my personal canon is the "Perfect Ending," actually, with D-ko having been inspired by Chigusa, and resolving to return to Ohtori to show everyone how much she's grown. (...then she can come back later, hammer-duel Utena, and spend the night playing with Anthy. )

Trench Kamen wrote:

In what universe is that not "interesting stuff"? ]

The universe where it's up against lesbian schoolgirl BDSM shower sex, of course.

Is...is it possible to get an audio recording of that scene in the bathroom?

Lucky for you guys, thanks to all the LPs I've been watching, I've heard of HyperCam and got the Anthy Ending recorded and uploaded to Youtube.

So if you can't play the game for some reason, but would like to see this ending, you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAS0v0Z1fEg

The_A_Man, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE UPLOAD!!!
Anthy sounds fantastic as always~~ Even though the player's character is a girl in the game, but she sure sounds like a typical dirty old man (with a girly voice)

Dallbun wrote:

If you guys are interested in Saturn game videos, Nico Nico Douga has a whole lot of them. I could post a catalogue of links.

Please do.

Thanks The_A_Man, I think I almost came.

Dallbun, now I officially you.

Thank you so much for playing the game so many times and translate it for us, even though I wasn't there to vote, I still read all four threads with great interest and I just couldn't stop.

My personal favorite ending is Anthy. Simply hilarious, I tried very very hard not to laugh out loud so that I won't wake my husband. But seeing the perfect ending let me know the plot and make me know the charactersw even better.

Now I want to write a D-ko fanfic to see what happen when she return to Ohtori.

Once again, many thanks to you, Dallbun!

I have no life and I like being totally anal about stuff like this. If any mods think this would be better off as its own thread, shoot me a quick PM and let me know.

Based on two pieces of information provided (possibly three!) in the second Let's Play (the one for the perfect ending), I used the date/time function provided by any installation of Windows XP to track down the timeframe of when the game takes place to the very day.

I first present the first piece of information, the calendar in the fencing club's locker room:



As can be seen, the month has 31 days, starts on a Monday and has the date of the 25th (a Thursday) circled. Taking into account that only four days are spent during the game (and I assume that the 25th is the last day, of course), we know that our cheerful yet clueless protagonist arrived at Ohtori on the 22nd of the month (a Monday).

Now, moving on to the next piece of information, the game reveals in our second playthrough that Chigusa is examining student records from 1981 to 1983. I assume this has something to do with the way Japanese upper schools keep records in comparison to the way Western schools do (or, at least, American schools; I'm basically writing what I know here, to use a trope). We learn through the conversation with our bubbleheaded heroine's (not Utena) parents that the whole incident leading to Chigusa's death took place fifteen years ago.

With a quick bit of arithmetic, we learn that She of the Slippery Mambo is attending Ohtori between the years 1996 and 1998, barring some bizarre wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey mojo on Akio and/or Anthy's part.

Most humans I know also learn the reinforcing mnemonic (spelled right?) rhyme that "thirty days has September, April, June and November; the rest have 31 save February." Gives us seven months to work with in a year, and with three years this gives us 21 months to examine. The third possible piece of information appears to be that the season is between late spring and late summer in Ohtori. (I think, anyway. I assume that a Japanese winter in Ohtori would involve snow and changing of leaf colors.)

With that known, we can examine which months in range turn up as possible hits.

From 1996, we have January and July. In 1997, there's December. And in 1998, we have nothing that matches. This brings us down to three possible months across three years. January and December seem much too cold to wander around without warm clothing, so this leaves only July 1996 as our winner.

Now, I'm not saying that the facts of seasons turn up as I'm assuming, because I've never ever been to Japan. I also have to assume for sake of continuity that there's nothing funny about the way Akio's keeping track of time in Ohtori and Houou City. Any major change to this continuity and we throw this all out the window. I'm just presenting what I dug up today when totally bored and decided to do a bit of integrity checking.

If anybody with a greater understanding of the variables involved has a different opinion, I'd honestly welcome them onto the table, as it were.

BioKraze wrote:

From 1996, we have January and July. In 1997, there's December. And in 1998, we have nothing that matches. This brings us down to three possible months across three years. January and December seem much too cold to wander around without warm clothing, so this leaves only July 1996 as our winner.

Now, I'm not saying that the facts of seasons turn up as I'm assuming, because I've never ever been to Japan. I also have to assume for sake of continuity that there's nothing funny about the way Akio's keeping track of time in Ohtori and Houou City. Any major change to this continuity and we throw this all out the window. I'm just presenting what I dug up today when totally bored and decided to do a bit of integrity checking.

If anybody with a greater understanding of the variables involved has a different opinion, I'd honestly welcome them onto the table, as it were.

I thought that the calendar we see in the locker room was the OLD calendar, not the current one?

Aw, man, that makes things harder!    So we no longer know that the first day of the current game-time month is Monday.  But we still know that the 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th are all school days (possibly including Saturday, which is a school day for most schools in Japan).

The calendar isn't from 1981, which had no 31-day months beginning on Mondays.

The calendar page could be March 1982.  That would set the game in 1997.  But in March 1997, the 23rd was a Sunday, not a school day, meaning that the game definitely doesn't take place in March 1997.  So if the game is set in 1997, Chigusa is using the wrong calendar month (March) to mark off the days till the 25th, which seems kind of strange (though perhaps no stranger than using the wrong calendar year).  And if Chigusa's using the wrong month, we have nothing to go on.

The calendar page could also be August 1983.  That puts the game in 1998, the not-too-distant future from the anime audience's perspective.  But here again, it turns out that the 23rd of the month was a Sunday in August 1998, so we still have Chigusa using the wrong calendar month.

1980 and 1984 turn out not to work either, for parallel reasons.  So either the game designers didn't think through what month the game was set in and what month Chigusa's calendar would reflect, or Chigusa just ripped an arbitrary month from her calendar.  I think obviously Chigusa is to blame here. 

Dallbun wrote:

stuff about the date

satyreyes wrote:

more stuff about the date

You guys are gonna laugh. I had to correct my original calculations because I was doing them fifteen years ago, game-wise.

And you know what? You're right. It's totally pointless to try and figure it out. Even if the game designers did their research and got everything lined up, and the calendar made sense both "now" and "fifteen years ago," it still wouldn't apply because of the one quality of fan-wank we all typically agree on here: Ohtori is timeless. So I'm still stabbing roses in the dark because I assumed Akio wasn't diddling around with time, and he still is!

Buuut, it's fun to try and do this sort of thing, isn't it?