One of the saddest realities of being an anime fan is how much of the stuff you love never gets translated or officially licensed. Even if you’re lucky enough to get your favorite anime officially translated, there are various neat spin-offs you won’t get to see stateside, from light novels to musicals to image songs. There’s a lot of really interesting video games based on great anime that have never made it stateside. But thanks to the power of saavy fans, we know about them in depth- and I’ve even gotten to play some! Let’s take a look at some of the coolest unknown anime video games.
If you like these a lot, you can make enough noise and an official release may come someday! Do you have any other video games you’d like to see? Say so in the comments!
Sailor Moon: Another Story
There are a ton of Sailor Moon video games that we didn’t get to see in the West and some that we did. But Sailor Moon: Another Story is by far the weirdest and most interesting. The game was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This was a fairly complex RPG. You could play as all ten of the Sailor Soldiers, even getting to choose which ones you wanted in your party of five later in the game. You have access to a variety of attacks and could even “link” soldiers to combine attacks. For instance, if you linked up Sailor Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, you got an attack called “Dead World Submerge”, which has to be the coolest combined attack name ever.
The plot of the game is both simple and intensely convoluted. The story was ostensibly set between the third and fourth seasons of the anime.
The Sailor Soldiers are being pursued by “Opposito” Soldiers, that are basically their evil counterparts from the future who have traveled back in time to change fate.
Official art of the "Opposito" girls
Meanwhile, Tuxedo Mask is in distress (because of course he is) and the Soldiers need to find the medicine that will cure him. In order to do this, they split up and each Soldier goes to a different part of the world. Sailor Jupiter goes to Canada, Sailor Mercury goes to Switzerland, Sailor Mars goes to Tibet and Sailor Venus goes to Turkey. Because of the Opposito Soldier’s ability to time travel, old enemies are resurrected and the girls even find themselves going back in time.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the game was how it seemed to borrow from both manga and anime canon. This is perhaps best exemplified by Sailor Saturn’s father, Professor Tomoe- in the anime, he was a good person who got possessed by a demon. It was exorcised and he survived. In the manga, he was just evil and he ended up dying. The game combines both these versions- Professor Tomoe is an innocent person who was possessed, but he also apparently died. So there’s basically stuff from both continuities sprinkled throughout the game- the manga element of Tuxedo Mask having four bodyguards in his past life is present and so is the anime-only plot point of Sailor Mars’ failed romance with Tuxedo Mask.
It’s definitely an interesting mishmash, and though there is some tedious grinding and weird out-of-character moments, the game itself is pretty fun. It’s a shame America didn’t get to enjoy it.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Someday My Revolution Will Come
Did you know there was a Utena dating sim? Well, now you do! And it’s amazing.
Technically, a more accurate translation of the title of the Utena game is “Revolutionary Girl Utena: Story of the Someday Revolution”, but the English title fans have come up with (“Someday My Revolution Will Come”) is extremely clever. This game was released in 1998 for the Sega Saturn console.
The game is set between episode 8 and 9 of the anime and you basically play as a new female student who has just transferred to the wild world of Ohtori Academy. You can name the character anything you want- I have dubbed her Purple Pigtails- and from there you have an option to pursue several “paths” with different characters- basically you can get cozy with the four members of the student council (Juri, Miki, Touga and Saionji) and Utena herself. There’s also a super secret hidden route for Anthy and that ridiculous amount of subterfuge is just perfect for the character.
Of course, since it has to fit within the continuity of the show, you can’t expect things to get too steamy- but other than that it does function basically as a dating sim. Which is hilarious, because if you know anything about Utena you know all of there characters are way too screwed up to be decent boyfriend/girlfriend material.
Of course, it’s not just a dating sim- the main character is also dealing with a very sinister mystery in the form of another new student who seems to be up to no good. Choosing which characters to get close to is actually choosing who to save from a horrible fate. Much like you’d expect from Utena, it’s an unsettling, slightly supernatural story that is heavy on symbolism and touches on stuff like gender roles.
But the dating sim elements are still great in their own right. I predicted that romancing Utena would have her interrupting you every few seconds to go through a bout of gay panic where she tries to reassure herself she is a NORMAL GIRL who wants a NORMAL BOY- something she was prone to early on in the series- and this is hilariously correct.
There’s a path that involves the character you play as discovering slowly she’s a lesbian (or bisexual, depending on your interpretation). While it checks off a lot of 90’s yuri (girls love) story clichés (“even though we’re both girls” is uttered not once, but twice)- it’s kind of amazing that we’re looking at a game, aimed towards teenage girls rather than a niche market, from the 90’s that encourages the player to put themselves in the shoes of a character exploring her queer sexuality. And that the story itself stresses that there’s nothing abnormal or wrong about these feelings, and that those who feel them aren’t alone. That’s pretty cool and it’s a shame no one outside Japan got to experience that.
Basically, this game has all the things you can expect from Utena- drama, intrigue, psychological horror, screwed up family dynamics, exploration of tortourous adolescence, duels, bizarre comedy and lots and lots of gayness. You can even find out some interesting and presumably canon information about the characters- like how on earth Saionji managed to get the position of Vice President of the Student Council despite his general incompetence and what Juri’s secret hobby is. I give two thumbs up to this weird game.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Games
The video games based off the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime were produced while the anime boom was still big in America, so most of them got official translations stateside. Sadly, this is not true for the games based off the more manga-faithful second anime, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
There are three main Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood games. Both Fullmetal Alchemist: Prince of Dawn and its sequel Daughter of the Dusk are original stories while Fullmetal Alchemist: To The Promised Day follows the plot of Brotherhood with some stuff added in. All of these games were made for the Wii.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these games looks absolutely ridiculous, but they’re ridiculous in a fun way. Just pouring through the screenshots and trying to guess what the hell is going on is an adventure in itself.
The plot of these games is some convoluted thing about a visiting prince and Envy imitating Riza and Roy and Ed get imprisoned at some point and then a giant robot attacks the city- and as amazing as the characters of Fullmetal Alchemist versus a giant robot is, what is really important is all the ridiculous nonsense that happens in between. It’s pure fanservice, in the non-sexual sense of the word (though there is some random sexy fanservice too, and it’s pretty eyeroll-worthy).
There’s a part where Winry puts on a play for a friend, and this leads to us getting to see the characters of Fullmetal Alchemist in every ridiculous fanfic-style alternate universe one can imagine.
This includes a high school AU:
Please enjoy Al’s cat shirt and also enjoy how Winry forgoes the usual anime staple of toast-in-the-mouth and just runs to school with a WRENCH in her mouth.
And if Riza chooses the play, she decides it’s about her being a lesbian knight and rescuing Princess Winry from tiny Demon Ed. Lady’s got good taste:
In addition to all this, you can play at a dinner party and manufacture an intimate moment between characters of your choice, play detective as Winry and solve an increasingly bizarre mystery, and so much more.
As for the Brotherhood game, it does add a lot of stuff to the main story. Some of it is along the lines of the game developers apparently feeling that Brotherhood did not have enough pointless scenes of half naked women, but it also adds in some missing moments that creator Hiromu Arakawa discussed only in the artbooks, like the origin of the automail leg on Winry’s dog or how Maria Ross shot a dude to save the emperor while in Xing:
All in all, these games have a lot of great schlock for a Fullmetal Alchemist fan to shamelessly indulge in, and it’s a shame I can’t get one for my Wii.
Super Heroine Chronicle
The Super Heroine Chronicle was released for Playstation 3 in 2014 and it’s a really interesting concept as a video game. It basically takes the heroines from various anime series and lets them interact or fight together- or fight each other.
This game mostly features heroines from lesser known franchises like Symphogear and Infinite Stratos and other anime I’m not super familiar with, though it does include Koto and Yase from Kyousigiga which is one of my personal favorite anime.
I’m not really interested in this particular game itself as much as a concept- I’d love to see another game based on crossing over various heroines from pop culture. Imagine if you could team up Buffy and Xena! Even just limiting it to anime, there are tons of team-ups I’d like to see. I hope there are more games made with this concept in the future, whether in the States or in Japan. And if they’re made in Japan, I hope they make it over to the States, despite the liscencing issues.