One more Lords of Shadow thing, and I'll shut up

If your first game was widely criticized for not breaking completely free from its Lord of the Rings roots, is it wise to start off your trailer for the sequel with a "MARCH TO HELM'S DEEP!" sequence, complete with Deeping Wall explosion?

(No, I'm not enticed to stick around by the prospect of 'roid-rage Alucard.)
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31 Days of Game Music: Shoujo Kakumei Utena

Utena the anime is, in brief, about a bunch of students at a chivalry-themed academy fighting a series of sword duels for control of a power that, it is promised, will ultimately allow one of them to "revolutionize the world." Each individual episode tends to focus on the insecurities and internal conflicts holding a given student back from personal growth and self-actualization and unmet needs driving them to vie for the world-revolutionizing prize, the exploration of which will usually culminate in a swordfight accompanied by a choral piece that comments obliquely on the preceding episode's events and the protagonist's mindset. The show is noted its heavy and skillful use of symbolism, its remarkably complex character studies and examination of gender issues, and its Charles Rennie Mackintosh-inspired art design.

The Sega Saturn game of Utena is essentially a dating sim, with the player taking the part of a new transfer student. Problem: the anime's tight web of relationships and largely serious tone isn't really set up to accommodate an original character or gaiden story arc. The game deals with these reservations by completely and utterly abandoning them - it is almost exultantly juvenile in its protagonist's Mary Sueism. You can grab the power to revolutionize the world; you can replace their eternal beloveds in the main characters' hearts; you can make the villain abandon his wicked ways (more or less) and fall for you. This is kind of like an FF4 where you unseat Cecil and become king of Baron, or woo Edge away from Rydia, or become Mysidia's greatest mage, etc.

And then comes the ending, where the show's puppeteers make a few wry comments on the proceedings and proceed to snap their fingers and erase your GTA escapades from their universe. Everything you've done has been undone; this has just been a ridiculous, overindulgent wish-fulfillment fantasy for your own entertainment.

Which brings us to the duel choruses for the game:

Musically - particularly the listless "Gerushen no Kubi"/"Gertzen's Head" - they're not the franchise's best work (here and here are perhaps closer to that mark), but they're remarkable for their frank meta commentary. The very title of the first, "Sakasama Boku to Boku no Heya"/"The Inversion of Me and My Room" (lyrics here) represents the switch between audience and author that's being lived out in the game - instead of your fanfic being played out in the "cheap apartment" of your head, it's now up on the big screen of what initially appears to be storyline canon itself. The creative process itself has "recoil[ed]," and we have gone "beyond written record"; fan now supersedes creator, and the private and personal is now for public, officially-sanctioned consumption. There's a cheeky tone to "The Inversion of Me and My Room," with imagery of "danc[ing] through space" and a "cosmic swing at the end of the universe" representing the creative process - like the bemused villains pulling the strings of the series plot, the artists behind Utena don't seem to mind surrendering the driver's seat for a bit. I think they know you'll crash the car in the end anyway:

Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, good-bye to whom?
Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye - good-bye to me!

Your work is not lasting in this universe.

The choruses also poke fun at the game's derivative production methods themselves. One of the game's showpiece duels will feature the cheap pop of your favorite, love-interest character smacking the stuffing out of whoever the game has concluded to be your most hated character. The show's duels, however, you see, usually take place between the series heroine and the supporting cast; there aren't many shots of the other players dueling each other, and the combinatorics make the prospect of animating every possible scenario expensive. The producers therefore resort to reusing snippets of footage from the show to create a "composite" battle, the cheapness of which is not overlooked by "Gertzen's Head":

Bringing forth existence,
Regenerating parts
To be revived --
My experiment was a success!

But, then again, the chorus is kind of sniping at the player as well - for wanting to relive the storyline of the anime in a self-serving, juvenile manner that doesn't mesh with the mission statement of the show.
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