There are a few smaller stories of interest to the Saturn community this week, from a movie with ties to a Saturn game hitting North American theaters for the first time to a new optical drive emulator being teased and a patch to fix an old problem in a beloved game’s soundtrack. Let’s take a closer look.
‘Adolescence of Utena’ coming to theaters
An anime film with ties to the Sega Saturn is set for its first run in North American theaters 27 years after it was created.
GKIDS announced Thursday that “Adolescence of Utena” will screen in select theaters across the U.S. and Canada on June 21 and 22.
The movie hit Japanese theaters in August 1999 but hadn’t played in North American cinemas until now. It’s part of the Revolutionary Girl Utena series, which began as a manga and an anime in 1996 and ’97, respectively.
Sega developed and published a visual novel for the Saturn in May 1998 set between episodes 8 and 9 of the anime. A group of fans — Endless, Dalbun and Ayu Ohseki — released an English translation patch for the Saturn game in October 2015.
The screening will have English subtitles only — it won’t feature the English dub that Central Park Media created for a North American DVD and VHS release in 2001.
The movie can be watched with that dub for free on Pluto TV, which may be helpful for anyone who doesn’t have a screening near them or can’t make the two-day run.
GKIDS previously distributed another anime film with ties to the Saturn, “The First Slam Dunk,” in 2023.
Here’s the trailer for Adolescence of Utena that GKIDS posted to YouTube:
The official website describes the movie thusly:
Utena enrolls in the prestigious Ohtori Academy on her quest to become a prince, and stumbles into a mysterious cabal of students dueling for possession of the “Rose Bride.” The role belongs to their classmate Anthy, an enigmatic girl who equally captivates and confuses Utena. While fending off powerful rivals, Utena must uncover the secrets surrounding Anthy and her own desires. As the relationship between the girls intensifies, their thirst for freedom crescendoes into a need for revolution.
ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA is a standalone genre classic that brings together the creative genius of director Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sailor Moon), writer Yoji Enokido (EVANGELION franchise), and art director Shichiro Kobayashi (ANGEL’S EGG) with J.A. Seazer’s transcendent music. Straddling the line between fairytale and surrealist opera, the film stands as a bold display of the ways social roles chain us— and demands we smash through them.
Ced teases new hardware
The creator of Saturn optical drive emulator Fenrir posted an image on X that seemed to tease new hardware.
Ced posted on Monday a pixelated image of a silicon board with the word “Titan” — a moon of the planet Saturn — printed on it. It appears to have an SD card reader and ESP32 Wi-Fi chip at the back, and at the front are pins similar to those on the Saturn’s Video CD card.
All those facts lead some to speculate that this is a new Saturn ODE to compete with the Satiator, which connects to the Video CD card slot in the back of the console and hijacks the CD block to run games off an SD card.
Ced didn’t answer questions about what the device actually is. “I’ll talk more about it when finished,” he said in his Discord server.
His most recent ODE, the Fenrir Lite, debuted in August 2025 and last got a firmware update in December. Fenrirs require users to replace the Saturn’s CD-ROM, which makes those who still want to use original discs hesitant to use it. It’s an advantage other ODEs like the Satiator and the SAROO cartridge have over it.
The Satiator’s creator, Professor Abrasive, has a good humor about it. When asked whether this was the first direct competitor that isn’t a clone of the Satiator, Abrasive said, “Yeah looks like Ced is the first to get something booting via the Video CD slot. Hats off to them, it’s not easy.”
Patch fixes Sega Ages: OutRun soundtrack
A user on SegaXtreme righted a 30-year-old wrong in OutRun’s soundtrack with a patch Wednesday for the Japanese release of Sega Ages: OutRun on the Saturn.
The user, named — ahem — BaraFapper69, uploaded the patch to SegaXtreme’s Resources area. It replaces OutRun’s music files with new versions that fix the drums, which apparently had been far louder than intended in the original 1986 arcade racer.
BaraFapper explains:
As you know, back in 2006 or ’07, in preparation for the release of the OutRun 20th Anniversary Edition soundtrack, WAVE MASTER’s Shigeharu Isoda noticed that the drum samples from the original arcade game were very noisy and found that one of the ROMs had bit6 always “ON”, so Hiro Kawaguchi, the game’s original composer, went to fix this glaring issue. Years later, M2 would include this fix for the Nintendo 3DS version of OutRun, but not before djyt would implement this fix to both Cannonball and OutRun: Enhanced Edition years earlier.
After grabbing the rips of the fixed soundtrack and converting them to .flac files, BaraFapper imported them to audio software Audacity and looped them how the original recordings are in the Saturn version. Then they exported them as .wav files and renamed them to .bin. files.
“So now FINALLY Sega Saturn players can listen to the game’s soundtrack exactly like how it was intended. Justice has been served!” BaraFapper said.
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