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ing a flag with a striking resemblance to the flag ofthe People’s Republic of China (although resemblanceto the Viet Cong flag or the People’s LiberationArmy’s Air Force flag are arguable as well):one large, and several smaller, gold five-pointedstars, the large on a red background. The flag ofthe Dominion is cut in half with blue on the bottom(where the smaller stars are), which bringsup the other resemblances.Liberation Maiden takes as its premise a fantasy futurein which the roles of the Second Sino-Japanesewar are reversed. The chairman is now theimperial aggressor.Suda51’s games have a tendency to engage internationalpolitics, but Kill the Past tends to be readas a purely personal theme. The fact that Killer7uses an America-Japan conflict as its motivatingincident is subsumed into the personal conflictsof its characters. Liberation Maiden doesn’t allowfor this, though: the only way to read it, in termsof Killing the Past, is politically.This political reading is fraught.It mirrors the ascendant rightwing tendency in Japan to revisethe nation’s imperialist aggressionsduring the second worldwar.In terms of the game itself, it pushes the ecologicalthemes away from the benign Save theWhales feeling that blowing up buildings to maketrees provides and towards something more likeBlood & Soil. But the obvious counterpoint, thatthis premise is largely locked away behind a seriesof menus and so is not central to the game, ishard to argue ever since it received a sequel. LiberationMaiden SIN might not be available to English-speakinggamers, but the fact that it is a vi-