I think I got it.
It seems to be about the game mechanics themselves, how the player tries over and over to beat the game. The Marisa here is a remnant of one of those tries, one that ended at Parsee ("yes, it replays"), which is why she doesn't know Satori. She is a lost soul who returns to the place where she died and is guided along to Nirvana by the one who killed her, who envies but seems to like her, which is why she drags the whole thing out. Marisa also envies her friends, for example Reimu, who, contrary to herself, masters the stages without ever dying. Or perhaps she does die, Marisa wouldn't know.
Now the beast within the forest is jealousy/envy, but whose? I'd say Marisa's as Parsee makes no attemps to ever hide hers, which would make the forest Marisa's subconscious. She feels a sense of deju vu at the gate, right? She recognises her envy.
Satori and Orin clean up the mess left behind by themselves and the other bosses of SA, as in collect the "corpses" of every failed attempt at the game. Orin seems to regret never having been able to actually kill her off for good, since her actual corpse would have been a lot more useful.
It's a story about envy and the player character dying countless times before finally gitting gud.
I love stories like these, which refer to the game without blatantly breaking the fourth wall, apart from the mana comment.
last edited at May 17, 2015 9:58PM
