Starting life back in the year 2000 as a doujin visual novel, Tsukihime gained a reputation as one of the best visual novels available, despite some dated elements. Over 20 years later, Aniplex and TYPE MOON have brought it to a wider audience with the remake, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.
Not heard of Tsukihime before? It might interest you to know that it’s written by Kinoko Nasu, the author of Fate/stay night which spawned the massive Fate franchise, as well as the canonical basis for the fighting game series Melty Blood.
Tsukihime Remake
It is worth taking a moment to note that Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is not a complete remake of Tsukihime. It only contains the ‘near side’ routes which focus on vampires. The far side routes that focus on the Tohno family are to be included in Tsukihime -The other side of red garden-, along with a new route for Satsuki Yumizuka.
In exchange, the scenarios that are included have been rewritten and added to, with significant changes. While it only includes the two routes, it’s still about 50 hours long. The production values are also significantly higher and the remake is fully voiced, unlike the original which was completely unvoiced.
Blood Moon
Tsukihime’s story opens by introducing Shiki Tohno. After an incident when he was young, he awakened the power of seeing the lines of death. By tracing these lines, with the most minor effort, he can cut down anything or anyone. However, seeing this puts a strain on his mind. Luckily a passing magician gifts him a pair of glasses that can block his view of these. He’s told to only use this power when the time is right.
Years pass peacefully until Shiki has a shocking encounter with Arcueid, a vampire who hunts down other vampires. She explains that a vampire is slowly taking over Souya City and manages to convince Shiki to use his power to help. As they investigate, Shiki learns more about vampires and the secrets hidden by the church that hunts them down. Beyond that, he’s just moved back in with his family after years of separation, leading to hints that there’s more to his own past than he once thought.
Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- nicely mixes mystery, action, and horror, with a touch of romance. This isn’t just a simple supernatural action story, but a multifaceted plot where characters all have their own motivations, and unexpected twists often occur. It feels like everyone is hiding something in Tsukihime, with nothing as it first seems.
There are also moments of shocking violence. This visual novel is rated for adults, not due to any sexual content (it fades to black in the one instance this is included) but due to how extreme the violence can be. This isn’t just in a somewhat-justified context of fighting either.
The fighting itself is well-written. The scenes can be quite long, but each is filled with tension and excitement. It felt like there was always a new move that enemies and allies alike would pull out during the bigger fights and Shiki’s panic felt real even in the smaller action scenes.
Tsukihime is not all mysteries, fighting, and violence though. The story can be rather dark at times and even those on Shiki’s side aren’t always innocent, but it is balanced by moments of levity. Arcueid can often be lighthearted and charming, with a lack of common sense and understanding of human society that leads to some amusing moments. Ciel, the focal character of the second route, often teases Shiki and there are clashes with his overly strict sister. I did find that these moments worked well to break the tension, providing moments of reprieve between some rather serious topics and interesting but dense informational sections (read: lore dumps). There are those moments of romance too, though these are never the focus. Fittingly for the story, even the romantic aspects can be rather dark with moments of guilt, and there’s no guarantee that things will go well.
Building a Kamige
Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- does a brilliant job of building up a world by slowly revealing more information. It drops hints, often in very subtle ways that may be missed by less attentive readers. Characters change how they act and minor events happen in ways that don’t always seem important in isolation. Quite often, we see Shiki experience things but not realize it at the time, leaving the reader to notice first. Imagery is used in the wording at times to hint at upcoming events and it even sometimes mixes in visual cues that something is happening, while not commenting on the situation in the dialogue until much later.
Perhaps due to this, I found Tsukihime to be a much slower read than a lot of visual novels. The writing pulled my attention with this technique and I found the style of writing itself quite gripping. It’s a credit to the localization team that they managed to bring this across to the English version.
One aspect that I felt worked particularly well was how the other routes and endings were used to build on and expand the story.
Ciel’s route can only be played after Arcueid’s. We barely see her in the first route at all, but depending on the choices made, we can sometimes see hints of what’s happening in the background with her. This pays off when playing her route, giving that feeling of the satisfaction of finally understanding the events we saw in the first route. As well we see a very different side of Arcueid caused by the way that events play out differently here, along with a closer look at the main villain that makes him much more interesting as a character than in the first route.
There are also 21 ‘Dead Ends’. The world of Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is violent and Shiki can easily die, sometimes completely unexpectedly by making what seems like a normal choice. It’s not the case for all of the endings, but many of them add key information that isn’t found elsewhere. Some add story threads that are left unexplored, but these are mostly related to what’s happening in the Tohno mansion, which has only built my anticipation for Tsukihime -The other side of red garden- where we’ll get to explore those events.
If you want to find (or avoid) all of the Dead Ends, you might want to check out our walkthrough/guide for Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.
AAA Visual Novel
The difference in production values between the original Tsukihime and Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is startling. The Tsukihime remake has been referred to as an AAA visual novel and it certainly makes sense why.
The original art was simplistic, to put it kindly. It was certainly the work of a doujin (i.e. self-published and relatively small-time) group. The art in Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- feels extremely high quality.
The amount of graphics used is incredibly high and there are some really detailed backgrounds. Even the character sprites are nearly indistinguishable from the CGs, they’re so good. There’s also a lot of use of animation; sometimes in the background to create a sense of movement, a slowly growing blood splatter rather than a more simplistic flash of red, and fading images of objects in and out to show their use.
NVL (text covering the entire screen) is used in Tsukihime, which is unusual for visual novels these days. I’m usually not a fan of this as it covers up the characters, but I felt it worked well with the more extensive style of writing present here.
The music and use of sound really add to the sense of tension or horror in certain scenes. It’s used well too, with techniques like slow ramp-ups, use of silence, and frequent switching of a wide variety of tracks to match the mood.
Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is fully voiced as well, including the main character which is a rarity in visual novels. The performances are all great.
Verdict
Between the masterful writing, exciting story, engaging mystery, and high production values, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is absolutely worth buying.
TSUKIHIME -A PIECE OF BLUE GLASS MOON- IS A MUST BUY
Guide: Click Here
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy our review of Mashiroiro Symphony HD -Love is Pure White-. Or, check out our section on visual novels covering a wide variety of genres, both originally written in English and localized from Japanese, by clicking here.
Thank you to Aniplex for providing a PlayStation 4 review code for Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
