”I am never going to play that fucking shit in my life,” I said after reading Cab’s review on Tsukhime, circa April 2022. However, regardless of telling myself that, the morbid curiosity of playing whatever this game was has lingered in my head for quite some time. Probably not helped by me getting a bit into Melty Blood at the time, alongside watching the Ufortable adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works. But, if you know me at all, the biggest roadblock was of course the adult content. Not that I mind a story reflecting sexual themes, as those are important stories to tell, but more in the fact that the way Tsukihime presents those themes is gross and immature. However, my friend DomencioDovanna let me know of a fan patch that entirely skips the pointless time sink that is the adult scenes, while still not undercutting the themes, and he helped me set it up. Thanks!
It’s truly fascinating seeing Nasu’s humble beginnings in the VN industry. While not his first written work (that would be Garden of Sinners, iirc?), it was the first of his stories to be in the Visual Novel format. Context is very important to Tsukihime’s release, as it was a game made by about less than 10 people on a shoestring budget. In fact, all of the visual assets were made by one person, that being Takahashi Takeuchi. Both his artwork alongside Nasu’s writings share nice parallels in being extremely earnest, but still very amateurish and yet to fully bloom into their greatest potential. And that’s what’s so endearing about Tsukihime. Behind the blurry photographed backgrounds, the poor handling of sexual themes, the sometimes janky spritework, the occasionally repetitive prose- there’s a clear effort here to tell a memorable story. It’s probably one of the most honest and impressive games I’ve played, and it’s that context of its development that heightens my respect for it overall.
I don’t want to delve into the story very much here, because ultimately I would like you, the reader, to see what lies under the moon yourself. It’s a story about how important the choices in our lives matter. It’s a story about overcoming our trauma and finding a greater understanding in ourselves. And yes, it is a story that is telling us that life is worth living. It has these wonderful heroines, and each route is truly unique. It’s a game that’s both comfortable yet unnerving, fills us with sorrow but also gives us joy, it can disgust us yet can be so beautiful.
If you have ever wanted to try out Tsukihime, now is the time. The english patch by mirror moon has been out for years, and even offers a SFW patch for the game as I described above. You can play it on a multitude of platforms, even including a fantastic web version that is soon to be the definitive edition of the game. The plus disc also has a translation by mirror moon, and is also worth checking out after the main game, alongside a translation of the sequel(?) Kagetsu Tohya, by Mr Fortayee. And of course, the remake is going to be getting an official translation next year, which I am very excited for! If you don’t have the patience though, there is an already existing translation patch for the Switch version by Tsukihimates.
Despite all of what I’ve said, I can’t exactly recommend Tsukihime. It’s absolutely not a game for everyone, and your enjoyment of the experience is going to vary. But I think if you can look through the cracks, you can find a fantastic narrative that may stick with you for a long time. And lastly, a thank you to Dr Delicious who sat through all of my liveposting throughout my playthrough, and gave me much more insight into the story that made me appreciate the experience even more as a whole.
” - —- Thank you. I’m glad I met you, Sensei.”

It’s easy to point at the gratuitous sexual assault scenes as being incredibly edgy and indicative of quality, and I think Tsukihime would have benefited from cutting some of them out (others could have stood a rewrite but still have a function). But there is a heart to Tsukihime, a cast of scared, lonely teenagers (and one ancient vampire) all going through their own Hedgehog’s dilemma. Don’t let the rough spritework and poorly compressed soundtrack scare you from giving Tsukihime a try, as it still maintains an incredibly unique sense of atmospheric style that shines through the lack of polish.

Arcueid is such a fascinating character. I know a lot of people joke that despite being the main heroine, she doesn’t appear for the second half of the VN, but her route really is great as a tone-setter, and it’s where Tsukihime states a core part of its philosophy. The other heroines have loved at some point prior and been hurt for it, but Arcueid had never developed a true bond before Shiki. During her bittersweet true ending, she outright states that she’d rather have loved and lost then never have loved at all, a mature insight that reverberates throughout the rest of the routes. She’s incredibly memorable for her unique philosophy on humanity and innocent humor, and the only downside to her is that you’ll be missing her dearly after her route.

My other favorite heroine is Kohaku - to keep it vague without spoilers, I think her character is the most human of all, at times very ugly but also capable of being beautiful. Sometimes we seek to deny our own humanity because of how much it hurts to be vulnerable, and Kohaku demonstrates the psychological horror of that self-dehumanization in such a subtly eery way, I ended up crying a few times during some scenes because of how terrifying raw some of her story is. She’s an excellent foil to Arcueid: the non-human who wishes she was human, and the human who wishes she was anything but. It’s why I think her route is great as the finale.

Please don’t wait for the remake to get a translation, the original is absolutely worth your time. It’s an important piece of VN history as one of the first notorious horror VNs and I honestly believe it still holds up to its contemporaries in that genre today.

edit: bumping this one up a bit because the longer i sit with it the more i appreciate this game and care for it in spite of its flaws. maybe the type-moon title i've thought about the most lately. i still think kagetsu toya and fate/stay night are better but something about tsukihime at its best is simply unshakable for me.

tsukihime and i have been building up the guts to talk to eachother for ages, now. type-moon's work was always something i was aware of - certainly, growing up in the post-y2k onslaught of the visual novel heyday and with fate/stay night exploding in popularity at that time, it was essentially a matter of when, not if i would get to it. of the two really big studios of the era that garnered a lot of buzz in the west, though, i was a key/visual arts devotee. in my days of clannad and little busters!, stuff like tsukihime and kagetsu toya slipped me by. well, i'm happy that years later i can finally rectify that. i want to make clear off the bat, i do think tsukihime remains one of the most pivotal works in the history of the genre and one of the most underrated games in history in comparison to the unspeakable influence it's had on japanese media over the last 20+ years. it's absolutely a classic and an essential play for anyone interested in the medium. but it sure ain't perfect.

nasu was clearly a writer getting his chops here. i can't comment on how this evolves with his work yet (this is my first of his works) but he clearly doesn't understand how to let moments speak for themselves yet. he doesn't quite have a grasp on how to let characters internalize feelings or thoughts yet. and, jesus fucking christ, can he not write a romance to save his life. despite being overall a far less interesting or compelling game, i look to the same year's never7 as a much more competently multi-route romance endeavor. nasu's depictions of sex in this game is not only painfully amateurish but at times directly spits in the face of some of the end-game's heaviest moments and reveals. i have no problem with sexual abuse or sexual violence being used as an element in a story inherently, but i do absolutely believe tsukihime falls into the camp of "gratuitously overzealous for the sake of provocation over actual meaning or value" like 8/10 times.

i do think he managed to write a largely compelling cast of characters though. i walked away from each route really enjoying its main heroine, and in a sense i think i enjoy this cast and the idea of their stories a lot more than i like the stories in execution. arcueid is an incredibly fun, goofy character who manages to land a few really strong moments when it matters; an interesting examination of what a grown person restricted from meaningful human connection could look like when granted an unyeilding amount of power and terror. ciel's route largely serves as a loredump but she herself is a pretty charming character. the dynamic between the two in the near side routes is pretty blase though. akiha, hisui and ESPECIALLY kohaku are where the game shine, though. i'm reminded a lot of be-papa's revolutionary girl utena with some of the dynamics at play here; retaliation against unfair violations of trust and innocence through either developing harmful complexes or lashing out when all one seeks is affection. hisui and kohaku's routes in particular stand tall above the rest of the game, and i almost wonder if a game focused entirely on the dynamics of the far side routes with more competent writing could land genuine "masterpiece" status (here's hoping the remake lands this). definitely see the sparking influences for works like higurashi and the house in fata morgana here. shiki almost works as a main character, but the necessity for gratuitous objectification of the entire lead female cast (and i'm not talking about his unstoppable 'urges' or anything here) strays too close to the inauthentic for me to really care much about what happens to him or the internal complex he himself is dealing with. i will say, the game's brief epilogue does a lot to close his arc out pretty nicely, though.

still, if tsukihime was going to make any sort of commentary on much of anything... i feel like it was better suited to push hard into the angle of "these are all repressed, traumatized teenagers trying to learn to connect with one another in spite of the positions they've been shoved into" over anything else. the lore and the constant near side-gushing about vampires and blood-sucking and all that didn't grab me beyond simply providing context. shiki's abilitiy itself is really interesting though, and i'm interested in checking out kara no kyokai since i hear it's talked about more in that.

tsukihime still wins me over, though. despite my many criticisms, the bulk of my experience with the game was good. no way i couldn't be charmed with an art style and a fantastic (albeit dramatically limited) score like this. tsukihime's presentation and perpetual hanging loneliness speak exactly to what i love in this medium. honestly some of my favorite art direction in any game, period. enough that it really managed to keep me invested at points the story could not.

this is one of very few examples where i actually think i might end up liking the remake more than the original, despite absolutely hating this new art direction it's going for. the changes i've heard made to this story ultimately sound like improvements thus far, and i look forward to sitting under the blue, blue glass moon once again after the far side routes are released. i'm invested and charmed enough to want to continue with nasu's work, and ultimately i walk away from tsukihime with a setting, a feeling, and a cast i care about more than i think i actually enjoy the game itself. i think i could see myself really attached to this series as a whole, so despite feeling fairly shaky about tsukihime itself, i'm really glad i've finally taken this off the list and i'm sure it's the start of something a lot bigger for me.

rather than a traditional review, allow me to posit five stray thoughts about my experience with tsukihime. you can think of it like, say, five routes in a visual novel. read as many or as few as you want, or in whatever order you please. maybe they'll provide greater insight into my feelings on the title as a whole. maybe they won't.

playing this game allowed me to put into words a feeling that i'd always had about art. it's not even a very complex feeling, but for some reason it didn't occur to me to articulate it this way until i was like two dozen hours deep into this thing. i think most stories sit on a scale, where one side is "emotional complexity" and the other is "narrative complexity". i won't argue one is better than the other or whatever, but i know i prefer the former, and even tend to stay away from the latter. its part of why things like hard sci-fi or dark fantasy have never landed with me. i get lost in the semantics and lose the throughline im generally there for. tsukihime is, just, so fucking cranked to the "narrative complexity" side that it's broken free from its hinges. it is such an overwhelmingly emotionally simple experience, but is told with the most unbelievably convoluted set of internal logic i think i've ever bore witness to, at least for such a run time. just when i thought i had arranged all the pieces where they needed to be one more bit of lore jammed its way into the greater picture, it got fucking comical.

i spent 90% of my time playing this game doing the kubrick stare. i spent the remaining 10% in vitashell manually editing the VNDS port's script files because the vita port is barely functional. in a sense it sort of heightened my experience, i always like having an excuse to poke around in a game's files. it also meant i was constantly on high alert looking for clues that i'd been knocked onto the wrong route because the software had zero regard for flags.

i cannot believe the limitless depths of circular writing this game achieves, it is seriously written like the fucking super diary. i feel like i need to make a public apology to my wife whom i committed almost-certainly-classifiable acts of torture upon each night before bed as i made my way through tsukihime via reading excerpts of the game aloud that were particularly egregious. it's a problem both macro and micro, every major plot element is restated constantly, and individual dialogue exchanges are always written like "I XYZ, therefore, XYZ. which of course does not mean XYZ, and instead, means XYZ." i dont understand how writing like that is fun or rewarding. it just seems like an exhausting way to tell a story.

i thought quite a bit about how i'd rank the routes as i was playing, but i think each route had about as much good as one another, and about as much bad, although in each case the bad far outweighed the good. akiha's character spoke to me the most i think, and i thought her epilogue had some of the game's best writing, but jesus christ the truly painful romance elements made me cover my face in secondhand embarassment. ciel's route had the most compelling sense of intrigue, but the constant catfighting with arcueid was a tedious drag. i could go on like that for each character, but i think you get the idea.

i cant stop thinking about this moment where akiha's like, "ah right nii-san, your anemia. you know, problems like that have run in our family for generations. our dad for example, had manic depression. also known as a split personality." the guy who wrote this was 27 years old at the time.




secret far side of the moon true ending: saying all this im sure it won't take long for me to think back retroactively fondly of this thing. even factoring in the fatigue i feel with it currently, i kinda cant help but be charmed by the depths to which this work of fiction is in love with its own fiction, in a way that somehow manages to be as convoluted as it is, but not at all pretentious. well. that's about all i have to say about that. will you take ciel-sensei's lesson?
>yes
>no

This review will contain both minor and major spoilers for Tsukihime, I will do my best to not go too deep into major spoilers unless they absolutely need to be talked about.

Content Warning: I’m going to be discussing the following topics: Sex, Rape, Incest, Pornography, and other forms of violence.

I’ll be completely honest… I have no idea how to truthfully go about reviewing this game in its entirety.

It is something with ideas that are vastly engaging and filled with symbolic and philosophical value to me, but also has some of the worst writing decisions I’ve ever seen in a form of media that I’ve ever seen.

It’s a game where when it’s good, it’s excellent. It’s a game where when it’s bad, it’s fucking terrible.

I guess the first thing I’ll tackle is why I wanted to play this game. I’ll start off with the obvious reason. I saw the huge explosion in Neco Arc memes throughout last year and I found myself thoroughly entertained with the strange and zany situations “La Creatura” would find herself in. I had no idea where she came from, and initially I didn’t really care much.

I just thought that she was funny, from videos of her interacting with people on Omeagle to that one video of a Neco Arc nodding its head while the vine boom sound effect would blare loudly.

What got me curious however was my friend, Simon, going through the game. His reactions were so insane, and the dialogue he would share with me was so goofy that I couldn’t help but be interested. I also eventually joined the Discord server which introduced him to the game, Tokyo Millennium, and ultimately found myself beginning my warrior’s journey into the rabbit hole known as the Nasuverse.

I was surprised to find that Tsukihime was made by the same people who made Fate, a franchise I was at least familiar with, despite not having consumed any of the media related to it. It’s such a popular franchise that it was always on my peripheral. So I felt like I was finally getting my true introduction to the work of Type Moon.

Upon playing and finishing Tsukihime, I am left with a feeling of utter confusion and maybe a bit of insanity seeping in.

From here I’m going to separate the review into sections delving into the individual routes.

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Arcueid:
This is definitely one of my two favorite routes in the game, simply because the writing for the growing relationship between the two is so well done. I genuinely felt like these two were meant to be together by the second half of the route given their natural chemistry, they feel like they’ve known each other forever despite having only known each other for like a week.

The lore for this route in particular, while a bit heavy on the exposition, still caught my interest due to how the game’s version of vampires function. Nrvnqsr Chaos in particular was a great antagonist in The Heavy regard. He was written to be such a hateable and disgusting force of violence and terror, and I love how utterly imposing he was. His ability was also incredibly intriguing to me, but going more into that would be veering way more into spoiler territory then I want to go.

I think the weakest aspect of Arcueid’s Route in particular is the actual primary antagonist, Michael Roa Valdamjong. While his lore is very significant, he is an antagonist that has very little presence. While I recognize he also isn’t the primary focus of the route, I still think that his minimal role as well as lack of screen time caused him to lose my interest, and comparing him to Chaos is like night and day. I think he functions better in another route, but we’ll get back to that.

However, the real issue I have with the Arc Route has to do with its portrayal of sexual assault. At a certain point later in the route, there is a moment where the protagonist Shiki attempts to rape Arcueid. This moment comes almost completely out of nowhere, has a visual CG showing Shiki committing the sexual assault (which in turn is an attempt to entice the reader), and gives the player the choice to actually rape her, which while that is the incorrect choice, should never have been an option in the first place.

The scene then ends with Arcueid blaming herself for the sexual assault. It is easily the most upsetting H-Scene in the entire game, and my reaction to it was to rant very angrily to my friends about how absolutely livid I was with that entire moment.

It doesn’t help that within only the span of another chapter, there is another H-scene where Arc and Shiki consensually have sex, which just feels so poorly paced because I cannot actually fathom someone wanting to having consensual sex with the person who tried to rape them the day before.

It’s definitely the most disgusting use of rape in this entire game, and it’s only the second H-scene you will witness period.

We’ll touch on my overall thoughts on the sex scenes at the very end however.

While still on the subject though, I would be remiss to not bring up a scene near the end of the game where Ciel tries to stop Shiki from going to fight Roa, and in his desperation he threatens to rape her. It’s like, so excessive in my mind and even for such a desperate moment, it still feels like they forced the line to be centered on rape when it could easily be that he could threaten to kill her instead and it wouldn’t lessen the impact of the scene.

I do still think that Arc’s Route has probably the best pacing throughout the entire game, and it was where I was the most engaged.

I think Arc’s True Ending is one of the best in the game and really hits on a poignant emotional level for me. I like the Good Ending as well, but mostly because it makes me happy.

Overall, Arc’s Route is mostly solid, but the negatives that permeate the entire game can be at their utter worse here.

I would rate the route itself as 4 stars.

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Ciel:

Ciel’s Route is usually slept on from what I’ve been told, and I can sort of see the reason why. A good chunk of the route is mostly a repeat of Arcueid’s for the first half of it. There’s also a lot of focus on how much of a missed opportunity it is that Shiki and Arc aren’t together, which is a little further accentuated in that Ciel and Shiki don’t have nearly as good chemistry with each other as Shiki has with Arc.

However, I think the second half of Ciel’s route is excellent and actually makes Roa into more of a sincere threat, despite actually no longer having a physical presence. It was definitely the best usage of his character in the game, and it makes the stakes for Shiki himself incredibly high.

I think Ciel herself is a very interesting character, and the story surrounding who she is and her complicated feelings of what she truly desires in this route creates a unique conflict for the friendship between her and Shiki.

Ciel’s Route also has one of the most introspective True Endings in the entire game which had me on my toes from beginning to end, and genuinely caught me off guard. It was borderline like watching the final two episodes of Evangelion for me, and had me thinking a lot about the meaning of one's own consciousness and desires.

Of course, not all things come out unscathed. There is yet again another moment of sexual assault, fortunately it is not visualized through a CG, but there is a point where Shiki (who is currently in a state of losing his sanity) forces himself onto Kohaku. While the situation is handled far better in comparison to the Arcueid one, since there are genuine consequences for the action taken, and Shiki does not receive forgiveness for the act he committed, it still feels like an excessive use of sexual violence for the sake of shock value. The scene could have easily just had him try to kill her rather than ejaculating on her on top of that. It’s definitely one of the less upsetting examples, but it still feels forced despite it all.

There’s also the topic of the “Roa Boner” or the Broaner as I call it. Basically, in one of the game’s many excuses to have a sex scene, Shiki’s body (currently being possessed by Roa) needs to have a “release” in order to slow down the takeover. Cue the Ciel H-Scene. It’s just one of the really dumb moments that will make you laugh and question who thought it was a good idea to include. It also is part of what makes the Shiki/Ciel relationship feel a little hollow in comparison to Arc’s, in that they need a roundabout excuse to have sex in comparison to just… being in love with one another.

Ciel’s Route also has the worst Good Ending in the game, being almost a borderline parody of itself and it’s very dumb. If it makes you happy, more power to you, but honestly Sun reminds me of some of the stupidest shit I used to watch as a teenager. It’s like watching the like, scene in Evangelion where it’s a typical school day scenario, which in Eva is meant to be this subversive moment that’s self aware. It’s like that but without that self awareness.

I would rate the Ciel Route as 3 stars.

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Akiha:

Ugh.

So, this is the route I honestly don’t want to talk about. Before I played Tsukihime I was told that this route is considered “the best” in the server that introduced me to the game. However, when I brought this up in the Backloggd server, everyone was taken aback questioning how such a viewpoint could exist.

I already had reservations about this route for one obvious reason: It’s the incest route.

Now in reality the characters are not actually related, but the perspective is that Shiki has believed Akiha to be his sister for the past 8 years of his life, and it just makes the whole thing very uncomfortable.

Shiki and Akiha have almost zero chemistry romantically, and while I understand Akiha’s reasoning, in that she knows that Shiki isn’t her actual brother, and that she’s been abused by her father and has to deal with the other SHIKI, she is merely trying to get comfort in the one person she truly cares about, I still can’t help but think that it just doesn’t justify it enough.

Something a friend of mine has said is that the characters of Tsukihime are meant to be subversive, which is true. For example Arcueid. She’s this affable genki girl who you think would get along with anyone, but in reality she’s only acting like that because she has flat out never had friends for her entire life and is still very innocent and naive because of her duty.

Akiha feels like the least subversive of the entire cast, fitting squarely in the tsundere incest sister trope that has been around in Japanese Media for a long time. While again there are reasons for why she acts the way she does, those reasons have also been used in the past in Japanese Media as well for this trope as well as other similar ones i.e. Shinmai Maō no Tesutamento.

The route is also host to both the longest H-scene in the game, and the worst non-sexual assault related one as well. It is such a cringe inducing and painful scene to witness… that you can’t skip the whole way through because there is plot relevant information within the scene. If there’s something I haven’t brought up, it is how amateur the artstyle is. For the most part it isn’t a problem, and I honestly think that it looks pretty good most of the time, but it is at its absolute worst with the H-Scenes and combined with the awkwardness of Akiha’s H-Scene in general just brings nothing but pain.

I’ll be completely honest, the Akiha H-Scene broke me completely for the rest of the game. After that scene I could not feel anything for the H-Scenes that came after because Akiha’s is so inherently awful in my eyes that nothing else could offend me more outside of the sexual assault scenes.

The thing is, the Akiha Route still has good ideas despite it all, and that’s honestly what makes the bad parts of it hit worse for me.

I love the early part of the route involving Shiki’s classmate Satsuki turning into a vampire and trying to turn Shiki as well, and how it leads to a long lasting guilt for him when he ultimately kills her. I like how that moment is mirrored in the endings of this route as well. But then there’s also the part in that moment where he decides to kill Satsuki not for his own sake or for realizing that she can’t be helped, but because ”who would Akiha have to protect her”, it just felt like such a forced and awkward moment for me (made especially more clear given how the next two routes handle this exact same moment) given how early in the route it occurs and how unrelated to the current situation it felt.

SHIKI is also a pretty good antagonist in this route, showing exactly how creepy it is to want to bone your sibling (in this case, his actual blood sibling), and is a very hateable and personal enemy. He does a better job than Roa personally in having presence and actually bringing stakes to the plot.

I also think the endings for this route are pretty good as well, as there isn’t a Good Ending but a Normal Ending. Both are tragic, but the True Ending at least has a light at the end of the tunnel that shows that things will be alright. I personally prefer the Normal Ending as it shows the ultimate consequences of the route and paints the incestual love as what it is: inherently toxic.

I also actually like when the route shows the sibling dynamic Akiha and Shiki have rather than the romantic aspect of their relationship, as they actually work well as siblings and they’re written as being understanding and caring of one another while also having that typical conflict.

It’s just a shame this game is an eroge from the year 2000.

This is the one route I hope gets some major changes to it in the remake because I really think that the incest is what ultimately harms this route the most (y’know, outside of the porn). Definitely the weakest route in the game for me.

I’d rate the Akiha Route as 1 star.

Also Akiha has a long ass neck.


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Hisui:

This is the second of my two favorite routes. It essentially takes the best aspects of the Akiha Route, and removes the incestual plot, while also showing a well written and developing relationship between Shiki and Hisui. They are probably my second favorite relationship in the game behind Shiki and Arcueid as their growth feels incredibly natural and results in incredibly heart wrenching moments in the second half.

I really don’t want to spoil much of this route because I think those emotional gut punches need to be experienced blind for the true experience, but trust me, they hit hard.

There’s only two parts of this route I have a major problem with, that being the use of a CG to show one of the characters after they had been raped, which feels like an unnecessary visualization of something that would have been better off not visualized.

The bigger problem is like with Arcueid’s Route, there is a scene where Shiki has the option to sexually assault and rape Hisui. Regardless of what the guide says, I heavily recommend not going with the option to sexually assault, the scene is disgusting and is nothing but pure excess on the part of the writers. It’s incredibly unnecessary and only appeals to people with a very sickening mindset and is absolutely harmful.

There’s also the part where Shiki winds up having consensual sex with Hisui which is another one of those “we made up an excuse so the characters can have sex” moments the game is fond of. It’s a dumb moment but makes sense lore wise, but still feels really awkward.

The endings for Hisui though are spectacular and among the best in the game, in fact Hisui’s Good Ending is easily the best Good Ending in the entire game in my personal opinion.

Outside of that, I don’t want to go further in spoiling the Hisui Route, but just trust me that outside of those negatives I’ve listed, this route is truly an emotional ride from start to finish and absolutely worth it.

I’d rate the Hisui Route 4 stars.

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Kohaku:

As the finale to this lengthy experience, the Kohaku route mostly focuses on tying up the loose ends of all the other routes. While it is a good overall experience, it definitely has a bit of a pacing issue, and Kohaku herself isn’t really much of a focus of it.

However, I still think that the overall relationship between Shiki and Kohaku and how he tries to help her is a very good emotional core, and I think that makes the second half of the route have one of the better payoffs in the whole game.

I do like Akiha as the primary antagonist as her brocon tendencies are accentuated as being unhealthy, and it shows how someone like her could become just as bad as SHIKI if they give in to their obsessions. I think it’s a natural extension of the character we were shown in her route, but fits better here due to being an antagonist.

I do think the ending is a little weak though, mostly in that it doesn’t feel like there are enough consequences for the acts of the characters within the route, but it’s still something that makes me happy overall and didn’t leave me completely unsatisfied.

I’d rate the Kohaku Route 3 stars.

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Discussing the Sexual Content:

As you can probably gather so far, I found that the sexual content in this game was inherently harmful to the story that was trying to be told by Nasu.

A good chunk of it feels extremely indulgent in what I find are the worst aspects of the eroge genre, creating stupid excuses just so characters can fuck, giving the player the choice in scenarios involving sexual assault to appeal to people with a very unhealthy fetish, and ultimately feeling completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of the greater narrative.

This isn’t to say that I don’t want writers to be able to bring up and discuss subjects and themes like sex and the impacts of sexual assault and rape but more in that writers have to be careful when utilizing such concepts because even the smallest misuse can be extremely harmful in the conveyance of them.

I believe Nasu does a mostly poor job at how he conveys these themes, and because of that it results in an experience that will leave most readers extremely uncomfortable and drop the material.

The H-Scenes in general are written is such a blunt and comical way at points that the game literally feels like one of those bootleg porn parodies you would find on Pornhub, it’s so degrading and ultimately meaningless that it almost makes you laugh until it gets specifically awkward and uncomfortable.

This is the part I’m glad to see be gone from the remakes, and I genuinely hope Type-Moon never does sexual content like this ever again in the future, I simply don’t believe they are competent enough at it.

My recommendation for people who plan to play Tsukihime is to hold the Control button when you get to an H-Scene, it fast forwards through the whole thing and is ultimately better than sitting through them like I did. I sat through them so nobody else has to, so please do me a favor and skip the H-Scenes in this game, I’m fucking begging you. Do not let my efforts be in vain.

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Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I am Shiki Tohno fr fr, as I can see between the lines that fill this entire visual novel. If I were able to cut the bad (pornographic) parts out of this entire experience to make something that feels less over indulgent in its perversion, I would.

Because, underneath all the schlocky porn, the incest, the dialogue where Shiki talks about ejaculating, underneath all of that there is a story here about the meaning of life and how important our choices are and the consequences of our actions.

It is a narrative that speaks to the inherent humanity within me that aspires to be free from depressive and negative thoughts, and all I want is to be able to experience it in the way it was truly meant to be.

That is why I cannot easily recommend Tsukihime as it stands to you, because as it stands its excess involving sex and sexual depravity is just something I cannot wholeheartedly condone.

If you want to give Tsukihime a shot, here is a link to the English Translation website, run by none other than kohakudoori who I would like to thank for giving us all the chance to get the experience of Tsukihime.

I definitely see myself coming back to reread the Arc and Hisui routes in the future because they’re just so damn good, and I genuinely can’t wait until the remakes are fully translated to English, though how long that will be I do not know.

I would like to say thanks to Tokyo Millennium for giving me the brainworms required for this, and my buddy Simon for sharing his experience with me which inspired me to try the game out.

And last but not least, I want to thank you Backloggd, for keeping me sane during this duration of my life, I love you folks.

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P.S:
Fun fact, but you can easily change the music in this game.

If you are going to commit the act of actually sitting through the H-Scenes (I do not recommend nor condone this for the record), I recommend changing Track 5 to any song you choose. Here’s the steps.

1.“Procure” a music track of your liking (I picked a variety, my last one was It Has To Be This Way for that epic final battle against sex.)

2. Change it to a .ogg file. You can do this here.

3. Download the file and rename it to “track05”.

4. Open the “CD” folder in your Tsukihime folder, and put the new “track05” in there.

5. Replace the file.

Then voila, it will play the respective track in place of Track 5. This should help anyone who thinks they have “the balls” to stand up to the terrible H-Scenes.

Anyways, I need to start working on my “How Close Is This Media To Tsukihime” Tier List, so until next time.

Burennya~~

Have you ever felt the saddening passion of loving someone, knowing that in but a few hours you’ll be parted forever?

There’s so much I could talk in-depth about with Tsukihime. The rough art style that detracts not at all from its characters’ iconic charm. The deep world it tries to immerse, sometimes drown you in. Story beats that knocked me off my chair as a kid in the late 2000s. The story of being a fan of this awkward, weighty fan-translated game. The unintentionally comical sex writing and the shocking, off-putting scenes of rape and violation that run through its trunk like fungus on a tree. But none of those explain the feeling I get when a random playlist in the background, gone unnoticed, picks a song from this game. What makes me stop what I’m doing and look up at the sky.

To me, Tsukihime is about impermanence. It is about knowing how easily we lose the things we cherish, and how we act when faced with that knowledge. Whether it’s facing those who’d do anything to avoid their own mortality, or realizing that even timeless figures bleed and hurt. Our protagonist, Shiki, lives an impermanent existence, his life uprooted, his health as fragile as glass, cursed to see the fault lines that live in all things, no matter how powerful they might seem. The thread of his life is intertwined with that of the women of this story, each powerful in their own way, each in some way scarred by a man’s inability to process impermanence. There is no immortality in Tsukihime. There is only false security bought by inflicting loss on others, becoming the thing you fear in the eyes of others. Everything goes away, including the ones you love.

Yet Tsukihime remains a story of love. In each of its routes there will come a time where crisis has drowned the story, where the foe seems unstoppable. There will be a scene where Shiki and his lover somehow snatch a sliver of precious safety amidst this deluge, sometimes no more than a few hours. At no point are they, or you, allowed to forget about the imminent danger. This is a temporary reprieve, coming after a narrow escape and before a doomed last stand with everything on the line. Neither expect to make it unscathed. Even if they do, there’s always something that’ll make their victory short-lived, whether it’s Shiki’s health or the tragedy of his lover or just the nature of the world, but whatever it is they know the face of the end they cannot avert.

In those moments they let their love for each other spill out. They spend their tiny moment of quiet on each other. The music is never joyful in these scenes, but it is gently, warmly sad, tender with anticipated loss. Love is made cruel by impermanence. It would be so much safer, so much more reasonable to keep your distance. But that very same thing makes love so powerful in the moment, allowing you to feel incomparable longing for someone even though they’re right here with you. To choose to feel that pain for a lifetime just to be with them with all your being for just a few more hours.

If you’ve lived through that, then you know what it feels like to wish you could put your entire being out with this person, to make every part of them feel precious in an uncaring world, one last time.

And if you haven’t, Tsukihime might be able to show you what it feels like. I can think of no higher praise than that.

Christ this is a tough one to write about.
First, I'd like to thank Mitsuru for sending me download links with this game and Fate Stay/Night. Like 10 months ago.

Anyways is this game good? Yeah, mostly. The greatest flaw in this game is Near Side routes. It's not the worst VN I've played but a bit close. They are so slow paced and after playing the Far Side routes, I found them to have almost zero reason to exist. Not gonna lie, Near Side felt three times as long while Far Side felt like it was half as long. I don't know why. Maybe it was because it took me seven to eight months to wrap up both of them and I finished all the Far Side routes in less than two. I checked with other people and they said Ciel and Arc were terrible routes.

Far Side is great in my opinion. Akiha's route is my favorite. I liked the twists and turns it takes and the ending was quite sweet. Hisui's was also nice and added some interesting concepts. Kohaku's was a bit confusing. It definitely was explaining literally everything about what the fuck was going on but Huh?

The Music? Great buuuut...ten tracks. TEN. This game is forty hours long. It's like Xenogears' lack of music but twenty times worse. I just turned on some classic rock music or fifteen different versions of Ys III - Morning of Departure on repeat. I actually did that. I swear I'm not a schizo. The tracks the game has are actually pretty good in the time I was actually hearing them.

Final Review: Would be five stars but the fact that Near Side is god awful and the game includes Neco Arc made me lower the score just a bit.

I think I've had enough with Type Moon for a while so I'm gonna go back to playing some nice PC-98 VNs.

Newcomers, please start with the remake first, I wish I had waited for the remake, and instead what I got from reading this first was being spoiled on the remake's Near Side routes, the emotional impact was greatly diminished.

While amateurish at times, since Nasu was new to writing at the time, Tsukihime is definitely a passion project. Its impact on the VN medium is undeniable, and if you had to use the "soul" buzzword for something, it'd be this.

While it is enjoyable, though, and I enjoyed it more after my reread, it still isn't anything too crazy to me outside of the Hisui and maybe Kohaku routes. It has a lot of repetition where the VN doesn't recognise what is obviously mostly previously read text as such, the sex scenes aren't very tasteful (I don't just mean that they read like a joke, I think they're straight-up tasteless sometimes) a lot of the time, the Ciel route needed 20 years to get better, and the good endings in Near Side are thematic assassinations on the VN. They basically undo the issues of the routes with solutions that seem extremely easy and shit on the suffering and great lengths the characters went to in the main story.

Additionally, I don't really feel like this VN is all that ambitious with the themes, characterisation, storytelling or the use of the medium, but it's still pretty good on that front. I just don't feel like Tsuki has much to offer to me in terms of stuff that I feel like I've seen done better in my opinion elsewhere. In terms of denpa it's pretty cool, and the magic system is a lot more consistent than Fate's. It also has a sort of "grounded" urban fantasy/mystery feel that is gone from later Type-Moon entries outside of F/SN.

Overall, definitely worth reading, and most people will probably like it, but it's not really my kind of thing.

Oh~ to yearn for the day where a beautiful somebody would appear before me on a whim suddenly and WHISK my virgin loser ass away to an exciting new world I've never known... (also I'd have secret super powers and be rEALLY deserving of vampire pussy in the first place!!!!)

Classic wish fulfillment-y bishojo game type stuff. Gets a little interesting when the MC of this one turns out to be a bit of a murder-loving psychopath with fun killer drivelings to read through. The majority though - when it isn't focusing on that more deranged angle that I'm into - is kinda just too lore dump-y and embarrassing for my tastes. Especially when the thing elects to spends exTENDED periods of time indulging in scenes of the cast just straight up suckin' and fuckin' while also trying to seriously tie those cringey H-moments in with its 'deep lore'.

Like dude you're expected to take seriously shit like: "Master! You've been PSYCHIC VAMPIRE CURSED!!! The only cure is for you to have unprotected vaginal sex with me! Hurry! We have no choice...! RELEASE your 'liquid magma' inside of me! We MUST exchange 'bodily fluids' to alleviate this cursENING BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT!!!"..........

I'm not a prude! I like the acknowledgement of sex and other 'taboos' you might normally see glossed over in similar works (shoutouts to the RAPE and PEDOPHILIA ALSO INCLUDED). I JUST THINK for the sex in particular it ends up coming off VERY juvenile here; vERY 'pornhub plot-adjacent', and undermines the attempted heavier elements of the story with how long winded and HORNYYY those scenes turn out feeling. It gets tough to take the thing seriously anymore when you get into one of those obligatory fucking moments and suddenly - what? Is the point just to cheaply titillate now? Why are we spending SO much time getting cartoonishly detailed - talking about this 'MAGMA' that the inexplicable sex god known as Shiki Tohno can unload onto all these woman? Can't we just cut to the point after a few lines? Or IS the point just to make anime porn now? It'd certainly SEEM that way with all these moments even compiling a token 'H scene gallery' you can look at upon completion... Hard to take seriously! Hard to trust the conceit........

I only finished the Arcueid and Hisui routes, but ima assume that's a good enough spectrum for a fair take on the game. I dig the meandering way its written to a point, the crusty real world backgrounds and classic 2000s ass character art is my shit, BUUUT 5 routes of these one-sided lore prattlings? With inexplicable resolutions, tenuous continuity, and GUARANTEED awkward sex everytime????? I'm good......... :)

"contest not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you spot long a white woman, the white woman spots also."
- frederick neetchah

the parts of this that really hit do so to such an extent that I was both genuinely moved and got that someone-walking-over-my-grave adjacent sensation of "oh this would have Done Shit to me as a teenager" but everything else really just gave me a new appreciation for fatomoru as a group of people looking at this and saying "hold my beer I can hurt you way worse and more gay-ly and with none of the gratuitously ill-considered sexual assault as gratification."

Arc and Hisui/Kohaku routes the obvious standouts and the opening and closing segments with Aoko put a perfect lil' bow on the thing, so bring on witch on the holy night I'm sold lol

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It is February 2022. I don’t remember the date. I’m sitting in my living room at midnight. I’m scrolling through twitter.
Nothing better to do with my time.

I see my friend, Rom, on the timeline talking about a game he really enjoys.
Tsukihime.
Game? That’s not quite right—it’s a visual novel. Up until this point the only one’s I’ve played are a handful of Ace Attorney games and the main entries in the Danganronpa series, but I see them more as games than visual novels in my eyes. I’m not particularly enticed by the screenshots of Tsukihime that I see either… I don’t read much and I don’t know if I could handle 50 hours of just that.

But even so, I’m find myself being pulled towards it…like a lost relic from the past, I’m nostalgic for it without a reason to be so, it might just be that I’ve played a lot of Melty Blood the year prior without any care for where these characters originated from but this feeling scratches away at my mind like a dog with my curiosity being the only driving factor. I do not understand.
—I cave.

𝗧𝗦𝗨𝗞𝗜𝗛𝗜𝗠𝗘
—Suddenly, I awaken with a start.
I can’t remember much from my reaction to the beginning, other than that I only experienced the first three hours before going to sleep, expecting myself to continue the next day. I didn’t.
A few months later, I find myself isolated. I can’t talk to my friends, I can’t do much of anything except waste my time playing video games. Still, it’s not all bad. This allows me to overcome some games on my backlog.
A voice in my head nags at me. Begging me to come back, come back to Tsukihime. Before I know it, I find myself on the title screen again. Over the course of the next two days, I find myself enthralled by the game, especially by Arcueid Brunestud. I wouldn’t call myself a “milkman” in any capacity…but something about this particular white woman puts her apart from the rest of the cast.

I meet her in the street. It’s my first contact with her.
It’s my worst contact with her.
Yet she still takes a chance on Shiki, and he takes a chance on her. They’re each other's polar opposites but incredibly similar too. They’re both beings haunted by a sin they committed as they try to atone for it. Their sins are pulling them toward each other, and it’s ultimately their sins that are tearing them apart. A love burns in Shiki’s heart that’s only matched by his murderous rage, both birthed out of the same place. He can’t let go.
A few days go by and I’m at the end. Shiki stares at the orange sky, I stare at my laptop screen. Both of us are waiting, waiting for a chance to meet her again and yet that feeling is what we ultimately must let go off.
The credits start rolling. There’s not a single tear in my eye…yet I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way at something before. I promise myself that I will finish this VN soon. The first of many lies.
On the 18th of April, 2022 at 12:02 am, I finish Arcueid’s route.

𝗗𝗔𝗬𝗟𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗕𝗟𝗨𝗘
I close my laptop after that ending. I’m excited. I don’t think I’ve been invested in something this much in a while. I promise myself that I’ll start reading the next route tomorrow. This too, of course, is a lie.
I feel like it should be put into perspective just how much I had changed when I picked up Tsukihime again. I’d finished The Silver Case and with it I felt like a whole new world had been opened to me, a different way of viewing art itself. I feel like it was made for me on every level and it showed me where the true strength of a visual novel medium lies. Surely nothing else will ever make me feel this way, right?

—I’m in a familiar place. I’m isolated again. I’ve got nothing to do, nobody to talk to. Slowly, I feel an urge come over me. I’ve been here before, I know what to do. I find myself on the title screen again.

This music…I realized it before but this track really is beautiful. As limited and repetitive as Tsukihime’s tracks can get at times, I still love the sound. The repetition of the tracks is something I can grow accustomed to.
The same can’t be said for the narrative.
A few hours into the Ciel route and I’m still clicking away most of what I read. I’ve read all this before, seen all this before. It’s not unpleasant to go through this once more, but I really feel this is holding Ciel back as a character. I don’t think she’s being given ample time to develop her. I’m at the halfway point now, I think. I can’t tell when the Arcueid route ends and the Ciel route begins, but I think I made it.
Now that I think about it, each heroine is a character that lives and dies depending on their relationship with Shiki so what exactly is going on? Am I not near the end? Why is it still-

THUMP
—My heart throbs. I realise it.
This isn’t a mistake. This is a love triangle.
Frustrated. I’m frustrated. The more I read the more my suspicions just get confirmed. “Show don’t tell” is the rule isn’t it? Then why are scenes, ones that can be moving and impactful, traded away for a quick explanation of how each other is feeling? This is crazy, I’m crazy. I’m complaining about exposition dumps in a story filled to the brim with them. But I can’t help but feel this is where it’s most egregious.
What I’m reading…it’s something about perspective. Not only just in the routes, but bit by bit you uncover more of these characters, things you aren’t told in the other routes, and the two Near Side routes are a perfect showcase of that. Ciel is someone who’s able to stand on her own, apart from Arcueid, as a character. Yet she still parallels Shiki’s descent. So it’s frustrating. Frustrating that the relationship between these two feels so underdeveloped.
These thoughts keep churning in my head. At the forefront of my mind, while I keep on reading. I’m at the end now, the end of this journey. I’ve been critical of this whole route…so why does it make me feel this way? Is it some kind of Stockholm Syndrome? Am I just easily won over by lazy writing?

Shiki opens his eyes and Ciel’s teardrops fall. I smile.
On the 8th of January, 2023 at 1:08 am, I finish Ciel’s route.

𝗪𝗔𝗥𝗠 𝗔𝗙𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗡𝗢𝗢𝗡 𝗡𝗔𝗣
I close my laptop. I lie to myself again. It’s become a ritual now.

—It’s March. Hell is right around the corner for me. I don’t care. I don’t want anything to do with it. I refuse. I utterly refuse to care what life is throwing at me. Truth be told I don’t even think of it. To escape my hell, I decide to dip my toes into another one.
Truth be told, I knew what I was getting into with this route. It’s simple when I think about it. This is a game where in each route you have a heroine that you get into a romantic relationship with, so it’s not too far-fetched to assume this route will do the same. Only problem is that the heroine is the Shiki’s sister.

I can handle “dark” subject matter, it’s not a question of whether or not I can stomach incest, it’s if this game handles it well. Either that…or it veers into the dangerous territory of “problematic”. I’ve always found discussions about problematic content interesting. Of course I think the elements that fall under that label shouldn’t be in media if they’re used to fetishize them but I can’t help but notice that a lot of the argument surrounding them centers on the fact of morality. That in a society as consumed by capitalism as ours the only way to have an identity, something with which we can recognize others, is by the content we inhale at a rapid pace. Where the only way we can tell others that we are inherently good is if we enjoy stuff that doesn’t have anything “problematic”.

—There’s someone out there who could probably make an essay of this topic, but this is a review on Backloggd and I’ve spent too much time thinking about this because I’m already at the big scene.

“I love you as my sister.” Shiki says.
I hold my breath. Time feels like it’s stopped. A spark ignites in my head, the synapses of my brain jolt back and forth. My eyes fixate on the screen. My hand hovers on the spacebar. Maybe it will be all right, maybe there is no incest. I have hope, but fear still has an iron grip on me. After what feels like an eternity, I close the gap between my finger and my keyboard.
“But… I love you as my sister even more.”
I close my eyes.
“It is fate.” I utter.
Nothing I can do besides accept it.

Fate. It’s only now I realise that fate lies at the heart of this route. I’m so close to the end but this is where this route has laid its soul bare. Are we all fated to end up this way? Or can we change that? Is Akiha is a product of nature and Shiki one of nurture? Can you even fight against yourself in that manner? Is a child who has been abused all his life destined to repeat that cycle of abuse, is that evil just in his nature? It took me too long to realise, and now it’s too late.
Under a blue sky, a girl cries and hugs a knife. The end credits start playing.

On the 3rd of March, 2023 at 1:04 pm, I finish Akiha’s route.

𝗠𝗜𝗗𝗗𝗔𝗬 𝗠𝗢𝗢𝗡
—I lie again.

I have an idea. I’m eventually going to finish this visual novel one day, so why not make my review different for this one? Why not write in the style of Nasu’s prose?
Of course, I know how insane that sounds. I can’t compare to the real thing but I want to try anyway. It seems like a good way to challenge my writing capabilities.
The biggest hurdle right now is actually finishing this thing. I’m free now, so why don’t I finish Hisui’s route as soon as I can?

The first thing I notice is that this is a repeat of everything in the Akiha route for now. Mindless taps. Nothing but mindless taps.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I’m in a dark room.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I keep waiting.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
That rhythmic tap of the spacebar. I press it over and over and over. I feel like I’m going insane. But I can feel it, I’m so close. So close to finally getting to the new stuff but with each tap my patience keeps dwindling until there’s nothing left. Knots in my brain. Cold dead eyes. I stare at the screen.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Ta-

This is it. I’m here.
…
……
………!?
Is this a joke? I don’t understand.
The main scenario in this chapter is just Shiki going insane in a room. Just like I was. For a moment it feels like an unfortunate coincidence, something to point at and laugh but I can’t but feel like there’s something more. I have spent these past few months honing my backloggdian skills, becoming a better writer on the way.
No. My analytical skills tell me this is something more.
Yes. Kinoko Nasu did all this purpose. Yes. Kinoko Nasu is that much of a genius.
I clasp my hands in a prayer. Blessed I am to be reading this visual novel. I can only marvel at this man’s sheer writing power. With this one route, I am not “just like” Shiki Tohno. I have become him.

But I’m ignoring something, aren’t I?
Hisui’s doll-like expressions, calm demeanor, and general aloofness is something I’ve grown accustomed to by now. So seeing it break doesn’t feel like the conclusion of a character arc, it feels like a porcelain doll shattering. It’s messy. Every time I look at her I see nothing, besides someone so hellbent on protecting oneself by any means necessary. Even if it means not rejecting your own humanity.

I’m underneath a tree. Clear blue sky. I listen to her.
My heart shatters.

On the 4th of October, 2023 at 11:08am, I finish Hisui’s route.

𝗗𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗠𝗦 𝗢𝗙 𝗦𝗨𝗡𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗘
I’m done lying.

—Perspective.
It lies at the heart of Tsukihime. A subtle change in how you perceive an event can lead to a radically different outcome. For a story that’s written with this theme at heart, I can only expect the final route to be a culmination of everything I’ve come to know so far.

But with each clicking sound on my keyboard, I just feel my opinions lowering. Is this…really it? I didn’t expect a grand finale but most of what I’ve seen so far is just a rehash of the Hisui route, and not in a good way. I can almost taste the laziness through the screen.
I don’t know if I’m disappointed or something else. In a way, I can’t say this is surprising. But regardless, everything feels so rushed. It’s almost tragic to see a narrative failing its most interesting character.
—Hate.
Everything in this house is built on hate. A carefully constructed façade through and through. If you didn’t know, you could have never even guessed, and the more I play the more I become convinced that everything would’ve turned out this way, sooner or later.

I keep pressing the spacebar. Of course, now I’m long past the point of divergence with the Hisui route as well. Coming face to face with what the route has to offer and I can’t help but feel an ache in my heart, coupled with a smirk on my face. I ache for what suffering took place but my smirk isn’t a sign of a critique of the game. I think.
In a lot of ways, Kohaku’s route sort of mirrors Akiha’s route as well. “Can a doll be fixed?” being the main question here. When do you stop believing in a person, when do you give up? For a person as pigheaded as Shiki Tohno, the answer is obvious. Of course I smirk, if only Akiha route’s Shiki could see what this one has to say about incest.
I come closer and closer to the finish line. The only thing I can hope for is a happy ending, and I got a rushed one.

On the 8th of October, 2023 at 11:26pm, I finish Kohaku’s route.

𝗘𝗖𝗟𝗜𝗣𝗦𝗘
—I’m finally here, aren’t I?
Text pops up on the screen, my eyes carefully examine every single line. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe a more meaningful understanding of everything so I can tell myself that it was worth it. Maybe I don’t want it to end.
With each tap, with each clicking sound, I read more and more of the final words this product has to offer. Maybe it’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome, but despite its faults, I think this visual novel won me over.
What am I saying? Stockholm Syndrome isn’t even real.
Even now as I sit here months later, way past the due date on this review, I think back to it. My first experience opening Tsukihime and meeting her, along with my last.
I can only hope that I captured even a little bit of what makes Nasu’s writing so captivating to read, but even I can acknowledge that this is nothing more than a pale imitation. Although…don’t we all try to imitate a little bit of everything that we see?

When it comes to what I’ll imitate besides this…well…
The way I look at it, every single person touched by Shiki is due to his love. His decision to pay back that small bit of kindness he received when he was very little. We are all surrounded by kind people aren’t we? So why do we hurt the ones we love the most?
You may call this unrelated rambling. I call it a clever way of imitating Nasu’s tendency to go on tangents.

At the end of the day, I have nothing more than the memories I received. It doesn’t matter if they’re positive or not, I’m just glad to have them. I know that even they will twist, even they will fade. But I don’t care.

—The lunar eclipse is far away.
So I let go.
You go ahead and pass through your remaining time.
I’ll pass through mine.
Thank you, for everything.

Rewrite incoming, when I find the time. This is one of my favorite stories ever told, and while I'm still proud of the effort I placed into my original review, this game has come to mean an incredible deal to me and I would like to be able to discuss, in much greater detail, my reassessment of it as a full work, as well as the ways in which it has unquestionably changed me and helped me grow as an artist. No question, a flawed work, but it's simply one of those things that I haven't stopped thinking about in months, almost daily. I think any of you who read my work enough (and thank you, honestly, so much for that) know the kind of thing I'm talking about. Expect a much more in-depth writing on Tsukihime in the near future.

Given that the character select screen in Melty Blood alone is full of late-arrival spoilers, I don’t make special effort to avoid spoilers in this review. No plot events have been mentioned, but if you’re especially spoiler-sensitive you may want to avoid this. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this page wondering if you should play this game, I do recommend it, with the caveat that there is a LOT of sexual violence in this game. It’s not a factor in every part of the story, but it’s still featured prominently in both the lore and the foreground of a few scenes.

It’s been six weeks since I finished the last route of Tsukihime at this point. I had originally contented myself with throwing down some lazy notes as I completed each route, slowly amounting to a large wall of text without many of the qualities of a real review. At this point, though, I’ve realized that I’ve not stopped thinking about this game for a month and a half - any piece of media that can do this deserves a better, more thought-out review.

The first thing I feel that I should mention is that it’s an incredibly... rough game, in a number of ways. I’ve already mentioned the sexual violence in my disclaimer at the beginning, but even with a strong stomach for this kind of thing there were a couple times where I found myself actually physically cringing at the text on my screen. The dialogue is sometimes laughably weak (god help you during the H-scenes) and the art itself can also be… strange. Nrvnqsr is an unsettling presence in the VN for his incredibly long neck long before he gets to directly participate in the story.

Despite all this, it manages to shine rather brightly through strong character writing and excellent usage of the enforced route order to execute layered reveals. It takes a lot of skill to keep new plot twists coming after 4 playthroughs and 25 hours without feeling contrived, but they do pull it off. In the early routes these tend to be delivered in the form of one of the heroines sitting down to have a thirty minute info-dump conversation with Shiki, but as the game progresses the new reveals flow better with the story and can even be rather subtle. I know it doesn't sound like I'm setting a terribly high bar here, but the late plot twists are rewarding to discover as they feel logical (by the standards of the universe) and have sufficient build-up.

Tsukihime’s characters are the real draw. There’s a reason half the reviewers here have profile photos from the game. While trope-y writing weighs some of them down pretty heavily (I’m sorry, but Akiha never progressed beyond “real doujin hours”), the saving grace here is that each character is given real agency within the story, even if they fail to make full use of it. This is why I found the Far Side routes to be much more enjoyable overall - with most of the background lore about this world out of the way and a focus on life within the Tohno mansion, there’s a lot more room to drive at what makes each of the players here special. Some of the supernatural stuff is still tiring, with SHIKI and Yumizuka becoming especially grating presences, but being able to ignore “True Ancestors” and “Dead Apostles” in favor of stories about festering resentment and familial guilt is a real blessing.

A lot of Tsukihime’s biggest flaws crop up whenever sex is involved. I maintain that it would benefit tremendously from not being an eroge, as working the H-scenes into each route has a tendency to weaken them overall. When the buildup is fine, there’s still no guarantee that the scene itself will be any good - between the music, the premise, the writing, and the fact that it was apparently deserving of a “Fridge Brilliance” entry on TV Tropes, the mere thought of the Ciel H-scene is enough to make me laugh every time. The game falls back on lust to show that Shiki “isn’t thinking clearly” and while nothing usually comes of it (even the H-scenes are typically portrayed as romantic affairs) it doesn’t stop this from being gross when it comes up. I’ve seen Kara no Kyoukai, I know what Nasu can do when he doesn't have to shoehorn in some fanservice.

Even with its flaws, Tsukihime is one of the most captivating visual novels I’ve read. It is amateurish in many ways. Its characters are both tropey and fleshed-out, its world is simultaneously cozy and unsettling. I think the best parts of the game are contained almost entirely in the back half, after you’ve already played it at least twice - and I think it’s the experience of having read through four versions of this story that makes the fifth so rewarding. While the “land of contrasts” is pretty lazy media criticism, with Tsukihime I do sincerely believe that it is because it is so frequently clumsy that the standout moments are so much more interesting.

Tsukihime is an interesting title all around. It showcases the humble beginnings of which Type-Moon started from and it's both one of the earliest known creations from Kinoko Nasu while also being his first venture into the world of video game/visual novel storytelling. Yes, indeed, before the world was taken over by that of Fate/stay night, there was Tsukihime.

This visual novel is ROUGH and I don't think it takes too much time reading it to realize that. The artstyle, while being charming and, at times, even beautiful (it is, after all, Takeuchi), is very amateur feeling and definitely lacks that "professional" aura that you usually come to expect with a TM title. The OST is very short and, in my opinion, extremely nerve-wracking to hear over and over again after about a route or two. The presentation, all around, is just very amateur but, at the same time, you can tell the people who made this were putting all the love that they could into this project with what little assets they had. You can certainly feel that through the entirety of this work.

The writing is a BIG mixed bag for me. Nasu is still a pretty inexperienced writer at this point in his career and YOU CAN TELL. It's not downright bad, though. There's lots of moments you can see the seeds of what makes him a fascinating writer begin to blossom, as he has a very distinct voice to his work that was there even when he was still learning to become the Nasu that we've all come to know now. It's a lot of good. It's a lot of bad. Depending on which side speaks louder to you will greatly determine how you will probably feel while reading this visual novel.

The best way I could describe my thoughts on Tsukihime is like this: Tsukihime is like a really nice, quality steak. However, it's a steak that is not exactly cooked to my liking. At it's most simple form, it is really something special and unique, but it definitely needed to be cooked more in order for that to shine through. It's not ruined, nor is it not enjoyable, but the potential of it could have been so much more.

Here's to hoping that the remake is everything and more of what I wanted this story to REALLY be.