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.