In 2000, at the end of that year’s last Comiket convention, Type-Moon released Tsukihime, an eroge visual novel about vampires. 25 years later, you can now play its remake, Tsukihime – A piece of blue glass moon, a title that not only updates a fantastic piece of narrative, but also makes an important piece of gaming history more accessible.
Following the traditional design of visual novels, Tsukihime – A piece of blue glass moon has multiple paths that branch out depending on the choices you make in key moments of the narrative. Updating the visuals of the original Tsukihime — and removing all of the erotic scenes from it — the 2024 remake contains two of the original routes (the remaining routes are meant to come in Tsukihime – The other side of red garden, a new game without a release date yet) and is available for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
Throughout the available routes in Tsukihime – A piece of blue glass moon, all events are seen from the perspective of Shiki Tohno. The regular “anime male protagonist,” Shiki is your average brown-haired, unmotivated teenage boy. He leads a normal life going from home to school, until he meets Arcueid, a young blonde woman, after returning early from school, but what seems like a chance encounter changes Shiki’s life.
By saying “meet,” I am underselling this moment in the game, but explaining exactly what happens would spoil one of the visual novel’s biggest surprises. Regardless of the quite bloody events surrounding their first encounter, Shiki eventually learns the truth about the woman: She’s a vampire. Not only that, but she is hunting another vampire, one who is responsible for multiple murders in his city.
In Tsukihime, there are two types of vampires. The more traditional version is called Dead Apostles, who are humans turned into vampires. Drinking blood is a physiological necessity for Dead Apostles; otherwise their bodies stop functioning properly. They don’t walk during the day and they can even create familiars to do their dirty work. Arcueid, however, is the other kind of vampire. She’s 800 years old and one of the True Ancestors, a more magical and fantastical type of vampire. As the existence of vampires is revealed to Shiki, he’s pulled into a world of legends and real dangers he didn’t know existed — but a world that he had always belonged to.
Despite looking like a regular teenager, Shiki’s life has many layers of drama. For years, he had been living with another family as ordered by his father, Makihisa Tohno. If becoming a pariah was not enough, a bit before Shiki had suffered an accident that almost killed him. Although still alive, young Shiki woke up to find that everything and everyone he looked at were covered with red lines. By tracing them, Shiki learns he can break anything — from a massive tree to part of his bed — or anyone. To give the kid a break, life sends a mysterious woman on his way, who gives him a special pair of glasses that makes the lines disappear while he wears them.
Magical glasses, eerie red lines, vampires: These are only a few of the fantastical elements that are part of Tsukihime and, instead of feeling a mishmash of mythologies, the final product is a cohesive and captivating world, thanks to the writing work of the Type-Moon team and its key writer, Kinoko Nasu, who envisioned and wrote the story. There’s a careful attention to world-building that makes you enchanted by the universe the characters live in.
From the rationale behind the functioning of a vampire’s physiological system to the different types of vampires, the world is packed with potential mysteries. Nasu even came up with a justification behind the preference vampires have for killing virgins — their blood is more nutritious. The pacing of the first three chapters fluctuates a bit, but after the fourth one, it’s difficult to stop reading. It’s enthralling to see some beautifully written sentences appearing over the gorgeous backgrounds, as if the thoughts and emotions of the characters are flooding the screen.
Tsukihime – A piece of blue glass moon has won me over because of its writing and fascinating setting, but it’s also an important game that shows the strength of the Japanese independent scene. Type-Moon was a recently formed doujin circle composed by artist Takashi Takeuchi, writer Kinoko Nasu, programmer Nobuyuki Kiyotake, and composer Keita Haga. Takeuchi and Nasu had already worked together on another project (the light novel series Kara no Kyoukai), but it was only along with the other two that they started making Tsukihime, an eroge visual novel for Windows PC.
The doujin culture in Japan was already well-established and the group of artists saw in it a chance to publish their work. As the PhD researcher Tomás Grau de Pablo explains in his paper “Between Indie and Doujin: The creation of the Japanese indie,” doujin describes a movement based on self-published work, which is distributed in hobbyist spaces. The origin of the doujin scene can be traced back to the literary circles in the Meiji-era in Japan, remaining strong to this day.
The original Tsukihime’s success propelled the group of hobbyists into a full-fledged company that created what would become an extremely successful series: the Fate franchise. From games, manga, to anime shows, Fate is everywhere and permeates pop culture with well-known characters such as Saber. Its gacha game, Fate/Grand Order, has been out for more than ten years, has been downloaded 12 million times, and earned $6 billion in revenue. At the same time, the anime Fate/Zero is among the top 100 most popular shows, ranked by My Anime List, and has been watched by more than 1.5 million users as of this writing.
The foundational work made by Takeuchi, Nasu, Kiyotake, and Haga put them on the map, but little did they know that the success of this piece of work in the independent scene in Japan would pave the way for the company’s success years after, even though we rarely see it being celebrated. Thankfully, Tsukihime – a piece of blue glass moon breathes life to this piece of work so it never fades away from our memories.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
