Review - Tsukihime - A piece of blue glass moon
(originally posted August 8, 2024)
If you know something is a remake, are you more or less likely to check it out? Is the novelty or convenience of it being a new release the main draw? Are you less interested because you find the concept of remakes distasteful or more interested because clearly enough people liked it enough that it warrants a remake?
I assume that there are at least thousands of people who played Final Fantasy VII Remake or the various Resident Evil remakes who had not played the original versions. Surely there are those out there who watched the Rebuild of Evangelion movies without seeing the TV version first. Are they thinking about how these are remakes? Does it matter?
If you have experienced the original, it's the obvious point of comparison. If you haven't, I think the question, "was it like this before?" will always be floating somewhere in back of your skull... or maybe that's just me. I'm kind of guy who often seeks out the "original" version of something or looks for earlier works by the same creator. I didn't podcast about the Die Neue These remake of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I went after the original 1988 OVA... but only after I watched the first season of DNT. Watching Reconguista in G made me want to check out the original Mobile Suit Gundam and everything else directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino.
This mindset is why, after I finished playing the fan translation of the infamous Fate/Stay Night back in the late 00s, I sought out Type-Moon's first visual novel: Tsukihime (月姫, translated as "Moon Princess"). Even back then, I was curious why it deserved a remake.
Tsukihime follows Shiki Tohno, an Ordinary High School Student in the tradition of any number of anime or manga. As a child, Shiki was involved in a life-threatening accident, and upon regaining consciousness acquired an ability called the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception". These allow him to, well, perceive death, in the form of lines that crisscross the world like cracks in a decayed wall. Cutting along the lines inflicts instant death on anything or anyone. Only a chance encounter with a tee-shirt-and-jeans wearing Magician prevents Shiki from being overwhelmed by his eyes, as she gives him magical glasses that hide the lines from view.
The story picks up ten years later, when Shiki - disowned since the incident and sent to live with distant relatives - is summoned back to the family mansion after the death of his father. As Shiki tries to navigate this new status quo, balancing everyday school life with the strict expectations of his imperious sister Akiha and his own shaky memories, he's captivated by the mysterious foreigner Arcueid Brunestud and stumbles into the supernatural underworld of clashing vampires, reincarnating mages, and artillery-wielding nuns.
As a visual novel, gameplay in Tsukihime consists almost entirely of pushing buttons to advance the text. Occasionally you'll hit a point where Shiki needs to make a decision, prompting you to choose from usually two or three options. Sometimes the choices simply lead to a bit of different dialogue before things proceed as normal, but just as often a wrong choice can be fatal (or worse) for Shiki. These "Bad Ends" lead to out-of-character comedy skits that offer hints to get things back on track.
The original Tsukihime is famously an "eroge" ("erotic game") with explicit sex scenes. The broad arc of the narrative is constructed to facilitate this goal, even as A piece of blue glass moon removes any on-screen happenings. It's certainly no coincidence that a solid half the cast - including characters new to the remake - are pretty anime girls of various stripes who flirt with Shiki in equally varied ways.
This manifests most prominently as "routes", where the entire plot shifts to focus on Shiki's relationship with one character in particular. The original game has routes for the capricious vampire Arcueid; Shiki's dependable upperclassman Ciel; his domineering younger sister Akiha; and one each for the Tohno family's twin maidservants, the softspoken Hisui and the bubbly Kohaku.
This is less of a "choose your own adventure" scenario and closer to reading a whole series of romance novels. The route structure allows the game to explore the cast in various circumstances and (ideally) give each their due diligence as main characters. Later routes can utilize the player's knowledge from earlier ones in their storytelling or offer details that recontextualize what they already know (or thought they knew). And even without the promise of plot twists, sometimes it's just nice to spend more time with the characters.
The "Tsukihime Remake" was announced in 2008 and showed pretty much no signs of life until December 31st, 2020, where it was re-announced with the "A piece of blue glass moon" moniker and a 2021 release date for exclusively Japan. It only just now got a worldwide release in July 2024, making it the second mainline Type-Moon visual novel to get officially translated (the first was Witch on the Holy Night, and Fate/Stay Night will likely be out before this review is).
That's thirteen years for the actual target audience and sixteen for a sicko like me. You know what else took 16 years to materialize? Duke Nukem Forever, the game that everyone dunked on for years as being vaporware. The PS2 was hot and fresh when Tsukihime came out and the Playstation 5 (Five!) came out before the remake did. It was a persistent meme to the point where even other spinoffs like Carnival Phantasm joked about how it wasn't happening. It's almost bizarre to be in a world where it exists.
A piece of blue glass moon adapts the so-called "Near Side" routes - Arcueid's and Ciel's - expanding them to the point that together they're as hefty as the entire original game. The second half (aka the "Far Side" routes), titled The other side of red garden, has no planned release date. The sequel's also slated to include one of the ancient selling points for the remake: the inclusion of a planned but ultimately cut sixth route starring Shiki's ill-fated classmate Satsuki.
As the eponymous Moon Princess and OG Anime White Woman, Arcueid Brunestud had the lion's share of attention in the original game. Both the anime and manga adaptations follow her story route and she even makes a cameo or two in Fate works. Ciel's route comparatively felt like a mere offshoot, maintaining strong elements of Shiki and Arcueid's relationship and consigning Ciel to her lot as a memetic punching bag doomed to play second fiddle.
In Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, Arcueid's route is now the one that feels a bit perfunctory in comparison. It only truly diverges from the version I remember via introducing new characters, several of whom don't become important until Ciel's route (and some not even then). My understanding is the first route was intentionally constructed to more-or-less line up with cultural memory, and the second was where they could really roll up their sleeves and show what they had cooking.
And damn, do they cook. The remake fleshes out Ciel's route significantly more than I was expecting. By adding several new characters to the cast related to her, the story gains new vectors and opportunities to examine her internality and motivations in greater depth, while still hitting most of the same plot beats as the original. Many of her informed traits become material in ways that weren't financially feasible to depict in 2000.
It's not as if these aspects of Ciel's character didn't exist before, it's that they didn't have the chance to shine. The greater scope of the remake and greater scale of what can be depicted on screen creates room to breathe. Her relationship with Shiki feels more natural when there's simply more raw screentime devoted to how it develops. Ciel's backstory hits harder when the the game fully dramatizes it from multiple angles. It feels like the Near Side of the moon is finally full in a way I didn't realize I was missing.
The open question is naturally how they'll handle the Far Side routes in the future. There's so much work put into Arc and Ciel's two routes that I'm just not sure how Type-Moon intends to flesh out another four to the same extent. The remake's got plenty of old foreshadowing and new characters being set up for the sequel (especially if you know what to look for), and there's clear intent to eventually finish the full remake project, but I can't consider it truly whole until it's all there.
Even with the caveat of the remake being incomplete, what is here is not only a much-appreciated expansion of the original work but a rare big-budget visual novel easily deserving a standalone release. Perhaps even more importantly, it's an affirmation of the work's position and importance after years of relative obscurity within Type-Moon's catalog.
Playing A piece of blue glass moon now, in 2024, what I find most striking is the feeling of it being out of time in a "they just don't make 'em like this anymore" kind of way. For all the new polish, it still plays like an indie visual novel from the turn of the millennium, not bothering to cater to the crowd. It's got a specific flavor of anime spectacle urban fantasy that feels as if it's fallen out of vogue.
You know what a modern Tsukihime would look like? It'd be titled something like "I Got Reincarnated In Another World Where I Killed The Vampire Princess With My Eyes Of Death But She Survived And Became My Lover". Or it'd be some kind of infinite vertical scroll webtoon bullshit where Shiki got a floating RPG stat window with "Skill: Mystic Eyes" on it because dungeons started sprouting up around Tokyo and he becomes The Strongest Hunter. It would be atrocious.
A mere magical-girlfriend action-horror visual novel like Tsukihime feels almost quaint in its comparative lack of audience pandering in favor of self-indulgence. I've been watching Outlaw Star for the first time lately and it gives me a similar feeling of devil-may-care playfulness, as if the creators put in whatever they wanted just because they felt like it. It feels brazen in how few fucks A piece of blue glass moon gives when, for example, Arcueid literally wheels out a whiteboard to draw a bunch of diagrams about how vampires work in the setting. The Bad End "Teach Me, Ciel-Sensei!" comedy skits take a sledgehammer to the tone of the main narrative and I wouldn't have it any other way.
That said, if you're a newcomer and worried about being overwhelmed, this is a great place to start. Type-Moon works have a reputation of being arcane and convoluted, but that's mostly the fault of spinoffs and wiki pages. A piece of blue glass moon is actually pretty focused. It's fundamentally just about some weird teen with fucked-up eyes who finds out his crush is involved in some really ratchet shit and he's gonna help her out because she's got huge cans and makes his eyes bug out like a horny cartoon wolf. Any infodumps or references on the periphery are additions to the main story.
This is one of the great strengths of mainline Type-Moon, I think. The worldbuilding and conflicts feel immense, yet personal. We can spend half of Arcueid's route going up against a vampire so powerful his mere presence burns down entire city blocks, just to be told he was on the wimpier end of the list of "The Twenty-Seven Dead Apostle Ancestors". Are we hunting the rest of them down, gaining power-ups and new allies along the way? Fuck no! That's someone else's problem. We're busy enough with our dumb little corner, because it's this town and these people who are in danger right now.
Compare something like the Persona series, likely Type-Moon's closest aesthetic analogue. It's another anime urban fantasy where teens go to school, fight monsters, and try to score with girls, but the mood is different, more egocentric. It's only natural that the fate of the entire world is in the hands of these high schoolers. Only you are chosen to enter the shadow dimension and prevent the apocalypse. The universe whirls around the blank slate protagonist, keeping the magic and mundane separate to maintain the artifice of reality. None of this is necessarily bad, what I'm trying to communicate is that it's a fundamentally different flavor.
Tsukihime can have Shiki realize that he was always a frog at the bottom of a well, that the world and its dangers were so much deeper and darker than he ever knew. No matter how special his eyes are, he's just a human in a world of mages and monsters. All he - any of us - can do is affect the things in front of him and hope that's enough. Maybe a match in the right spot can spark an inferno, but sometimes what you need to save a soul is just a candle in the dark.
However, A piece of blue glass moon deploys this mood in ways I'm ambivalent about. The original Tsukihime was Type-Moon's first major work, and it set the tone of the studio's output for years. These days the Fate series is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Grand Order's gravity is inescapable, power creep is inevitable, and they just have so much more money now.
The original Tsukihime simply didn't have the budget to get fancy. A piece of blue glass moon cranks that shit to eleven with meticulously crafted setpieces loaded with bespoke artwork and effects. It's bombastic, it's exciting. You no longer have to just sort of take their word for it that Arcueid is one of the most powerful beings on Earth; you can see it for yourself. If you're curious what a visual novel brings to the table that Just Reading A Book doesn't, it's this kind of big-budget audiovisual intensity.
I guess this is what a remake is supposed to do - hell, this is broadly what I wanted out of A piece of blue glass moon - but I can't help but mourn some of that indie spirit, the feeling of humble origins. The story is no longer set in a small town, but the urban sprawl of the greater Tokyo area. More characters and factions show up, making their moves and cranking the intensity of the conflict. With such spectacular theatrics on display, that "immense-yet-personal" vibe I so value tips further towards "immense". It's improved in all the ways facilitated by better technology and more money, but the air in the room is different. I miss Arcueid's long skirt. The remake can only ever supplement the original, not replace it.
But this is just how it is in our ever-escalating world. Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- goes harder than it needs to because, well... it does need to. Otherwise, it couldn't compete against Jump juggernauts like Jujutsu Kaisen or Demon Slayer, against Evangelion's or Final Fantasy's own reforged legacies, against Fate's own money machine. Sometimes it feels like we can never go back.
I wonder if, like Shiki himself, the core Type-Moon team can see the lines of death, the cracks in the citadel. Fate/Grand Order still makes money hand over fist - it recently made $150 million in one week - but all those who flourish must fall. Putting Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, Fate/Stay Night, and Fate/Hollow Ataraxia out internationally, even remaking Fate/Extra... If I look at it from the right angle, it strikes me as a metaphorical rebuilding of the company's foundation in preparation for when the tower inevitably collapses.
In my comically overwrought review of the third Heaven's Feel movie, I lamented that F/GO, big budget anime, and various spinoffs had effectively obsoleted the core appeal of the franchise with a facade of pretty lights. But they made a Tsukihime remake. Even if the project isn't complete, they fucking did it. And it's still just a goddamn visual novel like it was, like it should be. It was sobering to play A piece of blue glass moon and think, "Oh right, this is still cool. There's still something here."
They may have built over the buildings where I spent my youth, but they didn't tear them down. They kept that center courtyard. You can still see the crimson sky fade into a deep, dark blue. You can still see the glass moon.
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