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.
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.