#Tsukihime Remake Liveblog Archive

[moonlit-tulip]

Tsukihime Remake Liveblog Archive, Part 2: Ciel Route

The newly-translated route! Which I finished last night. I had been thinking I'd wait a couple extra days before posting it, just in case I developed more to say, but on consideration… nah, I'm impatient, I'll just post it now. If I say additional things later I'll… I don't know, edit them onto the end and post a notice-of-something-having-been-added, or put them in a reblog, or something.

Below the cut: the Ciel-route segment of the liveblog, featuring spoilers for all of both the original Tsukihime and Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.

June 17, 2023

[4:14 PM] Knowing that everyone’s memories of Ciel are fake, it’s very funny going through the opening segments of her being widely known as The Perfect Senpai So Good That Even The Teachers Rely On Her. Like, sure, useful cover, but also, that sure is a reputation to have given herself! (And to then, in proper Perfect Senpai fashion, deny when it’s mentioned to her face.)

[6:36 PM] The “dreaming of a story that has already passed” scene at the start of the second day has me wondering, now, whether this remake is yet another of the ‘remake’-as-stealth-sequel setups that seem to be popular nowadays. I somewhat hope not—I find that pattern somewhat frustrating—but it is a possibility I should maybe keep in mind, given that scene.

[6:59 PM] …especially, it now occurs to me, in the context of Day 2 being called ‘Day that Wasn’t’. That’s a name whose significance-to-the-local-narrative I was never able to figure out, last year; the only meaning I could ever get out of it was the “this day wasn’t in the original, only in the remake” meaning, and while that’s definitely part of the meaning I’d assumed it was just one half of a double-meaning. But, if the remake is doing the stealth-sequel thing, that assumption suddenly seems much less well-founded; it could, easily, just be the reference-to-this-being-different-from-the-original that I first read it as.

[7:04 PM] In other news… so, last time, I talked about how the mansion feels less isolated in the remake than in the original, with Saiki Gouto and Arach showing up early on. This remains true. But the flip side of this, which I didn’t consciously register last time, is: while the mansion itself is less isolated, Shiki is more isolated within it. There’s much more emphasis on his status as the Ill-Fitting Outsider, with Saiki’s “your getting injured and disowned about it was an Unvirtuous Desertion Of Family Obligations” monologue and then with Akiha’s generally-more-emphasized-in-the-remake degree of Pointedly Overbearing Demandingness towards Shiki. So it’s actually more of a change to the mansion’s tone than I’d realized; minus one thing and plus another, rather than just the minus.

[10:13 PM] Day 3 complete! I am now Solidly On Ciel's Route, I think. Or at the very least I've made it past the point which (a) was the final point-of-no-return for onboarding to Ciel's route in the original and (b) is where I ran into Japanese text when I found my way onto it under the old Arcueid-route-only patch-version. The "Ciel talks Shiki down from suicide-via-exposure and gets him into a state of thinking and engaging with the world again" scene was very good, as it was in the original, although it's been long enough since I've read the original that I can't easily do detailed comparison of content beyond "very good", or of fine details of how very-good they were relative to one another. And I look forward to seeing how things diverge from here! I strongly suspect that one of the things the remake is going to change is the degree to which Arcueid and Ciel's routes overlap one another, since that was one of the more awkward structural elements of the original; but I'm not sure how much earlier to expect the divergence this time. The one Arcueid-route Bad End with the investigation-of-Vlov's-lair, where Ciel-sensei strongly hints that that it'll be safer to do that in Ciel's route, could be interpreted as meaning that it'll still re-merge at least for the initial adventures-with-Arcueid section—especially in combination with the game UI suggesting we're still in common-route territory, with Day 4 having the same name even after the big heartfelt moment with Ciel and with the save still not being marked with any particular route—but also could be compatible, potentially, with "things continue diverging and the investigation-of-Vlov's-lair happens in some other different context". I look forward to finding out!

[10:39 PM] Also, off in the realm of Parallels Which Were There All Along But Which I’m Only Now Managing To Catch: it Sure Does Hit A Way, seeing Ciel give Shiki the “don’t just sit there and drown in suicidal guilt about the murder-you-did-while-not-yourself, instead figure out how to atone” speech given the knowledge of her own position having (a) done way more of those than he did and (b) being pretty suicidal about it. Giving him the maximally-optimistic form of advice which she refuses to accept in that form from herself. :(

June 18, 2023

[1:10 PM] …so Shiki was explicitly noted, during the stalking-Arcueid sequence, to have hidden away his jacket before breaking into the apartment building. But then, the next morning, Ciel implies that she’s washed it. This suggests that either (a) he had the presence-of-mind to retrieve it on exit even while in full barely-coherent-despair-and-guilt mode or (b) Ciel managed to figure out where he’d left it. (More likely (a), since he presumably retained his jacket in the non-Ciel branch too? I don’t specifically remember it, but I assume I’d remember if his school uniform had been incomplete the next day.) Both of these branches are Interesting, from an “implying things-not-otherwise-shown about characters’ mental stated” standpoint!

[1:13 PM] …or never mind that parenthetical! Since apparently they’ve got spare jackets at the Tohno household.

[2:59 PM] …huh. So this time I noticed: Arcueid gave the “only one vampire ever took in more than one beast as a familiar, and he’s already gone” line that makes Nrvnqsr’s nonexistence in the remake-timeline clear and that left me-a-year-ago Confused by the two dogs accompanying Vlov in his attack on the hotel. But then, on the whiteboard behind her, she’s written “Usually 1-3 animals”. So… only Nrvnqsr has taken in more than one kind of beast but others have taken in e.g. more than one dog? Or they can take in a single dog but then release multiple copies? It’s a bit unclear, but does make me lean towards “there’s something hard-to-translate in the thing Arcueid says there” as a more likely hypothesis over the “Vlov’s two dogs are an Actual Mystery” reading I’d taken last time.

June 19, 2023

[3:01 PM] …huh, apparently Vlov’s gang got a girl from Shiki’s school some time before they got Shiki. I wonder if, in the remake, Satsuki got vampirified by Vlov rather than by Roa? Relevance-to-Satsuki’s-route could certainly explain the otherwise-mysterious thing where the remake inserted Vlov in place of Nrvnqsr, if for whatever reason Nrvnqsr’s personality and habits would be incompatible with the route’s happenings. (Although also plausibly it was just some other not-Satsuki girl; after all, we already have had very strong implications of at least one non-Satsuki victim of Vlov’s gang from Souya High, namely the teacher who Noel replaced.)

[3:27 PM] …ah, nope, at least the most recent one they were talking about is Not Satsuki.

[4:49 PM] Ciel with a gun! :o

[5:50 PM] It's interesting how much worse Shiki's mental state is in Ciel's route, compared with in Arcueid's. During Day 5 he had two internal monologues with "well, the only thing I'm good for is Doing Murder" as a core component, compared with zero similar ones that I recall in the Arcueid branch. Apparently the combination of "be less in denial about having killed Arcueid" plus "encounter the Deeply Unpleasant Environment of Vlov's basement" was Not Good For Him!

[5:52 PM] (Or possibly just the former? I haven't yet checked what happens if, at the apparent point-of-no-return of "set out to attack Vlov in his lair during the day", I instead choose the other option of waiting for night, whether that merges into Arcueid's route or whether it leads to some sort of death instead. If the latter, then perhaps it's just the being-less-in-denial part which leads to the worse mental state.)

[6:14 PM] Also: Vlov has a grudge against Roa, apparently! There won't be much more chance to explore it from Vlov's perspective this route, given the thing where he's now dead, but I'm curious if we're going to get anything on it from Roa's perspective, once he starts leaking more into Shiki.

[6:37 PM] (I say 'leaking more', as opposed to just 'leaking', because, while popular interpretation of Shiki's big moment of Suddenly Stalking And Murdering Arcueid In A Fashion Laden With Blatant Sexual Overtones seems to be that it's just a Nanaya-family-instincts thing, I myself have always taken that moment to be at least partially leakage of Roa's influence. For one thing because that is very much in-character as a direction for Roa's influence to point—he is far more obsessed with Arcueid than with anyone else, it makes sense for him to reach through more strongly to Shiki about her than about anyone else—and for another thing because, as I recall (it having, admittedly, been a while since I last read Tsukihime), Shiki-running-on-Nanaya-instincts usually doesn't have those sorts of sexual overtones around killing, whereas Shiki-influenced-by-Roa consistently does.)

June 20, 2023

[1:49 PM] Well! Things sure did just diverge much harder than expected, the night of Day 6! Roa dead already thanks to Arcueid not burning as much energy against Vlov, and Arcueid herself possibly lining up to take over as Chief Antagonist, even before realizing that Roa has moved into Shiki Specifically, just for Difficultly Keeping Her Bloodlust Under Control Post-Being-Murdered reasons??? We’ve still got so many days left! Well, then. I guess it’s time for Lots Of New Things to happen!

[1:55 PM] (Notably, this feels like a much more… Fate/stay night-shaped way for the route-structuring to go. Less routes-hugging-one-another-closely-until-towards-the-end like in the original Tsukihime, more “okay, you’ve done the previous route, you’ve had all the exposition on who these people are and what they can do, now time to Elaborate and Explore New Ground From That Baseline Of Knowledge”. I hadn’t been sure, before, whether the Arcueid-and-then-Ciel route order would be enforced in the remake—it wasn’t enforced in the original, just recommended, and I didn’t think to test “try to get on Ciel’s route” in the remake last year before finishing Arcueid’s route, partially for “already knew that recommendation” reasons and partially for “it was untranslated so there wouldn’t be much point” reasons—but I now strongly suspect that we’re doing FSN-style route-order-enforcement here, because I don’t think the exposition-structures at play here would work otherwise.)

[1:57 PM] (Once I’ve finished the route and don’t need to worry about spoilers, I should go look this up and see whether this prediction actually holds up. :p)

[9:59 PM] > "I never said that Vlov was my target, did I?" Actually you did! I missed it in my run of your own route, but with more context I managed to catch it on this pass! You said the burning Dead in the alleyway had been created by your target. You were mistaken about that, but it still sure was a thing you said!

[10:03 PM] …also apparently Arcueid is running the same “bring Shiki in to hunt down Roa” maneuver this route as last route despite Roa already being dead! This is Suspicious, and I don’t think it’s being driven by Ciel-style suspicion-he’s-in-Shiki, I think it’s relatively pure “she likes Shiki and wants an excuse to spend time with him (plus bonus Growing Bloodlust Problems which seem noticeably less under-control this route compared with the last).

[10:06 PM] …ah, no, she is being open about having already killed Roa and is just bringing Shiki in for subsequent cleanup, never mind.

[10:42 PM] Arcueid is being So Worrying here, wow.

[10:47 PM] (Her reaction to Shiki’s headache-spike in the park. Not the hostility I’d expect if she’d realized Roa was working on possessing him, but she sure did realize Something. (Or maybe it was the Roa thing, just with bonus “aha, he’s not really in control yet and this is an Exploitable Opportunity of some sort”?))

[10:50 PM] …also. Wait a minute. Vlov has a grudge against Roa. Vlov stated his intention in town as being revenge, and expressed disgust for the overall state of the town. Arcueid doesn’t know what brought Vlov to the town in the first place. Did Vlov come by for purposes of launching some sort of attack on Roa?

June 21, 2023

[4:28 PM] Oh wow Noel has So Many Issues. That interlude was great. And I spent the first half of it wondering if she’s always like this by default or if this was the lingering-influence-from-Vlov’s-bite that Ciel and Mario had been discussing as a possibility, but after that second half… yeah, definitely some lingering (and escalating) influence. (Parallel with Shiki and his slowly-accumulating Roa-derived issues!) Although that doesn’t actually, on consideration, preclude that sort of vampire-mass-murder-with-bonus-torture having been among her habits even pre-Vlov! Since she sure did imply having pulled similar stunts previously in Europe, albeit to less effect.

[4:30 PM] Also: something happened thirteen years ago, apparently! It got mentioned once earlier, and again now this time. Roa’s pre-Ciel incarnation, maybe? But, mostly, Not Enough Information, for now. Something to keep an eye on as things continue developing.

[4:49 PM] ...hmm. Timeline. So. 1989, start of the Ciel-and-Roa flashback. Age 12, presumably 2001, the point where Roa-derived intrusive thoughts started hitting her. Age ???, the point where hiding in her room broke down as a strategy and Roa grabbed more substantial influence. Main story takes place... I'm not sure it's been stated directly, but probably 2020ish. Which would line up, given Ciel's outwardly-visible age, with that particular round of Roa-causing-trouble actually being the thirteen-years-ago one? Except in that case I'm not sure what would have happened seven years ago to set SHIKI off; Ciel had a Moment Of Horrified Realization about whatever-it-was, in the restaurant, but apparently in the remake it's not as simple as "Roa jumping into SHIKI set him off ~instantaneously upon Roa's arrival" the way I recall it was in the original, and I lack alternative hypotheses.

[4:52 PM] And apparently Roa has Plans To Make Arcueid His, beyond just "keep fighting her forever because he doesn't know how to deconflate lust from hatred" as in the original. I'm not sure what plans those might be, but whatever they are, they seem Worrying probably!

June 22, 2023

[5:25 PM] I am now re-confused! Ciel was 13 years old when she became an Executor? That doesn’t line up at all with Roa getting to her 13 years ago! And there’s a tempting alternate theory of “1989 was when Roa got to her, not her birth-year”, but in that case we run into the problem of why it would be the 13-years-ago incident that Noel is particularly traumatized about, as opposed to the ~31-years-ago one. My best guess is that the 13-years-old thing was just a cover story? Second-best guess is that the 13-years-ago Roa was somehow so bad that he managed to traumatize Noel even harder than the Roa who destroyed her hometown ~31 years ago? But I’ve got decently large piles of probability-mass on “neither of these, something weirder (or at least harder-for-me-to-predict) is going on”.

[6:38 PM] ...and Day 9 complete! That was very good. And now Ciel has said her goodbye. Which... if I'm remembering the trajectory of the original right, at that point she disappeared from everyone but Shiki's memories at school, and only reappeared to save Shiki from Roa. Which means it's time for the derailedness to progress still farther! What will drive Ciel to return this time, given the lack of external Roa to threaten Shiki? My best guess is Noel doing... something? Deciding to try to kill Shiki on the off-chance he's Roa? But low confidence in that, for now.

June 23, 2023

[5:35 PM] Well! Arach finally interacting with plot-significant events in a more substantial way than just "exist next to them"! I... expect that the references to her having eight legs were metaphorical, Nasu doing his usual animal-metaphors thing, rather than her being Literally Spider-Shaped? Given the lack of spideriness on her sprite that scene. But as for her actions... well. She claims that her 'helping' Noel is just charity; I find that I don't particularly believe her about that. Nor do I think it's likely to be as trivial as just "finally get to do a clinical trial of her Vampire Juice". She's up to something bigger. The question is whether we're going to actually learn anything about what that thing is, this route; I'm expecting her to be mostly involved in far-side events, even if she's unexpectedly poked her head into the near side—she was tied up with Makihisa, and is a regular at the mansion, and both of those are points far-side-ward—and as such it wouldn't shock me if she were to mostly just Not Involve Herself Farther in things for now.

[5:36 PM] Plus bonus "turns out Noel wasn't turning into a Dead Apostle to begin with, prior to Arach's intervention" irony!

[5:41 PM] ...and, for all her talk about how it's better to die than to become a vampire, it's kind of striking how definitively Noel chooses to live even when this entails turning-into-a-vampire. When she gave that die-rather-than-being-a-vampire speech to Shiki, I'd assumed this was her projecting, that her plan was to kill Shiki-who-she-Gettiered-herself-into-'know'ing-was-possessed-by-Roa and then to kill herself before her transformation was done. But then not only did she not do that but she also deliberately avoided letting the church find out about her transformation-in-progress, thus ensuring that they wouldn't kill her and she would (on her world-model) become a vampire. (And thus, because Cruel Irony, losing her chance to discover that she was Not Actually Becoming A Vampire before Arach got her.)

[5:51 PM] Also: Yet More Timeline Confusion! Ciel has affirmed the 'joined the church at age twelve' story, and apparently has been an Executor for six years. Which doesn't fit any of my projected timelines! If Ciel snapped quicker-than-I-initially-thought under pressure from Roa, got fully possessed and destroyed her hometown and got killed and joined the church at age 12, became an Executor at age 13, and has been at it for six years, then... well, that does line up with SHIKI's incident seven years ago, but then in that case what's going on with 1989 and with 13-years-ago? (Which aren't the same year, because this version of Tsukihime is set in The Era Of Smartphones and that era started post-2002.) Let's see. Suppose Ciel was born 1989, Roa possessed her in 2001, and now it's 2008. That's... unlikely, unless smartphones reached fixation a few years earlier in Japan than in the US? But the first iPhone was only 2007, so I doubt it. Overall, I continue to not see any plausible timeline in which Noel-and-now-Ciel's claims around Ciel's age-at-which-she-got-tied-up-with-the-church line up.

[11:17 PM] ...am I wrong about when the present day is? Is it actually 2014, rather than 2020ish? If the present is 2014, then smartphones are plausibly already reasonably at-fixation in a way they wouldn't have been in 2008, and that lines up with the 13-years-ago number. But then that doesn't line up with her supposed 7-year timeline in the church, and so yet again I'm forced to conclude that that has to be some sort of lie unless there's something weird going on that I'm failing to consider.

June 24, 2023

[1:09 PM] !!! Satsuki is here at school on Day 11! Alive, to all appearances! I’d thought she was one of the unnamed-at-the-time missing students who got mentioned on Day 3, but apparently not!

[1:14 PM] …or, no, apparently she was out for a few days for reasons related to the serial killings, she’s just back now! I’m not sure what to make of that, but it’s definitely Interesting! Either she’s been vampirized but found some very-exceptionally-effective way of hiding it and avoiding sun-related problems and continuing to act like herself-as-she-was-pre-turning, or her run-in with the serial killer in this route somehow got derailed such that she didn’t end up vampirized by it! Interesting either way; I’m curious to see how her thread gets developed, when the far side comes around!

[2:43 PM] Huh, interesting that Shiki still pulls the “escape to the park” maneuver after The Incident With Kohaku, despite this involving running through a residential area a ways and despite the largeness of the Tohno mansion-grounds-forest! I suppose distance-from-the-targets-he’s-been-most-fixated-on was a higher priority for him, in his escape-panic, than more general distance-from-the-nearest-people. (Or perhaps the park is bigger than I’m envisioning it as being from the art, enough to beat out even the 40-acre-if-I’m-remembering-right Tohno forest. Or perhaps he’s thinking strategically enough to realize that he’s more likely to be successfully chased after in the Tohno forest than in the public park. There are lots of options, just all of those options Imply Things Not (Yet?) Stated Directly.)

[6:49 PM] Day 13 complete! Wow that was A Lot.

[6:53 PM] So, the timeline-mystery is now resolved, via a six-year gap in which it was in fact very reasonable to count her as not-aging, because she was dead throughout that time. (Placing us, then, in 2014.) Meaning that Ciel is actually substantially younger in the remake, 19 rather than ~25! And also meaning that she Just So Happened to wake up the same year that Roa got to SHIKI, which seems like very much Not A Coincidence, even if it's not quite as direct a connection as the original's "SHIKI inverted ~immediately upon Roa!Ciel's death" one. Something something world didn't consider Roa to be alive until he was back re-active something something, maybe, and thus didn't see the need to enforce aliveness on 'Roa'-who-was-actually-Ciel?

[6:56 PM] (I don't recall any explanation from the original, and am somewhat unclear in the remake too, regarding why it is that Ciel alone seems to have immortality-for-as-long-as-Roa-lives, from among his many castoffs over the centuries. Presumably the same bug-in-the-world with her soul being bound to his also applied to everyone else's? I suppose possibly there are, in fact, a bunch of other immortal Roa-castoffs running around, and they just lack the rest of Ciel's exceptional ability-set and as such aren't Doing Big Things with their immortality the way Ciel is. (After all, someone at the Church needed to have enough idea what was going on to give Ciel the authentication-error metaphor.))

[7:02 PM] The remake version of the Ciel-versus-Shiki showdown was, as the original was, Thoroughly Excellent. Even with my faded-at-this-point memories of the original, I feel reasonably confident this time in proclaiming that the remake version is at least comparable in quality, if not better. Because it successfully brought me near-to-crying, towards the end, and crying is a rare-and-prized thing for me which I would remember had I done it during the original Tsukihime; thus I infer that, while the original plausibly brought me near-to-crying too (the memory is fuzzy enough that I'm not confident it did, but it's at least plausible), it didn't bring me to Actual Crying, meaning plausibly-comparable quality but probably-not-substantially-higher quality.

[7:06 PM] (I am somewhat unclear on where Ciel's information-source is, as far as backtracing the Shiki-Adoption Switcheroo goes. Records-investigation could get her as far as learning of the existence of two Shikis, if the records were erased sloppily, but at the time when she found Roa's coffin she'd gotten that investigation done and inferred SHIKI, rather than Shiki, to have been the adopted one, and I'm not sure what additional records she could have found to make her realize that she had it backwards. But this is the sort of minor thing which will plausibly not be returned to; the details aren't hugely plot-essential, even if I happen to be idly curious about them.)

[7:08 PM] (And I don't think she was lying, at the coffin scene, about getting it backwards, because it wouldn't really have... helped? It wasn't like exactly which of the Shikis was which particularly factored into her cover-story for continuing to hang around him, or anything. I think she just... got additional information, somehow, afterwards?)

[7:24 PM] Then we had the Noel showdown. Which was... not nearly as intensely good as the Ciel showdown? But it was still interesting; it felt much less out-of-place than e.g. the Ciel-versus-random-monster-of-Roa's fight in the finale of Arcueid's route, much more like it was actually about the characters rather than just a new fight scene for its own sake. Overall, I like Noel a lot as a villain! I'm not sure where I'm ultimately going to fall on whether her finale taking the form it did was to the benefit or the detriment of the remake, relative to the original—it involved... a lot of Flashy Fighting With Less Emotional Baggage Than The Fight It Immediately Followed?, where I found Noel at her most interesting during the earlier sections of the route where she was less about the Direct Fair-Ish Combat (which she was, after all, not hugely good at) and more about the Preying Upon Those Weaker Than Her—but it was, at the very least, Interesting.

[7:29 PM] And, as a subcomponent of the Noel showdown, we got the big flashback to Roa!Ciel! Which was both effective-in-its-own-right, as an establishment-of-how-horrible-Roa-can-get and as a contextualization for Noel and why she's a mess in some of the specific ways that she is, and also interesting from a standpoint of there sure did seem to be some familiar figures there. There was the spidery one who was monologuing in a very recognizably Arach-like manner, and there was also, I'm pretty sure, Vlov's silhouette! Which, coupled with the mention of an unexpected sixth person showing up and throwing off Roa's plans, has me very much suspecting that this isn't the last we're going to see of this particular event, that it's going to be unveiled still farther either over the remaining day(-or-maybe-days-if-the-remake-adds-an-extra) or somewhere in the Far Side. (More likely the latter, for previously-mentioned "Arach seems Far Side-flavored" reasons.)

[7:32 PM] (And also: Vlov seemed to really hate Roa, during his fight with Shiki and Ciel, to the point of there being some implication that he'd come to town specifically in order to get some sort of revenge on him. Vlov's silhouette seemed, in Noel's flashback, to be not actively attacking. So what happened, to flip Vlov's opinions on Roa as hard into antagonism as they ultimately got flipped? This also points in the direction that probably Vlov will have more revealed about him in the Far Side, that he won't be relegated to Offscreen Irrelevance the way Nrvnqsr did in the original Far Side.)

[7:37 PM] And then Ciel made her very interesting comment, that since Shiki and Roa are merging into one Shiki would be able to remember anything Roa had done, and thus definitely hadn't killed anyone. Which leads to the question: where, then, did Shiki's two days of missing memories disappear to? He jumped straight from Friday to Sunday. At first I'd been leaning towards mostly Roa with some outside chance that it had been Ciel doing her memory-wiping thing repeatedly, but at this point if Ciel had done it she'd have admitted it, and apparently it can't have been Roa either. So who can it have been? It seems like not-Arcueid's-style, so I'm leaning towards not-her; and, while it seems like it might have served Mario's goals somehow (...not that I've got the best read on what his goals are, even now), it doesn't seem like it's within his capabilities, relative to my current model of them. So I'm not sure! One more Lingering Mystery for the collection.

[7:41 PM] One place where I find the remake to suffer a bit relative to the original, here: it loses the feeling of Repeated Finale-Fakeouts. In the original, Roa is killed, and this initially appears like, okay, the protagonists have won, now we've just got Happy Epilogue to go! And then he starts possessing Shiki. And then Shiki and Ciel have their big showdown, and at the end of it they're closer to one another than ever and have a plausible-sounding plan for his defeat, and this initially appears like, okay, the protagonists have won, now we've just got the Happy Epilogue to go! And then Roa is stronger-than-planned and takes Shiki outside and Arcueid is there waiting, and only then does the true finale happen. Whereas, here, Roa's death happens early enough to be very clearly a start-of-tension-building rather than a finale, and then the narrative pointedly brings back all its hooks of Future Antagonists after the Shiki-and-Ciel showdown rather than doing any sort of fakeout, with Noel showing up immediately and then with Arcueid getting her interlude-to-remind-everyone-that-she's-still-active before the Shiki-and-Ciel-in-Ciel's-apartment scene. And I liked the original's finale-fakeouts, so I feel a bit sad about their absence in the remake.

[7:49 PM] Also I was somewhat surprised at how non-awful Roa!Shiki's attack on Kohaku ended up being, in this version. Still bad, certainly—and presumably worse, in the Bad End branch I have yet to explore—but much less specifically hitting her right in the yet-to-be-revealed Deep Backstory Traumas, compared to how it went in the original. Which... probably wouldn't have been surprising to me if Arcueid's route were different, but since Arcueid's route did still keep the sexual elements of Shiki's attack on her in the alleyway the one night (albeit in toned-down form), I was kind of expecting something similar here? But instead the thing of Roa-instilled aggression taking on a specifically-sexual shape is mostly left very understated, mostly only visible (at least so far) in Shiki's somewhat-more-active flirtation in the days before things come to a head and in Flashback!Roa!Ciel's state of nudity. Which is interesting! I wonder what led Nasu to tone that down as far as he did in the rewrite, while still leaving the Arcueid-route bit relatively un-toned-down; in my mind, the two had seemed more of-a-kind with one another, more "probably either both go or neither goes"-shaped.

June 25, 2023

[11:22 AM] Well! Normal end get! Which is not the true end, because apparently the endings have been rearranged this time around! :o

[3:40 PM] ...and true end get! In unexpectedly-actionized form!

[3:46 PM] This is much more the sort of thing I was semi-expecting back in Arcueid's route, after the Vlov fight proved Unexpectedly Escalatory relative to anything in the original. But was nonetheless unexpected here, because after the way Arcueid's route was in fact not ever re-actionized to that degree of intensity post-Vlov I expected the same to hold of Ciel's route. But nope! Big Apocalyptic Setpiece-Battle Finale! Which it's going to take me a while to settle my feelings on, probably; but it does definitely drive me in the direction of more substantially internally differentiating the remake from the original, thinking of it more as a different story which happens to contain many overlapping components from the original, rather than as the-original-but-with-extra-budget. (Much moreso than e.g. Noel did; Noel felt like she was still basically running on standard Tsukihime-ish narrative stakes and standard-for-the-remake-ish power scales, being an extra wrinkle in the plot and character arcs but being mostly tonally in-line with the original; whereas the Big Arcueid Fight was very dramatically outside of the tone-space covered at any point in the original.)

[3:48 PM] (I remain confused about what That One Monster Of Roa's was doing, in the finale. Like, it felt like much less of a tonal/pacing hiccup this time around, a much briefer fight which did some work in showing Ciel's mental state in a route where her mental state is a core focus in a way it wasn't nearly as much in Arcueid's route; but it's still weird, from an "I don't understand why Nasu included it at all" standpoint. Given its spideriness, maybe it's going to be related somehow to whatever-is-going-on-with-Arach, once the far side comes around, and so it's here for purposes of Early Foreshadowing?)

[4:05 PM] ...I feel like Nasu's action-scene-writing has grown increasingly extravagant over time in a not-unambiguously-positive way. Like, the original Tsukihime's action scenes were generally pretty lightweight; Fate/stay night's were a lot more intense, but were still mostly pretty grounded scale-wise, even despite all the overpowered abilities being thrown around; but then Mahoyo had [rot13 for Mahoyo spoilers]gur ovt nzhfrzrag-cnex frdhrapr[/rot13] which dwarfed even the biggest Fate/stay night fights scale-wise, and the Tsukihime remake escalated still farther from there, with both Vlov and Arcueid escalating to attacks which straight-up would have destroyed the whole city had they not been stopped. And, like, the scenes are cool? But I feel like they're also... tipping increasingly in the direction of feeling out-of-place relative to their surrounding works, over time, tonally, in some way that's hard to articulate. Or... no, not quite that. Shaping the tone of their surrounding works, let's say. It's very hard to hold onto an original-Tsukihime-ish relatively-small-scale-storytelling mood amid a Big Fight Scene Where The City Is At Risk Of Being Casually Squished As A Side-Casualty; that those sorts of big fights happen anyway is one of the key elements tonally differentiating the remake from the original. And that's fine as long as one is aiming to write stories with the sort of tone that those fight scenes bring about; but it seems like a... loss of versatility? It reduces his ability to do other sorts of tone. I'm not sure that the modern-day Nasu would be capable of writing the sorts of relatively-smaller-scale stories that he started his career with, with Kara no Kyoukai and with the original Tsukihime, and that seems kind of sad, because I liked those stories. And, like, I like his more recent stuff too! But there's still something sad in the feeling that he couldn't go back to doing things-like-the-older-stuff even if he tried.

[4:11 PM] Anyway! Big Action Setpiece. Cool novel way of killing off Roa, which I found very elegant. And then a nice epilogue, mostly pretty similar to the original Ciel true-end epilogue as far as I'm managing to recall it. (...although it felt a bit more repetitive after the normal-end epilogue, here, since they covered a lot of the same ground as one another.) I didn't find the epilogue this time around to be as emotionally-impactful as I recall having found the Arcueid true-end epilogue—the big moments of emotional impact this route were mostly earlier, the various Big Moments Of Catharsis between Shiki and Ciel and between Shiki and Arcueid—but it still closed things off well enough in its own right, and was generally enjoyable.

[4:12 PM] ...and now all that's left is branch-exploration! And then the final accounting of my thoughts and of whatever lingering mysteries-from-this-route have yet to be resolved.

[4:17 PM] (Also I don't 100% understand the divergence between the normal-end branch and the true-end branch. Or, like, I get that Shiki trying harder to let Arcueid down gently in the true-end branch leads her to have more brainpower to spare on continuing to think while being All-Consumingly Mad At Him, thus leading her to invoke Serious Large-Scale Reality-Warping against him rather than simpler-and-more-direct "regenerate and then apply Large Quantities Of Violence"-shaped actions like she uses in the normal-end branch; but I don't get the divergence on Ciel's end, why normal-end!Ciel has the Seventh Scripture but true-end!Ciel delays getting it and instead rushes to grab Shiki first. It seems like they diverge even before the reality-warping comes out, based on some other factor I have yet to discern?)

[10:51 PM] 100% completion done! At least to the best of my ability to discern via lack of non-viewed flowchart-entries, via lack of non-unlocked music-player tracks, and in general based on gallery-completion. 44 hours logged total for Ciel's-route-counting-branch-exploration, apparently. I'd be curious to see how that compares with my time on Arcueid's route, but unfortunately I didn't have game-time-logging set up for my Switch emulator last year the way I do now, so I suppose that will remain forever a mystery.

[11:02 PM] Thoughts from branch-exploration: - The "Shiki-under-Roa's-influence kills everyone in the mansion" bad-end-branch was High-Quality Horror. Very effective slow unveiling. Also I am very curious what Kohaku was thinking, in that one, with her continuing to pretend everything was normal even after both Akiha and Hisui were dead. I mean, presumably she was thinking "it would be undollish to have feelings about this, so I'm going to Not"; but it's still somewhat surprising to me that she was so blase about Hisui's death specifically, as opposed to e.g. adding Shiki more unambiguously to her revenge-target-pile and then being more cautious around him. I suppose possibly she intended to lace his food with Interesting Substances next time she fed him, and was foiled only by his un-accounted-for change of diet, or something? - Meanwhile, in the branch where everything isn't quite as terrible, we've got a very interesting interaction between Kohaku and Hisui around carrying Shiki up to his room, wherein Kohaku asks Hisui to do it (despite knowing about Hisui's issues around physical-contact-with-men), Hisui objects, and then Kohaku proceeds to formally give Hisui permission to make an exception to her usual patterns, after which Hisui does it without further objection (albeit while still pretty clearly feeling uncomfortable about it.) This is interesting. This is a wrinkle in the Kohaku-Hisui dynamic that I don't recall seeing in the original; in the original, as I recall, Hisui's issue-pile is more purely her own, influenced by her knowledge of Kohaku's history but never indicated as far as I recall to be a product of any sort of, like, explicit understanding between the two of them, as opposed to just Hisui reacting in her own way to the knowledge of what Kohaku went through for her sake. But apparently there's more to it, in the remake! - ...and then we had the Big Moment in the other side of red garden trailer, with Satsuki. The trailer as a whole was Very Pretty, but also more specifically I am so interested to see what's going on with the Satsuki route, and that single few-second patch of trailer is probably the biggest indicator I've seen to date of its likely shape.

[11:17 PM] Lingering mysteries: - Whence the missing memories? I would think Roa even more, now, after the everyone-in-the-mansion-dies branch, except once again that contradicts Ciel's statement that, if one does a thing under Roa's influence, one will remember that. And, indeed, even when Shiki is temporarily forgetting / not turning his mind towards Roa's activities, as in the scene with Mario and Shiki's lack of thinking-about-it-afterwards, it's pretty consistently the case that those moments are still followed by the eye of the narrative, indicating at least some degree of theoretical accessibility-to-Shiki probably. Whereas for the two missing days there's just nothing. So I'm not sure what's going on there. - Speaking of which: Mario! What's his deal? After this route we've got probably-close-to-everything-we're-going-to-get on Noel—she seemed like she had a pretty complete arc, here, and while I expect her to still feature in the far side I don't specifically expect her to be a big player in it—and I've updated towards Mario's two less-in-focus minions (Karius and the other one) being probably Actually Genuinely Unimportant Side Characters, but Mario himself has taken a big step up in Mysteriousness, similarly to Arach albeit less immediately plot-affectingly. It sure does seem like there's some sort of hivemind or body-transference or something along those lines going on, in the Laurentis family, and apparently they-via-Mario are looking for the secrets of immortality, but we've got very little in the way of detail, so far. Little enough that I find myself wondering if we're going to get more church-focus in The Other Side of Red Garden than we did in the original Far Side, to go more into this. - What's up with the variable stopping power of Shiki's eyes? The story specifically makes a point of noting that even just tracing a line, on one of Vlov's dogs, is enough to stop it in its tracks and render it sufficiently definitively Dead that it can't even take purely-reflexive final actions like Bite Down Harder On Shiki; and yet, in the Roa!Shiki-and-Ciel-kill-each-other ending, Ciel manages to remain functional enough to stab through Roa!Shiki even after he stabs a point on her, which naively I'd expect to have even more stopping power than tracing a line. (And I half-recall that Roa similarly managed Action In His Final Moments in Arcueid's route, even if it's been long enough that I no longer remember the precise details.) Something something Lifescale something something, higher Lifescale leads to increased ability to continue acting after getting got with Mystic Eyes of Death Perception? (This would also line up with Arcueid being able to straight-up keep on fighting him, when he slashes her lines in the normal-end branch, only being somewhat slowed down rather than anything more serious.) - ...plus everything already discussed earlier, Vlov's feelings towards Roa and Arach's deal and so forth.

[11:18 PM] ...oh, also, the bit in the Black Key exposition-branch where Ciel starts out trying to replace all references to magecraft with prayer only to give up midway through was Very Funny. One of my favorite comedic moments in the whole VN, I think.

[11:20 PM] And that's everything, I think! It's been fun. I look forward to The Other Side of Red Garden coming out, whenever it does that.

[11:23 PM] (It sounds, from Ciel-sensei's lesson with the Other Side of Red Garden trailer, like plausibly it'll be less action-y; it was described there as being more mystery-shaped instead. I'm curious to see whether that means the Fights With Apocalyptically Powerful Abilities Being Thrown Around Endangering Everyone are less present in the far side than in the near side; my current guess is no, that we'll see similar sorts of stakes-escalation around e.g. the big Akiha fight, plausibly whatever is going on with Arach, et cetera, because as mentioned earlier I'm not convinced Nasu is really capable any more of not doing that sort of thing.)

[11:30 PM] ...also I wonder if Satsuki's route is going to end up being sort of a bridge between the near side and the far side. Because we keep getting all these hints of far-side-content hooking back in with Roa's schemes, with the person-who-sounded-like-Arach in Noel's flashback (and, for that matter, more generally with the nature of whatever Roa was trying to do against Arcueid in that incarnation being repeatedly teased-but-not-revealed), and with whatever is going on between Roa and Vlov that hasn't been discussed much yet, and so forth; and, in the Other Side of Red Garden trailer, Satsuki was the one character to be shown against the backdrop of the broader city rather than specifically of the Tohno mansion; and, of course, Satsuki herself has a connection with Roa, on account of his being the one who turns her. So... possibly that route is going to be some sort of grand-finale blend-of-the-two-halves'-respective-tones-and-casts, or something? And if the remake were following original-Tsukihime-tone then I'd expect not-that, because the near-side/far-side split in the original is pretty sharp and never really gets blended like that; but the remake has at this point established itself as fully willing to handle tonal things differently, compared with the original, so I'm less confident in that and as such this seems a lot more plausible.

[11:34 PM] ...oh, also another lingering mystery I forgot to list earlier: what's up with Satsuki's apparent survival, in Ciel's route? Being attacked and then making it through well enough to be able to attend school in daylight, which is even more mysterious than if she'd just been butterflied into not-being-attacked. I have very little idea, right now, what to make of that, but it's definitely Interesting and something to keep an eye on.

[moonlit-tulip]

Tsukihime Remake Liveblog Archive, Part 1: Arcueid Route

Last year when Arcueid's route of the Tsukihime remake got translated, and then again this year when Ciel's route got translated, I liveblogged on Discord as I read. But Discord is not the ideal platform for long-term archival accessibility. So I'm going to dump the archives on tumblr, instead.

Below the cut: the Arcueid-route segment of the liveblog, featuring spoilers for all of the original Tsukihime and for Arcueid's route of Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-.

July 16, 2022

[6:16 PM] First off: the Tsukihime remake is really pretty, like, wow. I've played high-budget VNs from two decades ago, and I've played low-budget VNs from relatively recently, but this is my first time getting more than maybe 30 minutes into a high-budget VN from relatively recently, and things sure have advanced.

[6:22 PM] All the individual backgrounds are Very Pretty, and there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of CGs, and everything is very blended-together compared with what I'm used to. Like... I'm accustomed to VNs following a format of "there's normal sprites-on-backgrounds art, and there are CGs, and the latter are a conspicuous jump up in fanciness relative to the former. The Tsukihime remake, as of the end of the first day, is Not Doing That. It's throwing CGs out at such high density and with such a high level of background-art-prettiness that they end up feeling like just an ordinary part of the flow.

[6:24 PM] (The other recent high-budget VN I played the first ~30 minutes of, which I intend to return to at some point, is World End Syndrome, and it goes an extra step beyond even that, with animated backgrounds. Thus I infer that the jump in fanciness is a general Recent High-Budget VNs thing rather than something specific to the Tsukihime remake.)

[6:29 PM] And, like... so, the standard model followed by older VNs and lower-budget recent ones has a more-or-less static camera: here's the background, here are the sprites, when we're in this area and not in a CG there's not going to be much variety in the visual layout. But, here, it's constantly zooming and panning around. To the point where it very much comes across as the camera following Shiki's gaze, rather than just representing The Area in the abstract? Which is really cool. (And also speaks to the resolution at which the art assets were drawn, that it can get away with zooming in on them constantly without substantial blurriness resulting. And the detail with which they were drawn, that it can zoom in on them and have them still be interesting to look at.)

[6:36 PM] ...also, it's interesting how fashionable "start VN on a train" seems to be, lately. Heart of the Woods did it, World End Syndrome did it, the Tsukihime remake did it... I guess because trains are a popular way of getting from place to place and it's common for VNs to start with the protagonists going somewhere new? But nonetheless it feels like it's happening disproportionately, relative to other transit methods / "the transit happened offscreen before things started" / not starting with going to a new place at all / etc. Which is interesting. I wonder if there's something about the visual design of trains which makes them particularly popular among VN artists, or something.

[6:39 PM] Also, the remake sure does start hinting at the suspiciousness of Shiki's seven-years-ago-accident a whole lot sooner than the original did, wow. In the original, sure, it eventually becomes clear that there's something more going on with it than just the nominal car accident, but that only starts being hinted at a ways into the plot. But, here, we get the scene in the prologue of Shiki being told he was in a car accident, and then we jump seven years forward into the main story, and Shiki pretty quickly starts narrating about how seven years ago he almost died in an accident involving a building. (I don't have a copy of the VN script on hand, so I forget if it was a falling building or a construction-site accident or what, but it was something vaguely along those lines.) Very conspicuously inconsistent; far more suspicious far more quickly. It's interesting.

[6:40 PM] ...I should look into the logistics of opening up NSP files to see if I can do script-extraction from the translation patch; my searchable copy of the Fate/stay night script is very convenient, and I expect I'm going to end up wanting something similar here.

[6:42 PM] Anyway! Day 1 complete; it was delightful; I was very impressed with it; I look forward to continuing.

[6:43 PM] ...oh, wait, right, let's also have the bit about Lessons To Learn About VN Engine-Design, because that's a thing I like to do when I get into new VNs with particularly nice features. In this case, one positive lesson and one negative lesson.

[6:45 PM] The positive lesson is: the Tsukihime remake includes a flowchart of its choices and resulting scenes ingame (constrained to those scenes one has seen so far, for non-spoileriness), such that there's no need to memorize all the branches or keep extensive notes or suchlike. This is a very good idea, and I should make sure to include support for it whenever I get around to designing a VN engine of my own.

[6:50 PM] The negative lesson is: if you're going to give your VN individual voice sliders for each character with voiced lines (which is, itself, a good idea of which I approve), and you're going to hide the sliders for characters who haven't spoken yet in order to avoid spoilers, don't then go and initialize all newly-unhidden sliders at the default voice-line volume irrespective of what the user has set the visible sliders to. The Tsukihime remake even has a slider for "Other", as in all the bit characters who don't get sliders of their own; it would have been so technically simple and so much more convenient if they'd set things up so that, whenever a new character who does get their own slider appears, that slider were just set to the level of the Other slider, instead of initialized to the default 50% such that I had to keep going into the menu to adjust the new sliders upward for parity with all the old sliders. (Which I'd been systematically setting to 80% in order to have them not be drowned out by the background music.)

July 17, 2022

[9:33 AM] ...oh, also, off in the realm of thematic stuff, there was this interesting understated / not-very-emphasized moment I appreciated, when Shiki first made it to the Tohno mansion gates. Up to that point, we'd been getting all this internal monologuing about how the Tohno family was a sort of living anachronism, an artifact of a past era in whose territory modernity struggled to take hold. And yet, at the gates, things had modernized a bit, relative to what Shiki remembered from his childhood. The gate which once relied on a live guard had been replaced with an entirely-remote "ring the buzzer and wait for the gate to be electronically unlocked" system. Even the Tohno mansion, central territory of the Tohno family, wasn't entirely untouched by the changing of the times. And I found that cool. I wonder if this is going to end up being a more in-focus thematic thread later on, or whether it's going to be consistently left as understated subtext like this instance was.

[9:48 PM] It's somewhat surprising to me how much extra impact some of the scenes are having, even given very similar textual content, just on the basis of the visual enhancements and the increased variety of music.

[9:51 PM] In particular, this afternoon I hit the "Shiki finds Arcueid waiting for him by his school" scene (which is to say, Arcueid's second scene in the story), and wow that scene hit me hard given the extra benefit of the new CGs and music. Like, in the original, I found Arcueid's initial appearance in that sequence less impactful than the subsequent chase and conversation in the alleyway, but here, her initial appearance itself felt like a Big High-Impact Moment in its own right.

[9:52 PM] (...and then, near the end of the scene, I got a BSOD, because yuzu, whatever its virtues as a generally-impressive emulator, apparently doesn't know how to avoid leaking so much memory that it ends up crashing windows given a few hours of runtime. That part was less ideal. But not enough to undermine the scene's impact.)

[9:53 PM] Also, Arcueid's theme is just generally really good. Very plausibly my favorite bit of music to appear in the VN thus far.

July 18, 2022

[3:35 PM] Just got my first bad end! #3. It had a very cool little gimmicky moment to it, with a fake choice point: Shiki goes into decision-making mode, the choice-selection text comes up, but then, before there's any time to choose them, Shiki gets whacked in the back of the head and the Bad End progresses. Very much the sort of maneuver which... would lose impact quickly if overused? But which, as a one-off thing, makes for a very nice surprise double-subversion of the Bad End. Make a choice which seems like an obvious bad-end choice, then unexpectedly get a choice-point (thus suggesting that it's perhaps not inherently a Bad End path, since those have choice-points less often than non-Bad-End paths do), only to have the choice-point then immediately taken away and the Bad End proceed along a more unambiguous path of Badness.

[10:32 PM] Made it to the end of the fifth day. That fight with Vlov was really dramatically larger-scale than anything from the original, wow. Feels like something of a Dramatic Tone-Change; I'll be interested to see how that's handled going forward, whether the remake continues to lean more into Bombastic Large-Scale Action of that sort or whether this is going to be more of a one-off turning point after which things will return to the more familiar and personal-scale approach of the original but now with extra church attention and a big crater in the middle of town.

[10:34 PM] (Or, well, the remake near-side routes, at least. Given the nature of the far-side routes, I'm at least moderately inclined to expect that they still won't be heavy on Bombastic Large-Scale Action, whenever they get released, irrespective of whether or not the near-side routes end up being thusly focused; the smaller-scale personal focus is kind of a central tonal element of the far-side routes in the original, I think.)

[10:37 PM] (Although, like, [rot13 for Fate/stay night spoilers]Urnira'f Srry orvat Sngr'f sne-fvqr-ebhgr-rdhvinyrag qvqa'g fgbc vg sebz orvat gur ynetrfg-fpnyr bs gurz nyy, npgvba-jvfr[/rot13]. So I'm not all that strongly confident in this analysis.)

July 20, 2022

[4:45 PM] An interesting side effect of Nrvnqsr's replacement with Vlov is that it's pretty substantially changed my impressions of Shiki's "we killed the vampire, everything's solved now!" misunderstanding post-big-fight and of Arcueid's reaction thereto. Because, in the original, Arcueid explains that she's in town to hunt down the vampire serial killer, and then Nrvnqsr shows up, but he's very clearly chasing her, and never shows any sign of having interests in town beyond that. (Plus, you know, doesn't leave any corpses behind after murdering people.) Whereas Vlov is relatively infrastructurally established in town, having built up a bunch of Dead, had his scheme in place for long enough that Arihiko has already heard of it by the time of the first day, et cetera. So, sure, Vlov himself can't have done the described "exsanguinated corpses without other distinguishing traits" murders on account of the burning-people problem, but there's a very natural interpretation wherein the deaths attributed to the serial killer are a product of Vlov's Dead, who lack the same burning-people-around-them curse. (Indeed, I strongly suspect that I myself would have fallen into this interpretation, had I not already read through the original.

[4:45 PM] ...and, as a result of this, even though the text of Shiki's misunderstanding and of Arcueid's reaction thereto is largely the same, the change in context makes it read very differently? In the original, it feels like dramatic irony, Shiki failing to put the pieces in front of him together and thus thinking the plot is resolved even though it isn't yet. Here, though, it feels much more like Shiki reasoning sensibly from the information he's been given, with the result that the misundersatnding ends up feeling far more like a consequence of Arcueid failing to communicate clearly, rather than of Shiki failing to make available inferences.

July 23, 2022

[4:21 PM] Interesting! So apparently, in the remake version of Arcueid's route, Ciel just straight-up got taken off the case after the Vlov fight, with her role in the plot of the original version of the route being filled instead by the various new Church-affiliated figures added in the remake. I won't be able to get to Ciel's route for a while, yet, given its not being translated thus far, but this sure does seem like it'll make her and Arcueid's routes diverge a whole lot more immediately, relative to the awkward coupled-until-a-largeish-chunk-of-the-way-in manner in which the two are structured in the original.

[4:22 PM] (Ciel's route was one of my favorites, in the original, so I'm very much looking forward to the remake-version.)

[4:36 PM] Also: I was really not expecting for the "Shiki finds Arcueid in the alleyway after she almost sucks his blood at the park" scene in the remake to be as similar to the original as it was. Like, sure, things in the original are more explicit / go farther, and the remake-version is somewhat better-written even on axes aside from the "Nasu can't write sex scenes and in the remake he doesn't try" one—there's some sense of thematic parallel between Arcueid and Shiki's respective sequential bouts of Sudden Very-Hard-To-Resist Urge Towards Violence in one another's directions here, for instance, which was nonpresent in the original (at least to the best of my ability to notice) and which I found to make the Shiki-attacks-Arcueid half of the sequence land a whole lot better—but... I was expecting a somewhat-substantial replacement along the lines of e.g. the Fate/stay night Realta Nua sex-scene-replacements, and this was Not That.

[4:47 PM] (I suppose in retrospect I should have seen this coming; after all, the sexual overtones of the initial "Shiki stalks and murders Arcueid" sequence all the way back at the beginning weren't cut out either. But I failed to update properly on that, and thus this still came as something of a surprise. But now I'm updating. I continue to expect that there won't be actual onscreen sex scenes, but I'm no longer expecting them to necessarily be entirely cut out / replaced, as opposed to just sort of made less explicit while otherwise being retained.)

[4:54 PM] (Although the succubus subplot was entirely cut out, so it's not as simple as "everything is going to be kept in approximately-original shape", either.)

[10:04 PM] Day 11 complete! It was Very Good. It's been long enough since I've read the original that I don't remember exactly how it compares with the equivalent part there impact-wise, but I'm very impressed with this version, regardless. Lots of excellent romantic development between Shiki and Arcueid. Plus Ciel making a surprise reappearance, which simultaneously was a moving and impactful scene and also was kind of funny in how much Shiki just sort of Did Not Question this sempai from his school knowing everything about his recent adventures plus a whole bunch about Arcueid's backstory. Very good scene. Very good day. Probably my favorite chunk of the remake thus far.

July 24, 2022

[2:27 PM] Moon Princess ending reached! And thus Arcueid route complete. Just the true ending; insofar as the good ending exists in the remake as it did in the original, there was no mention of said existence in the post-ending Teach Me, Ciel-Sensei! session, and there are only three rather than four ending cards in the endings gallery, so I'm guessing that's it. Which... feels right, to me. The Arcueid true/good ending split never made much sense to me, in the original.

[2:27 PM] I have yet to go back and get all the bad ends I missed and otherwise Do Branch-Exploration; I'm going to do that later this afternoon. But, in the meantime, overall impressions of the route based on this single pass through it:

[2:44 PM] It was good! I liked it a lot. It was not, on the whole, as good as the original was at being the thing the original was, I think. There were individual scenes where it managed to outpace the original, definitely; where the new renditions of the scenes felt like the original thing, but better-crafted / more what-it-was-trying-to-be. As well as some newly-added scenes which felt like they successfully enhanced the tone of the original, like the "Ciel tells Shiki about Arcueid's past next to the crater left by the fight with Vlov" scene. But there were also various scenes and story-elements which felt like they were doing other things, things that the original wasn't doing, and which, through dilution, were sufficient to end up making the route feel somewhat less concentratedly the-thing-the-original-version-was on net. The presence of guests in the Tohno mansion, which reduced the sense of isolation which characterized the place in the original; the Vlov fight, which was a lot more Large-Scale Bombastic Action-shaped than anything from the original; Ciel's replacement with Noel and Mario during the middle parts of the plot, which dampened the impact of her disappearance and subsequent reappearance towards the end; Ciel's interlude just before the final fight with Roa, which was relatively straightforwardly action-y and lacked the sense of Desperate Pursuit Of A Probably-Doomed Happy Ending that the rest of that sequence had; et cetera.

[2:45 PM] ...but, at the same time, while it may not have been as good as the original at being the thing the original was, it still did a very good job of being itself?

[2:47 PM] Overall, then: I enjoyed it, I am very much looking forward to the translation of the next route (and to the release of the subsequent routes), and, while it remains to be seen how I'll ultimately rate it relative to the original (having now confirmed that that rating won't be "superior in every way, does everything the original did but better"), I'm very much expecting to find it good and worthwhile and worth revisiting in the future for its own sake.

[2:50 PM] ...and I am absolutely expecting at least some scenes' Prototypical Images In My Head to be overwritten with the remake-versions. As well as some backstory-explanations. (The remake's exposition-sequences often felt somewhat clearer, in a fashion that I'm not sure whether to attribute to differences in writing or to differences in translation.) So I guess my default imagination of Tsukihime, from here on out, is going to be a sort of weird patchwork of original and remake, rather than purely one or the other; that'll be interesting.

[11:02 PM] Branch-exploration complete! Exactly one unexplored branch remains, on the flowchart (which is a thing that's accessible from the ingame menu, it's so good, I applaud whoever came up with that as an innovation over the "fans need to assemble and pass around our own flowcharts" meta of prior Type-Moon VNs), and that branch is untranslated. So I guess that's it for now! Nothing more remains, pending translation of the next route.

[11:19 PM] A few branches which stuck out to me which I happened to not hit on the first pass: - There are multiple layers of Bonus Dead Apostle Exposition that one can choose between and can't see all of in a single pass through the VN! I managed to miss both of them, the first time through, but even if I hadn't, I'd have been stuck with just one or the other rather than both. Mean. (Although... plausibly warranted from the standpoint of "they add up to solid hour-ish of non-plot-central infodumping", admittedly. The prior mandatory Dead Apostle exposition-round was a bit much even just by itself, so I can understand spacing out the bonus rounds to take place on multiple successive passes, even if in this case I ended up doing them both in sequence anyway.) - The "Shiki goes out to see Arcueid while still weak from his encounter with the clearing behind the Tohno mansion that morning, and ends up falling apart over the subsequent day" dead-end branch was interestingly different and weird, in this version of things. Instead of getting picked up at school by Kohaku only for her to suddenly be gone and Roa to be there and kill him, he gets driven home, runs into Kohaku-in-disguise-as-Hisui at the mansion entrance while his internal monologue grows progressively more deranged, taken into an off-limts hallway of the mansion, and then she's suddenly gone, with his internal monologue and the presence of a Bad End at that point indicating that something kills him off but with no indication as to what? It was interesting in the degree of utter unclarity there was regarding what happened, even moreso than in the original version. Something Kohaku-related, presumably, but I have no solid hypotheses regarding details. - Where the "let's go to that one alleyway in town!" date-branch in the original was a Clear Wrong Choice, here, it starts out seeming like a Wrong Choice but actually ends up somehow being probably the best of the three date-branches? Both on the "Shiki and Arcueid both have a fun time with it" level and on the "contains Interesting Side-Character Stuff" level. It's the only branch in the entirety of Arcueid's route where we get to learn anything about the one purple-haired girl who keeps on showing up in minor roles throughout the early parts of the route and who's almost certainly going to be important in some other route! And apparently her name is Saiki Mio. As in the same family name as Saiki Gouto, who's been generally ominous and who stabbed Shiki to death off in a different dead end. So that seems significant, even if thus far I have nowhere near enough pieces to put what's up with the Saikis together into any sort of coherent picture.

[11:23 PM] (...was Mio somehow involved in the incident with the Loud Dogs In The Nighttime that woke Shiki up? And/or with the thing where, despite Vlov lacking Nrvnqsr's "have more than one animal familiar" superpower, there were still two dogs in the elevator at the head of Vlov's attack on the hotel? Certainly she made some sort of obscure comment about dogs, during the "Shiki runs away from the hotel room and sits in the park debating whether to really go through with abandoning Arcueid" branch. Once again: not nearly enough evidence for me to be confident. But I've got my eye on her, at least.)

[11:53 PM] Also, while I’m at it with the various mysteries left hanging whose answers aren’t clear to me just on the basis of familiarity with the original: - Why, at the start of Day 7, is Shiki in that state of “feverish in a manner that seems mutually-reinforcing with his more-overt-than-normal attraction to Akiha”? There’s no succubus to leave him pre-flustered, this time. But it’s clearly something weird going on beyond his normal health issues and his normal attraction to Akiha, there. - Whose familiar / shapeshifted form / whatever-else-it-might-be is the panther that keeps showing up? Whoever they are, they don’t seem inherently hostile to Shiki; the panther shows up just before he passes out, in the aftermath of his first fight with Roa, and nonetheless he wakes up alive the next day. But they also don’t seem inherently non-hostile to him, because the panther totally does tear his throat out if he ends up killing Arcueid a second time in the alleyway. - What’s up with Shiki’s nighttime jaunt into the hidden attic, on the first night? - What’s up with Shiki’s nighttime jaunt into the one alleyway, on the second night? - What’s up with Shiki’s throat-itchiness, early on? It seems like plausibly Noel’s fault somehow, but details are highly unclear of what plausibly-she did, why, and what its effects are (beyond “be yet another component in the soup of negative mental influences Shiki spends the story stewing in”). - What’s up with the various new characters? (Saiki Gouto, Saiki Mio, Arach, Noel, Mario, the third Church person whose name I forget, Vlov, perhaps a couple more I’m forgetting as well; all seem like they have things going on beyond what’s been revealed thus far.) - What’s the prior time saving Shiki that Ciel alludes to, after saving him from Roa? Was it in fact her, rather than Noel, who cleared the path for him to stab Vlov? Or was there some other occasion that I managed to miss or which happened in Secret Backstory or something?