When we looked at the first story in the Type-Moon visual novels that somehow manages to culminate in both a bathroom-played fighting series AND the world’s most popular non-MiHoYo gacha game last year, I did have to issue a warning about Witch on the Holy Night. Specifically, it was a true visual novel, without any choices to break up the reading portion - over 25 hours and somewhere between 350-400 thousand words. Its followup Tsukihime does offer some choices, but perhaps not enough due to the file size requiring half of the paths to be removed.

Tsukihime is set in an alternate Japan and stars a young high school student named Shiki Tohno, who is the son of a conglomerate CEO expected to take over the business one day. When he was roughly 10 years old, he was involved in an accident of some sort that causes him to be able to see lines on everything that when traced causes inanimate objects to fall apart and living objects to immediately die. Only through the intervention of a young woman who gives Shiki a pair of glasses to block his “Magic Eyes of Death Perception” is he able to remain sane and live with a different family for seven years - as the game opens, he is forced to return to his birth family’s home. The premise only escalates from there, as it appears that a vampire is invading the city where he lives, forcing Shiki to work with supernatural beings and humans in order to save the city.

Red eyes at night, student's delight. Red eyes in morning, students take warning.

The Type-Moon visual novels are known for being visual door stoppers: Witch was about a 40 hour read, and though Tsukihime is a hair shorter to get one good ending, that just means you’re looking at 35 hours to get to one true ending. The choices do mean that there will be some replay value in case you want to see everything, but this Switch release only covers half of the stories of the original game’s path with the endings focusing on one of three female characters in addition to Shiki. The soundtrack has been radically expanded and sounds great, and the graphics are just as high quality as Witch’s remake - no surprise, they’re from the same team. However, a lot of the new graphics are focused on extreme levels of violence: this story gets a ESRB M / PEGI 18 / CERO Z rating and revels in it. One particular instance of Shiki using his powers to kill a supernatural creature gets excessively detailed in both the translated text and in the new graphics, so this is definitely not a game recommended for younger or more squeamish audiences. I could normally do a novel of this length in about two weeks, but it took me more than a month to get to the point where I could write this because of the intensity of the scenes requiring me to take a break for a few days. I can’t recommend it for the storage impaired either: the additional text and graphical quality means it’s a 23GB download, and any sort of physical edition is probably going to require a massive download.

We’re about to see the game that truly put Type-Moon on the map this week as of press time in Fate/Stay Night Remastered, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to jump right into it coming off of Tsukihime. Especially knowing that there’s another set of stories still coming. It’s a long summer’s read, but it may be too intense for some: it certainly was for me.