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Tsukihime
Isn’t it scary, Sacchin: The faulty fandom of side characters (plus added moe BS)
Apr 21st
Premise 1: Tsukihime, one of my personal favorite visual novels – and one I would highly recommend to anyone who wants some real sad girls in stuff, except with stronger characters and hundreds of times more action scenes – is apparently getting a remake of sorts. To use a colloquialism, much bricks were pushed out my rectum.
Premise 2: There has been more than a fair hint that everyone’s favorite no-luck heroine, Satsuki Yumizuka, might finally have her arc and story ending in said remake, mainly because 1) she’s listed as a “heroine” in the scan, 2) there’s not much else to add, and 3) Sacchin fans are probably standing outside Type-Moon headquarters right now with pitchforks right now demanding it. If this is true, I might push out enough bricks to build a house. Not like a apartment, but like a three-story mansion with twenty rooms, all filled with brick furniture and brick technology and brick refrigerators filled with brick food and drink. And, of course, a meido…made of brick. In fact, twin maids.
Needless to say I am a mild fan of Satsuki Yumizuka and being able to see her true ending, hinted at in the spin-off game Melty Blood (which worked things in the typical Nasu way by going off an ending which at the time didn’t exist), would be quite the experience. But I can’t help but feel a bit pensive about this development, in part due to something I’ve been brooding.
It was something I read on a fellow blog, or perhaps on a forum, about the popularity of side characters. Side characters, or at least characters without a defined story, tend to be quite popular, sometimes more popular than some of the main characters. Think of Kanon’s Akiko Minase, the Itsuki / Mayumi comedy duo in Shuffle!, Yukine of Clannad. Or, going outside of the visual novel genre, any of the Lucky Star minor characters, Wilhelmina / Margery / whatever yuri bait from Shana, hell, I even have soft spots for Hamaji (H2O) and Sakura Sae (sola).
But is there any logical basis behind this greater appreciation of characters left out from the big dance? I think there’s definitely a sort of bias going on here, one that might end up dimming the ranks of the Sacchin supporters if such a route ever comes out.
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Twelve Moments in Anime 2007 – #3: Tsukihime Hisui True
Dec 23rd
The “12 Days of Christmas” series is a joint feature by some members of the Anime Blogging Collective recognizing twelve moments, twelve series, or just twelve things about anime that we’ve enjoyed over the past year, that really make us enjoy loving what we do, and that is being an anime fan. Feel free to join in the list-making fun too if you wish. We hope you enjoy this feature.
With all the hype I’ve piled on to the visual novel anime, it’s only fitting that the third step on the podium belong to a visual novel itself.
Although, it’d be – unsuprisingly – wrong to call visual novels and visual novel anime similar. One being animated and one being in mostly still form, the two have to take entirely different approaches to grabbing a viewer’s heart.
Anime can rely entirely on actions, on visuals, on stunning effects. Visual novels, being of the written form, naturally have to actually use words a lot to paint the picture.
It’s different from normal books, as visual novels do get still images, and perhaps more important, mood-setting music, but it’s still tough to get the reader right where you want them.
Which is strange, because in visual novels, the author pretty much leads the reader by the hand. It’s tough to visualize what the author does not describe, to hear what sounds are not made, to find the details not presented. It’s essentially, up to the author to create their world, down to every last detail and foreshadowing. The pictures, here, serve as supplements rather than the main course.
Naturally, visual novels typically have a slower pace as well; you can read at your own speed, pause and put it down anytime, or even go back and read previous scenes. Yeah, the same theory is true for anime, but somehow it seems wrong in a sense to rewind a moving picture, rather than going backwards in a book. There’s a sense of broken continuity, to me.
But for some reason, one of the things that has affected me most in my year of anime, and now, anime-likes, has been a visual novel.
Tsukihime’s a stellar read all around, and I’d have to put Hisui’s True Ending as one of the most powerful moments of it.
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Melty Blood Act Cadenza Sequel Confirmed!
Oct 27th
For a while it was up in the air between the previous news (broken in the preview for the Novemeber issue of Japanese magazine Tougeki Damashii) of a possible sequel to the hit 2D fighter and the consequent removal of the title from the preview page, but now it’s confirmed:
Hot meido-on-unlucky-osananajimi action is back, baby.
Series Review: Lunar Legend Tsukihime
Sep 20th
Visual novel conversions are quite common in the anime world. It makes sense, a lot of the time; the content’s already there, without much need for original work. And the characters typically already pander to the mostly male anime audience; whether it be improbable body shapes, lolicons, or just straight-up moe characters. And there’s already a proven audience; the people who bought the original visual novel and are dying to see it in animated form.
But, for those animation studios who decide to make an anime out of a mostly serious or emotional visual novel, it’s hell on earth. While playing to the lowest common demographic in more ecchi/lighthearted conversions (like, say, the first halves of Shuffle or D.C.) may be easy, making a visual novel with an actual story “work” is very hard.
Why? It’s the simple concept of most visual novels; one guy, many girls. While it’s not always as dirty as it sounds, the framework goes as such and as a result there’s not one canon storyline to work off of.
There may be a main storyline, one heroine who is placed above the others, but still one obviously cannot ignore the other harem members and their stories entirely. And such resides the complexity of visual novel conversions in that a studio has to work to flesh out and unify the story as much as possible without straying too far from the original work, lest the fans be forced to take up their arms (although that seems to happen about anything, eh?).
And that is why Tsukihime is simply one of those visual novels that Does Not Compute into anime form.
Certainly I appreciate the efforts to make an excellent story into an excellent show, but in the end, Lunar Legend Tsukihime falls far short of the mark…even when you give it credit for trying to make a workable story out of things.
(Spoilers for Tsukihime anime and visual novel post-jump.)
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Lunar Legend Tsukihime (1-5) through the eyes of a Tsukihime fan
Sep 6th
What Tsukihime anime? I thought it didn’t exist.
Such is the legendary reputation of the anime Shingetsutan Tsukihime, the incredibly polarizing adaptation of Type-Moon’s hit (or at least, quite good) visual novel Tsukihime. The general consensus is, if you’re seeing the content for the first time – if the anime is your only experience with Tsukihime – then it’s a very good show. But if you’ve played the visual novel to any degree of completion, you’re going to hate it like it’s name was Makoto Itou.
(Incidentally, the reason why we don’t have a School Days 10 post today is because it would be five pages of ranting about how everybody sucks and that there are no more heroes – except maybe Nanami – and that everybody should die, burn, fire, katto katto katto katto, etc or at the least not have a happy ending. An entertaining post maybe but School Days has it’s direction pretty well defined by now, so I don’t need to talk much about it.)
And so, having read the Tsukihime visual novel “cover-to-cover”, finishing all 5 paths and the epilogue, I embarked on possibly the most masochistic quest yet: watching the Tsukihime anime. It would be a true test to see if I could really, really hate an anime.
Going into it I was vaguely familiar with some of the fan community’s bigger gripes about what Lunar Legend Tsukihime got wrong, so I can’t say I was completely shocked by the incorrectness of some things, but seeing it in person is always better and more complete than listening to one person flame about it (hopefully in this post I will just be smoldering) – not to mention, there were still a few minor surprises in store in terms of direction taken.
So. Love? Hate? Love? (I don’t even watch that anime.) As usual, as much as I’d like to take the arugment to some sort the real answer is somewhere in between in that the anime does a lot of things right – one might say passably – but there are some things that hurt (and not so good, either) to watch.
Spoilers on the Tsukihime visual novel follow. Jump, how high, etc.
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