Trivia / Tsukihime

• Adaptation First: Before the VN's remake was announced for an official release in English, the manga and anime adaptations of the original Tsukihime had been localized (although the manga adaptation was Cut Short).
• Bonus Material:
  • Once you've cleared all the routes (and "Eclipse") in the original, it seems like there's nothing more to do... but click the topmost Kanji for the Mirror Moon Staff Room, the thin bar for a series of gags, and the words "TYPE-MOON" along the bottom for more gags.
  • Kagetsu Tohya also has 10 short stories, which are unlockable through doing certain actions during the game. Three of these are non canon, but the others are used for world building including one that is actually the epilogue to Akiha's better ending.
• Content Leak: The trophies for Melty Blood: Type Lumina went live a few hours before A piece of blue glass moon's release and spoiled Noel being part of the Church in its icons.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Mario is voiced by Ayane Sakura.
• Doing It for the Art: Though Witch on the Holy Night is famously one of the most visually pleasing visual novels ever made, the intense production took a toll on art director Hirokazu Koyama, so the remake's art team was mandated with creating less detailed artwork for the sake of people's health. The art team forgot this mandate as they got caught up in work and went all in anyway for the remake.
• DVD Commentary: Pre-ordered copies of -A piece of blue glass moon- came with a booklet that has Nasu's commentary from 2011 for playing through the original version of Tsukihime, specifically Arcueid's route, and his thoughts on the game overall looking back on it years after its release.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: The remake was announced in 2008, but making Witch on the Holy Night was the bigger priority, so it took until 2012 to confirm that the remake was in production... only for Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] and especially Fate/Grand Order in 2014 to take up more time than expected with the latter requiring any non Grand Order production to be halted indefinitely during its launch period. It would take Grand Order being stable around 2017 to bring the remake out of hiatus and start work again, with making it the highest priority so other projects wouldn't delay it yet again, finally seeing release in 2021.
• Inspiration for the Work: The author of Higurashi: When They Cry was inspired by this and visual novels published by Key (such as Kanon). Specifically, he decided that what made those works popular was how they started out happy and ordinary, only for something horrifying and tragic to happen.
• Late Export for You: The original visual novel has never been officially localized, with the A piece of blue glass moon remake being announced to arrive in the West in 2024, marking two decades between its original release and an official English version. The remake itself was released in 2021 and is only slated for release in the West three years afterward.
• Meaningful Release Date: The remake was officially announced on December 31, 2020, two days after the twentieth anniversary of the original visual novel's release date.
• No Export for You: The original visual novel has not been officially licensed and translated in any other language.
• The Original Darrin: Miyu Matsuki, who voiced Hisui since Melty Blood, succumbed to lymphoma on October 27, 2015. As a result, the role of Hisui returned to Yumi Kakazu, who voiced her in the anime adaptation of Tsukihime, albeit in the form of Magical Sapphire beginning with the fourth season of Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA.
• The Other Darrin: The anime's voice cast is entirely replaced by that of Melty Blood for succeeding appearances. And the 2021 remake replaces the cast again.
• Production Nickname: To differentiate the remake from the original, it was referred to internally by Type-Moon employees as Tsukihime "R"(emake).
• Referenced by...:
  • Chie Rumiko from Higurashi: When They Cry is confirmed to be an expy of Ciel.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York features an NPC named "Princess" who looks and dresses identically to Arcueid and threatens a player in a way similar to describing her "Marble Phantasm" ability.
• Saved from Development Hell: The remake was announced in 2008 and for over a decade, all fans knew was that it was being worked on concurrently with Fate/Grand Order. With only concept art released in the first half of the 2010s, it had seemed like Tsukihime was abandoned in the second half as news pretty much came to a halt. However, it made a comeback on New Year's Eve 2020 with the announcement A piece of blue glass moon would be coming out the next year and finally did so on August 26, 2021.
• Shrug of God: Supposedly, a request to describe Altrouge's appearance was declined because "it's more interesting that way!"
• Sleeper Hit: A piece of blue glass moon is this as far as Nasu is concerned - according to this interview with Japanese gaming site 4gamer, he was expecting 100,000 units (physical and digital) sold in a year... and ended up getting 200,000 units sold in 2 weeks (240,000 for the month), making it a spectacular success in VN terms.
• Troubled Production: The Tsukihime remake took long in the making, rumored and vaguely hinted at for years (since Type-Moon had money after F/SN and wanted to go back and clean up the rough bits), and finally got officially announced at the end of the manga adaptation in 2008... and aside from occasional updates promptly disappeared into deep Development Hell again, especially once the wider Fate 'verse picked up steam and became a genuine media juggernaut. It was confirmed in a release day interview that they had actually started development on it after releasing Witch on the Holy Night in 2012, only for a year later to have to completely halt everything in 2013 for Fate/Grand Order, and by 2017, they essentially decided to start development from scratch to produce the game that actually made it to storefronts. It was also noted that the visual team extended development time significantly by going all in on the CGs and graphics. By the end of 2020, A piece of blue glass moon was finally given the release window of Summer 2021 and it came out on August 26 that year.
• Vaporware: Tsukihime 2: The Dark Six. It got a No Fourth Wall trailer alongside the release of Kagetsu Tohya and TM posted three prologue chapters which have floated around the internet forever. And then Nasu & co. decided they wanted to make a different, simple little action VN for their first commercial product, both because they just liked the concept of it, noticed fans liked Tsukihime's action sequences and wanted to give fans more of that, and because they wanted to expand on some worldbuilding that would be handy for TDS (specifically the idea of the Counter Force and Counter Guardians, who are similar to Servants), and once that was done, they'd get right back to Tsukihime. Needless to say, after Fate/stay night's explosive success, there has been no real discussion of Tsukihime 2 since 2004.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Satsuki was originally supposed to be one of the main Tsukihime heroines with her own route. This was removed at the last minute and she simply became a minor character. Isn't... it... sad? One of the big supposed thrusts of the remake is that it would finally restore this route, and after years of silence, it seemed this promise had no bearing… and then it would be confirmed at the end of the remake's Near Side Routes that her route would indeed be coming! Isn't… it… great?
  • Nrvnqsr Chaos was not meant to be in the original scenario, but Takeuchi insisted on including another enemy for Shiki to fight besides Roa to add more to the first half of the Near Side story and Nasu eventually relented.
  • The sequel would have explained that the accidental Magus ritual incident in the 1970s that was responsible for the depletion of mana in the Fate/EXTRA universe was the Aylesbury Valesti ritual, which was the Dead Apostle Ancestors attempting to revive the Dark Six. This happened earlier in the Fate/EXTRA timeline while it was supposed to happen during Tsukihime II in the Tsukihime timelines and would have been seen. Despite this being planned and still considered even somewhat canon, later works in the EXTRA setting completely retconned this out and made it a combination of the Harwey family's ritual and the White Titan during the Age of Gods causing the decline of magic.
  • The reveal trailer for the remake was meant to be released in February or March 2021, but Type-Moon saw that the fans were celebrating its 20th anniversary and decided to Throw the Dog a Bone.
  • Takeuchi wanted to release the remake on PC, but out of preference and nostalgia, Nasu convinced him that they only needed to release it on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Though later Nasu stated that if it was released on PC, a translated version would pretty much be a must and even if you were to only translate it to English and Chinese, both translating it and formatting the text would be too large of a task for them to ask for.

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