Shingetsutan Tsukihime

Story & Characters

Tsukihime is a tale of a high school boy, Shiki Tohno, with the Gaze of Death and his encounters with a vampire princess named Arcueid Brunestud. Shiki is not your ordinary school boy. He is quite frail and often passes out. He also has the ability to see the world as a series of lines. By cutting along those lines, he can destroy anything, from humans to buildings. Shiki had been living with his uncle for the past 8 years since an accident caused a major falling out between him and his father. His father recently passed away, so his sister, Akiha, invited him to return to the Tohno estate. The day after he moved in, Shiki was walking home from school and was suddenly compelled to kill a blonde haired woman. Fortunately, that girl was not an ordinary human, but a vampire princess named Arcueid Brunestud. Using her abilities, Arc was able to revive herself and set her sights on acquiring Shiki's abilities for her own cause. There has been a string of serial murders in Shiki's city recently. All victims had fang marks and their blood drained. Arc explains that these murders are caused by Proselyte vampires lurking in the shadows of the city. There are two types of vampires, the Primordials and the Proselytes. Primordials are almost a part of nature itself, similar to spirits. Proselytes are humans that had their blood sucked by Primordials. They're the typical vampires people think of. Primordials like herself don't need blood to survive. However, some suck blood for their enjoyment and that's how Proselytes were born. Arc hunts Proselytes and Shiki now has a duty to aid her.

Review

Tsukihime is a rather short (12 episodes) anime adaptation of the TYPE-MOON doujin eroge of the same name. Given the type of fanbase that TYPE-MOON has, I was actually quite eager to watch Tsukihime, in spite of the slow burn of the Fate/Stay Night anime adaptation, and the warnings about how disappointing Tsukihime was.

Tsukihime tells about young Shiki Tohno, who has th

e ability to see lines. Yeah, I can see lines too, but the lines that Shiki sees represent the life of the object (I believe he has Shinigami eyes), and give him the ability to just obliterate things with a few precise cuts from his knife, Nanatsuya. One day, he has this sudden urge to completely cut down a beautiful blonde for having way too many vowels in her name, and this is the beginning of a deep and loving relationship with the vampire (Shinso) princess, Arcueid Brunestud. Fortunately she survives getting cut to

pieces, and enlists Shiki in her hunt for Roa.

The way I figured, the characters in Fate/Stay Night were pretty interesting, and the premise behind Tsukihime sounded intriguing, so how bad could this 12-episode be?

Boy was I wrong. Tsukihime is incredibly boring from start to finish, and I was just dying on the inside as I marathoned the series. The only part I remember being exciting was the knife fight between Shiki and Roa, simply because you so rarely see knife fights, and they really captured the desparation of the battle (since even a slight cut could

obliterate the victim). I can’t explain it, but I almost feel like just reading a text/novel version of the story would have been better than the drawn-out way the story was animated. Not even marathoning could save it.

And then the characters! I took this part for granted, thinking for sure they’d be awesome, but by and large, they totally sucked! While I can appreciate that they gave Arcueid and Nrvnqsr names that represented the timeless battle between vowels and consonants, the vampires were very boring, and seemed quite weak. Essentially, they

were just very difficult to kill. But as bad as the vampires were, Shiki’s harem was so much worse. Ciel’s character was so damn absurd, and this Clark Kent method of hiding your identity/power with glasses simply has to stop. Even Shiki with his thickass glasses could tell who she was. There is also Shiki’s bitchy sister, and his twin meido, and while everyone is supposed to be mysterious, they all come across as boring and poorly developed.

This is not to say that Tsukihime is all bad. The music is at times quite good, and the ending was acceptable. I was even a little saddened. I also thought that the romance between Arcueid and Shiki was decent; although how she could love him is beyond me. I mean, how could you ever win an argument against a crazy dude who can slice you to pieces on a whim? This, of course, brings me to my next point: the one thing I enjoyed about Tsukihime is how incredibly easy it is to mock. Just Shiki’s ability and that annoying blurry-cam effect alone had me snickering throughout the series (don’t even get me started on the psycho chibi-knifing flashbacks).

Overall, Shingetsutan Tsukihime (the anime series) is boring and tedious, in a way that will make you wonder how it can seem so drawn-out in so few episodes.