Tsukihime is.... well, basically, a vampire anime. Which is why this review is somewhat odd, because I hate vampire shows. (Vampires are one of the few creatures that give me the screaming creeps) This series, however, while somewhat scary is... impressive.
So, a little bit of info. Tsukihime is a 13 episode anime, based on a hentai doujin game of the same name. (No, I haven't played the game, but I have read most of the info, so I might put some in....) The artwork on this series is incredibly beautiful, and hyper realistic. (I'll add some screens later) The music is very haunting, lots of string choruses and some piano music.
The series, so far, is chilling in that Twilight Zone fashion. Even when there's nothing there, you just have those chills up your spine. It's full of Gothic elements, the big old house, the quiet mistress. The school where the protagonist, Shiki, goes is... dead. I don't mean all the students are dead, but it's a very septic place, quiet, and just lifeless. Most of the places they show so far are almost completely deserted.
The series gives a feeling of normality and evil invading normality, and at the same time... it feels very different from normality, just due to it's Gothic overtones.
Story so far: (This is what I like about doing a review part way through, it's not really spoilers.)
Shiki, a high school student, got into an accident when he was younger. Due to this, he can see lines in things. If he cuts the lines, the thing dies. (He demonstrates a couple times, and the things just.... collapse) You could almost call them the thing's lines of fate, I suppose. This is, apparantly, called having the "Demon Eyes of Death." Thus, he wears magical glasses, which hide the lines.
His father dies, so he moves back into the family's house with his sister. The house is a cold place, somewhat foreboding. On his first night, on his way out to buy some magazines, (violating his 7 PM curfew, I might add) a man falls on him, a man who is dead from a vampire bite. At the same time, he's attacked by a girl who looks like a friend of his from school, who is using this weapon that looks like a long claw...
But things get even weirder the next day. Shiki sees this girl in a park, and has this very realistic dream of killing her instantly, by cutting her into pieces (The glasses fell off.) But when he wakes up, there's no one there. He dismisses it as a crazy dream (Most people have one or two of them in their life, supposedly, according to some fact thing somewhere) until the girl shows up in the park the next day, alive and well, asking him why he'd cut her into pieces. Yes, that's right... Alive and Well, AFTER being cut into pieces.
And it's from here that the series starts to descend into the world of terror, with the "True" Vampires, who apparantly don't need human blood, though they seem to have an irrepressible lust for it, that they must fight all their lives, because if they give in, they turn into the other side, the "False" Vampires, or "Disciples of the Damned", is the term I believe the game used....
Rating so far:
Art: 10/10
Music: 8/10 (Not awe-inspiring, but fitting)
Story: 10/10 (unusual. Very different from Hellsing, or other vampire series)
Characters: 6/10 (Not all that impressed, but they're fitting. Some are very cliche)
Overall: 8.4 (Not bad, not the best I've ever seen.)
I'll conclude, as always with a fitiing quote. Today's is from Robert Jordan
Blood Calls Blood, Blood Draws Blood, Blood Is, Blood Was, Blood Shall Ever Be.
I think that fits the vampire theme pretty well....
Written 3/12/2005
I am having bad luck at finding series with endings that I like.
This one is no exception. I wasn't all that impressed.
SPOILER ALERT
This is the stuff about the ending of the series, so it's gonna be all spoilers. There's also going to be some stuff taken from the game, which is 18+.
Spoiler Alert
Well, at the beginning we find out about Shiki's ability with the cutting things, right? Well, the only time he uses it, after the third episode, is to stick the knife into a walkway floor and collapse the walkway. That's it. The girl, Arcuied dies, and all the does is crack the walkway. He doesn't even get to kill the guy who murdered her.
There were also a lot of things that weren't explained in the anime that were in the game. One of them I felt really took away from the series. In the beginning, one of the girls that was Shiki's friend was in the hotel the vampire attacked. Then, she just reappears. In the game, it turned out she'd actually been made into a vampire, but they didn't exploit this at all in the anime. I felt there were a couple places where whipping this out could have totally changed the anime, for the better.
Also, they don't cover the fact that the master of the house was murdered by the vampire Shiki (yes, that's right, there's two Shiki's.) But, VampShiki said he didn't kill his father of his own accord, he was ordered to. In the game, we find out: the maid, Kohaku, orders him to, because the master had raped her when she was 10, because that was the only way to access her power that would supress the Tohno's bloodline.
In addition, there were a few other things I felt could have been done to better exploit some of the plot things. But in the end, they "fixed" most of the plots holes by killing most of the main characters. I hate series that try to do that.
There were also holes about things like... Why did Akiha let out the vampire Shiki? How is Ciel alive if she's not Roa's container (the game answers this, as well), and pretty much all of Roa's past. (again, covered in the game) Namely, while the atmosphere was quite good, and what they did do was good, they could easily have added 3 or 4 episodes without taking anything away.
I used to have screen shots of this series, but I can't find them, so you'll hace to make do with these two:
Have you seen this series?
Did you like it?
