The classic April Fool’s joke as old as time is now our reality—here in the West we’re finally able to play not only Tsukihime officially in English but also Witch on the Holy Night (Mahoyo). It’s a dream come true for many visual novel fans to not only have one Type-Moon visual novel officially released in English, but for multiple to be available after years of pleading.
The version of Tsukihime you can now buy from Walmart is the recent 2021 remake of the original game, removing the erotic content and updating the artwork and story, making it feel fresh again. But this remake wouldn’t exist in the capacity it does now without the prior work, Mahoyo. Today, I want to look at the visual direction similarities and differences between these 2 stunningly cinematic visual novels.
This will be a mostly spoiler-free article, but I will be talking about the general premise of both stories. If you’re a fan of modern fantasy stories with magic and such, try them both out! You can even play Mahoyo on Steam.
some context
Tsukihime was originally an eroge released in 2003 as a doujin game (indie game) by Type-Moon. After the success of Fate/Stay night, they announced a remake of Tsukihime in 2008. This announcement then became the primary meme (aside from FSN being localized) for….oh, about a decade afterwards, as there was basically no updates. Eventually though, Tsukihime’s remake, now titled Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- redebuted and eventually released to massive sales in Japan in 2021.
Mahoyo / Mahōtsukai no Yoru / Witch on the Holy Night was an old script penned by Kinoko Nasu, the co-founder of Type-Moon, that was later adapted into a visual novel in 2012. In April 2022, almost out of the blue, it was announced that Aniplex would be localizing the remastered version of Mahoyo, marking it as the first ever Type-Moon visual novel the be localized for the West (not including other Type-Moon projects such as Fate/Grand Order, Fate/Extella, etc.). Despite Aniplex’s many attempts to sink Mahoyo, it sold well enough on consoles in America to later get a Steam release in December 2023 (that also sold very well).
Unlike Fate/Stay night or Tsukihime, Mahoyo’s original release was a linear visual novel and not focused on romance but rather a slice-of-life story about mages finding their place in the modern-ish era. Despite it objectively being the lesser known visual novel of the main 3 that Type-Moon developed, it had a cult following outside of Japan for its cinematography and use of visuals. Even when I was in college, I heard hushed rumors of how it was “like watching an anime”.
Most likely due to the success of Mahoyo in the West, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- (hereafter referred to as TsukiRe [Tsukihime remake]) was announced to receive a localization as well. And with that, we now have 2 Type-Moon visual novels readily available in English.
However, this isn’t the only influence Mahoyo had on TsukiRe. The much more noticeable influence is in its direction, as both visual novels have striking scene direction that accentuate the writing and storytelling in both.
Mahoyo’s direction
Mahoyo is a linear visual novel not focused on romance, but one core aspect that sets it apart from Tsukihime and FSN is that there is no sole main character. Rather, the story is told in 3rd person, mostly following the young mage Aoko Aozaki but frequently swapping to scenes with the other characters.
Mahoyo doesn’t frame the story through the lens of one character, but instead frames the narrative around the story as a whole. With the 3rd person perspective, the writing is able to note thoughts, biases, and more from each of the characters in a scene if it wants to, rather than being tied to the perspective character. But this 3rd person perspective is also reflected in the scene direction.
According to Nasu, with Mahoutsukai no Yoru, they aimed for a movie-like third person perspective, with things like scenes without the protagonist and expressions of the atmosphere[.] Frontline Gaming Japan‘s translation of a Weekly Famitsu interview from 2021
Because of this 3rd person perspective, the camera is framed very differently than their other works. What the player sees is meant to be the scene as it’s happening, focusing on the more relevant parts.
We get to see different views of the scene as if we’re over Aoko’s shoulder, or peeking over a fence, or watching from afar. We’re not seeing things from the eyes of one person, but rather from an omniscient perspective.
This bird’s eye view for the game allows for some fantastic shots and cinematography that otherwise wouldn’t make sense if the direction was done from the eyes of one of the characters in each scene. Mahoyo is directed in a way that lets us see exactly what we need—or what they want us—to see because it isn’t limited to 1st person perspective and has designed itself around that.
A majority of the time the story is more slow-paced slice-of-life, accentuated by the direction giving sweeping visuals, slow fades, and long establishing shots. When it’s time for fighting, though, the action scenes are vividly illustrated, showcasing a variety of visuals in fast-paced succession.
Tsukihime Remake’s direction
Tsukihime was originally an eroge visual novel where you go down multiple paths with each heroine from the perspective of the mostly faceless protagonist, Shiki Tohno. It was more common for romance visual novels to have the MC be “faceless” to let players self-insert into back then, leaving them not be shown for a majority of the game (nowadays, the popular self-insert romance VNs are all about highly customizable characters that don’t show up much but are more geared towards personalizing).
Because Tsukihime was through Shiki’s 1st person perspective, the visual novel was shown from his POV, albeit with limited camera usage that was common for the time. We saw Japan through Shiki’s unreliable mystic eyes, unsure of exactly how much of the narrative was real and how much was a delusion.
Mahoyo had already been announced by the time TsukiRe was announced in 2008, but development on TsukiRe did not fully begin until after Mahoyo released in 2012 after several delays.
Work [on TsukiRe] actually began after the release of Mahoutsukai no Yoru in 2012. Nasu and Takeuchi each replayed the original version of Tsukihime, wrote down what they wanted to do with the remake, then had a boot camp together where they banged their heads together about it. Work began immediately after that, but then the Fate/Grand Order project started and they became unable to work on Tsukihime.
Frontline Gaming Japan
This is very apparent in how TsukiRe handles… well, everything. It keeps the old format of sticking to Shiki’s perspective but combines that with Mahoyo’s detailed scene direction to create an intense action thriller. We still get to see Shiki in some of the CGs, but the majority of the story is through his eyes.
(aside from the whiteboard prop, all 3 of these screenshots are character sprites!)
Sticking to the 1st person perspective is clearly limiting in some ways but also allows for different scenes to happen—we can’t easily get bird’s eye view of scenes but we can get more romantic (or sinister) close-ups of characters, zoomed in shots of exactly what Shiki is looking at, a detailed example of Shiki’s thought process, and more.
When designing this remake, they really tried to blend aspects of the original game with this detailed direction style. However, with TsukiRe being much longer than Mahoyo, “from an early stage they decided on prioritizing player satisfaction over total quality” (2021). As they explain later in the interview, that meant focusing on quantity over quality for artwork. The artwork in TsukiRe is by no means sloppy, but the idea was to make fewer artworks of extreme detail and instead make more smaller artworks.
This approach resulted in more smaller pieces of artwork and character poses in TsukiRe, further fleshing out the world and character expressions—in a way, this is how expressive Shiki views everyone around him.
TsukiRe does not have as many immediately noticeable large-scale artworks like Mahoyo, nor is it capable of some of the more dynamic 3rd person shots in Mahoyo, but that doesn’t mean that TsukiRe’s is subpar to Mahoyo—it’s just taking a direction philosophy and adjusting that for a different story. We’re seeing Shiki’s view and thoughts in the story rather than the story as a whole.
With the Tsukihime remake, they decided on focusing on quantity over quality for the art, with less details in each piece but more pieces altogether, but when they actually started work on it Koyama and the graphics team ended up going all-out anyway[.] Frontline Gaming Japan
While there had to be some reworking with this direction style to make the leap from 3rd person to 1st person, they really made the most out of it in my opinion. Shiki is not a reliable narrator, with part of the initial horror being him struggling to understand if his impulse to kill is real or not. With this enhanced 1st person scene direction, it makes the horror and Shiki’s unreliableness front and center.
(trying to keep from showing the bloody & gory screenshots)
Mahoyo or Tsukihime remake?
Mahoyo and TsukiRe are directed with the same “cinema-like” philosophy but go about it in different ways to better compliment the perspective and overall goal of the story they’re telling. I don’t believe either take on this direction style is better or worse than the other, rather I see them both as 2 sides of the same coin executed in ways they felt would better compliment the stories.
Mahoyo uses its 3rd person narrative and sweeping locations to set us in an almost fairytale-like world, while TsukiRe uses its 1st person narrative to ground us in a romance while heightening the action and horror Shiki finds himself in.
It’s thanks to Tsukihime’s initial success decades ago that we have Mahoyo, and it’s thanks to Mahoyo’s release and subsequent success in the west that we have Tsukihime remake now. Both are great examples of how cinematic visual novels can be and how thoughtful art & scene direction can enhance the overall experience.
can you do this?
Not many visual novel developers can replicate this intense and costly kind of scene direction, but I think it’s still worth noting. Art direction doesn’t stop at character designs and backgrounds—it’s in the GUI, the scene composition, the mood of the setting, and more. Mindful art direction can turn a good visual novel into a great visual novel.
Scene direction is one aspect of that. How can you convey the proper mood of a scene with what you have? How can you use the visuals to accentuate the writing? Where can we blend the visuals and the novel better?
Copying the scene direction style of Mahoyo & TsukiRe (such as the massive use of dutch angles) isn’t the goal here—rather, giving you a better idea of ways you can structure your own scenes and being more mindful of visual direction.
I’ve been playing through Tsukihime’s remake and have really enjoyed the scene direction in it. Mahoyo’s direction really inspired me when I first played it and made me rethink how I view scene composition, both while writing and scripting. I even completely rescripted one of my demos after reading it.
The key part to taking inspiration from these kind of things is to show it’s an inspiration rather than taking the entire thing for yourself. With my own direction, I use a lot of cut-ins and mix in NVL mode in my ADV visual novels. I like cut-ins (like in Canvas Menagerie) because it’s a visually interesting way to highlight certain parts of a scene/character or show something that’s not easy to show with the current scene set up (like a phone call).
At the end of the day, my point is….. read more visual novels!!
Now I’m going back to reread Umineko.
— Arimia