Media in Review: Tsukihime - A piece of blue glass moon
It's hard to know what to say about A piece of blue glass moon, because it occupies a very weird state of completion. The "half-complete remake" idea inevitably draws comparisons to something like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but I don't think that's quite right - 7R is explicitly a small chunk of the game that's been expanded and polished to a mirror sheen, which is not an incorrect way of looking at TsukiR, but there's more nuance to the way Type-Moon has gone about it. It's more like if 7R had the entirety of Final Fantasy 7's plot, but you could only have Barret and Tifa as party members. If you wanted to learn about Aerith, Yuffie, or anyone else and see what happens to them, you would have to wait and play 7 Rebirth instead. This is not to take away from the craftsmanship on display here - the music is fantastic, the game is gorgeous, and the stories told on Arc and Ciel's routes are both well-done and complete for what they are. It's just a lot more obvious that something is missing when you have the full story in front of you.
TsukiR covers two of the original game's five routes: the vampire princess Arcueid and the church executor Ciel. Finish Arc's route to unlock Ciel, and finish Ciel's route to unlock a longer-than-expected true ending with a teaser for the remaining three routes. As I understand it, Arc's route is largely intact from the original; it's a little bit shorter than I expected it to be, but Arc herself is a bit of a whirlwind so I suppose that tracks. Ciel, on the other hand, has had drastic rewrites. I've never played the original or Melty Blood, so I have no context for what's been changed, but I've seen it mentioned that up to 90% of her route was redone from the original and it certainly feels fuller. Arc is still important to the overall story, of course, but outside of showing up for the occasional catfight with Ciel, she's more or less relegated to a background character. In fact, if you told me Ciel was the actual, real main character of the game, I probably wouldn't argue with you. Certainly, her route is longer, more involved, and actually has a complete, happy ending for what that's worth.
Once the game locks you into a route, everything is mostly smooth sailing, but the seams are most obvious in the opening parts of the game. Multiple characters show up for a scene or two and then vanish, never to be seen again (because they're part of the Far Side routes), and there are huge, unanswered questions about the role of the mansion and its previous inhabitants in the events of the story happening now. Presumably these are filled in on Akiha's route, but who knows when that will be released? "Well I guess I'll get some answers about this eventually???" is generally not the feeling you want someone to have when they wrap up the story, and I'm no stranger to "actually this game is only half the full story" (don't ask me how often Trails pulls this shit). What makes TsukiR's particular implementation of this hurt more is that it was adapting a complete game, and now it has a bunch of vestigal characters and plot points that are foreshadowing for content that literally does not exist in the game.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the game, I absolutely did. I didn't like it as much as Witch on the Holy Night, but that's a game with a vastly different structure and cast. Maybe once the other half is released, I'll come around on it, but for now, it's hard to give it any grade other than "incomplete." But damn, what a pretty, well-produced half a game it is.