Thread by @KaibutsuKantoku

It turns out I really don't have the patience to read interviews unless I'm translating or commentating them, so here's a superfluous thread for the Tsukihime 4gamer interview. If I take any long pauses, it's because my city's internet cables are literally on fire right now.

Source link: 4gamer.net/games/546/G054…

The interviewer is Suge and the interview was held on the 8th, so at the time, Nasu still hadn't read detailed reviews on the game, thanks to the spoiler grace period.

The game was a bigger financial success than expected, with Nasu hoping for 100k, while the game is currently at 240k.

FGO naturally contributed a lot to popularize the brand. Nasu thought of that style of visual novel as something only one every 10 console owners would care about, but Tsukihime really pushed over that boundary thanks to what TM built up before it.

Tsukihime attracted many younger fans who weren't used to this 90's style of game, so many of the spoilered tweets Nasu read were these kids impressed how much content a single heroine can have.

Every heroine getting her own route is something of an outdated format nowadays, so it makes the game stand out for younger readers. That said, Nasu believes TsukiR's audience is still 60% older readers.

Suge asks about TsukiR’s 13 years of development hell. Nasu explains how he started the project in 2008 because Tsukihime had a lot of shameful elements he wanted to get rid of.

Namely, there’s a lot that wasn’t done due to a “we’re a lot budget doujin, we don’t need to go that far” mentality. He wanted to release the game in a commercial level of quality like Fate/stay Night was.

Takeuchi was working on the game’s sprites since 2008, as he wasn’t working on Mahoyo. The text up the Ciel Route was complete in 2012. Everything was set for a 2014 release until Aniplex invited Nasu to make a mobile game.

The team would still need 3 more years (they actually needed 4) to make all the illustrations, so Nasu thought it was ok to work on FGO for 2 years while he waited.
Spoilers: FGO's production didn't last just 2 years.

The FGO hell kept Nasu and Takeuchi away from Tsukihime from the end of 2013 to the end of 2017. The illustrator team was still working on it while they weren't looking though.

But of course, the game's visual team also made assets for FGO as a breather from their Tsukihime work. Every artist working for too long on the same things needs to take a break to draw something else or else they'll go insane.

The end of 2017 was the breaking point where Nasu acknowledge the remake was taking forever and starting rearranging his schedule to work more on it. Summer 2020 was when he shifted his full attention to Tsukihime.

Discounting all the hiatuses, Tsukihime - a piece of blue glass moon - took 2 years to write and 5 years to produce (visuals, programming, voice acting, etc).

Tsukihime is set in 2014 because that's the year the remake started being produced for real. A time where 80% of the population had cell phones and their place in the social structure was already settled. Though Shiki is not a phone person.

Suge comments that Shiki's indifferent reaction to having his phone confiscated felt really strange nowadays. The city was also changed because Misaki was a suburb and Nasu wanted Tsukihime to be on a metropolis to make the case less personal and more about society.

Suge questions Aoko's age since it's been 3 decades since Mahoyo and Nasu has to explain again that Aoko doesn't age past 20.

Nrvnqsr was replaced because he was an un-vampire-like vampire created for the sake of originality, but now that these weird vampires are much more commonplace, Nasu wanted to counter the trend by creating a really old-school vampire. Go full gothic horror.

Vlov even gets this scene just to show how unabashed Nasu is being about following the archetypes set by Dracula. Nrvnqsr is also gone because upon a closer look, he was too strong to be the first boss in the series.

Vlov stands as a big downgrade over Nrvnqsr but still an enemy an ordinary person can't hope to match. Him being weaker but still this disastrous is important to show how easily humans can die.

The Vlov fight was always intended to have this much more of a blockbuster tone over the Nrvnqsr fight, and Fukasawa's amazingly gothic horror tracks contributed a lot to that.

The damage to the city was that intense because Nasu believes the old Tsukihime's standard of fights happening in full secrecy is out of fashion. Disasters are coming to the news all the time these days, and fiction needs to reflect that. Things can't feel distant to society.

That's what Nasu meant here. The problems are affecting society, not individuals. That's also why we're seeing the people who have to clean it up (Mario, Karius, and Andou).

https://twitter.com/KaibutsuKantoku/status/1442563616662867971

Suge mentions the infamous Throwing/Sliding/Pulling meme. Nasu explains that this choice is intentionally obtuse because he wanted the player to have at least one death at that checkpoint. It's everyone's best chance to get introduced to the Teach Me, Ciel Sensei!

Nasu wanted the choices to be timed but dropped the idea. What we got was enough to convey to the player that Shiki (or Shirou in FsN) won here but would have lost if he had made any other less optimal decision.

Arcueid's anti-heat dress was an idea Takeuchi proposed because the fight in her route was too lame compared to the fight in Ciel's route. Arcueid fights by adapting to the enemy, so Take made 8 dresses to change mid-battle, but Nasu thought that was too much and stuck to one.

Arcueid's date outfit was another case of Nasu rewriting a scene to answer Takeuchi's demands. He's the one who thought she had to wear something special there.

Ciel's new route is practically a whole new route, but Arcueid's route was well-beloved enough, so Nasu limited himself to just expanding it, replacing the Nrvnqsrs and fixing his own immaturities. He didn't want anything there to deviate from the original themes.

Nasu's focus on that new route was just making Arcueid cute and perfect.

The old Arcueid was a naive older girl, but with the refined sprites, she feels more like a girl Shiki's age. She's now more properly emphasized as the source of happiness that our nihilistic boy Shiki needs to get over himself to pursue.

The scene where Shiki sees Arc has no lines of death is really important. Tsukihime had to cut half of its storyboarded CGs for release (and still turned out a game choke-full of CGs) and this scene was one CG Nasu had to fight with the art team to keep in the game.

Nasu thinks the new voice cast is on par with the Melty/CarPhan one. Nasu did his best to make waifus people would obsess over for 10 years, and hearing them voiced made him feel like he went too far. He thinks Arcueid got the best voice, although her previous VA was also 10/10.

Keeping the 17 Pieces scene as violent as it got was a necessary aspect to make the player convinced of Shiki's regret and atonement, so Nasu took the CERO Z-rating, lowering the sales because he couldn't afford any compromise for that scene.

Suge thought the new Shiki felt a little more cheerful than the old one, but Nasu corrects him saying that the new Shiki is actually less cheerful. But both now and then he presents himself as a cheerful boy, with his fears and pessimism being hidden in his inner monologue.

The bed monologues are where Shiki's negativity is at its peak, as Shiki is always afraid he'll never wake up. He feels that kind of anxiety that comes with turning off a really old computer.

Shiki's nihilism comes in the form of being detached from his own death. It's not his problem, because he couldn't cope with it being. That's one thing that makes his character different from his old version.

That new scene with Shiki explaining to Arihiko why he respects Satsuki so much is the best place to see what changed in Shiki's essence for the remake.

The Roa fight was kept the Japanese horror essentials of the original (when you see it, it's already over), but it's also more sprinkled with foreshadowing that we readers still can't understand.

There is a secret meaning in Shiki being able to kill Roa's legs by killing the entire hallway he's in. This will be answered when "Why does Arcueid's route have only one ending?" is answered.

The Ciel route was completely reworked because Nasu replayed the old Ciel route and thought it sucked. The new route has 2 key concepts. Detailing the Church parts to expand the world, and detailing Ciel's past to improve the victim-aggressor relationships.

Mario is one major character who is there to inform the player about the Church's background. The old Tsukihime couldn't have characters unrelated to the story, but Mario was allowed here because players now can accept Tsukihime as a part of a bigger whole.

In 2010, Nasu wrote a timetable for the Church's history, similar to the timetable for the Mage's Association history posted in the Case Files materials, in order to delve deeper into the Church's lore.

Before this timetable could see the light of day, FGO and Case Files suddenly showed up and delved deeper into the Mage's Association, so Nasu had to rewrite the timetable from the MA's perspective and let Sanda publish it in his materials book.

Nasu is now finally being able to show designs and lore he came up with 10 years ago. Nasu apologizes to his illustrators for the long wait on the still unrevealed designs.

The Seventh Holy Scripture got like that in the remake to reproduce the surprise factor of the original, when it's revealed that the thing Ciel kept calling a scripture was actually a weapon.

At this point, Nasu still could show the Seventh Scripture fully operating as a tank, but we at least got a good glimpse at all the weapons it's loaded with.

The point of Ciel vs Vlov is to show how awe-inspiring it is to see a specialist from the Burial Agency fighting an Ancestor, even if it's just a grunt like Vlov.

While Arcueid is an all-round heroine, Ciel is a combat heroine. She heads to battle with a cold heart and a multitude of weapons from all ranges and eras.

Suge comments on Ciel's amount of magical energy. The numbers we got are:
Average mage: 20
Rin, a genius: 500
McDonnel, the Clock Tower's current record holder: 2000
Ciel, Roa's best incarnation ever: 5000

Ciel is the franchise's number 1 in amount of MP, but there are other important factors to consider. McDonnel has an extraordinary amount of MP recovered per turn, Zelretch's is effectively infinite with Kaleidoscope, and Illya's Circuit quality is just something else.

Ciel's circuits aren't complex, they just have a HUGE output, which was she exploits in using the Seventh's very energy-inefficient weapons, stuff normal people would run dry and die from using. That doesn't mean she can use any magecraft but she compensates with Roa's knowledge.

Suge speculates that Ciel's Normal End is also about expanding the world, but Nasu he can't explain it yet. He just claims that the Extra Route's ending isn't the true ending, because the case isn't concluded there.

The Normal End stops where it did because there was also a True End in the same story. With Noel's case being a thing, Ciel's route is a story that only means anything if something is lost. Someone has to get the short end of the stick. That's what the Normal End is for.

Noel is a character Nasu is super passionate about. She was created just to replace Ciel in the Arcueid route to preserve the surprise factor, but Nasu later knew he needed to make her a proper character that brings Ciel's sins closer to her.

Noel is weak and untrustworthy but you still can see some of Ciel in her. She's not good nor evil. Not dedicated nor neglectful. She can be sly and let her self-pity take a bad turn, but it's hard to blame her because she's just doing what anyone in her shoes would have.

Nasu’s mystical character tend to be on the stronger side, but he loves to sometimes write the drama of someone truly average powerlevel-wise like Noel.

Suge tries to compare her to Waver in that sense, but Waver is a bit too protagonist for that. Noel is just a victim who had to become an Executor because there was no way to go back to her old life.

Normal happiness was never an option for Noel. Since she came into contact with Ancestors, she was already a contaminant. Her only options were to be quarantined forever in a convent or join the hunters.

Noel’s final scream is amazingly memorable thanks to Kayano’s voice work. Nasu feels like made the right call is picking young VAs for the main 6 but veterans for the side characters. Noel is a super difficult character that no one could pull off like Kayano did.

Dead Apostle Noel’s design is themed after a butterfly caught in a spider’s web. Noel thinks she’s the protagonist of the world while everyone else can’t even see her as a guest character, which makes her squirm in the metaphorical web all the more painful to watch.

Nasu requested Takeuchi to design DA Noel under these instructions: “You can go as off-rails as you want, just draw something that looks like it’s in the wrong place in the wrong time. Go crazy, go nuts”. She looks 14 because that was her age before the incident that ruined her.

Arach and Saiki were introduced with the concept of foreign substances in mind. The Toono residence only had Shiki and the heroine so it was a comfortable place to return to, but now Nasu decided introduce unsettling external elements to that environment.

But Gouto and Arach are different in role and direction. Gouto symbolizes the urban fantasy genre as established by Seishi Yokomizu’s novels, while Arach is a more “what the hell” type of stranger. She’s fun to watch but no one can or wants to understand her.

There is a bad end involving Arach but there’s no malice in it. She never hated anyone ever. That was all just a snack to her. By the way the voice acting we got for her was Noto holding back. There’s a more intense version that Nasu tragically had to discard.

Suge commented on how many players didn’t recognize Noto as Arach until they read her name in the credits (me included).

Mario is a character who is still hiding his secrets but Nasu already spread all the hints the player needs to figure everything out. In fact, Nasu already found a theory post that got the answer completely right.

Mario’s subordinates also have planned backstories but even with that they’ll remain as side characters through all of their screentime.

Vlov’s mysteries aren’t over either. We still weren’t told how he got like that, why he was in Souya, what his future roles will be. Melty Blood: Type Lumina will give more hints but still won’t deliver the answer.

Nasu requested Takeuchi to design Vlov as a pretty old-school vampire, as mentioned earlier, but he was also requested elements of a knight and a winter hunter, since Vlov was from the isolated lands of the North Sea.

The Tsukihime worlds/Fate worlds split happened because the Type-Moon lore was first established through Tsukihime, KnK, and Mahoyo, and there Nasu planned a world where Servants didn’t exist. Then Takeuchi convinced him to do Fate/stay Night, but Nasu thought Servant were too +

unbalanced. Their presence would require doing things KnK deemed as impossible. So Nasu decided Fate/ would have to be its own separate thing where the finer rules didn’t apply.

Fortunately, Fate/ grew into something huge, so needed to make the split more clear. And that’s why he wrote the aforementioned Church timetable and Mage’s Association timetable. They’re almost identical but have some differences, mostly related to wether or not CM is active.

Fate/ worlds are where Human Order is strong and Tsukihime worlds are where Human Order is weak. Human history is hugely important to Fate/, so FGO’s singularities were necessary to tell exactly what kind of progress, prosperity, and decadence we’re standing on top of.

Meanwhile, Tsukihime is about humans and non-humans living the present. And maybe the future. Another way to split it is Mage’s Association = Fate/, Holy Church = Tsukihime.

The remake lore was created after Nasu studied a lot about the Church in 2010 and reflects what he learned really well. Sanda wanted to make The Adventures of El-Melloi II about the Church but Nasu asked him to keep writing about mages because the Church content was for Tsukihime

The adjustments to DAA list were all about fixing the characters whose abilities overlap with others, buffing everyone, and filling the blank slots with characters necessary for the remake. A third of the members of the list are introduced in Tsukihime, even if not directly.

The last section of the interview invites BLACK to talk about the composition of some specific scenes. Before Tsukihime, BLACK’s only experience was with Hollow and Mahoyo bonus scenes, and now he had to compete with the outstanding work Tsukuri did for Mahoyo.

Tsukihime was supposed to be more visually subdued, but BLACK kept receiving more and more assets to use when the work started shifting into Ciel’s route. And he had to go back and redo Arcueid’s route to even out the level of quality.

The plan was to have the game up to Fate/stay Night’s standards of quality, but after Mahoyo, that felt like a downgrade.

One thing BLACK kept in mind for the screen composition here was use perspective to convey the distance between Shiki and the characters through the sprite. Two sprites lined up feels unnatural, especially in fight scenes.

This makes Tsukihime particularly impressive because sprites simply lined is a genre staple, and the standard the people who are too used to FGO would expect.

The programming tools used in the game were Kirikiri 2/Z and Timeline Editor, with the former slightly customized by Kiyobee.

BLACK didn’t make many requests, other asking for more art and more facial expressions when needed. Also for the artist to put the characters, effects, and background on different layers to give room for him to move things around.

The overall policy of the game’s storyboard was to save resources on the CG department to add more on the amount of sprites and expressions.

BLACK never counted how many sprites they made, but he can tell Ciel has the most, followed by Arc, Vlov, and Akiha, in this order.

Sasaki Shounen did the storyboards for Ciel vs Vlov, vs DA Noel, and the Calvaria scene, but the rest of the storyboard was by Takeuchi, with ideas from BLACK and Koyama. Most of the storyboard CGs had to be cut though.

And then there’s the Aoko headpat, that wasn’t even in the storyboard but BLACK asked for it to be made.

BLACK’s favorite scene is the first Arcueid vs Ciel fight (the scene titled “Melty Blood”). The visual effects for Arcueid slapping away the flying Black Keys took a lot out of him.

Suge said that scene was very anime, but in a way that’s different from Mahoyo’s animeness, and BLACK loved the compliment.

Mahoyo has more “refined” long range battles, while Tsukihime’s and Fate/‘s battles get more physical, so they’re less about flash and more about speed. Tsukihime’s are also often looked to Shiki’s point of view.

Another favorite scene is the one with Vlov’s two grunts under the mall. Their talk gets long and BLACK couldn’t just keep showing the background the whole time, so they made the scene dark, with the two goons moving their flashlight in a way that expresses personality.

Suge’s personal favorite is Arcueid’s “I love him” scene. That’s a scene personally requested by Nasu to be added to the then finished script because of an inspiring line he read on volume 8 of the Tsukihime manga. And then he asked Kegani for the piano version of Seimeisen.

The scene titles and descriptions on the flow chart are organized to make everything amusing to a player who seen everything, but still easily recognizable. The game’s font was also carefully chosen because one of the biggest problems in the old version was the ugly font.

BLACK composed all game screens on his own, then Urushinohara joined the team, fixed the choices and normal life scenes, handled the Arcueid date scenes, and then the two of them worked on Teach Me, Ciel-sensei! together.

Suge asks why Nasu didn’t get more people to do that and Nasu explains that this work requires the same refined senses and patience that it takes to build a castle of toothpicks. Very few people can do it nowadays and it’s not a problem that can be solved with money.

VN screen composition is a niche profession and Mahoyo didn’t increase the number of people interested like Nasu dreamed it would. And it’s not thing with theories to study yet, so the Luminous Body/Calvaria scene is a thing every person in his place would have done differently.

Other Side of Red Garden is still on the pre-production stage. Nasu still can’t get started on it because FGO is getting to its climax right now.

Aside from Melty Blood, there’s a lot more planned for release in 2022 to give people something to do while they way for Other Side of Red Garden.

Satsuki route confirmed.

The split was 2:4 routes because Ciel’s is special. It takes a lot of intense graphical power to show what happens when you get the most powerful being in Tsuki as your enemy, and Nasu want to hold anything back there. The other routes will be more subdued… Nasu hopes…

BLACK’s engine test prototype used the doujin’s version script, including the old unused script for Satsuki’s route. There’s no reason not to release a Satsuki route now.

BLACK really insists not to expect anything more visually impressive because going beyond what was already would distract for the real start of the show: the text. This is a VN, not an anime. Many scenes were cut or toned down because the visuals overshadowing the text.

Nasu wants multilingual support for a potential Steam version, but just a translation isn’t enough for this game. Visual needs to be fixed for international releases and Nasu doesn’t have the money/time/energy to spare. He wants at least English and Chinese releases if possible.

Just translation itself is already hard enough without the extra steps Tsukihime requires, which is one of the reasons why very few Type-Moon works get translated.

Lumina’s story is just a place for Nasu to dump what-ifs and extra tidbits he couldn’t fit in Tsukihime proper. Depending on the character you play as, the story is set either before or after Tsukihime. Nasu wasn’t trying to follow any rules with this one.

For example, Arcueid didn’t talk before meeting Shiki, but Lumina’s plot doesn’t care about these strict details.

The next plans for Nasu are finishing Cosmos in the Lostbelt and releasing Other Side of Red Garden. Those two releases will mark the end of phase 2 of the Type-Moon project.

Nasu likes to settle a different theme to handle each decade. The one for 2012-2022 was “consumer culture”, which is why that’s the theme handled in Mahoyo, FGO, and the Tsukihime remake. Phase 3 will start whenever Nasu finds the new theme for the next 10 years.

If Tsukihime 2 gets, released it’ll be in a format other than a visual novel, preferably an open-world RPG. It sounds like a dream to Nasu, but it may be closer to reality with Studio BB around.

Putting this important addendum here because this took a few hours of research: forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php…