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Killing Machine Boy Meets Vampire Princess Girl

HIGH A riveting supernatural story with a legendary legacy.

LOW What do you mean the other half is still in production?!

WTF The tonal shifts when encountering a bad ending and reading the cast commenting on your failures.

Frankly speaking, the mere thought of being able to draft a review of the official English-language international release of Tsukihime feels unreal. For nearly 24 years, it seemed like Type-Moon’s legendary visual novel would forever be Japan-exclusive, never to appear in English without the help of fan translations — but it’s here now, and all is well.

To be accurate, the subject of this review is not, strictly speaking, the Tsukihime that I first played a fan translation of in high school. Instead, I’m reviewing Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, a remake developed by Type-Moon and released in Japan in 2021. It features a fully rewritten story and new original art from Type-Moon co-founders Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi.

Though the story has been rewritten, the core premise hasn’t changed. As before, the narrative is told almost entirely in the first person, experienced through the very special eyes of Shiki Tohno, a young high school student.

Shiki possesses the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, causing him to see supernatural “lines” drawn all over everything around him. Cutting along those lines instantly kills almost anything… or anyone, unless Shiki wears a pair of special magical glasses that hide the lines from his sight. After years living in exile away from his aristocratic family, Shiki is called back to the massive Tohno mansion following the death of his father. A shockingly violent encounter with a mysterious, beautiful woman named Arcueid kicks off the story proper, drawing Shiki deeper into a mystical world that lies just beneath the surface of the urban ordinary. It’s a world where vampires war in the city streets under cover of night, all the while dodging monster hunters empowered by the church itself, and where seemingly anyone, from the family doctor to one’s own classmates, might be hiding some kind of supernatural secret.

Adventure stories with a horror twist aren’t new, but it’s notable that Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is also, at its core, a romance.

Alongside the vividly rendered passages describing magical battles and vampire hunts are meet-cutes straight out of a romantic comedy playbook. In these instances, the writing bubbles with a sweet puppy-love vibe, full of dramatic teenage infatuation rendered in flowery, heartfelt passages. Thanks to an top-class English-language localization, the mood of reckless teenage romance is perfectly captured. It’s even thanks to this localization that segments where Shiki essentially ogles his female conversation partners come across as cutely awkward, rather than creepy — immensely helpful considering the large number of pretty girls that interact with Shiki. That said, the story of Tsukihime does focus on two main narrative branches, each centered around a different heroine.

One of the biggest departures A piece of blue glass moon makes from the original Tsukihime is in the writing of the second branch, which focuses on Ciel, Shiki’s mature, reliable, enigmatic upperclassman.

The original game presented Ciel as an alternative romantic “route,” as is the custom for games in the genre, though the bulk of written material and development was clearly concentrated on Arcueid as the “main” heroine. The result was a Ciel route that felt like a variation of Arcueid’s — an alternative path included less as an equally valid option than a value-add for players seeking replayability.

By comparison, Ciel’s route in Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon– truly feels distinct, with its own plotting, cast of characters, and and exploration of a different side of Tsukihime‘s setting and lore. If Arcueid’s story route largely involves vampires and other supernatural kindred, Ciel’s dips heavily into the holy church, a vaguely Christian organization that defends human society against supernatural threats and violently suppresses the ones that come too close to revealing the magical world’s existence to mankind at large. In their way, the two main routes in Tsukihime‘s remake feel like genuinely equal options, fitting well with Type-Moon’s permissive attitude towards what counts as “canon” in its various properties.

With that in mind, players must read through Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- multiple times to get the most out of the story. Thankfully, it includes plenty of tools to ease exploration. Players can save and load anytime, and a handy “flowchart” system not unlike the one seen in Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim allows players to jump back and forth in the timeline, checking the results of choices at their leisure. The main routes and their endings are also unlocked sequentially, so there’s no danger of making the “wrong” choice and being forced to reload or wait until the next playthrough.

There are even more than a dozen different “bad endings” to acquire for completionist players. Bad endings are very much the “wrong choices,” usually in the sense that picking them results in Shiki’s death, described in gruesome, embarrassing detail. These are usually played for laughs, though, and invariably conclude with a post-credits classroom sequence where the characters discuss what just happened and advise the player on what choices to pick after they reload.

Outside of the occasional typo and an odd bug where a small amount of voiced Japanese-language lines aren’t properly subtitled in other languages, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is larger in scale than the original, polished to a mirror sheen, and convenient almost to a fault. Its writing expands the story in an appealing way that’s conscious of Type-Moon’s status as a company at the top of its field managing its own multiverse of related stories and projects (such as the Fate/Grand Order mobile game and more besides). It doesn’t supplant the scrappy, rough-hewn, original Tsukihime, but rather compliments it, presenting the visual novel equivalent of a breathtakingly costly but inimitably entertaining triple-A blockbuster to contrast with the original’s history as an out-of-nowhere indie hit.

The only wrinkle in this otherwise perfect remake story is that A piece of blue glass moon is just the first entry of the Tsukihime remake project. The two routes contained in this release are just the “Near Side” routes. The original game’s three other “Far Side” routes — routes that were more psychodrama-focused and starred supporting characters like Akiha, Kohaku, and Hisui, are due to be included in another installment, Tsukihime -The other side of red garden-, which is still in production. This isn’t to say that the experience feels incomplete without the additional routes, but it’s an acknowledgement that those who want to know more about certain other characters and see how Type-Moon will address their respective stories may end up waiting a while for the second half of the remake project to release.

Nevertheless, as it is, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- remains a superlative visual novel, and a must-read for any fan of Type-Moon’s work, as well as a great potential entry point for those looking to get into visual novels as a medium.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed Type-Moon and published by Aniplex. It is currently available for the Switch and PS4. This review is based on a paid download and reviewed on Switch. A PS4 code provided by the publisher was tested. Approximately 47 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode and acquiring all main endings. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, and Suggestive Themes. The rating description is as follows: “This is a visual novel in which players follow the story of a high-school student who encounters vampires and ghouls in Japan. As players progress through the narrative, they view stylized story sequences (mostly still images), some depicting violence and blood: blood splatter; pools of blood; characters killed off camera; a character’s hand repeatedly stabbed. The text includes descriptive details of violent acts (e.g., “I stab, I cut, I slice, I carve. Severing piece after piece until nothing is left…”; “After listening to the weakling beg for its life, she begins her meticulous work…Once the other arm is gone too, she swaps her tools and sets work on its inside.”). Some sequences depict severed limbs and dismembered body parts in large pools of blood. A female vampire is depicted partially nude, with exposed pelvic area (no genitalia), and her arm covering her breasts. The words “f**k” and “sh*t” are heard in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The gameplay is not reliant on audio cues. All voiced dialogue is represented by on-screen text. There are no options for text size or readability configuration, but detailed options exist to manage text display speed. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s button controls are not remappable.

Developed by Summerfall Studios and published by Humble Games, Stray Gods: The Role Playing Musical was originally released in August 2023. Additional content known as "Stray Gods: Orpheus" was released in late June 2024 on all consoles. For the purpose of this review, I will only be reviewing the base game as I have not played the DLC yet.

Stray Gods tells the epic tale of Grace, a young woman and college dropout who feels directionless. After meeting a mysterious young woman named Calliope, Grace returns home only to have a fatally wounded Calliope die in her arms. From here, Grace finds herself becoming the last Muse, accused of murder by a chorus of Greek gods. Now, she has seven days to prove her innocence and find the true killer or be sentenced to death.

One of the first notable features in Stray Gods is the animated sequences. Consisting of 2D hand-illustrated visuals created by art director Benjamin Ee and illustrator Jess Lee, watching the animation feels almost like looking at a comic book. Characters are drawn realistically so that facial expressions and movement feel true to life. The designs are diverse in terms of race, gender, and body type and also vibrant and detailed enough to show facets of each character's personality.

Characters are drawn realistically so that facial expressions and movement feel true to life.

Speaking of the characters, they are a pretty lively bunch. Grace will be relatable to anyone who has felt stuck in life, while her female best friend Freddie is cool, optimistic, and knowledgeable about Greek mythology. Then, there are the Greek gods themselves. Hermes is a cheerful nonbinary Asian messenger with magic doorways. Persephone is a tough-as-nails club owner with a soft side. Aphrodite is beautiful, soulful, and deeply troubled. Orpheus is vindictive and musically gifted. These characters and their personal stories are dynamically enhanced by a stellar international voice cast that includes Laura Bailey, Erika Ishii, Merle Dandridge, and Anthony Rapp.

Moreover, the characters, story, and animated sequences are brought to life through fabulous musical numbers that change lyrically and genre-wise depending on the dialogue you select out of a series of timed, color-coded choices. The musical numbers are also affected by the color-coded traits you select for Grace at the beginning and climax of the game, which range from charming (green), kick-ass (red), or clever (blue). On my first playthrough, I chose the Clever trait, which made the song "I Can Teach You" into a fun jazz track. On the other hand, the kick-ass trait turned this song into an angry solo jazz number.

In addition to making choices during musical numbers, the dialogue choices you select influence which characters you romance. Some choices come with heart options that allow you to flirt with a character and at some point, you get choices with an exclamation point. Choosing the right one allows you to romance a character and later get a musical number. There are four romance options, including Apollo, Persephone, Freddie, and Pan. I romanced Freddie on my second playthrough and found their courtship poignant, down-to-earth, and sweet. However, other players might want to consider using a guide if you are going for a certain character to ensure that you pick the correct dialogue options, as it is possible to get locked out of romancing a character if you pick the wrong ones.

This brings me to the last two prominent aspects of the game. The first is the ability to reload your save from specific points in the game. If you dislike a choice you make in one musical number or a dialogue option, you can reload the chapter it is in and do it again. While you can't hit the "Y" button and fast forward through musical numbers you've already done, you can do this with the dialogue lines.

For those who want to do multiple routes, the replay value is very high. There are multiple save slots available for different playthroughs and the ability to skip dialogue lines assists with this. Not to mention, the rewards are worth it as you get to romance different characters, see what happens if you side with certain characters, and hear different versions of the songs.

All in all, this game is a campy and engrossing visual novel with a song in its heart. Visually striking animation, charismatic characters, and dramatic musical numbers come together to tell a magical story about gods learning to be human and finding a new place for themselves.

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Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.

James' conceit is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. Twain's "painstakingly" studied "Missouri negro" dialect is a put-on that Jim and other slaves use to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett is a sly writer, and he loves to employ this code-switching and the fictions of race for subversive comic effect.

But language is all-powerful in James. Early in Jim's journey, a slave steals a pencil for him—a hangable offense—so that Jim can "write himself into being."

"I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world," James, as he renames himself, writes, "a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written."

James' revolt against a society that defines him as property extends to the metaphysical. In his fever dreams he debates Voltaire and John Locke. He in fact writes himself out of Huckleberry Finn's unserious final act to pursue an ending that better fits his outrage and newfound agency.

Finn's key moment is when Huck declares he'll help Jim even if it means going to hell, but Everett reminds us that Jim is already there. James tells another man he was "born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me." James is not a gauzy moral fable or boy's adventure, but a man's flight through the inferno of America's racial past that is by turns darkly funny and terrifying.

The post Review: <i>James</i> Retells <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> From Jim's Perspective appeared first on Reason.com.

What are the best dating sims? These games all feature carousels of cute, courtable characters ready for romance. Whether you’re moving into a sleepy seaside town searching for love or ready to find that spark with a kick-flipping dinosaur schoolmate, players have more options now than ever to date around.

While dating is at the forefront of these simulators, great examples of the genre are feature-rich, captivating settings, underlying intrigue, and unique art direction, some of which could even be considered the best PC games overall. The top dating simulators tend to twist the traditional visual novel style and fork it into a new genre, such as adventure games or dungeon crawling - and, believe it or not, one or two even take inspiration from horror games. Regardless of where you want to look for love, this list has you covered with the best dating sims to play in 2024.

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The invention of AI imagery has done a serious disservice to gaming, as it allows unbridled laziness to take over. Case in point: Pakotime and their games. Another case in point: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium: The Visual Novel. It is a visual novel made up largely of AI generated cities and buildings. The character cutouts are probably also AI generated as well, if the lack of hands in the generic cutouts are anything to go by. I can also tell by the lack of specific imagery within the game. For example, take this:

In a normal visual novel, you would see an image of them escaping through the secret exit. But not in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium. But everything is told, not shown. Oh they’ll tell you what happens, amazing things, but never show in any images of the action, because its all generic AI generated garbage. But the rot goes far deeper than just the AI generated imagery. It extends to the story itself.

The writing in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is bad, really, really bad. The visual novel tells the story of a protagonist and her allies taking on a giant corporation that is kidnapping people, for reasons. It’ll tell you the corporation does bad things, but never spell it out:

After awhile, Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium turns into some thinly veiled leftist anti-corporate manifesto about resistance or something and I checked out. I didn’t care about any of the characters, it gave me no reason to. And because I didn’t care about any of the characters, I didn’t care about what they were doing. Since I didn’t care what they were doing, I didn’t care about people rising up against the evil corporation. And because I did not care, I just quit and never went back. When a porn game handles this stuff better, you know you’ve done messed up.

Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at all levels. Its fails in the visual part, as its all generic AI images. It fails as novel, with piss-poor writing. There is no reason to play this. The story is nothing you haven’t read before, and done much better. The visuals are all generic and frankly could have been left out, and little would have changed. This gets a garbage with a two back-end score.

Overall: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at the visuals, and as a novel.

Verdict: Garbage

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The post Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium Review appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.

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The literal and figurative search for enlightenment by a solar-powered "Artificial Friend" drives the plot of Klara and the Sun, a 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Purchased to serve as a companion to a fragile and isolated genetically augmented child, the robot Klara's autonomy and potential are limited by strict constraints on AI.

Klara's primitive, spontaneous sun worship and deep loyalty to her charge govern her choices in ways she only barely understands.

Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Klara is not alone—her humans are equally hemmed in by state, society, and their own fallibility.

The book's beautiful prose floats effortlessly over heavy questions of free will, epistemology, and faith.

The post Review: <i>Klara and the Sun</i> Tackles AI Regulation appeared first on Reason.com.

There should be a regulation on the books, that if a game is released in the United States with the words “Hentai” in the title, there should be sex and/or nudity in it or it is false advertising. Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is a case a point. No nudity as it is rated T. Probably implied sex at best. Unlike Retro Mystery Club, which was Japanese people writing about Japan, this game is Eastern Europeans writing a story about a Japanese guy going to Brazil to chase a girl. They have probably neither been to Japan nor Brazil. It reads like what a foreigner would know about Brazil off a google search. It name drops the food(see below), Carnival and Samba in the first ten minutes. Whether or not it takes ten minutes depends on how well you get through the sliding tile puzzles. The game shows the mixing up, and you can endlessly press B to reset. This means you just press B until get a favorable mix up, and backtrack.

Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is honestly boring, the Japanese guy is your typical wood plank hentai-hero, and the Tainara is what a foreigner imagines a Brazilian woman to be like. Now, I have never been to Brazil, but I am a writer, this is not how you write an interesting 3D dimensional character you want to get involved in. Also, the world building is inconsistent:

The sign above should read: bem-vindo à nossa casa, or something else in Brazilian Portuguese. In short, Hentai Dating Stories Brazil will get a Garbage Verdict with a two back-end score. I am sure there are more coming and I bet they’ll be equally terrible. For example, I’m sure in the theoretical upcoming Australian edition, it’ll be a woman who talks like Steve Irwin, has a kangaroo as a pet, and eats Vegemite Sandwiches. God help us!

Overall: Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is what you get when you have foreigners writing about a place they’ve never been to. Also it is crap!

Verdict: Garbage

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The post Hentai Dating Stories Brazil Review appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.

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For Reason's June 2024 special issue on AI, all of our brief reviews involve AI in some form or another. Of course, we decided to ask an AI to write one of the reviews. Since X's AI is named Grok, after the term coined by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, it was only natural that we'd ask Grok to write a review of another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. See what Grok wrote for us below.

In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein masterfully crafts a gripping tale of revolution and liberation on a lunar colony. The 1966 novel follows the colony's intense struggle for independence from Earth, led by the charismatic Manuel Garcia O'Kelly and supported by a fascinating AI supercomputer, Mike. Heinlein's unique portrayal of Mike highlights his destructive potential but ultimately emphasizes his choice to aid the revolutionaries.

Through the political, social, and military aspects of the Earth-Moon conflict, Heinlein delves deep into themes of liberation and revolution, weaving in his own thought-provoking philosophies about law, society, and frontier libertarianism. This sci-fi gem offers a captivating narrative, exploring the very nature of freedom and the role technology plays in shaping our destiny. In the end, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress reminds us that even a supercomputer like Mike can have a heart—or at least a well-programmed sense of humor.

The post Review: <i>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</i> Underscores How Technology Supports Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

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