Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon, the remake of TYPE-MOON's visual novel Tsukihime, will get an official English localization. Learn about the details of Tsukihime, TYPE-MOON's localization history, and what other works may be localized next.
Tsukihime: A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon Confirmed To Get An English Localization
Announcement States A 2024 Release
Tsukihime: A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon, the remake of TYPE-MOON's legendary visual novel Tsukihime, has been confirmed to receive an English localization by 2024 during the Anime Expo 2023. This comes 24 years after the original was released in December 2000 and 3 years after the remake was first released in Japan in August 2021. It will be available for the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation 4, with a pending rating by ESRB.
It will be the second of TYPE-MOON's visual novels to have an official English localization after their recent series, Witch on The Holy Night. It's worth noting that this announcement comes less than a month after a Tsukihime: A Piece Of Blue Glass Moon's fan translation project by Tsukihimates had finished.
Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon is about the life of Shiki Tohno who, despite looking like the average, if somewhat sickly high-schooler, possesses one of the rarest "Mystic Eyes" of them all: the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception." These eyes allow him to see the "Lines" and "Points of Death" on anything with the concept of an end to them.
One day, while walking home from school, he encounters a beautiful and mysterious blonde woman. Though their meeting was brief, a sudden and unexpected urge to murder her arose deep within Shiki Tohno. Unable to stop himself, he stalks the woman to an isolated location and proceeds to dismember her into 17 pieces, ending their first encounter.
Dismemberment under the power of the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception" in TYPE-MOON's Nasuverse (a collection of Kinoko Nasu's fictional stories) is normally permanent and irreversible. It forces "death" onto things merely as a side-effect of ending their meaning and existence through interacting with the lines and points. However, much to his shock and bewilderment, he meets the blonde woman again the next day. It turns out that she, who introduced herself as Arcueid Brunestud, is a vampire. Severely weakened by the effort of having to reconstruct herself from death, she enlists the help of Shiki to hunt down another vampire wreaking havoc across the city.
TYPE-MOON's Delayed Works and Localizations
There was a joke in the TYPE-MOON community that emerged back before the turn of 2020. "Where's the Tsukihime remake?" Fans would often ask. This idea was the result of various other inside jokes, such as "there is no Tsukihime anime," which references the utterly terrible 2003 adaptation by J.C. Staff, "isn't it sad, Sacchin?" which refers to Satsuki Yumizuka not having a route despite being one of the main protagonist's romantic interests in the original visual novel, and many others. The joke was so popular and endearing among TYPE-MOON's old fans that there had even been a Twitter account dedicated to counting the number of days since the remake's original announcement back in 2008 (it reached up to over 12 years of counting). Fortunately for everybody, that joke came to an abrupt end as 2021 came.
TYPE-MOON delaying releases or placing a series on hiatus is nothing new. One such example is Kinoko Nasu's Decoration Disorder Disconnection, a series published irregularly in Faust Magazine since 2007. It was supposed to have a third volume release, but as of the writing of this article, there has been no new chapter published. Another recent example is their latest visual novel, Witch on the Holy Night. It had been delayed several times and ended up with a 2012 release date instead of the originally planned 2009 release. It was also confirmed in an interview with 4Gamer back in 2012 that the work had two sequels in development. However, neither have been seen or even talked about until now, 11 years later.
It's not as if TYPE-MOON simply forgets about their works in progress. For example, in Back Alley Satsuki in 2013, one of TYPE-MOON's yearly April Fool's content, they made it evident that Nasu still remembers Decoration Disorder Disconnection by showing Kanata Shizue, a character in the novel, as one of the bosses. He mentioned in the same interview with 4Gamer that he plans to work on it after he finishes up with Witch on the Holy Night.
In terms of localization, TYPE-MOON has had both its high and low moments. Many of their derivative works have made it to the English-speaking world, such as their top-grossing mobile game Fate Grand Order, which still gets over 20 million dollars a month (according to Sensor Tower, a company that provides market insights into current trends) and Melty Blood. All of their anime adaptations, such as the Garden of Sinners film series by ufotable, have also been released with official English subtitles. However, they've been lagging in bringing their original visual novels to the West. For example, the original Fate visual novel still has yet to be localized, despite the series' overwhelming popularity.
Tsukihime, whose lore serves as the foundation for all of their following works, getting an English localization is a step in the right direction. But the company still has quite a backlog of its original visual novels to localize. Fate has Realta Nua, a more family-friendly version of the original adult visual novel Fate/Stay Night, and its pseudo-sequel, Hollow Ataraxia. Garden of Sinners, whose anime is already readily available through Blu-rays with English subtitles, still has three light novels that can be translated officially. Tsukihime, itself, also has a sequel, Kagetsu Tohya, that deserves its own remake and localization.
Sources:
Tsukihimates
4Gamer Interview with TYPE-MOON
