Tsuki Review


Contributed by Unicorn aka J. Sarunski

Tsuki

Genre:
Multipath Visual Novel

Story:
Yosuke Mitsuno’s life hasn't been a bed of roses: First his mother died; then shortly after his father remarried, his father and real sister died as well in an accident. However, after he was that much down on his luck, there were some women that cared for him and helped him get over this terrible strike of fate; first his stepmother and stepsister helped console him; then, a teacher and the class president at his school tried to alleviate his loss; and finally, the woman who employed him part-time at her cafe. So, after all his blood-related kins were taken from him and he was entirely down in the dumps, things gradually improved for him thanks to these women.

But for unknown reasons, a mysterious dark entity (or the dark part of his own personality) is now in control of his actions and drives him to destroy at least one of them.

Sound:
The soundtrack consists of 16 unique MIDI-themes. None of the themes is related to one person in particular. They enhance the player’s experience of the mood of the current situation.

All characters in the story except the main character have the original Japanese voice-actors. Not only the 5 female victims, but also all minor parts have voices.

Graphics and Animations:
The graphics in this game have resolutions of 640*480 pixels. The used colors are either dark or pale and match well with the story's dark theme. Rich and vivid colors would certainly have ruined the mood.

The drawings are technically well done; backgrounds are realistic and detailed. Typical features of Zyx games are animated h-scenes that are part of this game. While there are a whole lot of h-scenes per female character, each of them has only one or two animated scenes.

Extras:
After the game has been played through to the end the first time, an additional submenu called "Possesed Entity" appears in the game's main menu. This menu contains the following extras:
- gallery of the CGs that have been displayed during gameplay
- replays of the h-scenes and endings
- jukebox for playing each of the 16 MIDI-themes

My personal opinion:
The graphics in this game are typical Zyx-graphics: Technically well done, but somehow the character designs lack vividness. Perhaps, I don't like the pointed noses each Zyx-character has...

... but I think, the thing that really disappointed me in this game was the story. Being possessed by a malicious being might be a great excuse for showing one's gratitude by tormenting the people that helped him before, but I am not buying it. Of course, this demon existed in the story and sometimes even talked to the main character's ego. This happens in particular, if the player decides to be kind to the current victim. If there weren't one path in the story that prove the opposite, I would have thought the character really had a big schizophrenia and lived it out to the fullest. Perhaps, I would have rather preferred this solution, because it would leave fewer unanswered questions:
- where did the demon come from
- why was it attracted to Yosuke
- when did it possess him
- what happened to it afterwards

If my idea of schizophrenia was elected as the real reason, Tsuki could have become a good psycho-thriller; if the relationship between the main character and the possessing demon was further described, Tsuki could have been a captivating ghost story. For example, there could have been a feud between two families and the last member of the losing family curses with his last breath the surviving members of the other families. This curse takes the form of a demon that drives each generation of that family into a self-destructive frenzy. In the end, it could have even turned out that the main character was responsible for the deaths of his blood-relatives. But no, this game instead focused on the things the main character did because of him being possessed, and described them in complete cruel details, while failing to explain why these things happened.

The only thing, I can say in favor of this game's story is: Resisting the evil has definitely an impact on the endings; and even in the case of a bad ending, the main character faces the consequences for the actions he did under the influence of this demon.

So, even if this game is technically very well done, I think because of the story's inconsistency and the focal point on non-consensual brutal sex/scenes, it is one of those games that is going to give the whole bishoujo-genre a bad reputation, and thus a game I would have liked to never been released at all.