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*1
By the programmer and sound guy, he's referring to Kiyobei and KATE.
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*3
「To Heart」
One of the first love novel game series. It became very successful when it shifted to the consumer platform.
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Part Two - Early Movements
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"We wanted to make 「Tsukihime」 the gateway into Nasu's world."
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Editor |
So 「Tsukihime」 was created as a way to get a wider range of people to read Nasu's writing.
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Takeuchi |
Yes. I thought that Nasu's writing had a certain unusual rhythm to it. So that's why we wanted to make 「Tsukihime」 the gateway into Nasu's world. There were so many things that were hard for others to understand, for example: the "lines of death." Even though it's partnered with an explanation that goes on about "life contained within living creatures" and so on and so forth, it's still really confusing. (Laughs)
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All
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(Laugh)
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Takeuchi
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I thought that "brittle lines" was enough. If you touch them, they break. That seemed like enough. I wanted to add that sort of "easy to understand" nature to it. Of course, I never thought THIS many people would come to enjoy it.
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Editor
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Had you ever created a game before 「Tsukihime」?
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Takeuchi
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It was our first PC game. We had a programmer and a friend of mine who was going to do the sound (*1), so we just had to focus on the scenario and the graphics. We had a perfect team assembled that could make a game. Neither the programmer or the sound guy had jobs at the time, too, so they had enough time to join us.
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Nasu
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It was a naive, snap decision.
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Takeuchi
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Pretty much. We thought we'd be able to make a game in no time. We actually approached it pretty casually at the start.
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"Now that I think about it, I had absolutely no confidence in the erotic bits back then." (Nasu)
"Personally, I wasn't worried." (Takeuchi)
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Editor
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So it was sort of like all of a sudden, you found yourselves in the perfect environment to make a game. This gives me more questions, but before that, why did you decide to sell 「Tsukihime」 as an X-rated, "ero game?" I'm pretty sure neither of you had ever dabbled in that area before. (*2)
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Nasu
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I had absolutely no confidence in the erotic bits back then. I didn't even feel the need to put erotic parts in my own stories, so I never even thought about them. When I realized that the game's genre would be in that area, though, I realized it needed sex-related scenes. The thing I feared more than anything else was whether or not I'd be able to write something that would actually turn people on.
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Takeuchi
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Yeah. It just so happened that I was in the period of my life when I was interested in the adult market, so I sort of pulled Nasu into it with me. I didn't really have much of a history in it. In the doujin world, however, seinen and male-oriented products are the ones that sell. At the very least, it was a strategy to get people to pass their eyes over our product. So I forced Nasu to do it.
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Nasu
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Takeuchi just said it himself now, but "writing" is actually a very weak force in the doujin world. If you really want people to read your writing, then you need to come up with a few tricks to pull them in. So the way I looked at it was if I added visuals, made it a game, and then on top of that, added erotic elements, then I'd maybe get 1 out of 10 people to look at it.
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Takeuchi
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I asked Nasu to write a certain erotic scene for the PR version of 「Tsukihime」. When I looked at what he gave me, I knew it'd fly, and from that moment, I wasn't worried at all.
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"OK, we'll make a love game, but we're going to make the main character really cool!"
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Editor
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So Takeuchi-san was the one who brought up the idea of it becoming an ero game?
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Takeuchi
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Yes. We didn't really intend on it becoming a love game. We just figured that if we made it, it'd end up like one.
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Nasu
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We had another reason for choosing that as the genre, too. At the time, I didn't have a PC, only a PlayStation, and had played 「ToHeart」 (*3) and 「ONE」 (*4). Then I played 「Kanon」 on Takeuchi's PC. That's how I learned about love games.
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Nasu
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Love games and visual novels are very different, though. I suppose it'd be more convenient to call those games girl games. I actually didn't like them very much. They were really fun, but as a male, I didn't really get excited. For me, the stuff that really got my blood pumping were Japanese fantasy novels. That's how I got into all this, those were my core, so I wanted to make something really suspenseful. That's a bit different from a love game, though.
Going back to 「Kanon」, that was a game where there was an actual main character, but the heroines were really the ones who carried the story, and it was sort of like the main character was just tagging along. It was fun in that respect, but it felt weird to me, coming from my background. To me, the main character was supposed to be a vessel of the player. You were supposed to work in that world as the main character and become the center of the story.
That's why I wanted to make something where you could tag along with heroines' stories while still remaining as the center of that world. So I wrote our first project while I was convinced that: "OK, we'll make a love game, but we're going to make the main character really cool." Like visual novels that already existed...however, the games I ended up playing before production were "ONE" and "Kanon," so I ended up mixing that style with my own preferences, which became the 「Tsukihime」 you know today.
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Part 01
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Part 03
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*2
"In that area"
A long time ago, there was once a person known as "Takifuji Tadashi" who released a single adult doujin. His connection to Takeuchi Takashi is still unclear to this day.
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*4
"ONE"
Takeuchi fell in love with this game, and even wrote an anthology comic for the company that made it.
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