Kagetsu Tohya

Kagetsu Tohya Review

Of the visual novels I've played thus far, the branching narrative structure of Kagetsu Tohya made it feel like a puzzle, not just an illustrated book. The handful of options you get to make as the player were just enough to pull me in to the world. After a few playthroughs, though, I was unsure how much game there really was and turned to a guide. I'm glad I did. I was curious to know what a 2001 time loop visual novel could offer and after many, many loops I was surprised with the depth and bizarre directions the story took.

My favorite part of the game was just figuring out how to get it installed on my PC 21 years after its Japanese-only CD-ROM release. The community around this game has put a lot of effort into translations, patches, and instructions, to whom I'm grateful.

The most surprising element was the nudity in a some of the branching paths. It was mentioned in the setup guides but I was expecting it to be a major point (a la Game of Thrones). Instead, the couple of scenes that featured sex were surprisingly earned and thankfully short. I almost wonder why they were included, but I'd need a better understanding of turn-of-the-century visual novels to truly appreciate the answer.

If you're looking for a challenging game to install, hours of early 2000s dialog to read, and a bit of nudity, you could do worse than Kagetsu Tohya.

As funny as it sounds, I liked this one more than the original visual novel.

You can see the writers had a lot of fun and it adds a lot of layers to the existing characters and the overall story.

Also, reading this one made Fate/Hollow Ataraxia make more sense in why it was written like that.

If you did not particularly enjoy Tsukihime original novel you should definitely give this one a try.