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Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon Way

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayOr, The World of Visual Novels Part 3

This week, I'm going to cover a third visual novel creator, Type-Moon.

Where 07th Expansion has become a successful company by making a visual novel that danced to their own tune and creating something unique and didn't follow any marketing trend or research, Type-Moon followed the path of publishing a handful of titles in the fantasy genre with stories so ambitious and characters so vivid that they've effectively become the Joss Whedon of Japan. Their titles have been so popular and spun off into so much other media and merchandising that they can now command budgets of their choosing and take their time with their next title, which will be released this Autumn, six years after their last original title. And unlike Nitroplus's titles, their characters and titles have entered pop culture.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayType-Moon began as a doujin circle formed by. writer Nasu Kinoko and artist Takeshi Takeuchi. They released their first visual novel title on 2000, TSUKIHIME and haven't looked back. In 2004, they became a professional media company and released their most popular title FATE/ STAY NIGHT, which not only went on to sell over 400,000 copies, but has been ported to the Playstation 2 and sold over 100,000 copies there, spun off into an anime TV series, a theatrical anime movie of an alternate storyline, and role-playing and fighting games on the Playstation 2 and PSP since then. There's even a quarterly glossy magazine, TYPE-MOON ACE, devoted entirely to their titles and works. Posters and action figures of the characters are still being made and sold now.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayType-Moon's visual novels are particularly interesting for having multiple unlockable storylines and endings. When you complete one playthrough of the game, a new storyline is unlocked, and completing that in turn unlocks yet another storyline. Each storyline has at least two, sometimes three, endings, a melancholy or tragic ending and a good ending. At the midpoint of the stories, you can make the wrong choice that gets the main character killed and ends the game so you have to go back and make the right choice to keep the story moving towards its proper ending.

The reason I say Type-Moon are like Japan's answer to Joss Whedon comes from the fact that all their most popular characters are strong fighting women that the hero – the (generally male) audience viewpoint figure – meets and eventually falls in love with. Yes, the games do have a dating sim component that culminates in a porn sex scene that seems to on forever, but Nasu Kinoko might have more literary ambitions than just writing a dating sim, since the sex and hooking up are not the main point of the story. That FATE/STAY NIGHT removed all the sex scenes without altering the storylines at all for the PS2 port in order to qualify for an all-ages rating would indicate just how integral the sex scenes are to the story. What Kinoko's stories share with Joss Whedon and indeed all fantasy sagas is an intricately constructed universe and complex characters. In fact, the female characters are often more nuanced and complex than the hero, and their falling in love with him doesn't make them any less so. They're also filled with the types of high concepts screenwriters and genre writers would kill to have.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayTSUKIHIME is about a teenage boy named Shiki Tohno who ends up helping a female vampire hunt for an ancient vampire that has been committing serial killings in the city. Shiki has a special ability as a recent of nearly dying when he was a child: he has the ability to see the lines that hold all things together, and the ability to cut them, bringing about their permanent death. Seeing the lines gives him a headache that could eventually kill him, so he has to wear a pair of magical eyeglasses that give him normal vision. Shiki would like nothing more than to live a normal life, but finds himself obligated to help the vampire Alcueid after he attacks and wounds her. Their hunt for the rogue vampire brings Shiki into contact with other women with secrets of their own: Ciel, the schoolmate he befriends and has a crush on turns out to be an immortal agent from the Vatican also hunting for the serial killer; his younger sister Akiha, who has inherited the title of head of their upper-class family, has supernatural powers of her own due to the family's bloodline; Hisui and Kohaku, the sisters who work as maids in their house, have the ability to manipulate and manage the life force of all living things; and the vampire they hunt turns out to have a personal connection to Shiki's own past and the truth of his near-death in childhood. Arcueid herself has a tragic past as a princess of vampire aristocracy bred to know almost nothing else but to be a weapon against rogue vampires. Each of the women has their own story that can't be unearthed in a single playthrough, hence the option to unlock their own arcs after the first one, Arcueid's, is finished, and the stories become examinations of not just them, but also the character of Shiki himself through his relationships with them and the choices he makes when he learns the truth of their tragic pasts. This makes TSUKIHIME a fairly ambitious character study of characters coping with the lives fate dealt them, which has fans revisiting them again and again and endlessly talking about them the way all franchises generate a passionate following.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayFATE/STAY NIGHT has an even more epic storyline. Once every generation, the Holy Grail manifests itself and a war between seven chosen mages is declared to win it. The Grail offers its winner the power to grant their heart's desire, and the mages can call upon "Servants", the spirits of legendary heroes from history and myth, to be their familiars to fight for them, and as spirits, only the Servants can obtain the Grail for them. The Servants usually have their own agendas for fighting, and are usually paired with the mage whose temperament is most suited to their own. The hero of the story, Shirou Emiya, is an orphan who lost his family in the last Grail War, which ended disastrously and destroyed a whole neighbourhood, killing his family, and had been raised by one of the surviving mages from that war. Shirou wants to be a maga and hero, but lacks the talent and aptitude for magic beyond a few week spells, but finds himself thrust in the new Grail War when he stumbles upon two Servants fighting, and inadvertently summons a Servant to save him when he's attacked for having witnessed a secret battle. Now he's officially a mage, whether he likes it or not, and his Servant, Saber, is a Knight of the Sword, considered the best of the Servant ranks. Saber is not only a cute blonde girl but also has an unexpected connection to the legend of King Arthur when Shirou discovers her sword is Excalibur.

Kinoko has said that FATE/STAY NIGHT's three different story arcs have variations on a theme. The first is about idealism and the hero's naïve need to stick to his ideals of saving everyone where it might not be possible. The theme of the second, UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS, unlocked after completing FATE, is about the hero facing the corruption of his ideals, and the third, HEAVEN'S FEEL, is even darker when it forces Shirou to face an impossible moral choice. Each arc explores the theme through Shirou's relationship with a different heroine in the story, Saber in FATE, his fellow mage and rival Rin Tohsaka in UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS, and his childhood friend Sakura Mato in HEAVEN'S FEEL, and each determines the type of man Shirou will become by story's end.

Games columnist Andrew Vanden Bossche has written a terrific essay on storytelling and choices in FATE/STAY NIGHT, which covers a lot of things I wanted to say about the game, so you're better off reading it instead of me repeating his points.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon WayFATE/STAY NIGHT may have come out in 2004, but it's been resonant enough to still be in the pop consciousness in Japan. The first story arc has been adapted into a popular anime series (available in the US), and the second arc, UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS, has been adapted into a theatrical anime feature that was released early this year. The ongoing manga adaptation (published in the US by Tokyopop) stays closer to the plot of UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS and there's talk of an anime adaptation of HEAVEN'S FEEL.

Look! It Moves! #63: Universe-Building the Type-Moon Way

There have been fan patches for both TSUKIHIME and FATE/STAY NIGHT that enable you to play the visual novels in English, and the makes of the patch have been so diligent that they even programmed the patches to work only with legally-purchased disc editions of the games rather than copies downloaded illegally from the internet, though clever hackers can probably still create no-disc applications to get rid of the disc-check. It's a mark of how popular these titles are that people would actually want to work for years to create complete translations for them.

Alas, TSUKIHIME is currently out of print, though there's talk of Type-Moon remaking it for release on DVD-Rom with updated graphics and an addition story arc not in the 2000 release. There was an anime TV series (available in the US), but fans of the original visual novel didn't seem to like it and Type-Moon were said to be unhappy with it as well. There's an ongoing manga adaptation that does a pretty good job of subtly amalgamating elements from all the story arcs into what's ostensibly an adaptation of the first arc, though the US edition of the manga was unfinished when the publisher, Dr Master, has appeared to go out of business. The original visual novel FATE/STAY NIGHT is still a bestselling title, but is hugely expensive.

To be concluded next week.

Wondering if it'll ever stop at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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