hen Shiki Tohno was a child, there was some sort of event—his family tells him it was a car accident, but he himself doesn't remember—and he became ill. Strange, red, veinlike threads began appearing on everything—walls, furniture, people—and Shiki noticed that when the lines on an item were broken, the item fell apart. Unable to convince anyone that the lines were real, Shiki became desperate and withdrawn, until a red-haired woman calling herself a mage appeared and gave him glasses that kept him from seeing the lines. She told him not to take the glasses off until he had to, but said that someday he would want to protect someone, and the lines would become important.
Tsukihime Lunar Legend gets into gear eight years later, when Shiki is a withdrawn, distracted high-school boy whose memories appear distressingly fluid and incomplete. His father has just died, but though he's the only male in the family, his brittle younger sister Akiha stands to inherit, because of Shiki's poor health ... and possibly something more, given that his father avoided him ever since the childhood incident. Akiha orders Shiki to leave his aunt and uncle's place, where he's lived since he was a kid, and to return to the family estate; there she attempts to enforce curfew on him and shame him into behaving as she deems appropriate. Shiki seems more baffled than offended or cowed, but regardless, following her orders proves difficult.
Especially once he finds himself incongruously and abruptly knifing a blond woman, who falls to bloody pieces. The body and the blood disappear and he wakes up at home, but the blonde, who gives her name as Arcueid, later turns up to accuse him of murdering her. Though she was dismembered, she survived; as it happens, she's a vampire. Still, Shiki's seemingly unprovoked attack seriously weakened her, so she demands his help in her work: tracking and stopping another, more callous vampire, who's been leaving behind a trail of drained human corpses.
Lots of talk, but little is said
Tsukihime Lunar Legend has the plot potential to be another Hellsing, but its dreamy tone and its human-interaction-heavy plot recall more staid series like Haibane-Renmei instead. There are action sequences and some visceral horror—the scene where Shiki knifes Arcueid is particularly creepy, since it's presented only in fragmented flashback, and it's unclear exactly why he did it, or which parts of his shattered memory are real. But in these four episodes, talking dominates over fighting, though a great deal remains uncommunicated. Shiki's faulty memory and general uncertainty carry over into the scripting—some key scenes are presented only in confused fragments, perhaps to explain Shiki's discombobulated point of view, which makes him too uncertain to explore why he attacked Arcueid in the first place, or why his kind, bespectacled classmate Ciel keeps turning up armed at murder scenes.
Visually, Tsukihime Lunar Legend has two basic modes: broad, bright daylight, when everything looks so crisp and real that vampires, hellhounds and other creatures that go bump in the night are hard to credit, and dim, indistinct night. The latter mode can be a little frustrating, especially when Arcueid's adversary shows up wearing a dim thing that looks like a half-snake, half-wolf hovering necklace, or when scene after scene involves dark figures moving around half-lit areas. The daytime scenes, on the other hand, are precise and glorious.
Still, the animators get little enough to play with, considering all the talking-head confrontation (and, more often, non-confrontation) in the first third of this 12-episode series. When Shiki isn't actively attacking something (which happens rarely) or wailing about how it's all too much (which happens all too often), the series mostly focuses on calm, low-level conversations in which the achingly pretty score is the only thing keeping the tone from near-somnambulance. The show's established mysteries, its serious tone, its compelling style and its creative plot are all significant draws, but at the same time, everything moves so slowly that it's easy to wonder how far the show could possibly go in just two more discs.
I'd really like to see a few more anime series where the kid with the weird supernatural power/inhuman piloting skill/near-magical connection to his robot pal/etc. immediately and enthusiastically embraces his exceptional nature, instead of cowering, crying, getting stubborn and angry, playing it all off as a burden or a joke, or whatever other form of resistance the writers can think up. The reluctant-hero archetype makes for more drama, but at this point it feels like a cliche, no matter what his particular baggage is.
— Tasha
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