After 24 years, the legendary visual novel that put the Fate/stay night devs on the map has an English remake, and it's out-reviewing FF7 Rebirth, Hades 2, and more

24 years after its original launch, Tsukihime - the first visual novel from Fate/stay night studio Type-Moon - finally has an official English-language version, and it's reviewing extremely well. In fact, the scores are so good that it's already the best-reviewed game of 2024, outdoing the likes of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Hades 2, and more.

Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon is the first part of a remake series adapting and modernizing the original visual novel for today's players. The English-language version, which hit PS4 and Switch back in June, marks the first official localization of the game, and as reviews have trickled in over the past several weeks, it now enjoys an aggregate score of 94 on OpenCritic and 94 or 93 on Metacritic, depending on which platform you're looking at.

That makes this new version of Tsukihime the best-reviewed game of 2024 so far, topping the OpenCritic scores of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (93), Balatro (91), Hades 2 (90), Tekken 8 (90), and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (90). The caveat is that those mainstream releases have many, many more reviews than Tsukihime, which arguably makes their average scores a lot more impressive. But the visual novel has garnered enough attention to give it the number one slot on OpenCritic's 2024 hall of fame.

Regardless, the official worldwide release of Tsukihime marks a big moment for visual novel fans. The original VN - which, like many of its era, launched with some adult-only sexual content that's long since been excised - is legendary in its own right, and kicked things off for Type-Moon. The studio would, of course, go on to create Fate/stay night, and with it one of the biggest anime-style media franchises ever built. Tsukihime got its own franchise extension in Melty Blood, a fighting game spin-off that's become something of a cult classic in its own right.

It's a banner year for the format, with one of the OG anime visual novels finally hitting Steam with its first official English translation.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.