Tsukihime was my first Visual Novel and the engaging story well thought out world and the cast of equally lovable and complex characters completely drew me in. The game came out in 2000 and is SUPER dated with minimal and poor CGs no voice acting and no handdrawn backgrounds. Like they literally just took reallife images and placed a blue filter over them. Despite its age and clear lack of budget the sheer strength of the storytelling and characters massively outweighed the minor gripes I may have had. Tsukihime has undoubtedly become one of my favorite stories of all time however as far as an anime adaptation goes it seemingly has never received one unfortunately. Or at the very least the community would rather sweep its mere existence under the rug. So on to the main topic what do I think of the infamous yet elusive Tsukihime anime? Honestly despite what people say this really isnt the worst thing to ever exist. It tries its best to adapt some semblance of the Tsukihime story to the point where a newcomer might kind of enjoy this series just a little bit. However what I cant ignore is how unfathomably insulting this series is when stacked up to the source material. First of all it was basically doomed from the start when they gave it only 12 episodes. A 50ish hour Visual Novel was definitely not going to fit in such a meager amount of time without cutting some corners which they definitely did. They basically adapt Arcueids route but try to cram in the plot twists from Ciel and Akihas as well. Just about everything from Hisui and Kohakus routes are 100 omitted basically. That aside this anime somehow manages to present itself poorly in almost every single aspect imaginable which absolutely baffles me. The artstyle is terribly dull and ugly. The colors are drab grey and lifeless. The character designs are all adapted to look more serious and edgy and it completely falls flat when compared to their original designs which are full of color and personality. I get that this shift in artstyle was likely done to preserve the crushingly dark tone of the series but that can be done without making everything look as lifeless as a Dead Apostle. On top of this the animation itself is absolutely atrocious. The action scenes if you can even call them that are painful to watch. Theres really only a couple instances where theres any fighting but most of it is just really slow with as little movement as possible. There were approximately TWO scenes in this ENTIRE series where it looked like they kind of tried even just a little bit and even then they are probably not much better than average. Every time the characters are even a meter away from the camera they become indistinguishable meshes and every little movement is just so painful with absolutely zero impact or weight to any of it at all. Its hard to believe that this came out of J.C. Staff considering that they produced Utena under their studio name just 5 years prior. Obviously the studio behind the production definitely doesnt absolutely determine its quality but still I would imagine there would be at least some level of quality control. Sure this show came right at the beginning of the 2000s when digital animation was still fairly new and people were still adjusting to it so a certain level of jank is probably a given but this is just too much. The original Hellsing which came out two years prior looks MILES better than this show and people constantly rag on about how poor its production quality was. I think theres a lot of similarities to be found in these two shows actually. The old Hellsing however actually looks like it was made by people who care just a little bit. Theres not much positive I can say about this anime but hypothetically if you had never heard of the Tsukihime Visual Novel and came across this anime and were also able to get past its copious and glaring production issues you may find yourself enjoying the story at least a tiny bit. However if you have not seen this and want to get into Tsukihime or Type Moon in general this is not the way to go. Essentially TLDR I would absolutely not recommend this series as your introduction to Tsukihime. If it was Im sorry but I hope that any mild interest you may have picked up could lead you toward playing the Visual Novel. Hell Tsukihime also has a manga adaptation thats actually pretty damn good. I would highly recommend either of those choices. If youre already familiar with Tsukihime and just want to watch this anime for educational purposes which I did I cant say Id really encourage that because it was pretty painful for me and ultimately it didnt really feel worth it. Well heres hoping that we get a ufotable Tsukihime anime once theyre all done with Fate.