A Tithe in Blood (A Tithe in Blood ~Chi no Chigiri~) is a kinetic visual novel developed by Studio Élan, the studio behind works like Highway Blossoms and Please Be Happy. Like their other works, this is a yuri/girls love story, this one pitched as a dark tale of love, mystery, and magic.
Love Across Time
A Tithe In Blood takes place during the snowy season in Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido prefecture. Our protagonist Honoka is a generally reserved and quiet young college student studying Italian literature, the sort of person who would otherwise be trudging through the day-in-day-out doldrums of university life were it not for a particular grimoire she came across. Within its pages lies information on the art of “blood magic”, a form of magic that even non-mages can use…for a price. After performing a spell written within the book and paying its blood cost, Honoka finds her spirit being sent to a version of Sapporo from the Meiji era.
It’s here where she finds Yasue, a mage with a penchant for theatre who has been sealed in this pocket dimension for over a century. Honoka is the first new person Yasue has had the opportunity to interact with in a lifetime, so she naturally takes to the young lady from the future, welcoming her company. Honoka’s quiet disposition already keeps her from being all that social a person, but she’s also been dealing with immense emotional turmoil over the tragic loss of her parents shortly before the events of the story, so the rather bright older woman quickly becomes a beacon in an otherwise dark period of life. The two of them quickly form a bond, one which begins to blossom into love.
The setup of the story is one of A Tithe In Blood’s greatest aspects. I found the particular nature of the relationship between Honoka and Yasue compelling enough on its own all throughout the first act of the story. I’m something of a sucker for stories regarding characters from different timelines interacting, and the way Yasue responds to pictures of the people of the future she never got to experience is cute in its own way. There are also moments where we see Honoka unsure of how best to really go about matters like catching Yasue up on history (as a lot of good and bad has happened in the time since the Meiji era), and these work well for the scenes showing these two interacting.
Gravitas
The defining part of our main pair’s relationship, and to an extent the story itself, is their shared grief. One of them has experienced a rather down-to-earth and real tragedy in being orphaned, while the other has experienced a more fictitious tragedy (being sealed away from her world by magic) that nonetheless carries the all too real sense of deep isolation even beyond that which mages often experience in this universe. They work like opposite sides of the same coin, similar yet different enough.
Plenty of narrative drama emerges as a result of their hardships. Honoka, someone who already struggles with a sense of powerlessness in life, becomes increasingly disheartened searching to find the means to offer Yasue freedom while her own body begins to grow pale and anemic due to the literal blood toll needed to even see her beloved. Meanwhile, Yasue shows signs that not all is as it seems with her own mental state, with her radiant ladylike veneer masking her own pain at the loss of connection to the world she once lived in as well as enmity towards the one who sealed her. They find both comfort and something that they each lack in one another, but their circumstances pose a great many complications.
To digress a little bit, the subject matter of grief and the naturally accompanying depression, self-loathing, and listlessness are nothing new in fiction. All the same, this story hit closer to home than the vast majority of media I’ve experienced that addressed the subject. It’s rare that I feel like something really “gets it” quite to this extent. And while I tend to find that simply being sympathizable doesn’t necessarily make me like a story or character more, I definitely felt more of a connection to how it was portrayed than I often do in other explorations of the subject.
Putting It Together
Aiding how well the story is set up is its excellent presentation.
While A Tithe in Blood takes place in Japan with voice acting mostly in Japanese, the team behind it is multinational. The story was written for English first (the text itself I believe technically being Australian English which makes sense given the Aussie scenario writer, Suriko, something noticeable with the presence and spelling of certain words I’m less used to seeing). It reads a bit more novelish than some of the more script-heavy visual novels, though I found the prose still relatively lush yet breezy to actually read through.
The visual component is very well-presented. In particular, I found the setting of a dark, wintry modern Sapporo contrasting with the bright yet illusory feel of the Sapporo of the past really fits as a visual and thematic backdrop for the main couple. A Tithe in Blood is a nice-looking visual novel all throughout, as there’s a lot of variety in the backgrounds, the several dozen CGs, and even a fair share of animations to character sprites that help make it all quite expressive. As a story that features plenty of self-inflicted bloodshed and emotional anguish, it can sometimes get rather visceral, although rarely gory to the point of being outright disturbing (and there are toggles in the options for those more squeamish or sensitive to this stuff).
Further setting its particular tone is A Tithe in Blood’s fantastic soundtrack, one which uses a lot of slower and often rich arrangements to truly elevate each scene. Several tracks feature multiple variations, further giving that sense of intentionality and musical attachment that a recurring theme often does. Dialogue is fully voiced (including Honoka, who also unusually has a portrait on screen despite the first-person perspective of the text), which is nice. I didn’t find any particular issue with the voicework myself, and the sound design is also superb throughout.
I felt Studio Élan overall did a splendid job on presentation, as I found myself quite immersed in the look and vibe of the story.
…Now What?
A Tithe In Blood takes place over several acts. I have a ton of praise for the majority of Act 1 and it made me eager to see where all it was headed…to more mixed results.
Act 2 shifts away from Honoka’s perspective, as we spend more time with the supporting cast that was briefly introduced in Act 1. Honoka finds an acquaintance early on in the story in Shino, a seemingly more jovial girl working the library and the closest thing she ends up with to a friend thus far besides Yasue. Initially, their encounters are fairly unspectacular, with a couple of conversations in the library here and a chance encounter at a pub with one of Shino’s acquaintances there. Act 2 covers a somewhat truncated version of the days of Act 1, this time from Shino’s perspective as we start to learn more of what’s going on outside of Honoka’s more narrowed perspective of events. Shino’s role in the story becomes more clear, as well as that of her acquaintances we briefly met thus far (Kaoru and Tatiana). It’s here that we start to see more forces at play, including that of the main antagonist of the story, as Honoka’s use of forbidden magic has her caught up in more serious matters than she knows or bargained for.
It is also here where I find that the story begins to get substantially more bumpy. The supporting cast outside of the main two are generally fine enough characters in their own right, but the way they’re fairly abruptly put front and center as the focus for a considerable chunk of Act 2 doesn’t quite fit in as smoothly to the story thus far. That’s not to say there aren’t still some compelling scenes or dialogue exchanges, but their integration into the greater picture of the story doesn’t really mesh as well as it should.
Things only start to get worse as the story approaches its climax. Later portions of the story have some surprisingly robust action scenes (there are mages in this story after all), but I found the scenes of actual, meaningful character growth along the way to be rather subdued and limited even as the tension built. This particularly hurts both Yasue and Honoka, with the former getting significantly reduced screen time, and the latter not really given much space to actually grow as the focal figure of the narrative.
This all culminates in a severely underwhelming climactic scene that felt like it missed the mark in almost every way. It’s particularly lackluster when taken as either a show of or a means to facilitate meaningful character development. Any message it’s trying to convey here feels woefully muddied. Heck, even taken as an action scene, it’s easily the weakest. It doesn’t help that the main antagonist of this story is incredibly underdeveloped in terms of motives and personality, the worst character by an order of magnitude in what is a rather condensed cast. At least the epilogue manages to salvage things a little, but it all around was a disappointing conclusion to a story with a very strong beginning for me. Things just felt rushed near the end, which is a shame because despite its structure I found the story to be otherwise pretty well-paced.
Verdict
It’s difficult for me to really pin down exactly how I feel about A Tithe In Blood on the whole. Its setup, its theming, and its presentation are all incredible, making for a memorable experience with reading the visual novel. As a story of the experience of grief and living through it, I connected with it quite a lot.
Once it gets to actually having to progress its narrative, however, things gradually get shakier and shakier in the way it pieces together its various sections, and it features an overall letdown of a conclusion. While in its set-up act, it’s one of the most emotionally resonant and striking parts of a visual novel I’ve read in some time. Unfortunately, by the time I was done, I spent more time dwelling on how I felt about the story rather than the impact it had on me, the sign of something with a share of missed potential with the direction it took.
Still, there are compelling aspects to this story and a lot that I did really like about it. There is something genuine beneath it all, and I found I got more out of it than I do from a lot of attempts at this subject matter. It won’t work for everyone and the story that it tells is rough and uneven, but it manages to have the memorable good aspects to stand out just enough.
A TITHE IN BLOOD IS RECOMMENDED
If you’re looking for another yuri visual novel, you may want to check out UsoNatsu ~The Summer Romance Bloomed From A Lie~. We have also covered a wide variety of other visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to Studio Élan for a PC review code for A Tithe In Blood.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
