Imagine this, you’re an university student with no friends, losing touch with your friends from high school. You breezed through high school easily so you thought yourself clever, but university causes a difficulty spike that makes you realize you weren’t. You find a book on blood magic and get transported to a world and get acquainted with someone in that world, someone who fills you with a hope you’ve never had before. The cost to get to her, however, requires you to self-harm to use blood magic.

In a world where your only light, your only motivation to keep going, can only be visited when you abuse your body… What would you do? Would you be able to moderate yourself if it means going through multiple empty, gray days without that light? Would you go to drastic measures to use blood that isn’t your own? These are very unfair questions to ask of anyone, but these are questions Honoka Aikawa must struggle with.

This premise is what captured my interest with A Tithe in Blood a year ago when I played the demo. It’s compelling to see how Honoka moderates herself to visit the person she cares for most and how it affects her both her body & mental state overtime. Additionally, with the perspective of another character present in the story, it also adds a lot of weight to Honoka’s conflict beyond being a tragic love story.

Honoka makes for a fantastic protagonist, reminiscent of Hanako Ikezawa from Katawa Shoujo (given the scenario writer worked on Hanako’s & Lily’s routes for KS, to the point where Honoka’s name is just a vowel swap from Hanako’s; even their last names have similarities) in a few places. She prefers the quiet, yet hates solitude. She has plenty of self-loathing, yet reaches the hearts of others without even realizing. Honoka's big differences from Hanako are both the lengths she goes to for Yasue (the blood magic) and also her introspection that causes her to shut out reality, always trying to escape reality. Honoka’s a compelling character and the story does a great job tackling her mental health problems and struggles.

The other characters are fantastic too. Yasue (who is extremely similar to Lily from KS) works well as a love interest and is adorable with Honoka; Shino (who has some similarities to Emi from KS) ended up being my favourite with both her energetic personality & struggles; Kaoru is a fun mad lass whose antics are hilarious; Tatiana was very neat with her serious demeanor; and Yorehana executes her role in the story beautifully, being my third favourite (Honoka is my second favourite).

I also appreciated that the characters added a layer of uncertainty to aspects of the story. For example, there were times where I wanted to root for Honoka, but other times where I felt Honoka was understandably in the wrong, which made it unclear who to root for in a good way.

One way to describe the story is that it’s about AU versions of Hanako & Lily from KS, with a cast that has a Katawa Shoujo influence personality-wise in a Nasuverse-esque (Fate Stay/Night, Witch on the Holy Night, etc.) world, but with yuri. This has to be one of my favourite sentences I ever said, lol.

The themes present are well-executed as well, although it’s hard to touch on in detail without spoiling the entire game, so full spoilers ahead: The theme that resonated with me the most was “what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to lose one's humanity?” For Honoka, she is on the verge of losing her humanity as she devotes so much of herself to seeing/saving Yasue, to the point where she objectifies her own body (and I truly mean, treats her body like an object) with her constant self-harm. Yasue had lost her humanity in the realm she’s trapped in, ironically unable to make her humanity again despite her magic powers; it was only when she met Honoka that she could feel emotions she had lost long ago and thus regained her humanity.

Shino has been alive longer than anyone else, and has lost her humanity a very long time ago. She can no longer become attached to others as they’ll die anyway, she cannot be understood for even mages cannot imagine the dread her loss of humanity caused her. Yet, she feels an attachment to Honoka, as she reminds Shino of her past self; they can understand each other’s pains; and seeing how Honoka is teetering into the same abyss she did, Shino wants nothing more than to prevent that abyss from engulfing Honoka’s humanity. Unlike the Kaoru, Tatina, and Yonehara, you see that Shino genuinely wants to save Honoka; which, in turn, makes her an awesome wingman for Honoka & Yasue as she makes their relationship possible by the end of the story.

Yonehara was the most interesting aspect of this theme, as her greatest desire is to no longer be human. Humanity had shunned her when they blamed her for the fire that took her parent’s lives, even Yasue shunned her for it, despite her having no part in it. Throughout her time alive, she has been called a monster and shunned time and time again, and with those eyes of hers, you can tell the depths of her pain are deeper than any abyss. Ironically, despite her power to unmake things, she could never unmake her humanity. Even when she believes her guilt over trapping Yasue is the reason she sticks around, the last thing she needs to do to erase her humanity, it’s unlikely her guilt would go away with Yasue’s death considering she believed Yasue was dead for around a century. What would killing Yasue now change? The very notion her humanity would be erased from killing Yasue was desperate self-delusion from someone who was betrayed by everyone around her, from humanity itself, doomed to never be anything else but human.

I personally took away that humanity is a beautifully flawed thing. It can be our greatest flaw, the reason our emotions get the better of us, but it’s also what keeps us human. There is no joy in always being happy, there are no tears when you’re always sad, there is nothing when you feel nothing. However, it’s also that greatest flaw that can ruin other people’s lives (namely Yonehara), and that’s where humanity stops being beautifully flawed, but simply flawed, as it becomes too easy to abandon the thought of seeing another you fear as human, to unfairly shun another out of the circle that is humanity out of fear/anger (the witch hunts are a strong example of this). Humanity is not something that we as humans can abandon, so why should we abandon the notion that another is human? To do so creates the very unfairness that caused Yonehara & Yasue so much grief and the very unfairness that many face in our world today. We are all human, humans that deserve to be treated and seen fairly.

My only real criticism with the story would be that the romance takes a backseat beyond Act 1, so those seeking more cute moments with Yasue & Honoka will be mostly starved unfortunately.

The presentation is also insanely well done. The visuals are clean & appealing, sprites have many different expressions, multiple animations are present to add more life to when blood magic is used, hesitation from the characters or walking are conveyed through the character sprites, every character (including off-screen characters) are voice-acted in Japanese, and the music captures both the Reiwa & Meiji eras. A Tithe in Blood is pure eye candy, and very impressive for the Ren’py engine (the most impressive I’ve seen with the engine so far), making A Tithe in Blood feel less like a visual novel and more like an experience in the best way possible.

As a kinetic novel, there’s not much to say. However, it was interesting seeing the system had a four act system like Katawa Shoujo. I know I’m bringing up KS a lot in this review, and while A Tithe in Blood is undeniably its own unique thing as the KS aspects are more-so neat thing to notice than overbearingly present, it’s hard to not bring up the KS influence given KS is o

Pretentious and poorly written. The climax makes no sense, thematically disconnected, completely unsatisfying. The blood magic concept potentially could have been extremely interesting but then barely glossed over it. The whole thing was more of a metaphor for self-harm than any actual lore or world building. Honoka is the most boring protagonist ever written, and the main antagonist has the depth of a piece of toilet paper. Worst of all this is barely even a novel at less than 8 hrs long. Studio elan had some pretty decent works in the past but this one is not worth the time at all.

Honestly im a bit disappointed coming from previous titles in the series, almost 2 hours in and there's no romance between the characters, just basic care, I feel like more could have been done to actually flesh out some sort of love story but sadly that wasn't done, love the studio behind this, just not happy with this work of theirs.