#code realize review

MY HEART. MY BOY. MY SWEET PRECIOUS CINNABUN.

I’d save him for last because he’s transparently my favorite, but I’m trying to do this in the play order I’ve worked out should be done. Victor was my first route, though, because aaaa he’s so perfect - this was a bad choice both because it meant I saw him in all other routes and couldn’t romance him and because he spoils everything except Germain and Lupin’s routes. (He doesn’t spoil a plot twist in Impey per se, but information Impey gives you is redundant if you play Victor, and you’re definitely supposed to have Van and Impey’s routes done to make the ‘surprise’ in Fran’s route work. It’s not a surprise if you go directly into Victor’s from Common Route)

Anyway, Victor should be done third. It spoils Van Helsing’s route and negatively impacts Impey’s route. Germain’s route spoils Victor’s so even though Van’s teases Germain’s, you should do Victor before San-chan.

Victor Frankenstein

THE BOY’S PERFECT.

Anyway, Victor has an unfair advantage over all the other guys, even Lupin. He shows up the most in the common route and is super important to Cardia. He’s technically the third introduced, but Impey’s solo scene with Cardia is shorter and mostly focused on bullying Impey, and Lupin suffers from what he’ll always suffer from: plot is way more important than him whenever it’s ‘his’ time. If you don’t believe me, trust me anyway. I will make a whole separate post to PROVE to you that Victor gets an unfair advantage in the common route compared to literally everyone else.

But it’s no joke to say that Victor Frankenstein’s route feels the most ‘natural’ of them all, because the common route does such a good job of setting it up (especially if you’re going for his route) that by the time you’re on his route you can’t imagine her ending up on anyone else’s route. It’s so effective that Victor being my first route made me think that the whole common route adapted and gave special scenes to whatever the highest affection boy was, so that you naturally fall into their arms like ‘well of course they fell in love’.

It’s so significant I can’t even review his route without talking about his common route parts.

So let me stop rambling and get on with it.

Victor, like Impey, has a really obvious role in the story that you know basically immediately. He’s the cute nerd who’s also the only doctor for Cardia, dedicated to improving her life because he feels responsible for her creation and is suffering from crippling guilt over the Vampire War. He makes her clothes, he identifies the gem in her chest, he explains where it came from and what it’s meant to be, and he teaches her how to handle chemicals. Which she takes to REALLY well, because Isaac is her dad.

Victor’s route further explores the fact that the Vampire War was all just a staged play and more of a pointless genocide than an actual ‘war’, and that’s part of why Helsing’s route should be played first, but also Alistair is outright villainous in Victor’s route, so it’s impossible to be fooled in Van’s route if you’ve done Fran’s first.

You may not know immediately if you don’t also guess/know that Cardia is a homunculus, but Fran is one of...I think just two? who know immediately that Cardia is a homunculus. Most of the men find out when she does, after they’ve already fallen for her, but not Victor. He knows from the beginning, and despite that, all he ever sees her as is a human girl like anyone else. He loves her knowing full well what she is, because to him she’s always just been an innocent girl he caused harm to.

Fran’s one of my favorite routes on a purely technical level, because Cardia learns chemicals and uses them alongside Victor. He doesn’t let her use the deadly explosive kinds because he’s super protective, but his is one of the routes where her training actually comes in to play, rather than expecting her to step back and let Fran protect her. In fact, his route requires you to treat him as an equal and trust him implicitly.

Victor’s route was super easy to get into for me because I was a simpering fool for Fran anyway. You’ve got to go with him to help protect him in the train during the tag team mission, and ideally you’re supposed to trust him to be able to handle himself against the Twilight soldiers even when it looks like he’s backed into a corner and helpless, because he wants to protect Cardia so much he’d rather be put in danger than let her endanger herself.

Cardia’s route is probably the roughest encounter with Finis, as he succeeds in activating the Horologium before Victor can show up to save her, turning her into a ticking time bomb that can’t be turned off.

Victor is actually so attentive to Cardia. When Cardia tries to sneak out of the mansion at the very end of the common route because she thinks she’s a monster, she looks back to the mansion because her heart aches at the thought of never seeing Victor anymore...but there he is. He noticed she was trying to sneak away and followed after her, because Victor would rather banish himself than allow her to feel alone. Imagine my surprise when I found out like half the other routes Cardia just escapes because no one notices her trying to sneak away.

So, Victor doesn’t just reject that she’s a monster, he rejects it with the authority of having always known her true nature not out of some spat of denial. He accepts her completely, and loves her even in her darkest moment. Then he promises he will do anything to save her, and runs off into the night.

It’s just about the next morning that Cardia realizes this strange feeling in her heart might actually be love, but oh my gosh. This girl has it bad. She’s always dedicated to her routemate, but with Victor, she is laser focused on him and only him, and will blindly rush into danger if it means seeing him.

to be fair, though, Victor is basically the same thing. Honestly, you wouldn’t expect the scientist of all things to have maybe the most action packed route but dang, he is just IN THE THICK OF IT. He jumps off a bridge with Cardia while a bunch of Twilight soldiers are shooting at them and that’s at the beginning of his route.

Especially if you’ve played through Impey’s route where Cardia can’t stop taking back her confessions and Van’s route where he pretends he isn’t in love to ‘protect’ her, the fact that Victor and Cardia admit they’re deeply in love and will say it just over and over again, without ever doubting each other or questioning each other about it, it’s really nice. Maybe a tad mushy, but the angst on the route helps balance that.

For me, Victor’s route was the easiest route to play. I didn’t hit any bad ends for Saint Germain, either, but I was more uncertain about some of the choices. Victor’s are so easy you kind of have to choose them on purpose to fail.

Victor doesn’t trust himself, Cardia and Victor both believe they don’t really deserve to live. The fact that the choices and overarching plot of the route is basically “Trust Victor because he’ll do literally anything to protect you, even controvert the laws of the universe, so don’t you dare give up, but also protect him from his own stupid choices motivated by survivor’s guilt” is pretty wholesome.

Victor’s route is, I would say, the most wholesome, and I’m sure I’m not biased or anything.

All the boys have things that allow them to sympathize with Cardia, but I feel like Victor and Cardia have the most similar backstory. Victor sees himself as a monster because his work massacred the innocent vampires, and Cardia sees herself as a monster because her poison killed the only person who ever loved her aside from her father who abandoned her and told her she wasn’t allowed to ever love anyone.

Granted, there’s no revenge or closure or anything on the villagers for what they did in Victor’s route, but there is acceptance, understanding, and healing, because both of them have ugly, horrible tragedy in their history that they can’t go back and change or make better, but they have someone who loves and understands them and doesn’t blame them for it anyway.

Victor is at once plagued with the guilt and self-loathing that tells him he doesn’t deserve to be happy and just so desperate to make up for what he’s done and find a way for someone to forgive him so he can forgive himself.

But man.

Cardia is transforming into the Philosopher’s Stone in Victor’s route, which means this person he loves, the only person who knows everything about him and loves him anyway, is a ticking time bomb who is going to explode and wipe out an entire city full of innocent people again, and it’ll be his fault for not doing anything.

Because the queen isn’t pretending to be a good person in this route, she gets the most development out of all the routes. (she has a really weak and shallow epiphany in Lupin’s route that matches Victor’s, but that’s the ‘must resolve all plot threads whether it makes sense or not’ thing) It’s also the one that most clearly shows she’s romantically interested in her knight.

Victor’s route climax has him caught between two horrible fates: allow Queen Victoria to release the Zicterium and massacre her own people to plunge the world into a massive war so that Cardia will survive and be allowed to live as a normal human girl, dying beside her in the process, or...allow Cardia to be the one who kills all of Steel London when she explodes, killing her as well. No third option, no ‘save all of London’.

This is just. so cruel to Victor. He has a big flashing button on his chest that says ‘traumatized by the fact that Zicterium killed a bunch of people after he accidentally invented it’, and then his route climax is him stuck in a dilemma where the only answer is ‘everyone dies by Zicterium’.

Despite that, Victor thinks just incredibly fast on his feet, and he’s so dedicated to his ideals and pacifism that he’s able to finally sway Leonhard into defying the queen’s commands and defending her from herself. I don’t particularly find Victoria sympathetic regardless of her motivations, because she’s a ruthless killer who massacred the vampires and tried her literal hardest to do the same to her own people in a misguided attempt to protect Britain, but the route tries to make her sympathetic anyway.

Victor and Cardia both get BDH moments, including Cardia rescuing herself from being a hostage and showing up at the showdown to allow the heroes to fight to their fullest without fear of her being killed as a hostage.

And they’re always like ‘I’d rather die for you’ ‘no, I can’t live in a world without you, I’ll die first’. Honestly, they’re just...so adorable.

Cardia’s poison goes away late in the route because she’s mid-transformation, which gives Victor the ability to kiss and touch her without fear.

and rather than try to explain how cute it is, I show a picture and save probably literally 1,000 words

aaa

so perfect and cute.

...

I think I’ve gotten lost in the weeds again.

anyway.

so.

Honestly, you won’t be surprised by the queen AT ALL if you just go by what happens in the route. It relies on you being tricked by Impey and Helsing’s routes where she comes off as good-natured and reliable, so that you’ll fall for her tricks in Victor’s route. Aleister’s role in the route is pretty much superfluous, though, he’s there to be annoying and hold Cardia captive so that Victor can be scared for her, and then flounce off into the night in style because you just saw him star back in Van’s route.

The other boys also don’t contribute that much to Victor’s route, other than being there in the big showdown while they fight off the Twilight troops and helping Victor try to sneak into the castle again. Saint-Germain briefly features to tell Cardia what she’s feeling is love, but even though the routes usually have the ‘next in line’ feature in the route to tease you, there’s just so much going on with Victor that there’s no time for Germain to do much but look absolutely fabulous and murder Finis so hard he doesn’t come back.

Both of Victor’s endings are so good!

His normal/bad ending is one of the more tragic and painful of the endings, and while it’s not as completely different as Impey’s, it still feels unique and based off of the choice you make, not just collected affection points deciding if the story cuts off too soon or not.

It just works. Cardia deciding to take away the responsibility from Victor and  save his life by killing herself is well within her personality, and it plays out so painfully tragic - as she didn’t know he was only moments away from finding the solution to save her.

It’s also interesting, because Fran’s is the only ‘normal’ ending in the original game where Cardia dies instead of the love interest. Her dedication to making sure that Victor survives, and her determination not to live a life without Victor is just that strong.

Poor Victor.

BUT ANYWAY ONTO THE GOOD END.

Victor being willing to put Zicterium in his mouth so that he can feed it to her, conveniently in the form of a kiss! Granted, he does point out it’s much less volatile and immediately deadly in liquid form, but it’s still extremely dangerous, since leaving anything behind or swallowing any of it could be terrible.

Victor gets to kiss Cardia more than the other boys, but, look. he

earned it

.

It kind of cracks me up, honestly, that while Victor is always looking for a cure for Cardia, it’s only on his route that he immediately figures out a fix. Most people have to either wait for Future Blessings before he’s done or complete her transformation into the philosopher’s stone, but Victor is like ‘well it’s a prototype but it’s one I’m willing to trust my lips and other things to’

To be fair, the version he gives Cardia in his route requires her to constantly take it, and never neutralizes it completely while the others are one-and-done, but still.

ANYWAY

The fact that Victor refuses to see her as anything but a beautiful, lovely, human young girl and that Cardia refuses to blame Victor for the atrocities that the queen perpetrated, that she gently holds him when he cries and he removes his gloves to touch her face when she thinks she’s becoming a horrible monster....they’re just so sweet.

They’re so adorable.

in conclusion:

VICTOR IS THE BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

also, how can I not love the ship when it is “Victor Frankenstein and his monster”

Mod S 

This past episode of Code: Realize honestly left me more concerned than relieved. I'm not necessarily saying that I think everything about the new episode was bad, but it really left me unsatisfied. 

To try and keep a positive note, I'll talk about some things that I did enjoy. Finis' exchange with Queen Victoria was quite enjoyable. She's absolutely gorgeous in the anime; even more than in the visual novel I think. It showed us what kind of character she's going to be, and it seems that they are focusing on the side of Queen Victoria that shows up in Victor's route. I honestly expected that, so I'm quite pleased. Though she is more of an antagonist in his route, Victoria receives far more character development there. I'm glad they are attempting to do her justice. Finis himself is still amazingly represented in the anime as well. 

The animation's quality has, the majority of the time, kept up. For an otome anime, I'm honestly quite impressed with how well it's animated. Usually, more widely popular anime have the best budgets and therefore have the best animation, so I knew that it wouldn't be the most beautifully animated show when I walked into it. But even still, I'm glad that it has received at least this much. In particular, I think Lupin, Impey and Finis are animated incredibly well. Impey actually gets to show off how expressive he is, and I love that. 

I enjoyed some of the small details that they did end up keeping in the anime: how Lupin stops Van from shooting Cardia (that is mostly the same), details about Cardia not having a human heart, Impey being a good cook, Cardia wanting to touch a loved one, Victor convincing Van to join their cause, and Impey's entire dynamic with Cardia. These parts of this anime is what really makes me glad that it's being made, and I hope that they continue with it as much as possible. 

There were a few changes that I actually ended up liking too: I enjoyed the fact that Victor was the one to explain that Cardia has no heart instead of a random NPC. It felt like a much more intimate scene to me, and I think it is good characterization for Victor. I also enjoyed the conversation Cardia has with Lupin by the riverside where she explains that she longs to touch someone she loves. I think it helped to form the relationship between the two of them. I would much rather have them focus on Lupin's route than just ignore all routes to begin with for the sake of the anime anyway. 

I was also incredibly disappointed in Saint Germain's introduction. His intro in the visual novel was a testament to his mysterious and whimsical personality, and I don't feel like they captured his nature at all there. And this might be a little nitpicky, but I was frustrated they did not show him praying before the meal they ate together. Saint Germain's entire character revolves around the idea of the Christian religion, so why ignore it? Probably not to waste the precious frames of animation. Even still, it's a disservice to his character. 

But, now I have to talk about what disappointed me. I don't enjoy how they changed too much of the outing Cardia has with Lupin, Victor and Impey. I would have enjoyed it more if the three of them had been together from the start, but I do understand that they are trying to focus on Lupin. The entire change to Van's introduction also frustrated me. It was far more interesting in the anime to watch his introduction via a crowd of screaming patrons and to chase everyone out into the woods, but I also understand the need to focus their time and energy (and budget) on other scenes. Nevertheless, Van's introduction was far less interesting than the visual novel's, so I was not impressed. 

And even though the animation is good, there are still some animation critique's that I have. Van Helsing's gun animations are kind of weak, but I think they're holding back the good stuff for the airship race, the train heist and the final confrontations with Finis. Yet, as it stands, I hope Van's animations can at least keep consistent. I also think that Saint Germain is not being animated as he should be. His character model seems a bit awkward in comparison; I think this may be because of how his hair is, and the fact that he is being shown without his cape. I can only hope that they fix his model soon. Basically, I think Saint Germain (so far) is getting the short end of the stick in this show. 

In regards to Episode 2, I feel less like this was Van's introduction and more like a quick attempt to shoehorn him into the story because they had to. I wasn't afraid or transfixed by him like I was in the visual novel, and I honestly do feel that they could have done a better job capturing those feelings. I still think it could have impacted me even though I've already played the game. 

Finally, I'll address some predictions. I definitely think that this will only be a 12 or 13 episode show and that they'll pick specific scenes to focus on each character's backstory. I think Van's will be soon, as Delly's introduction this Saturday. Victor's will probably be after that, followed by Impey's with the introduction of Nemo during the airship race. Saint Germain's will probably come in where it usually does during Lupin's route, with a bit more detail from his own route in regards to the Apostles of Idea. It will likely be an incredibly abridged version, but at least it won't be totally ignored. 

I'm no longer hoping for the inclusion of route specific scenes, save for Lupin. I'm also very wary of how much will stay the same based on what's been changed and cut short so far. I've done my best to abandon any expectations that I had originally as to try and enjoy my favorite franchise receiving more attention, and I feel like that might be the fandom's best course of action at this point. Episode 3 might be the nail in the coffin for me; I might just have to separate the game from the anime entirely so that I can try and have a fun experience. 

Until next time! 

Mod Cheshire

Mod S touched upon many points that I agree with. This episode did not do as I had originally hoped. My biggest issue with the episode was Saint Germain’s lackluster introduction. He’s a mysterious and exciting character, but the anime failed to show any aspects of his personality. Anyone watching the show without having played the game won’t know a single thing about it, which is a bit sad. They won’t be able to get as attached to him as we are. His animations are also really...off. His head looks way too big and his body seems super thin. He’s weird to look at.

Van’s introduction was at least exciting. I was hoping for Van to attack Cardia and Lupin in the middle of the fair, as opposed to an alley, but the anime is really pressed for time, so I can completely understand the changes. His animations are A LOT better in the actual show than they were in the opening, which I’m extremely grateful for. I’m looking forward to his action scenes later on! I hope they’re just as good as they are now.

Aside from that, this episode was rather bleehh. It had nothing exciting to it, and I really wanted to see more of Victor and Impey. We at least got to see Queen Victoria, which is fun. 

I have determined Van Helsing is the correct/expected second route. Similar to Impey, his route doesn’t spoil anything, but it does hint at Germain’s route and sets up Victor’s. (Victor’s route will spoil Van’s)

Van Helsing got the immediate VA boost, which was good, because his introduction was the first jarring experience of making a choice that meant nothing. “Come Out/Stay Hidden” has no difference except a couple paragraphs of dialog and which people get affection points. That’s to be expected in a free mobile game, but for a game with a $50 price tag (even considering the bundled fandisc) it’s pretty unforgivable. The lack of animation and repeat backgrounds/misc CGs also show through in this route whether it’s your second as is likely to be expected or especially if it’s third like mine was.

Not to go on a tangent, but the fact that the boys don’t even get unique bedrooms despite each of them getting at least one scene in their bedroom is a travesty.

Anyway, back on topic. Van is a fun little tsundere route, but the trouble with his route is that you spend most of it waiting for a payoff that barely happens, due to the plot they decided to go with. Transferring tsundere into manpain makes for a rough route when it’s the same length as everyone else’s.

It’s interesting that this route departs from the others where it has multiple villains that Van has to go through before the final villain, instead of just sending endless waves of Twilight mooks and giving one big boss at the end. Unfortunately, if you’re a fool like myself and first played Victor and Impey before him, you’ll be disappointed that Cardia isn’t really ‘shaped’ by Helsing. Despite the focus on self defense and martial arts - which will come in handy in other routes - Cardia’s role is pretty similar here as in Impey’s, minus engineering stuff: stand back, let Van Helsing be awesome, worry about him.

I found his bad endings easier to avoid in general, except against Jack the Ripper. Mostly because the choices were again pretty weird. You can kind of guess ‘don’t resist’ is the correct choice from his lessons about when to surrender (if you forget that it’s literally Jack the Ripper, and you don’t let Jack get near you with knives) - but good luck if you’ve done Germain’s route before this, because like with Impey and Victor’s routes, the same dilemma has the opposite answer in Germain and Van’s route. The second bad end Jack can give you (because what’s more fun than one bad end instantly after you start a route? Two!) is just some serious BS, though, I’m calling it right now. “Do you stay and try to get the door open or abandon it and look for another route” is absolutely a ‘damned if you do or don’t’ dilemma, because either route can and will result in death in a horror movie...but when you stack on that the narrative says “This is a dead end with only one door that has faint light behind it” before giving you the option to decide whether you should keep struggling with the door while Jack closes in or abandon it and look elsewhere is just unfair. (Spoiler: it wasn’t a dead end, she could have kept running and does so)

On the bright side, the story does eventually let Cardia be more violent in Van’s route compared to others, as the climax of the story has her grab a man’s throat with her bare hands specifically intent on murdering the heck out of him if necessary. But man is there a lot of ‘just stay out of Van’s way’ up until then.

The route’s really slim on romance, but it has lots of angst and feels in its place, and it’s the route Delly gets to be more than just ‘that kid who pops his head up and sasses sometimes before he goes back to house-sitting or something’. Even in Lupin’s route, Delly barely gets to do anything onscreen. Since Delly is glued to Van’s side, he basically fulfills a role somewhere between little brother and son to Cardia through the route and it’s pretty cute. Even in the ‘normal’ ending, Delly is the one who’s there.

The only iffy moment isn’t much of one, because it’s a pretty weak trap. You’re supposed to stay and help Delly in one scene - failing to do so will just get Van injured - while in another, staying and helping him will get you a bad end. That said, it’s not so bad, because the former doesn’t give you a bad end and in the latter case you should know the flow of things well enough to know you should chase after Van. (Weirdly, in Code: Realize, it’s basically never that a bad end results in a boyfriend dying, even when it would makes sense)

Speaking of bad ends, Victor’s normal end isn’t a sucker punch choice designed to mess with you, as Impey’s feels like...but man is his lazy. His isn’t the only route that does it, sadly, but nothing feels quite so much like they wrote the True Route first and went ‘what if we just MESS WITH them for the Normal End’ as Van’s. It’s tedious because you have to track through a bunch of identical stuff for a microscopic amount of change pre-epilogue, whether you started with Normal or True End (but especially if you start with True End, the only reason you’d bother with Normal End is to see epilogue Delly. Maybe two lines of writing is even any different at the Normal End cut off point, compared to just playing through True End and seeing ‘the rest of the scene’)

Overall, Van Helsing’s route is extremely thorough in exploring both Van and Delly, because it’s extremely plot relevant to know basically everything there is to know about Van Helsing in it. It’s really great for getting the player to fall for Van. It’s very weak on romancing Van Helsing, though, because when you get into a tsundere route your expectation is that you’re gonna break through to the dere, but that really doesn’t happen. You wanna see Van Helsing’s dere? You can see it from Isaac’s lab all the way up until Azoth appears. Most of that time Cardia isn’t with Van...and in Germain and Lupin’s route it’s confirmed Van behaves pretty similarly when Cardia goes ‘missing’ in those, so unless the game is implying everyone falls for her no matter what (which sometimes I think it is), it’s not that helpful.

Van’s love of Cardia isn’t secret to the player - Azoth immediately calls him out about it, which is what makes him push Cardia away for her safety, when Cardia almost dies to save Van they have a sweet moment, the final choice in the route has his anguished declaration of ‘you’re important to me’ in the rain, and the climax of the route has Azoth using Van’s unspoken love for Cardia against him, resulting in Van attempting to kill himself to protect Cardia. Unfortunately...that’s all you get until True End, extra scenes, and sequel fandisc stuff.

My main criticisms of the route are these:

1 - Cardia’s training under Van Helsing doesn’t come into play, and she’s instead expected to stand back and let her boyfriend be awesome like with Impey’s route, but she doesn’t get to be an engineer on this one, so it’s all her running from danger or through it to get to Van. Arguably, the scene where Cardia has to sneak through a fortress full of Twilight soldiers to help spring Impey from his cage in Impey’s route would have fit better in this route (with Van captive) than his - and to support that, you have to use one of Van’s lessons to succeed in that! To know the answer for one of Van’s bad end choices, you need an answer Lupin provides, which is impossible to have on first run.

2 - Van’s route is very slim on actually romancing him. If Impey’s route has him CONSTANTLY confessing and having Cardia refuse to accept she’s in love with him because it’s embarrassing, Van’s is the opposite where he refuses to accept he’s in love with her but Cardia is incredibly determined.

3 - The Normal End, although so easy to avoid you pretty much have to get it on purpose, is nonsensical in its cause-effect relation to the choice you actually make to trigger it (unless it’s really triggered by overall affection points, like Lupin’s is) and is extremely lazy, just cutting off the True End at a point that would make the story end sadly instead of happily

4 - Just screw everything to do with Jack the Ripper’s section except the moment when Van Helsing finally manages to rescue her and looks cute. It was an awful section, Jack’s design is ugly, and it overall makes no sense. Sholmes doesn’t solve an easily solvable criminal case we later learn he’s tracking extremely closely, Azoth wants a crazy woman killer to capture and keep a woman without killing her, Jack goes from ‘I won’t kill you’ to ‘Nevermind killing time’ without any real reason to it, and the choices you’re given seem designed specifically to bait you into getting the bad end first. ALSO - we later learn that Azoth expected Van to kill Jack and this would have hurt his psyche for some reason, when killing a serial killer in the midst of actively murdering women doesn’t really seem like something that would at all harm a soldier’s psyche. And he set up a bomb in the room with his recording anyway.

5- NOT EVEN ONE ‘FAKE’ KISS. NO KISSING. NO TOUCHING. Because Cardia neither removes her poison, nor has it weakened temporarily in his route, no one gets to touch her. Because Van pretends he isn’t in love with her the whole time, he never even does the Lupin hat kiss thing. No kisses. No touches.

First thing’s first: Yes, Sholmes is in this route, but he’s not in it long enough to be able to pull it out of the muck and garbage that is this route.

Second: Yes, the boys all get cool BDH moments, but again, not even that can save this travesty of a route

I could have included those as small concessions at the start, but that wouldn’t fit the rule of three, and frankly those three things are the only stuff that’s present consistently enough to matter.

So the route opens with an amusing little scene where Lupin disguises himself as Sholmes (weirdly, Lupin flexes a skill that Sherlock Holmes would normally possess, but whatevs. Code Realize struggles a little to keep up with Sherlock. It happens.) and steals a statue, presumably sticking this story around the point where Lupin stole all the vamp treasures back for Delly. (It’s not, because later they establish it’s definitely after Victor’s chapter, and I think the airship race is referenced once as well, placing it in an alternate universe where Finis doesn’t ambush them at the lab and Lupin is like ‘whoops, I said I got everything but I forgot the most important treasure of all’)

He runs into some mafia who try to kill him to get the statue back, but if Lupin is anything, he’s bullet proof. You might expect this mafia stuff to loop back to the festival place that Lupin inadvertently wrecked, the sky pirates that he pissed off, or the black race they participated in. You’d be wrong. Those stuff are barely mentioned, and the only purpose they solve is a brief scene where The Demon flexes her skills.

So the Twilight are super hard looking for Cardia at this point and they may possibly even have narrowly escaped a Twilight raid at that lab without killing Finis (we know he’s not dead, because Cardia would never miss an opportunity to remind us of how scary Germain was when he killed Finis had it happened), and this naturally means that Impey decides to go ahead and send her off all on her own for a drive through Lowtown with just Sisi to defend her, because testing the automobile can’t wait and Van Helsing is about to create a bioweapon in the kitchen. Why doesn’t he send Delly with her? Because Delly doesn’t want to be in this story, don’t force him.

While on that test drive, where Cardia would be unable to fix the car if it broke down, making the test drive totally pointless except to needlessly endanger her and open up Finis’ route, The Demon appears. The Demon being the girl in the photo, and who the route is about, Shirley Gordon. Shirley. She’s the 13 year old daughter of a mafia boss who simultaneously just wants to be normal and wants to go on a murder spree.

Shirley makes a habit of running away from her ‘crime’ family. There’s no reason for her to do this, actually, because they dote on her, never make her do anything bad, and are really better considered vigilantes than mafia. They’re so virtuous that the Lawful Neutral Sholmes that explicitly states he only cares about what the law says, not about the morals behind those laws, thinks they’re a-okay and will help them without hesitation.

Anyway. Shirley runs away to do...something. It’s never clear where she thinks she’s running to, other than maybe hoping to find a different crime boss and murder the heck out of him. Along the way, she spots a random woman driving in an automobile and is like “Yes! That one! I’m going to drag her into this escape, knowing full well that it’s not just endangering her but everyone around when I make her SPEED through the streets running away from my family, even after she says ‘I can’t control the car any faster than this, I’ll hit civilians’!” She also tries to get her father killed by flinging him off of a car at high speed into a street full of other cars and horses. But it’s okay, cuz he’s sturdy.

Impey planned ahead for some danger that would inevitably befall Cardia, the most danger-attracted person in the kingdom (and I mean ‘attracted to danger’, because this is the woman who at one point is warned about a mass murderer and immediately decides she should go ahead and wander in the sewers until she gets lost because it’s raining) - he made a button that activates a transmitter that warns him if she’s in danger. And that’s it. He doesn’t even tell her what it is, so by the time she tries to use it, it’s too late to do anything effective. Imagine if instead of a band of vigilantes cornering her, it was Twilight. “Oh, gee, but I put a transmitter on her car! Where could Cardia-chan have GONE? She turned it on, but this is just an empty alleyway with the car, no Cardia.”

Everyone scolds Impey about it, but that’s mostly because of a sudden uptick in mafia stuff (which to be fair would also be bad, because had it been actual mafia they’d have gotten there in time to find Cardia’s bullet-ridden corpse instead) and not because he let Cardia go unsupervised while Twilight is still looking for her.

Okay, that’s a lot of words harping on one thing, but it’s the vital starting point of this entire story. It’s important, and it is ridiculous. Anyway, moving on. Stuff happens that isn’t important except as a plot framing device. Cardia talks with Shirley and her dad, and immediately accidentally reveals her poison. As one does. Because the mafia looks at a living weapon and doesn’t immediately recoil in horror, Cardia instantly latches on to them to the point that she almost forgets Lupin’s crew exists for a few seconds. (Elaine and Etty, too)

She remembers that ‘oh, you kidnapped me and you kept me in London and not in a super obvious landmark like St. Paul’s Cathedral or some apartment in Baker’s Street, you screwed up!’ just in time for the rescue party to make their explosive entrance. The crew sans Saint Germain (because Germain would be murdering people and that would be unfortunate under the circumstances) arrive in a blaze of glory that is, frankly, pretty fun and has a cool CGI. It’s a bright spot that’s only slightly dragged down by Cardia koalaing the first second third (fourth counting Sholmes just being surprised on the train and then discounting it) group of people who don’t see her as a monster (in a timeline where she never saw her 665 past versions) immediately upon seeing her alien acid--I mean poison.

Saint Germain arrives home just in time to feel a bit awkward for missing Cardia’s monthly kidnapping and hints at plot stuff. Delly is also there and is cute enough that Saint Germain can’t help teasing him a little. Some time later, no one seems particularly hurried, confirming this is either right after Victor’s chapter or an AU where Finis didn’t show up in the lab and everyone ended up at a dead end related to Isaac. Sholmes shows up at the mansion because for some reason a case that has his name practically written on it is too much for him to handle on his own and he feels he needs Arsene’s thief-y mind to help him with it (maybe he’s suspects it’s a trap and is looking into the Certain Person he’s hunting?)  - For no reason in particular, he goes ahead and leads the Gordons to Germain’s mansion as well.

Because Germain is there, it’s a pretty okay scene despite that. Sholmes and Germain are very alike and understand each other extremely well, and it sucks how little they get to interact.

Alas, the good scene can’t last, because while there’s a bunch of adults in a room talking, they unfortunately dragged dead weight into it, and it’s just a count down before Shirley blows her top. THIS HERE IS THE FIRST INSTANCE OF SOMETHING THAT REALLY BOTHERS ME.

Everyone, Cardia included, keeps crowing about how Shirley is Cardia’s first/only friend that is “Her age and gender”. Shirley is 13. At the end of this route, they will make a point to show that she’s about Delly’s age - Delly who is like a little brother/son and who never gets a route even two fandiscs in, because he’s too young. Cardia (although actually like 6) is in the body of someone who’s 17-18 years old. She’s a ‘young lady’, but not a child. She’s old enough that it’s not weird for thousands of years old Germain to be in love with her, nor is it creepy that Impey wants to sex her like a day after meeting her, and anywhere from 6 months to a year from the end of the plot each route she gets married. She’s old enough that Jack the Ripper considers her a legitimate target. She is NOT 13. Shirley isn’t her age, Shirley doesn’t act like her age. She’s basically a kid Cardia constantly has to babysit and who drags Cardia into trouble with her childish antics. It’s annoying that the game conflates a prepubescent child with an adult just because they’re both teenagers.

Anyway.

Shirley, in all her infinite wisdom, throws a temper tantrum because REASONS, and decides to drag Cardia out of an important meeting to go ‘have fun’ around town. And not only that, but she demands to do it without a single guard. While there are drug crazed killers wandering around town, and more importantly Twilight soldiers still looking for Cardia. Lupin gang comes to the absolutely deranged conclusion that Cardia will be fine ‘if she only runs into one or two Twilight’ as if that has ever been the case.

Remember how they all berated Impey for letting Cardia go on her own because dangerous mafia was out in the town? And then Cardia IMMEDIATELY GOT KIDNAPPED? Well, they don’t, because they all come to the same conclusion that Impey did and completely forget there’s still a group of killer mafia out there who probably are all the more likely to target Cardia when the daughter of a rival family is with her. If they wanted Shirley to shut up/Cardia to have some girl time, but they weren’t willing to send any adults out after her because it would be a bummer to catch that guy up on what he missed later, they could have sent Delly off to secretly tail her. But, again...Delly has his statue and now wants NOTHING to do with this route. As well he should.

Obviously, Cardia gets kidnapped immediately.

But first:

Shirley drags Cardia all over the place like an over-excited puppy, until she makes it to the mafia controlled festival place. Evidently it’s not her mafia, because while people are polite to her she still has to pay and play the games to get prizes. The cliche ‘she’s so good at shooting that an intentionally broken gun at a carnival game is no match for her’ thing plays out, complete with the ‘begging her to stop or they’ll go broke’ thing. What happens if you win too much is that the owner just says ‘mmkay you’re done for today’, that’s all. Also, even if you won the whole inventory from him, chances are he’s already made so much from failed attempts that it’d just be an annoyance.

At their last stop before they go home, Shirley finally realizes they’re being tailed (great reflexes, Shirley), and naturally her 13 year old, no-gun, no backup self immediately sprints after the person she’s sure killed her mother. Cardia, instead of picking up the girl with her superior strength and speed and carrying her home, foolishly decides to go off into the alleyways - which she KNOWS she shouldn’t do - after her.

Shock. Shirley runs into a blatant trap, because she is a child. She barks and yaps at the mafioso because she could do literally nothing else when she’s not even armed, and then Cardia is kidnapped alongside Shirley. Good job, Shirley! Your father was part of a three-part collaboration to take down Avido, but you bravely marched yourself into his arms and gave him ultimate leverage against not one but two of those groups!

Instead of instantly being killed to send a message, or even immediately used as effective leverage, they’re fortunate enough to just get stuck on a ship. It’s a good thing Avido has no connections to Twilight, because it sure would suck if he kept Shirley for leverage and then sent Cardia off to Finis. Fortunately, Impey learned from his previous mistake and this time put the tracker ON Cardia. So they can find her dead body more easily, if she ran into literally anyone who didn’t decide to just keep her safely locked up somewhere instead of killing her.

Shirley tells her sob story, it pales in comparison to even Lupin’s past, but Cardia feels terrible for her anyway because she hasn’t heard any of those stories yet on this route. Shirley, who wouldn’t sound out of place as Leon’s daughter, screams and tantrums about how she’s definitely gonna kill Avido while trapped in a cell who-knows-where with no actual way to kill him. She nearly just kills herself instead, slamming uselessly into the door like a rabid dog. Cardia has to jump in the way just to stop her.

Because, despite her rampant kidnapping, Cardia is actually competent most of the time, once Shirley stops causing a ruckus Cardia manages to spring them from the cell. The escape doesn’t last, because Avido uses ‘infinite footsteps’ jutsu, and Cardia and Shirley are surrounded. Remember in the Train Robbery chapter where Cardia remarks that Van Helsing taught her it’s really hard to get overwhelmed in an enclosed space like a tight hallway?

Yeah, forget that.

Anyway, in a charming semi-callback moment, the wall explodes nearby, letting Van Helsing and Germain into the hallway, chattering pleasantly with each other. Germain looks dapper AF while walking through the wreckage of the wall, as usual. It’s a nice moment. And, you know, if you get rescued by Van and Germain you’re pretty much set. Not much is gonna overwhelm that.

EXCEPT WHEN IT DOES, HAH. Avido pulls the ol’ “I have your friends and if you don’t want them to die, you’d best come with me peacefully” and so naturally the noted war hero whose family died because he went along with such a demand and the hostage taker killed them anyway, and the multi-thousands of year old assassin who has not just seen every trick in the book but probably written the book, immediately fall for it and go along with Avido.

Everyone, including the trickster thief and the other mafioso, also fell for the trick and so everyone ends up gathered in one place at the ballroom as Avido wants. Fortunately, Avido didn’t bring them all together to easily execute them, because their total lack of trust for each other’s skills really would have bitten them all in the butt then (except Germain, who would have egg on his face shortly before he killed all the mafia on board in revenge, I’m sure). Instead, he just wants them to...be there.

No, he doesn’t have any specific purpose for them. He just wants them there. He also wants Cardia dressed up for no particular reason. Fortunately, the Gordons gave Cardia a fancy dress right before she got kidnapped, and Victor has the poison proofing down so well now that he can just go ahead and treat a complex ensemble like that while riding in a car speeding its way to Liverpool. Because...well, there’s no actual reason why he’d feel it was an emergency to treat that clothing, nor why he’d even have brought it, but it’s a good thing Victor really wanted to see Cardia in that dress.

I guess you can argue that Lupin decided it was a part of his plan to make Cardia strip down and swap clothes when they found her so she could sneak out, but...that’s a stretch and a half. Especially when they were exploding walls to get in and find her. Stealth is gone when you use explosions, boys.

Anyway, the outfits Lupin made for the boys are great. Yes, they’re a little plain and not nearly as quirky as their normal ones...but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some annoying things like Impey’s always half-off sleeve are gone, and both Victor’s questionable color scheme and Lupin’s atrocity are replaced with a suit meant to make them look good. Still the pointless top hats though. Always the top hats.

Unfortunately, though Shirley’s also meant to change, the plot and game itself instantaneously forgets this and it’s never mentioned or shown. Even more unfortunate: you might see Cardia in a beautiful new outfit and hope for the boys to give some kind of impressed, breathtaken, or blushy response.

They won’t. No one even comments on how she looks beyond maybe Shirley. Not even Impey, noted horndog, makes a comment. Lupin who presumably is the reason they brought the dress at all makes no comment, In short, Cardia looking pretty is just for you, the player. It won’t make any difference except that she gets a CG or two dressed up in it.

Avido flexes that all the sketchy mafia and questionable nobility who attend a black market cruise are in danger if Lupin or Gordon makes a move. Fortunately for his plans, everyone except Shirley actually cares about that, and so their hands are tied. Again, not really sure why Avido would threaten his customers so that people who want to take him down and provide him zero benefit won’t do anything when he even says later he could gun them down in full view and none of his customers would find it weird.

When the gang and mafia are all put into an extravagant room that Saint Germain had previously booked for himself (because he’s a bit of a cad that loves his antiques, dammit, the fact that it’s illegally acquired is really not that important!) Shirley realizes it’s been practically a whole half hour since she’s made a nuisance of herself, and so she starts screaming and tantrumming because her father didn’t shoot Avido dead back when there were countless bystanders around and each one of her allies - herself included - had guns pointed at them.

No. She literally throws a shrieking tantrum that involves flinging things across the room when he sends her off essentially ‘to her room’, and then spends the rest of the night sobbing into Passy’s arms. This, the person who keeps whining and complaining that no one will treat her like an adult, that people keep sheltering, that Cardia bafflingly keeps trying to compare herself to. She has a childish meltdown when she’s told ‘no, we can’t just kill Avido right now’.

Amazing.

Her dad, Darius, tells his sob story. It’s basically the same as Shirley’s, nothing really to write home about. Honestly, I kept expecting some kind of twist where Shirley’s mother actually betrayed them and he’d been forced to kill her to save Shirley, or her mother was actually on the cruise ship working with Avido. That’s how boring and unimportant the backstory is. You think Impey and Lupin’s stories are limp? Shirley’s story is just a big old ‘so?’. Even the last detail Darius later adds is like ‘and? You got angry and wanted to kill someone for murdering your wife. But you didn’t.’

Imagine for a moment if Germain’s story was that he got to know that little boy, got attached, and then even though he desperately didn’t want to do it, he killed him like he was supposed to. And then nothing happened after that, he just went on continuing to Idea Apostle

YEAH! THAT’S RIGHT! EVEN THAT WOULD BE MUCH WORSE THAN DARIUS’ STORY.

I’m getting sidetracked here, but this is a brutal part of the story that’s hard to get through, because Shirley is so beyond obnoxious, screaming and throwing a literal fit because no one listens to her, while they play the sad music that means you’re supposed to care.

Anyway, because Avido was too dumb to kill the people who are determined to stop him, Lupin and the others immediately start plotting to stop him. There’s a drug plot that’s designed to make the statue Lupin steals matter and give Victor something to do. Cardia is a competent nurse and Victor looks hot while he saves someone’s life, but man did I think it was a trap when someone ran in saying Victor was calling for her. That would be giving this route WAY too much credit.

For reasons that aren’t clear, there’s a room that has a bunch of counterfeit treasures of everything that’s up for sale. They bad counterfeits, though, and couldn’t possibly be mistaken for the same item, so it’s not like it’s an art theft swap or something. It just serves to show where a small part of the drugs are hidden. Not all of them, mind, because that would give the room a reason to exist. Just some of it.

The crew split up. Impey and Van Helsing both go to the engine room so they can seize it and turn the ship around before it can go to international waters. Because for some reason crimes committed there would cause a war or something. Cardia probably could have mentioned to them that she took out the whole engine crew on her own, so using up the vampire AND the living weapon on that assignment isn’t likely to be necessary, but that’d require some kind of sense, which this route doesn’t have.

Victor, Lupin, and Germain do...stuff. I think Germain goes off to seize the drugs in the food, Victor goes off somewhere nondescript to make an antidote, and Lupin farts around for a while to waste some time. What’s important is that even though Cardia’s there to see all the assignments go out, Lupin secretly also told Germain to find all the valuables in the ship and set charges on them. Probably because it would take .5 seconds for Germain to overpower some cooks and mafia boys and everyone knows it.

Cardia, bereft of plot, goes back to the room to wait to be important, and finds out that Shirley realized she slept through her half hour and forced her way through a window...I guess to the outside of the ship? And scaled up the outside of the hull like the demon beast she is, to escape confinement in her room. So she can run off and be a waste of space and oxygen not in her room, but somewhere actively detrimental to all the plans everyone’s made without her.

Presumably because everyone is as sick of Shirley as I am at this point, no one even tries to look for her this time. Maybe they all hoped she fell off overboard, I dunno. You’d think they’d all know she’d make a beeline to Avido and go collect her there, banking on the fact that Avido doesn’t know they’re planning anything (effective) and is determined to make them play the part of innocent passengers right now. But nah. She’d just screw up any plan they made anyway.

Lupin showboats around and disseminates the antidote to all the passengers during the auction via a fancy champagne tower. Then, long before all of them could actually have drank their cups, he goes ahead and tells Avido exactly what he’s done, forcing them to move onto the next step. The step that definitely involves most of the passengers dropping their glasses in a blind panic.

Avido, by the way, is a human traficker. The reason he keeps Cardia alive and kidnaps her instead of leaving her be or killing her is because he thinks she’d sell for a high price. It’s not a secret that he does this. Mafia apparently do it all the time, to the point where the no-crime Gordon family casually discuss the possibility of selling Cardia until another person has to remind the first that ‘yo we don’t do that’. Avido also traffics drugs. Drugs which inevitably either kill the user or turns the user into a violent zombie akin to a Hidden Strength victim, meaning that he’s causing a lot of deaths. Avido has personally killed a whole lot of people. He murdered one of his henchmen just because they failed to get a statue he doesn’t even care that much about.

Got that? Avido’s a bad boy. Objectively, Avido is worse than just about anyone else in the game other than Victoria - who at least has her ‘greater good’ reasons - Isaac - who is insane with grief - and Azoth. Hidden Strength victims are out of their mind, and while Nemo is callous toward human life in the face of science, he doesn’t go out of his way to murder for kicks and giggles. He’s also insane. Omnibus, also, is a question of personal morality vs greater good. Avido? Stone-cold sane, no greater good involved, he just wants power because he thinks it sounds fun.

Now that we’ve established that, does anyone in the room just kill Avido?

No. No they do not. Instead, they waffle about it and ramble about philosophy until he’s able to wrench back the upper hand via sheer numbers (because Van and Germain are otherwise engaged), and backs everyone up onto the surface of the boat.

Sadly, Shirley didn’t fall off the boat, she just jumped into Avido’s arms so she could become his hostage. AGAIN. He doesn’t reveal this at first, even when they’re outside and he has the upper hand. He takes his time before he brings out the unconscious Shirley. Supposedly she got so far as to point a gun at Avido this time, but I don’t think I believe him, because her strategy up until this point has been ‘angrily yap at him hoping he’ll just off himself’. Plus she’s supposed to actually have some skill with a gun and is psychotically enraged at him. She’d definitely have shot him if she ever thought to bring a gun.

Fortunately, there’s still some competent people on board the ship, and Impey + Van Helsing bust through the top of the ship in Impey’s automobile to help turn the tide of the battle. Sisi is there too. Which makes one ask ‘where is Delly, then?’

The answer is ‘not in this route, screw you, he doesn’t want to be here’.

Where’s Germain? He’s busy. It’ll be obvious why in a bit. That said, they have Avido dead to rights once Van Helsing and Impey get there (it’s mostly Van. Impey’s great and all, but Van doesn’t need back up) What do they do? Do they kill this murdering scumbag who wants to rule the entire world just so he can kill people when he feels like it? Who’s sold girls off into slavery? Who’s killed people just because he felt annoyed?

NO. FOR IF YOU KILL ME, BATMAN, YOU WILL BECOME ME.

Now, Impey and Lupin don’t kill. Even when Lupin was like ‘Hey, I love this girl and if you say that again I’ll literally kill you’, he didn’t actually kill the guy when the person immediately said it again. Victor can do it, but it’s pretty deeply traumatizing to him, and he’s pretty firmly in the ‘might doesn’t make right’ camp. But Van Helsing does. Sure, he’s deeply traumatized from the war and he won’t kill unless necessary - pretty much it’s a hard sell to kill anyone not Finis shaped....but he does it. Between ‘crime family compromising its ideals for revenge and becoming criminals’ and ‘man under the protection of the crown killing a violent and horrible criminal he was sent to deal with who has directly endangered his friends’, Van’s gonna just step up and do it.

Instead though, it seems Lupin had told everyone on the team except Cardia about his actual plan, which was to blow all the treasures to hell instead, and let Shirley pull the trigger. because revenge, I guess.

Since the ship is now SINKING, Impey and everyone but Germain (hold pls, he’s busy) drive off of the ship onto the dock in a way that would definitely do damage to the car and the dock, and into the night with the assumption that the Yard will do clean up from there.

In the biggest plot twist of the entire route, when treated the exact same way he was last time he got caught and had his plans blow up in his face, Avido again doesn’t learn his lesson. Instead, he manages to get a mother heckin tank off of his sinking ship and chases the Impeymobile through the streets.

Let me take a moment to say: the insane scientist he got this from had BETTER be Nemo, or else all of Victoria’s dreams of the UK having superior military force to the rest of the world just went up in smoke. Because, fun fact, Germany wasn’t so hard to handle in WW2 because of mustard gas. It was their tanks. (and as another aside: Germany got beaten up in WW1, only to come back dominant in WW2, so Victoria’s entire ‘spark a world war now to ensure dominance forever’ plan wouldn’t work no matter what)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: I’m not mad that they don’t know how to fight a tank. That’s understandable. Tanks are a big deal. My problem is that the tank is able to plow right through solid brick buildings lengthwise. Not one or two, but just...constantly plowing through the alleyways at a speed so high that an automobile can’t escape. That is not how it works. Another problem is that neither Impey nor Lupin ever realize that the tank can’t turn for heck, and the automobile could spin circles around it if necessary.

But most of all, Avido pops his stupid head out of the tank at one point during the chase, and somehow it continues to be piloted. There’s never any mention or indication that anyone is in that tank besides him, he’s just Mr. Fantastic, and can stretch out and bend his legs infinitely, allowing him to pilot a tank full speed while standing more than halfway out of the thing. Worse than that super power, we have an impenetrable literal tank chasing the Lupin group around, destroying Liverpool, backing them into a corner. Soon they’re going to run out of a place to run, or they’re going to get hit and die.

Why, then, does Van Helsing see Avido pop his stupid head out, and proceed to do literally nothing? Obviously at this point he should just kill Avido, because nothing else will stop him, but just a few minutes before it’s mentioned that Van Helsing is so quick to switch from shrapnel to rock salt that it looks like some kind of a super power, which means he has ZERO reason he can’t just shoot Avido in the face with rock salt and knock the fool out.

Instead...they do nothing and just listen to him babble for a bit until his head pops back in again. Then they discuss jumping over to the tank and probably intend to get in there to get at him. You know, like they could have just done if he popped his head out.

Faced with all possible choices, Lupin decides the smart thing to do is to ram full speed into a renovating hotel and hope Avido is stupid enough to follow in. And, you know, that the falling debris will do anything to a tank that rammed right through an entire alleyway worth of buildings without slowing down or looking at all damaged.

Van Helsing is Van Helsing, and he protects the automobile from excessive damage, and lo - the plan works. It incapacitates the tank.

Avido, who could now safely play dead and wait for them to leave, instead climbs out of the tank (uninjured) and comes at them again. At this point although he was initially intimidated by Van Helsing he seems to be aware that no one is ever going to kill him, because he charges Van Helsing again.

Cue long boring monologue involving Avido’s slightly more interesting sob story and Darius absolutely refusing to ever kill Avido because IDEALS.

Currently they looped back around to the port and are near the boat, which may make you say ‘oh wait, where is Saint Germain anyway?’ The answer to that question is ‘not there, because we can’t have a literal time assassin who massacres entire villages of innocent people for the sake of the timeline be here while we pretend that good people don’t kill’. Sholmes also sat this out, because he would have been given permission to kill Avido legally, and we can’t have that.

But yes.

Germain’s busy on the boat threatening to kill people for some sweet art, while everyone is passionately preaching at Avido that they’d never kill him, not ever. Which is good for Avido, because if Germain weren’t busy getting filthier rich, the conversation would have been cut very short.

Y’know.

When Germain just stabbed him through the heart from behind.

As he does.

Also, we’d have to answer the question of ‘if this man is endangering the entire world with his plan, or even all of London, isn’t this a serious concern for the proper path of humanity? Ie; shouldn’t Germain be killing this man?’ if he were there.

Darius is like ‘well, you’re family, so even though you’re a murderous psychopath who purposefully got people nonconsensually addicted to a deadly drug and sold who knows how many innocents into slavery, I’m gonna look out for you’ just in time for Leonhart to show up and flail angrily at Arsene.

He immediately blames Lupin and the gang for the mass destruction of Liverpool, and instead of anyone saying “Well, actually it’s that tank there, It kept shelling the place and mowing through buildings because Avido is a psychopath”, Victor goes “Well, we have no excuse”

yes

yes you do

you didn’t do the destruction. (Except the hotel, but at that point it was ‘damage a rebuilding hotel or die’, so really...)

There’s a vaguely humorous bit where the mafioso realizes that the royal guard isn’t interested in arresting the mafia, just the random band of thieves, and then, wonderfully...Saint Germain finally shows up.

Truly, he lights up everything when he’s around. Aside from the times when he’s obligated to turn his murder blades on Cardia. That’s just sad.

Anyway, left to his own devices, Germain extorted a bunch of mafia into overfilling his automobile full of priceless treasures and cash. He’s shameless about it. It’s adorable. Give that man your art. Do it. It’s not a request, he’s taking your art.

Anyway, since the Impeymobile is wrecked, they all hop into Germain’s getaway car, and zoom off in a pretty cute ending CG, benny hill music playing as Leon chases them and Victor - poor, precious baby - nearly falling out of the car like a dweeb.

Sadly, there’s an epilogue, because this route is bad and it won’t let Germain save it.

Oh yeah, there’s an irrelevant noble who dies right before Germain probably would have killed him anyway. It’s stated that no one really tries to stop Germain from keeping his treasures, because most of them were originally acquired illegally and some are even national treasures of other nations, so even acknowledging they exist would possibly spark a war that Victoria totally, definitely doesn’t actually want for realsies.

Victoria responds to them saving the country and the world by not really responding. Instead, she sends them an invoice for the damage to Liverpool that they didn’t cause. It’s just so knee-slappingly hilarious that the invoice somehow matches the cost of those aforementioned priceless treasures. Because that gag is ALWAYS FUNNY AND NEVER OLD! IT’S SO FUNNY! HAHA THEY MADE MONEY BUT THE COST TOOK UP ALL THE MONEY! HAHA

except you know...

how...

how does the cost match priceless artifacts? Germain isn’t selling them, and he can’t even if he wants to. There’s not even price tags on some of them. How is it they’re ‘in the red’? Just the cash that was in the car?

Yeah, no, it’s stupid.

And to just cap off that bowl of stupid, we get to see The Demon, who unfortunately survived her repeated kamekaze attempts. This time the Lupin gang remembered that Twilight exists, so Delly and Passy go with her and Cardia on the town.

Naturally, because Shirley’s a little shit, she harasses and disrespects Delly.

...Well, it’s supposed to just be ‘two kids playing’, but Shirley’s a miserable little cave troll without a single redeeming iota of her being, so it just comes off as her being unreasonably rude to Delly.

There’s another photographer moment like in the Airship picture, but instead of a cute picture, it’s cropped out Delly and Passy, and just focuses on Shirley and Cardia holding ice cream, while the little brat has five scoops on her cone, which is definitely going to end up mostly melted on the street.

The route ends with Cardia being happy that she’s ‘made a friend that’s her same gender and age’. After establishing RIGHT BEFORE that Shirley is about Delly’s age, and is playing like a child with him while Cardia and Passy watch them.

Also for some weird reason, everyone is convinced that Sisi is a guard dog in this route. Just because.

You might think ‘is there a pay off with that whole statue thing’? no

You might think ‘okay, so what’s the conclusion with Herlock Sholmes? Does he toss some part of his earning for the assignment to Lupin and the others who actually did 100% of the job while he sat back and did nothing?’ no, nothing happens

You may think ‘okay, at least maybe they clarify what happens with the Twilight, or where Shirley is during the epilogues?’ no

no they don’t.

you may even think ‘at least Avido is dead or in prison or something permanently punished for all the horrible-’

no

no

it’s a bad route

it’s an awful route

it’s bad, bro.

Just enjoy the boys - particularly Germain - being cute. That’s all you get.

But not Delly.

My first impressions of Impey were that he was adorable, that he clearly was the person that everyone in the game - and the player - is expected to trash on as the buttmonkey, but is clearly the most honest and straightforward good boy, therefore a great first choice, if only he were a little prettier.

All plans of pandering to Impey the first time through evaporated the first second Victor appeared BUT NEVERMIND THAT-

Going into his route, I didn’t really expect much. He was the easy and uncomplicated bachelor and he pretty openly broadcast that. And lo, stuff in his route basically has no bearing on anything else until Lupin’s ‘everything AND the kitchen sink’ route. It’s, ostensibly, the easy route.

SO WHY WAS IT SO DANG HARD FOR ME??? IT’S THE ONLY ROUTE I GOT THE NORMAL END ON FIRST BY ACCIDENT. One of the bad end choices is nonsensical - I’d call it a 50/50 coinflip, but honestly, the ‘bad end’ is the one that seems like the smarter choice under the circumstances, and your best clue for what you should do comes from Van Helsing’s route - which you won’t have done if you do Impey’s first.

It’s also the only one I know of with an ‘optional’ CG, which I missed because I couldn’t figure out WTF was going on in Cardia’s head. Why is she playing Love Chicken with Impey throughout the route? It’s not like she isn’t super lovey-dovey with Victor her whole route, so it’s not some push-pull trope. Just confess and be done with it! Stop making me confess and then playing takebacksies! Don’t give me the option to say yes to a proposal and then pull the rug out from under me and pretend I didn’t say yes!

And!

Don’t!

Prevent Cardia from defending Impey all route long and hammer in that Impey wants her to trust and rely on him only for the FINAL CHOICE IN THE ROUTE to be “Don’t trust a hoe, never trust a hoe”.

That said, his Normal End is 100% unique content unlike some lazy routes that just cut off the True End early, and it is sad. and it’s based on Cardia’s choice rather than a random whim of fate that changes depending on route, It’s just maddening how you get it. It introduces the weird concept of ‘character definitely died but their body is never found leading everyone else to live on in a false hope they’re still alive somewhere’ that follows the game around forever for some weird reason. Not counting Isaac, obviously, where the entire plot of the game is based around “he disappeared, is probably dead, but no body so no one knows”.

Honestly, him being the one vampire you get to romance who’s secretly kind of cool is underused in the route, because it’s mostly focused on Nemo being insane and Impey being bullied by Cardia.

At least he gets to touch and kiss her. Unlike a certain someone.