After my
glowing experience with Sweet Fuse, I was
still pretty low on energy and not quite ready to tackle a demanding RPG, which
led me to elect another otome game as Sweet Fuse's follower. The happy
winner was Code:Realize, an game that has been patiently waiting for its
time since last year. Now that I'm done playing it, I think it could definitely
have waited longer.
I'll be blunt: I didn't like Code:Realize. It had its moments and it
managed to captivate me to some extent; but overall, it was a pretty negative
experience that left a bad taste in my mouth. And yet, as I mentioned above, I
played it entirely—and intensively, since I polished
off the whole thing in a couple of days without taking a break to write about
it. So why was I so hell-bent on playing a game I didn't like, you may ask?
Well, I guess it was out of curiosity—morbid
curiosity, that is. I wanted to see how ludicrous the story would get and what
absurdities it would throw at me; and last but not least, I wanted to see if
the game would manage to wrap things up in a fulfilling and convincing way. For
the record, the answer was no.
As you probably guessed already, my main beef with the game and bone of
contention with its reviewers is the story. It's widely said to be
stellar, so much so that the game garnered the stellar score of 85 on
Metacritic and was highly praised even by male reviewers; and yet that stellar
story failed to enrapture me. This is the Steins;Gate situation
all over again: a supposedly amazingly good story that started auspiciously yet
ultimately left me cold and annoyed. If you want to know why, follow me through
the next SPOILER-bristling paragraphs, dear fellow gamers.
I'll start
with a disclaimer: CR's story is not inherently bad, although it has its
flaws. It's suspenseful, gripping and well told, with interesting and loveable
characters and narrative arcs that converge towards a conclusion that ties all
ends together. There are very few contradictions and plotholes, but that's not
saying much given the nature of the story: it belongs to the fantastic
genre and as such, it's much more likely to get away with plotholes through the
shameless inclusion of ad hoc narrative elements. There are a couple of incoherencies,
such as the fact that Cardia was virtually abandoned in the middle of nowhere
instead of being securely kept at her father's side, or the fact that she could
talk despite being an artificial being that had never been in contact with
humans before escaping the mansion; but without these, the story would
basically not exist. So let's just exercise suspension of disbelief and move
forward.
My main issue with CR's story is how sprawling and all over the place it
is. See, I am a rather single-minded person that tends to favour slightly
claustrophobic "huis clos" narratives, such as locked-room mysteries.
I love when writers stick to a simple premise and skilfully work their way
around it to weave a gripping and potentially mind-blowing story. And that,
dear fellow gamers, is exactly what CR's writers did not do. They do
offer an interesting premise, if only a bit cliché; but instead of
sticking to it, they expand their narrative to the infinite and beyond,
throwing tons of disparate elements that clash vigorously with each other into
the mix. Vampires, British monarchy, philosophal stone, cloning, Knights of the
Round Table, giant flying fortress: you name them, CR has them.
Some developments come completely out of left field and seem to have been
included for the sole purpose of avoiding plotholes, filling up narrative
threads or giving a backstory to some of the characters—I'm looking
at you, Saint-Germain's route.
What I
dislike even more than sprawling stories is derivative sprawling stories, and CR
is a proud exemple of the genre. Not only are the characters lifted
straight from literary works, but their backstories and the content of their
personal narrative arc are more often than not also lifted from said literary
works in the process. Such a heavy-duty borrowing of narrative elements verges
on plagiarism—or at the very least on a very
blatant and massive lack of inspiration. The blunt thruth is that despite its
pizzazz and flashiness, CR is little more than a glorified cross-over
fanfiction.
Even worse, CR doesn't even have the grace to be a fulfilling cross-over
fanfiction. As anybody who ever laid their eyes on this peculiar form of
writing knows, the main purpose of fanfiction is to create romances that were
never intended by the original material's creators—the
smuttier, the better. Since romance is also the meat and potatoes of otome
games, we should have a match made in heaven, right? Well, not quite so.
Someone at Otomate apparently decided that it would be a great idea to make
most of CR's romances entirely platonic. Yup, you read that
right: not even a kiss to reward you for all your hard wooing work, let alone
the promise of steamy physical intimacy between the newfound lovers after the
credits roll. The harsh truth is that in three of the five routes, Cardia simply
cannot touch her lover or be touched by them at all without the protective
layers of her poison-resistant clothing. Really, game? Sure, this situation is
justified by the narrative, but it sucks nonetheless. What's the point of
having a love story in an bloody otome game if it doesn't allow for
physical intimacy? That's cruel to the characters, and even crueler to the
player that spent several hours of their precious time pursuing a bachelor,
only to be rewarded by forced abstinence at the end. Shame on you, Otomate. I feel
robbed, I really do.
Mind you, there is worse to the
routes than the inconclusiveness of their featured love stories. I've come to
understand that otome games always have a so-called "true route" that
is supposed to fully answer all the questions raised by the story and to put an
end to said story for good. Well, CR's writers went absolutely overboard
with the true route: they made it the canon route by excellence, grossly
neglecting the four other routes in the process. Said four other routes come
across as mere side dishes, aborted versions of the main story that the player
must plod through to gain access to the only real and authentic route that
answers all questions. These routes shift the focus from Cardia's mysterious
identity to whatever hurdles her bachelor of choice is facing, leave heaps of
questions unanswered and don't even have the decency to offer conclusive love
stories, which makes them feel entirely non-legit and out of place in the grand
scheme of things. Games like Amnesia: Memories and Sweet Fuse had
a true route all right, but all the non-true routes stood on their own and
offered satisfying endings. Not so in CR, the game in which all non-true
routes are mere roadblocks on the path to the one and only true and cannon
route. And boy, does it suck.
My, that was a lot of ranting, wasn't it? You get my point, dear fellow gamers:
far from impressing me, CR's story ultimately left me frustrated and
disappointed. It certainly doesn't help that it was so darn long: count
three to four hours of play for the common route alone, plus two and a half to
three hours of play for each route. That's nearly twenty hours of play, and
these twenty hours left me drained and exhausted. Mind you, that won't prevent
me from writing a route report very soon;
I have more things to get out of my chest to settle the score between this game
and me. I'll see you soon, dear fellow gamers! Thanks for reading, and be my
guest anytime!
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