#considering my track record with final routes and characters with hidden sides

[foxstens]

.......3 choices away from the end of nami-sensei’s route

[unwiltingblossom]

Code: Realize Route Review - Van Helsing

Round two of the Code: Realize routes/character reviews. This uses information from the main game + extra scenes in the main game. I have the first sequel fandisc, but I haven’t played it yet, so that content isn’t included.

Abraham Van Helsing

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.

Overall the route is good, though. Its big twist is 100% ruined if you play Victor’s route first, because nothing Van can say will change the fact that Aleister causes two bad ends all on his own in that route, but it’s still a fun route to play through and the lack of Van Helsing fluff can be fixed in the fandiscs. By the epilogue and the extra scenes, Van is full dere in his slightly sarcastic and prickly way, it’s just a shame we couldn’t get more of that.

[justpodcasts]

let's talk about the magnus archives for a sec, can we talk about the magnus archives

I'm far from the first person to say this and others have said it more eloquently than I will, but I want to talk about the meta aspect of the magnus archives regarding how us listening to the podcast is basically the beholding listening to the tape recorders, which makes us a part of the beholding.

(I didn't realize this until much later in the podcast, probably around when I noticed the tape recorders started turning on by themselves to listen to interesting events, and then I saw the whole "we're the beholding" pointed out in tumblr posts.)

Personally, when I listened to the magnus archives, I tore through 150 episodes in about 2 weeks, and I know other people listened in a similar way. Part of it was because I had nothing else to do because it was summer, but another part was the need to understand, to know what was happening, to get more than just tiny pieces of information and reoccurring names I didn’t know the significance of yet. People keep notes and string-boards when they listen to keep track of everything going on in the hopes of connecting a few dots.

We don't know that, as listeners, we're practically a part of the beholding until we're in too deep, until you've been drawn in with the hope of learning more and you finally know about the fears and avatars, but then there's something else happening and you want to know, and so on. I’ve seen this point before and that's what got me thinking, but we're like Jon: we don't know how much we're connected to the beholding until we've already made the "choice" to bind ourselves to it.

A lot of the magnus archives is about choice. Simplistically, characters choose to become avatars, even when it's a choice between two shitty options. They can also choose to disconnect themselves from the fears, like Eric and Melanie, though it comes with a price.

The other side of that coin is the lack of choice. Most notably, Elias/Jonah says Jon chose to become an avatar. Except that's bullshit, because Jon didn't know what he was getting into until it was too late. He didn't get the info he needed until he was more than halfway to being an avatar, to being the archivist. We also know now that Jonah manipulated Jon every step of the way. It’s not really “making a choice” when you don’t know all your options.

Jon could've taken the same route as Eric and Melanie and removed his eyes, but there's debate about whether that would even work: is he too far in? would he just heal himself? is his connection to the beholding too strong? We don’t know. As for us, we could make a choice to break free, too: we could stop listening. We could stop observing these events, stop gathering more information. We could stop serving the beholding.

Obviously, we aren’t going to (and the speed with which I can assure myself of that is... something). For one, this is a fictional piece of work, and we aren’t actually tied to a fear entity. But for the sake of the meta, play with me in the space for a bit. Let’s say I stop listening to the magnus archives. I delete it from my podcast feed, I stop posting about it, I blacklist it on tumblr so I don’t see anything related to it. There’s still 160 episodes worth of knowledge in my head. I can try really hard, but chances are I’m still going to think about it from time to time. I can replace it, bury myself in other podcasts, but it’s still going to be in my head (and if I listen to other podcasts, am I still serving the beholding? How far does it extend? I’ll keep it simple and limit it to tma). I’m also somewhat invested in it, and once I know the hiatus is over and there are new episodes releasing that I could listen to, how long could I go? I already vigorously refreshed my podcast feed every Thursday until the new episode showed up and I could download it, despite the fact that I was doing this at the beginning of class and I wouldn’t be able to listen to the episode for at least two hours. I just needed to know it was there, that when I had time there would be nothing stopping me from immediately listening.

Speaking of the hiatus: I know we joke, but seeing posts about needing new episodes and missing tma even when we were only a week into the hiatus really solidifies our beholding tendencies. Whatever entity you identify with, the beholding got you first. 

And again, tma is fictional, so us listening to it has no evil consequences. We aren’t really feeding into the beholding. But for a podcast that deals a lot with choices, it’s interesting that we haven’t considered our own hidden choice, and how much I can convince myself that it isn’t a choice at all. Because I know I won’t stop listening.