VN Talk: Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~ - Part 2: Victor

Victor was my favorite love interest in the previous Code: Realize games, so I decided that I'd play his routes first whenever the opportunity game up, be it a Triangle Date (covered last week) or a more meaty route designed for a longer play session. This entry is split up into two sections, one covering his First Christmas story, and the other his Special Epilogue, which is normally only unlockable after completing all Christmas stories, side stories, and regular epilogues.

Here's your warning. There are spoilers below!

Afternate Story: First Christmas

Victor's Christmas story takes a different route from both his and Lupin's ~Guardian of Rebirth~ endings in that he doesn't return to Queen Victoria's service. Instead it's like the other endings where he starts a clinic in the poor part of London as a doctor. This allows him to be in different circumstances, where he's busy, but surrounded by the less fortunate. Surprisingly we also have cameo appearances from members of the Gordon Family from ~Future Blessings~. This threw me off a bit initially since they don't show up in Finis's route, but they're still part of this timeline since their story would have taken place during the ~Guardian of Rebirth~ common route.

A lot of Victor's Christmas story takes place from his perspective, which I found I enjoyed. Among the potential love interests, Victor is a relatively normal person and the only one still with a living set of parents. (He also gets Finis's seal of approval as the "most acceptable" of the men around Cardia.)

One day in December, Victor gets a letter from his mother in Switzerland and he realizes she's probably been worried because of the whole thing where he got declared a terrorist and hooked up with a band of thieves. While there is that, her letter also tells him that he should consider settling down and getting married.

Victor means to tell his mother that he will when he finds someone, but ends up writing about all his time with Cardia, which results in his parents misinterpreting his letter as Victor saying that he's in a serious relationship. His parents decide to visit for Christmas to meet him and his wife-to-be. Victor naturally freaks out and this sets the stage for the rest of his Christmas story.

Given that it's getting close to Christmas, and that he's in England and his parents are en route from Switzerland, I'm not surprised that telling them to stay home due to a misunderstanding is not an option. They're on their way and no letter will reach them in time. But he handles this poorly by running over to Wales to see Cardia and asking if she can pretend to be his significant other until Christmas. Of course he really would prefer she was his significant other for real, but is afraid of rejection.

And of course this being a romance game, when he asks her to help him, the wording comes out in a way that Cardia initially thinks Victor is reciprocating her attraction to him, only for him to stomp over the whole thing because he's asking her to fake it. Thankfully, Cardia recognizes that she's being asked to do something really stupid, and the narration does an effective job at conveying how pissed off she is even though she's not breaking his face at the moment. (You know she's upset when she intends to use a move Van Helsing taught her on Victor if he so much as moves.)

After hearing him out, she agrees help him under two conditions: that she goes to London immediately with him, instead of coming in Christmas Day to meet his parents, and that they actually pretend to be a couple in the days leading up to it instead of just while meeting his parents. She figures this way she'll at least get the satisfaction of seeing what it would be like if they really were in a relationship, and I like that she finds a way to use Victor's dumb idea for her own ends.

Probably the most entertaining part of their fake dating is meeting up with the rest of their friends in an attempt to fool them. Because if they can't fool their friends, how can they fool Victor's parents? Despite Victor's overacting, Lupin and company (barring Impey) take the news as if it's completely natural that Victor and Cardia are in a relationship. Their level of non-surprise makes the scene a lot funnier than it would have been if they had expressed any level of disbelief.

The rest Victor and Cardia's prep time together is charming (barring an underwhelming restaurant scene). She gets mistaken for his wife by his patients, and the ice skating scene is cute since it allows Victor to be proficient in something unexpected. He's good at ice skating due to having grown up doing it every winter in Switzerland.

But eventually, as they're waiting at the train station for his parents to arrive, the fact that their "dating" is going to end soon gets to both of them and Victor decides to tell her how he truly feels, that he loves her and that he wants a family with her. Cardia is pleasantly shocked and reciprocates, so when his parents finally arrive, the two greet them as an actual couple, and it's fun seeing how she looks at them and Victor to see what a family is like, since her own situation has been so messed up.

Though I like Victor a lot, and found his scenarios pretty strong in ~Guardian of Rebirth~ and ~Future Blessings~ I didn't find that the case here. I wasn't too fond of the deception angle or the overacting. I also found the constant use of the term "significant other" to be jarring. This is Victorian England so I can understand not wanting to use "girlfriend" which didn't gain its current meaning until the 1920s, but "significant other" didn't come into play until the 1940s, which is even later. It really feels like the game should have used "fiancée" instead, since Victor's parents are assuming they're getting married and the term was part of the English language back then.

I also disliked that neither Victor nor Cardia talk about what to do after their charade is over. Of course it turns out not to be a charade, which is how it gets its happy ending, but supposing that they kept up the act and never discussed anything further, what was supposed to happen afterwards? Victor's parents would surely ask what happened to the girl he was supposed to marry sooner or later.

Special Epilogue

After spending so much time in alternate timelines, it was a bit of a shock to return to the original started in ~Guardian of Rebirth~. Even though I knew this was a continuation of Victor's ~Future Blessings~ After Story, I felt like I was experiencing things out of order.

I can see why the Special Epilogues are only unlocked after nearly everything else, because they're short and the player might feel cheated if the epilogues were viewed as part of the main event (they feel only slightly longer than a Triangle Date), but I think if that was conveyed ahead of time, the best play order would really be to play the Special Epilogues ahead of the Christmas stories so that the player's brain only has to go one "reset" instead of jumping back and forth between timelines.

When we last left Cardia and Victor in ~Future Blessings~, they were already living together as a married couple in all but name, and ~Wintertide Miracles~ makes it pretty clear that they consider themselves husband and wife even though they never had a wedding ceremony, which turns out to be the story of the epilogue.

Victor is accidentally reminded by the employees of their new laboratory that he and Cardia never formally tied the knot, and he ends up feeling bad that it got overlooked between all the stuff with Idea last time and setting up the research that will give her a human lifespan. How Cardia feels about that is up to the player. She can tell him it's okay that they never had a wedding, or let him know she wants one.

Either way, Victor will run through hoops to get one set up as quickly as possible, and due to it being wedding season, the only place they end up being able to use is no less than St. Paul's Cathedral, thanks to Queen Victoria reopening it in time for them to use. It's pretty funny considering that St. Paul's Cathedral was Twilight's headquarters in Code:Realize, and the game even comments on that, but it mostly does it as a bit of trivia from Cardia's perspective, because she never goes to Twilight headquarters on Victor's route. Though if she had, and had been traumatized by it, she would probably be less likely to want her wedding there.

Though there's not a lot of meat on the Special Epilogue, I did find it in character for Victor to get distracted and not get around to having the wedding, but I found it odd that we missed the transition to when they started considering themselves married. You'd think the topic of a wedding would have come up then.

I did like, though, that they included some of the traditional English language wedding vows in the dialogue, since that gets skipped over in most of the wedding scenarios.