VN Talk: Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~ - Part 5: Saint-Germain

This week,I'll be covering Saint-Germain's route for Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~, both his Christmas story and his Special Epilogue.

This game is still less than a year old, so here's your spoiler warning!

Afternate Story: First Christmas

I enjoyed Saint-Germain's Christmas story. Like Van Helsing, his circumstances post-game on Finis's route are significantly different than in his own. For one thing, Saint-Germain is still an Apostle of Idea and immortal. His route also starts earlier than everyone else's, so it hasn't started snowing yet, but it serves as an excellent way to show how Saint-Germain handles the passage of time. (I'd guess it starts in late summer or early autumn, since it's enough time for people to have parted ways and for Saint-Germain to get bored in the lead-up to Christmas.)

Omnibus unexpectedly tells him that he's to take a break following the successful end to Code:Realize, and he quite frankly doesn't know what to do with himself. The mansion is empty since Victor started his clinic, Cardia and Finis moved out, Van Helsing and Delly are looking for surviving vampires, and Lupin and Impey have taken a trip to France. Saint-Germain suddenly realizes that after living in a bustling household these past few months, it's kinda lonely once it's just him again, and no amount of distraction cleaning is going to fix that.

From there, his story is rather simple. He decides that he's going to have to throw a Christmas party so that everyone has a reason to come back again (especially Cardia), but he also ropes in the other Apostles to help him do the prep work, so there's some fun seeing Hansel and Guinevere (outside her armor!) making Christmas decorations.

Everyone comes back, chaos ensues (with a bang, because Impey crashes the ornithopter into the house), and Saint-Germain feels blessed to have such chaos in his life again. He's so happy about it that the rest of the gang can't help feeling that he's acting strange.

There are two things that I didn't quite like about though. The first of those is that like Van Helsing, there is history between Saint-Germain and Finis. And it's recent. No matter what the route is, Saint-Germain always kills Finis in Isaac's laboratory and Saint-German dreads meeting Finis again because it's hard to let bygones be bygones when it involves stabbing the aggrieved party in the heart.

Saint-Germain acknowledges this, but Finis surprisingly doesn't make a big deal out if it. I get that the writers might have felt it was too close to Van Helsing's talk with Finis in his own Christmas story, but the situation is reversed with Saint-Germain, where he is the one who did the wronging. It was nothing personal, but he still did it. Instead Finis brushes it off in a single line and it never comes up again.

The other matter that didn't quite work for me was the romance between him and Cardia. Saint-Germain is very difficult to get to know (with good reason) prior to the route split, and given that the rest of his route doesn't happen in this timeline, I found it hard to believe Cardia would be interested in him. Him liking Cardia was fine, but I don't see why Cardia would have fallen in love with him in return. Whereas most other routes she's usually described as mooning over the guy by name, or clearly into him, this time around Finis finds her reading some alchemical treatise Saint-Germain wrote a couple centuries ago, which doesn't feel like a sign of puppy love.

Interestingly, his route also has a number of references to the After Stories in ~Future Blessings~. Even though those stories don't happen here, due to being in a different timeline, the circumstances leading up to them still do. So we have mentions of his friendship with Trismegistus, as well as the fact Idea had been looking at Victor Frankenstein as a potential recruit. When Saint-Germain considers whether he can have a future with Cardia, he tells her that he would be uncomfortable with the idea of her welcoming him home after he's killed someone on a mission, which is the argument he gave Victor when trying to convince him not to join Idea in Victor's After Story. These references don't affect the plot, but it's nice to see them woven into more of the common continuity that should be shared no matter which route eventually happens.

The ending is a bit unexpected, considering that Saint-Germain is still an Apostle and thus has a duty he cannot retire from, but Omnibus stops by the Christmas party to let him know that she never did tell him how long his break is supposed to be. Being that they're immortal, she's figuring on ten, twenty, or maybe even a hundred years, which makes it clear that she's freeing Saint-Germain to live a normal lifespan with Cardia before he has to go back to work.

I'm guessing since Cardia is poison-free in the best way in following Finis's route, there's no reason she might eventually revert like in Victor's After Story, though the game neglects to mention she might have a longer than human lifespan. Considering the nods to other timelines, it's a little surprising this wasn't addressed in some fashion.

Special Epilogue

Saint-Germain's Special Epilogue picks up with him and Cardia returning to London after having visited his hometown at the end of ~Future Blessings~. It's been a year so her poison is gone and the Horologium has changed to white, indicating that it's completely drained/neutralized in the same fashion as Lupin and Finis's endings. Because of this, Omnibus says Idea will no longer look after them and they have her blessing to get married. The danger that Cardia once posed is completely gone.

Perhaps for a change of pace (and to avoid reusing too much of the same scenery), Saint-Germain reveals that he's purchased the Gracia, the boat from the Lupin Gang side story in ~Future Blessings~, and had it rebuilt for his wedding with Cardia. Since they've been globetrotting, having their union celebrated on a boat seems appropriate.

The Special Epilogue draws parallels between Saint-Germain and Cardia as outcasts and thus how they are an unusual pair. Saint-Germain should have died a couple thousand of years ago, but has instead been living as an immortal in the shadows, and Cardia was born a poisonous monster. Now both of them have left the darkness of their previous lives and are about to move on to happier lives in the light. (Since in this ending, Saint-Germain is no longer an Apostle.)

It also brings out the fact that though the Apostles of Idea are a merciless organization, for better or worse, they are family. Since everyone else dies around them and their organization exists only in the barest of rumors, the only people the Apostles can confide in are each other.

Hansel also makes an appearance in this route, though Cardia hasn't met him in this timeline so they need to go through a short introduction. I kind of wish we'd gotten a fourth named Apostle, but I can understand not wanting to do that for a bit part, and the Cantarella side story had enough going on without introducing another one (aside from the fact it happens prior to the Idea reveal).

The Saint-Germain Special Epilogue is a nice send-off, and ties up remaining loose ends, but otherwise is not too remarkable.

As a side note: I'd mentioned that in ~Future Blessings~ there seemed to be a new translator or editor involved because of the inconsistent terminology, and that seems to have been the case here as well. The majority of the game appears uniform, but Saint-Germain's Christmas and Special Epilogue routes feel just a little stilted. This happens in a couple others routes as well, but Saint-Germain is particularly impacted since this affects both his routes.

Usually Aksys does a good job in making the dialogue feel like it was originally written by a native English speaker, but some of the lines on these routes felt like a more literal translation I would see in a fan translation than a professional one. Like it wasn't necessarily wrong, but you probably wouldn't choose that wording if English was your native language. In a few cases the sentences themselves weren't even grammatically correct, like we have the first half of a thought, but not the second. And we end up with "Idea's Apostles" again even though "Apostles of Idea" is the more common wording. I'm really surprised that there wasn't a glossary of some kind for the translation/editing team to ensure consistency.