VN Talk: Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~ - Part 7: Sholmès

This week I'm covering Sholmès's route for Code:Realize: ~Wintertide Miracles~. Please beware of spoilers if that concerns you as I'll be discussing everything up until the ending.

I have to admit that when I started Sholmès's epilogue it forced me to realize that I don't really remember the details of his ~Future Blessings~ route all that well. I remember the basic gist of his story with Moriarty/Aleister and how Cardia ended up at his house, but the epilogue opens with Sholmès reflecting on his relationship with Watson and how Mary ended up getting killed, and that was a detail I didn't remember all. I remembered that Watson's wife had died before the Sholmès route began, but couldn't recall exactly what Sholmès had done to contribute to to it, and his musings do nothing to refresh my memory.

I also hadn't liked Sholmès's route much due to heavily borrowing plot elements from Van Helsing's storyline, including the villain himself. Unfortunately he doesn't fare much better in his After Story either.

The epilogue picks up shortly after his route in ~Future Blessings~. Cardia is still poisonous, they want to fix that, and she's now working with Sholmès as his apprentice. The opening is a lot of fun since we get to see Cardia, Sholmès, and Watson mess around with Lupin and Impey (and Lupin and Impey mess around with them in turn). It adds another layer of character to Lupin and Sholmès's rivalry to have Cardia involved as well, and as a result, attempting to foil Lupin's heist feels a lot like a game between friends. Unfortunately this is the route's best foot forward and it's all downhill from here.

We get to see cameos of other members of the main cast (everyone except Saint-Germain really) and of course Victor gets involved again. He and Watson are working on trying to develop a cure for Cardia, but there's no Zicterium for him to work with this time, so thankfully the game avoids shoehorning Victor's ~Guardian of Rebirth~ solution into yet another After Story.

Sholmès himself is rather useless this route since he can't personally do anything to help Cardia except cheer her on since he's a detective, not a scientist. But he does a fair enough job of wining and dining her, and he does run into a convenient contact, who leaves him with a potion identical to the one used by the Count of Monte Cristo that will leave someone in a deathlike state without killing them. The contact's identity is intentionally hidden from the audience, but from context it's fairly easy to guess that it's his brother, Mycroft, who has not been used in prior games.

This potion turns out necessary because Cardia's Horologium (conveniently for the plot) reactivates and starts its more murderous transformation where she'll eventually explode and spread poison for miles around.

Since Victor and Watson believe they are at least a year away from rendering the Horologium harmless, they get help from Impey and Nemo of all people, to adapt the potion to one that should be safe for Cardia to take and revive from later. After some mushy talk with Sholmès, during which he proposes to her, she takes the potion and the credits roll.

Of course the route doesn't end like that, and the post-credits scene is after the year has passed and Cardia's condition has been successfully neutralized. But what I didn't like so much was that when Sholmès goes to wake her, he pretty much pulls a Victor by putting the wake-up medicine in his mouth before kissing her to wake her up. If Victor's ~Guardian of Rebirth~ ending hadn't already mouth-fed her medicine, it might have been all right, but Victor's did it first and it had a more compelling reason for him to do so other than he would think it's romantic. It also didn't help that the kiss illustration is posed almost identically, as if the artist couldn't be bothered to get a different angle.

What I did like though is that Cardia gives him crap about not letting her get her bearings after being asleep for a year because the first thing she wakes up to is finding his lips on hers. And I did like that we avoided a Victor and the Zicterium rehash. They just rehashed a different part of his route. But at least that gives us some reassurance that even if Victor had never gotten a hold of the remaining Zicterium, he would have eventually developed a cure as promised.

There are still two posts to go with Finis's epilogue and the Canterella side story. I will likely cover Finis next week, depending on whether I have the bandwidth for a more writing-related post. Because of the issues I've been dealing with, free time is very precious right now and I'm fortunate in that all these Code:Realize posts were actually written back in February/March when I played the game, so adding them to the blog is just a matter of formatting them and adding images.