VN Talk: Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~ - Part 9: Cantarella

Sorry for another bobble in my posting schedule. Things have been a bit rough lately, and I'll try to address that in my next post, since I'd really like to finish up my Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~ write-up first. But I will say that if you've been enjoying my VN Talk series to please consider dropping a tip in the Ko-fi jar, which you'll see in the upper right of my blog.

That said, this is the last, but certainly not least, of the ~Wintertide Miracles~ stories.

While I was playing this, I wasn't sure how everything would come together, because the side story has two plotlines and I wasn't sure at first which was the subplot and which was the main plot, but by the climax I knew what Cantarella was ultimately about.

It's a story about fathers and daughters and it's much better done than the Lupin's Gang side story in ~Future Blessings~. Lupin's Gang wasn't bad, but it clearly a side story unrelated to the main plot, and it didn't handle its father/daughter pairing with nearly the same deftness that Cantarella does.

In fact my biggest complaint with Lupin's Gang was that Shirley's father gave the final punch to the villain, taking away from Shirley's previous moment of victory and making the finale a showdown between two dudes, neither of whom the audience really cares about.

Like Lupin's Gang, Cantarella takes place after the airship race, but before Cardia and friends discover Isaac's laboratory, and from there dances a careful game between what the audience knows and what the main cast knows. Unlike Lupin's Gang, this does not take place completely outside the main storyline, and weaves in familiar enemies and even a familiar backstory.

Cantarella is a singing star in London, filling the opera house every night she performs, and Cardia and friends happen to meet her off the stage when the mysterious masked Baron Aiguille tries kidnapping her. Though they drive off Aiguille, Cantarella feels weak and they escort her back to her home so she can take the medicine she needs for a chronic condition of hers. This allows Cardia and Cantarella to become friends and for the crew to also meet her father, Miles Strand.

Miles is introduced as a lazy layabout who gambles away all of Cantarella's earnings (save what she needs for medication--he's pretty adamant he would never go that far) and from his looks, it's pretty obvious that he's not old enough to be her biological father. Though Cantarella's often frustrated with him, she tells Cardia about how Miles found her gravely injured as a child and took her in. They started calling themselves father and daughter because there could be no other reasonable explanation for a man to be living with a young girl, but Cantarella always calls him "Miles" because she's not sure how well he'd take to being called "Father" and she's afraid of being rejected, and with good reason.

As the audience learns, but Cardia never does (and even Cantarella perhaps only partially understands), is that Cantarella is one of the failed Cardia clones. She was unusual in that she was often awake while growing in the vat, and possesses memories of Isaac Beckford disposing of his failed prototypes. And then one day, to her horror, it was her turn to be thrown away. Isaac was disappointed by how she deviated from Cardia's intended appearance; her hair was white and her right eye deformed.

We also learn that Miles used to be the second-in-command of Twilight, so naturally he knew something (though not all) of Isaac's research, and became horrified when he was introduced to the room full of Cardia clones. This led to him becoming disaffected from his job and when he finally went AWOL, he spotting a dying clone and took her with him, naming her Cantarella.

(Which, by the way, only works because apparently nobody in Code:Realize knows the story of the Borgias. Miles named his daughter after a poison, which given that she's a Cardia clone is appropriate, but not something he should be advertising to the world.)

This means that Cantarella is actually Cardia's older sister. And by basing Miles's backstory around Twilight, the story is able to make use of Aleister and Twilight itself as part of the plot. Since Cantarella was artificially created and Isaac seemed to have implanted something in her brain, Miles needs Zicterium to treat it, and Twilight's the only source of that in town. Miles has been paying them Cantarella's earnings to get a regular supply, but now that Cardia's in the picture, Aleister has a different sort of payment in mind; one that Miles can't refuse.

I liked Twilight showing up since this takes place during the main story so they should be an ongoing danger and they were conspicuously missing during Lupin's Gang (though granted a lot of that took place on a boat where Twilight had no business being). As a former operative, it's fun seeing Miles change personas as he discards his "daddy" personality for that of a hardened agent (and it's something that probably was his game face earlier in his life). Seeing him prepare to face off against Lupin and company to capture Cardia was a good moment of tension, broken only by the story's other subplot.

I mentioned how Cardia meets Cantarella due to Baron Aiguille trying to kidnap her. Baron Aiguille is a completely unrelated party who has "inherited" a moving castle that won't walk anymore because it lacks the voiceprint of the appropriate singer to make it move. It's implied the castle was built by Isaac, and given that he knows it will no longer move but the appropriate person may eventually be born who will be able to wake it, it was probably something he'd built for the real Cardia and then buried knowing that eventually the reborn one might be able to reclaim it.

Aiguille is a fun character even though he comes off as a bit of a brute in his introduction. He's arrogant, and shows up in a hilarious variety of places. The player gets to choose where to hang out with Cantarella soon after meeting her, and there are five locations (so each love interest has an opportunity to tag along). I highly recommend reloading repeatedly to do all of them. Even though a lot of the dialogue between Cantarella and Aiguille ends up rehashed I love how he randomly turns up in his mask and carnival costume in public as if it's no big deal and there's always a context specific question about why people don't mistake him a robber or the like.

One thing I love about Cantarella is that she has a really sharp tongue. She uses it on Miles a lot, and she certainly doesn't spare Aiguille. When he tries calling her his Fairy Tale Songstress, she doesn't have any of it, and won't even respond to his loony threats until he finally gives in and properly calls her by her name. Cardia and her male companion generally comment on how it doesn't even look like the conversation is happening between kidnapper and kidnappee.

When Cantarella is broken by Miles's betrayal, she on the verge of despair, but Aiguille blasts down a wall and interrupts with his steam-powered carriage, announcing that he's come to take her away and that he's not going to argue with her (because he knows if they do, he's gonna lose). Cardia also hitches a ride and escapes, leaving her friends to handle Miles and Twilight, which they do.

At this point, I really wasn't sure where the story was going, since the two plots were so different from each other. There's a fairy tale we're given early on about a paraplegic prince and a singing princess who are given a moving castle so the prince can see the world, and from the accompanying drawings, the prince and princess are clearly supposed to be Aiguille and Cantarella, but the two of them don't actually have a shared history and this fairy tale actually exists in their world so it would be weird if their lives were exactly as the fairy tale depicted.

Fortunately that's not the case. We finally meet the real Aiguille, who is not entirely paraplegic, but has "bad legs." Apparently he can walk a little bit with a cane, but it's very difficult for him so he usually goes around in a sort of automated wheelchair. I do like that Code:Realize has a prominent disabled character in the story, and depending on the choices made he might even get a big moment to save the day, but I'm not sure whether I like the ending where they mention he's training to walk better. It seems like if it was possible for him to regain his ability to walk (he lost it in a childhood illness) he would have done so years ago. Worse, it implies that the reason he hasn't been able to walk is that he's been too lazy to rehabilitate himself.

Aiguille and Cantarella have some good chemistry together, in both of his personas, but given how little time they actually spend together their story ends with only a potential for romance rather than an actual relationship. He wants Cantarella because one of the devices left to him indicates that her singing voice can power the castle, and even though she's in a rather poor state of mind, she takes pity on him and agrees to do it. That way Aiguille can travel the world just like the prince in the fairy tale.

Of course, being that this is an invention of Isaac's (especially if you play this after the Finis epilogue) it's not entirely unexpected when things go horribly bad. The castle powers up and sucks Cantarella into its main hub where the device in her brain goes into overload with leftover commands from Isaac. In anguish and having flashbacks of being discarding, Cantarella continues singing, because she wants to please her father and knows that's what is being asked of her, and her dirge turns the castle into an uncontrollable monstrosity that powers straight for London.

This sets up the finale where Miles comes clean about what he was really doing with Twilight, so he can accompany Lupin and friends on the rescue mission to the castle, where they met up with Cardia and Aiguille and everyone heads for the main hub to rescue Cantarella.

Though everyone plays a role in rescuing her, the lion's share goes to Miles, who has to apologize for his deception and tell Cantarella what she truly means to him. Unlike Lupin's Gang in ~Future Blessings~ where the climax is Shirley's father Darius punching out the bad guy, the climax in Cantarella is a bleeding and battered Miles risking his life to tell his daughter how much he loves her.

It packs an incredible heft to it, especially considering that much of Code:Realize has already been about children and their fathers, particularly Isaac in regards to his creations. But unlike Isaac, Miles truly cares about Cantarella as a human girl and not a homunculus or lab experiment.

This is the finale, and not anything that has to do with Aiguille other than the fact the trigger for Cantarella's device happens to be a part of his castle. I really liked the father-daughter relationship, and the fact we've come to care about both Cantarella and Miles makes this work. Though we're only with them for a few hours, both of them are fully realized characters with their own fears and foibles by the end of the story.

What I didn't particularly expect to find in this side story though, was the rehabilitation of a minor, previously unnamed character, now known as Theophraste. This is Lupin's mentor.

As we learned in Lupin's ~Guardian of Rebirth~ route, his mentor was previously a Twilight operative, and from Miles's backstory we discover that the two of them were close friends and found out about the Cardia clones at the same time. Apparently in Twilight's early days, before it became a full-on secret agency, Theophraste was able to convince himself that even if he got his hands dirty, he was doing it for the greater good, and some of his sense of justice rubbed off on the more cynical Miles. But learning about the Cardia clones broke both of them, because there was no way any of those girls could be related to protecting the British people. Being in charge of intelligence, Theophraste arguably had it worse, as he knew exactly what Isaac's plans were.

The two of them escaped Twilight, and given Miles's POV, we're able to see why Theophraste is so shaken that he can't carry on the fight anymore, making him more sympathetic than what he ultimately ended up being in Lupin's backstory. And Miles is canny enough to realize that Lupin is a student of his former friend.

Though this tie-in worked for me initially, it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The problem is that Lupin says in ~Guardian of Rebirth~ that he met his mentor when he was about ten. According to the official artbook, Lupin is 24 at the start of the game, meaning that they met fourteen years ago. But according to Miles, he and Theophraste didn't freak out and leave until six years ago. When they go through the lab for Isaac's documents, most of the specimens are already dead or disposed of. The successful Cardia is not there, which matches the timeline given in ~Guardian of Rebirth~, which places her in Wales six years prior to the story.

I suspect that someone forgot (or decided to ignore) that Lupin's backstory can't be reconciled with the new information in Cantarella. Even if we ignore his age in the artbook, Lupin's young enough in the flashback image that he's probably no older than his early teens when his mentor dies, and this is a man he's described as raising him, so they'd obviously been together for some years prior.

One thing that I'm a little surprised about is that we never learn Miles's birth name. One of Miles's flashbacks mentions that is not his real name, which makes sense being that he's an intelligence agent, but we're only left with implications as to his real identity, rather than it being spelled out at any point. This means that only lore nerds are likely to guess that he is actually Mycroft Holmes.

Miles mentions having a younger brother multiple times, but only vaguely suggests what his brother is good at and that they don't see each other often. Mycroft is typically depicted as being involved with the government in some fashion, and post-Doyle writers have often placed him in intelligence work, which fits with Miles's backstory. There's also the matter that Sholmès gets the Count of Monte Cristo potion from someone with a lot of connections in his epilogue, and we only catch a glimpse of a silhouette depicting the person he'd spoken too, which looked like Miles.

I can understand not wanting to spell it out in Sholmès's route since there's no way of knowing the order the player will go through the different stories and explaining why Mycroft is going by Miles in the opening credits would get needlessly complicated, but at least in the Cantarella story it should have been okay to call him Mycroft at some point. Sholmès doesn't show up, but the players already know that Sholmès is Sherlock Holmes and he's been a major character in the past so there would be less explanation needed.

Cantarella was unexpectedly the highlight of ~Wintertide Miracles~, which makes me a little sad that there isn't anything left in the main story to explore, since I very much would like to spend additional time with Cantarella and Miles. There are no additional fandiscs after this, and the two don't appear in the unlockable Special Epilogues, which is a shame. This side story is a real gem, and I expect to go through it again in the future.