VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 5: Il

If I was ambivalent about starting Ignis's route, I expected even less from Il's. I figured Ignis would be entertaining because of his brash personality, even if the fiery tsundere is not normally my type of romance, but Il's characterization is akin to a well-meaning, but socially inept, child. He's unable to take care of himself and spends all his time playing otome games. Most of the regulars baby him (barring Ignis) and at one point it's even brought up that he's not allowed to go outside by himself because he tends to get himself into trouble, which the others later have to extract him from.

That doesn't make him a bad character, but it made it hard to see him as a romance option. At one point in his route, Kotone even wonders if he's seeing her as more of a parental figure than a romantic one, which is completely fair.

His story though, completely knocked my socks off. Il might not be my type preference in romantic lead, but his route is probably the best written out of all of them. Not only does it answer questions about why Il behaves the way he does, but it really pushes his character development in unexpected directions.

When I originally started the game I thought it was strange that a male-presenting angel is obsessed with otome games and chalked it up to the writers knowing their audience. Kotone, Il, and the player could bond over otome games in a way they might not if Il had been playing galge aimed at men. But after playing his route, I learned why Il's first game happened to be an otome and, more importantly, how much it changed his life to have played it. It sounds like hyperbole when he first mentions it, but once the original circumstances are out, it's one of the saddest moments in his story.

We know Il is powerful, because all the patrons of Enchante are, even beyond that of other interdimensional travelers, but until his route we don't know just how powerful, because Il himself lacks initiative to do more than asked. In fact, in the common route, his character chapter revolves around Il finally learning why it's worth making other people smile instead of always being the recipient of another's cheer. He has a flashback with Kotone's grandfather who brings him up on this shortcoming, and initially Il doesn't see the point, until he realizes that Kotone is feeling miserable and he'd like to do something about that.

His route begins as an extension of that. Viewing the world through the lens of his games, Il comes to realize that the others in the cafe are like the romantic leads in an otome. They're helpful. When Kotone needs something she can rely on them to chip in. However, Il can't count himself among them because he's always the one being taken care of instead of taking care of others.

He makes this connection on his own and realizes he wants to do better. Though he's occasionally inconsiderate, it's never on purpose so much as he just doesn't understand what the proper social response is supposed to be. For instance, what prompts this introspection is that he uses his magic to help Kotone take a nap in the park, but ends up knocking out every other person and animal in the park as well without realizing that could be a bad thing. It's only afterward that he realizes a person could fall down and hit their head, and then he feels guilty because Kotone ends up apologizing to the rest of the group since it had been her idea to take Il out that day.

Il trying to make himself useful is charming, even if he is so bad at it, and we're even more inclined to root for him once Mikado's nameless assistant takes a larger role in the story and belittles Il's capacity to learn things he had not been designed for.

Angels in this setting are a fusion of science and the divine, so they operate under principles of logic and a rigid hierarchy (fans of Shin Megami Tensei will feel right at home with how clinical their world is). Needing to understand things such as sadness or social sensitivities are unnecessary for them, which is why Il is so inept. He's willing to learn, but it is very much not in his nature.

What his nature actually is, is the big secret.

Mikado's assistant is actually Solitus, another angel from the Heavenly World of Caelm, who has come to the human world to retrieve Il. Even though Il protests that he's fallen and can't go back, Solitus says that Il has not completely fallen, which turns out to be true, as the emotional trauma of reuniting with his former comrade causes Il to give up on emotions entirely rather than relive the pain of how he came to his current state in the first place.

Solitus is driven away, but the cafe crew quickly realizes the only way they can "fix" the now unresponsive Il is to take him back to his homeworld.

I'll skip most of the world building, save that it once again involves humans visiting another world in the ancient past, which has been a common thread in other routes, but the crux of Il's issues is that in Caelm he was created to be the Apostle of Judgment, which meant that it was his job to kill all the fallen angels who deviated from their purposes. Angels are not allowed to have emotions or personal wishes, and gaining them causes them to fall and their wings to turn black. (It should be noted that Il's wings are normally a mix of light and darker feathers, but mostly light, which is confusing until Solitus is finally introduced and we see them side by side.)

At some point in the past, Il's communication with God (the supercomputer that rules Caelm) was cut off by a romantically involved pair of fallen angels who tried to befriend him. Though he didn't understand much about their emotional state or their feelings for each other, he felt that they were not actually dangerous to the safety of Caelm, so he didn't want to kill them when communication resumed. But of course he did, because that's the way he was built.

This broke him and he fled through the Gate leading to Cafe Enchante where he was eventually found, and the reason he's so obsessed with otome is because he was trying to understand the feeling of love between the pair of fallen angels and why they were willing to die for it. Misyr, not sure how to explain love to Il, ended up buying Il's first otome game in an attempt to give him an educational tool, and Il took it to heart, even naming himself after the young man whose route was the first one he played.

This explains not only Il's love of otome games, but also his strange habit of not quite understanding how to react to things. He had taken on the personality of Il Fado de Rie from the game, and was extrapolating how the character would react (hypothetically) to a given situation and give the appropriate response. In some cases, he didn't have a strong enough point of reference, so he would simply blank out until someone else gave him something to work with.

And once his secret is out, he's horrified that Kotone now realizes that the person that she knew, the person that he was, was completely a fictional construct and there's nothing to speak of that belongs to Il himself.

Of course, that's not true, as Il grows over the course of his route, even prior to Solitus's appearance, but considering how hard he'd worked to get as far as he had, it was devastating to have it ripped away without a chance to explain.

After getting Il fixed (or broken again, from Solitus's point of view), Il finally takes the initiative on his own and becomes the big damn hero for a surprisingly high stakes finale where if he fails, the human world is likely to be turned into spirit parts for the heavenly one. There's less teamwork in his finale than the others (though the regulars get to show their stuff earlier in his route), but it feels appropriate to keep the focus on Il given his history, and in particular his friendship with Solitus.

Solitus only appears as himself on Il's route, but he's an interesting character in that he's highly emotional, obsessed even, when it comes to having Il at his side. The two of them have worked together since their creation, so when Il disappeared, Solitus could only think of getting his partner back. So I was puzzled that his wings are white almost the entire route through, since narratively it's completely obvious he ought to be a fallen angel. It's only in the end that Il points out that Solitus's emotions have tinged him black, but it's not enough to make his wings completely black like the other fallen angels'. I guess it takes time for wings to change completely black, but narratively it ended up bugging me for most of the route and nobody comments on it until the very end, by which point it feels more like they just didn't want to make another set of sprite artwork for him.

As with Ignis's route, I didn't expect to be as moved by the ending here, which is particularly bittersweet. Though there's a promise that Il will recover and move forward again in the good ending, his victory was definitely not without sacrifice. It makes me a little surprised that the story started with a young woman deciding to run a cafe, because given those beginnings that's not where I would have figured this would end up.