Loscon 43

I'm going to be at Loscon 43 and will be there for all three days. My panel times and locations are below and because they're evenly spread out I will have plenty of time to talk both before and after panels in the event anyone would like to catch me.

Reboots, Reimagining and Fandom FRI 16:00 Boston

All About Editing and Editors - SAT 11:30 Chicago

Best Advice I Never Got - SUN 14:30 Marquis 2

I did not request an autograph table, but if you run into me and have something you would like me to sign, feel free to ask. I'll have a pen on me.

Also! If you have a 3DS, I will have mine with me at the convention. I'm not currently playing anything on it, but I love Streetpassing and I have a ton of puzzle pieces. If that's your thing, you want to bump into me! :)

VN Talk: Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Continuing my Danganronpa replays, today we move on to Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, which is also available in English on Steam and PS Vita.

I originally played this right after I finished the first game (for the second time), which made going into Danganronpa 2 hard. In retrospect it might have been better not to have played them so close together because I may have unfairly judged the new cast against the old without giving them adequate space to grow on me.

Having played through DR1 twice and finished all endings in the optional School Mode, the cast of the first game had become quite dear to me, and it was hard getting thrown into a new game with sixteen new strangers and expecting to get to know them all as well.

Once again there is a group of Hope's Peak Academy "Ultimate" students who are forced to play a killing game, where the winner gets to "graduate" and escape confinement (in this case, the abandoned tropical resort island they're stranded on) as long as they are not found out in the subsequent class trial. Discovery equals execution. If the culprit succeeds, then all other students will be executed, giving a huge incentive for the culprit hide their tracks (better yet, pin the deed on someone else) and for the innocent students to find out who the murderer is.

But why is there another game? How is Monokuma back? Why are there more students when the first game said that the members of Class 78 were supposed to be the only ones from Hope's Peak Academy who survived the worst tragedy in human history? And how did they get unwittingly transported all the way from their school in Japan to some tropical island?

It's kind of amazing how much about the early portion of DR2 doesn't make sense, but the player is willing to overlook it as just a stretch beyond expectations for an already exaggerated set of circumstances.

The opening scene with Hajime Hinata heading to school for his very first day at Hope's Peak Academy is an easy parallel to Makoto Naegi's from the first game, but instead of passing out, the player's screen glitches with a graphics bug we call "tearing" in the industry. Shortly thereafter Hajime finds himself in a classroom with his new classmates who are also having a bizarre first day, which is capped off with the reveal of their new teacher, a robotic plush rabbit called Usami, and the classroom walls falling down to reveal that they're actually on a tropical island.

Usami lets the group know that they are on a school trip and their goal is to become friends with each other to collect Hope Fragments, and after they've gotten them all, they will be free to leave the island.

Everyone is naturally suspicious. How did they end up on a school trip, and to a tropical island no less, without being aware of it? But just as some of the students are starting to think this might be okay, Monokuma, the sadistic teddy bear of the first game, usurps Usami's position, remodeling her as Monomi so she looks more like him, and then declares the rules of the killing game in order to leave.

As before, it's impossible to talk about the full story without giving away the ending, so spoilers from here on out!

Danganronpa 2 plays with and subverts the expectations of the audience from the first game, which is one of the humorous highlights of the game. For instance, Monokuma reveals that an organization called World Ender ruined the world outside (the destroyed world being a major reveal towards the end of the first game) and they're the organization that trapped the students on the island as well as removing memories of their previous years at school. Players of the first game will immediately connect World Ender to Ultimate Despair, the group that included Junko Enoshima, the mastermind behind Monokuma and the first killing game. The memory removal was a similar late reveal in the first game to the survivors who made it to the end.

But because of when in the story this gets revealed, it's so early that the students have no proof that anything Monokuma says is true, whereas in the first game the reveal was the only thing that made all the weird clues make sense. It's a nice reversal that plays with player expectations while still using the same foundation of the characters not knowing what happened before.

As the player goes through Danganronpa 2, the students begin to uncover proof of their missing memories. One of them even recovers her memories entirely and murders two of her fellow students because she now remembers who she is, and that the Future Foundation (aka World Ender) was the one who put them in this situation. The other students are horrified by the glee with which she goes to her execution, particularly because she now behaves like a completely different person.

The truth behind Danganronpa 2 hits like a truck, much like the surprise reveal at the end of the first game, though it's not quite as cleanly executed as Monokuma essentially provides everyone with a gigantic infodump of assorted clues that he swears are all real, and the clues lead to the discovery that were other survivors of Hope's Peak Academy besides Class 78 and that they were subsequently taken in by the Future Foundation

Seeing as the newly acquired fifteen were similar in age to the participants of the first game, the Future Foundation placed the newcomers under the supervision of the survivors from the Hope's Peak Academy killing game.

But it turned out the fifteen students were a part of Ultimate Despair (explaining why they survived when no one else did), and followers of Junko Enoshima. Together, they were responsible for setting off the spark that resulted in civilization's fall.

The members of Ultimate Despair had originally been Hope's Peak Academy students who had become corrupted by Junko Enoshima to the point that they were functionally considered limbs of hers, doing whatever she required. Most of Ultimate Despair committed suicide when they discovered Junko had executed herself at the end of the first game, but that was not true of the fifteen who became known as the Remnants of Despair.

They were a psychotic bunch, trying to get close to despair, and committed all kinds of atrocities to themselves, to their friends and families, and to complete strangers. It's heavily implied that the fifteen have no one left to go back to, and that several of them are disfigured in the real world (whereas their virtual bodies have been rewound to 2-3 years prior to the game so they appear normal).

Makoto Naegi, the protagonist of the first game, objected to their destruction and with assistance from his fellow first game survivors, placed the fifteen Remnants of Despair in a VR machine that removed their memories prior to their stay at Hope's Peak Academy, prior to them meeting Junko, and prior to becoming corrupted by her.

In the virtual world they would have a chance to make new, happier memories, so they could go back to being the more joyful people they had been before they ever met her, and then this new version of them would be uploaded into their bodies, replacing the ones who had become Ultimate Despair.

But there was a complication, leading directly to the conflict in the second game.

Unlike Makoto, Hajime is a more complex protagonist, and his past is all kinds of jacked up to the point I'm not sure it's useful to discuss it for what I want to get at here. In a nutshell, Hajime is both the lead protagonist and the mastermind behind the second killing game, but he's unaware of it due to his memory loss.

It's clear that the Remnants of Despair knew what was in store for them when Makoto and company took them into their custody, and past-version Hajime uploaded an AI clone of Junko Enoshima as a virus into the virtual reality system, kicking off the second killing game in a bid to resurrect the real Ultimate Despair.

This explains the return of Monokuma, the strange graphics glitches at the start of the game, and other nonsensical things that shouldn't be possible but the audience could handwave as Danganronpa-style silliness taken to the next level.

The plan behind the second killing game was to kill off the majority of the Remnants of Despair (which is why the one who got her memory back was thrilled to accelerate things) and then get the remainder to graduate, which would cause their memories from the virtual world to be uploaded into the real one. But the AI Junko would be uploaded into the bodies of everyone who had died in the virtual world, essentially resurrecting the villain of the first game.

It's the kind of horrible plan that a bunch of devoted and psychotic followers would voluntarily come up with, but the problem is, the surviving characters at this point in the game are no longer crazy. They don't want to be manipulated by their former selves, but now they're trapped between graduating and bringing a monster back into the real world with them, or remaining forever in the virtual world.

Hope arrives in the form of the timely arrival of three of the first game's survivors, which together give them the eight votes needed for a majority to activate the emergency shutdown sequence. (And it was a lovely moment seeing Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya charge into the virtual world to save their former schoolmates.) But in another twist, the Junko AI was prepared for that too, and if she's to be believed, getting them to jump in like that was her primary reason for the killing game.

What the survivors of the first game reluctantly reveal is that while the emergency shutdown will allow everyone to escape the Junko AI as well as preventing her resurrection, it will also erase everything else that happened in the virtual world, which means that all the memories the second cast had built up would be deleted, including all the friends and sacrifices they made along the way, and they would revert to the former Despair versions of themselves on awakening.

It's a Catch 22, and the AI Junko capitalizes on the fact the five surviving Remnants of Despair do not want to forget what happened to them on the island, or, in Hajime's case, to simply cease to exist, since Hajime's 2-3 years' ago personality was so damaged that what he is in the virtual world is simply the best reconstruction the system can come up with.

The choices are self-destruction, to graduate (which will also doom Makoto, Kyoko and Byakuya since AI Junko will not allow them to graduate and graduation is subject to instructor approval), or to remain in the virtual world (trapping Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya along with them).

And this is the part where I think AI Junko falls down a bit. While the five remaining Remnants of Despair are justified in asking why they should sacrifice themselves when it means losing the people they've become, their alternatives are really not all that great.

The first game's final vote against hope or despair worked because everything they had been fighting to return to no longer existed. Both staying where they were and going outside into a post-apocalyptic world were equally despairing options, but the latter involved clearly seeing the truth with their own eyes, no matter how bad it would be.

In the second game, the options are again to maintain the unpleasant status quo or to leave via two different unpleasant methods. It's easy to rule out graduation, because that brings back Junko, who wants to destroy the world, and could the surviving Remnants of Despair (who are good people again) really condemn the three members of the Future Foundation who came into the virtual world to save them?

While the plot does spend a good bit bringing the five Remnants to the brink of Despair, using the emergency shutdown seems like a foregone conclusion. Even allowing for a continued existence in the virtual world, it doesn't seem like a happy way to survive and they would still be stuck with AI Junko (trapped on a island with their worst enemy!).

The problem with presenting this choice as the final dilemma is that only one of the two options favorable for Junko is the best one. If the Remnants graduate, the Future Foundation members are trapped, and if the Remnants choose to stay, then the Foundation members are still trapped. But even though AI Junko says her real purpose was to draw in the Future Foundation members who escaped her real self, the best choice is for everyone to graduate because that's the only option that sends her back into the world and she completely fails at selling it as a viable choice.

In the first game, her reveal of the truth of the outside world and that the students had voluntarily incarcerated themselves, made it clear that staying inside could be right thing to do (with the downside of being stuck with a psychopath).

She really needed to be telling the Remnants of Despair that graduating and bringing her back was what they want just as much as her, and she doesn't. Instead she tells them how their fallen companions will be inhabited by AI copies of her and how she'll continue the worst tragedy in the history of humanity, which all of them find completely revolting. If she managed to take a step beyond that, and show them why it would still be worth it other than "you guys won't wake up in the real world as Ultimate Despairs anymore" it would have been amazing.

After some soul searching about whether or not to stay inside the virtual world, the five Remnants choose to activate the emergency shutdown and vow to remember as much as they can when they wake up (even though it should be nigh impossible).

The epilogue sequence, much like the first game, chooses not to show the details. We see Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya leaving the real island that the virtual one was based off of and going to report back to the Future Foundation where Makoto's going to take the heat for his unorthodox plan to redeem the Remnants of Despair. He thinks the Remnants are going to be okay. They've woken up and have decided to stay on the island and try to help revive their friends who didn't make it out of the game.

The final shot of the epilogue is a back view of Hajime. As he watches their boat leave he narrates how he's now going to live as Hajime Hinata, rather than the version of himself who had become Ultimate Despair.

The implication is that the Remnants now have both sets of memories, both the horrible ones and the new ones they made on the island, leaving them changed people.

I was satisfied with the ending, and didn't feel that there really needed to be more for this particular cast of characters. If anything, thanks to the world building and the introduction of the Future Foundation, I wanted to follow the continuing adventures of Makoto and company. Fortunately, there's the opportunity to do both in Danganronpa 3.

But first, we'll take a side trip to to the spin-off game, Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls.

VN Talk: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

This past summer Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak Academy aired as two parallel anime series, one that was a prequel to the Danganronpa games, and one that was a sequel and the chronological conclusion to the story of the students at Hope's Peak Academy.

It was a must-watch show for me, having fallen in love with the series a year ago, so I decided now would be a good time to replay (or play for the first time, in the case of Another Episode) the original games.

The first one, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, is one of my favorite visual novels ever (and it's now available on Steam as well as PS Vita). Unusually, I played it a second time immediately after completing it. I only run into a game that drives me to do that maybe once every ten years. It's not uncommon for me to replay highlights, but the whole thing?

Outwardly it looks like a cross between the Ace Attorney series and 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. On the one hand, the player searches for clues they can later use in a courtroom situation to suss out a murderer. On the other, the player is trapped in a sadistic game where people can die in a horrific manner.

Fifteen students who are the "Ultimate" at what they do (the Ultimate Martial Artist, the Ultimate Fashionista, the Ultimate Programmer, etc.) have the most bizarre first day of school at Hope's Peak Academy when they pass out and wake up to find themselves trapped inside. The windows and doors leading out have been completely bolted over with metal plates that cannot be removed. A plush mechanical bear called Monokuma declares itself the headmaster and informs them that they are to spend the rest of their lives enjoying a peaceful communal existence inside the school... unless they want to graduate, which is done by killing one of their classmates and getting away without being discovered in the ensuing class trial.

Outwardly no one wants to kill anyone else, and accepting a peaceful life without escape is certainly an option, but Monokuma stirs the pot by providing additional motivation for people wanting to leave the school; for instance, providing video footage that heavily implies that friends and family are in danger.

The students are completely cut off from the outside world with Monokuma holding the only key to escape. They have very little choice but to follow his rules, as he makes it clear early on that breaking them will result in a swift death.

This sets up the stakes pretty early, and it's not terribly long before someone makes the first kill, but what I find most remarkable about the story is something that I rarely find discussed, and it's what made the most lasting impression in my mind. To talk about it, I'm going to have to spoil the end of the game.

So beware of spoilers from here on out!

As the player goes through the story they find clues that there is something going on besides killing each other for Monokuma's entertainment, and it has to deal with the school itself, which turns out to have closed a year before the start of the game. Monokuma never hides this, and allows the students to explore at leisure, but he's cagey about providing too much information that would explain any of the school's mysteries.

As the game progresses, the students discover a TV that shows the killing game is being broadcast on every station they can receive, and we're not sure why.

Then there are these strange photographs of a time when the new students were hanging out together like friends when they had never met each other before. There's even a collection of video interviews with each of the students saying that they understand that once they enter the school it was possible they would spend the rest of their lives inside.

None of them remembers any of this, and Monokuma teases more than once that if they knew the real secret behind the school they would never want to leave.

The secret comes out in the final class trial, when the mastermind behind Monokuma reveals the real reason behind the students' imprisonment and that their memories were tampered with. They thought they had only been at Hope's Peak for the few weeks the killing game was going on, but their first day of class was actually two years ago.

Their first year was relatively normal, which was when the happier photos were taken.

But then one year ago civilization effectively ended in a tragic disaster and most of the student body was killed, except for the sixteen students in Class 78. The real headmaster had the school transformed into a shelter for these "ultimate" students, humanity's best hope for a better tomorrow, so that they would be safe and could emerge at a future time to help rebuild the world.

All of the students consented and assisted in sealing themselves inside the sanctuary they might never leave.

But the mastermind, Junko, was one of the sixteen students and she erased everyone's memories so they forgot why they were trapped in the school, to give them incentive to leave the place they otherwise had no reason to escape. Then she turned it into a murder game consisting of fifteen students and broadcast it to the world to further drown the remaining pockets of hope in despair, because nothing would be worse than seeing the teenagers who are supposed to be the hope for a better future killing each other.

Junko's reveal is powerful, because all this time the characters have been fighting to get back to the world they left behind, only to find out that it doesn't exist anymore. They were fighting over nothing. The ones who murdered their classmates and were in turn executed themselves, did it in vain.

For someone whose real title is the Ultimate Despair, having the protagonists discover that escape is hopeless as well, is an excellent twist. The world outside is polluted and the only reason they are safe inside the barred school is due to the air purifier, which Junko has rigged to disable if she is killed.

Junko gives the surviving six students a choice, to vote to punish either Hope or Despair. If everyone votes to punish Despair, she will allow them to leave, but she will execute herself, so they will no longer have an option of staying in their sanctuary since the purifier will be broken. But anyone who votes to punish Hope, will get to live out the rest of their lives safely inside the school as originally intended and Junko will not kill herself.

Additionally, if any one person votes to punish Hope, everyone who voted to punish Despair will be executed, creating a Prisoner's Dilemma, where all six remaining survivors must vote identically for the best outcome.

Since Danganronpa is a game, it's unsurprising that after some wrangling everyone agrees to punish Despair, but knowing the characters and what they've gone through (especially just how much backstabbing they've endured up to this point), it's very easy to view in character through the protagonist that getting everyone to agree for the benefit of all is a dicey proposition and one they have been failing at the entire game.

Some players expressed dissatisfaction with the end of the game, after the survivors successfully vote against Despair and Junko executes herself. The air purifier stops working, but the six of them now have the controls to the vault-like door that opens the school's front entrance. They talk about what they may or may not find out there (since they never get their memories back) and express hope about their future, no matter how bad the outside might be.

Then they open the door, and the game cuts to credits.

Personally, I was hoping that was exactly what the game would do, because seeing the outside would have opened new questions or changed the mood. If it was happy outside, it would thematically undercut the desperation felt throughout the game. If it was as bleak as Junko told them, it would end the game on a sour note. But by cutting off there, we see the survivors at their best in the face of uncertainty. It ended perfectly.

(And if you really want to see their reaction to the outside world, you can now watch it in a flashback in Danganronpa 3.)

Danganronpa's story discussion usually focuses on the killing game, but people miss the post-apocalyptic side of it, why the killing game was broadcast, and the complete futility of the students trying to return to a life that has since ceased to exist. Even the broadcast version of the anime neglects it, in favor of the easy ending of bringing down the villain. (Though the extended home video release puts the reason for the game back into play.)

Junko doesn't start up the killing game just to get the students at each other's throats. She is a sick and twisted individual who wants to bring despair to everyone including those outside the school by attacking their symbol of hope, and the students are just chess pieces.

I didn't think Danganronpa could get more messed up than the student murders and subsequent executions, but the truth behind the school and their imprisonment, and that they were trying to escape a place they had voluntarily sequestered themselves inside, exceeded my wildest expectations.

When I finished the game, I wasn't sure how Danganronpa 2 could play out, given that the killing game feels like a unique situation and by then the sequel was already out. While I felt there are more stories to tell with these characters, it didn't seem like it could possibly follow the same format. Next week I'll cover Danganronpa 2!

Writing "Hunters of the Dead"

"Hunters of the Dead" took a long road getting to where it is now, and to be honest it didn't have a glamorous beginning. A year or two out of college I was going to play a homebrew RPG with some friends; an RPG of the tabletop variety. I needed a character.

Jan was created out of leftover gameplay ideas for a different character who was originally created for a piece of fiction. But where that other character was a wizard, Jan was less into the magic and more into the gritty aspect of fighting undead with sword and shuriken. What passed between the other character to Jan was the use of shuriken as a weapon and a lot of necromancy spells (because this was a game and I needed something to do with my turns).

In the week or two downtime between character creation and the game getting started, I wrote a short story called "Hunter of Dead." It wasn't very good, but it my first outing with Jan, so I could get a feel for his personality.

I ended up doing four revisions to that story before leaving it to rest, and it was rejected many, many times.

I think a part of me knew that it wasn't very good, but true to Heinlein's rules, I intended to keep it out on the market until it sold.

Then I won Writers of the Future. It was my first pro sale, and suddenly I had friends and mentors in the writing community that I hadn't before. I couldn't put out crap. What would people think of me?

So I let all my submissions lapse and used a spreadsheet to tag which stories I wanted to take another look at, in case they were worthy of going out again, and which I would in all likelihood trunk for eternity.

While I'd tagged "Hunter of Dead" for a second look, I looked at it again sooner than expected since I was tipped off about a horror anthology and "Hunter of Dead" was the only thing I had that was remotely suitable. I printed out a copy to revise, thinking it would be quick work.

It wasn't.

As I revised I realized how much was wrong with the story, and it wasn't that the character or the concept of his world was bad. It was that there wasn't any plot. It was just a day in his life, and I realized I needed to show the reader why this day was important.

Out went the extended flashback. Out went the original ending. I threw out about half the story, and wrote in its place at least another 75%, which meant that less than 25% of "Hunters of the Dead" came from the original story.

This version benefited from not having been touched in years. I had written other stories set in the world, so there was more backstory to the history of the borderlands, and I knew more about Jan himself since I'd been planning a prequel story at one point.

I thought the story wasn't perfect, but still the best I could do, so I sent it off to a few more places that opened in the interim between when I retired it and when I did the revision. It still got kicked back, but tended to make second rounds. At the time though, it was the best I could do, so I wasn't expecting to go back and do yet another round revisions.

Time passed, and finally I got a rewrite request from Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores to improve the pacing. By this time I had several professional sales under my belt, and Jan has been with me for fifteen years (no one ever said that it was fast becoming a professional writer). He's been my player character in two different pen and paper RPGs, my ranger in Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, my Hawke in Dragon Age II, and more recently my avatar in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright.

I know Jan, and I still believed in his story. I took a hard look at my last revision and cut it down from 9000 to 7000 words, making it tighter, stronger. I was a better writer now. I knew I could do this.

Now Jan's story is finally out there, and it can be viewed by CR&ES subscribers here as a September 22, 2016 release.

Music listened to while editing: It's been so long I don't remember what I originally wrote it to, though I'll admit there was a period in my life where every other song I heard of the radio could make me think of Jan. LeAnn Rimes's "Life Goes On" was my go to song while RPing (I'm not sure why since I can't listen to it and see Jan anymore), but while doing the latest editing I was stuck on the English cover of "Renegade" performed by Aruvn with lyrics by Jefferz.

Revision and Outline Week Check-In

Part of the reason I made last week's post was for accountability. There was no way I could not work on the revisions and outline that I said I would, if I said I'd do it.

And so I did.

I completed revisions of two novelettes and one short story. I also did some brainstorming for a short story that really ought to be a novelette or novella due to the sheer amount of world building info that I want to use in it. The expansion was not something I expected to start work on this week, but if the stars align it's a potential December project after NaNoWriMo is over.

My main outlining project of the week was in preparation for NaNoWriMo, and that I definitely started. I didn't finish, nor did I expect to, but I have all the major characters and their motivations laid out as well as the opening segment of the novel. Now that I know what everyone's doing and what the tentpole events are going to be I can connect how the plot's going to get from point A to point B and so on.

It really helps me to have a quick outline I can check during the throes of NaNoWriMo, because I'm generally writing too fast to spend brain power on figuring out plot. I usually write somewhere between 2000-3000 words each day, which is a fair bit above the NaNoWriMo daily minimum to hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.

The reason for that is 2000-3000 matches my natural chapter length, and I've found my work comes out more coherent if I think of a day's work in terms of chapters. I have a beginning, middle, and end, and then I'm done for the day. I start fresh with each sunrise.

There's still a week left until November begins, but I should finish the outline by then!

It's Revision (and Outline) Week

I'm fortunate enough to have a job with paid vacation time, and a boss that doesn't mind me taking off to write. My novel work (drafting and editing) tends to get planned out in advance, and because NaNoWriMo is coming up next month with Loscon taking up the majority of the Thanksgiving weekend, I know that my writing time (and writerly activity time) is going to be jammed.

I plan on drafting a new novel during NaNoWriMo, which I've done for the past three years. I find I work well with that kind of schedule, because it lets me keep the whole story relatively fresh in my head, resulting in less continuity errors. There's nothing like realizing you've lost a character for a whole afternoon in a story with a compressed timeline to make you wonder if there might be a better work process to avoid to that. (Better note-taking probably would have helped too.)

Anyway, my November is going to be packed and I have a number of shorter works that I've been meaning to revise. They're stories that were drafted without a specific market in mind so I never finished the revision process, or stories that may have not have turned out as well as I wanted.

Most of them are complicated multi-scene novelettes that require a deeper assessment on whether not all those scenes are necessary. Whatever the reason, I've been hesitant to send them out, but they're doing me zero good sitting on my hard drive.

So I'm taking this week off and devoting at least three days to improve three stories.

Any time remaining will go into working on my outline for my upcoming NaNoWriMo novel, which is still in the throwing things at the wall to see what subplots I'm going to have phase. Thankfully the main plot is pretty set.

VN Talk: Code: Realize: Guardian of Rebirth - Part 6: Lupin

After a brief break, we are back for the conclusion of my Code: Realize story breakdown.

Lupin ending up being my final playthrough not because I was saving him for last (if all routes had been open from the start I think Lupin would have been third, pushing Impey to fourth, and Saint-Germain last), but because he's gate-locked, I didn't have much choice in the matter.

While it's not uncommon to have a gate-locked romance, it's often the villain or the anti-hero; a sort of reward allow the player to see the story from a new perspective after having gone the proper way through. However, with Code: Realize it's very clear from the opening video and promo art that Lupin is considered the lead romantic option, the closest thing to a canon playthrough, and it's not possible to play his route without having gone through the game four previous times to see Van Helsing, Frankenstein, Saint-Germain, and Impey Barbicane's routes.

While there are players who will do this, not everyone will, particularly if there is a character they just can't stand. To be honest, Impey's route was slow enough that I almost put down the game a couple times and I pushed my way through mostly because I knew Saint-Germain and Lupin's routes would be better. (This is why I put Impey in the middle, because otherwise there was a good chance I wouldn't finish.)

I understand why Lupin's route is locked, after having played it. His story brings everything together for a grand finale that includes elements of everyone else's stories as well as the true reason for Cardia's creation, but it seems needlessly tedious for someone who buys the game because she wants to have a fluffy romance with the gentleman thief on the cover.

I thought Lupin might be a harder love interest to get to know, since he's typically portrayed as the consummate gentleman thief who never loses his cool. But because of that, he's a lot of fun. Sure, he can't fight worth beans and his idea of a dramatic rescue is appearing in a puff of smoke and then running away, but it was hard to play his route without a stupid grin on my face.

Seriously, one of the times he shows up, he says "It was never my intention to fight! This dashing thief's specialty is... dashing!" And then he does, dash that is, while the triumphant romance theme plays. (It helps that he's running away while carrying the woman he loves in his arms, but he's also running away from the "last boss" which is typically a heroic no-no.)

Lupin comes alive in his route in a way he doesn't in most of the others (save Saint-Germain's) and I think that's partially because he's very fond of grand gestures and the writing team might have been afraid he would overshadow the other men if allowed to grandstand. And that's too bad, since the result is that Lupin doesn't really come into his own until the player is almost done with the game.

Because Lupin's route is going to be the player's last, the writers throw in an awful lot of references to the other routes without bothering to explain them. The player will already be familiar with them at this point. Nemo and his Nautilus return from Impey's route, we see the deployment of the Zicterium Twilight had hidden in Victor's route, Idea from Saint-Germain's route shows up to help/hinder the heroes, and Van Helsing learns the true killer of his family and faces off against Aleister.

This the only route that closes off everyone's storyline completely with no further battles to be fought, and everyone has an epilogue that shows them moving on with their lives.

I'm pretty sure that if the announced Code: Realize anime happens, Lupin's route will be used and the final confrontation involving everyone's storyline has the potential to awesome when rendered in animation.

Lupin's route is blast, and everything I could have wanted from a romance with a gentleman thief who is very much both a gentleman and a thief. But there are just two things that nag at me about his storyline.

One is that Cardia is more helpless in his route. It's not because Lupin is a jerk about it like Impey, but she gets discombobulated in ways she doesn't in others. Normally she's good about keeping herself calm under duress. Yet for some reason, Cardia can't keep her head on straight when faced with the various dangers on Lupin's route.

Yes, they are unnervingly more personal in many ways, but she ends up being a helpless damsel a lot. This does come with the side benefit of giving Lupin frequent opportunities for a daring rescue. In fact Lupin has a boatload of scenes depicting him being dashing towards Cardia compared to any other love interest, but I can't help wanting more considering how awesome she is elsewhere.

My other complaint is that Lupin's motivation, once it comes out, is pretty weak. We know Impey is in London to steal back his anti-gravity device, Victor is there to destroy the remaining Zicterium stockpiles, Saint-Germain is there to stop Isaac's plan and destroy his creations, and Van Helsing wants to kill Finis (and later Aleister once he knows the truth).

Lupin's story should be the linchpin, since he's the only one at the start of the game who is specifically there to stop Isaac's plan, but his reason for doing so is because his mentor was a former Twilight operative who didn't like what Isaac was doing and ran away. While this allows Lupin to be aware of what Code: Realize (Isaac's secret plan) is ahead of everyone else, it feels very odd he would feel driven to thwart it.

It might have been different if his mentor had been an honestly good person, but he had betrayed Lupin's trust and fled from Twilight, making no attempt to stop Isaac himself because he was too scared to stay. Though Lupin still has fond memories of the man he thought his mentor had been, he doesn't delude himself about his betrayal, so it seems odd that Lupin considers it an obligation to destroy Code: Realize in honor of his mentor's memory.

I can understand wanting to stop an attack of mass terrorism for its own sake after learning about it, but Lupin's frames his involvement as specifically because of his mentor, and that's enough to make him pack up and move from France to Britain. It's really hard to buy into.

Lupin's story and involvement with Cardia is fun, but doesn't come out as intrinsically tied to her story as with Victor, which is really what stops Lupin's from being my favorite. Perhaps it's his nature as an interloper to not be tied with or to anything (save in marriage to Cardia in the ending), but I thought the romance wasn't as strong because of that. Dashing, yes, but not as deep.