English Dub Season Review: Code: Realize -The Guardian of Rebirth-

Steampunk, literary characters, conspiracy! In the middle of it all, the worst case of “look, but don’t touch” a woman has ever given a man.

Overview

In an alternate history, London under Queen Victoria is steampunk and perforated with gears that serve no logical purpose but to look cool. Out in the country, a girl sits alone in a house. Her name is Cardia, and she is a monster. Or, at least, that’s what she and everyone she’s ever known thinks. You see, she has implanted in her chest a crystalline device called the Horologium. Despite the fact that the name regards a clock, it’s actually a power core that runs on and generates poison. It also functions as her heart, which means that she has caustic skin. Anything she touches that isn’t specially treated will dissolve to nothing in moments. The Royal Army is sent to her house to retrieve her and immediately regrets it. One of the soldiers loses an arm to her touch. Just then, a dashing young man in a tuxedo arrives and steals her away to his hideout, where his merry band of rebels makes war with a secret organization: Twilight. They were the ones behind the army coming after Cardia.

Courtesy: Funimation

These fine young rebels are actually characters from novels in our world: Arsin Lupin, Victor Frankenstein, Impey Barbicane, and Saint Germaine. They are later joined by Van Helsing and a child Dracula. Together, they attempt to defeat the warmongering Twilight while uncovering the secrets in Cardia’s past. Hopefully, they will discover something that will allow her to get rid of her poison, and live a normal life again. No, they really hope for that, since they all have varying levels of the hots for her. Along the way to her salvation, they find out just how connected her missing past is with the origins of Twilight, and how it weaves together with the genocide of the vampire race.

Our Take

Basing your anime on a visual novel has some upsides and some downsides. For one, all of the development of the story and characters is made for you. All you have to do is chop up the information into half-hour sized bits and animate it. On the downside, if that visual novel is a harem story that doesn’t work hard to conceal its nature, you end up with a show that is so bland and obvious, there’s almost no point in watching. You inherit, and in some cases end up amplifying the story’s problems. Here, the problem is that the characters are little more than dating simulator archetypes given the names of literary characters. Lupin (the “Prince” character) is a gentleman thief. Didn’t know that? Well, keep watching, since he’ll remind you every few minutes. Any trace of personality or depth is lost amidst the show’s focus on inconsequential side plots, and the characters end up getting flattened into an assemblage of tropes. He’s a thief, right? So everything he says is turned into a sterling reference. Impey, who is the main character of From the Earth to the Moon, is reduced to being an occasional mechanic and the guy who can’t help but over-dramatically declare his love for Cardia in every scene. This starts to get even more ridiculous when you get to Dracula. It hurts to even call the character by that name. He’s a petulant, screaming child throwing a tantrum over the death of his parents. He’s nothing more than the Naughty Shota archetype. I weep for the literary Dracula. He doesn’t deserve this.

Courtesy: Funimation

Which brings up my question to the creators of the original novels: if you were just going to destroy these literary characters, and have them completely unrelated to their original stories, why didn’t you just make original characters? These entities don’t even resemble the ones from their respective books, and it doesn’t even look like you tried. That is Frankenstein in name only and has no personality traits of the original. You made Helsing older than Dracula when the novel had the vampire already alive for centuries before Helsing was ever born. What was the point?

I’ve mentioned the inconsequential side plots. The main mass of seven episodes is completely meaningless. Characters attempt some method of getting more information, or an upper hand on Twilight, fail, but happen on some clue in the after-credits stinger. So many times, I would watch the episode, and find that the only thing of any meaning would happen in the few minutes of the stinger. This renders the vast majority of the show worse than useless. There are attempts to use this space to develop the characters, but none of them have enough personality to start with, and cannot have that personality grow. Instead, it’s just more time with flat, bland characters as they play out their archetypes and tropes in an attempt to convince you they’re worth watching.

Oh, and then there’s the watching. The animation in this show is boring as all get out. The cinematography is designed around keeping this show low on cost, which means that the camera angles are less than inspiring, and there’s almost no action that is shown. CG is used occasionally, but the objects move so slowly that they might as well stand still. Similarly, the voice acting is uninspiring. When you deal with these trope-ish characters with little personality, there’s only so much you can emote before you break character. With no personality, they have a grand total of three different emotional modes. Even Cardia is a character who is stated to have almost no expression when she talks.

How To Watch

Watch the entirety of the first two and last three episodes, and the hooks and stingers of the rest. That’s all you need to get the plot, and you skip out on all the blase attempts at character development. Since this really isn’t all that much, you can probably down it all in one sitting. Pair it with a hard lemonade or similar drink for some flavor.

Score

Summary

In the end, we are left with a mediocre plot, uninspiring voice acting, cheap animation, and terrible characters. The bits of plot we are given keep you guessing, but once revealed, it's a story you've seen a hundred times.

5/10