English Dub Review: Code:Realize “Promise”

I guess I need to add a “messed up family” tag to this show…

Overview (Spoilers)

The Queen’s army makes its assault on St. Paul’s Cathedral, home of Twilight. While a diversionary force draws away most of the plague-doctor-masked figures, a smaller force (alongside our heroes) charge down the throat of the beast. Of course, there are some guards left behind. Drac and the soldiers give the rest of the cast a chance to break ahead. Figuring out the button for a hidden door, the team is ready to move deeper, until they find more guards, as well as Finis’ right-hand man. At first, it’s Helsing that takes him on. From nowhere, St. Germaine jumps in to duel the man. After his sword is broken, Saint switches to a pair of Assassin’s Creed-style blades. The battle continues for a while until Drac and the army show up to assist.

In the lower levels, the team finds a gigantic sphere, filled and surrounded by clockwork gears. Finis reveals himself, fondling a little red bangle. It seems to have some effect on Cardia’s Horologium. Helsing begins pressing the midget for information, but Finis knows his motivations. He taunts the vampire hunter with the death of his family, and the interaction between him and Helsing not only makes the bauble glow, but it hurts Cardia. As she collapses, Lupin reaches out to hold her up. Finis loses his cool at someone touching his “sister” and dashes in to stab Lupin. For his trouble, Saint arrives and puts his assassin blade right through the flaxen-haired horror. At first, Helsing is upset that he didn’t get to torture Finis to death, but it looks as if he’s going to get his chance. The room is now full of Finis clones. I mean, you could have seen this coming, with all the Cardia clones we saw earlier. Finis reveals the truth. These clone bodies are just puppets. his real intelligence is in the giant globe, along with the mind of Beckford himself, slumbering away. Helsing lunges in to destroy the globe, but then, they’d have no way to remove Cardia’s poison. His hesitation is all Finis needs to whip out mechanical tentacles to slap down Helsing and Lupin and abscond with Cardia up to the waiting Nautilus, an unstoppable airship built by Nemo. The airship drops a load of poison onto the surface, wiping out the British army. The gang runs from the cathedral to regroup as Cardia awakens inside the Nautilus.

Our Take

Finally! Up until now, each episode in the series could be reduced down to the content of the stinger at the end of the credits. The actual episodes had little to no plot. Finally, we have it the other way around, where the episode has the plot and the stinger may as well have not even gotten dressed in the morning. I’m not saying that this is the most riveting of a plot. We could all see it coming a mile away, given that there are two episodes left. Not including the stage musical. You heard me right. Code: Realize Fantastic Party. Glad I don’t have to review that… The story is the typical buildup to the final battle. All of the mooks are defeated, along with the villain’s lieutenant, all while whittling away the unnecessary support heroes. We are given a bit more of the truth about Code: Realize, but nothing to sink our teeth into. It’s this family that I find a bit odd, and I guess I’m supposed to. A father who wants to ascend to godhood through mass murder and a machine, an army of clone sons who are obsessed with getting their father’s love and being the only ones to touch their sister, and said sister who is the only force for good in the family. You know, because fiction always likes to paint girls as intrinsically pure and good and not actual people. Finis descended into a series of complexes that would give Freud a solid afternoon of fun and show us that he isn’t the final boss of this game. No final boss is this flavor of crazy.

And that is where I’m at with this show. An entire series where the plot is confined to a few minutes and spends most of its time with fluff that has little to do with anything. When it finally has no choice but to focus on the point of the whole thing, it’s extremely plain and predictable. We see so much of Lupin, Helsing, and Saint, that the rest of the male cast vanishes into the background, completely useless. Not that they served much of a purpose before, outside of the episodes that were about them. This is one of the many things that scream that this was a simple visual novel.

This episode contained a bit more action than we normally, and we get to see Saint’s fighting style. The animation gave us a bit more to look at than we usually get. That doesn’t mean that it’s all that and a bag of chips. It’s just better than usual. The combat gets beaten out pretty easily by other anime, even lower end action titles. The voice acting was another snoozer for me. I got nothing worth paying attention to. Oh, and Drac was given lines in this episode, so we started off on the wrong foot already.