"Lupin's Gang" - Initial Opinions

(Spoilers for Code: Realize: Future Blessings down below!!!!)








At this point I am somewhere about halfway through the "Lupin's Gang" short story. It's turning out to be a lot longer than I had expected. The plot is also very different to what I thought it would be, too. I thought that it was gonna be about some other gang that Lupin was part of, I didn't realise that Lupin's Gang actually refers to him and the rest of the main cast of the story.






This side story happens during the common route of the original game, but I don't think they had thought of it until after that game came out, because they never see any of the characters in the original game, even though some of them turn into Cardia's new friends.

In this story, Cardia goes out alone and ends up meeting a young girl who gets our main character captured by the mafia. It turns out that the mafia is actually this girl's family. Luckily Cardia gets saved by Lupin and the gang before they can do anything to harm her.

Then the girl (Who's called Shirley, in case you were wondering) visits Cardia in the mansion with her father, another member of her family, and Sholmes. It turns out that they're actually not criminals or anything. Then Shirley and Cardia become friends. Cardia mentions that it's nice to have a female friend her age, but Shirley's like thirteen whereas I'm 100% sure that Cardia was created to resemble someone much, much older than that. So they're not really the same age.

Meanwhile there's all this talk about this vampire statue thing, and then I just got to the bit where they talk about this drug with the same name as the statue. The drug has effects that sound a lot like what happened to those people in Van Helsing's route who were part of that "Hidden Strength" program.

Cardia and Shirley also go out on this girls' day out, where they find out from Leonhardt (Who I originally thought at the start of the first game that he was gonna be a bad guy) that some druggie has caused a crime somewhere in the poorer area of town. I predict that the drug that criminal was on is the drug that they were talking about in the mansion, the vampire statue one which I can't remember the name of.

I'm enjoying this side story so far. I suppose it's good for Cardia to have another female friend. There were literally no other women in the game before apart from Guinevere, Victoria, and Elaine and Etty from Cardia's past. Also I think in this route the game managed to mention another English place name other than London and Wales (I may be wrong though), so well done to them! There's no romance here but there's not supposed to be. It's set before any of the routes start. I do like the designs of the new characters too, especially Shirley. She's cute and she has a nice name.

I don't know if this story's going to be longer than the other after stories or not. It's definitely not gonna be longer than the two full routes included on this fan-disc. It doesn't really matter though, since it's not a boring slog. I wasn't very excited for this side story originally, but now I'm rather enjoying it.

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I just put this random line here because I have no idea how to conclude this post.