After sitting down on the sofa with my cat and my Vita for many hours, I have finally completed Sholmes' route, and it was a very dramatic roller-coaster ride that I enjoyed quite a bit! I suppose this post is going to be almost like a proper review of it.
So, this route starts immediately after the common route present in the first game, at the bit where it cuts off and goes onto whatever route the player has earned. You could actually get the first game out, play the common route, then once it ends you could immediately take the cartridge out, switch over to the second game and start this route.
The beginning of every Code: Realize route starts off with Cardia running away because she's scared that Lupin and the others will think that she's a monster, even though they're such good friends of hers and they would never think of her that way. Sholmes' route starts out in this way too, so I think that Finis' will also be like this as well.
Cardia runs away and mooches around London until it starts raining. So she does what everybody would do and takes shelter in a sewer. Yes, you read that right, a sewer. She's in London, there's like a billion other public indoor places she could've went into instead. What about a pub, or a tube station, or a hotel? How the hell did she find her way into a sewer??
So she goes into the sewer and just sits down there even though it's probably really stinky and gross. And just like in Van Helsing's route, she runs into Jack the Ripper. I found that this route shares so many similarities to his route. And Jack the Ripper tries to kill Cardia, but luckily she gets saved by a very handsome version of John Watson. Unfortunately you find out very early that he's already taken, so there's a little chance of him eventually becoming a love interest in a future fan-disc.
Watson lets Cardia stay at his house overnight, which was nice of him. On his mantelpiece is a picture of him, his (dead) wife and Sherlock Holmes, which Cardia points out to him. She notices that Sherlock looks suspiciously like Herlock Sholmes... She tells Watson and then he gets really confused, because his friend's supposed to be dead. This was when I found my knowledge of the BBC's Sherlock series to be really useful. In the Code: Realize world, Sherlock does almost exactly what he did at the end of the second series of the TV show, he fakes his death after battling Moriarty and doesn't tell Watson about it at all.
I think Cardia then ends up telling Watson where Herlock Sholmes lives, and the two travel together to his house on Baker Street. Watson reunites with his friend and gets quite angry, but not as infuriated as he gets in the BBC series, where from what I remember, he ends up throttling Sherlock multiple times.
After a bit of discussion about the problems going on with Jack the Ripper (which is going on in the exact same way as it does in Van Helsing's route), Sherlock asks Cardia why she's run away. She explains that she doesn't want to hurt Lupin and the others, and how that she has nowhere else to go. Then Sherlock offers to let her live in his house, which she immediately accepts. I don't really understand this bit. She's scared of living with Lupin's gang because she doesn't wanna hurt them, but she'll just gladly accept Holmes' offer, when you'd expect her to also be concerned with hurting him too. If she's alright with living with Sherlock, some bloke she hardly knows, she should be alright living with Lupin and co. I know they need a reason for her to get close to him, but Cardia's accepting of Sherlock's offer was just so strange for me. Maybe a smarter person would be able to understand it, but I just don't. Sorry.
So Cardia decides to live with Sherlock, leaving Lupin and the others without their princess. They just order Saint-Germain over and tell him the news like it's no big deal. Lupin's supposed to not like Sholmes that much, so wouldn't he be super annoyed if Cardia just goes and lives with him suddenly? I know she's her own person and she can do whatever the hell she wants, but still, she's gotta be a bit careful.
There's this scene in Sherlock's home where Cardia and Watson make him some onion soup, with a plate of scones on the side. I know Americans have those savoury scones that they eat with meals and stuff, but in England we usually have scones with jam and clotted cream and a cup of tea. Nobody (well, at least nobody I know) has it with soup. Cardia won't let Sherlock try the batch she made with her poison hands, but he just eats them anyway saying something along the lines of "These would be great with clotted cream!". There was a in-game definition for "clotted cream", so I decided to open it up to be curious. And what I was greeted with was very odd.
There aren't really many cute romancey scenes with Sherlock and our heroine near the start of the story, but they put a lot more in near the end. This scone eating scene was one of them, and you can tell that because Cardia mentions it almost every time she ponders her relationship with the detective.
Anyway, Cardia gets quite used to living with Sherlock and helping him out with cleaning and stuff, not even bothering to visit Lupin and the others. But then Leonhardt comes in and discusses the Jack the Ripper case with Holmes and Watson. Cardia listens in and decides to become bait to lure the killer in so that they can capture him.
The bait works, because they manage to lure Jack in fine. I turned the voice acting on at this point because Jack likes to scream a lot and it's interesting hearing the actors have to do that. Imagine seeing one in a studio just screeching into a microphone like that, it would be quite funny to watch. Holmes gets really annoyed with Jack and it feels like he could kill him, but Watson and Leonhardt come to lock him up before he can do anything.
Later on, Watson and Cardia are hanging out around London when they find Finis, dying in an alleyway. I actually kind of like Finis, so it was a bit sad seeing him die, but he's a villain so I suppose he deserved it. He got stabbed by Aleister/Moriarty, but I can't remember if Finis actually tells them that. I thought that they might've been able to save him, but Watson just flat out says that he can't be saved, so he just dies right there. I listened to the voice acting in this bit too, and in Japanese, I'm sure that Finis uses the honourific "sama" when referring to Cardia, the same as what he uses when talking about his father. I just thought that it was an interesting thing to point out, because I thought that honourific was used for someone you respect, when I never thought Finis really cared about Cardia.
Oh yeah, I'm adding this at the last minute, but Finis tells Watson and Cardia to go to Tower Bridge, they do and they find Sherlock there but I forget what happens. I don't take notes whilst playing or anything, and I can't be bothered to go back onto my Vita and find the scene again.
Some more stuff happens that I can't remember, until one day when they read in the papers that Queen Victoria's been murdered along with Leonhardt and a few others, and Holmes, Watson and Cardia have been framed for it. I was a bit shocked that the writers had the guts to kill off the Queen, but as you find out later, she's not actually dead.
The trio decide to run away, and they hide out in this random building somewhere. Watson goes off for a minute and there's this CG with Cardia against a wall and Sholmes almost pushing her into it, a bit like the CG in the rain and the wall in Van Helsing's route. Sholmes says all of the typical otome stuff like "You can't love me" and all that rubbish, trying to push her away. Luckily Watson comes back and they decide to run away somewhere else.
Unfortunately, they get cornered by the public, Moriarty and the army, and it looks like they're doomed until they're saved by Lupin and Impey using the Ornithopter or whatever it's called. Cardia's dangling in the sky, holding onto Sherlock's hand. She gets shot by Moriarty, and her poison blood leaks out and burns Holmes' hand. Here you can either choose to let it go or keep holding on. I chose to let go, but it ended up killing Cardia. So I went back and chose to keep holding onto Sherlock.
This ends up making Sherlock fall to the ground instead. Watson and Cardia get really sad, but Lupin shows no emotion, which makes it obvious that he had planned something with the detective.
Then Watson goes into backstory monologue mode, in typical Code: Realize fashion. We find out that Sherlock killed Watson's wife Mary for some reason, but later on Cardia finds out that it was because she was affected by Hidden Strength.
Everybody, including Cardia and Watson, head back to Saint-Germain's mansion. It's been the first time she's seen them all since she ran away. They're not really annoyed with her for going off to live with a strange, single man or anything. Meanwhile, Sherlock's shirtless and bandaged in prison, and he sees Moriarty and they have a little chat. There's a CG here and you can see his abs and everything. It's probably there for fanservice, this is a "fan-disc" after all.
Lupin and the gang agree to help Cardia rescue Sherlock, who she now is in love with. I don't really feel that they had many romantic moments together before this. There were a couple in the route that I forgot to mention, but other than that you don't really see them do much together. I just didn't feel much of a chemistry. It turns out that Victoria and Leonhardt were hiding in Saint-Germain's mansion for almost the whole time, because Sherlock had warned them that they might die and told Lupin to go and rescue them.
Impey and Lupin plan to transport Victoria and Leonhardt back to Buckingham Palace to show themselves to the world as officially not dead, whilst Watson, Cardia and Van Helsing go to rescue Sherlock and destroy Moriarty. The rest of the gang do some fighting and stuff, I can't really remember, they weren't really needed so I think the writers just kept them away from the important plot stuff.
This ending contains a lot the same stuff that was in Van Helsing's route, with a little bit of Lupin's sprinkled here and there. Cardia and the other two manage to find Sherlock and Moriarty. There's a CG of our villain sitting on the Queen's throne, which kind of reminded me of this scene from the BBC adaptation where Moriarty steals the crown jewels and sits on that throne with them.
Van Helsing gets annoyed with Moriarty like he does in his route, because he thought that he was Aleister and because he had no idea that his mentor/friend was actually an evil super villain the whole time. And he finds out that Aleister also killed his family, so he gets really angry about that. And like his route in the first game, Van Helsing's pain triggers the Hidden Strength power inside of him, making him turn on Cardia and the others. Watson tries to fight him off, and Moriarty uses Finis' red necklace to make the Horologium go all funny, turning our heroine into a monster like it did in Lupin's route.
Then it all ends with Sherlock and a very weak Cardia fighting Moriarty on the roof of the palace. They find out that the cure to the Horologium's changing into the Philosopher's Stone is hidden with someone, but only Moriarty knows who it is. Some dramatic confrontationing happens which ends in the death of Moriarty before he can tell them who the keeper of the medicine is.
But it turns out that the medicine was stuck down Cardia's shirt all along! She takes the medicine and Sherlock confesses his love to her and it fades to the credits. There was no kiss CG, only a hugging one, unfortunately.
After the credits, we find Cardia and Sherlock on a train to Wales so that she can apologise to Etty for accidentally causing the death of her mother, even though I thought that she had already replied. There's still no kiss CG, because the medicine Cardia took to stop her from destroying everything didn't actually cure her poison for good, which I had forgotten because I was sure that it did in Lupin's route. Then, after explaining the outcomes of all of the other characters in the story, the route ends.
I cannot believe that I just summarised almost the entire story. Wow, this is almost turning into a proper review! I'm still not going to edit it, because I don't actually edit any of my posts because this isn't a fancy professional money-making blog. I don't like reading back on what I've written, it's just embarrassing.
So, what were my final thoughts on this route? I liked it, but it was so plot heavy. I dunno, I just don't think that the romance really had much build up to it, to be honest. Cardia also slightly annoyed me when she just left Lupin and the others. I know she did it in literally every other route, but in each one she had planned to just live alone back in Wales. If she was really afraid of hurting people and them hating her, she wouldn't have just lived with Sherlock easily like that. The rest of the route was pretty good though, even though quite a few of the elements were borrowed from other routes. I'd probably give it either a seven or an eight out of ten.
Tomorrow I'm going to be starting Finis' route and reading the final two mini episodes featuring Delly. I expect that Cardia's going to just have a really close friendship with her brother, not dating him or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did make an incest route. I also predict that Finis is going to be coaxed away from evil in his route and reformed like a My Little Pony villain. Even though Finis really annoyed me at the end of Lupin's route when he just denied Cardia's help and killed himself, I still love him as a character. Let's just hope that his path doesn't disappoint. An otome game hasn't really disappointed me in anyway yet, so this one shouldn't.
Now that I'm including Read Only buttons in my posts, I'm going to start naming each post properly too. This blog is slowly becoming better and better as time goes on!
I hope all of you enjoyed what might be my longest post yet. I bet that there's a boat load of grammatical errors! I should be leaving to do something else with my life now. See you all later!
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