#oneaday Day 839: Swooning Maiden

I started an otome game last night. After not being sure which one to go for, I put it to the vote on Twitter, and Code:Realize won out, so Code:Realize is what I've started. (The other options were Collar x Malice and Piofiore: Fated Memories).

I don't really know much about any of these games because I've kept myself deliberately in the dark in terms of plot — I knew I wanted to play them someday, just had never gotten around to it. Now I've started… well, I think I might be about to develop a real otome game problem if this is the sort of delightfully ridiculous nonsense I can expect from other games.

In Code:Realize you play Cardia, a beautiful young woman who may or may not be dead, and who has a precious stone called a Horologium embedded in her chest. For some reason, Cardia's skin and blood are severely toxic, meaning that any time anything vaguely biological touches her bare skin, it burns and eventually melts; she demonstrates this rather memorably in the game's opening scene, where Queen Victoria's Royal Guards are attempting to capture her, and a dog gets its face melted right off when it attempts to bite her.

Not to worry, though, because before long Cardia is rescued by the one and only Arsène Lupin, legendary gentleman thief, and his friend Impey Barbicane (star of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon). Upon escaping to London, Cardia comes into contact with Victor Frankenstein, who has been falsely accused of an act of terrorism, and I believe at various other points in the story you meet up with Herlock Sholmes (not a typo, he's from Maurice Leblanc's stories about Lupin), the count of St. Germain and Abraham Van Helsing.

Effectively what we're looking at here is a frigging literature fanservice visual novel, and I am 100% all about this. I know this is a not at all uncommon approach in other otome titles, either; I'm aware of several that unfold in a similar quasi-Victorian steampunk setting with characters drawn from both literature and history, and I applaud that. Absolutely wonderful.

Anyway, I haven't played that far as yet so there's not much else I can speak about for now. It's definitely going to make for some interesting bedtime reading, though!