English Dub Review: Code:Realize “London Steam”

See? I knew that Twilight was a terrorist plot!

Overview (Spoilers)

Cardia is a metaphorical princess locked in a tower, slumbering away her days. That all comes crashing to a halt when the British Army comes in to arrest her… respectfully. You see, this princess is also a monster. Her skin contains a poison that eats through almost anything, especially people. As the military caravan tromps down the road, they come under attack by a man in a dashing suit and domino mask: The Gentleman Thief, Lupin! Uh… Lupin the First. Not the third. Wrong anime. Lupin uses a sleeping gas bomb to knock out the army and spirit the girl off. You see, he and his two buddies were friends of Cardia’s father, Isaac Beckford. He was the inventor of many wonderful steampunk technologies that have made London the bustling, incongruously-placed-gear-filled city it is. He also built the Horologium, a machine capable of infinite, clean energy. That device has been placed inside Cardia, somehow, and may be related to her acid skin. An evil terrorist group called Twilight was controlling the Queen’s guard to try and get the Horologium for the purposes of a weapon of mass destruction. For her own protection, Lupin and the boys tell her not to leave the mansion. Unfortunately, drawn out by the resident cyber-corgi, she does just that. She comes under attack by wild dogs, who quickly learn that her skin bites back. At least one of the dogs attack are left as dissolving puddles of goo. She agrees to return to the mansion, for her own protection, but she has one caveat. Lupin and the gang are going to help her find her missing father.

Man, as soon as I saw the main character, I had PTSD flashbacks to Clockwork Planet. These feelings only got worse when we got to see steampunk London. Is there a purpose to these gears being here? No? Then put two there! Also, her father’s story continues this trend, as he’s a genius who revolutionized the country using his gears and stuff that make no sense. And he did it all by himself, nobody understands how this stuff works, and then he made Cardia. Cardia, who looks a whole lot like RyuZU. Of course, all these connections are merely coincidences, as the two were developed completely separate from each other. Code: Realize began as a girl’s romance visual novel for the PS Vita. It focused on the same plot you see above. All of the characters, save Cardia and maybe a couple others, originate from literature. Lupin comes from a series of short stories about a gentleman thief. Impey Barbecane, the mechanic, comes from Jules Verne’s From the Earth To The Moon. Their friend “Fran” is actually Victor Frankenstein.

Our Take

At first, this seems to be an interesting take on these literary characters. It’s a small conceit to have these characters all meet in London. However, taking a closer look at them, and the tropes the series relies on and shares with Clockwork Planet, I’m inclined to believe that this reversion is less inspired than it appears. The characters are two-dimensional and primarily eye candy. They seem to merely ape at being these literary characters. This isn’t so much League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as it is Mr. Peabody and Sherman. It feels like this series may be entirely derivative.

Maybe I’m being too harsh out the gate. Maybe I’m seeing the show through tainted eyes from that other terrible anime. Totally possible. Well, overlooking all of that, the characters feel flat because the episode ended up being over half exposition, as the boys explained all this junk to Cardia. And explained. And explained. So, really, if this wasn’t so much of a diatribe, we may have had more time with the characters being characters and see what makes them worth watching. As it is, you’ve lost my attention of the second exposition. Come now, the show doesn’t tell! Basic writing, people! If you have to have it spewed out a monologue, at least have interesting stuff happen in the meantime.

The voice acting reinforced this two-dimensional quality of the characters. Lupin, who engaged in stealth, combat, exposition, and then romancing, really only showed two emotional states in the entire episode: baseline and flustered. Why the flustered? Cardia was unbuttoning her top. His voice, J. Michael Tatum, sounds exactly as he did playing Katsumi Kanzaki on 18if. Everything. I half expected him to jump into the song about curry rice! Jill Harris, who plays as Cardia, also maintains a singular baseline tone. We should hear excitement or sorrow or confusion at various times throughout. All we get is a monotone mutter.

The animation caught my eye. There is a softness to the linework of the main animation that truly compliments the romance nature of the story. Characters are detailed enough to be visually interesting, as a steampunk romance should always have all participants eternally dapper. Despite those details, the animators didn’t mess up all that often at their work. I didn’t notice it anyway if they did. At certain points, as a shoujo anime is apt to do, the show does a special “look-at-me-I’m-pretty” closeup, which has ten times more detail and is built using looped animations of intense quality. These shots really were nice to look at, but the remainder of the episode was pretty standard quality.