Writing Tips and Reviews

Let's Look At Code Vein

Code Vein is a game made Bandai Namco and was released late September of 2019. It has a souls gameplay formula and characters you can fall in love with. This is one of my favorite games and I hope it has a sequel with plenty of mobile games.

So now that we're here, let's talk about the tropes that Code Vein used that were done well.

Vampires: If you haven't read my writing tips about Vampire Stories you don't need to in order to understand what I'm going to talk about. This is unique to say the least, it does the trope better than anything I've seen in recent years. No war between vampires and humans, no trying to make peace, no love triangle. Instead we get a story about what it means to be a vampire (or revenant) and how the life of humans change when they become one. They're not just looking for blood, they're looking for a purpose in their life and want to stay as human as they can.

Yakumo's line when entering the Howling Pit is a great example of him wanting to stay himself. And the line featured in the trailer is also a good showcase of how revenants deal with their predicament, "we fight, we drink blood, we revive, we fight again. Our lives are one endless loop, but every time you go around, you almost forget, that we were all human once." And the self important revenant's lines after the Butterfly boss in the Old City Ruins are important too.

This is more than any vampire story I've ever seen. It's not one character who feels this way, it's basically all of them. They're all scared of becoming monsters if they don't drink blood and have been portrayed to have that humanity in tact. A revenant like Louis and his friends are just some revenants we get to know well and are shown their struggles, both when they were human and after becoming a revenant. This is what many vampire stories lack, the inclusion of the internal struggles of vampires. And I'm excluding the vampire who wants to be human again or sympathizes with human. None of that. Too overused.

Immortality: In many stories the reason for immortality is explained through a power, a pact, or a species. The reasoning is the BOR Parasites, you can look them up, I don't have any want to get scientific here. BOR parasites make revenants immortal at the cost of their memories, yeah I'm sure you didn't see that coming in a vampire story. This is enough of an explanation so that the player doesn't ask any questions concerning how they work, and most of their details are in the loading screens. Whatever. When I role played with a Mary Sue, I remember her always stating that she was immortal so "no can hurt me," and I looked at her bio in that tab. I found she was immortal because she used a power of destruction on herself...you see a problem? I don't care if the reasoning was "so no one can hurt my precious oc" but really? If you poison yourself, that doesn't make you immune to poison.

What I'm saying is that the reasoning behind being immortal makes sense in this game. Everything needs a reason and if it doesn't, either expect it to be explained later, or it's written by an idiot, don't bother.