Soooooooooo remember a year ago when I got that Code Realize bundle of the main game and first fandisc? Yeah, I uh forgot as well which is why it took me so long to play it and review it. But you-know-who got mad that I was spending so much time cheevo hunting in FFXIV and this would simply not do, so yet again I was exiled to the bedroom to grind this out over the course of a few evenings…and also spoiler warning I eventually gave up at one point and started force skipping.

As you probably already know, this fandisc has a new story for each of the original husbandos, plus some routes for Finis and Holmes, plus the extra side story, and some random Delly stuff. I started with the husbando stories, which ended up setting completely the wrong tone for me for how this fandisc would play out. These were fairly short, maybe like an hour or two each. My assumption is that these would be the meat and potatoes of the game, since after all these are the main d00dz. So it was to my great surprise when I then went to play the other routes and they would…go…on…forever.

Before I get going, it was also jarring how bad the quality control was here. I don’t really remember any problems in the main game, but the fandisc had syntax errors and typos. Additionally, there was no style guide or anything, so all the characters sounded really different in terms of how they spoke versus the main game. Lupin was the biggest offender here, where he constantly was HON HON HON-ing in here when didn’t speak like that before.

The husbando stories range from fun to inconsistent to no1curr. I think I just went in order of the stories on the main menu, so no intentional choices regarding how the stories would best flow or anything, which also meant that my response kept going up and down as well. This meant that I started with the Lupin route, which was probably the best one as it was entirely about how Cardia wants to figure out a way to own him (because he keeps owning her by constantly going to town on her 🅱️ussy), then successfully does by making him sit there seething in cuck rage while she NTRs him. Then I had the Van Helsing route, which started out as a normal kyaah deeto route, then for no particular reason both of them get depressed, then for no particular reason both of them get un-depressed. Followed next by the Impey route, which was back to being fun since it was about naked mans and going on a submarine deeto. After that I did the Fran route, which was weird because it was almost like…a miscellaneous route? Like it felt like half the time it was about stuff with the queen and the other half was about Idea, rather than being a Cardia & Fran route. Then finally I did the Saint-Germain route, which was not just another all Idea, all the time route but also decided to throw in even more Idea characters for as a plot device.

After that I moved on to the Lupin’s Gang story, and this is where I had to tap out. Cardia gets involved with some Mafia OCs in this route, and I got maybe like a third of the way in before I facepalmed when the game was like “oh also here’s another group of mafiosos.” When you have layers of OCs within OCs, that’s clearly a sign that you’re out of material. I was mentally estimating that I was able to finish a route or two of the husbando stories in an evening, so once I was getting into my second evening with this story I gave up and went into force skip mode. And it took forever even to force skip! Just so weird how this random section ended up being the majority of the game.

Next up was the Holmes route, which I also did some force skipping on. I didn’t simply give up on it like with the previous story, but rather I force skipped a lot in the beginning because it was recycling a lot from Van Helsing’s route from the initial game, and honestly lots of stuff that I doubt people particularly cared about from the first game like that random Jack the Ripper storyline. And as I keep having to repeat over and over again, the route constantly gets mired down in OC land when we get digressions like half a chapter or so here being about Watson’s dead wife.

(Also c’mon, we all know that Holmes and Watson are gay as hell for each other, gtfo Cardia you’re ruining the blatant yaoi subtext that these two have in more or less every version of the story!!!!!!!!)

Finally I got to Finis’ route, which was significantly better than the other two since it at least tried to deepen the underlying story by being about Cardia’s family and give him more to do than simply being a DOUSHITE!!!!!!!!!! yandere otouto-kun. Unfortunately, yet again it suffers from the same problems as everything else here in that it’s way too padded with recycled elements from the original game and gets completely sidetracked with more Idea OCs showing up. I swear, I kept thinking “oh maybe I’m getting close to the end”, and then nope, time for like a hour long flashback for this rando that showed up out of nowhere!

Then I skipped the Delly’s Room because lol no.

Final Verdict: Well, even though probably about 80% of this one sucked, at least it was more or less free with the actually good main game. In a way it felt almost like an anti-fandisc in that it barely ever gave the fans the kind of stuff that they wanted (naked mans taking showers, getting motorboated by a husbando while you’re trying on wedding dresses) rather than parades of endless filler characters or scenes you already saw in the original game.