The Horror Of Code Vein Is You - With A Terrible Fate

Aaron Suduiko · November 24, 2020 at 5:58 pm

Hi, Tisha! Thank you so much for taking the time to read my work and share your own feedback with me. First, I should say, I hope it came through in the piece that I’m a huge fan of Code Vein: I think that its storytelling and cast of characters are wonderful, and I agree with you that the backstories of the characters can be very moving (especially Nicola and Mia’s, as you mention); I only intended this article to show how I believe the game also goes “above and beyond” by putting the character in a unique position of alienation and vampirism relative to those characters and their world.

You are absolutely right that my concept of metaphysical vampirism could be applied to the players of many different games: in fact, whenever a player plays a game and uses its characters as means for merely beating the game rather than intrinsically valuing them, you could rightly apply this concept to her—whether she’s playing Code Vein or Dark Souls or Mario Kart. (I actually discuss this more directly in a presentation I gave on the same topic; I omitted it from the article simply because the article was already rather long and I didn’t want it to become too unfocused.)

I am not trying to say that the concept itself is uniquely applicable to Code Vein; rather, what I’m saying is that Code Vein is unique by virtue of using a blend of JRPG-inspired storytelling and Dark-Souls-inspired mechanics (in the ways I specify in the article) to make its player disposed to taking on the role of a metaphysical vampire only to have her subsequently realize the horror of their vampirism, in a world where she should be caring about the characters that constitute the story. In other words, it is precisely because of the way the game articulates all the characters’ backstories that it is jarring and haunting to the player when she feels herself estranged from those characters; the storytelling simply wouldn’t work if the characters weren’t as thoroughly fleshed out because, in that case, the player would not feel unsettled or horrified by her estrangement from the characters.

One of the consequences of Code Vein’s mode of storytelling that amazes me, Tisha, is exactly how players who are made to recognize themselves as metaphysical vampires are then able to apply that concept to their engagement with other games. In a similar way to what you spelled out in your comment, playing Code Vein actually caused me to reflect back on other games I’d played and wonder how much I’d really cared about the characters in those games. That’s a scary thing to think about, but it’s also a line of thinking that’s encouraged me to get further invested in characters in subsequent games—so I think it’s equal parts a scary and uplifting realization to go through.

In that same spirit, it might be helpful for me to point out that, while you paraphrase me as saying these dynamics make the player the “true villain” of Code Vein, the word I chose—which is related but has a slightly different force to it—was ‘antagonist’. I mean ‘antagonist’ in the sense of ‘a character or entity that obstructs the progress of a story’s protagonists’. I think that’s structurally true of the player whether or not she appreciates the backstories of the characters by virtue of the way in which the game is structured to get her to focus on merely completing it and playing it, making it cyclical and estranging both the player and the characters from characters’ history in a way that obstructs real and final narrative progress.

I think it’s also helpful to consider that a single entity can function as both an antagonist and a protagonist (something I also didn’t mention in the article for the sake of focus). This is another way in which Cruz can be seen as a mirror to the player: she is certainly an antagonist in the sense that the reconstitution of her frenzied state spells doom for the world and is what the party is trying to prevent, but Cruz as a person was also well-intentioned, creating the Attendants and sending the avatar on its quest to try to improve the world and ease suffering. Similarly, the player is an agent who, in my view, advances the game’s plot in a protagonistic way (by making the avatar complete events and progress) yet also is ultimately parasitic on the game’s world, trapping it in endless cycles and distancing the characters from their very compelling backstories for the sake of the game.

I hope that’s helpful, Tisha; as I said, I love the game and am glad to meet someone else who does as well—and, even if you don’t ultimately agree with every point of my analysis, I hope it offers you a new lens through which to contemplate how this game tells such a rich and, I think, masterfully unsettling story. Cheers!

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