Rewrite [Lucia Route]

“Don’t wake me. Or else you’ll…”

Title: Rewrite (Lucia)
Developer: Key, Visual Arts, Amaterasu Translations
Release Date: June 24, 2011
Genres: Action, Fantasy, Romance, Tragedy
Rating: All Ages
*WARNING: SPOILERS*

Lucia Route

If Kotori’s route was a feels truck, then Lucia’s route was a feels nuke.

…Too soon? Sorry. I initially started this route because I thought it would be fun to mess around with Lucia a bit more, but by the end it was a really heartfelt, emotional route – I realized along the way that I’d come to care more for Lucia than I had for Kotori. Maybe that’s partly because there was a lot more character development and bonding between Lucia and Kotarou – during the common route, they were nothing more to each other than a class rep and pervert, while on the other hand Kotori had already been friends with Kotarou for a long, long time. Even with that aside, I felt that Lucia’s route was a very personal one – it dealt with personal issues in the style of Little Busters! with the conflict over Kagari taking up a position in the background. In fact, Kagari didn’t even appear (I suppose she stayed with Kotori this entire time) while the last boss was Lucia herself. While there was fighting between Gaia and Guardian, Lucia and Kotarou weren’t really involved to a significant extent. Actually, Lucia did kind of single-handedly wipe out the entire population of Kazamatsuri just by taking a walk, but yeah.

You can split Lucia’s route into two distinct halves, with the first of them being the investigation surrounding the “cursed girl”, Asahi Haruka – surprisingly, the Occult Club was used as a meaningful transition mechanism for once! I admit, at some point I did actually think it was a curse – it was pretty scary whenever glass randomly broke, and it didn’t help that Yoshino of all people seriously pleaded Kotarou to forget about it. The clincher was that they showed us scenes with Lucia herself being freaked out by the mysterious message or arguing with a spectral “Asahi Haruka” in her house, which made it seem like Lucia was a victim as well instead of the instigator. I did enjoy all the heavy romance scenes that came after the revelation – one of the joys of tsunderes is that underneath all the tsun, they can be very, very cute. And I’m not talking about the Doki Doki Maid Party cosplay either, though that was nice too. It was very romantic of Kotarou to rewrite himself into a being that was immune to Lucia’s poison multiple times – that sort of irreversible change isn’t something he’d do if he had no feelings for her, I would think. One solution I envisaged was for Kotarou to change to become the suppressant to Lucia’s poison himself, but alas it was not to be. The scene with a sea of wilted sunflowers was horrifying to say the least.

The second half of the route had a clearer focus on Guardian and their attempts to thwart Gaia and find the Key, all while dealing with a number of third parties including Brenda’s team of mad scientists and the USA and their desire to nuke Kazamatsuri with submarine-launched ballistic missiles to kill Kagari. Heh, ‘Murrica. Sometimes it felt like Nishikujou was the main character, but I don’t think I’d mind too much if she were 😀 Answers as to Kagari’s existence and meaning were much clearer here, although I’m sure Gaia have their own side of the story to tell… Guardian made her sound like some sort of walking nuke. Despite all its internal corruption, Guardian don’t seem like an “evil” group – Nishikujou made it evident that Kagari’s “salvation” involves actively destroying the world to create a new one, remaking everything from the ground up like in the biblical Noah’s Ark story. So from my current understanding, Kotarou is screwed either way. If Kagari survives with either Gaia or Kotori and sings her song of destruction, it’s over, while if Kagari is killed by Guardian, Kotarou also dies. I wonder what happens if the Rewrite dial completely goes full circle? If he fully harnesses the power given to him by Kagari, might he become an existence that can survive somehow? Also, it was interesting that Lucia called herself the new Key. She can certainly easily instigate mass destruction and all that, but someone (or thing) like Kagari is a completely different sort of existence. The Key should not be termed as a being which just has those capabilities, but instead an existence borne from the Earth itself like we learned in Kotori’s route – if Lucia is a Key at all, she’d be the Key of the poisoned Earth a thousand years in the future instead of assuming the role Kagari has now. Which begs the question – what exactly is the Key?

Although the route ended with Kotarou and Lucia living relatively happily, again like with Kotori’s route I don’t know whether I’d term it a “good” end. All these endings are so bittersweet somehow… a good end for me would have Lucia’s poison fully suppressed while Brenda and her team are caught and killed violently by Shizuru. Having completed two routes, it’s become very clear that it would be practically impossible to turn Rewrite into an anime series, purely because of how divergent the paths Kotarou takes are. The only way would be if it was in an omnibus format, and even then it’d have to comprise of multiple seasons. This is very much a visual novel that’s been designed only as a game, and only for a game.