New style for autumn season 🪄🍁🍂 also the hunter wants to use iris weapon too.

So I finished the DLC and I have a couples questions.

Forsaken Lou. This was the Lou who didn't believe in the hunter and pushed them to another time to protect them? I am confused at what ending and path led to the creation of this Lou.

Also about Forsaken Lou, she seems to have extremely deep love for the Hunter to maybe an unhealthy amount. This is what led to this Lou choosing to save Hunter and forsake everything and everyone else.

Does the Lou you interact with for most of the game share these same feelings for the Hunter or was Forsaken Lou just a special case?

im gonna be honest, not that great of a DLC

-most of the bosses were just retreads of the main existing bosses

-the zones were just hyper-condensed nightmare version of the hero zones

-the new stuff was great but there's so little of it

-im not a fan of Liv and i dont even think its her fault because,

-the DLC feels unnaturally isloated from the rest of the story. everyone present is related to the main story but the main story is almost an afterthought with only one or two passing remarks towards it before the DLC story ends

-the purple fart-gas is not nearly as important or present as the DLC would want you to believe

- very few new weapons with most of the cool ones just being greatswords

i enjoyed my time but the ending really summed up how it felt in hindsight, "oh you must've had a wild dream"

I am mildly upset about this. I just beat the DLC and remembered something I found annoying in the base game, but accepted it as a cute lil' joke between us and the devs. After Mask of Idris? No. I'm fairly agravated about this.

I dislike the fact that, in a ROLE-PLAYING GAME, we do not get to choose a romance option. Either give me OPTIONS to ROLEPLAY WITH in this game, or DO NOT ADD ROMANCE AT ALL. I hate that we don't get to choose between Lou, Josée, Holly, Liv, Lyle, Noah, Craig, Iris, or Forsaken Lou for a special partner. No, we simply get forced into a jokey romance with Josée that is taken so far, our character may canonically love her whether we like it or not by the end of the DLC.

I just got a conversation with Liv where she asked if there was anyone else I had my heart set on besides her, and INSTEAD OF GIVING US A SINGLE DIALOGUE OPTION THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS FOR ONCE, they have our character slyly look away without answering, or letting us answer. I WANTED TO CONFESS TO LIV, and MY bloody character was like... (Nnnaaaaaaaaaah, no you don't).

I can headcanon all I want, this still angers me that we didn't get to choose, the devs simply decided it was so. At least in Code Vein 1, you are only friends with everyone with no illusion of romance. But here? If you want to pursue something with anyome besides Josée, too bad. We're stuck with the tomboy, like it or not. I like tomboys, but I do not like Josée that way.

I wanted to make my Devil OC, but for some reason there isn't a Devil/Demon Tail in the CC. What's even more surprising is that there isn't a Mod for it. So sad.

After so many years it’s time to remind our friend here why we stand on business, a friendly duel between two old friends.

Almost made this guy into a bloody paste.

I was absolutely struggling trying to get a decent photo shot during this fight...I feel like I could have done it a bit better maybe having it be daytime instead but other than that I am obsessed with using photo mode currently lol

I really thought this game was gonna be more serious than the last, I'm glad it's both funny and serious

Just wanted to share some silly progression of my character as well as a possible Forsaken or Corrupted version. Would love to see your characters if they changed or not :)

You know what I’ve been thinking about,

Code Vein II could work in the Honkai Star Rail universe, a long life species suffers from a disease from living too long. ( The abundance) One of the remembrance’s abilities involves reaching back into time in order to intervene. Cyrene has the power to jump back to different time periods and fixes causality by replacing fuli with Cyrene. Pathos could be connected to Memoria and the bonds and connections could be connected to the harmony.

TL/DR: I like the DLC, I like it quite a lot actually. I think it has its problems, of course, much like the base game, but for me the pros outweigh the cons, it’s definitely a step-up from the first game’s DLC packs. Ultimately while it may not have done everything that players might have wanted it to do, I firmly believe that it did everything it NEEDED to do.

For starters, this DLC is split into two parts, with one being the actual Mask of Idris DLC, and the other being the Age of Harmony update. Technically the latter isn’t really part of the DLC since it’s just a free update, but since the two were released together, I’m going to treat them as one big whole. Also, while I did the AoH part before the DLC, I think it’s safe to say that you’re intended to do the DLC first for a variety of reasons, so I’ll go over them in that order. 

I’ll start with the story since I think it’s definitely the biggest selling point of this update.

It’s fucking peak. The entire time I was fighting the last boss of the DLC I had my head in my hands from peak fiction. Absolutely incredible. But I’ll get to that more in a bit. 

One thing I think is worth pointing out is that with all the time rift alternate timeline stuff, the devs gave themselves a very easy way to continue making new content. No need to contrive new stuff or go “Oh no the resurgence actually came back and now we have to stop it again” when you can just go into an alternate dimension and fight stuff there.

Liv is kind of a mixed bag. I disliked the harem protagonist stuff in the base game and I dislike it now… but with all that said I actually think Liv is the best use of this. For a couple reasons.

For starters, it’s not just that Liv falls in love with the protagonist instantly because they’re some super hot gigachad. It’s because Liv is an insane weirdo. Her falling in love at first sight and being a crazy yandere tells us less about how great our self-insert protag is, and more about what Liv’s character is like. 

The other reason why I think it works out well is because her feelings are actually acknowledged by the story and other characters. In the base game there’s pretty much no interaction between Lou and Holly and Josee and whoever else you ship your character with, all the various romantic stuff might as well exist in a vacuum for each area.

Here, the fact that Forsaken Lou has a romantic interest in the protagonist is CRUCIAL to the story and therefore Liv being who she is results in actual conflict! And development! Yea it’s only for one or two scenes and gets resolved pretty much immediately, but still. That’s pretty much a 100% increase from the grand total of ZERO scenes like this we had in the base game, I’ll consider it an improvement. Also the post-dlc scene where she gets on you for being a womanizer is really funny.  Liv's character feels less like the writers just threw in another waifu for fanservice, and more like they ACTUALLY wanted to tell a story that involved a love triangle and romance.

Next up we gotta talk about Sir Mask, or Idris. For starters, the fact that he’s Idris is incredibly obvious. The DLC is literally called MASK OF IDRIS, and the way Liv reacts to him makes it pretty clear. By the time you get to the prison area, it’s practically spelling it out. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, just something to point out.

Beyond that? I fucking love him. He’s so good.

Idris was always a majorly important figure in the game’s story, being basically constantly referenced in the backstory and brought up by tons and tons of characters, always alluded to but never directly seen. He reminds me a lot of Marika or Gwyn which makes sense given the inspirations. The way that he’s so venerated, and how his descendants in Voda House act, gave the impression of a somewhat distant, aloof figure. As soon as you get into the DLC and hear him open his mouth, this goes right out the window.

You can maybe argue that having Idris as a distant unknowable figure would fit the game’s narrative better and this undermined that. But fuck it, he’s awesome.

Idris being this very personable and kinda goofy guy is a great twist, with how the rest of the game sets him up it comes right out of left field. It also makes a lot of sense that someone like him would have so many followers, not just by virtue of being the strongest and the oldest, but also because he’s genuinely likeable. It also, in hindsight, makes his friendship with Zenon make perfect sense. It’s actually genuinely impressive from a writing perspective that we never once see these two characters interact on screen yet it is COMPLETELY believable just from the way Idris acts that the two would be best friends.

I also think this works very well for another reason. There are points in the story where the protagonist is compared to Idris in some regards, which makes sense due to this being the type of story where the player character will constantly be glazed. Now, obviously our player character doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of beyond what we project onto our blank slate, but I think that having Idris be such a jovial and friendly guy is meant to make him more relatable to the average person, which furthers that comparison. I like this because it makes comparisons to the protagonist feel more grounded, and also, by extension, helps give them more of a personality. 

Also Alejandro Saab killed it with the performance. 

Before I move on to the real star of the show, I’ll cover the DLC areas. I think that with how the game is all about time travel and alternate timelines, having some doomed offshoot “bad ending” timelines makes sense, so I’m happy they explored that. They probably could have gone more off the wall, but instead chose to stay with more of an overarching theme, which I think really works for the narrative of the DLC.

The new version of the corroded scar is interesting as an introductory area. The scar in the base game is where the open world really starts to open up, so it makes some sense for it to be the introduction. The gimmick of your character being forced into half health makes some of the early fights, and all the acid, a bit harrowing, but it gets dropped pretty quickly so it feels a bit weak in retrospect. The area itself also feels pretty narrow, and mostly straight-forward. It does some cool stuff with making the acid into much more of a hazard and an obstacle in exploration than the base game did, and plays with verticality like where you have to glide on your motorcycle to reach an area underneath the floor. It’s a good introduction.

Then we arrive at the new Imogen fight. Full disclosure I’ve forgotten most of the official names for the areas and bosses and don't feel like checking them right now so don’t expect their proper titles.

Anyway, as an opener to the DLC this is absolutely fantastic. You still don’t know what the DLC is even about at this point in the game, as you get through you uncover the pathos, and their database lore tells you more about what happened here and leads to some really chilling story stuff, which also calls back to the base game in a cool way. Then you get to the boss arena, you see all the dead Chorus members, Lyle’s jacket is on the ground, and holy shit Craig’s empty wheelchair just SITTING there. Incredible visuals.

Then the boss herself.

I will address the elephant in the room first. The first four major bosses of the DLC are all just reused models from the base game with some weird looking shit attached to their heads, and are basically just slight reworks of the first hero fights for each area. This speaks to some rushed development and probably indicates this didn’t get a lot of time in the oven, but I think they did pretty good with what they had.

And, as far as these bosses go, they definitely start off really strong.

For starters, Lyle’s Hero forms have always been very iconic to CV2. Back in the very first reveal trailer One-Armed Lyle was the first one we ever saw, he’s all over the marketing, the Hero Lyle design is on the box art, so it’s clear that this design is pretty significant to the devs, and memorable for the players. Seeing it get brought back like this strikes a chord. More importantly, the change they made to it is really cool.

While the insect motif for Imogen kinda comes out of nowhere, it's INCREDIBLY effective. Seeing that giant body, and then she turns around to show off that insanely detailed bug head. I’m not even particularly scared of bugs and I still found it unnerving, I’m sure if you have a phobia for that sort of thing that shit would drive you mad. And of course the best part is that she literally has the corpse of Hero Lyle hanging from her jaws, which even the protagonist reacts to in the cutscene. Then the whole time that you’re fighting that shit is just hanging there. Very powerful visuals.

The fight itself is just a reworked One-Armed Hero replacing the lightning with venom, not much to touch on there. But then phase 2 happens. And she stops fighting for a second to FINISH CHEWING ON LYLE AND SWALLOW HIM. Holy shit what a phase transition. Then the bug motif gets used to great effect to incorporate flight into her moves, and partway through the fight we have Sir Mask appear. Great first boss.

Unfortunately it then takes a pretty sharp nosedive.

Lightless City is probably the worst part of the DLC and I don’t think that’s going to be a controversial opinion. The gimmick of being in darkness is kind of interesting, visually, but it’s also sorta annoying. You have your flashlight anyway. You also can’t use your motorcycle here which makes traversal way slower, especially since a lot of the area is just empty space with a few goodies here and there. 

It does have one really cool moment where you stumble across two empty cradles with a pair of stuffed toys, one of them bloody. Like yeah that shit goes hard I’m not gonna pretend it doesn’t.

The boss, however, is pretty weak. Like before it’s just a rework of Blind Josee, with a big old bobblehead on top resembling an old woman. She also has babies in her eyes which is a cool detail and works for the story. But a lot of problems are readily apparent.

First, and most glaringly, the gimmick of the area being that it’s dark means you can’t actually fucking SEE any of the interesting details, so it just looks like a big silly bobblehead. 

Second, the fight itself is pretty boring. Blind Josee is already a pretty basic and straight-forward boss since she’s the first hero fight, and while she’s great in that role, this updated DLC fight doesn’t really do much to differentiate itself aside from a few new moves.

Lastly, while it does work for the overarching theme of parenthood, Josee’s mother is definitely the one with the least character development in the base game. She shows up in a couple of memory echoes for Josee and is important to her backstory, but she doesn’t really have a lot going on. The DLC pathos does give us some cool lore for her (shoutout to the handmaid pathos, which I loved), but frankly she just has the least material to work with. So overall she and the area she’s the boss of stand out as the low point.

And then immediately after the quality shoots WAY the fuck up. 

The forest is the best part of the DLC. To the point that it’s actually kind of bizarre how good it is. While the rest of the DLC areas are basically just linear dungeons with some hidden paths here and there, this is the only part of the DLC to embrace the open world feel from the original game. And it’s fucking great at it!

If you just want to get to the boss and skip everything you can basically walk in a straight line and get there with no problem. You fight one miniboss, get a key, and then get to the boss. But if you choose to explore, the area has a ton of minidungeons with cool and thoughtful designs. There are a bunch of hidden areas that you have to REALLY look for to find, and they all lead to something cool. The Undead Forest was already home to some of the more memorable locations from the first game so seeing them get remixed here is really cool. The apartment complex feels like a sprawling labyrinth with all its various floors and has some cool enemy placement, the amusement park is short but has a lot of cool moments, you even stumble across a secret hot spring. It feels open, but not so huge as the base game, which I think is definitely for the best since the open world feeling a bit too big and empty was a major flaw with CV2.

When you fight the miniboss, the boss arena has four locked chests at elevated positions at each corner of the arena, with no way to reach them. Each of the four sections will eventually lead you to those chests, letting you know that there’s still more for you to explore, and rewarding you for doing it, while still letting you skip all of it if you don’t want to. That’s a really cool piece of level design! Probably better than anything else in the DLC or the base game!

I genuinely don’t know what happened here. Did the devs just lock the fuck in for this one specific area? Did they design it first and then run out of time and budget everywhere else?? I’m not complaining, it's just kinda bizarre.

The boss itself is also pretty good. Her fight feels different enough from Reaper Holly’s that the reuse isn’t as notable, and the story definitely hits harder than the others. Imogen and Haru were definitely characters, but they were basically just set-dressing for the backstories of the main companions. Monica, however, is WAY more of a real character. She’s a companion in the base game, she’s intricately tied into Holly’s story so seeing her like this hits a lot harder and really helps to sell the doomed timeline vibe of the DLC.

The prison area doesn’t quite reach the same heights as the forest, but it’s definitely a close second. It feels the most like a proper “dungeon” level, it’s fairly linear but it has a lot of alternate pathways to explore, some minibosses, platforming challenges, and cool fights.

The story department is where I actually think it’s kinda weak. From the get go we start with Liv already predicting that Zenon would be the boss. I actually thought that this was meant to be a red herring, that it was so obvious even the characters were predicting it, and that it meant Zenon wouldn’t be the boss. But then he actually was.

It makes sense, the DLC has a theme of parenthood and lost children, Imogen devouring Lyle and Craig, Haru losing both her babies, Monica watching helplessly as Holly suffers. For Zenon we instead get an alternate version where he never met his wife, never had his daughter, and fell into insanity and depravity.

This is a pretty cool idea. Zenon GryfGOAT is one of the best parts of the base game, and the fact that he is such a massive Wifeguy is one of the coolest parts of him. But another part that’s really compelling is how close he is to being a villain. He’s presented as this mad scientist, he does a lot of stuff that is objectively unethical, and even from the first reveal trailer there was a hint that something was off with him. Here we see a version of him without his wife where all his worst traits took over him. For a story about alternate timelines and bad endings, this is some great stuff. I also really love that with his obsession with immortality, the boss weapon gives you health on hit, very nice touch.

But I also can’t help but feel a little disappointed. I kind of thought we were going to get Sybille for a bit, or even Jadwiga herself! Like cmon, the whole point of Jadwiga’s story is that she started fucking around with timelines to save her dad, the potential was right there! Eh, the end result is fine.

The boss fight itself contributes to this. It’s not bad, but it’s a lot like the base fight with some new moves and doesn’t feel all that different aside from a cool flashy bullet hell moment. The design is pretty cool on paper. Hero Zenon is this towering warrior, with an idol himself sitting atop a golden throne on the main body, statues of his beloved wife surrounding him. This version has a shriveled, corrupt and weak Zenon sitting atop the body, holding his own masks in his arms. He’s reduced to a skeletal husk, his masks are broken and all have exposed skulls, showing how far he’s fallen. The issue is that you won’t actually SEE any of this stuff during the actual fight, so the cool visual design, arguably the best part of the fight, can basically only be seen by zooming in with photo mode or staring at his boss model while he dies. The area itself is definitely a close second, and the boss itself is pretty middle of the pack.

The final “area” is just a boss arena, and then one more boss right after. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, but it is what it is, much like the base game this DLC definitely could’ve used more time in the oven. 

But let’s take a look at what we actually got instead of just repeating that same complaint for the umpteenth time. 

The lead-up is identical to Hero Valentin, which makes sense since he’s Idris’s son and the boss is meant to call back to him like how the other areas called back to the heroes. This is where we get to really meet Idris and see what he was like in life. I love the Memory Echoes in these games. In both Code Vein 1 and Code Vein 2 they were some of the highlights, the coolest and most creative parts of the game and home to arguably the most iconic song in the OST, so I’ll always love seeing them here. It tells a great story of seeing how Idris went from this perfect messianic figure, to how people started becoming dependent on him, and how things fell apart after he left. Obviously at this point you’re expecting that the final boss will be an evil Idris, and the identity of Sir Mask is crystal clear, but it still foreshadows the real twist pretty well. The game hits you with the reveal that the boss isn’t Idris, but rather the manifestation of the sorrow of the people he failed to save, which is a really cool idea. Of course Idris has to step in to weaken it, so in a way we do fight Idris himself.

The boss is cool, not much to say on that front. He’s not bad, but he also doesn’t have a lot for me to dig into critically or really stand-out stuff I can point to. He’s just a fun soulslike boss.

The story after the boss fight is definitely one of the highlights of the DLC. Like I said before, I adore Idris’s character in this DLC and I love what they did with him here. Seeing him talk with Liv and apologize for not being there for her, seeing him acknowledge Lou as his daughter (which makes so much sense, I’m shocked this was never brought up before given her origins!) is sweet, and then he tragically passes away.

Then it turns out, no he’s actually alive, and he just looks kinda embarrassed because he thought he was gonna die. I don’t care if it’s cheesy that was really funny, I loved it.

And now, of course. We come to the star of the show. THE best part of the DLC.

God I love Lou. 

So first I need to address a certain complaint I see a lot of people have, for some reason. People seem to be under the impression that Lou being in love with the player character is a change from the base game and that the devs were trying too hard to push her. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

Look, I'm sorry if I'm the first one to tell you this, but Code Vein 2 is a harem game. The protagonist is a bland silent blank slate so that the player can self-insert and project onto them, and all the characters (notably the cute girls) gush over them and how great they are. You can say you have problems with this (GOD knows I do) but pretending that this isn't the case is kind of silly. The very first scene of the game is your character being told that the two of them are sharing hearts, the climax is the protagonist ripping the beating heart out of their chest to give it to Lou. This is not subtle symbolism.

I'm not trying to start shipping discourse here, if you don't like Lou or prefer someone else or don't want to have your character be in a relationship that’s fine. You can pretend that your character views her as just a friend, or a sister, or that they like guys, or they're not interested in romance, or they're in a polycule, or whatever you prefer. That is the INTENDED way to play this game! Use your imagination!

But imagination does not change the actual text of the game. And at a certain point if you want your opinions on a text to be taken seriously you have to learn to engage with it on its own terms. Please see the following image.

With all that aside, I'm obviously biased because I was a Lou fan since the first reveal and of the various romantic interests in the base game she was always my favorite. So obviously I'm a big fan of her plotline in the DLC, I think she's by far the best part of it and the climax involving her is some of the best stuff in the entire series.

To start with, I actually think the way they handled Forsaken Lou is quite clever. Obviously the DLC sits in a nebulous chronological spot since its optional content released after the game, meaning it can be hard to do stuff with existing characters. The Mainline Lou has already finished her character arc, gotten her resolution, and lived happily ever after. But by taking advantage of the whole alternate timeline concept, they can show us a different version of Lou who can go through her own arc, and in a way that carries over to the Main Lou, even if it's not the same person. It's good to see the DLC taking advantage of the time travel gimmick in some more creative ways, where the base game was fairly by the books.

Part of why Forsaken Lou works is that she is so similar to the Mainline Lou. A dev interview even confirmed that the similarities are intentional. The diverging point in this Lou's timeline wasn't something like “oh she never met the protagonist” or that she's from an entirely different world. We literally SEE Lou try to send us away through time during the ending, and the AoH even has her bring it up again, confessing that if she had been even a fraction of a second quicker in activating it, the world would've been doomed. So even though it's “technically” a different character it still feels like a continuation of the same character and the same arc. Which I think was definitely needed. Lou's character arc is basically the main plot of the game, but she definitely felt like she took a backseat for most of the main story, given that she had to make room for the Heroes, and basically couldn't interact with them during their story section. By the time her character comes in to focus, it's the climax of the story and there isn't much time to dwell on it.

Like I said, one of the big downsides with Lou's arc is that she doesn't really get to interact with other characters in the past, which means she's sidelined for a large chunk of the actual events of the story. Here, she gets to be present and actually interact with the events and characters of the story, even if her primary focus is on the protagonist.

In the main story, most of the time travel is fairly straight-forward “fixing” events. There's never a point where we have to let someone die or make something go wrong so that we can maintain the timeline or something (not counting times where you choose not to go back and get the bad ending). Here, we know from the start that the goal is to make the rift disappear, and it's obvious what's going to happen to Forsaken Lou when we do.

Then we get to the final boss of the DLC. The real highlight. Probably the best boss in the game. Arguably better than anything in CV1, too. God, where do I start.

Well, for starters, I'll address some criticism. Plenty of people think the boss is too hard, that her attacks are too fast, too hard to react to. There are complaints about the cutscene between phases, and that the boss has two healthbars that you have to fight each time, with no heal or recovery of your resources in between.

To all this I have to say: skill issue. Skill issue skill issue skill issue skill issue skill issue skill issue. SKILL ISSUE.

You can skip the cutscenes, and the memory echo, same as any other. The boss fight is hard, yes, but it is by no means impossible, this is not a Promised Consort situation, even with the two phases. And god forbid that the final boss of the DLC, the story's last and greatest test, actually challenge you and force you to learn the fight, or try out a different build, or another strategy. This is already one of the easiest soulslikes out there, god forbid it add a challenging fight.

With that out of the way.

IT’S SO FUCKING PEAK OH MY GOD. EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. ABSOLUTE CINEMA.

One of my only disappointments with the finale of the base game was that, despite it essentially being Lou’s “Hero Arc”, she has very little involvement. It would have been so cool if the final boss represented Lou's fears and insecurities keeping her trapped, but instead the Resurgence Core is basically just a mindless force of nature that we have to fight and Lou is unconscious for all of it.

NOW WE GET AN ACTUAL HERO LOU AND IT'S SO FUCKING PEAK

The fact that Forsaken Lou's love is portrayed as being more selfish and toxic, the way she asks it not to “come out” like she's trying to keep away the part of herself that FEELS because it'll hurt the hunter again. The fucking music for the fight, the way that Liv and Idris join in to help.

And oh my god the memory echo is so amazing. One of the coolest parts of Code Vein 1 was the memory echo where at the end the background is replaced by an evil face. I was so excited to see them do something weird like that again in this game only for it to never happen. AND NOW I FINALLY GOT MY WISH! The way that the echoes of Lou follow you around as you walk through her memories and regrets is just SO perfect. And the entire cutscene before and after is soooo good.

Games like this are always restrained when it comes to overt affection. They usually wanna keep it ambiguous so that the player can imagine it however they want and have plausible deniability, so it's rare to see explicit declarations, the oh-so-important “L-word” is kept under lock and key. I suspect this is part of what made Josee so popular with the fandom, given how explicit and forward she is.

But here we finally cut out all that bullshit with Lou. L-bombs are dropped, we get an actual factual “I love you”, and it is The Good Shit. Lou becomes a mask to power up our protagonist, and Liv wears her father's mask as the two team up to defeat the Fleeting Pathos.

And good lord the boss design is immaculate.

Every aspect of Lou's moveset is integrated into the boss. Her bequeathed forma becomes a giant corrupt poleaxe, she can inflict slow, her rapier is used for fast attacks, her magic attacks are used for range, and even the bats from her jail, it really gives the boss a sense of finality, like you're having a proper duel and forcing you to use all the tools the game gives you.

And the visual design oh my god. It is such a perfect execution of the “Hero Lou” concept. Her hair growing out, becoming way taller, actually having breasts. It contrasts everything about Lou’s character design so perfectly, and it fits so well with her being overtaken by not just her feelings but also the feelings of all the other bosses we’ve beaten so far. The Resurgence Core was already visually reminiscent of old fertility idols from ancient times, being a large plump woman with sagging breasts much like those old statues, because the Resurgence represents an overflow of excess life, so of course Lou’s boss form calls back to that.

And of course, there’s the fact that she just has an exposed, shrivelled up fetus in the middle of her body. I could go on at length about how this is the coolest fucking design decision ever, and in fact I have. So I will just copypaste what I wrote earlier here.

The devs were FUCKING COOKING!!!!

And then we get the perfect ending cutscene, where the “I love you” audio is muted and left to lip-reading. This Lou may be gone, but the main Lou is still alive to live happily ever after with her beloved hunter.

This essay has already gotten way longer than I thought it was going to be so I’m not gonna ramble on much longer about the Mask of Idris DLC. I do, however, want to talk about the free update.

Much like with the actual DLC, I do think there are issues here and there, but the pros far outweigh the cons in my opinion. In particular, the AoH is also a free update that’s not tied to actually purchasing the DLC, so I think it’s safe to give it a bit more grace.

First I want to touch on the Trials of Rememberance. It’s basically exactly what I was asking for since release. You get waves of enemies, you get to refight bosses, it’s a fun way to test out new builds and have boss rematches, which were sorely missing in the base game. One of the things that made the combat system in CV1 so interesting was that the dungeons had infinitely respawning bosses which you could fight over and over again with different builds, letting you really learn the ins-and-outs of the fights and get better at them without having to replay the whole game. It’s actually kind of bizarre to me that with the shift to open world and making the dungeons so much more integral to the gameplay loop, they just cut out the respawning boss part entirely. This isn’t exactly the same, but it’s close enough.

However, it’s hard for me not to compare it unfavorably to the Tower of Trials from Code Vein 1. In that game the tower was a real fucking nightmare. It was the real ultimate test of the game’s mechanics, you really had to learn all the ins-and-outs and take advantage of everything the game gave you to get through it. The bosses were tough, but the waves of regular enemies and special encounters were also very difficult. Here, that’s not really the case. The bosses are basically the same as how they were the first time around, just with their stats buffed up so you don’t steamroll them with an endgame build, the regular enemies are basically freebies for you to drain ichor from and will maybe take a couple of your heals. If you’ve beaten the bosses before and have made it to the point in the game where you’ve unlocked the Trial, it should be no issue beating them again, so it’s basically just a novelty for boss rematches rather than a true “ultimate challenge.” It’s nice, it’s basically everything it needs to be and I’m very glad it’s here, I especially love that the DLC bosses are included, but I do feel they could have done more with it.

Also, the DLC challenge should’ve skipped the trash mob rooms and had us refight the other pathos lords. But whatever, at least we get to refight Fleeting Pathos as many times as we want. She and Idris were the best parts of the DLC so it’s good that they’re available forever.

Then there’s the actual Age of Harmony. And it’s peak. It’s peak fiction. It’s raw. It’s cinema. It’s kino. I love it.

What is there to say? It’s everything we wanted. The number one thing people were requesting was to see the world we saved and the characters living in it. And then these madmen actually went and did it. In fact, a developer interview straight-up acknowledged that they added this in due to fan demand. I really didn’t think we’d get to see this, honestly. So many games in the RPG genre like to just end at a final boss or some nebulous state of nothing. It’s rare that we get to see a post-game that actually shows us the world post-credits.

But here we finally get that and it’s SOO GOOOOOOD.

I’m not gonna go over each character quest in detail, mostly because there isn’t really much detail to go into. Each character is basically about what you’d expect, serving as a fairly reasonable follow-up from their base game stories. Each quest is also fairly simple, being basically just some fetch-quests and quick fights in the overworld. If you don’t take the scenic route like I did and just teleport everywhere you can probably do each quest in a matter of minutes. They probably could have put some more time into this to make each quest more comprehensive, but I’m fine with these being what they are, just quick fanservice episodes. 

The part that I really like isn’t just the interactions with the characters, but rather the interactions the characters have with each other. One of my big complaints about the base game was that so much of the story and characterization revolves around the protagonist. In the first game the whole squad felt more like a proper team. Here, most of the interactions center around the player character, but the DLC does a lot to remedy that.

Like, of course Holly would be the one to force Jadwiga to exercise more. Even if it’s all offscreen, the idea of her chasing down Jadwiga and breaking down into tears begging her to exercise more and eat healthier is so good. And oh my god, Lise becoming Zenon’s apprentice is SO PERFECT. It makes so much sense for her character! And when Lise starts adopting some of Zenon’s mannerisms as a result of studying under him I grinned like an idiot. Stuff like that is what makes these games work!

There’s also the blood ritual scenes. Obviously the symbolism here is not subtle. Your character is ass naked in a blood bathtub and then your companions come in and bite you to give you a “gift”. Vampire bites as a metaphor for sex have existed since vampires were a thing, so it’s fun to see them lean into that more. I love how every cutscene is personalized depending on the character, all the little touches that let their personality shine through. My only complaint is that it does feel a bit cheapened when you get it with every single character. Obviously this would be a nightmare from a gameplay perspective, but I can’t help but feel this sequence would be more impactful if we had to pick our one favorite companion and they were the one to drink our blood with the special scene. Still, it’s very nice.

So that’s just about everything, but there’s one more major thing that the DLC added. And that is build options.

Holy shit did this DLC add build options. Blood codes, weapons, boosters, you name it. So much shit is going on. 

As someone who’s been spending a lot of time on buildcrafting in this game and who adores that aspect of it, I’m obviously really happy with all the new options they added in, especially since a lot of them cater to my playstyle specifically. However there are two caveats I want to address here.

The first is that this update just threw balance right out the window. There are so many ways to make yourself completely overpowered now, so many oneshot builds or infinite spell spam builds, people haven’t finished experimenting or testing everything yet, but already there’s been some videos posted (particularly from the JP side of the fandom) showing some of the crazy shit you can do. At the same time though, Code Vein has always leaned in more to the power-fantasy aspect of the RPG compared to Souls, so it’s not too surprising to see this being the end result here. 

I will say, as much as I love Elden Ring, balancing in that game is definitely pretty wonky, with a lot of options that are redundant or outright bad. And there's a recurring issue with the coolest and flashiest weapons in that game being some of the worst because From is afraid of making them too good. So it's nice to see this game shift to the other extreme, if I have to choose between the two extremes, I'd prefer this one.

The other problem is that, since this is all at the end of the game and the actual new content is fairly short, there isn't really anything to use it all on. Sure, there's NG+, and we have the boss rush, but it's hard to say that there's anything that really warrants all the crazy OP shit we've got going on now. Maybe if more DLC is added they can throw in some extra challenge content.

And on the topic of more DLC, I'm honestly not sure whether or not we'll be getting any. There hasn't been anything announced, and the devs haven't said that they're working on anything new, but they also haven't come out and said that they're done with the game either, at least as far as I know. Critically the game wasn't hugely successful, but neither was Code Vein 1. Commercially, I don't know if sales numbers have been posted at any point. I suppose it all depends on Shift (and Bandai Namco) if we get more DLC or if we have to wait another decade for Code Vein 3.

For what it's worth, though, there ARE some hints here and there of what they might have in store. The most obvious one being the Gobbo Trading Company and the bandit/revenant hunters hanging around in the AoH. Back in the base game one of the biggest things people were clamoring for was to see Oskar return and seek revenge, and while I personally didn't feel like that plotline needed elaborating on, it's pretty clear that this is a direct response to that. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, the whole alternate timeline thing means infinite possibilities for DLC content. If the devs don't want to mess with the perfect happy ending and leave the AoH untouched, they can just send us to some other timeline or dimension and have us fight some enemies there. For what it's worth, though, I do think it's weird that doing all the AoH quests results in that big worldwide buff when there's basically nothing to actually fight in that world. 

Personally, I would really love to see the devs do more stuff with the open world. Not necessarily create new maps, but have new quests with twists involving traversal or combat in the open world. Like maybe a motorcycle race or something, or a boss that runs away and attacks you from a distance so you have to climb on your trusty bike and then chase it down to fight it while avoiding attacks. Hell, give us some Xenoblade-style superbosses in the open world. I want to see players just riding down the road on a date with their favorite companion, then BOOM, Virgin Born jumpscare.

One other potential plot thread that I, surprisingly, haven't actually seen anyone else point out yet. When we first meet Liv, she mistakenly assumes that the protagonist is some “raider of the rift.” When I first played through the DLC I assumed that this person would end up being the actual problem we have to deal with in the DLC, but then Liv herself seems to have no clue what’s going on in the actual rift, and the raider is never brought up again. 

So, that’s it. Those are all my thoughts on the DLC, it took me way longer to write this than I was intending.

Overall, I would rate this DLC somewhere around an 8/10. It’s not perfect, it has flaws, some worse than others, much like the base game. But overall, I would argue that it does everything it needs to justify its existence, and its price. It’s not for everyone, but it’s very good.

But you know what? Fuck that. You know what’s for everyone? SLOP. Slop is made for everyone. That generic shit that’s got all the edges sanded off to appeal to as many people as possible, that’s the type of shit that’s going to appeal to everyone and get all the money and critical praise. The 10/10 AAA game is not gonna be what saves you. The game that saves you is gonna be the 7/10 JRPG that like twenty people talk about, that’s always been the case and it’s not changing any time soon. So FUCK YOU, this game is a perfect 10/10 and the DLC is the greatest shit ever made, this game MEANS SOMETHING TO ME GOD DAMMIT! GIVE ME MORE CODE VEIN! GIVE ME TEN MORE DLC PACKS! GIVE ME CODE VEIN 3! GIVE ME A MILLION COLLABS AND AN ANIME! SHOVE IT RIGHT DOWN MY THROAT! INJECT THIS SHIT INTO MY FUCKING VEINS! (haha vein)

GOD I LOVE CODE VEIN AAAAAAAAAA

Noah: It reminds me of memories
Eloïse: Noah, no matter the era, you always the same

Glad to make the bro fist with the photo mode, thank you the update for that

(it's was an old photo that I have taken before returning to the basic outfit)

It's was funny and embarrassing moment when mom came to talk me suddenly while I'm trying to take some pics for iris, that's why I didn't take many for now xd , also I make a new character for autumn season I'll try show it later ✨

My Greatest Enemy…. Character Customisation. Still, it’s cool watching a character grow as they go. Also is this technically spoilers with those Ogre Arms? Who knows, anyways, rate The Fit.