Free Video Game Review: Narcissu 1st & 2nd

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

...I never thought I’d do a short review that seems like a “get out of jail free” comment, but this visual novel...damn it, this visual novel nearly made me cry my eyes out. It’s just...god, it’s so heartbreaking and yet so touching that I don’t feel I can say much about it without getting choked up about it.

OK, to boil this visual novel down to the basics, it is basically two visual novels crammed into one. The first part is the story of two hospital patients who escape from what can be basically summed up as a death ward (you go to it if you have illnesses which can’t be treated, but which aren’t contagious, and you are basically there to die) and traveling across Japan. And it is easily one of the saddest things you will ever read, as you really get connected to the two characters over the course of their adventure and the moment when one of them chooses to simply walk into the ocean and die due to her medication having run out and her being certain of dying as a result is hands down one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, even putting the painful ending of Emily is Away to shame in terms of nearly triggering the waterworks (I’m tough to make cry, but this almost managed it!).

The second part of the story is basically a prequel (although, bizarrely, it also includes a prologue within the prequel, focusing on another character entirely for 2 chapters...) focusing on the female patient from the first story remembering her time hanging out with a patient on the death ward. I think this story suffers a bit from deliberately trying to answer questions in the first part of the story in ways which don’t really make a lot of sense when you think about them hard enough, but, on the whole, it’s, again, a really touching story.

The only main problem I have with the story is that it doesn’t really have any interactivity, but I can see why that wasn’t done, as there’s not a lot of ways to add to the story and spin it off in other directions. There isn’t a lot of art in the visual novel, but what is there is excellently done, and the music and sound direction is just perfect.

It’s also an interesting visual novel in that you can play it with voice acting or without it. I deliberately didn’t access it, but I heard snippets in passing and I can attest that the voice acting is actually not that bad! Nothing exceptional, but it gets the job done nicely.

Really, there’s not a lot I can say about this visual novel that is negative. I think it suffers from a lack of replayability, but the story is so strong that I can’t even call that a problem: I really would play this visual novel a lot if it weren’t for the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to read it more than once without crying. This is truly a gem among the visual novel scene, and I highly recommend it!