Narcissu Visual Novel Review

The sad story of two patients in a hospital, both inflicted with terminal illnesses.

PRODUCTION INFO

Narcissu was developed by the company stage-nana, which is also a doujin group. It was written by the visual novel author Tomo Kataoka and released in 2005. It is currently available for free in many languages, including English on Steam.

STORY

Our nameless male protagonist enters the hospital as a young adult. Diagnosed with lung cancer, his hospital visit takes a turn for the worse when his illness becomes terminal. With no hope of survival, he is moved to the seventh floor of the hospital; a place for healing, as the doctors say. In reality, it's just a waiting room for death. He meets another person here: a woman named Setsumi, who is also dying from a terminal illness. Together, they decide that they don't want to die at the hospital, and choose to act on that decision.

WHAT TO EXPECT

This can be quite a depressing story, especially as it tends to drag out a bit and sting your heart harder as it does so. You're given just enough time to become attached to the characters, yet you have no hope of seeing either of them survive through the ending of the visual novel, which is what makes it seem like it's dragging out their deaths. Even so, this is still a pretty short visual novel. If you like sad stories, this is one you should definitely read. If you don't like sad stories, stay away from this title. There is no adult content in Narcissu.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Little is known about the protagonist besides that he got his driver's license shortly before coming to the hospital. He always wanted to use it, but never got the chance to. It remained in his physical possession during his entire stay at the hospital. When he enters the seventh floor of the building and meets Setsumi, he is a bit livelier than her, and is usually the one to initiate conversation.

Setsumi is a depressing girl who rarely shows emotion. She explains how everything works on the seventh floor to the protagonist when he arrives and they meet. Aside from that, she does little besides watch TV in the main room, despite it being boring to her. Even though it is so hard to get her to show an emotion besides indifference or depression, the main character finds that she is quite knowledgeable about random topics such as cars, flowers, and roads, and she opens up a little bit when she talks about those things.

OPINIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS

Narcissu was very enjoyable, but very sad. I'm not too keen on recommending this title to people who are depressed, but otherwise, people who enjoy sad stories must read this for a good cry. There was little in terms of visual effects and the picture was actually very small on the screen, and not just because it wasn't widescreen. There are very few pictures of people in the VN, even the main characters. So the story was nice for a selective audience, but it lacked visual appeal. However, the most important aspect to a visual novel is story. The atmosphere and execution were well done, though not incredibly so. If it had been a longer visual novel with more focus on the characters, the readers could have become much more attached and felt much more despair for them later on. Since it is a shorter visual novel, there was less time for that, but the author still did well with what the project that was put together for this length of text.