Quick Review: Narcissu 1st and 2nd

No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.

A creation of stage-nana published by Sekai Project and released on May 15th, 2007, Narcissu 1st and 2nd is a visual novel that veers far more on the “novel” side. It’s hardly interactive; outside of selecting the new chapter when that screen comes up, there’s nothing here but the story and its progression, with some voice acting.

The size of the pictures, within that big void
of black... it feels a tad claustrophobic.

700km? A decent road trip challenge for
some people who've never seen the world.

This product is a double pack, hence the name. Narcissu 1st is about an unnamed 20yo boy with a disease that’s never stated clearly in the story, all but left to die at the “seventh floor” of the local hospital. The hopeless cases, who will go back and forth between that floor and home, just waiting for the inevitable. Which never takes too long to come. During one of those boring days, the boy gets acquainted with a girl staying there as well, Setsumi Sakura, also suffering from an unstated disease, who seems disinterested in everything and resigned to accept her fate and basically stop living. Dying here, or dying at home… Faced with those depressing clear-cut choices, the protagonist gets a crazy idea for a third option, which Setsumi ends up joining on. Impromptu road trip? Impromptu road trip.

Narcissu 2nd is actually a prequel to the first, and over double the length, for a total of about 6 hours for both. Its protagonist is Himeko, originally a volunteer at the seventh floor, who also winds up diagnosed with a deadly disease and transferred there. She meets Setsumi, making the girl the tying element between the two Sides, and a friendship develops there as well. Road trip? Road trip. (Yeah, don’t ask me to explain either of these.)

It's sad when a hospital room seems like the
preferable option.

Lots of "Un." "Not particularly." and other
repeated phrases here.

Both games are available in both voiced and unvoiced versions, and with two translations – those were done by separate translators, so there are small differences between them. The presentation is minimalist; we rarely get to see the characters on the theater-wide strip above the text, and we instead get a lot of visuals of places without characters in them. The intention was to let the players fill in with their imagination (though we do get a few glimpses of the protagonists from time to time). The voice acting is still in the original Japanese, and is a lot more present in the second story than in the first. Both pack a fair number of emotional punches; it is, after all, a story of dying people, many of whom have already learned to cope with their situation. That said, the story is not kind to the health system in Japan, though as you can imagine, in a story that’s tied this closely to it, commentary on the subject was inevitable. Long story short, if the story does hook you in, then it will tug at your heartstrings more than just a few times.

Narcissu 1st and 2nd is available for free on Steam. If you were touched by the story, you might also like the 10th anniversary anthology project that includes a number of extra stories as DLCs and a lot of bonuses.