Narcissu

it’s the game that kickstarted my journey into anime/manga/vns that contains characters with terminal illnesses. i never got to know the people in my life who had one, so my time in the genre (about 2 months or so) was solely dependent on this story. it’s about patients who were put in an exclusive hospice on the 7th floor of a hospital that is primarily maintained by catholics. with that setting, no story would be exist without some kind of escapist plot. the main character of the first story meets setsumi, a girl who has been in and out twice, and supposedly no one has ever returned for three times. after learning a few things about the hospital and the accursed seventh floor, the pair escape. i’ve mentioned before that this story kickstarted my short period of consuming nothing but works with “terminal illness” as the plot. but admittedly, nothing has ever come close to the story of narcissu. in anime, it’s expected to have a “lovable heroine”. and in these stories it’s typically the dying heroine who somehow inspires the healthy yet depressed protagonist to live on despite the struggles, with her death posed as the ending’s tearjerker. the thing is, these girls are all roughly the same all across the board. they were all cheerful, and seemingly healthy until the inevitable plot twist, “i only have 3 months left” just as feelings were about to bloom. even in the face of tragedy, they keep putting on a smile; this makes the protagonist, who is struggling with some kind of internal turmoil, question himself: “why do i get to live instead of her?”. they were also all beautiful, like a flower swaying in the wind, or like moonlight. in other words, they were some kind of product that seemed too good to be thrown out this early. perhaps narcissu’s divergence from the genre stems from the fact that it is free to play. the heroine of narcissu, setsumi, is roughly in her 20s. yet she still fits in her school uniform. in a sense of bitter irony, it’s almost like she’s managed to obtain eternal youth because of her illness. she doesn’t have any kind of breakthrough moment where she becomes a distinct love interest to the protagonist. they are simply… acquaintances. she doesn’t talk much, but she knows the roads of the outside world like the back of her hand. setsumi is a heroine that enters and leaves with more questions than she started with. she isn’t exactly “lovable”, not like the cheerful sunshine girl type. rather, she’s more similar to the downpour that came down as the pair were on their journey to escape. the repetition of her silence seemingly drowning out the rest of the noise in the world. neither is she “too good to die”. from the first meeting, you could tell that she is insistent on dying. narcissus is the name of the white flower that grows in the ingame hospital’s garden. it’s named after the myth of narcissus, who died while looking at his own reflection. in the white room of the seventh floor, where the window barely opens to 15 centimeters, you can only live with your own reflection. the residents of the seventh floor have two choices, to attempt escape or die there. being admitted into the hospital for her illness some time around middle school, watching each day as the number of visiting classmates dwindled, then eventually being moved to the seventh floor; setsumi had never been able to grasp her own fate, almost as if the curse that was put on narcissus had been shoved onto her. thus, she chose to escape. there was something hasty about her motion, but it was calculated, perhaps even eager. the narcissus, who escaped from her own reflection in order to make a self-centered, selfish decision to die somewhere else. a remarkable game.