#oneaday Day 604: Emotional Release

Okay, I've been carrying this around all day and haven't been able to actually talk about it with anyone, so I'm just going to splurge it out here. Spoilers for Nurse Love Addiction ahead — stop reading here if you plan on playing it yourself! Skip ahead to after the "block quote" section to avoid spoilers.

All right. So, as you know, I've been reading Nurse Love Addiction at bedtime lately. I figured it'd be a good choice — cute, pink, pastel-coloured romantic visual novel about a bunch of gay nursing students. And indeed so far it has been. Well, it was until partway through my reading session last night.

For a bit of context, the lead character Asuka is a bit of an airhead, as female VN protagonists often tend to be. The early hours of the story see her affections flitting around somewhat between her sister and the two girls she finds herself grouped up with during her nursing training. There's Itsuki the rather forthright, overly honest young woman (who is also a not-particularly-secret otaku and doujin game developer) and Sakuya, the "princess"-like character, who is calm and refined, but is dealing with a sickly parent who keeps demanding her attention and dragging her away from her studies.

Itsuki and Sakuya are in a relationship with one another. Early in the visual novel, Asuka witnesses an intimate kiss between the pair of them when they think no-one is watching, and starts to Feel Things as a result. A little later, when Itsuki and Sakuya have a serious falling out with one another — to such a degree that Itsuki moves out of the dormitory room she was living in with Sakuya — Asuka starts to find herself even more confused about what is going on. On the one hand, she wants things to go back to normal. On the other, she can't deny that she definitely has feelings for Sakuya.

Eventually, the school festival rolls around. At Teito Nursing Academy, the first-years are responsible for running the whole thing, because the second- and third-years are all busy with their studies. Asuka and Sakuya have some disagreements over what their group should put on as an attraction, but eventually reach a compromise by running a "nurse cafe", whose gimmick is that they take their patrons' blood pressure along with their order, and provide those with high blood pressure with a low-sugar menu.

Anyway, this is all besides the point. After the festival day is over, Asuka heads up to the school rooftop because she received a note from Sakuya to meet her there. Sakuya follows along a little while after, and, long story short, she kisses Asuka. Asuka has no idea what to do with this information, particularly as Sakuya departs shortly afterwards having left some cryptic words with her.

Asuka also doesn't get much time to think it over, because a moment later, she is stabbed in the stomach by an unknown assailant apparently wearing a nurse uniform. And we, the audience, get to witness and experience this in excruciating detail, with a gory event image and some very graphic descriptions of what Asuka is thinking and feeling as she feels her life slipping away.

She wakes up what feels like a moment later, only to discover that her sister found her collapsed on the rooftop and she has since been asleep for a full day. There is also no trace of any stab wound anywhere on her body, leaving her understandably confused as to what actually happened and what was a delusion, a dream… or something else altogether.

I was kind of floored by this bizarre but undeniably effective and emotionally devastating curveball the game threw me. I was not expecting this sort of thing at all — largely because I'd not read anything about the game beforehand, and the most I'd heard is that some bits of it were "a bit weird".

And I won't lie, it kind of left me a bit freaked out — but in a way that I enjoy. I haven't played a visual novel that did this to me for quite some time — Grisaia was probably the last to deliver such an effective gutpunch — but I'm excited to be experiencing something like this again. Even if it's making me a bit hesitant to read the next chapters!

Spoilers end!

Anyway, yeah, Nurse Love Addiction is quite a ride. I can't wait to read more. In fact, I think that's what I'm going to go and do right now. Wish me… luck?