Narcissu

This evening, I started to read the first Strawberry Panic light novel, out in the park behind my house. It was a beautiful sunny day and was so quiet that I could clearly hear any human conversation 50m away. Adults walked their dogs, children rode their bikes, police patrolled on horses. I sneezed. And I sneezed. And I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed.

Argh, hay-fever. My body's defenses are too high!

It's just not dignified to sit and read something outdoors with so many bits of soggy tissue paper, so I returned home, closed the doors and windows and showered all the pollen off of me, and decided to stay indoors and read something. Goodbye, sunshine!

I decided to start reading the DS port of the free visual novel Narcissu. I'd avoided it for a long time because I have a medical phobia. It's about two young people whose bodies have also failed them, but in a far more severe way than mine - terminal illnesses.

There's a voiced and unvoiced option for the story, even on the DS port, so I chose to read the voiced version. There is only one voice - a whispering girl, and she doesn't say too much, but it's good to hear her. She's played by "Ms Rino Ayukawa", whom I have never heard of, nor had I expected to recognise her name. But, it's good to hear her.

The music playing is also very beautiful, and fitting.

It's good, a touching story. Something about it, about halfway through the story... something about the two characters, reminded me somehow of the young mute walking couple in the film Dolls, which is one of my all-time favourite films.

Both pieces manage to be somewhat... distressing, never really stop being saddening, but are calming and beautiful at the same time.

It's short enough to read in an evening.

I may come back and read the unvoiced story sometime. It's a separate translation of the story, for one thing.

The DS port is ok, the pictures are possibly too small to clearly see, and there are a few typos in there and sometimes square characters in the middle of some words, but it's cool. It is listed as version 0.0.4, after all. Nice not to have to sit at my PC all evening. (I say, sitting at my PC typing this).

The VNDS is really good, possibly my favourite application for DS. ^_^ It's still receiving constant updates and new stories are being ported to it and released for download every few days! ^_^

DS Visual Novel Reader

There's a visual novel reader for Nintendo DS, you know. I had heard of the demo of Fate Stay Night and some of Tsukihime (English translations) being ported to the DS, but had not looked into it.

The site for the reader is here: http://digital-haze.net/vnds.php

That includes the reader, and ports of that demo of FSN and Tsukihime, as well as Narcissu (which I hear is good from the PC version), and something called "Anon's Nice Day" which I admit I haven't heard of before.

It seems to use its own format - some .scr files that describe the background image to use, sound files, music, text, choices etc, as well as needing those visual/audio files separately.

EDIT: Wow, this Fate Stay Night DS download is 73MB whereas I thought the demo for DS was under 10MB... maybe it's the whole game after all!