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Narcissu is a free visual novel by the dojin group stage-nana. The anonymous
protagonist is diagnosed with an unspecified terminal illness shortly after his twentieth birthday, and is admitted to hospice care at a hospital in eastern Japan. There he meets
Setsumi, a woman a few years his senior, who is also terminally ill. Finding that they
both rejected the expectation that they will wish to die either in hospital or with
their families, they run away together in a car belonging to the protagonist's father.
They travel west across Japan's many highways and prefectures, initially not knowing
where to go, but later collectively decided on taking the famous narcissus fields of
southern Awaji Island as a somewhat arbitrary destination. Many of the scenes and
events of the story are road-movie cliches. The work was originally written in
Japanese by Tomo Kataoka, and subsequently localized and translated into English,
Chinese, and Korean, by various fan translators. Unlike most fan translations,
however, this was an authorised work and can be considered a semi-official
localisation. Both the original Japanese visual novel and its English version were
released as free downloads over the Internet. Narcissu is an experimental work: it
uses minimalist graphics in a very narrow window, and includes two full scripts, one
accompanied by a voice track, and the other adapted to work without voices. In the
English translation, different translators translated each version, to provide
multiple perspectives on the story. The original Japanese version uses the NScripter
engine; for the English localization, the open source clone ONScripter was used
instead, as this has been modified to support English. |