Nurse Love Addiction is a Visual Novel by KOGADO STUDIO and published by Degica. And boy oh boy, do I hate Visual Novels. Stuff like Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton at least present a game-like challenge. Actual Visual Novels? Not so much. So I bet you’re expecting me to do my usual thing and say this surprised me, or something like that? Nope. This one’s exactly what it says on the tin. And while I haven’t decided on just what I’m going to do yet, my editor is going get it for giving me this one. As in, if I could flood his frequently visited Pokemon Go areas with more Pidgeys and Rattatas, I would. Especially because, normally, this would affect my Steam queue, filling it with more shitty VN’s than it already had. Well joke’s on you, sir, they’ve made it so that I can blacklist certain tags from my queue. Praise to Gaben.
I have a long, abiding hatred of the genre. Mostly because, much like the constant stream of stupid, moeblob highschool slice of life animes, they tend to skew towards the lowest common denominator (otakus and weeaboos) by generally being insipid as all hell. In short, I “played” as much as I could tolerate before I began to feel the literary diarrhea that was every thought that passed through the main character’s head slowly drive me insane.
You play as Asuka Osechi. She’s the sort of moron you’d expect to randomly forget how to breathe at any given moment. She’s sexually attracted to her teacher, and possibly her own sister. And also probably all of her non-faceless classmates, but I didn’t get that far. If she was similarly attracted to fire, she might very well be a screamapillar. She’s predicated her future on something she scrawled in a children’s picture book when she was a kid, and she spent most of her life being a bigger loser than me. Not really earning those endearment points. I think Nursing appealed to her because the uniforms really turned her on.
The game is literally clicking text boxes and occasionally making a decision. That’s it. That’s the whole damn thing. That’s almost always the whole damn thing. It’s why I hate the genre. If the story and characters don’t appeal to you, the game has almost nothing left to offer. Other games might have a terrible story, but at least they might be fun to play. Visual novels are like a half step above the constant stream of Twine games that occasionally pop up in the recently added page on Steam. The quality will range from passable (at best with parodies of the given thing) to atrocious. But at least they have pictures, which sets them apart from the endless stream of choose your own adventure books masquerading as games. And a lot of the time, those pictures look like the characters are twelve years old. If you really like looking over your shoulder to watch out for Chris Hanson, this is your genre.
The music seemed to loop constantly and noticeably. Then again, I only heard a few tracks. I have no idea if the smattering of voice acting is good or bad. I don’t speak Japanese.
But the kicker? Oh ho, the kicker. They list this at $40 US. That is outrageous. So rather than get upset and write something I’ll really regret, I decided to make a short list of things at around that price that will likely bring someone more enjoyment:
- Monster Hunter Generations
- Pretty much any 3DS game, as a matter of fact
- The materials for a number of small craft projects
- $40 of Steam credit during a sale.
…and many more, were I willing to just sit around coming up with things worth buying for $40 or less. Which would still be preferable than calling for the head of the person who decided $40 is a reasonable price for something like this. I don’t care how visual your novel is, that’s a bit much.
So you can probably guess whether or not I recommend Nurse Love Addiction, which has sadly messed with my Steam recommendations. And I’d argue that it’s not $40 of novelty. I don’t really like ripping something like this, either. But chances are, the sort of people that like these sorts of games will dismiss it anyway. After all, I don’t get it.
Pros/cons:
+- Can be played with one hand, you sicko.
+- Will simultaneously drive friends away/bring them in
+- Isn’t a Twine game.
We were provided a copy of this game for review
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