The romances develop between characters come as they help one another come to terms with their unique qualities and learn to be comfortable within themselves.
It’s a real page turner, in other words, and avoids dropping into trash novel territory thanks to the thinly veiled philosophical musings hanging over the top of it. As a philosophical core, this idea is often clumsily executed (and is not helped by a translation that could use another run past an editor), but there’s an earnestness about the delivery that is really quite appealing, and the characters are, one and all, gorgeous. With the airship standing as a metaphor for the walls that people who are “different” put up to put distance between them and the rest of society, what goes on within those walls is, then, an exploration of each of the character’s feelings of ostracisation and the coping mechanisms they have developed to handle those feelings. With each play through, you’ll have the opportunity to get particularly close to one of the men, which simply requires that you pay attention to the dialogue and storytelling and answer one or two dialogue options “correctly” every so often as you read on.Īs with all visual novels, it’s the strength of the storytelling that Norn9 lives and dies on, and I’m happy to say that this reads very well indeed, in a kind of pulp science fiction/ romance sense. Once that story starts in full, a lot of the weirder science fiction elements fade into the background, and the storytelling shifts to focusing on the relationship between the woman that you “control” (you get to pick from three, but as typical for the visual novel medium, you don’t get a great deal of agency over them), and the various men that co-inhabit the giant aircraft.
Once that prologue is finished with, the game shifts perspective and protagonist, and from that point onwards players are following along with the more traditional Otome format, in seeing the world from the eyes of a woman. Norn9 has an odd set up, whereby a child prodigy finds himself pushed back in time, and then, through a confusing sequence of events involving a girl that can’t remember anything, finds himself on a giant, floating airship that is solely inhabited by a small group of world peacekeepers, each with their own special talent, which behaves very much like a magic power. Which is amusing, because its (really very good) music is actually composed by an Australian.īut I digress.
Norn9 var commons pc download portable#
Originally a PlayStation Portable game, this new version looks gorgeous on the PlayStation Vita’s screen, and while I’m not sure if there was a US release of the original, I’m almost certain this is the first time we’ve had the opportunity to play it here in Australia. Norn9 Var Commons is the latest Otome game to land on the PlayStation Vita, and it is a good one. That’s not to say that I would ever criticise Steins Gate, Tears to Tiara or Danganronpa for what they are, and you’d be nuts to think I have a problem with those games, but I do love that through all these Otome games we get to enjoy stories about romance, relationships, and the more simple, human, side of life. There’s also a very different perspective on the world and relationships between characters that we get when the leads are typically women, and the shift away from fanciful science fiction stories, such as in Steins Gate, or violence or fan service-heavy narratives in the likes of Tears to Tiara or Danganronpa is refreshing. As a genre designed primarily for a female audience, these games have a distinctly different tone and atmosphere to otaku visual novels. From being a genre that was almost completely ignored for localisation, much less release on console, to one that has earned decent prominence courtesy of the efforts of Aksys and Idea Factory, it is truly great to see Otome games gaining attention among English-speaking audiences.Īnd it’s really quite understandable why they would resonate.
Norn9 var commons pc download full#
Clark’s full review.Įven more impressively, however, is that a lot of these visual novels are Otome games. Related reading: Another excellent visual novel on the PlayStation Vita, just released, is Code:Realize. Perhaps because they are relatively inexpensive to localise, and that the only people still regularly playing the Vita are fans of Japanese games, we have seen a real surge of the genre on the console. The last couple of months have seen an absolute deluge of visual novels land on the PlayStation Vita.
0 kommentar(er)
