Nurse Love Addiction: The route report

Nurse Love Addiction offers four love interests and nine endings. I have no qualms about admitting that I resorted to an FAQ to land all the endings, and for good reasons: unlike its fellows romantic VNs Norn9 and Amnesia:Memories, NLA doesn't provide any clue to help the player figure out if they're on the right track. On top of that, the relevant dialogue choices are often quite random, and you cannot really figure out the 'right' answer by yourself despite all the patient character development present in the game. Last but not least, most of the bad endings (and some of the good ones as well, for that matter) come completely out of left field and clash vigorously with the story's overall sweet and heartwarming tone, leaving you gaping at the screen in sheer incredulity. Having said that, on with the show! (Giant SPOILERS included!)

Itsuki: My least favourite route by a very long shot. On top of disliking Itsuki's design, I was left totally cold by her character (non)development and relationship with Asuka. We're basically dealing with two people that are initially in love with someone else rather than with each other, and it takes an awful lot of crafty storytelling to make such a setting work — storytelling that NLA sadly doesn't display. Itsuki and Asuka find themselves in love with each other out of the blue, and they don't even seem to enjoy it that much — in fact, they seem rather reluctant to be with each other, which certainly doesn't encourage the player to root for them. The big reveal about Itsuki posing as a bold and brash girl when she's actually a shy introvert was interesting; however, the writers made a serious disservice to her and to her story by not letting her switch back to her initial personality when alone with Asuka, which would have made her character much more nuanced and touching. Instead, she keeps her bratty facade on at all times, and comes across as utterly unconvincing in the process: as a reader, I simply cannot believe for a second that she managed to overhaul her own personality so thoroughly and maintain that change for ten-or-so years. And if she does switch back at times, well, she's just insincere for not doing it in front of Asuka. At the end of the day, Itsuki is a painfully one-dimensional and superficial character, and her talking mannerisms (i.e. "uso da yo" repeated ad nauseam) and clichéd otaku-ish hobbies really don't help her case. Another thing that doesn't help her route at all is her bad ending, which is so ridiculously improbable that you might miss what's actually happening here at first (I sure as heck did). Prior to this event, there is absolutely nothing in the story that hints at the fact that Asuka could become a cannibal-meets-necrophile upon losing her lover, and the tone shift is so brutal that it kinda fails to register and leaves the player more incredulous than shocked.

Sakuya: As the game's resident 'hime', Sakuya gets a route that fits her personality to a T: mysterious, dramatic and romantic, with a super-duper plot twist to crown things. This could have been one of the best routes, if not for the story's excessive reliance on the whole 'destiny' theme. The premise goes as such: Sakuya and Asuka were in love with each other as kids; and that love, far from being your usual puppy love, was a fated romance bound to transcend time and space. We're dealing with the most overused romantic cliché of them all here; and unfortunately, NLA doesn't manage to make the most of it. The main issue is that interactions between Sakuya and Asuka at the nursing school are few and far between; and when said interactions occur, they are usually cold and superficial. Because of that, the game relies overly on Sakuya and Asuka's shared past to craft a romantic vibe between them; but since we, the player, never get to see that shared past with our own eyes, we just cannot get involved and feel the love. This is a classic case of telling instead of showing, and it makes the route quite flat and unbelievable. To make matters worse, the writers pushed the 'fate' thing as far as they could — up until the point where it becomes utterly grotesque. Sakuya's route is the only one in which the bad ending is actually better than the good ending: having Asuka hold a mariage ceremony on the hospital roof with a dying (or freshly dead) Sakuya is just a thousand times more romantic and touching than seeing Sakuya reincarnate as Kyoko's and Asuka's daughter and state in no uncertain terms that she's gonna make a pass at Asuka as soon as she's sexually mature, which makes Asuka giggle in delight. Seriously, game? You wanted to shove in your fated love story so much that you had to dabble in incest? And sure, maybe that new Sakuya is genetically related to Kyoko rather than to Asuka; but the whole thing is vomit-inducing nonetheless.

Kaede: This is by far the most grounded route of the bunch, a perfectly normal love story involving normal people doing normal things; and it's also the only romantic route that doesn't mention Asuka's past at the Center at all. Since there is no pre-existing relationship between Kaede and Asuka, the game has to focus on the stakes of their current interactions; the result is an engrossing and subtle piece of story that deals with the perils of romances involving an age gap. As a young and inexperienced girl, Asuka dates Kaede out of admiration and lust, and focuses solely on the entertaining aspects of their relationship rather than on Kaede as a person; Kaede, on the other hand, is a full-grown woman with romantic experience that longs for a deeper and more serious relationship and is not quite sure that Asuka can provide it. From that situation emerges the only remotely predictable crossroad in the entire game: it either leads to the good ending, where Kaede and Asuka end up together, or to the bad ending, where Kaede goes back to her lover yet keeps bonking Asuka on the side. Not giving the letter back to Kaede confirms that Asuka is indeed just an immature brat with no morals who only cares about her own happiness, and leads Kaede straight back into the arms of her former lover — and the player straight into the arms of the bad ending. On the other hand, giving the letter back to Kaede shows that Asuka cares about Kaede's happiness first and foremost and is mature enough to renounce her if need be; such a display of selflessness melts Kaede's heart and secures the good ending. If I had to point a flaw in that route, it would be its overall mundanity and occasional corniness: this is a route that's more likely to induce yawns and embarrassed giggles than to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Nao: Lovely Nao-chan was my favourite character by far, both in terms of looks and personality. I had thus a mighty big bias towards her route; and well, I was not disappointed. Nao's and Asuka's love story is by far the deepest and most fleshed-out of the bunch: not only do Nao and Asuka have the greatest amount of interactions, but their romance starts in a really subtle way — little touches that feel more erotic than they should, double entendres that sound a tad too serious, declarations of love that are a little too intense for sisterly love, and so on. You can really feel the love between those two, and this is the only route that actually made my heart flutter and made me root for the pair in earnest. It's also nice to get a plausible explanation for Asuka's weird personality change over the years: although it's never fully confirmed, we can infer that Nao's repeated tampering with Asuka's memories also messed up Asuka's personality, transforming her into the scatterbrained girl she is nowadays. Nao's constant dotting on Asuka is motivated by a mix of intense love for her sister and gnawing guilt over what she did to her; and those conflicting emotional forces get to shine in the good and bad ending respectively. Not getting Asuka's forgiveness and redonning the role of the younger sister who takes guidance from the older one allows Nao to atone for her sins and let go of her guilt, ultimately leading to a fulfilling relationship with Asuka. On the other hand, being forgiven by Asuka increases her guilt so much that she starts somatising and cannot physically stand to be near Asuka; this leads to the most twisted outcome of them all, in which Asuka has to beat Nao repeatedly in order to quell Nao's extreme guilt and self-hatred. The only flaw I could find in Nao's route was the spoilery quality of the whole romance: since it's obvious that the game is not going to show genuine incest on screen, we can guess pretty much right from the start that Nao and Asuka are not biological sisters. Of course, this also generates a modicum of suspense, so maybe it's not that much of a flaw after all.

Asuka: Miss Jellyfish has her own dedicated 'owner of a lonely heart' route, which happens if you fail to romance anyone. It shows Asuka dutifully pursuing her daily life and her studies; upon graduating, she reflects on the past three years and gets a bittersweet feeling, commenting on the fact that she didn't "find her star". As uneventful as it is, this route is actually one of my favourites: it maintains the sweet, heartwarming and comforting vibe of the story all the way through and spares us all the gruesome stuff present in the other routes. It's kinda refreshing to experience Asuka as a perfectly normal girl, with no traumatizing past or twisted relationships to worry about; in a way, that somewhat dull ending is a perfectly happy one.

NLA apparently has no true route; however, I fancy thinking that Nao's route is the true route in disguise, if only because of the intensity of their love for each other. Nao's relationship with Asuka is ten times the 'fated love' Asuka's relationship with Sakuya ever could be, with them meeting as children and ending up in the same family without ever being separated since. Also, look at the picture above: Nao and Asuka are the same size and basically glued to each other, while the other girls' heads are bigger and kinda float in the background, like larger-than-life fantasies that have no real chance of ever becoming true. If we want to go really wild, we can postulate that Nao only manages to rescue Asuka from Kyoko's stabbing in her own route thanks to the strengthening of their love bond, and fails to do so in other routes because of the converse weakening of said bond; consequently, all routes bar Nao's are just the twisted dreams of an Asuka stuck in a coma. Of course, it's probably just my own fondness for Nao speaking; but in the absence of any officially anointed true route, I can let my imagination run the show. And these, dear fellow gamers, are my final words about Nurse Love Addiction. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!