by Stephen DeckAlso available on Windows
Review written by Stephen Deck; originally published 08/28/2018 on Teacher by Day, Gamer by Night
Nurse Love Addiction is basically the perfect visual novel for me (as far as what would actually make it onto a console), and I mean that in all of the creep ways you’re probably thinking. Post-secondary students at a nursing school in a story filled with lesbian pseudo-incest (basically the whole “step-sister” trope) and a surprisingly interesting plot albeit one that’s a bit slow to get started. Best of all is that there are nine endings, so for super ecchi lords like me, there’s enough here to keep you busy for a decent little while.
The basic story of Nurse Love Addiction is that two sisters enroll at a nursing school together for reasons that I can only describe as “anime af.” The older sister enrolled because she wrote in a book “I want to be a nurse when I grow up!” when she was a little kid and spend the rest of her life thinking “Well, I wanted to do it when I was a kid, and I don’t want to do anything now, so I guess I’ll do this!” The younger sister enrolls because she seems hellbent on following the older sister everywhere for the rest of her life. I’m not kidding. When they’re there, they meet two particularly bright personalities, a rich girl with a hoity-toity attitude that wouldn’t be out of place for a family with a nine-digit income and her girlfriend, a blunt-to-a-fault tomboy from a poor family and a motorcycle.
What adds the bit of plot point foreshadowed early on is that your main character has amnesia. As a kid, she at some point hit her head and lost her entire memory. Something something plot devices. I won’t say anything more than that because it is a pretty cool story once it gets going, and with the different branches that it can take based on what waifu you pick. Each of the game’s five core characters has a unique and interesting personality, and while they do hit the big anime tropes – you’ve got your tsundere, you’ve got your borderline yandere, etc – the characters themselves are pretty well written. Unfortunately, the game crashed on me a couple of times leading to a couple hours’ worth being lost between the crashes.
Being a visual novel, there aren’t any moving 3D character models to animate, so some of my pet peeves like hair clipping through shoulders are avoided. As a result, the 2D character images are absolutely fantastic, and the voice acting – all in Japanese, by the way – is great. My only real gripe with the visuals is that there aren’t many backgrounds, and for a visual novel that took me around 25 hours to get through, it would have been nice to see a little bit of variety in the image backdrops. Other than that, it looks great. Unfortunately, it does suffer from a bit of the game fatigue problem that a lot of Shin Megami Tensei games have with me – it just lasts too long. It’s a really good story with great characters, but it just lasts longer than it probably ought to.
Nurse Love Addiction is a very enjoyable visual novel and one of the few good ones that I’ve played on Vita. It gets a bit tedious and drags on a bit longer than it should, but it’s still a really enjoyable story, and since it’s on a handheld that you can just put in sleep mode and then pick up whenever you have five or ten minutes here or there, it’s a perfect fit. It’s one of the best pooping games I’ve ever played on Vita. It’s not without its flaws, though. I had some crashes, and as I said, it wears out its welcome. I absolutely recommend giving it a download if you see it on sale, though. I wouldn’t dish out the money for the Limited Run release like I did unless you collect LRG releases (like I do) or just LOVE ecchi VNs (like I do), but definitely give it a download.
