VN Talk: Norn9: Var Commons - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS Vita
Release: 2015

Norn9: Var Commons is unusually ambitious. As an otome game it features three protagonists, nine fully built out love interests with accompanying storylines, a frame story involving a time displaced twelve-year-old, a world that is not what it seems, multiple enemies with differing agendas, and there's a hidden traitor among the team.

That's a lot to juggle, and I wouldn't say it entirely succeeds in what it was trying to do, but it definitely tried. I think the problem is that it's by design an otome and performed that part of its job extremely well, but at the expense of fully explaining its worldbuilding and the frame story that should have tied together the reason all the events in the game happened in the first place.

Having good worldbuilding and being a good otome are not mutually exclusive, but I think Norn9 was juggling so much with nine very different routes that it wasn't possible to give a reasonable amount of attention to anything that wasn't directly part of a romance plot, even with the addition of a non-route affiliated epilogue. So we learn a lot about Natsuhiko, who is the primary attacker on the ship, because he's a love interest. However, most of Shiro Yuiga's personal story comes from an info dump in the epilogue because he's not a love interest, despite the fact his actions have a direct impact on multiple routes and he is in fact the one who enabled the world that currently exists.

When we finally learn Shiro Yuiga's story and what he's after, it seems like he's supposed to be a tragic maniac, but the emotion just isn't there because we aren't given the chance to see his pain and the life he lost. It's just a line of narration for later dialogue to react to. Worse, despite being the closest thing to a universal enemy across multiple routes, his story never feels like it's properly resolved.

On the face of it, Norn9 is about twelve people in the year 1919 on a flying ship called the Norn, who are on a journey to see The World, which is sort of an all-encompassing entity that maintains peace throughout the world. Most of those on board are espers with unique psychic powers who expect that The World will send them out to various countries as goodwill ambassadors after arrival. This premise serves as a romantic complication on multiple routes since there's an underlying expectation that the pair will be separated at the end of their journey.

However, their journey is actually for an entirely different reason, one that ultimately ties into the frame story that sends Sorata Suzuhara from the year 2015 to the year 1919. Though the vast majority of the game is spent with teenagers and young adults sorting through various romantic attractions, it seems like Norn9 also wanted to be a commentary on humanity's propensity for warfare, and this is where the game starts to fall down.

The surprise reveal when the espers finally meet Aion, the AI known as The World, is that the world was devastated by war in the mid 21st century. In 2085, it was so bad that a group of scientists came together with a plan to literally reset the world through Aion. Following the Reset, humanity's knowledge and technology was rolled back and war disappeared.

Since then, every time things begin to get bad, Aion creates a group of espers (no one's born with the ability, they're just gifted one day in childhood) and when they come of age she gathers them on a journey to meet her. Based on their personal experiences from growing up different, the espers then decide whether the world needs another Reset. Aion tells our current espers that being called does not mean a Reset is mandatory. Just over half the time she assembled a group of espers, they voted against it.

This also means that even though the characters think this is the year 1919, it's actually 8075 because there have been three Resets thus far. Sorata, though he thought he's from 2015, is from the Third Cycle and has been in cryosleep for the past two thousand years. So while he's definitely a kid out of time, there was no time travel involved. He took the long way.

Norn9 peppers about half of its routes with signs of war and conflict. Guns are largely unknown to the espers, but become highly visible on any of the routes where the Norn visits a battleground. The fact that they keep coming back despite all the Resets seems to be a comment on warfare being an inevitable part of human nature.

But there is one thing that plays against that, and it's Shiro Yuiga's involvement. He's the scientist who created Aion, and it seems that in every cycle he pops up again somehow in a synthetic body and turns into a weapons merchant to accelerate warfare in an attempt to recreate a disastrous event in the original 2065.

As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't take the time to really explain Shiro Yuiga's motivations or bother with the details of how he's still around. He appears to have uploaded his mind and body hops to different shells as needed, but that doesn't explain why it takes him thousands of years to turn into a wrecking ball large enough to warrant a Reset.

It's not bad that Norn9 wanted to tackle these kinds of themes while also being a sci-fi romance game, but it didn't leave itself the room to do so. And adequately explaining Sorata's place in all this takes too much time for too little payoff.

Suffice to say, I feel like the frame story primarily exists to set up the fact that this 1919 Earth is supposed to be the world Sorata (and thus the player) knows, but for some strange reason it's not. That way the fact it's actually the year 8075 can be a surprise at the end. But for 90% of the story it doesn't matter. The frame story could have been removed, and with some nips/tucks made to Shiro Yuiga's backstory, Norn9 could have been a lot tighter and focused on the personal stories of the espers and their journey, which is what it does best.

It isn't as though the espers have the easiest time of it. Even without worrying about never ending cycles of war, they're dealing with more immediate concerns for most of the game.

Despite the Norn's gargantuan size (it has three levels and a roof, with enough space for a forest and a field to grow crops to feed everyone on their journey), it has only nine rooms for passengers, leading to the suspicion that it was intended for nine people, even though there twelve people on board. Sorata, being time displaced and a non-esper, is an obvious extra, and seeing as he's far from home, the group is largely okay with taking him on, but aside from that, there are possibly two other people on board who shouldn't be here.

This suspicion grows with the attacks on their ship. Someone on the outside is trying to kill them, and early in the game, a large hole is blown open in the ship's hull. Due to the lack of debris inside the ship, the espers come to the conclusion that there is a traitor on board, and the explosion was from the inside out.

This kicks off the game's route selection. To make sure the traitor is not able to act independently, Kakeru suggests everyone pair off and stay with their partners and the player's chosen heroine is allowed to choose who she wants to be with or be the odd person out (in Mikoto's case, since her team only has three people). The heroine's partner will become her love interest for that route.

As a result, the common route is fairly short, both the prologue to the game itself and the part in common for a particular heroine. This is what allows the game to manage nine routes without being drastically longer than its contemporaries in the Otomate stable. Choices made post-partner selection are mostly to increase affection to earn a particular character's happy ending.

Because there are three protagonists, this also removes the blank slate syndrome that happens in some games. Koharu, Mikoto, and Nanami are each distinct from each other, and while Koharu matches the mold of the all-loving otome protagonist who just wants everyone to be friends, Mikoto and Nanami are cut from a different cloth. Mikoto is assertive and demanding (both of herself and others) and Nanami is a self-loathing, soft-spoken girl who doesn't really care what other people think about her.

Arguably, because they are different, there are some romances that only work because of who they are. The push and pull dynamics during Sakuya and Itsuki's routes in particular, would be difficult to replicate without a heroine as outspoken as Mikoto.

All three protagonists are voiced, and unlike my problems with Beniyuri in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, I was very comfortable with their performances and never had any moments where my internal reading clashed with the audio. I think it helped that they are intended to be distinct characters rather than self-inserts, because they are participating in every route of the game even if they are not the player's currently chosen protagonist.

With nine routes to go through it seems like the game could get pretty tedious, but it's aided by a couple features. One that I'm surprised more visual novels don't use is a flat out skip button when you're about to see the same chunk of text you already saw on a different playthrough. While not everything repeatable is skippable, this lets the player ditch most of the prologue, the shared opening section of the dream sequence (which is the same on every route it appears), and Aion's infodump on the Reset (which happens on slightly less than half the routes).

The other thing is that each route is fairly different, essentially becoming its own timeline. For instance, though Ron is always the traitor, he's never revealed the same way. Sometimes he's found out halfway through the story. Sometimes he makes it all the way up to Aion. He's still the same character in actions and behavior. It's that the circumstances have changed. The result is that even though the player knows Ron's the traitor, it's still not possible to predict when he'll make a move or what it will be on any given route. (In fact, he might end up not doing anything at all.)

Normally I'd be annoyed when a game diverges too much on different routes (like for some reason Ron only goes for Kakeru's earring on two routes when he should be doing that all the time), but this one seems to work for me; perhaps because of its multiple heroines. It's not just one person making choices, but three, and the player is only in control of one of them.

Who the other two heroines choose to pair off with will change from route to route. They have their preferences (Mikoto and Koharu pair off with Sakuya and Kakeru more frequently than others), but the element of mixing and matching with the other girls has a tendency to change character dynamics and as well as which characters are more likely to interact on a given route. This helps keep things fresh.

I originally wanted to play through knocking out all three love interests per protagonist so I could see a particular girl's story in an unbroken chunk, but the game is not designed that way. Though you can, the game recommends which four of the nine routes you should do first. And it turns out that the girls themselves (unfortunately) don't have a comprehensive story that forms after going through all three of their routes, so jumping between protagonists doesn't cost you anything.

So I ended up bouncing between all three girls. I played through in the order Kakeru > Sakuya > Heishi > Senri > Akito > Itsuki > Masamune > Ron > Natsuhiko, specifically putting Ron and Natsuhiko last due to being the traitor and the attacker. The rest were broken up so I could alternate between heroines while doing the four recommended routes (for first time playthroughs) first, the two non-recommended routes second, and the three locked routes last.

I enjoyed my playthrough order, but due to the differing amounts of story reveals in the game, I think the following order works if you want to work from least spoilers to most: Heishi > Senri > Kakeru or Sakuya > Itsuki > Akito or Masamune > Ron > Natsuhiko, if you avoid the bad endings, which sometimes spoil more than the happy ones. Natsuhiko's route is not necessarily more spoilery than Ron's, but I think he's a better lead-in to the true ending due to Sorata playing a more prominent role than he usually does, and Sorata's epilogue is the true end.

That said, it can still be rewarding playing a little out of spoiler order. Even on early routes, it's possible to see reactions from more spoilery characters that only mean something after you've played their route, which is a nice touch. For instance, Akito always has a non-verbal reaction to seeing Aion's male adult form, but it's not possible to understand why until seeing his route.

For commentary purposes, I'm going to group each heroine and her love interests into three separate entries when I do my deep dive in future posts. Next week will be Koharu!