Norn9: Var Commons - A Review

It seems like forever since I've written on this blog. That's due to the fact that I took my time playing Norn9, I think I managed to drag it out for over a month! No, I did not get bored of the game, it's just that I was busy with other things too, very important things like completing this one anime before my Crunchyroll trial ended. Laziness was also a reason.

But today, my Norn9 review is finally here. Be prepared for a very long ramble, like usual.

Norn9 is an otome that I was slightly sceptical of originally. It never seemed like something I didn't want to play, but it was never something that was at the top of my Absolutely Must Purchase Now list. The game released in English almost five years ago, but I only just got it recently because A. I didn't have a PS Vita five years ago, and B. because I was starting to run out of localised otoge I hadn't bought yet.

And the reason why I wasn't that sure about Norn9 was because of the heroines. As I have stated fifty bajillion times on this blog (you are probably all very tired of me saying this!), I am a proud self insert player who sometimes gets frustrated with heroines who have a little bit too much personality. As soon as a boot up a game, there is a 100% chance of me immediately turning off the MC's sprite as well as her voice, in the rare case that she does have one. Dealing with just one fully fleshed out heroine is hard enough, let alone THREE of them. I'm not saying I hate MCs that aren't boring doormats, it's just I take my self inserting very seriously, that's all. So that's why I wasn't super thrilled about Norn9 at first. But of course, I bought it anyway.

It's always the games I'm not sure about that turn out to be the best. And Norn9 somehow turned out to be one of the greatest ones I've ever played. It sits right below Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, my all time favourite otome. And this is my review of said game.

(Am I the only one who pronounces the title as "norn nine" instead of "norn plus nornette" like you're supposed to?)

As I usually do, the first part of this post is going to be a long ramble about the system and the basics, and then I'm going to give you my individual opinions on each route. My mini route reviews were all written as I finished them (to ensure I didn't forget anything!) so some of my thoughts in them may contradict each other, or be repeated early on in the post. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

Norn9 was originally a PSP game, my sources tell me. The version us English players got was the Vita port, given the subtitle "Var Commons". I still don't know what that's supposed to mean. Us Vita people get some extra content, but I'm unaware of exactly which things are new and which aren't. You can tell that it's a PSP port because some of the UI features don't work with the touch screen at all.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, this game works like every other visual novel does. There aren't any mini games (except Norn9 Quest, which I'll mention in more detail later), but one "interesting feature" I noted is timed choices. They're rare, but they exist. You get ten seconds to choose, and if you pick the wrong choice, you'd better hope that you saved eariler because there's no skipping back.

There are still plenty of interesting things apart from the main story. They're good for when you need a break from the romance and want to mess around instead. Playing the game allows you to earn points that can be used to buy extra content (of which there is a lot of!) like after stories, CGs and little comics. The after stories I all enjoyed, and the CGs were all made using the game sprites instead of original artwork, but they were all quite strange so I liked them. My favourite one is down below, but I also liked the one with all the boys wearing hiyoko costumes.

There's also an easter egg game you can play called Norn9 Quest. I'm not sure how it unlocks, because I only found it at the very end. I thought it was going to be some Jetpack Joyride clone, but it's actually this fun retro styled mini game with pixel art sprites of all the main characters! It's cute, it's also funny in places, and I wish I had known how to find it much earlier.

Another absolute genius extra is Norn + Ensemble. Seriously, whoever thought of this is a legend. By reading the main story, you unlock voice clips of each love interest (not the heroines though, for some strange reason), and it lets you play around with them however you please! You can make fake conversations between characters, or you could be immature like me and attempt to turn it into some kind of intense BL drama CD. I basically just burst into laughter spamming the sighing sound effects. I haven't played around with it too much yet, because I wanted to get through the story first.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡ °)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡ °)

Sometimes in the middle of the main routes something called the "Hiyoko Channel" would play. They were basically short little interviews with the characters. I'd look forward to them and got slightly disappointed when one wouldn't come up for a while. I'll talk a bit about the hiyokos later once I stop rambling about the system and get to the actual plot!

Norn9's art is good. 99% of the CGs I liked. The sprites were decent too. Only Senri got a shirtless one, but a lot of the other characters got to take their tops off in CGs, so that's alright. In the gallery there was the feature that let you click on the images to "see the characters thoughts", which I feel is a bit pointless, but at least it gives you extra voice lines.

 The font that Aksys chose for the dialogue I thought was a bit boring at first. It looks like a default font on a word processor, not something for a game! Still, I got used to it. I've seen people complain about their translation for Norn9, but I don't think it's any worse than what they usually do. They did add a LOT of extra lines though, so many that at one point I thought that the game was only partially voiced.

Did I mention the soundtrack? It's wonderful, sometimes it made it sound like I was watching an action film. The opening theme I listened to a few times and then forgot about, it was nothing special, but the ending, now that's what I call music! I loved it so much I listened to it outside of the game, but it's really not the same without the video that goes with it. (Norn9 also has a few character songs that came after the game, I listened to Itsuki's one and it was actually pretty good, but that's a discussion for another day)

How I have I written this much without going into the plot yet?

The story of this game is about a boy called Sorata, who ends up on this flying ship with a bunch of people with superpowers. There was an epilogue that explained how on earth he ended up there, but none of it made any sense to me. There's a bunch of time travel stuff that's going on which is never explained too. The reason why these superpowered people are on this ship is because this robot lady wants them to combine their magic (it's not called that but it might as well be) to literally reset civilisation whenever a big war starts up. 

There are also these birds on the ship called "hiyokos" (the Japanese word for chick), it's never explained what they are or why they're there. Really, they're like Norn9's very own version of the Minions, except less obnoxious and actually cute. The hiyokos were adorable, and I loved their voices. My favourite one was the one labelled as "Hiyoko?" because it looked like more like a penguin instead of a yellow chick like the others. There's still a part of me somewhere that believes they just exist to sell merchandise...

Anyways, let's get back to the plot. The plot is shoved aside to make way for the romance, and nothing really gets explained at all. To be honest, I'm 100% fine with that. I don't really care how well written the story is, as long as I have fun. It's nice to finally play a game that focuses more on the character interactions than some deep layered story. I feel like I'm the only person who prioritises romance over plot though. 

There are some locked routes, however, to prevent readers from being given some details too early. I thought the locked routes for each heroine were all supposed to be "true" routes, but they aren't apparently. There were nine routes in total, a bit more than your average otome. They weren't too lengthy, but because I took my time it took me around three days to get through one. I did run into quite a few bad endings, but I didn't rush back to get the ones I missed. At least the bad endings in Norn9 are actually good, they come with CGs too!

I'm going to go more into the characters when I get to my individual route reviews down below, but I'll talk about the heroines. Even though I had my doubts, I didn't mind having three MCs in the end. Sometimes it got a bit awkward playing as one girl and seeing one of the others dating your favourite character (*cough* Mikoto and Itsuki in Heishi's route), but other than that, it was fine, even for me, the most aggressive self insert player in existence. At first, I was just going to turn every heroine's voice off and overwrite myself onto all of them, but that was a bit difficult after one route, so I decided to only turn off the voice of the girl I was using instead.

I love all three of the heroines, they were all great in their own routes and as supporting characters. It was nice seeing them hanging out with each other and dealing with their own romances in the background while you (or the heroine you chose) are going through yours. I liked their voices, Koharu's was slightly grating at first but I got used to it. Actually, she was my favourite girl to play as. Koharu was so sweet and kind to everybody, I couldn't not hate her. I usually hate naive heroines, but this time I thought it was fine, in fact it made her more interesting. Nanami was decent, but I think she was my least favourite. Mikoto was a pain in the bum to self insert as (except in Natsuhiko's route where I forgot she was even there), because she was the complete opposite of me. However, I love her as a character. Even though she could be quite aggressive, she seemed like she cared a lot about her friends in her own way. Some of her lines were also quite hilarious. 

I'll talk about my favourite love interests down below the next part of this post - my thoughts on each route! It's sort of like a diary of my playthrough. It's just a lot easier writing them that way, because otherwise I'd forget all the details and not be able to discuss anything!

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Itsuki's Route

I completely ignored the game's route recommendation and chose Itsuki first, because he was the non-locked character that appealed to me the most. This was a very good start to the game, I absolutely loved Itsuki and his route. It's the first thing I've read in a while that doesn't focus on some big plot or tragic backstory, this one was all about the relationship drama.

At first I was having trouble self inserting onto Mikoto since she's so different to me, but I got used to it. Her tsundereness was slightly annoying at first, but it actually made the romance development a bit more interesting.

Characters like Itsuki aren't usually my favourites, but I pretty much loved him from the start. His power to manipulate dreams reminds me of something I gave an OC a few years ago. He seems like one of those boring playboy characters at first, but he does have a bit more depth than that. Sometimes he sort of maybe slightly reminded me of myself when he talked about dreams and all that.

 In the middle of the route he turned out to be a slight yandere, trapping Mikoto in some never ending dream. I purposely got this depressing bad ending during that scene by choosing to stay in the dream world forever (something I would probably do if this happened to me in real life). It even came with a CG, so that was cool.

I was glad that some main overarching plot wasn't the focus here. At the end Mikoto and Itsuki just ditched everyone else to live their own life, not really caring about what happened to their friends that much...

Basically, this route I enjoyed. I played it very casually until I was close to the final chapter. It took me almost a whole week to complete, which was a surprise. I actually thought that it was going to be really short and have about four chapters, but no, there were seven! There were plenty of dialogue choices that weren't just "say x" or "say y", there was one set during Itsuki's yandere dream cage that would keep repeating unless you selected the right combination. I kept picking wrong choices at the beginning because I had forgotten all about the "love catch" or whatever it's called, I am so glad that I realised before I got any bad endings.

Kakeru's Route

I wasn't that keen on Kakeru at first, I thought he was going to be a boring angst-free good guy character, but I was pleasantly surprised by his route. In fact, I ended up enjoying it more than I had expected to.

The romance between him and Koharu was decent, although it didn't take ages to develop like it did in Itsuki's route, it seemed that they literally both loved each other from the start. The romantic scenes actually made me feel something, but that might just be because I love Yuki Kaji's voice.

I had heard that Koharu was going to be a more boring, generic heroine, but I enjoyed her here. Yes, she is a bit naive, but that's one of the things I liked about her.

Plotwise, this route was just straight up romance until the very last chapter. It was then that everything went all dramatic and they decided to give us a lot of plot and exposition. The background music made it feel like I was watching some action film. At one point I was pretty sure that they were trying to say that Kakeru was a robot, but they never followed up on it so I suppose I was wrong. I thought that his mind control earring was some kind of computer chip that changed his code, but nope. For some reason the game kept saying that the earring was green, but the sprites and the CGs clearly showed that it was silver! Perhaps it was just an error in translation...

Akito's Route

Akito's route isn't as fresh in my mind now, but it was good. I was interested in him during the common route because he seemed like my type of character, and he did not disappoint. From the beginning I thought it was going to be a childhood friend route, but nope, it's a childhood enemies route! Usually I don't like it when the love interest and the heroine had some kind of fight or something in the past, but I didn't seem to mind it here.

This route actually made me care about Senri a bit more. He's Akito's long lost brother, which I did see coming because I'm pretty sure hinted at it in Kakeru's ending. What is it with otome games and long lost siblings? I'm not complaining (this is one of the many tropes that I absolutely adore!) but I really wonder why it's so commonly used. Actually, maybe it's not that common, because right now I can only think of four games that use it.

I got a bad ending on my first try because I selected to erase Senri's memories, because I thought that was what Akito wanted, but nope, you get a good ending by ignoring what he says. It was like that with Heishi's route too. Usually getting an accidental bad ending isn't a problem, but it was for me because my only save was too recent to be able to go back and get the good ending with. Yes, I know you're supposed to make multiple saves, but I'm trying to save storage space here! (The Vita's really weird because it doesn't let you delete saves without erasing the whole game's data! It's so stupid, but of course they made it that way to sell more overpriced memory cards!)

Anyway, Akito's route is good. Even though he's 100% my type, he turned out to not become one of my favourite characters.

Heishi's Route

Heishi's route had so much drama, I absolutely loved it! The final two chapters were so enjoyable for me! I decided to play the yandere bad ending first, it came with a very creepy CG. It was quite angsty and a bit tragic, but of course I liked it. The choice you make to get it I thought was going to be the one for the good ending, but nope.

The good ending was great too. I like the idea of Heishi and Nanami running away and travelling the world, it's rather romantic. When they were trying to get away and they ran into Masamune I was like "Oh shit, please don't make them come back to the ship!" I thought that he was going to take them back and they were going to learn that running away is a bad idea, then meet Aion and deal with all the Reset nonsense again. I'm glad that didn't happen.

One thing I also loved about this route was Itsuki and Mikoto's part. It almost made me prefer Itsuki as a supporting character rather than a love interest... But honestly, his friendship with Nanami and Heishi is lovely, he's like their big brother and I really like it.

There were some good fluffy scenes in this one too, like the scary maze and the shirtless pool CG. I'm sure they used that CG for Norn9's Amazon listing to sell the game. The funniest part in the entire route was when Heishi said that he loves Nanami so much that he'd even reject Mikoto's naked body for her.

I liked Heishi in the common route, but I think I like him a bit more after this. At first I was like "he's basically just Heisuke from Hakuoki" (they share the same voice actor, I think), but no, they are actually separate characters, despite having the same voice and suspiciously similar names. I'm now wondering how he would work in a relationship with the other heroines. (I'm pretty sure one of the fandiscs pairs the boys up with different girls) I think he'd get along well with Koharu, but I think she'd probably end up letting him go full yandere on her though. I do not see him romancing Mikoto at all, however.

Ron's Route

Ron is a bit of a... problematic person, but I can't really hate him for some reason. I sort of just like how terrible he is. He does a lot of bad things in his route, and I have no idea how Nanami fell in love with him when she hates him 90% of the time, but I still enjoyed it. I wanted it to touch more on Ron's past and why he's trying to stop the Reset and Aion with Natsuhiko, but the route didn't go over that at all!

In the good ending, Ron doesn't even have to face punishment for what he did, because Nanami just erases his memories. That's a bit annoying, but whatever. Ron basically just forgets literally everything, so I suppose we'll never get to learn about his past now... The tragic love ending (which I got before the good one, luckily I had multiple saves so I didn't have to skip through the whole route again!) was actually better, I thought. It had just the right amount of tragedy in it. Also Itsuki was there and it sort of felt like he had romantic feelings for Nanami...

There's not much more I want to say on this one, which is surprising. I suppose Senri was good at the end, he seemed to go through a bit of growth then. It broke my heart a bit to see Kakeru and Koharu together, because I liked him so much in his own route...

Masamune's Route

While Masamune isn't really a character I care too much about, his route was 110% more exciting than the ones I did before it. Instead of just having the characters visit Aion and do the Reset business, they had to take part in some random war. It was something different for once, and I appreciated it.

This route is very much tied to Sakuya's too, except it's some kind of bad ending version of it. When Sakuya died and Koharu decided to use her fire powers to fight that war, I was really convinced that I was heading for some kind of bad ending. I felt pretty bad for poor Mikoto, it's a shame that she had to lose someone she loved while Koharu and Masamune get to be happy together.

Speaking of bad endings, I accidentally got a super hilarious one early on. If you choose to go into Itsuki and Ron's room, they begin flirting with you and this triggers Masamune so much that I'm pretty sure he kills them. I knew that visiting that room probably wouldn't have won me any affection points, but I had no idea that it would end the game. It was worth it for the CG and some more screen time with Itsuki and Ron.

The actual happy ending of this route I liked a lot, but I still don't know why they had to make Nanami erase Koharu's memories. I know if they didn't she would've wanted to stay and protect Mikoto, but surely there could've been some other way to get her to run away with Masamune? I liked that they got to move in with Natsuhiko though, I hadn't played his route yet so I was glad to see more of him.

Masamune felt more like Koharu's big brother than lover, but I still enjoyed their romance. I don't know why they made him get drunk on sugar, it just felt a bit absurd, couldn't they just have made him get drunk on alcohol instead? Getting "drunk" just changed him to Sexual Harassment mode. It sort of felt like they did it to make his character more interesting, because apparently every character needs some kind of bad side to not be boring.

This route had the same problem as Ron's, in which we didn't even learn much about the love interest at all. I probably learnt more about Natsuhiko and Setsu than we did Masamune! I have so many questions about him. Why does he seem to know Aion personally? Why does he have contact with The World? How did he grow up? Where is he from? What are his hobbies? I know literally NOTHING about him!

This route was the first time I actually got to see Setsu properly, and I actually liked him quite a bit. He's another one of those side characters who are way too interesting to not have a route. Let's pray that he at least has his own extra story in one of the fandiscs....

Senri's Route

Although Senri is probably the most relatable character in this entire game, I didn't care for him at all at the beginning. After Akito's route I began to be a bit more interested in him, however. The younger shota type characters are not my thing 90% of the time, but Senri's route was a pleasant surprise.

He had a lot of character growth and his relationship with Koharu was good. I thought they were going to reveal that Akito was his brother, but oh well. Perhaps the writers didn't want us to have to read through it all twice.

When Koharu ended up going off with Kakeru's dad (I think his name is Shiro?), I thought I was heading into a bad ending. Actually, I never ran into any bad endings this time. Perhaps I'll go back and do them at a later date. I expected the plot to be just full of fluff, but nope, Koharu ends up having to fight in a war and Senri has to rescue her. When the game revealed Shiro's master plan (I don't remember exactly what it was), it reminded me a little bit of something from Code: Realize, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I can't really explain.

Even though I enjoyed this route quite a bit, I'm running out of things to say about it. Oh yeah, the CGs were super pretty. That one with Senri and Koharu flying in the sky might actually be my favourite one in the entire game.

This was the final time I got to play as Koharu (not counting the after stories, of course), and I wish I could've learnt more about her. Yes, I know as a self insert player, I like my heroines to be blank, but I was still curious. All we've learnt is that she lived alone and the Traveller visited her a bit and she accidentally caused some people to be scared of her powers, calling her a monster. (This also reminds me of Code: Realize!) Who are her parents? Why is she living alone? How did she even look after herself if she was by herself for her whole life????? Norn9 as a whole is just leaving me with so many questions.

(This is probably the prettiest CG in the entire game)

Sakuya's Route

It was much harder for me to self insert into this one, but of course I still did it anyway. In every other route I'd seen Mikoto and Sakuya together so much that I began to ship them. Actually, I would consider replaying this one with the heroine's voice and sprites turned on, which is something I'd never thought I'd say.

Even though I still don't care any more about Sakuya than I did before, his route was great. The romance between them was super interesting, the fact that they couldn't love each other because it could potentially kill Sakuya added a lot of angst that I appreciated. It was nice that it didn't just develop the love interest, but the heroine too. I know it usually sounds like I'm an annoying self inserter who likes to wipe all traces of the MC out of existence when I play, but I still do enjoy it when the heroines have a bit of depth to them.

The scene where Mikoto destroys (I should probably use another word for this but I can't think of one) Natsuhiko was hilarious to me for some reason. I think if it wasn't voice acted, it wouldn't have had as much of an impact.

One thing that I didn't think was that great was the ending. It felt like it was missing something, but I'm not entirely sure what. I think it's because the other endings show the MC and her man going off and living happily together, but Sakuya's isn't that at all. The final kiss CG was a bit rubbish too, their lips were hardly touching! A few of the other routes had post credits scenes, and I think Sakuya's route really needed one. I have no idea why they didn't just give them to every single route instead of only to a few.

I'm just glad that this route wasn't as boring as I thought it would be.

Natsuhiko's Route

I wanted to romance Natsuhiko first, because of his seiyuu and his design. However, it was locked, so in the end I just decided to leave it until last. That was probably the best thing to do because it was such an excellent conclusion for everything. This route was my favourite one in the entire game. It's much more plot focused and has less of the mindless fluff that the others have, but I still adored it.

I liked pretty much everything about Natsuhiko and his route. He's tied with Itsuki as my best boys in this game. The writers used the amnesia trope just like they did with Ron, but I didn't mind. I know giving characters amnesia is super overused, but I still enjoy it. In this route I was very scared that Natsuhiko's memory loss was going to be permanent, but luckily it wasn't.

My personal favourite scenes in this one was the first chapter where Mikoto draws this awful picture of Natsuhiko and goes around showing it to everyone, the bit where Ron pushes our heroine off the ship (the way he did it was just hilarious to me), whenever Natsuhiko and Mikoto looked at the stars, and of course all of the romantic bits. I pretty much just listed the entire route here. That robotic hiyoko that was made for our heroine was also super cute. Sorata actually had some screentime with our heroine, which I liked, because in most other routes he was just off doing his own thing and you never saw him.

Before playing this game, I looked at the cover and thought that Natsuhiko was going to be this scientist bloke who lived on the ship who was going to be a lot older than everybody else. During the common route, when Sorata was going around meeting everybody, I was thinking "when's the scientist bloke going to show up?"

I also originally thought that he was going to be much more of a tsundere, but he's really not like that at all. He's exactly my type of love interest. His reasons for wanting to kill the espers and stop the Reset are also deeper than I expected. Waiting for almost the entire game before romancing him was so hard, but it was certainly worth it.

This route I enjoyed so much that it seemed to go by so fast. I'd start another chapter and it felt like it was over five minutes later. At the end I had a very big smile on my face, which is quite rare for me. Some things I wish it had explained were the time travel, as well as how Ron and Setsu met Natsuhiko. I'm so used to otome games dedicated loads of time to long tragic backstory flashbacks (Code: Realize in particular made every route have what felt like almost half an hour of backstory explanation), but Norn9 doesn't seem to focus on that at all. I expect they'll do something like that in the fandiscs, however.

In conclusion, this route was amazing, a ten out of ten from me. Definitely would play again.

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As for the love interests, my personal favourite was Itsuki, with Natsuhiko as a close second. Itsuki is special because he was my first route, but I love his personality too. His powers remind me of something I gave an OC ages ago, actually. In his route, he was awesome. Usually I'm more into the strong ones with tragic backstories, but Itsuki's flirtiness got to me somehow. His banter with the other characters was excellent, and even in other people's routes he stood out. I liked him just as much as a supporting friend as I did a love interest. One route in particular he was great in was Heishi's. 

Natsuhiko I 've talked about enough, so I won't repeat what I literally just said up there. My third favourite character was Ron, because everything about him was just hilarious to me. I didn't dislike anybody really, and I can't even pick a least favourite character.

I just love Norn9 so much. I could probably praise it for hours. It has exactly what I want in an otome, great characters, a focus on the romance, and plenty of content to explore! There are two fandiscs after this to play, but they're probably super expensive to import. The Japanese can't be that difficult in them, because with this first game I could understand a lot of the dialogue without reading the English translations. Perhaps I'll get round to buying them one day.

I'm also curious about the anime, even though it looks like a rehash of the game's plot with strange looking animation. Otome anime adaptations I usually enjoy so I might binge it one day and review it for this blog.

If you haven't played Norn9 yet, I obviously would recommend it! The localised version isn't that expensive to buy. There's also a Switch port, but I have no idea if Aksys will ever release it over here. Norn9 seems super popular in Japan, but I hardly ever see people in the English-speaking otome bubble talk about it! It doesn't get as much spotlight as other games, which is sad. I think it's just because a lot of fans in the West seem to prefer games with heavy plots and less romance. There must be some more of us romance preferring self inserters hiding somewhere!

Hopefully you enjoyed today's extremely long post. Now I'm going to take a break from otome... until my next game comes in the post.

Goodbye for now!




Grammarly is telling me that my engagement in this post was "a bit bland". What's that even supposed to mean???