Natsu no Shuusoku (夏ノ終熄) Review

Hey! Friend, have you had COVID? Are you worried about long COVID? Are you scared of getting quarantined?

By now it’s been confirmed over and over that COVID is a “self-limiting disease” — which basically means there’s no silver bullet against the virus, and all you can do is boost your immune system and tough it out. But nobody ever tells you how to boost your immune system, or what counts as a way to significantly boost it.

But one eroge recently gave a clear answer.

Natsu no Shuusoku (夏ノ終熄) is a CUBE release that came out of nowhere. My guess is the opportunists at CUBE caught wind of a new money-printing scheme: the illustrator U35. Ever since that “youth drama about playing basketball in the rain,” every visual novel he’s touched has been drenched in adolescent hormones. Whether it’s the later “Memories Off” entries or the various “spiritual successors,” the girls U35 draws always have this inexplicably familiar, welcoming feel to them.

So CUBE brought in U35, paired her with the jack-of-all-trades writer Kazuki Fumi, and dug up the long-dormant voice actress Shizuka Ito, all in an attempt to craft a brand-new “literary-style little romance piece” and make a quick buck on the cheap.

So what story does this game actually tell?

The game’s heroine, Mio, fed up with how her life has been going, runs away from home and decides to head for a deserted mountain village to end it all. There she meets the protagonist, who lives alone in a mountain hollow, and he takes her in. The two start living together, and bit by bit she’s moved by his upbeat, forward-looking spirit and gives up on the idea of killing herself.

It’s actually a pretty simple story, and it does a good job of highlighting the current state of Japanese society. Most young people who get bullied at school or at work, unable to bear it, end up choosing to run away or end their own lives—one of the reasons Japan’s suicide rate stays so stubbornly high.

But the most insane part of this game is that it has two endings. In the normal ending, the heroine suddenly catches some unknown disease — fever, sore throat, weakness, trouble breathing — and eventually dies because there’s no medical care to speak of out in the sticks. The protagonist catches it too, one after the other. What this “unknown disease” actually is never gets explained in-game; all you get is that news in Japan and worldwide keeps reporting it spreading, impossible to contain, causing a pandemic…

Actually, I figure I don’t even need to say what this “unknown disease” is—everyone already knows…

Of course, the game has another ending. If you choose to have the heroine tag along with the protagonist on more hunts during the mid-game, eat some wild game, and especially eat a lot of meat… the two will still get infected one after another and show symptoms, but they’ll recover quickly…

That’s when I finally got what the game was going for.

Remember what Shanghai’s “Doctor Zhang” was saying two years ago? To fight COVID you need to eat more meat and less congee. Congee is all carbs, meat is protein, and only a massive protein intake can boost your immune system so your body can beat the virus on its own…

I didn’t expect this game to double as a science lesson, though the so-called “lesson” feels pretty jarring inside the game itself. That jarring quality even makes the second half feel like it breaks character a bit—after all, the idea that simply eating a little more meat can defy fate and change your destiny is, to a lot of people, kind of hard to swallow.

The title “夏ノ終熄” was probably meant to signal a tragedy from the start — the end of summer, where what goes out isn’t just the summer fireworks but also the lives of two young people with no one but each other.

For a moment I genuinely couldn’t tell which of the game’s two endings was supposed to be the canonical one. All I can say is that the biggest takeaway from this game is:

The wonder drug for treating COVID is “eat more meat.”