Inochi no Spare I was born for you (生命のスペア I was born for you) Review

Tearjerker stories, everyone thinks they’re so moving. So the moment you say tearjerker, naturally someone’s gotta die.

There are a thousand ways to kill someone off, but the handiest is terminal illness. Blaming it on terminal illness is super convenient—everyone can just curse how unfair the heavens are.

So of course visual novels use terminal illness too. One fairly well-known one was Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu..

What did I think of that game… one word: trash.

So the same staff went and made a new one, still about terminal illness: Inochi no Spare I was born for you.

What did I think of this one… still trash.

Actually, it’s even worse than the last one…

The setup in Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu. was that the heroine had cancer, but in Inochi no Spare the heroine has… Sakura-mark disease.

What’s “Sakura-mark disease”? Basically, a cherry blossom mark appears on your chest, then the mark spreads, your heart randomly explodes, and eventually you inexplicably die. You can think of it as sudden heart failure, the kind you can’t save. Well, it’s not completely hopeless—you can do a heart transplant.

So the heroine is the protagonist’s good friend, she’s got Sakura-mark disease, and to save her, her family made a test-tube baby—her little sister—so they can transplant the sister’s heart into the older sister and let her live.

That’s what the subtitle “I was born for you” means: the little sister lives for the older sister, was created for the sake of the older sister’s heart transplant, and the older sister isn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of her sister dying for her. All very melancholic and sorrowful—feeling moved yet?

Except the premise itself is already broken, isn’t it???

Heart transplant is an extremely difficult surgery, and the success rate isn’t exactly high to begin with. Plus… a basic requirement for heart transplant is that the donor must at least be brain-dead!

Your sister is still alive, and you’re gonna rip out her heart?

Are you doing live organ harvesting?

Aren’t you afraid the Falun Gong crowd will show up protesting outside a hot pot restaurant in Canada?

And even though the heroine’s disease is clearly heart-related, she never gets a single checkup or takes any medication throughout the entire game. She’s constantly saying she’s gonna die, doesn’t want her sister to die for her, while the sister keeps insisting the older sister can’t die—if anyone dies it should be her, she’ll offer her heart to her sister (left hand on hammer, right hand behind back), and the two sisters even get into arguments. Meanwhile I’m sitting there completely baffled.

No other way to put it—this game’s medical setting is just too absurd. I couldn’t get into the story at all.

First off, the heroine has several sudden attacks of severe heart pain.

Why does she bite her own tongue when it hurts? Because the pain is unbearable? Why does her heart randomly hurt with no ECG monitoring in place? Japan already has wireless mobile ECG devices, doesn’t it? Why does she never go for checkups? No doctor gives any advice? Are you even a terminal patient? And most importantly:

Why the hell do you, a terminal patient who claims you’re about to kick the bucket any second, look healthier than me?

Yeah, I thought the chatterbox heroine from Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu. who had cancer but was cheerful every day and just wouldn’t die was already my limit. But this game’s heroine broke that limit—she talks even more… and her daily life is more eventful than mine. School, flirting with guys, gaming, family dinners, cherry blossom viewing, picnics—she’s having a blast! And she’s physically doing all of it. Sure, her heart cramps up occasionally, but no big deal! She recovers her HP instantly after each episode.

Oh right, and there’s sex too!

Sure, the game does mention that when Sakura-mark disease isn’t acting up, patients are just like normal people. But something still feels off, you know?

Isn’t it missing that “watching the other person’s flame of life slowly flicker out” kind of sadness? You can’t have the heroine bouncing around the whole time and then one day just go “gah~~” and keel over like Fan Wei, right? Way too abrupt!

And yet the game is exactly that abrupt!!

The protagonist gets tangled up with the heroine from the start, she asks him to be her “fake boyfriend,” and of course it turns real. Then in the second half, the game reveals the protagonist also has Sakura-mark disease and had an older brother who died from it. His family situation is a mess too—he’s got a past of being “forced to have his heart harvested,” his father is out chasing women and whatnot…

Whatever, none of that matters. The later story is just the heroine and her sister going back and forth—the heroine wants to die, the sister doesn’t want her to die, they cry at each other, and finally the heroine chooses to die together with the protagonist. Two Sakura-mark disease patients cough up blood and die under the cherry tree, and the sister says she’ll live on for the both of them…

Honestly, it feels like the game was trying to make me cry in the later parts. But every time I remember that stupid-ass Sakura-mark disease setup, I just can’t take the story seriously. I fall back into that dark loop of “why isn’t the heroine dead yet”… because she’s just so damn energetic. I can’t see a single sign of sorrow—except for the occasional heart cramp that quickly goes back to normal. By the time she’s actually dying, I still expected her to bounce back…

All in all, this game’s setting is fundamentally broken, and I’ll say it straight:

The writer has basically zero medical knowledge, and that directly makes the story itself ridiculous. If the foundation is crooked, there’s no point talking about the rest.

My advice to this writer: if you still want to write about “terminal illness,” maybe first go look at actual terminal patients, or check some Wiki pages about historical terminal illnesses—see what makes a terminal illness terminal. In this world, aside from jumping off a building, car accidents, or getting murdered, there’s no such thing as a symptom where you just go “gah~~~” and keel over. At least make your bullshit plausible, okay?

If that’s too much, look at how other people write terminal illness. Look at how Piano no Mori no Mankai no Shita did it—it’s short, but it builds a proper sorrowful atmosphere. As for this game, there’s not a shred of sorrow…

By the way, Nishioka Kyouhei, jump ship already. Staying with this company is a waste of your future. The music’s so good but it always gets paired with these goofy stories—what a waste of a great OP and OST.

And does Hanazawa Sakura really not have any pillow business going on? Why is she the heroine of every single one of this company’s small releases? Every damn time!