Niji no Kanata ni (虹の彼方に) Review

Frail girls trigger the protective instinct, which is why so many stories give their heroines a serious illness — or a setup where they’re liable to catch one. Lying in a hospital bed, gazing out the window at the scenery, looking up at the sky, imagining what ordinary life would be like if she were ever cured. Then the kind-hearted protagonist shows up, spends every day at her bedside watching the half-moon with her, all while internally accepting that this sickly girl doesn’t have many days left.

Ah, so tear-jerking! So heartwarming! So moving!

So when you read the official site’s description of Niji no Kanata ni, you’d naturally assume it’s that kind of healing story. Well… in a certain sense it really is quite healing.

So our protagonist, a doctor, enters the room of the heroine Miku, helps her with her homework, chats and jokes with her, plays games with her. Miku is gravely ill — her legs are paralyzed from cancer, her brain is severely damaged, and her parents died in a car crash. Couldn’t be any more tragic. Our good doctor keeps saying how much his heart aches, it hurts, angina, knowing her condition but unable to tell her the truth.

“Once I’m better, I’m going back to school. I wonder if Ma-kun and Mika-chan will accept me like this.” Miku laughed cheerfully.

“Don’t worry. If they treat you badly, I’ll straighten them out.” Our great doctor reassured her like that.

If the story ended there, that’d be about it… but of course a healing game like this doesn’t stop there.

“Hey, I learned a new game today. Wanna play?” “Yeah, yeah!”

And so the game begins! Ever played a nukige? Seen the hypnosis series from the maho fansub group? That’s right — the protagonist starts hypnotizing the heroine, plants a whole pile of hypnotic suggestions, and even orders her: “When I say ‘Niji no Kanata ni,’ you fall asleep.” So Niji no Kanata ni becomes the trigger phrase for the hero’s hypnosis. At first he just hypnotizes her back into childhood, then hypnotizes her into growing up, then hypnotizes her into marrying him, and then gets down to the things you do after marriage. Bang, bang, one round done, and the hero hypnotizes her into saying she wants more. Round two, round three, round four — by the fourth round her eyes roll back! The hero, i.e. the doctor, sighs and, in the spirit of “don’t stop,” finishes the deed.

Afterward the hero cleans her up, puts her in the wheelchair, and leaves the room.

Up to here it’s nothing special. You could chalk it up to some small studio’s nukige called “Hypnosis: Niji no Kanata ni” or whatever. But the healing doesn’t stop! It continues!

The hero goes to the nurses’ station, where two nurses are DIY-ing. Who set that up? Our hypnosis master and attending physician, of course. He claims both nurses on duty tonight are his fuckbuddies, so he can mentally control them — otherwise someone would definitely notice him banging Miku that many times. Our hero snaps his fingers, releases the two from their trance, and thinks to himself how lucky he is that his two fuckbuddies were on duty, or he wouldn’t have had the chance to bang Miku tonight.

Then the hero goes outside and gets a phone call. From whom? His mistress. She demands he cut things off with the heroine, saying how can a doctor screw his patient behind her back. The hero sighs and explains he beat the shit out of the heroine’s guardian — Miku’s uncle, since her parents died and the uncle became her caretaker, but the uncle is a cheapskate who won’t pay the medical fees, so Miku can’t get treated and is going to die. The doctor, our hero, got angry and beat the uncle (using “Hit” — I don’t know if that means he killed him). The mistress on the phone is pissed, threatening to die, all that.

“I slept with you once, and I hypnotized and raped you, so I don’t love you. Get lost.” The hero speaks righteously.

“If you like that little girl so much, go marry the little bitch!” The mistress curses him out over the phone.

“I… can’t do that.” Another sigh. “I did her yesterday, and her eyes rolled back at the end. She’s probably dying…”

The call gets hung up, and then the hero gets a call from the hospital saying the heroine is dying.

The doctor arrives at the hospital and sees the heroine one last time. She’s gripping his hand and calling him Daddy, already out of her mind.

“I want… to see… a rainbow… one more time…” Those were her words before she died…

Hold on — isn’t “Niji no Kanata ni” the trigger phrase for the hero’s hypnosis-rape? You want to see a rainbow again, what exactly are you asking for? Another round?

Even better, there’s a branch here: the hero once said the heroine was already dead and he was just manipulating her with hypnosis, and nobody noticed. I don’t even want to think about it. Combined with the way the rainbow line is presented, sort of like a flashback, I wouldn’t be surprised if the hero was screwing a corpse… but it’s not made clear, so let’s assume it isn’t.

Then the heroine dies. The hero gloomily goes out to the outskirts, the sky clears, a rainbow appears. He sees a girl in the distance holding a paper pinwheel like the one in Miku’s room. The girl has no face. She says “arigatou” to the hero and vanishes.

Finally the hero looks up at the rainbow, remembers his promise with the heroine about rainbows (promise?), and the game ends.

Holy shit, so healing. Let’s recap: the hero is human garbage with a harem of fuckbuddies plus a mistress, who uses his position to screw a sickly heroine. Screwing her is one thing, but she’s in poor health, and he screws her to death… Fine, plenty of nukige have this setup — the hero is scum and everything exists so he can fuck girls.

But what’s with that second half, the whole true-love act with the mistress? And beating up the heroine’s family for her sake? Is he a yandere? No, wait — if he were a yandere, why run away?

What’s more interesting is the game’s description. The official site is full of sunshine and “bonds” and words like that. Bullshit, that’s not what it is at all. This is perfect fraud, isn’t it?

Something like Mockingbird or Imouto Choukyou is too hardcore and no good for baiting people. I recommend giving this 77 MB game a quick slapdash translation and using it to trick innocent little newbies — you’ll hook every single one of them…