Narcissu
Time period covered: Mostly January and February 2005
Narcissu is a short story about a couple of young terminally ill patients in a hospice... and I was kind of nonplussed by it. It's an OK story, but I didn't really feel it worked best as a visual novel. There are few backgrounds and no sprites over them, so it's not so different from a book with a few illustrations per chapter. The pictures are not tall and usually only 2 lines are used for text, so most of your screen is unused (especially if playing this 4:3 game on a wide screen) and clicking to go to the next page is happening all the time. It also doesn't bother to identify speakers, so even when there are usually only two people talking in a given scene there can be occasional confusion. The main thing that would be lost if not in VN form is the background music, some of which is pretty decent. It also has voice, but only for one character, and I didn't find it added much beyond making me realize she was more listless than I would've guessed by text alone.
If you do want to check out Narcissu, I recommend going straight to Narcissu: Side 2nd. It's a prequel that includes the entirety of the original. In addition there's an epilogue if you have saves completed for both games, so I had to go through the content of the first game again to unlock that--though the inclusion of the automatic mode made that a mostly painless thing to do in the background.