“What on earth is what atrocity?”
“Look at my stats. Smarts, Fitness, Looks—all zeroes! How did this boy manage to make it into high school? What has he been doing with his whole life? Nothing but breathing?”
“No, that’s just how these games work,” I explained. “You can raise your stats. You can even get first in the class by the time finals roll around.”
“And what is my class rank now?”
“With Smarts of 0? Uh, you’re probably closer to the end of the list. You’re the kind of guy who’d get held back…”
Satsuki-san promptly closed the game and returned to the title screen.
“Hello?” I said.
“I cannot possibly see myself in such an uneducated churl,” she said. “Let’s start over from the top.”
“Excuse me?! Why did you just name him Amaori Renako? You are so mean!”
“There, now it’s perfect.”
“It’s really not!”
Average high school boy Amaori Renako gave us a dumb grin and pumped his fist in the air. Time to get a cute girlfriend! Homie, a girl should be the last thing on your mind, I told him. You need to get those grades up!
“Now we can only hope,” Satsuki-san said, “that someone in this fictional universe will find you attractive.”
“Satsuki-san, that’s literally the point of the game.”
Oh yeah, I should probably explain how this game worked. First off, it was a stat builder. Once you got your stats high enough, a new girl showed up. From there, you had to work on increasing her affection for you by taking her on dates. Rinse and repeat. Your goal was for the girl to announce her feelings for you at the end of the game.
“If the two of you are that close,” Satsuki-san said, “couldn’t you simply confess to her? Why bother waiting for her to speak up?”
“I mean, that’s just how these games work.”
“Interesting. You’d think one would make the first move if they wanted to date a girl. I suppose Amaori Renako is too afraid of commitment.”
“Stop calling the MC Amaori Renako!”
Before long, the MC’s childhood friend showed up. She wore a headband in her long hair.
“There she is,” I breathed. “Michino Tebiki-san!”
“Pardon?”
“Oh, nothing. Just, this girl—Tebiki-san—she’s the hardest character in the game. You basically have to max out all your stats to pursue her. People call her the game’s final boss. She wouldn’t be my go-to, honestly. Since she’s the top of the school’s social elite and all.”
“But isn’t she your childhood friend?”
A cutscene started playing: us running into Tebiki-san on our way home from school. Amaori Renako asked her, “Wanna walk home together?” but Tebiki-san turned him down in no time flat.
Satsuki-san frowned. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are, but like…she doesn’t give us the time of day unless we have high enough Smarts. She’s kinda mean, honestly.”
“Ah, I see. She has no interest in spending time with morons purely because she’s known them since childhood. A woman after my own heart.”
“Wow, did you just find your waifu?”
Meanwhile, Amaori Renako chuckled like the dim bulb he was and said, “I guess she just didn’t feel like it. Oh well. I’ll get her next time!” Homie, it’s because you’re two bricks shy of a load. This Amaori Renako dude sucked.
We unlocked a number of other girls too, but Satsuki-san never took her eyes off the prize: forcing our Smarts up. She kept spamming the Study command, and when June hit, our Stress overtopped our Stamina, making us fall ill. Okay, now that was in character for Amaori Renako.
“What just happened?” Satsuki-san asked.
“You need to Rest periodically, or you’ll burn out.”
“What, can’t he rest while he’s studying? Surely he isn’t studying for hours on end without breaks. That would be ridiculous.”
“I agree, but that’s not how the game works!”
She and I were in agreement: this Amaori Renako character couldn’t take care of himself. He was really starting to get on my nerves. Even though he had so many wonderful friends to fall back on, he still ran away up to the roof, and—wait. No, that was the real Amaori Renako.
“And why does he sleep the entire day when I make him Rest?” Satsuki-san said. “It’s not like anyone expects him to go home from school and study for six hours straight. But he should still make an effort to study every day. It wouldn’t hurt to put in an hour of studying.”
“But he can’t. That’s just not how Amaori Renako rolls. He can only do one thing once he sets his mind to it, and that’s why he’s always causing problems for everyone else.”
“I see.”
However, thanks to our hard work, he managed to place within the top thirty students in class when the pre-summer vacation finals rolled around. My heart sang.
“Amaori Renako!” I cried. “You did it!”
“I suppose that will have to do for a start,” Satsuki-san said. “After all, Amaori Renako did work hard.”
I giggled bashfully.
“Now if only you”—that was, the real Amaori Renako—“could score just as high,” Satsuki-san continued.
Eep. Had I just lost? To the Amaori Renako who still, months into the game, had zero Fitness and Looks? I lost to that? No, say it wasn’t so! I didn’t want to be a loser!
“Very well,” Satsuki-san said. “Since he did such a good job, we shall allow him a little fun. Who should we ask out?”
“As in, one of the girls? You should choose whichever one’s your type. That’s the fun of dating sims.”
“I hardly think I have a type, but very well.” Satsuki-san scrutinized the list of girls whose phone numbers we had. Then, after a moment to think about it, she called up the girl on the student council. She seemed like a sweetheart.
“Ooh,” I said. “Why’d you pick her? Just asking.”
“I was on the fence about Tebiki-san.”
“Gotcha. You’re so talented yourself, you like the smart, strait-laced type.”
“No. I merely thought that if I were Tebiki-san, I’d turn down any boy so utterly incompetent in anything but book smarts. So what was the point in calling her?”
“That’s mean,” I told her.
“And then,” Satsuki-san went on, “we must consider that Amaori Renako is too horribly incompetent for small talk. Thus, I chose the one girl who seemed to be the most put together to compensate for him.”
“That’s really mean!”
If she’d been a streamer, the chat would have been popping off right about now.
While she and I bickered, Satsuki-san made Amaori Renako go on several dates with this same girl all through summer vacation. At first, Satsuki-san kept griping about this or that as she played, but as time went on, she seemed to warm up to chatting with this fictional girl. Oh ho.
“You like quiet girls like her, huh?” I said. “I never would have guessed.”
“Not really,” she said.
That’s when it hit me. “Wait. No, I totally should have guessed. This girl’s the spitting image of Ajisai-san! Now it all makes sense.”