I really wanted to tell my sister to give up on completing this. I wanted to tell her to download someone else’s full-comp save files from the internet. But…the game had a certain feature where the characters would actually say aloud whatever you’d named the protagonist. My sister had used her own name—something about wanting to hear those famous voice actors whispering as if to her. Ergo, downloading someone else’s data wasn’t going to get her what she wanted. I had no choice.
“I’m so sick of this! The prince keeps dying!” A thought occurred to me. “Is that what the developers want? Are they trying to coerce me into microtransactions, is that it? You want my money that bad?!”
For an offline game, this one had a wide selection of extra paid content. Players could purchase special items to make the battles easier to get through. I wasn’t sure if it was to placate complaints that the game was impossible to beat or if the developers were just being calculating.
I didn’t want to spend more money than I already had for my stupid sister, but there was no denying that the strategy elements were sucking up all my time. Everything else was the same as any galge. As long as I followed the guide and got all the right answers, I’d have no problems clearing it.
I took a break from playing to look at the paid content—which was plentiful. Most of the stuff sold for about a hundred yen a piece, but the battle items, such as the airships and mobile suits, were more like three to five hundred yen, some even as high as eight hundred.
“These extra fees are precisely what killed this company’s reputation,” I noted. It had been a heavily anticipated release, but players soon criticized the game for being unbeatable without paid items. The outrage prompted the company to lower prices in their online store within a month of its release. I still thought the items were expensive, though.
As I browsed, I noticed one of the items was a men’s swimsuit. Exasperating. “No thanks, I don’t wanna see a dude in a Speedo.”
Granted, if this were a galge, I’d probably buy every single item just to see all the girls in their swimwear.
“Guess there’s not much difference between men and women, huh?” I chuckled weakly, feeling drained.
It was personally way uncomfortable to think about female players enjoying guys waiting on them half-naked. But really, games and anime had a lot of situations like that. If it was a male character surrounded by a bunch of women, it was called a harem; if it was a female character surrounded by a bunch of men, it was a reverse harem.
“Wonder if girls feel the same way about harems as I do about reverse harems?” The fact that I was even giving such a thought serious consideration was proof I was utterly beat.
“Eh, not like it matters.” I needed to focus on finishing up this game. “Okay, so what do I need to buy to beat this thing?”
All the paid content items were powerful. There were exclusive weapons for the male characters and equipment for the protagonist. Personally, I wanted something that would serve me well in battle; cosmetics could suck it. As long as I could beat the game, I didn’t give a crap how it looked.
“Oh, how about this?”
My eyes landed on the most expensive item of the bunch: a battleship. It didn’t require resupplying and it ignored all of those annoying RNG battle elements. Most importantly, it was a super strong unit.
“Although it looks more like a spaceship than an airship,” I mused.
Its metallic exterior had a completely different aesthetic than the other airships in the game. It was enormously powerful, living up to its thousand-yen price tag. I gave the description a brief glimpse and saw it was an ancient blah blah blah… TL;DR: It was a prodigiously powerful spaceship.
“Wait, so it really is a spaceship? That has to be a typo, right?”
Had someone messed up when they wrote the item description? Frankly, it didn’t matter as long as I was able to clear the game. At this point, I’d buy whatever just to get through.
Next, I checked out the Armor for sale. Well, that’s what they were called. They didn’t look like regular armor, more like giant robots. Even so, the men who donned Armor to fight were known as knights.
Did women really enjoy watching men fight for them?
Well, can’t hurt to purchase this, too.
The black armor almost looked like an enemy unit, it was so imposing, but that didn’t bother me. Being the dark hero was badass. Come to think of it, this was actually a pretty cool design for something in an otome game. And it was going to have so much more combat utility than those stupid love interests.
Like, one was a swordsman who was amazing in duels but possessed no long-range weapons; another was a guy who thought it was weak to rely on anything but pure skill, so all of his equipment was outdated and flimsy; and a third was skilled magic user who was about a total glass cannon that would shatter the second an enemy unit so much as sneezed in his direction.
These pointless jerks had been the cause of a long, long series of Game Overs.
“Ugh. I’ve gotta do it. I’ve gotta finish this game.” I’d lost enough of my sweet, sweet weekend as it was. I broke down and purchased the spaceship and the dark Armor.
After equipping them and restarting the entire adventure sequence, I hit the ninety-percent-completion mark by that evening. I was a master of efficiency, racking up affection points and blazing through the daily events with each love interest. I sold all the gifts they gave me to the secondhand shop right away, and I did it while the dude in question was still in my party. Sure, selling a gift right in front of the guy who gave it made me a jerk too, but it was a game, so who cared?
Of course, if this were a galge, I’d totally go out of my way to make sure the girl was off my team before I got rid of her gift. Game or not, I couldn’t be a douche when it came to girls.
But this was my sister’s otome game. All that mattered was clearing all the content. Now all that was left was getting the ending where the protagonist dated the whole cast of male characters at once. This was the game’s true storyline, the canonical true ending.
I didn’t give a crap what they called it. When I finally achieved the reverse-harem ending, I felt two things: joy at being released from my servitude and hollow from how much time I’d wasted. I watched the final video play and simmered with anger…then sadness.
“That’s two whole days of my life I’ll never get back.”
I saved the data, having kept my promise to my little sister, then collapsed on my bed. When I glanced at the clock, I realized it was a little soon to be going to sleep. I had no desire to move whatsoever, but with the freedom that came from finishing the game, I realized I was hungry. I pressed a hand over my stomach. Breakfast was the last thing I’d eaten.
“And there’s nothing in my fridge.” I’d originally planned to spend the day restocking groceries, but instead I’d prioritized that stupid game. “Guess I can hit up a diner.”
I double-checked the time on my phone and noticed a message from my little sister: Today was so much fun. I’m beat! I’ll be back home in a few days, so make sure to clear the game by then. If you don’t take me seriously, you’ll be a pervert in our parents’ eyes forever! lol
“She really is a piece of work.” Making me do her grunt work while she went out of her way to emphasize how much she was enjoying herself.
Speaking of, one little thing bothered me about all that.
“How’d she get the money to go on a trip?”
The little bit of spare change she extorted out of me wouldn’t have been enough to cover the whole thing. And no way did she have any kind of part-time job. She couldn’t stay out late for work anyway, since our parents gave her a curfew. Plus, she’d whined about not wanting to work. She had too much pride to do anything illegal for cash.
Then I recalled what Mom had told me not too long ago, and a light bulb turned on in my head. “She said my sister needed money for a class to earn her license.”
My parents had assumed she meant a driver’s license and given her the funds without question. That had to be what she was using to finance her overseas adventure.
I immediately copied her texts and the pictures she’d sent me, then sat down at my laptop and sent a message to our mom, attaching the evidence.
“That idiot. This is what she gets for blackmailing me.”
What would my parents think when they saw the truth and realized she’d not only blackmailed me but used their money to go overseas without permission? She couldn’t weasel her way out of this now. I’d ripped the sheepskin off the wolf.
I grinned triumphantly…until I goddamn realized.
“Wait. So I could have exposed her from the very beginning without wasting all that time on her stupid game?! Ugh, just kill me now.”
Disgusted at myself and still hungry, I stood, reaching for my wallet. The whole business with my little sister could be put on hold until I had a chance to eat. At any rate, I didn’t need to worry about that godawful otome game anymore.
I stepped out the front door feeling strangely light, almost as if I were floating. It was the same kind of happiness you might get leaving work after a hard day.
“I think I’ll splurge a little tonight. Really treat myself.”
I made my way along an oddly empty road, streetlights flickering eerily, then started down a set of stairs. That was when the dizziness hit.
“Aw, crap.” I grabbed for a railing. “This isn’t good.”
I fell.
It was like I was a marionette, and all my strings had been cut. My strength was gone. I watched helplessly as the ground came closer, anticipating the pain of hurtling down the stairs…and all I could think of was how I’d lost my precious weekend to my sister, and now I was probably going to die.
God, I was pissed.
Right then, my vision shifted. Was my life flashing before me? But no…I’d never seen anything like this before.
A land floating over ocean. Airships soaring above me. Blue skies and white clouds. My own hand reaching out toward the sun.
“It’d be too…pathetic…to die like…this…”
And then my consciousness faded.