“You’re far too uncultured for your own good, Beelzebub! You’ve failed!”
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“I-I’ve failed…?” Beelzebub repeated, somewhat bewildered by Pecora’s scolding. She was getting told off by her boss, technically, so of course she wouldn’t know how to react.
“Think of the scenes in plays where the characters disguise themselves. The actors don’t actually wear convincing enough disguises to fool the audience, of course—anyone watching can easily tell who’s who. Would you, when watching a play like that, gripe about how unconvincing the disguises are, and how little sense it makes that they would fool anyone? No—that would be boorish! Downright uncultured! And that, Beelzebub, is precisely what you’re doing at this exact moment!”
Sh-she’s right! Plays have their own set of narrative shorthands and conveniences, but nobody has any trouble separating them from reality!
“Plays exist within a reality of their own. This game, meanwhile, exists in a reality of its own as well! You have no choice but to accept that!” Pecora concluded. Even I found myself nodding along in agreement with her explanation.
“Y-yes, ’tis a fair point… I understand… I swear I’ll stop nitpicking the finer details of the story,” Beelzebub said with a meek nod.
“Good, good! So long as you understand! ” Pecora said happily. “At times like these, you always have to start by accepting the rules of the world you find yourself in and engaging with it on its terms! ”
“I guess all the weird schemes you’ve cooked up over the years have made it pretty easy for you to understand these things, huh…?” I said. If anything, it felt like she’d accepted the game’s logic even faster than I had.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say I understand them! I’m just paying the creators the respect they’re due,” said Pecora.
Talk about broad-minded! That’s a demon king for you!
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“Um, Lazy Azusa? I believe it would be best for us to return to the matter at hand soon,” said Laika. I hadn’t realized just how much time we’d spent on our little digression until she pointed it out.
“Right, yeah!” I said. “So, um, our next objective’s in a cave, but considering we haven’t had a single fight so far, I was thinking we should go out into the overworld and do some leveling up before anything else.”
“Oh? Perhaps you’d have us defeat nothing but slimes to accumulate experience points?” asked Beelzebub.
I gave her a nod. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. If we go into the cave at level one, we’ll get wiped out. We might even have to fight an early-game boss to get at the item we want, so we need to level up and make sure we’re ready for it.”
“I see! So we’re training, then! I shall dedicate myself to self-improvement in this world as well!”
You’re really into this all of a sudden, huh, Laika…?
“I don’t think we need to go quite that intense to win this, honestly. We don’t know anything about this game’s battle system for now, so let’s start by heading out into the overworld and finding something to fight.”
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We left town, stepped out into the overworld, and were immediately confronted by a group of doglike creatures that started gradually closing in on us.
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“Hmm. Is this one of those games where we have to actually bump into an enemy sprite to make a battle start?”
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“Do you mean to say there are other sorts of games, Lady Azusa?” asked Laika.
“Yeah. Sometimes you can’t see the enemies at all, and you end up getting taken to the battle screen randomly as you walk around. Then there are games where the fights happen on the actual map itself, without any battle screens. That’s particularly common in games with action-RPG elements. Then there are games where you move your characters around individually on a bigger battle map to fight—sorta like chess, basically. Those tend to be more tactical type games.”
I wasn’t much of a gamer, but I could still come up with a handful of examples right off the top of my head. Video game logic had clearly firmly taken root in my mind.
“This is all very fascinating! In that case, let us make contact with that oddly angular dog creature!” Laika said. She stepped forward to touch the dog, and the screen instantly shifted into battle mode.
Okay, that was some pretty authentic RPG stuff, all right!
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A trio of zombies was now standing in front of us.
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“Hell’s bells! What is the meaning of this?! That was a dog moments ago, wasn’t it?! Why are there zombies now?! And there was only one of them before—why three?!”
Beelzebub’s calling out the game logic again!
“I mean, it’s just one of those things again… Probably…,” I stammered. Before I could say anything more, however, a voice rang out in our minds.
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Hello hello, Godly Godness speaking! As you’ve seen, we decided to go with a non-random, contact-based encounter system for this game. We didn’t have the resources to make individual sprites for every monster in the game, though, so all monsters ended up being represented by dog sprites on the overworld!
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Surely that’s just too much of a cop-out by anyone’s standards…?
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By the way, I should note there’s no real point to grinding levels in this game! In order to make sure battles stay tense and exciting, the enemies are designed to scale in strength based on how many battles you’ve fought so far up until around halfway through the game or so. You’ll get some powerful spells in the second half that’ll make everything pretty easy, but grinding levels outside of town won’t have any impact, so there’s not much of a point to it at all.
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That’s a pretty meta thing to straight-up tell your players, but considering how much of a pain beating the game would be without knowing that, probably better to just come out and say it.
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As such, beating slimes over and over and over again until you’re gone up to an outrageously high level isn’t going to work in this game!