Prologue
LIFE IS A SERIES OF CHOICES: Where will you go today? What will you eat? Who will you talk to? What will you talk about?
As monotonous and unchanging as everyday life may seem, everyone finds themselves faced with these tiny, seemingly insignificant choices.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Some choices are monumental. If you were to use video game terms—let’s say for a visual novel—then perhaps you could call these the pivot points at which your life diverges down a separate route. Of course, life’s not really a game; you can’t just save or reload. Someone (can’t remember who) once said that life has no resets, only an off switch.
Anyway, point is, some of your choices are permanent—never to be undone.
But what if you’d made a different choice at one of those crucial forks in the proverbial road? How might your future have played out?
✦ ✦ ✦
It all started during a long vacation from work. My little sister showed up at the crack of dawn, banging her fist against the door to the apartment where I lived alone.
I forced myself out of bed, still groggy, and unthinkingly cracked the front door open. Big mistake. My little sister took this as her cue to barge in and shove a paper bag into my hands. It looked like a gift bag at first blush, but a glance at the contents revealed a video game case and a USB flash drive.
Is this supposed to be a present? No, the game’s cover is all wrong. That’s definitely a girl surrounded by a bunch of sexy guys. In other words, it was a dating sim—specifically an otome game.
I scratched my head, hair disheveled. My eyes moved from the bag to my smiling sister. “So, what’s this?”
She had the nerve to sigh, as if exasperated that I hadn’t read her mind. With both hands planted on her hips, she leaned forward and sneered up at me, her eyebrows raised. That look always pissed me off.
After a moment of silence, she realized she had no choice but to explain. She huffed. “It’s a brand-new otome game that I was really looking forward to, but the difficulty is insane. There’s no way I can clear it. You’re on a long vacation, yeah? Why don’t you clear it for me, then? It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.”
She had piqued my interest at the mention of a steep difficulty curve, but the last line ruined it. Her disparaging comment got right under my skin.
“Wild assumption, but sure,” I snapped at her. “Whatever. Why’s this one so difficult anyway? All you gotta do in this kinda game is pick the right choices for your route and maybe finish a mini game.”
Most dating sims had the player directing the main character through actions and dialogue, chosen from a small set of options. Skill wasn’t really a factor in that kind of thing. All you had to do was test the choices to figure out which ones got the results you wanted. In fact, if you wanted to eliminate the guesswork, there were always plenty of walkthroughs and guides online.
My little sister already knew all that. She’d played a ton of these otome games and 100-percented all of them.
“I thought the same thing at first,” she said. “And that works well enough for the romance portions, but the other two parts of the game are a real slog.”
“What other two parts?”
“The adventuring and the battles are stupid hard. We’re talking nightmare-level difficulty.” Her face puckered, brows furrowed. “See, it’s got this RPG-ish adventuring section. I could put up with that, I guess, but the minute war breaks out in the plot, it adds a turn-based tactical sim.”
But why? Why would anyone stuff such unnecessary mechanics into an otome game? Sounded like they were throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the wall to see what stuck.
Still, as a guy, I was legitimately interested in the mechanics she described. If the game were a galge—a dating sim made for guys with a dudely protagonist and girls to romance—I’d hop right on and snag myself a copy. The same couldn’t be said for my little sister; she saw this gameplay as pure nuisance.
“No matter what I do, I get stuck midway through. I haven’t managed to clear it even once,” she grumbled. “You’re pathetically obsessed with this kind of game, though. You could totally breeze through it, right?”
Seriously? Does she have to piss me off every time she opens her mouth? And sure, I was interested in what she described, but I had zero desire to play an otome game.
“I’m sure you’ll make it if you find a good walkthrough,” I said. “Clear it yourself.”
“If I could, I wouldn’t have come all the way here to ask you! I already tried looking for a guide, but people are all up in arms review-bombing it. I couldn’t find anything actually useful!”
“Whoa, they’ve taken it that far, huh?”
“The devs added a bunch of microtransactions and DLCs. It’s all marketed as things to get you through the adventures and battles. You know, real ‘pay-to-win’ type stuff.”
The old “sell ’em a solution to the problem you created” scam, huh? I could see how that had rubbed players the wrong way. The devs had made their hateful bed and now they had to lie in it.
My little sister clasped her hands and looked up at me with the saddest puppy dog eyes. I was kinda late noticing, but she’d really dolled herself up. She didn’t normally put so much effort into her clothes and makeup when dropping by my place.
“Please, dearest brother, won’t you clear the game for me? I mean the whole game, of course. I want to be able to watch all the event scenes and animated sequences.”
She had a bad habit of calling me things like her “beloved older brother” when she was after something. Other guys seemed to find her adorable. Studying and sports came easily to her, and she was a natural beauty, so she’d been doted upon since grade school. Currently, she was a university student and lived with our parents back home.
But her cutesy, high-pitched tone grated on my ears. I pulled a face, retreating half a step back.
Infuriated, she puffed her cheeks. “Why’re you being so difficult?! Your adorable little sister is asking you for a favor here!”
“I’ve got a little sister all right, but she’s not adorable. She’s a selfish brat.”
I knew guys who fantasized about having little sisters now and again. I wanted to shake every one of them and force them to behold my reality. A little sister is an older brother’s dreaded enemy with whom you happen to share blood. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But they were still a royal pain in the butt. What pissed me off more than anything was that, when I said as much to my buddies, they’d laugh me off, saying, “Aw, there you go again.”
I sighed. “Whatever. You can find videos of the event scenes online if you’re that desperate, can’t you? Why do you have to actually clear the story yourself?”
“I hate those kinds of videos,” she said.