Prologue
Prologue
There's an indie game called 'If You Wish'.
A raising sim solo-developed over about three years by an indie creator with peculiar tastes, someone who loved both reverse harem and yuri stories told from a female protagonist's point of view. They looked at the landscape and thought, 'If it doesn't exist, I'll make it myself.'
The creator threw in character setups that blended the dating sims and romance comics they'd consumed up to that point, a dash of makjang drama, and yuri elements, then crammed in their fondness for the raising sims of their childhood. They even released it for free.
As a result, the backgrounds weren't crisp commercial CG but photos run through a blur filter, and the characters looked like they'd been drawn in MS Paint. Yet that weird quality contrasted with a game system that actually worked, and the sheer oddity earned it a cult following.
Some of the absurd choice options and developments seemed entirely intentional, while the surprisingly in-depth raising system and the choices that shifted depending on your stats all synced remarkably well within a single game. The pinch of Korean-morning-drama-style over-the-top excess layered on top added an unexpected sense of urgency to the male protagonist routes. For better or worse, the lack of a budget meant the creator's niche tastes were on full display.
The problem was, the Villainess who seemed to have walked straight out of one of those morning dramas, inserted to fuel that exact flavor of story, turned off the traditional female audience that usually enjoys otome-style dating sims.
She wouldn't stop throwing herself at whichever character you were pursuing. Worse, if you messed up raising the female protagonist or picked the wrong choice and shot straight into a Bad Ending, the game would dump you into a full-blown NTR ending. Unless you already enjoyed that kind of genre, it was bound to grate on you.
On the other hand, the Yuri Route was relatively well-received. In the Yuri Route, the Villainess herself became one of the pitiable heroines. And there weren't any characters constantly hitting on you. The original male leads got shoved all the way into supporting roles, creating a purely yuri-game atmosphere.
Maybe that's why the game supposedly sold better among men than women. A lot of people played the male protagonist routes like a so-bad-it's-good shitpost game, then turned around and approached the Yuri Route as an actual yuri title.
The playthrough I watched was by a male streamer, too.
...And that was it.
I'd never actually played the game myself.
I'd only ever watched a streamer play it on a video platform.
Even then, I hadn't watched a full stream or unedited footage. I'd only seen highlight compilations, roughly ten minutes per episode, three or four episodes per route.
On top of that, the streamer hadn't cleared every route.
There were routes for three male characters and three female characters. The streamer had cleared one of each. Having been burned over and over by the Villainess's interference while working through the male character route, when he went for the heroines he never paid the Villainess route the slightest attention.
I was a little curious about the other routes, but downloading the game and playing it myself felt like a hassle. Instead of taking on that burden, I just looked up the character names on a wiki.
Granted, since it was a wiki, there was no way the full details of a niche free game would be written out properly. Still, I got lucky—the character entries did exist, even if they were short.
The Villainess's entry said something like: "Delivers catharsis to the player by meeting a gruesome end in the Happy Ending of every male protagonist route."
It looked like someone... tried to list out her actions per route? But as with most unmaintained wiki pages where one person writes almost everything, only the table of contents existed; the actual content was blank. Maybe they'd hit a wall of existential despair while writing.
Well, I didn't feel any pressing need to dig deeper.
Text-based games weren't really my thing to begin with. The main reason I'd watched all the highlight reels wasn't some deep fascination with the game itself; it was because watching the streamer suffer through wrong choices was entertaining.
So the attention I'd given that one-man project, 'If You Wish,' ended right there.
...Now that I'm looking back, I really shouldn't have let it.
*
I didn't care much for text-based games, but that didn't mean I hated reading text entirely. I liked novels well enough. I never had the focus to sit down and devour a whole volume in one go, but I'd spent plenty of days spread out across a week enjoying a good book. As a kid, I'd read a lot of light novels and fantasy novels, too.
Unsurprisingly, I also read web novels on my commute. So I had a rough sense of what was trendy and what kind of material was hot in modern web novels.
I'd naturally come across the premise of "becoming a character in the last novel or game you consumed" a few times. Of course, I'd never once imagined it would actually happen to me.
Who hasn't let their mind wander while reading an other-world story? I'd have handled it better if I'd landed in that situation. If I'd met a heroine like that, I'd have treated her way better! Instead of wasting time acting so pathetic, I'd have swung the sword one more time!
I never empathized with protagonists who obsessed over returning to their hometown or bragged about the life they'd built for themselves. If you got sent to another world and found yourself surrounded by beautiful girls, wouldn't it be better to just be satisfied and live your life?
In that sense, I preferred the modern web novels coming out these days to the light novels of my childhood. The protagonists were decisive, they didn't push away the heroines who came to them, and they didn't obsess over going back. Honestly, while slogging through office work and reading novels, I often wished I could be one of those web-novel protagonists. I mean, as long as I didn't end up as the protagonist of an NTR or heavy angst story, wouldn't it be worth getting a little hurt to gain all of that? At worst, even if I ended up in a gender-bender story, I could just get by as a streamer or something.
But as always, delusions were only delusions.
The moment I was dropped into another world for reasons I didn't understand, the instant I felt a sudden, crushing agony as if my entire body was shattering, all those smug, cocky fantasies were blown clean out of my head.
That's what happened to me.
Right after I fell into the world of 'If You Wish,' the first thing I did was scream my lungs out.