Why Is She a Girl?
There was a mobile game that had been quite popular a few years ago.
It was a visual novel fantasy RPG with gacha collection elements, titled .
The story was so painfully generic it felt outdated—a straightforward, linear tale of a hero forming a party to defeat the Demon King. But what set it apart was that players didn't have to choose the default hero. Instead, they could create their own character from scratch and role-play however they wanted.
The game had been heavily advertised with the claim that its cutting-edge AI would dynamically alter the story based on whatever character the player created.
On top of that, it was one of the few mobile gacha games at the time that offered genuine interaction.
The characters you pulled didn't just have unique lines for you—they would celebrate your birthday, send letters via messenger birds on anniversaries, cook for you, and adjust their behavior to match your preferences.
I was completely hooked by that feature.
Even with the same core storyline, I was curious how the world would change if someone like me stepped into it.
Back in middle school, my girlfriend and I had both started playing and compared our stories as we played.
I chose a thief born from the bottom of the slums, while she picked the default hero, 'Damian.'
Hero Damian.
That was exactly where the problem started.
For players who skipped the default playable character and created their own, the story took a truly horrifying turn.
The game's flagship heroine—its very first pickup character and the one featured on the official icon—was the ★5 Raven Saintess, Leibi.
If the player hadn't chosen Hero Damian, she would only ever say things like:
She would only greet or speak in ways that made it clear she already had someone she loved. She would even share the food and equipment the player gave her with Damian, chatting happily with him the whole time.
Players who sensed something was off immediately started datamining the game files.
They soon discovered that if you didn't choose the default Damian, every heroine—including Saintess Leibi—started with a favorability of negative one hundred percent.
In other words, every single gacha character in the game was programmed to like Hero Damian by default. That meant anyone who created their own character was forced to steal the women away from him.
The result was an insane setup where you had to slowly seduce your pulled characters and personally NTR them from Damian before you could ever be with them.
The community split in half and burned to the ground. One side insisted, 'Just play as Damian, what's the problem?' while the other raged, 'They literally advertised that you could play as a custom character!'
Either way, over time the game became infamous as the ultimate symbol of NTR. It shut down before the most important story arc for Hero Damian could even be released.
Perhaps it was karma for how poorly I'd treated my girlfriend.
Because now, in that very NTR game I'd thought I'd completely erased from my mind, I'd been reincarnated as the thief character I'd once created.
Or maybe my sin was jumping straight into the game the moment I saw how pretty the character illustrations were.
* * *
That was why I'd grown stronger ahead of time—so I wouldn't lose the heroines to the story's real protagonist, Damian, like in the original game.
"Damian, why are you wrapping bandages around your chest…."
"…Please keep it a secret from the other party members that I'm not actually a man. Got it?"
Why is she a girl?