What Do You Call Their Baby?
So what are you supposed to call the baby if a rabbit and a turtle breed?
A dating sim.
Short for beautiful-girl romance simulation. A few people will insist the abbreviation stands for "missile rapid-fire system" or some other nonsense, but in a world where anime films clear ten million at the box office, it means beautiful-girl romance simulation. Damn right it does.
Most people, I'd wager, assume the term refers to a story about romancing a beautiful girl—a visual novel whose ending shifts according to the choices the player makes as they go.
That isn't wrong. But a dating sim also includes the adventure systems where you draft a schedule and run around, and the raising-sim systems where you grind your stats upward.
Back in my day...! It wasn't only the choices. Your stats, your date route, which gift you gave to whom—that's what flipped the ending! You really think you can know true love just by picking options?! You work on yourself! You sit there and worry over what the other person might like! You shape yourself to fit them! That's how you earn true love... that's what I'm saying!
Of course, it's far harder than simply picking choices. ...Without a walkthrough, I couldn't fall in love if I died and came back to life.
Anyway, the system isn't the point. The point is whether there's a story in which you get to have a sweet, syrupy little romance with a beautiful girl! That is the heart of a dating sim!
Which is why.
"...Can I really call this a dating sim? The more I think about it, the more this feels like a slip of the tongue."
I couldn't play the thing without saying it.
I mean, there are no beautiful girls. Not one beautiful girl.
This wasn't a dating sim so much as something you could quite fairly call a visual novel about a rabbit and a turtle falling in love.
Honestly, right up until I started the game, I'd just assumed the rabbit and the turtle would be anthropomorphized. At worst, I figured it was a game made by someone who liked furries to a suspicious degree.
...I did not expect an actual rabbit and an actual turtle, raw and unadorned.
If they'd slapped a few scraps of photo together, I could at least have soaked in the B-movie charm. The developer had made this game with painstaking, wholehearted care.
Which is to say, I got to sit there admiring high-quality illustrations of a rabbit and a turtle that blended seamlessly into the game itself.
"You think I am?"
For all the way I'd been putting it, the story itself followed a pretty orthodox line.
A girl who loves running and is good at it, and a boy who can't run and hates it—childhood friends who have known each other since they were small, stacking up affection a little at a time, gradually coming to see one another as someone of the opposite sex. It had that worn, familiar feeling, and yet the progression was solid enough to stand as a polished, by-the-book pure-love story.
Except a rabbit and a turtle were the ones living it.
All the nationally mandated beats were there too. Huh? Was he always this dependable? Huh? Was she always this pretty?
Except a rabbit and a turtle were the ones living it.
...What game had I even brought onto this stream?
He confessed.
He said he liked me. He said he saw me as a girl. That was what he told me.
And so, tomorrow, he said he would beat me in a race.
...That fool still remembered what I'd said when we were little.
Back when I was buried in running—that I would marry whoever beat me at it.
"...Is he actually an idiot? Obviously that was nonsense I spouted back when I didn't know any better!"
More than that, did he truly believe he could beat me? With that heavy shell on his back? Me?
If it was that stubborn, single-minded fool, he might really mean it.
But unfortunately, he cannot beat me. This is an eternal, undying truth. A turtle cannot beat a rabbit in a race.
...No. There was one way. A single way. And whether that way succeeded or failed rested entirely on my choice.
And my choice would shift according to what I felt for him.
"I... the turtle..."
The next day.
Just as they had promised, the rabbit and the turtle held their race.
They started three kilometers out from the finish line.
Both of them broke into a run.
The gap between them slowly opened. Between the turtle, already falling behind, and the rabbit pulling ahead, the distance became the kind no ordinary race could ever overturn.
But the turtle kept running with everything he had. He poured all of himself into it.
The turtle did not give up.
And the rabbit, stealing glance after glance back over her shoulder, watched him.
They kept running. They drew so far apart that, from where the rabbit was, the turtle could no longer be seen at all.
Then, with only a little way left to the finish, the rabbit stopped.
"...I've come this far. Even if I shut my eyes for a bit, I'll still win, won't I?"
No one was there to hear it, but she murmured it anyway, like an excuse, and stepped off into the grass.
She lay down in the meadow and fell asleep.
In that time, the turtle at last overtook her and reached the finish line first. The turtle had beaten the rabbit.
And so the two of them———
"...Uh. Um."
It was genuinely hard to know what to say. I chewed for a moment on what kind of line to throw out, then opened my mouth.
"So what are you supposed to call the baby if a rabbit and a turtle breed?"
What am I supposed to do, I'm actually curious!!!
...So what would you really call it? A bunnurtle? A rabtle? A turbit? Some old-fashioned classical compound, haretortoise... that one feels a little too hokey.
"...Anyway, the visual novel I'd prepared as part-one content was truly memorable. Memorable enough that I suspect it'll stay with me for the rest of my life."
The viewers were clearly suffering the hangover of that lingering aftertaste far worse than I'd expected.
I'd been through something like it myself, once. I'd watch an anime so sad it wrung the tears clean out of me and left my nose stinging, and the aftershock hit so hard I couldn't lay a finger on anime for a while afterward.
...Of course, whatever the viewers were going through seemed to be a slightly different species of aftershock.
"Part two... feels like awkward timing. Playtime ran quite a bit longer than I expected. ...We'll finish the part-two content tomorrow!"
So what now.... Hmm. Filling whatever's left with just chatting is probably the move.... Or a game short enough to squeeze in....
"Ah, I still haven't announced that. I'll put up a separate notice on the NewTube community and the fan cafe, too. Raider launches August 1st at 11 a.m., so... I'll be live by 10 at the latest. I will not tolerate missing a two-digit UID!"
What is a UID?
A UID is the number a game uses to tell one user from another. And that number is generally assigned in the order accounts are created.
So what does it mean, gunning for a two-digit UID?
It meant that even if the account I created the instant the servers opened gave me nothing worth a Bitik, I was going to play that account all the way to the end.
"Honestly? The owner of the Raider CBT boss First Clear walking around with a four-digit UID? A five-digit one? Started ages after everyone else? ...That'd be pretty lame, right?"
On top of that, judging by my time in the Raider CBT, a reroll marathon looked like it would devour a serious amount of time. What, just spin up nine clients at once and it's solved? ...This is an open-world action-adventure RPG. You think that works?
So here's the point.
If your luck is bad, you could spend the entire day rerolling.
If your luck is truly awful, it might be three days, four days, of nothing but the reroll marathon. Rather than taste that particular hell, the option of simply playing the game with an easy heart looked a good deal more attractive. It even preserves a First Clear holder's dignity. What's not to love.
"Oh, right. Since we're already talking Raider, shall we take a look at the launch celebration art I posted on the fan cafe? This one's marked D-9, so I'm guessing they'll upload one a day right up until the day before release?"
I talked Raider with the viewers until we were all good and worked up, and then I ended the stream. And how much time passed after that?
I went into the fan cafe and wrote a post.