The Only Good Elf Is Afaneru
Games have a genre called the construction-management simulation. According to KingMuWiki, it is a game in which you build something, develop it, and manage it—or words to that effect.
Games where you build amusement parks. Games where you build bridges. Games where you build zoos. Games where you build factories. And so, of course, games where you build cities existed as well—not just one of them, but several. Among all those city-building management sims, the one I picked was...
"Ta-da! It's City vs Alien!"
Naturally, it was a city-building management sim full of pretty girls. I had never played it myself, but I had scavenged enough stray facts to know the game reasonably well. The basic goal was to grow your city until it could hold off an alien invasion. For the record, the aliens were all pretty girls too. A very correctly designed world.
If you went looking for what made City vs Alien special for otaku of this particular stripe, the answer came down to something like this: it had a variety of official modes. And since I had never touched City vs Alien even once, the plan for a first run—just to get a feel for it—was something plain and ordinary...
"I'll go with Elf Mode."
...Which is to say, I did not go with something plain and ordinary!
Why pick Elf Mode instead of Normal from the very first second? Because I love elves so, so much?
No. Nothing so trivial as that. The reason I chose Elf Mode was simply—
"Märchen's stream has nothing but hawawa girls and high schoolers who've already finished their military service. If it's going to be Märchen City, we have to stay true to the lore, don't we?"
Because in Elf Mode, every citizen of the city was a life-form in possession of XX chromosomes.
Then how do they reproduce, you ask? In this game the elves looked much like humans, but set beside the human method, their way of multiplying was something else entirely. Elves reproduced by being stamped out of a giant, tree-shaped elf factory known as the World Tree.
...For real.
The only reason I had been able to scavenge any information about City vs Alien at all was thanks to lore like that. The trouble was what that reproductive setting did to the mode. Population growth crawled. The instant anything went wrong with the World Tree, the city's destruction was guaranteed. And preventing that destruction meant pouring spare capacity into World Tree management, which meant the city itself developed late. Individual elves did have excellent stats, long lives, and stubborn vitality, advantages all—but honestly, none of that was enough to cover those drawbacks.
So the unwritten law of the land was to grind a few runs on an easy mode, get comfortable with the game, and only then attempt Elf Mode. For the streamer Märchen, however—the woman who had begun her broadcasting career on the hard mode known as Knight Rise—Elf Mode was practically Märchen-optimized mode, the one setting in which she could keep the canon perfectly intact.
"They say Elf Mode is a little difficult, but I've got the hours in. I ought to manage well enough, right?"
"Anyway, let's just start and see! We've got a lot to do today, so we're moving fast!"
The concept of the city I would be building and managing today was simple: the city where Märchen's five hundred thousand NewTube subscribers live. So I raised a statue of Mayor Märchen in the center, divided the districts between otaku subscribers and non-otaku subscribers, and even built a mandatory educational facility by the name of Raider.
I was hard at work raising buildings, setting policy, and developing the city when a surprise event fired.
Mayor. Among the citizens, the Cult of the World Tree Mother Goddess is slowly catching on. What should we...
1. Just leave it. It's nothing special.
2. Suppress them! Religion will not be permitted!
3. I shall create a new religion suited to my taste!
"Obviously we make a new religion. In Märchen City, worshipping some scrap of wood instead of Tomoe? That's heresy."
I chose option three without a moment's hesitation. And thus the Church of Tomoe was born. What a thoroughly wholesome city this had become!
The surprise events did not stop at one. The moment construction of the Temple of Tomoe was complete, a new one was there to greet me.
Mayor! Some of the citizens are protesting, demanding their daily wages be raised tenfold! What should we...
1. It's only some of them, so ignore it.
2. Crush every last one of them with violence.
3. Hear them out a little more first.
4. Through agitation and fabrication, turn the protesting citizens into humans dreaming of overthrowing the city.
"In my heart, four looks like fun, so I kind of want to do it, you know? But that would break canon..."
"...Since four looks fun, I'll let it slide this once. Next time, no mercy!"
And so, through agitation and fabrication, I had the protesting citizens rounded up. A demonstration demanding a tenfold raise in daily wages was, by anyone's measure, grade-A shit-stirring, so my conscience wasn't particularly pricked.
The result of diligently honoring stream canon while also steering the city toward an otaku paradise on earth—
It failed like a dog.
"Killed them, my ass! They killed themselves!"
The aliens' faces? I never even saw them. The citizens rose up before the aliens could arrive, and Märchen City was blown to pieces by their own hands.
"...Isn't this a trash game? No—I benchmarked Märchen NewTube exactly, the channel that gained four hundred and fifty thousand subscribers in a hundred and ten days, and this is what fails?! This is MeTube hate!!!!"
Unable to accept the cruel reality that had come for me, I thrashed my arms and legs. Needless to say, flailing did not rewrite an outcome that had already been decided.
"Märchen City... my dream utopia, where only pretty girls exist... the otaku paradise on earth...!!!"
"The theme of the five-hundred-thousand celebration stream is awfully sad..."
For a moment I nearly let a tear slip. Anyway, one run was over.
"Then again, this ended awkwardly early, didn't it?"
I said it, then scratched my head. On an ordinary day, a run ending quickly wouldn't have been much of a problem. I would simply play another. If it were an ordinary day, that is.
The problem was that today was the five-hundred-thousand celebration stream. The problem was that I had content I had prepared rather diligently. And the problem was that I had to get through all of it before the Raider official broadcast relay at nine tonight.
"I made today's stream plan on the assumption that I'd obviously clear it in a single run..."
Tuning the content to fit a situation like this was also part of what a professional streamer was supposed to show. I briefly rebuilt the schedule in my head. The safest move was to stop here and fill the gap with just chatting...
"Let's do just one more! If I leave it like this, I'll be too pissed to sleep tonight! Revenge match!"
With that, I went straight into mode select. I meant to take Elf Mode again—but perhaps the shock of that little revolution had been too great, because my whole body was temporarily rejecting the race known as elves.
Right. There was no reason to take those traitors back a second time, was there?
The only good elf is Afaneru...!
"Is there a mode that ends quickly? Anyone know?"
Having decided to abandon the elves, I immediately picked a mode the viewers recommended and tried once more to raise Märchen City—
"...I'm already getting anxious about Afaneru's pickup banner."
No matter how much easier it was supposed to be than Elf Mode, I cleared it far too smoothly and succeeded at building Märchen City.
...Did I really have some kind of history with elves?