Lulu Has No Luck
“Hello everyone~ It’s Lulu~!”
Lulu’s greeting was unusually simple today. Normally she would have thrown out something cringeworthy like “Hello, my sacrifices” without batting an eye.
But she had a reason for keeping it short.
“Today is the launch day of a brand-new mobile game! Ihyeon is out~ Waaaaah~!”
“So that means! Today we’re diving straight into Ihyeon! Let’s gooo~!”
Today was Lulu’s sponsored stream day, after all.
Ihyeon was famous as a subculture GSA-style series. The kind of game where you hop into a car, steal stuff, get caught, and get dragged off to prison—that whole vibe.
Thanks to its PVs and viral marketing, it had steadily built up recognition, and now it was finally receiving its official release.
And Lulu just so happened to be running a promo stream timed perfectly with that launch.
“Why’d they give me the sponsorship? Well~ Because I’m ridiculously good at games, right? That’s why they asked me!”
Lulu started fishing for aggro the moment the stream began. To cut to the chase, they had almost certainly brought her on because she was terrible at games.
Ihyeon was an action subculture open-world title, and most games in that genre weren’t particularly demanding when it came to mechanical skill.
The point was to show that even someone with Lulu’s potato-level physicals could still pull off flashy combat. On top of that, once Lulu started promoting a game, she was the kind of streamer who would keep playing it for at least a month out of sheer loyalty.
That made her sponsorships hit different.
“Ooooh… So this is how it starts~”
At the character-creation screen where you pick the player’s gender, Lulu flipped back and forth between the male and female options, examining each one in turn.
“Hmm~ This female character is uglier than Lulu. Her figure’s worse too!”
The chat erupted into laughter at Lulu’s reaction.
Honestly, even from our perspective, her comments about her own figure were pure nonsense.
As for who was prettier… yeah, Lulu probably had the edge there. Whether it was the model or real life.
Personally I felt the VTuber model couldn’t quite keep up with her real-life looks… but that one could go either way depending on taste.
If Lulu gave off the vibe of an insanely cute yet utterly annoying little sister, Lua felt elegant and mature with a heavy dose of clinginess.
“Hey, you! The ones who just laughed! Aren’t you being a little too mean? Do you even know how good my figure is?!”
“Grrrrrrrr…!”
Lua ground her teeth so hard you could practically hear them, glaring at the chat, but it was useless.
The viewers had already finished every preparation necessary to bully Lulu.
“Hey! You lot! Apologize right now before I pick the male protagonist!!”
Lulu’s ultimate weapon was none other than the male protagonist.
Ihyeon defaulted to a female lead, but that didn’t change the golden rule of subculture games.
If you can choose the protagonist’s gender, you always pick the female one.
Most players of these games are guys, so choosing a pretty girl as the character you control has basically become an unwritten law.
Of course there were players who wanted to properly immerse themselves and picked the male lead, and some female players preferred the male option too…
But Lulu’s chat leaned male. From what I knew, her viewer gender ratio sat around 6.5 to 3.5 men to women. For a female VTuber that was actually a pretty high female viewership percentage, but even so the guys still outnumbered the girls.
And today was an Ihyeon promo stream. Anyone tuning in for a sponsorship stream was already interested in Ihyeon, so whether that crowd would be mostly male or female was a question with an obvious answer.
Naturally the chat immediately started apologizing.
“Heh-heh~ That’s more like it~”
Lulu’s expression turned smugly, unbearably smug. The chat seethed when they saw the model’s face change in an instant, but the ones who had already surrendered were the viewers.
In the end Lulu declared in a voice overflowing with confidence:
“Then we’re going with the female protagonist~!”
She selected the female lead, named her Lulu, and jumped straight into the tutorial.
The tutorial progressed at a leisurely pace. Since this was a promo stream, she needed to poke around everywhere, enjoy the story, and show off the game’s little details.
“Whoa, everyone. The colors switch between green and red every time I move here. They must’ve put work into this, right?”
“There’s dialogue here too… Oh, it even has sprites!”
“Can I swing my sword here? Huh? I can’t? In most open worlds they don’t block that, do they?”
Lulu was checking things a little too thoroughly, and in the middle of it she even found an easter egg.
You can’t swing your sword here!
“Ooooh… When I swing the sword here it actually swings, but someone immediately runs over and stops me?”
How many players would ever comb through the tutorial this carefully?
But the way Lulu went through every little thing and highlighted the developers’ attention to detail must have made her an incredibly welcome player to the production team.
And she wasn’t even an ordinary player—she was a VTuber promoting the game. That made her twice as welcome.
“Alright, let’s push the story forward~!”
The story involved the protagonist joining an organization that managed urban legends and anomalous phenomena in the city, then solving those problems.
The tutorial itself was about resolving a rampaging anomaly caused by an internal mistake at that organization.
Lulu dove into the tutorial section and started playing right away.
“Yap! Yap! Yaaap~!”
She controlled the character according to the tutorial prompts, and even accounting for Lulu’s potato-level inputs the character moved with impressive agility and grace.
On top of that, she started dodging attacks she normally never would have avoided.
“Oh, ooooh…! The dodge windows are super generous, huh?”
“Hey! Whoever just said ‘an open-world action game even Lulu can play’! What the hell does that mean?! Are you saying Lulu sucks at games?!”
While bantering with chat in full WWE mode, Lulu finished the boss fight and put on a supremely confident expression.
Once the boss was down, Lulu finally headed for the true essence of a subculture open-world action game.
And what was that?
“Well then… shall we do some gacha!?”
Gacha—the flower and essence of every subculture game, and the ultimate source of dopamine.
But Ihyeon’s gacha was different somehow.
When she opened the gacha menu, the screen that appeared was…
“Oooooooh…?”
The gacha window was a board-game board.
“What is this!?”
Ihyeon’s gacha worked by rolling dice on a board-game board, moving your piece, and receiving a reward matching the rank of the space you landed on.
In other words, it was a system that let you watch your luck collapse in real time with every roll.
“Waaaaah…! I’m rolling the dice…! Of course I’m going for the rate-up character…!!”
Going for the rate-up meant she was aiming to pull the featured character.
You could get the rate-up from an S-rank space at low odds, or guaranteed from a special zone you could only reach by taking a side path.
Obviously neither option was easy…
“Ah…!”
“Uuuu… just give me a 3, only a 3…!”
“AAAAARGH! Why is it a 4!!!”
Lulu missed the side path by a single space.
And on top of that…
“It’s an S-rank space! It’s an S-rank space!!!”
She landed on S-rank spaces a full four times and somehow managed the miracle of not getting the rate-up even once.
Of course the odds of pulling the rate-up from an S-rank space were already tiny, and since each roll was an independent trial, failing to get it was only natural.
And Lulu…
“Uuuuuugh…! Everyone, give me a second?”
…proceeded to pull off the absurd stunt of dropping a full 120,000 won in just five minutes.
“Alright, let’s gooo~!”
Lulu purchased the package known in gacha circles as “the truck”—the 120,000-won bundle—and immediately started rolling.
And then…
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”
“Not pity, anything but pity…”
“KYAAAAAAAAA!!!”
In the end, she hit pity.
The silver lining was that in Ihyeon, hitting pity guaranteed the rate-up character.
Take comfort in that at least, Lulu.
As a side note, Mei and Aris—who received the same sponsorship—both got the rate-up without reaching pity, one through an S-rank space and the other via the side path.
In other words, only Lulu had terrible luck.
Looking at Lulu always puts my mind at ease.