Official Service Launch Day (1)
What competencies does a game's main director truly need?
Understanding of and passion for games?
Outstanding programming skill?
Unshakable professional ethics and a pro's mindset?
Leadership that balances the stick and the carrot in perfect harmony?
The answer changes depending on the angle you take.
What if the genre is a subculture mobile game?
Nothing inspires trust quite like a reliable pair of development pouches.
If a developer trying to sell you on subculture shows up with hair dyed some politically correct rainbow shade… well, you'd feel a little uneasy, wouldn't you?
In the end, though, a director is the face of the brand and the designated bullet sponge.
And if there is one skill they need most — the one every peer in the industry envies above all others…
It is, of course, a technique that has ascended to the highest ranks of illusion arts.
Voluptuous Mouth-Craft.
And right now, standing at the podium, was a creature that should not exist — someone who had shamelessly mounted not one but two development pouches on her breastplate, where ordinary male developers only ever equip a single one on the abdomen, and who wielded with effortless mastery the rhetorical style of the man once known as the "Cyber Goebbels," Kim Ji-hyun.
She burned through twenty minutes on nothing but her impressions of the raid she'd been running in-game until moments before. Forty minutes on the content available at today's demo floor, and how it would look even better at official launch. Another twenty minutes of on-the-spot Q&A with audience members she plucked from the crowd…
For a full eighty minutes — sometimes trading rhythm with caster Byeon Dong-jin, sometimes filling the entire hall with her voice alone — she poured out enough TMI that, had the speech been transcribed into a web novel, it could have padded out a solid two chapters for free.
No. To be precise, it wasn't TMI at all.
There was nothing "too much" about it. Every story was so compelling that simply listening made you start imagining the adventures waiting in Fantasy of Galicia without even realizing it.
Compelling enough that audience members checked their watches and thought, Wait — why did the time fly by so fast?
Some of them even pushed back their own turn at the demo booths just to keep listening.
Game demo?
I can wait all day.
But our director's passionate, development-fueled words of wisdom?
Not a second. Not a single syllable. I refuse to miss any of it…!
"Wow, hahaha — our director handles a showcase like she's been doing this with me for nearly ten years! I feel like I'm the one learning today!"
Strictly speaking, they had been connected for close to a decade. Back at her previous company, she'd called in caster Byeon Dong-jin for just about every showcase and live broadcast.
"Caster Byeon made it so easy to just talk. Hehe…"
But she couldn't exactly let on that she knew him, so Se-rin fielded the compliment with perfect natural grace.
And so, just before the curtain fell on nearly ninety minutes of the Shin Se-rin Show…
"I've been talking so hard I've definitely worked up a bit of a heat. I'll have to ask them to dim the venue lights starting tomorrow. Anyway… to close us out, please enjoy one short video. This has been Kim Se-rin, main director of Fantasy of Galicia. Thank you!"
At last, Se-rin — having enchanted every soul in the room with a sweat-soaked breastplate and that honeyed voice — trotted off behind the stage to cheers and applause.
A very brief video began to play.
Nothing particularly special.
And yet…
At the end of the video.
"WHOOOOOA…!"
"Next month! Next month!"
"Just two weeks?! FoGal?! It's coming out!"
The audience lost their minds.
The cheers and the roar of voices soon fused into a single name.
"Shin Se-rin! Shin Se-rin!"
Today's protagonist.
The name of an era.
Soaked in sweat on her way back to the waiting room, Se-rin heard her own name drifting faintly from behind and furrowed her brow.
"Why do they always just change the surname whenever they feel like it…"
Come to think of it, had caster Byeon Dong-jin done the same during the introduction earlier?
Still, in a world where "respect" usually meant slapping on prefixes like scum, trash, or bastard, a mere surname swap to something like Shin was relatively tolerable. Se-rin let it go with nothing more than a sigh.
She opened the waiting room door…
"Great work, boss!"
"You were incredible!"
"Shin Se-rin! Shin Se-rin!"
The fuss followed her even here. Members of the cosplay and event guide team — running on two shifts — who happened to be on break all rushed to greet her at once.
And then…
Slap——!
"Ow!"
There was one heretic bold enough to lay a hand on a goddess's back.
"Hey, what was that for?"
"You lunatic, look at yourself. Go change your clothes."
Only then did Se-rin notice that her entire body was drenched in sweat — the combined result of the heat generated by a massive crowd and the stage-set lights hitting her dead-on.
She accepted a towel on reflex and gave her face and neck a quick wipe…
The towel came away soaked in holy water.
"……"
For a fleeting moment, Se-rin found herself wondering whether the human body had always been this fragile, and caught herself faintly missing the flawless divine physique her goddess self still possessed on the continent of Galicia.
"I'll go… change."
Se-rin hurried into the partitioned changing area, accepting the paper bag Yoo Seol held out without a shred of suspicion and darting inside.
Watching her go…
"……Hss. Is it just me?"
Yoo Seol chewed on a growing sense of unease.
Their beloved, revered, boss-devoted, mutually-boss-adoring president.
…And that insane mouth-craft, with a gravitational pull that rivaled the president's own.
Surely even Thailand couldn't pull off a gender transition this perfect, but…
No matter how you looked at it.
She was a carbon copy.
What on earth was going on?
Of course.
"Hey, Yoo Seol…!"
"Pff—"
If it had really been their president, he wouldn't have come storming out in a rage just because they'd stuck him in a gray sweatshirt.
Well. Yoo Seol decided to file it under "whatever" and move on, same as always.
For gamers, it had felt like the blink of an eye.
For everyone involved, each day might as well have been forty-eight hours long. At last, the endless Gamestar schedule drew to a close.
The pre-launch reveals of various new titles had soothed gamers' hearts well enough — but despite pressure from a certain game company, every gaming magazine outside the major press outlets had heaped praise on one game and one person in particular.
Need it even be said?
The new revolution in MMORPGs.
Fantasy of Galicia, and…
Dude I still haven't seen them
Mods do you WANT to see me make a really big decision right now???
There was a director who had claimed the grand prize at the 2026 Gamestar Cosplay Awards.
There had been the minor issue of Earthling Kim Se-rin holing up in the CEO's office for a stretch and refusing to log out of the Galicia continent… but in any case, the game had vacuumed up every scrap of attention available.
And alongside it, the three syllables of the name Kim Se-rin had set the cyber world ablaze in more ways than one.
The spotlight grew so intense it rendered meaningless all the hush money a certain game company had scattered to control press coverage. Articles even appeared about a temporary surge in capsule sales domestically.
At that point, even the major outlets could no longer maintain their silence. One by one they surfaced, slapping on the bizarre title of "K-VR Game"…
"Th-those bastards…! Do you know how much we spent on promo…!"
Division Head So of a certain game company was apoplectic that Lineage 3 had been completely overshadowed — but that was someone else's problem as far as Se-rin was concerned.
And it wasn't just domestic interest. Western gamers who lost their minds over anything RPG — the so-called westernoids — and the neighboring country that still owned Aincrad (unreleased) and where game-fantasy novels still sold like they were current…
…had also built up enormous expectations.
Regrettably, Fantasy of Galicia had not applied for a publishing license in the world's largest market of 1.4 billion people — but even if they had, it would have been rejected on the grounds that skeletons appeared as monsters, and anyone who wanted to play would just route around the block anyway. Same difference.
And so, having finished farming global attention well beyond Korea's borders…
At last.
December 2, 2026.
The day of official service launch arrived.
While the entire world waited for the scheduled open at 12:00 p.m. sharp…
"Haah… hss… haah…"
Se-rin was sunk deep in anguish.
The reason was singular.
"I want to play too… I want to play…!"
Before she was a developer, Se-rin was a hardcore gamer. The kind who, once she locked onto a game, wouldn't stop at one hundred percenting the achievements — she'd go full yarikomi, digging into every last system the game allowed and chewing it down to the marrow.
But?
This was the first virtual-reality online RPG to appear since the half-erased existence known as Galicia Online…
"…If I play it… I'll be spoiled…"
Se-rin simply couldn't enjoy it with a clear mind.
This was a completely different league from some dual-wielding cheat user who'd come out of the beta. She hadn't merely touched specific systems the way Yoo Seol or Seo Han-ryang had — she had been deeply involved in the entire development process. On top of that, she carried a goddess's near-perfect memory that far transcended any ordinary human's.
Se-rin…
Couldn't enjoy it…!
And so, fighting back tears, she monitored the community instead.
The gallery was so flooded with traffic it needed constant refreshing — practically wallpapered in posts — but aside from the occasional direct hit of "that screenshot" dropping faster than any paid shill could react, every single response filled Se-rin with pride.
And then, into her field of view…
Normally she would have just snorted and scrolled past…
"If I just… smash my skull… really hard… and wipe the memories…"
Today, of all days, Se-rin…
Couldn't stop staring at a single sentence.