Probably a Game
The world is full of games.
Horror, sci-fi, shooters, RPGs, collectible gacha, MOBAs, sandboxes, roguelites, soulslikes, open worlds, action, stealth, mystery, battle royale—on and on and on. Name them one by one and you would never reach the end, and even in this very moment some new genre, or some mongrel stitched from several, is probably crawling into the light.
So let us cut the categories down.
Transcendent god-tier. God-tier. Well-made. Flop. Trash.
Ahh—five kinds. Clean. You can count them on one hand, which is genuinely pleasant.
What? Where do the average games go?
Oh, please. Hunting for "average" in a world this harsh? Still a pure little gamer, are you? Sadly, these days, anything at or below middling—the sort of game some seventy people out of a hundred might like—isn't worth a category of its own. When a Steam review comes stamped Mostly Positive, the feeling is a little off, isn't it? That kind of feeling. A feeling of a feeling.
Anyway. Even in a reality that cold, a few trash games still manage something strange. Objectively they earn the verdict what even is this garbage?—and yet they become someone's game of a lifetime. The world has always had too many people and too many tastes for that not to be true. And the ones who stumble onto a lifetime trash game all react the same way. Desperate to have their taste and their eye acknowledged, they hold the thing up and shout, Here, take a bite. It's. Actually. Delicious, right? and set about evangelizing trash.
Wanting someone else to feel what you felt about a work you loved is only the natural instinct of a social animal. Of course, a trash-game apostle's labors almost never see daylight. They become one more quiet proof of the proposition that trash is trash, and get buried without a sound. For the gamer who found a lifetime trash game, it is enough to make the blood boil. This is clearly a god-tier title that should never have been left to rot like this! The world is the problem! Everyone's gone blind! But what can you do? Reality is reality. If you are the only one-eyed man in a village of the two-eyed, then the one-eyed man is the freak, isn't he?
The lifetime trash game he had met was exactly that kind of freak.
Its name was Eldas Legendary. Its genre, open-world RPG.
What?! An open-world RPG, and it's trash? The ending writes itself! Collectibles worse than that big-eared company's, an empty world, interactions that aren't worth a damn, optimization like shit, storytelling slapped together with their feet—that sort of game, right? If that is what you are thinking, you are badly mistaken. He would say so flatly. You just kicked away your own chance to play a god-tier game!
This god-tier title he had dug up had not become trash because the quality was, frankly, ass. A vast open world, and a freedom so wild it bordered on madness. People never stop saying AI has advanced, AI has advanced—but the NPCs' reactions and interactions were so natural, and so varied, that you had to wonder whether any of it ought to be possible. The graphics were a little rough for something calling itself a game of the 2020s... but they were perfectly watchable.
Above all, the world of Eldas Legendary felt so real you could believe a place like it actually existed somewhere in that immense universe, out past distant stars. Of course, it lacked even the usual conveniences—there was no fast travel—and it didn't have a proper main-quest line either. The gameplay was, quite literally, freedom itself, and the first time he played, that had thrown him badly. But once you tasted what it meant to write your own story in a new world, no other game could ever satisfy you again.
What? This isn't the 1990s, or the early 2000s—it's the 2020s. What kind of fossilized thinking is that? So it is trash, then? Even games from back then at least handed you a main quest before they started, didn't they?
...Quiet!
Ahem. Back to the story.
Of course he, too, would have liked at least a basic guiding main quest, all else being equal. But it was fine. The other virtues were so overwhelming that little flaws like that were easy enough to step over. Anyway—developer bastards who had somehow made a god-tier game and yet, suspiciously, seemed to have no interest at all in promoting it. And thanks to their collaboration with the blind little shits who clenched their teeth and ignored the thing even when it was promoted, the number of people actually playing it today seemed to converge, endlessly, on zero. Even for a trash game, the neglect was suspicious. Was the whole world just piling on? Some kind of fix?
But however he felt about it, reality was reality, and the unpopularity of his lifetime trash game, Eldas Legendary, did not change. Worn out at last by echoes that never came back and effort that bore no fruit, he deleted the promotional post—day who-knows-what of the one he had been in the middle of writing for the community.
Might as well just play another round with the time. He would drain this god-tier game to the marrow all by himself, neat and thorough. If he told them and they still wouldn't eat, that was their loss, not his, wasn't it? He was done forcing slop down the throats of people who turned their heads away even when you held the spoon to their mouths.
"What should I do this time?"
Before the start menu glowing on the monitor, he fell into thought. Customization, after all, was the making of the self that would move through the game's world. It was never something to do carelessly. In Eldas Legendary, character creation mattered enormously, because the in-world interactions were absurdly good. A character's abilities, personality, and looks—every single one of them changed how NPCs treated you. Which meant that if you built some sweaty veteran abomination, blue skin and a grotesque face and nothing on but a pair of panties, you could be exiled from the starting village, or mistaken for a monster and killed before you'd begun. Someone out there would scarf that kind of hardcore play down and call it delicious. He, at least, was not that someone.
His first run of Eldas Legendary had been a by-the-book human knight. Male. The textbook of medieval fantasy, you might say. Still unfamiliar with the systems, he had gone in meaning to adapt to the game like a normal person rather than force some concept. His character—something like the third son of a rural domain's nobility—took a passable suit of armor and a single horse from his parents and threw himself into the wide world.
The age was one in which a mighty empire had fallen. A post-apocalypse where you could no longer tell commoner from bandit, or bandit from noble. A time of chaos in which force itself was law. He leapt into that muddy river and, with nothing but a sword and his will, cut the rough current in two. In a world sunk in chaos he raised a new order. A kingdom.
He started the second run at once.
From the second run on, he got serious about the concept. Race: orc. Appearance: a warrior's body so perfect that even the Terminator in his youth would have wept—flesh a god might have sculpted. Muscles so flawless they showed through the gaps in his clothes at a glance; a form every warrior alive would have envied... a truly genius warrior...!
But.
Only the outside looked like that. He was hopeless with his body—an intelligence build who didn't even know how to make a proper fist. An orc who would become the first mage of his kind, and a great sage. From those deep eyes, set in a face that looked as though it had no business holding a thought, the light of wisdom glittered. The fun of it was forever being mistaken for an ultimate warrior because of how he looked.
Despised among the muscle-brains, the orc broke from his tribe. After all manner of trials he became an archmage and returned to the Great Steppe. A glorious homecoming... it was not. Orcs born warriors, who lived by running horses across the Great Steppe, were never going to acknowledge a mage who had appeared out of nowhere. But even that had its limit. The power of one who has reached the end of a single path is something to be revered beyond even race.
The archmage orc who came back to the steppe began a great journey despite the contempt of his own kind: a journey to gather into one the orcs of the Great Steppe, torn apart piece by piece. And at last the orc who had been despised was acknowledged by his people as a great one—Great Sage Karalnak. A name that would endure for as long as the Great Steppe itself.
So the second run ended, and after various things happened in between—crapping out promo posts, or starting in a tryhard look and getting wrecked from the opening—he began the real third run.
Race... elf.
He had done human. He had done orc. Of course this time it was the elf's turn. Looks: pretty, as an elf ought to be. A blonde elf felt a little too common, though, so black hair. The overall air of her, beautiful and pitiable, as if she held dew and the starlight of dawn... slim. Slender.
"Hmm."
Personally he preferred glamorous to slender, but it couldn't be helped. The concept of this third run, just like the second, was the gap between looks and ability. And so the appearance work was finished, and at last came the stats. He set no complicated abilities, no delicate ones, no special ones. Superpowers, gravity, high magic, swordsmanship lofty enough to cut the sky itself—none of it was necessary.
This third run's concept was only one thing...!
A heaven-overturning war god of an elf, dwelling inside a pure and pitiable face. If the body is exceptional, the head doesn't have to suffer! This was the third run he would play.
And then...
"Huh?"
When he came to, he had opened his eyes in an entirely different world.