Chapter 0 : Chapter 0

Prologue

There is an indie game called "If you wish."

It was a simulation game made over three years by an indie developer with a unique taste, who loved both reverse harem and yuri genres, deciding, "Since it doesn't exist, I'll make it myself."

The game was filled with the developer's preferences, combining dating sims and romance comics with a dash of melodrama, plus the developer's fondness for the raising-simulator games they enjoyed in childhood, and it was even distributed for free.

As a result, unlike commercial games with neat background CGs and character CGs, this game had backgrounds blurred from camera photos and characters that looked like they were drawn with Paint.

Yet, the strange charm of the working game system earned it a cult following.

The game had intentionally bizarre choices and developments, a surprisingly serious simulation system, and options that changed depending on the simulation results.

Despite its oddities, everything was surprisingly well-balanced, and the morning-drama-style absurdity added intensity to the male protagonist routes.

Whether for better or worse, since no money was involved, the developer's niche tastes were on full display in the game.

However, because of the villainess who appeared as if she stepped out of a morning drama for the absurd storyline, it didn't gain much popularity among traditional female gamers who enjoyed NL otome games.

While trying to court a character in a dating sim, the villainess would constantly interfere, and if the player raised the heroine poorly or made the wrong choices, they would head straight for a bad ending, sometimes even an NTR ending, which naturally could turn off players who didn't already enjoy such genres.

On the other hand, the yuri route was well-received.

In the yuri route, the villainess became one of the pitiful heroines.

Plus, there was no creepy character making advances in the yuri route.

The male protagonist characters were completely sidelined, and it genuinely felt like a pure yuri game.

Perhaps that's why the game sold more to men than women.

A lot of players experienced the male protagonist routes as silly and the yuri routes as genuine yuri games.

The video I watched was also by a male streamer.

…That's right.

I had never actually played the game.

I had only watched a streamer play it through a video streaming site.

And even then, I hadn't watched a live broadcast or a full playthrough.

I just watched 10-minute highlight reels, with three or four videos per route.

Moreover, the streamer hadn't played all the routes.

Out of the three male characters and three female characters, the streamer had only cleared one route for each.

While clearing the male character route, the streamer had suffered several defeats due to the villainess's interference, and when conquering the heroine, the streamer completely ignored the villainess route.

I was curious about the other routes, but rather than download and play the game myself, I opted to type the character names into a wiki instead.

Of course, being a niche free game, the wiki didn't have much information.

But, fortunately, there was at least a short character entry.

It said, "In all the happy endings for the male protagonist routes, she meets a terrible fate, giving the player a sense of catharsis."

It seemed like they had intended to write out the details of each route's events, but as with many unpopular wiki pages where a single person writes most of the content, they had only made a table of contents, and the rest was left blank.

Maybe the writer had gotten disheartened halfway through.

I didn't feel the need to look any further.

In the first place, text-based games weren't really my style.

The reason I had watched all those highlight videos was because it was amusing to see the streamer suffer from making the wrong choices, not because I had any great interest in the game itself.

And so, my brief interest in the one-man-developed game "If you wish" ended there.

…Looking back now, I realize that was a mistake.

*

I didn't dislike reading text, even if I wasn't into text-based games.

I liked novels.

While I lacked the focus to sit down and read through an entire book in one go, I had enjoyed many novels over several days.

When I was younger, I read a lot of light novels and fantasy books.

Of course, I also read web novels during my commute.

So, I had a rough idea of the kinds of web novels that were popular these days and the current trends in web novel themes.

Naturally, I had read a few stories where the protagonist ends up as a character in a novel or game they had been reading.

Not that I had ever imagined something like that happening to me.

Haven't you ever had thoughts like that when reading an isekai story?

That if you were in that situation, you could do better.

That if you met that heroine, you could treat her better!

That instead of wasting time wallowing in self-pity, you would swing your sword one more time!

Stories about returning to your hometown or feeling pride in the life you built never resonated with me.

If you were sent to another world and surrounded by beautiful girls, wouldn't it be better to just settle down and enjoy it?

In that sense, I preferred modern web novels to the light novels I read when I was younger.

The protagonists are more decisive, they don't reject the heroines, and they don't obsess over returning home.

Honestly, while working and reading those web novels, I often wished I could be the protagonist.

Honestly, as long as it wasn't an NTR or tragedy, wouldn't it be worth getting a little hurt for the chance to gain everything?

Heck, even if I ended up in a TS scenario, I could just stream and make a living.

But, as always, fantasies are just fantasies.

When you're suddenly transported to another world and feel a pain like your whole body is shattering, all those confident daydreams vanish from your mind.

That's what happened to me.

The first thing I did after falling into the world of "If you wish" was scream until my throat gave out.