[2025.6.29]
You find a game and discover it's cheap, but hardly anyone has bought it. When you click in, you find reviews from the first two players. The first player's wording is fierce at first, but they describe their experience in the game with great care, ending with: "Open it and you'll discover a different world."
The second player carefully writes about her experience in the three worlds she played. After reading these two lengthy reviews, you're captivated and buy the game.
After installing and opening it, you're sucked into the game world. At the character information selection screen, you don't hesitate at all to choose the identity randomly generated by the System: Hirose Kisa.
Hirose Kisa, that is, you, is choosing a world when she notices that two maps have a "New" label in the upper-left corner. Looking closely, she sees "Yokohama Love Story" and "Technical College Romance."
After hesitating between the two worlds, she clicks on "Yokohama Love Story." Once she enters the game, her identity information arrives too: Hirose Kisa, a country girl who came to Yokohama to work. Hirose Kisa stares at the words that abruptly cut off, unable to believe it. That's it???
On the streets of Yokohama, she sees a gloomy man wearing a black coat as stiff as steel, then a fiery orange-haired boy riding a motorcycle up the side of a building, and then a scheming man wrapped in bandages from head to toe, whose smile doesn't reach his eyes. And so on... Hirose Kisa falls silent. Wait, I'm just an ordinary person. Are they the romance targets???
The huge crashes that keep coming in the night as she tries to sleep drive Hirose Kisa to the brink. She should have picked one of the anime she'd watched. She has no idea what will happen next. By chance, Hirose Kisa gets a back-office job at a company with a view of the Ferris wheel, and stumbles straight into the main plot. The System quickly gives her a reward: the supernatural ability "Alive."
Hirose Kisa is utterly broken. After reading how "Alive" works, she closes her eyes, resigns herself to her fate, and heads toward that building.
In "Technical College Romance," Hirose Kisa's identity information this time is: the only daughter of the Hirose family in the village. "?" Hirose Kisa gives up. Why is it so provincial? Looks like she'll have to enter the main plot before she can get the corresponding ability. But why does this world seem so crowded? There are not only people, but also monsters with hideously distorted features.
Theme: Staying alive will reveal a different kind of wonder.
