|THE F-RANK VILLAINESS| 「YURI」

[1]「PAIN」

I don't know how the sound of my mouse being clicked over and over again, repeatedly, for the span of ridiculously many hours, isn't even a bother to my brain anymore. I mean, I don't even process it. It isn't distracting, in the least, even though it should be, it's not. Is it because of habit? Is it from the sheer number of times I've pressed my fingers against it, burning the whirring noise in my ears, with me eventually getting used to it?

There is no reason to be pondering these unnecessary questions, and yet my mind, because of my shortened attention span from the continuous play time I've dumped into this game, seeks it's daily dose of coming to arbitrary conclusions, irrelevant with whatever I'm doing in the present. I stretched my legs from my gaming chair, and opened the phone to see the time: 00:02 a.m, two minutes past midnight. I've been playing for the past, let's see, thirteen hours?

I was totally invested. It's a first, you know. My head hurts, and I want to engage in my normal sleeping routine, but my mind just won't leave that eternal stream of pure dopamine.

I am one of the few people who had the opportunity to test this bad boy before its global launch; VICTA. The latest Otome game, with a wonderful twist. You actually have control of the Heroine and her choices in a real-time, action-packed RPG environment, with some visual novel elements here and there, like the dialogue, for example.

It's one of the top releases for this year, and people have been literally fawning over it. Even the mainstream gaming community has taken a liking to it. Hell, even i am playing it, a freaking guy. It has a surprisingly immersive and interesting plot, one that neither leaves the player disinterested nor completely caught up with its excessive dialogue and wacky tropes. A story that balances gameplay and a proper visual novel aesthetic.

To he honest, I was quite skeptical of the game in itself, but soon I came to realise that it started extremely good, with a banger intro where the main heroine battles some horrific monsters in an underground cave, demonstrating her abilities. It makes you feel like you are the Boss, and not those monsters in front of you.

I really like it. It's a shame we don't have these kinds of games from a male standpoint. I guess we do have Harems, but I think they've grown to be too unoriginal and boring. Don't get me wrong, some are proper classics, but the new ones remain mediocre at best.

I don't hate them, but I don't like them either. It's like they don't try, you get me? They just pursue something different, and try a mainstream approach, one that is guaranteed to appeal to a specific type of audience: the ones who solely look at the girls and nothing more. The plot for them is non-existent, they're there simply because they liked a girl from the cover and bought the game.

Such shallowness and hollowness isn't here. Quite the opposite, actually. This game isn't like the others, oh no. It is notoriously difficult, but satisfying when things go your way and requires a certain intellect to play it. It challenges you from a different approach, one that you find in soulsborne games.

The game itself has been out for a week, and I am nowhere near finishing it, despite the fact that I've been a beta tester for a month before the game had even revealed a gameplay trailer. The company, "VICerOY," let me keep my beta account in appreciation of the work I did.

When I contacted one of my friends about it, he told me that they told him the same, so I guess it makes no difference. They simply want to get as many people as possible hooked to the game, especially those who may have had a bad experience with it at first, i.e., beta testers.

Well, that's how multi-billion dollar corporations operate nowadays. They may operate under the facade of "VICerOY," but companies are still companies. Even if you promise that the game will be fully patched and ready at launch without bugs and/or microtransactions that have plagued the AAA game industry for years, you're still an insatiated corporation that solely cares about profit for the least amount of work.