Chapter 3: To the Vanguard of Efficiency, What Do You Offer?

Shangri-La Frontier.

Released last spring, and apparently recognized by some world record earlier this year as the game with the highest number of simultaneous players, it is a game that belongs to the same category as Fuckaria while standing at the exact opposite end of that category.

Players can freely live in a fantasy world where, thousands of years after an original spacefaring migration fleet somehow met its end and left behind a new humanity, civilization is roughly medieval while sci-fi elements can still be incorporated naturally.

Unlike Fuckaria, where the reception was so bad that even its detractors had to desperately search for something good about it, SLF is so highly regarded that its tiny number of detractors are drowned out by fans numbering dozens of times as many.

Rakuro: “I’m starting to feel like it’s rude to put the package in the same row as the kusoge.”

Starting with Fuckaria, the legend of legends, there is Cosmo Buster, a brutal kusoge in which enemies endlessly respawn and attack from all 360 degrees in an FPS perspective.

Then there is the die-hard simulation kusoge Thrilling Farm, which tells you to leisurely run a ranch while gigantic creatures unleash catastrophic destruction like a typhoon roughly once every week of game time.

Then there is the deserted-island survival kusoge Survival Gunman, now traded at a premium because people actually ended up hospitalized over it, where the premise is to hunt gigantic creatures using nothing but a pistol.

Then there is the post-apocalyptic kusoge United Rounds, where every kind of item has drop rates so absurdly low that, despite being a co-op game, players looting one another reaches apocalyptic levels.

There are still plenty more kusoge out there… whoops.

I was about to get my heart captured by kusoge again, like getting absorbed in a manga while doing a major cleanup.

I put the SLF package somewhere separate from the kusoge zone, put on my headgear, and lay down on the bed.

Rakuro: “All right… let’s begin.”

Make sure you have taken care of both kinds of bathroom business and finished hydrating and getting some nutrition.

If there is no need to play seriously, play while lying down on the bed.

Keep a bottle of drinking water nearby so you can hydrate as soon as you wake up.

After confirming the three basic rules for VR gamers, I began a game other than a kusoge for the first time in so long that I could hardly remember how many years it had been.

Rakuro: “Whoa… you can even change your height and gender. That’s amazing.”

In a character creator that is practically standard for this kind of MMORPG, I was impressed by how much freedom the character-making system had.

Race, body type, accessories, horns!? …I see. With this much freedom, it would be rare for two people to end up with exactly the same appearance except through some extraordinary coincidence.

Rakuro: “Now then, what kind of look should I go for…”

I’m the type who makes my game characters look different from my real-life appearance.

People who stream their gameplay or are confident in their appearance seem to reflect their own looks in their game characters, but as far as I’m concerned, games and reality should be separate things.

Rakuro: “Hm? Ah, so this is one of those systems where you can skip character creation and decide your job and stuff first.”

Apparently, this game applies modifiers to stat growth based on your Origin and job.

Since there are also character-creation systems built around your job and Origin, I decided to choose those first.

Rakuro: “Whoa… it takes five seconds just to scroll through this? How many jobs are there…?”

I mean, are things like Knight (weapon user) all separate entries too? What a pain… They could just have everyone start the game equipped with a wooden stick and let them choose a weapon afterward. Maybe this kind of ridiculously meticulous attention to detail is what makes it a god game.

In that case… yeah, I’ll go with Mercenary (dual-wield user), based on its DPS and the skills it can learn.

Rakuro: “Origin is… hmm.”

Born to a wealthy family, ordinary birth, parentless child, cursed child… They all seem to come as packages of both positive and negative modifiers… oh.

Rakuro: “Wanderer… this one’s good.”

An Origin where defense is harder to raise, but luck receives a bonus.

If I remember correctly, critical hits and drop luck are apparently affected by luck in this game, so it’s probably a fairly important parameter.

It’s not like having this guarantees anything, but there’s no reason to complain about having high luck.

So, having gotten a rough image of my character from my job and Origin, I proceeded with character creation based on that… or rather, I did.

Rakuro: “What is this…”

What I ended up with was a tall, thin male character wearing a bird mask while half-naked… strangely enough, looking almost exactly like I had when I cleared Fuckaria. To put it mildly, he looked like a pervert.

No, let me make an excuse. Though, if you ask who I’m making the excuse to, I wouldn’t know.

I looked into it, and apparently this game lets you sell your starting equipment during character creation. Mercenaries come equipped with something called mercenary equipment as their starting gear, and it sells for a pretty good price. Specifically, it raises your starting funds to about three times the normal amount.

Money is no small matter in this kind of game. Since it’s a full-dive game, even when you accept a quest, you’re the one actually jumping and running around, so the effort required for a single quest is pretty damn intense.

My style has always been centered on lots of attacks and mobility, so I wanted to put my investment into weapons rather than armor. That’s why I sold the armor… but unlike Fuckaria, SLF has a large number of people logging in, so going around half-naked with my face exposed is pretty rough… which is why I decided to equip the character-creation option called the Staring Bird Mask, a bird-shaped mask with unusually intense eyes.

Rakuro: “This is… no, since the system allows it, there have to be other people doing it too… right?!!”

I steeled myself against my doubts by placing vague faith in the hardcore players I had yet to see, then moved on to the final step of character creation: setting the player name.

There was no need to hesitate here.

I use the same name in every game, so I gave this pervert—no, this wandering mercenary—the name I had used to conquer countless kusoge.

Rakuro: “Sunraku, then…”

Rakuro: “It’s ‘Sun’ from my surname and ‘Raku’ from my given name. It’s pretty straightforward, but that’s what player names are like.”

Rakuro: “Now then, let’s see the power of a god game…!!”

Final decision: the wandering mercenary known as the half-naked pervert finally enters the world of Shangri-La Frontier…!!

Shangri-La Frontier is technically accessible from overseas, but lag and various other reasons make it a harsh environment for hardcore gamers, so after SLF was released, the number of foreigners moving to Japan increased… or maybe it didn’t.

On top of that, most of the players are Japanese, and it would be difficult to say that the game supports languages other than Japanese, making it a somewhat high-difficulty game for foreign gamers to start playing.

In other words, if someone is playing SLF despite all that, they must be a pretty serious gamer.