Chapter 150: Justice and Evil Race Through the City of Chaos
I'd kept missing every possible chance to show my face, until an unspoken "so this guy's really going to keep the mask on right to the end, huh" atmosphere settled over the place. In the end, I had no choice but to have dinner brought to my room. Well, that aside, the food was genuinely good... Free food is wonderful. It doesn't hurt your own wallet at all.
And so, diving into the VR world by a slightly different route than usual, I booted up the game that would be the battlefield for our fight the day after tomorrow—Galaxia Heroes Chaos. I headed into Training Mode for the moment, and now I was standing at the character-select screen in the middle of a serious dilemma.
Rakuro: "That said... I barely know any Galaxia Comics characters beyond what they look like, and the only ones I really know are from the stuff I read on the maglev..."
At times like this, you start by picking based on appearance. I was definitely going to try every character eventually anyway. For now, let's start with this samurai-looking character called Ranzo...
About an hour later.
Rakuro: "Hmm... I've at least tried everyone once..."
Because the nature of the franchise meant you could play not only heroes but supporting heroes and villains too, test-driving the whole roster was, well... exhausting. Still, after moving around with all of them, one thing became clear: the claim that this game used SLF's technology seemed to be true.
Games from before SLF had a certain unavoidable problem: the sense of wrongness caused by the difference between your real body and your avatar's physique in virtual reality. For example, if a tall, slender person in real life used a dwarf-shaped avatar in-game, there was no completely getting rid of the mismatch caused by differences in gait, body movement, limb length, and overall build. That was why full-dive VR games generally referenced the player's real body when constructing the avatar. FPS games in particular, with plenty of freedom in setting up the "individual," could be called easy games to move around in on that front.
Fighting games, on the other hand, were a terrible match for full-dive VR. Their whole identity was controlling characters with wildly different traits and physiques—fat guys, beanpoles, sometimes even nonhumans. Unlike old-fashioned games where all you had to do was move a lever and press buttons, fighting-game players first had to go through the preliminary step of "getting used to their main's body." Because of that, quite a few fighting games let you reference your real-life body type for avatars such as "Constipation."
I'm not saying every player was a hundred-kilogram blob, but anyone whose body type simply wasn't suited to a fighting-game avatar was inevitably stuck struggling with the difference between moving a body in reality and moving one in VR. That was also one reason people said full-dive VR should be played in a healthy body. Put simply, conventional full-dive VR was harsh on fat people.
But Shangri-La Frontier had somehow solved that problem completely. Make yourself taller, shorter, fatter, or so thin you were practically skin and bones—whatever build or physique the avatar had, the player could control it as though that had been their own body from the very beginning.
And apparently the same was true of this game, which had SLF's blood running through it. I'd tried everything from huge bruisers to tiny characters, and so far I hadn't felt any difficulty moving due to differences in physique.
Rakuro: "For now, I'll narrow the characters I'd use in the real match down to about five... then settle on the final choice today or tomorrow."
Even though the game had not officially released yet, at this stage I could already choose my alter ego from more than twenty characters. For now, I picked out five that had personally felt easy to use.
First candidate: Ranzo. Apparently written with the characters for "storm" and "storehouse," he was a so-called SAMURAI—not a samurai—character: an old-man hero who fought in a dual-wielding style with two Japanese swords, rather like Miyamoto Musashi. Part of the appeal was that his fighting style was close to mine as Sunraku in SLF, but I also rated his special move highly: an iai technique that was practically teleportation.
Second candidate: Cursed Prison. As the name suggested, he was a villain whose power was sealed inside cursed armor, and the arch-enemy of Metius, the character used by Sylvia-whatshername. He could absorb things like cars and rubble to reinforce his armor, though because of how that worked, compensating for his mobility took some ingenuity. He also had one particularly romantic, rule-of-cool move built in, and overall he was simply fun to play.
Third candidate: Metius. Just as Katzo had said, Sylvia-whatshername was the same type of gamer as me, and her main character was extremely easy for me to use too. Its mobility was completely absurd. If you could overlook the weakness that sharp turns required coming to a complete stop first, its explosive straight-line speed let you seize control of spacing from your opponent... Yeah, this was the kind of character that died the moment it was forced onto the defensive.
Fourth candidate: Twinkle Pixie. The name already gave off a certain kind of aura, but yes, she was a female character. A heroine-like character built around fairy-ish cuteness... was only the surface. Her true nature was a mass of harassment specialized entirely for point-blank infighting. Almost every combo was built out of "get close," "lock down movement," and "hit them with a stick." She seemed less like a fairy and more like some kind of demon.
And fifth candidate: PSY-Borg Lord. A projectile-wielding character combining psychic powers and cybernetics. You could practically say the projectiles were the character. The concept was brutally straightforward: "if they get close, you die." That said, he had a wealth of step techniques and projectile moves that could let you pound an opponent one-sidedly if you trapped them in the right pattern. The demand for strong positioning and movement technique made him very much my kind of character.
Rakuro: "All right, I'll play some matches with these five and make the final call... 9:52, huh."
We were meeting online at ten, but that didn't mean the server only opened at ten. If I was going to sit around waiting for matchmaking anyway, I might as well connect now...
『Matched with Nu2meg. Moving to the character-selection screen.』
Rakuro: "Nwah!?"
The match was made almost instantly, and an embarrassingly stupid sound escaped me. In this game, the character you'd used most recently was provisionally treated as your avatar, so on the character-select screen a handsome, mechanical-looking guy was making a dumb face... but that wasn't the point right now.
Rakuro: "This name... I see. So I have to prove myself right away."
Not Katzo. Not Pencilgon. In that case, who this person was should have been obvious. This one match carried as much weight as the real thing.
(I should've asked about Megumi's playstyle... Katzo already gave away mine... Damn that guy who can't trigger his own Uniques.)
Now, what to do? In terms of ease of use, Metius or Ranzo would be the choice. But if I wanted to feel out an opponent I'd never fought before, PSY-Borg Lord or Cursed Prison would work too. Twinkle Pixie was risky without knowing at least some of what the opponent could do, so I'd pass on her this time.
Rakuro: "...All right."
"Chaos"—an unidentified entity that even the omnipotent Galaxeus could never have predicted. Neither harmony nor destruction, but endless battle and chaos itself were what this being desired. It drew heroes and villains from every world into its own world, "Chaos City." Would heroes who each upheld a different justice join forces? Would villains who placed their own desires above all else turn on one another? Or would mortal enemies—hero and villain—form a team!? Over the city of chaos, the supernatural being laughs—!!
That was the premise of this game, and because of it, battles followed rules very different from those of conventional fighting games.
First, there were two victory conditions. One was to knock out your opponent—in other words, defeat them. As a fighting game, that was the main condition, but for a certain reason, simply beating on the other player was not the whole problem.
The second was to obtain the "Chaos Cube," placed randomly somewhere in the vast battlefield of Chaos City.
The standard template for a fighting game was to battle inside a colosseum-like arena. In GH:C, however, environmental objects were randomly rearranged every match, so an entire city that always showed a different face became the battlefield.
You might think that meant you could ignore your opponent, pick a high-mobility character—say, Metius—and rush the Chaos Cube as fast as possible. But it wasn't that simple.
Depending on the character they used, players began the match with either a Heroic Gauge or a Villainic Gauge. You could not collect the Chaos Cube until that gauge had been filled. And as for what you had to do to fill it... well, that hardly needed explaining.
Incidentally, if two villains or two heroes were matched against each other, villain or hero NPCs would apparently spawn on the map.
Rakuro: "Now then... looks like the other side picked a villain character."
When a Hero was matched against a Villain, the Villain player was given thirty seconds of preparation time. It was probably a rule based on the convention that the hero arrives later, but during that time the Villain could fill their gauge, set traps, strengthen themselves, and so on.
Taken by itself, that might make the Villain look advantaged. But Hero characters could win over the NPCs living in Chaos City. For example, they could gather eyewitness reports to locate a hidden Villain, or perform disaster rescues to fill the Heroic Gauge.
Do you focus single-mindedly on defeating the enemy, or run to obtain the Cube...? It was a fighting game, but I could also feel a strong strategy-game side to it.
Rakuro: "Excuse me, young lady. Have you seen anyone rampaging around here?"
Woman: "A-a monster's going wild over there...! My husband might still be there...!!"
Rakuro: "I see... By the way, is there a sweets shop around here?"
Woman: "How can that possibly matter right now!? Shall I tell you where the retirement home is instead!?"
Yeah, just as I thought. Watching the woman snap at the old man who had suddenly asked a completely deranged question, I realized the true nature of this game. Offline single-player matches... Even as a hands-on demo tester, naturally I couldn't play the full retail version, and it had only been a simple Training Mode, but I had still been able to interact with NPCs.
So, naturally enough, I had tried all sorts of things. Taking a small child hostage while playing a villain. Performing disaster rescues over and over as a hero. Making obnoxiously affected remarks. And with that last check just now, I'd confirmed something.
The true essence of this game was a simulation game.
To put it bluntly, if SLF is a game five generations ahead, then Galaxia Heroes Chaos is probably around three and a half generations ahead.
The NPC AI is certainly excellent, but it is several levels below SLF's. Its ability to answer questions is strong, but if you keep talking to an NPC five or six times, the conversation starts looping. That's about the level of intelligence we're talking about.
Even so, apparently an enormous amount of money changed hands... or maybe it didn't.