Chapter 421: With the Overall Verdict in Your Heart, Roar, President

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There is a word: compromise.

It means giving up on reaching the original quota and ending the work once it has reached a line you can at least accept. Its actual meaning apparently has something to do with two parties disagreeing, but when making something, the two parties in question are the ideal and reality.

You really want to make a robot game where you fly through the air in three dimensions and fire missiles from all over your body, yet what reaches the market is a pixel game where you can only move in straight lines up, down, left, and right and fire rice-grain-sized “lasers” (lol).

You would think that could not possibly happen.

But having once unearthed a robot game whose movement literally jerked around in uneven steps, I cannot help thinking that the swamp called trash games might have its abyss connected to outer space.

Then let us look at the reverse case.

If the creators packed every single thing they wanted into a game, without excess or omission, would it become a god-tier game?

At the very least, SLF is a successful example. Even if it has rough spots, if it produces satisfaction beyond those flaws, then it belongs among the masterpieces.

What about Fuuun Prejiden?

...That game is like a dish where the ingredients were combined wrong from the start.

And the seasoning measurements were wrong too.

Kyomurus: "O world... sink into darkness—into darkness—and vanish...!!"

Sunraku: "Oh, you’re the destroy-everything type? You’re the fifth final boss like that."

Demon-God Emperor Kyomurus apparently had some grand background story, but I could look that up after watching the ending credits.

I had overcome a boss rush where every boss kept its stats, plus extra bullshit, just to stand here. Nobody told me there would be a combined Four Heavenly Kings boss, goddammit.

Right now, around this final dungeon, Demon-God Castle Avisuma, the United Army had gathered the strength of the entire continent, now made into the Great United States, and was buying time at the risk of its life so that I, the President, could fight in perfect condition.

It had been a pain finding the quest that was good for grinding army experience...

Of all things, they had made it a hidden quest.

Compromise is not the same thing as giving up.

Stuffing every topping into one serving just gives you indigestion. If you cram in everything, there will naturally be disadvantages to match.

As an overall assessment after playing Fuuun Prejiden...

“The ingredients earn a passing grade. The cooking method earns a passing grade. The cooking utensils are decent enough. But mixing sushi and parfait using a curry recipe will not necessarily make something tasty.”

That was about where it landed.

Fuuun Prejiden was a game that packed strategy, Musou-style action, nation-building simulation, and a touch of hack-and-slash into one title.

The player became an entity called the President: sometimes commanding an army, sometimes standing at the front lines, and sometimes sitting at the negotiating table with foreign nations.

Put another way, the player had to swing weapons around and mow down enemies while issuing orders to an army, expand the country while considering the climate and surrounding environment, and agonize over negotiations—even if the goodwill command did work.

SLF was like a full Manchu–Han banquet. You could choose whatever you liked from a huge selection of dishes. You were not obligated to finish one plate, and you could reach for a different dish halfway through.

This, on the other hand, was an everything-on-one-plate meal.

At the very least, it was hard to imagine that the public would enjoy a dish where you found cooked salmon roe and strawberries inside a curry.

The difficulty also made the game’s shortcomings stand out.

When making a game, balancing its difficulty was an eternal challenge.

You could not possibly win if your first encounter was the Demon King. And if your starting equipment was final-dungeon class, the catharsis of combat would become distorted.

Difficulty should basically rise like an uphill slope, but this game had separate difficulty levels for each of its many elements.

And those elements could not substitute for one another.

No matter how powerful the individual player became, the game would force a game over if the army’s level was too low. If national strength remained low, alliances with other countries could not be made. So the game demanded a high standard in every element.

On top of that, the difficulty rose to the level of an entirely different game before and after the Empire invasion in the middle of the story, forcing you into grinding.

High difficulty and a sense of accomplishment are inseparable, but that does not mean you can just crank the difficulty up all at once.

Still...

Yes, still.

Even if this game ended up classified as a trash game for many reasons, it had one point that deserved to be praised.

Sunraku: "Nothing is impossible for the President, and the President is the leader of the United! The Dinner United States table celebrates every person’s own colors! I don’t want some flavorless future painted entirely in darkness!!"

That point was its story.

Fuuun Prejiden had likely built all of its systems without compromise on the foundation that the entire story, from prologue to epilogue, came first.

That was why the President was busy with the hardships of being a head of state.

That was why the difficulty spiked because of the Demons that appeared as enemies of humanity.

・The United will not lose!

・We will defeat you!

・We will not hand the world over to you!

Even Mr. Stock Phrase was completely fired up.

It turned out in the latter half of the story that the will of the goddess connected to the Sacred Relics had been guiding the protagonist all along. So, without exaggeration, the “goddess in the lower-left box” turned out to be an actual character.

It was a little sad that the joke options stopped appearing near the end, but forcing comedy into things here would only ruin the mood.

And these were not words aimed at the final boss.

They were for Rice-chan, still imprisoned and being forced to use the power of the miraculous Sacred Relic, the Unity Flag.

・So...

・So...

・So...

The choices were not functioning as choices.

But this was preparation for what came next.

There was no need to get fancy.

Sunraku: "So..."

In that instant, the world stopped as though it had frozen.

A single window appeared before me, and lines of text began to form within it.

・Please call out

・to the very first citizen who believed in you

・so you can bring her back!

Leave it to me, Goddess.

I brushed the window aside as though shattering it and sent my voice ringing through the world as it began moving again.

Sunraku: "The President’s desk is not where you are, Rice-chan! Come back!!"

Rice-chan: "Y-yes!!"

The skewered grilled-fish flag began to shine.

The shadows holding Rice-chan vanished in the light, and Rice-chan grabbed the Unity Flag and ran toward me.

Rice-chan: "President!!"

Sunraku: "Welcome back, Rice-chan. Now then, Demon-God Emperor... if you want to surrender, now is your chance."

Kyomurus: "Damn you... daaaamn you!!"

With the Unity Flag returned to the player side, its effects began extending to me and everyone belonging to my faction.

The President rose through the faith of the citizens.

The citizens moved forward through the President’s guidance.

The goddess’s blessing was now at its peak.

Even effects that had previously been usable only in limited ways were unlocked. Emerging from the light in a sacred design embroidered with gold, the Unity Flag activated its true power: granting a status buff whose value was calculated from the combined fighting power of every citizen of the Dinner United States.

An immense enhancement, represented as light, was granted to the player.

The golden aura surrounding my body drove away the darkness.

Sunraku: "Its name is Ultimate President Mode... As a human being, I, the President, will defeat you, Demon God!!"

Overall Conclusion!!

If the company had not gone bankrupt immediately after release, this could have eventually become a masterpiece through a difficulty-balance update, couldn’t it?!

A player slapped in the face by failing game balance and pushed onward by a perfect-score story now faced the final battle—!!

・Fuuun Prejiden’s World Setting

Gods originally lived in the world, but the appearance of a Demon God triggered the Final War.

Nearly all the gods perished, but the last surviving goddess succeeded in sealing the Demon God. The goddess’s body was destroyed as the price of the seal, leaving the goddess as a being of mind alone, who then entered a long sleep.

By the time the goddess awoke, humanity had spread and prospered throughout the world.

The goddess watched over humanity, but the Demon-God race revived time and again. Unable to physically interfere, the goddess instead chose powerful people from among humanity and had them seal the Demon God whenever it returned.

But individual strength had limits.

In one of the Demon God wars, the seal succeeded, but the records were burned away and humanity suffered damage severe enough to set civilization itself back.

So the goddess scattered items containing fragments of her power across the world and decided to select not individuals who would fight a Demon God, but people who would lead humanity against the Demon Gods.

Those items were the Sacred Relics. At the start of the story, the protagonist is the person chosen to lead humanity through one of them.

The dialogue box visible only to the protagonist and the President Beam are both effects of the heart-shaped Sacred Relic, Mind-to-Mind.

The full explanation would take a while, but in short, it sent mystical nanomachines through the protagonist’s bloodstream, turning the body into a receiver and using it to perform miracles.

The goddess casually modifies people’s bodies, but she is a good goddess. Really.

Before the story began, the protagonist, before player control, accepted this Sacred Relic in exchange for every memory except the dream of becoming President.

Meta-wise, of course, that is because the story starts there. In-universe, accepting the relic at that price is why the protagonist has no memories from before the prologue.

Basically, what makes this game a trash game is that it forces endless tedious tasks on the player and has wildly uneven difficulty balancing.

The reason it is treated as a hidden masterpiece by those in the know is because its story alone earns a perfect score.