[Don't run away from the Ancient Battlefield. Fight... fight... Even if you don't belong there, you can farm meat. Declare that they should come at you. Have the guts to act the part. Cast aside any desire to run. Push that button beyond your limits. "Ruu!" is an incredible manga. Crying won't win you anything.]
Sunraku: "Drop dead, asshole!!"
Oikatzo: "You wanna go, asshole!!?"
Pencilgon: "All right, all right, that's enough of the comedy routine."
Oikatzo and I stop glaring each other down, and the four of us face one another in a space where all kinds of items float and drift through the air like stars.
Pencilgon: "Hmm... she's a little too distinctive to just ignore, I guess?"
Saina: "No problem. This unit's Intelligence is fully capable of resolving the situation."
Pencilgon: "Man, you've got a strong personality... Well, I've already checked the facts, but you're the Conquista Doll who made a contract—or whatever—with Sunraku, right?"
Saina: "Affirmative: This unit is Elma=317, a Conquista Doll that provides Intelligence Assistance to its Master."
Pencilgon: "Sunraku-kun, mind telling me the trick to getting one of these contracts? This looks fun as hell."
Sunraku: "Honestly, I don't really know the conditions myself. How does that work?"
The fourth member of our little gathering—Saina, who had casually gone and made herself a personal space inside Inventoria's storage space—points at Pencilgon and continues.
Saina: "Contract criteria vary depending on the circumstances, but each Conquista Doll model has its own compatibility requirements for contractors. In your case, I believe a Liriel-type would be a particularly good match."
Pencilgon: "Liriel...? Oh, that one with the calculated-cutesy act."
Sunraku: "You remember her pretty well."
Pencilgon: "I mean, my job does involve showing people my face and looking at other people's faces. If somebody's got a face distinctive enough to look like a game character, I can usually remember it."
Come to think of it, I'm kind of the opposite. I see so many similar stock-character types across different games that I'm actually pretty bad at remembering them...
Oikatzo: "Oh, right. Changing the subject—Pencilgon, looks like you can't make it after all?"
Pencilgon: "Make it? Oh, that. TV You Gotta is in the Tokyo metro area, right? I have to be out in Kansai that day."
Oikatzo: "Complete opposite direction, huh... Yeah, that's probably impossible."
Something still doesn't add up.
Why the hell is he putting this much effort into that broadcast or whatever it is? Sure, if he can bring in the two mysterious substitute players who ran wild at GGC, that's probably plenty of good material for the show, but...
Apparently Pencilgon has been thinking the same thing. She narrows her eyes at Oikatzo.
Pencilgon: "Katzo-kun... aren't you hiding something? Like you're deliberately keeping information from us...?"
Oikatzo: "No, no. No, no, no... th-that's not true at all."
...Suspicious.
Sunraku: "All right, spit it out, chicken-bone boy. Depending on what it is, I might suddenly develop an unavoidable appointment that day."
Oikatzo: "Ghh............ The truth is... Sylvia and Amelia both said they absolutely want to appear. Yes."
Sunraku: "Amelia... the Raptor of Dinoscull?"
What the hell is that badass nickname?
Wait, does that actually refer to a real person?
Pencilgon: "As a gamer, even I don't know all that much about her. But she's over 190 centimeters tall, pretty solidly built without being too massive, and somehow still has a model's figure. She's a monster. I know about her more through work than gaming."
Laughing to herself, Pencilgon adds that apparently, if you go strictly by photobook sales, Amelia even beats America's number one. Then she keeps talking about this Amelia-whatever-her-name-was.
Pencilgon: "Huh. If Amelia's coming, I'm kind of starting to want to go too... So? Even I know, with my surface-level knowledge, that Amelia Sullivan absolutely hates losing... Ahh. So that's why..."
Sunraku: "Why is what?"
It isn't Pencilgon who answers.
It's Oikatzo.
Oikatzo: "Amelia Sullivan. Number two in the U.S. rankings. The Raptor of Dinoscull. A pro gamer who uses heavyweight characters and has brought down every high-mobility character—bar one single exception............ And..."
—Until this summer, the woman who had come closest to being "Real Cursed Prison."
Oikatzo: "All right, here's the question. A mysterious suspicious freak appeared like a comet on the grand stage of GGC and, using Cursed Prison, pushed America's number one—Real Metius—all the way to an extra round. What do you suppose the insanely prideful pro gamer who came storming into Japan wants?"
Sunraku: "The Japanese pro gamer who handed her her first loss."
Oikatzo: "We've already played around two hundred matches. Her win rate's about sixty percent."
You're getting your ass kicked.
Hilarious.
Oikatzo: "And by the way, Sylvia recently installed Chinese martial arts and now has a one-hundred-percent win rate."
She's absolutely crushing it.
Terrifying...
A chill runs down my spine at the casual revelation that the monster's already absurd base specs have received a demonic upgrade.
Chinese martial arts are not okay... That America's-number-one freak would absolutely start pulling off some fictional fa jin shit for real.
But now it finally makes sense.
This bastard was trying to drop me straight into a den of monsters without telling me jack shit...!
Sunraku: "Looks like I'm scheduled to come down with a cold and stomachache that day..."
Oikatzo: "Want me to express-ship you stomach medicine and cold medicine? Hm? No, seriously, please don't. Originally I was only planning to invite you, but somehow word got out, Sylvia found out through it, and..."
Pencilgon: "By the way, what happens if Sunraku-kun cancels at the last minute?"
Oikatzo: "America's number one and number two form a dream team versus me alone, and that vision of hell gets broadcast to the entire world."
Pencilgon: "I really want to see that."
Sunraku: "I'm gonna start practicing how to catch a cold that day."
Oikatzo: "DON'T!!"
That was his real voice.
Actually, his hands were shaking.
Dude, what the hell has happened to you between then and now...?
No.
Let's pretend I never noticed. Every world has holes you're better off not peeking into.
Oikatzo: "...Heh... heheh..."
Pencilgon: "What do we do, Sunraku-kun? Katzo-kun broke."
Sunraku: "Send him in for repairs?"
Oikatzo: "Hehehe... But... but even so, Sunrakuuu... I've prepared something that'll get you fired up..."
Huh?
Oikatzo slowly opens his mouth with an ominous grin and speaks the words.
Oikatzo: "I'll put up the first edition of the Japanese-localized boxed release of Justice Versus as your reward."
Sunraku: "Wha............!!?"
A first edition of JusVers!?
Pencilgon: "What's that?"
Sunraku: "A foreign retro game. You can technically play it on modern VR systems, but generation-wise, it's a VR game from before full-dive VR."
Sunraku: "...You're joking, right? You mean the second edition... right? Version 1 of the physical release belongs in a damn museum..."
Oikatzo: "I told Amelia it'd make good bait for No Face, and she got one for me without much trouble. Want to hear... what it cost?"
Sunraku: "............"
I try to say something.
My mouth doesn't move.
Justice Versus—JusVers.
If I remember right, it came out a little over a decade ago... It belonged to the last generation of controller-operated fighting games, the kind that were completely driven out by the spread of full-dive VR.
A genuine retro game.
Full-dive VR was already beginning to spread by the time JusVers released, even if the number of titles was still small. In the middle of all that, the game deliberately chose good old-fashioned controller controls.
Its tagline was:
"Take the Unprecedented to Infinity."
Full-dive VR is a technological revolution you absolutely cannot leave out when talking about the history of games.
Empathy between player and character. Identification. Synchronization.
Complete full-dive could be called the ultimate form of all three.
And yet, from one particular perspective, there is something it does worse than games where a controller moves the character.
It's simple.
No matter what you do, the player is still human.
You can't perform movements the human body is incapable of, and you don't know how to move body parts humans don't even possess.
Justice Versus—JusVers—was a masterpiece that pushed that advantage of controller-based fighting games as far as it could possibly go.
The essence of old-school fighting games is surprisingly similar to a card game.
Every move a character can perform has its power, range, and effects determined beforehand.
The players are essentially smashing hands of cards into one another, each hand stacked with everything from light punches to meter-consuming special moves, and competing to see who wins.
With full-dive VR, that "hand" is less rigidly defined—but also narrower.
Because the player physically moves their own body, part of the game inevitably depends on the player's own specs.
Of course it does.
With the technology they had back then, if you tried to make some complete beginner perform CQC movements, you'd basically end up with their body moving on its own regardless of what they actually wanted it to do.
If anything, what's insane is that only ten years later we got a game like SLF that can make you intuitively think, "Yeah, I can do that."
Motion assist is still the mainstream.
So what makes JusVers so amazing is its sheer customizability—
...No.
That's not important right now.
Sunraku: "You're serious... aren't you?"
Oikatzo: "Dead serious. I want to end this life where Amelia sends me challenge emails and nagging messages every single day... So, Sunraku, I want you to go just as completely off the rails as you did when you pushed Real Metius to the brink."
Even while confessing the most pathetically desperate motive imaginable, Oikatzo had a grin on his face...