Part 1

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Volume 1

Chapter 1

— 1 —

New Communicate Online, commonly known as Nekomimineko, was widely-acknowledged as the shittiest game of the century. Many legends had been born from this game, but if you asked what the most impressive one was, you’d surely hear the point “it’s single-player” be mentioned.

Even though the title contained words like “Communicate” and “Online”, not only was it not an MMO; there wasn’t a single function in the game that allowed you to interact with other people. Quite shocking.

I’d done a bit of research on the net before, and it looked like the company had once created some Communicate something-or-other which was neither a VR game nor an MMO, but an action game series. When they decided to make a sequel, they wanted to create something in the currently-popular VRMMO genre, and that was how New Communicate Online came to be.

A new VRMMO in the Communicate series, thus New Communicate Online. The origin of the name was straightforward.

Except, of course, the production company had no know-how for creating MMOs. Besides, the regulations had become rather strict, especially for VRMMOs, ever since that cyber-terrorism incident. (They took over part of the servers for a VRMMO game, and forcibly exposed players to strong lights and sounds. Though there were no fatalities, many people lost consciousness and were hospitalized.) In the end, the company seemed to have given up due to technical problems and decided to redevelop it as a single-player VR game.

It would have made sense to at least change the title but apparently, after considering things like redoing advertisements and such, they recklessly decided to just stick with it. Even now, I was amazed that this game managed to meet the regulations.

That being said, the fact that an anticipated VR game had become single-player was actually a plus to me at the time.

I was still managing to remain alone—I mean, proudly independent—throughout college, so why should I be forced to deal with other people inside of a game world?

Harboring such thoughts, I bought New Communicate Online on release day in high spirits amidst the laments of the many people who were hoping for multiplayer support.

But back then, the game’s rise to legendary status had just begun. The release version was riddled with bugs and barely functioned as a game. It was a horrible mess.

Characters randomly teleporting while you were talking to them, NPCs who were supposed to be dead showing up if you played the events in an unexpected order; these things were commonplace. There was also a secret technique, nicknamed Grey’s Shadow Clones, where, by fulfilling the required conditions and triggering three specific events at the same time, three instances of the same NPC would appear. This bug in particular was responsible for the awkward laughter of many people.

If all bugs were like that, you could still laugh it off and call it a day, but many of them completely halted story progression. For example, if you threw away a certain early-game quest item that looked like junk, there was no way to get it back, making it impossible to clear the game. Similarly, if you tried to work through two questlines involving the same NPC at the same time, it was possible that your progress on one of them would be lost, making it impossible to clear the game.

The bugs weren’t just limited to the story and quests, either. One of the game’s selling points was that you could experience exhilarating battles using countless skills, but even the battle system was pretty sketchy.

Starting with the worst, it would have to be the monsters’ death animations. When they died, monsters turned into particles of light and disappeared, but the animation was so overdone that they disappeared abnormally slowly, so sometimes you’d get hit by monsters that were supposed to be dead.

Of course, monsters didn’t start new attacks after they died, but if they’d started their attack animation right before that, it wouldn’t stop after they died. As a result, more and more players were killed by monsters with 0 HP, and this bug became one of the reasons for New Communicate Online‘s lack of popularity.

And that wasn’t all.

The weapon mastery system was supposed to be a core part of fighting, but using swords could occasionally raise your axe weapon mastery, you could sometimes use axe skills with a spear, or you couldn’t use bow skills with a bow equipped. To top it off, when the players discovered that skill attack power was completely unaffected by your level of weapon mastery, many serious players cried out in frustration.

The game balance was all over the place too. You could struggle to take down a tough, rare monster only to get the same amount of experience as a regular monster. On the other hand, unimpressive trash mobs in some dungeons would give you more experience than the dungeon’s boss. Some dungeons contained almost no enemies due to monsters randomly falling to their deaths. There were also cases where, thanks to a mistake in the coding, the boss of a difficult dungeon would be just walking around a low-level field, leading to a festival of death.

The highly anticipated skills hyped-up by the beautiful and spectacular effects shown in a pre-release demo video were, of course, not without their own share of problems.

The most well-known skill bug was commonly referred to as the Anakin Skywalker Incident, where using Air Jump after fulfilling certain conditions, you could walk in the air; depending on the situation, the only way to return to the ground was by committing suicide. For skill bugs, this was just one of many, as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Not surprisingly, there were bugs that gave the light from some skills’ visual effects a physical presence and bugs that made some skills’ actual range not correspond with its animations and visual effects. Even among these, some particularly unique bugs were discussed at great length in online forums and, as a result, certain groups of people started giving them interesting names.

An especially famous example was the Forbidden Combo: Death Flash. If you managed to observe two certain spells that had particularly intense effects at the same time, the safety system added after the cyber-terrorism incident would kick in and forcibly log you out due to the excessive light and sound.

Then there was the disappointing Illusionary Wide Slash, where the visual effects made the area of effect (AoE) appear to be five meters, but the actual attack barely reached two meters.

Then, for some reason, one skill’s AoE overlapped with your character’s hitbox, which usually killed you the moment you used it—Instant Suicide: Bloody Stab.

Or maybe the Sword of Life: Assassin’s Rage, which had a negative damage multiplier—probably due to a typo—so it actually healed the target as you attacked; lots of strange “skills” had been found.

But even among those who could overlook those bugs because they made for good jokes, many gave up completely when it came to the all-important gameplay.

Let’s be clear—the creators who set up the scenarios and gimmicks weren’t half-hearted sadists. From the unreasonable instant-death traps that were absolutely impossible to avoid the first time you ran into them, quests that gave no sense of accomplishment—on the contrary, made you depressed when you cleared them—to events that were outright impossible to clear due to an oversight in the setup, important characters being killed by environmental damage with complete disregard for the story, or even autosaving right after an event that forced almost all your party members to leave; many of these situations made you want to say, “This was definitely done just to torture the players.” With content that felt like the developers were trying to cram in everything that should never be done in an RPG, players with any self-respect left one after another.

Even the game system itself frustrated the players in many ways.

For example, take a look at the character creation. The fact that character names couldn’t contain capital letters was just the start. Then, when it came to customizing the character’s appearance, which was an important feature for many people, the game only offered choices in hair color, skin color, and the head accessory. Everything else was determined by the player’s real-life physical data saved in their VR machine.

And even then, there were only three choices for hair and skin colors while there were eight different cat ear designs available for the head accessory. Comments like “they’re totally focusing on the wrong things” or, “just how much do they like cat ears” flooded a certain anonymous forum online.

I’m pretty sure it was around that time when the name Nekomimi Cat Offline started being used around the net as a pun on New Communicate Online.

The commotion lingered for a while, leading to affectionate nicknames such as Nekomimineko and Nekomemeneko.

…God only knows if those names really carried any affection.

As you’d expect from seeing the final product, the complaints to the production company kept flowing in. Things such as “Give me my money back!” “What part of this is online?!” “Do something about the bugs!” “My screen went completely black and now I can’t move. What should I do?” “Do you even care about the players??!!” The backlash was so extreme that it even made the news.

Perhaps ironically, this uproar was what caused Nekomimineko to finally become an “online game.” In order to receive the bug fix patches, you needed an internet connection, and without the bug fixes, it was impossible to properly play through the game.

One after another, new patches were released, and with each patch, there were more new bugs than the patch fixed. After about ten patches, most players had already given up.

Even the players who took pleasure from making a fuss about the bugs on the internet—in a sense, the game’s number one fans—eventually left as the hype died, and started searching for the next crappy game to flame.

…The party was over.

Even then, I didn’t stop playing.

There weren’t really any other single-player fantasy VRRPG games, but more than anything, I had fallen in love with Nekomimineko.

One year after its initial release, Nekomimineko was indeed still a defective product. It stopped getting updates after reaching v1.37 and—after many setbacks and complications—most of the story progression-halting bugs had been fixed, while the bugs they deemed low priority, such as the skill bugs, were mostly left untouched.

But if you changed your perspective, that was the game’s appeal.

The bugs were actually just another feature. Sure, this game was full of bugs, the game balance was all over the place, and the scenario was warped. At first, I thought about quitting multiple times thanks to the unfair events and overall difficulty.

However, once I pulled through a troublesome event that could never be overcome through normal means, with a strategy the developers undoubtedly hadn’t thought possible, I felt it—the gratification from conquering the evil events, the crazy game balance, the bugs that made you feel hopeless, all with my own wit and insight.

This joy from surmounting these unreasonable obstacles where no correct path existed, sometimes through brute force, sometimes through intellect, and sometimes through exploiting bugs, was something that you surely couldn’t find in any other game.

I waded into the sea of information on the net gathering more information than anyone else; I devoted pretty much all my time outside of classes to Nekomimineko. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Nekomimineko made up over 80% of my university life.

Well, that being said…

“I can’t believe I’m going to be literally living in the game…” I inadvertently muttered out loud, then laughed wryly at myself.

After Reinhart dropped me off at the town of Ramlich, I did some more investigating on my own. As a result, I was able to conclude that this world was an astonishingly faithful reproduction of New Communicate Online‘s world.

To give an example, there was the pouch around my waist. The moment I reached inside, an image of two flasks containing either red or blue fluid appeared in my mind. Focusing on the blue flask and removing my hand from the pouch, I now held a flask filled with blue liquid.

This was, of course, the health potion that I’d had since the start of the game, but that wasn’t the point. Even though I’d removed such a large item, the pouch’s size and weight hadn’t changed.

If such a thing happened in the real world, it would be either a magic trick or a supernatural occurrence. That alone was enough to tell me that this was a different world from my old one.

Furthermore…

“It’s a bit of a waste but… Umpf!” I threw the potion to the ground with all my strength.

The flask shattering against the ground with a loud crash, fragments flying in all directions—was not what happened. A blue light diffused from the location of impact and, a second later, I heard an unremarkable *pwong*.

Bending over and carefully investigating, there wasn’t a single shard of glass around where the potion shattered. It had disappeared without a trace.

In Nekomimineko, there were three ways of using a potion.

You could drink it, apply it or throw it.

Drinking its contents would of course restore your HP, and pouring it over a wound would heal it as well. Finally, to use it on a companion mid-battle, you could just throw it. That was unthinkable in real life, but if one was solidly struck with a potion, it would disappear along with the flask while rejuvenating the target.

This alone made it clear that this world did not obey the real world’s laws of physics but instead behaved according to the game’s laws. But that wasn’t all.

There was a famous and still-unfixed bug in Nekomimineko when a potion was thrown.

It was known as the “Sound… Is… Lagged” bug.

I don’t know what or how you’d have to screw up to create something like this, but for some reason, when a potion hit something, there was about a one-second delay between the visual and sound effects. That’s right, just like what I witnessed moments ago.

—In other words, this world was, including all the bugs, a complete reproduction of New Communicate Online.

Out of all of the game’s functions, the only one that couldn’t be used was the menu screen.

The reason was unclear, but it wasn’t like I had absolutely no idea. My guess was that the <save>, <load>, and <logout> functions you could access from the menu screen were too meta—or rather too game-like.

Skills and magic could be explained through the fantasy world setting, and you could say levels and HP were just numeric representations of a person’s strength. However, the menu screen and save/load functions were different. They were concepts that could only exist in a fictional world and were unfitting of a world that was supposed to be real.

That’s why only those features were rejected when this world was created. That was my conclusion, but I didn’t know the truth; I just knew that I couldn’t use the menu, and I needed to keep that in mind from now on.

Being unable to open the menu was a problem for a number of reasons. There were, of course, many complications related to character status, but by far the largest problem was the inability to <save> and <load>. I actually tried to do so many times at the town’s monolith, which acted as a save point, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the save menu to appear. <Save> and <load> could not be used.

In other words, no second chances.

Having died in this game over and over and over, so many times even trying to keep track was stupid, I clearly remembered what happened after you died. After the player died, their vision faded to black, they lost control of their character, and a menu screen opened with choices to <load> or to <return to title screen>. If you couldn’t access the menu screen, then, once you died…

Damn it, you’ve gotta be kidding me!

Not being able to use the menu screen also meant that it wasn’t possible to <logout>, that is, to issue the command to stop the VR machine and return to reality.

Though it was possible to have someone operate the VR machine from the real world, or to trigger the VR machine’s safety device, the main method for someone in VR space to return to reality was that command.

Meaning, my best chance of returning to my old world had been blocked before I was even able to try it.

The old world. The old world, huh…

I decided I would make an effort not to think about the real world anymore.

Well, I mostly kept to myself at university and barely kept in contact with my family. If I didn’t return after a few weeks then my grades for the first semester would be hopeless, but that wasn’t something that I couldn’t recover from.

If you asked me before I came here what my biggest regret regarding the real world was, then I would probably answer, the fact that I couldn’t play more Nekomimineko. The current situation allowed me, in a sense, to play Nekomimineko as much as I wanted, so that was one thing I didn’t need to worry about anymore. …Not that it made me any happier about this situation.

Even then, I need to return to reality somehow—return to my world!

It was one thing to enjoy it as a game, but in many ways, this world was too ruthless to actually live in.

Just as I made my decision to return to the old world no matter what, a gust of wind blew through the gaps in the house.

“S-So cold!”

The cold evening wind assaulted my body mercilessly. In the game, there were no sensations of hot and cold, but now that this world was real, that was no longer the case.

“…Well, I’ll work hard starting tomorrow. For now, let’s just rest at the inn.”

Having quickly become disheartened by the unexpected obstacle, I hurriedly headed towards the inn.

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