episode_0001

“A new work?”

“Yes, sir. To be exact, it’s not a new work, it’s a remake.”

In a spacious room, a man sits in front of a computer, wearing a headset, talking on the phone with someone.

“That’s surprising. Why are they remaking the classic game ‘Academy Story 2’ now…”

The furniture that makes up the room is luxurious and antique, but it clearly shows the owner’s age.

“How much did you do with Uncle Academy Story 2?”

The voice coming faintly from the headset the man was wearing sounded like that of a young lady. She seemed to be quite a bit older than the man.

“What do you think about that?”

“It appears next to the start game button.”

The man moves his wrinkled hands to manipulate the mouse, but the game play time that the opponent is talking about is not shown.

“It’s not showing up…”

“…Sir, are you still playing a game? I have to turn off the game.”

At the girl’s words that contained a look of absurdity, the man saved the game he was playing and quit it. After a while, as the girl said, the game play time was displayed next to the start game button.

“About 28,000 hours.”

The man’s opponent said nothing to the man’s words. He probably was so shocked that he couldn’t even speak.

Regardless, the man searches on the gaming platform site. But the search results are disappointing.

“The game is out in VR.”

“While you’re at it, why don’t you get a VR?”

The girl on the other end of the phone answered as if it was nothing.

In fact, it’s been over 10 years since most games moved to VR. In a world where almost all computer games are now classified as “classic games,” the man is still playing a game that was released 30 years ago.

“New mods are coming out steadily, and this time, three large mods are coming out officially, so it’ll be fun to play for a while…”

The man said that with a hint of regret, but the other person did not seem to sympathize with his words.

“I found out that almost all of the large mod contents have been officially incorporated, and all of the essential mods have been applied to the game.”

“Hmm.”

At the young lady’s words, the man weighs two thoughts in his head: maintaining the status quo or taking on a new challenge, and plays the released game trailer.

The trailer for the remade Academy Story 2 was made with a focus on respect for the original game, paying homage to the trailer for the game from 30 years ago with more care and better graphics.

“The trailer is amazing, right? I’ve been playing for a few days now because I pre-ordered it, and it’s great. Once you get used to it, you don’t need to learn the game again since you already know everything, but the depth has gotten deeper, and the content added through the mod has been added to the original content. ”

The man, who had fallen for the words of the girl who was so supportive of the new product, began to look around the VR device along with her advice.

Academy Story 2 was a game that came out when I was young.

The objective of the game is simple: the player enters the Academy after (ridiculously) coming of age at age 12.

After completing the seven-year academy life, the player’s future is determined. The future also changes depending on how the player lives, what he learns, and who he becomes friends with.

It was a fairly popular game, and while it wasn’t a god game, it was considered a good game. It also adopted the worldview of gender reversal, which was very popular at the time, and it was a world where there were animal humans (now there’s the word “furry”, but there wasn’t such a word back then) rather than ordinary humans.

“Hmm.”

Thinking about that, I looked at the VR device that took a whole 3 hours to install. I think I looked at the manual that was not even clear dozens of times to install it…

The monitor showed that the game was about 95% downloaded. A while ago, I heard a lot of noise around me saying that the prices of components had dropped significantly, so I thought I was being fooled and spent a lot of money to replace my computer. But then I ended up playing a VR game that I hadn’t even thought about, so I guess I should say the timing was good.

“It’s amazing. Academy Story 2 is an 8GB game, but this is over 2TB…”

It feels like time flies. I was in high school when I first started Academy Story 2, and now I’m almost 50.

The sun was setting outside. Since I had to put on the device and go into a state of sleep to play VR games anyway, and since I was going to play for a long time, I got up early, turned off the lights in the living room and bedroom, and sat down in front of the computer again.

The game has been fully downloaded and is now ready to run. When I move the mouse and click the start game button, a program starts running and the message ‘Setting up for the first time’ appears.

Since the game was ready quickly, I waited for a while with the VR device in my hand. Soon, the message ‘Game ready. Please continue in VR’ appeared on the monitor.

I put on the VR in my hand and lay down on the bed, moving the pillow here and there to make myself comfortable. It was said that if you don’t pay attention to your lying position while playing VR for a long time, your neck will hurt. The field of vision is dark because of the VR. After confirming that your body is comfortable, I press the button on the side of the device. The screen brightens and I feel my body getting tired.

“Oh, that’s amazing.”

…And after a while, when I came to my senses, a space filled with blue waves appeared. In front of me stood the phrase ‘Character Creation’ along with the default dog-human figure.

Since all characters in Academy Story 2, including the player, are animal humans, or Furries, the player character creation is also created as a Furry character.

However, it is unique in that there are two characters, one is the young player and the other is the player after they have grown up. This is a feature that did not exist before, and it was not available in the mod either, so it is quite new.

In previous games, I tended to choose player races based on racial traits rather than appearance. For example, dog races have good stamina, rat races are fast, and cat races are more agile than other races. Racial traits only give you a 1-3% advantage in terms of numbers at best, but they help you a little bit with mini-maxing, so I end up paying attention to them when playing a digging game.

While thinking about what to do, I changed the races here and there and discovered that there were carnivore races such as lions, tigers, and leopards, as well as the ‘jaguar’ race.

“He’s a male, but he has all kinds of carnivores, including a jaguar.”

The Jaguar race is a race that does not exist in the original Academy Story 2, but is now a race added in a mod that people call a ‘required mod’. It seems that it is not wrong to say that most of the mod’s functions have been officially incorporated.

The male chose the jaguar race. The reason why the race addition mode in Academy Story 2 is popular is because the worldview is based on ‘gender reversal’, so in most cases, females do what men would normally do and males do what women would normally do, so unlike female characters, there are almost no large or carnivorous races among male characters.

After choosing the race, I started customizing my character… After a while, I created a black jaguar that obviously looks young and gentle even when grown up, even though it is a carnivore.

“I made it while thinking of my son’s cat, and it turned out so cute.”

But I liked the cute appearance, so I started to create more characters.

According to the settings, only noble children can enter the Academy, so the background is set to the lowest level, the child of a baron. Playing as the child of the highest noble family has the effect of lowering the difficulty, but the background recommended in the game is the child of a baron.

Also, I couldn’t help but think long and hard during the special skill selection stage. The most time-consuming part of character creation is selecting traits. In the original, you would just select simple special skills like ‘Swordsmanship’, ‘Magic’, or ‘Politics’, which are less than 10, and move on, but the remade game is jam-packed with more than a dozen special skills, almost 100.

As I was reading through the specialties one by one, my eyes stopped at the ‘Medicine and Recovery’ trait.

[Medicine and Recovery]: You are skilled in the medical arts of healing others and in restorative magic.

This trait, which is simply specialized in recovery magic without a mod, is confidently promoted by the game’s developers as a beginner recommended trait for male characters, but it is actually a trap trait.

It seems that since female characters are superior in terms of physical ability, it means that you should make friends in the game and have your female companions come forward during battles, while the player safely uses recovery to solve the game from behind…

“Actually, it’s not that good of a trait.”

The problem is that the AI of the companion characters is not good enough to be called good in vain, and the basic mechanics of the game are problematic. The companion AI needs about 3 related mods to be usable, and since there are few people who play as a healer in any game, many guide articles introduce that it is better to avoid playing as a healer unless you like it.

I also tried it briefly in the early stages of the game, but when I realized it was a trap trait, I restarted the game, and when my playtime exceeded 8,000 hours, I decided to write a guide on the Internet, and after watching a few endings with a recovery trait character, I never chose it again.

So I chose the medicine and recovery traits. They are somewhat boring traits, but since the game has changed to VR and the battle system has changed, I decided to get a feel for them with the decent recovery trait. In addition, although the battles are more boring, choosing the recovery trait has the effect of making other characters more favorable to the player, so it is not a trait that is completely bad.

After deciding on the characteristics, I finished the small settings and started setting the difficulty.

The existing easy, normal, and hard difficulty levels were provided, but in addition to that, a custom difficulty level was also provided that allowed for detailed modification of all items that were mod functions, so I started adjusting the custom difficulty level without a single second of hesitation.

For example, Academy Story 2 used to be that you could only reach the maximum level of 50 right before graduation because the amount of experience gained was less than necessary, and you had to dig deep. Now, users who only have fossils left can reach level 50 before graduation even if they play as newbies, and if they dig really hard, they can reach level 50 by the end of their first year at the Academy. The multiplier was set so that the maximum level could be unlimited. This was to prevent the game from becoming loose and to increase the content.

I also started adjusting various things after setting the so-called ‘national rule multiplier’ slightly higher.

For example, unlike before where you could only obtain up to 4 traits, we lifted the limit on the number of traits you can obtain, or we increased the growth of stats that were discarded because their growth was too small no matter how hard you tried to raise them, so that it would be fun to play even if you raised them with a dedicated build. Or, on the contrary, we adjusted highly efficient stats that made the game easier just by raising them to an appropriate level.

The man, who had set the difficulty level to be easy to enjoy, unlocking various convenient features to get the feel of the game for the first time, clicked the ‘Yes’ button under the phrase ‘Start the game as is’.

And then the vision went dark.