I Don’t Want to be a Villainess

There’s an indie game called If You Wish.

It’s a unique simulator created over three years by a game developer who has an unusual taste for reverse harem and yuri, thinking, “If it doesn’t exist, I’ll make it!”

The developer mixed their love for dating Sims and romance comics with a sprinkle of melodrama, thrown brutally into character settings, combining it all with their childhood nostalgia for simulation games, and decided to give it away for free.

Thanks to that, it became a game with blur backgrounds taken by a camera and characters that look like they were drawn in Paint, making it a unique cult hit for its bizarre quality and surprisingly functional game system.

With some intentionally absurd choices, oddly solid growth systems, and ever-changing options based on those growth results, everything fit surprisingly well. Add a little Korean morning drama flair, and the male protagonist route was full of thrilling antics. Good or bad, it was a game screaming the developer’s niche tastes because no money was involved.

But maybe due to the villainess popping out like a sore thumb from a morning drama, it didn’t catch on much with the female audiences who enjoyed traditional NL female-focused dating Sims.

End up with a character being all up in the face of the targeted character, and if you slipped up on growing the heroine or choose the wrong option, boom! You’re blasted into an NTR ending—talk about a turn-off if that’s not your jam!

On the flip side, the yuri route received some praise. The villainess became one of the pitiful heroines! Plus, there were no character distractions in the yuri route. The characters that were initially male protagonists were shoved down to sidekick roles, creating that pure yuri game feel!

Because of this, it seemed that more guys bought the game. Playing the male protagonist route felt like tackling some silly nonsense, while the yuri route gave an actual yuri gaming experience.

The videos I saw were streamed by a male streamer.

…Right.

I’d never played the game myself.

I only caught bits and pieces of the streamer’s gameplay through a streaming site. Not even full live broadcasts but mostly highlights of about ten minutes each, with three or four parts per route.

Besides, the streamer didn’t play through all the routes.

Out of three male characters and three female character routes, they cleared one route each. After facing a few setbacks due to the villainess while pursuing the male character, the streamer didn’t even bother with the villainess’s route when going for the heroine.

I was curious about the other routes, but didn’t feel like downloading the game. Instead, I opted to shortcut my search by typing character names into a wiki.

Though, being a minor free game, I knew the wiki wouldn’t be thorough. Luckily, there was at least a brief character section.

It said, “Provides catharsis to the player with a terrible ending in all male protagonist routes.”

The section on each route was… supposed to be adequate, but like many low-traffic wiki pages, it consisted of empty sections. Maybe the writer got hit by reality while writing.

Well, I didn’t feel the need to dig any deeper.

I wasn’t even a fan of text-based games. I had enjoyed highlights, mostly because it was funny watching the streamer get wrecked from choosing poorly—not because I was particularly invested in the game itself.

So that was the end of my interest in that indie game If You Wish.

…Looking back, I really shouldn’t have let it go like that.

*

I wasn’t keen on text games, but I didn’t completely dislike reading text. I enjoyed novels. Though I have a short attention span and couldn’t sit through an entire book at once, I had read plenty of enjoyable ones over several days. As a kid, I read a lot of light novels and fantasy stories.

Naturally, I read web novels during my commutes. So I had a vague idea of what’s trending in web novels and the current popular themes.

I had also read about getting sucked into novels or games a few times. Of course, I never thought that would happen to me.

But haven’t you ever thought about how you could do better in those scenarios? Like how you’d swing that sword one more time instead of standing around twiddling your thumbs, or how you could treat that heroine way better?

The idea of going back home or being proud of my life’s accomplishments didn’t resonate with me at all. I’d rather just be satisfied living surrounded by cute girls in another world.

In that regard, I found today’s web novels much more appealing than the light novels I read in my youth.

The protagonists are straightforward, not blocking the heroine’s path, and don’t even think about going back. Honestly, while reading novels during work, there were many times I just wanted to become a protagonist in those web novels. As long as it’s not NTR or grimdark themes, isn’t it worth it to get hurt a bit for all that?

But, as always, daydreams are just daydreams.

The moment one gets dropped into another world without any reason and feels a crushing pain as if their whole body is shattering, all those bold fantasies vanish from the mind.

I went through that when I suddenly fell into the world of If You Wish.

What I did right after was scream my lungs out.

ARGHHHHHHH!