Okay, sooooo I kinda said that I wouldn’t be covering light novel debuts for a while. However, at the time, I had completely forgotten that I was looking forward to The NPCs in This Village Sim Game Must be Real! (along with one other series). Look, Japan puts out thousands of these every year; I’m not the only one to completely forget something I knew I wanted. So, after this and that other series, I’m DEFINITELY not covering any light novel debuts for a while. I think?
In The NPCs in This Village Game Sim Game Must be Real!, a NEET named Yoshio receives a strange package, containing a game in its alpha build: The Village of Fate. He must test the game, but the fact that it’s classified is really weird. That, and the fact that it has the most realistic graphics ever despite how well it runs on his older computer. Oh, and the fact that the characters seem all too human.
Right off the bat, Village Game shows a lot of promise. The author clearly put a lot of thought into the game mechanics, but it’s definitely not something most people would play. Basically, imagine a village sim roguelite, which sounds pretty kickass just from that description. However, there are some things that seem like utter BS, and intentionally so. For starters, Yoshio gets only one run, and the game permanently soft-locks, in addition to the permadeath that can happen to the NPCs. Also, he cannot directly control them. The only way to command them is to write a prophecy as the villagers’ god. And this feature only refreshes once every twenty-four hours of real time. He can accumulate Fate Points (FP) to unlock powerful and necessary upgrades, but the upgrades are expensive, and—here’s the real kicker—the game has micro-transactions.
This series seems to be setting up a character study that can—hopefully in an intellectual manner—examine people and how easily they can lose their sense of reality to that of a game world. And in addition to that, Yoshio undergoes some real growth that most characters of his ilk do not. Since he’s stuck in the real world, he has to face his insecurities head-on. As questionable as The Village of Fate is, it has compelled him to go outside. He even has to get a job because, as expected in a game with microtransactions, The Village of Fate is pay-to-win. And I don’t even mean that from the standpoint of making a grindy game less grindy; it is simply impossible to gain enough FP to keep up with the crap the game throws at you.
The problem lies within The Village of Fate itself, and I don’t mean how intentionally sadistic its design is. The game’s worldbuilding and denizens are about as bland as any substandard isekai. Our cast of the game is a family of three, whose little daughter has an unhealthy crush on a fourth main character named Gams, a significantly older man. They’re… there. I don’t see how Yoshio got so invested in them outside of how realistic they look in the game.
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Verdict: 8.9/10
I didn’t expect The NPCs in This Village Sim Game Must Be Real! to be good at all. And yet, it pleasantly surprised me. I highly anticipate how much more advanced the game will get as more stuff happens, and Yoshio’s character arc is very engaging. I recommend it not to isekai fans, but slice-of-life fans, since it’s pretty grounded for a fantasy series.
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