Chapter 2: What the Hell Is This Graphic Quality?

Y-jun was a gaming content creator on the Pilipili video platform, and her account ID was 【Excited Y-jun】.

Y-jun was hardly a pro gamer. Previously, just recording a horror game on normal difficulty had taken her over half a month.

Along the way, there were certain checkpoints that took her multiple attempts to clear.

However, she had a distinct personal style, leaning heavily toward comedy, which brought her a large following.

Y-jun played a wide variety of games; whatever the mechanic, she could always connect it to something similar in another title.

Due to intense exam prep recently, she had stopped uploading for a few months, but her efforts paid off: she received an offer from Oxford University for their game design program.

Her follower count had dropped from four hundred thousand to a little over three hundred thousand.

“Now that I have time over summer break, I need to put out a few good videos.”

Y-jun browsed the latest releases on the Steam platform.

But after looking around, she didn’t find anything fun or eye-catching.

As for the titles with great reviews and high sales, other creators had already covered them.

She didn’t want to make generic, copycat videos.

When in doubt, check the creator dashboard!

Taking a cue from certain web novel authors: just copy the top-voted book reviews and call it a day.

Y-jun began scrolling through her private messages in reverse chronological order.

The title mentioned the most was 《King of Fighters》.

King of Fighters?

She had actually just seen this game on the Steam platform, but the game description was a complete mess.

The genres listed were fighting and side-scrolling 2D, and the developer wasn’t even an actual studio.

One look was enough to tell the quality wouldn’t be very high.

“What year is it? People are still making side-scrolling 2D games?”

“And traditional fighting games at that.”

Y-jun could name dozens of games in that genre alone.

Curious, Y-jun searched to see if anyone had covered 《King of Fighters》.

Just as she expected, no one had.

After all, it had only come out yesterday afternoon. Even if someone wanted to make a video, they couldn’t possibly do it that fast.

To her surprise, however, she found a promotional cinematic for 《King of Fighters》 with an insanely high view count.

“Ranked number one site-wide?”

“Number one on the trending chart?”

Y-jun clicked on it.

“Holy crap.”

“The runtime of this cinematic… is ninety-eight minutes?!”

“You call this a cinematic?”

After finishing it, Y-jun was thoroughly stunned.

Just how massive was this production?

Bullet comments^[1] were flooding across the screen.

“The pride of domestic gaming!”

“Just watching this cinematic makes me want to play!”

“Guys, I’m already playing it! The story is amazing! But it’s way too hard!”

“Y-jun, I know you’re watching! Hurry up and make a video on this!”

“Forget it, everyone knows Y-jun is all thumbs. Don’t set our girl up for suffering.”

…

“Interesting.”

“Just the price alone makes this cinematic worth it; it’s under ten Yuan.”

“I’ll just treat it like buying a movie ticket.”

[Payment Successful]

Y-jun added the game to her library.

“How big of an install is this game?”

“5 GB? 20 GB? 30 GB?”

When she clicked to start the download, she was completely dumbfounded.

Only a few hundred megabytes?

Wait.

Did I buy the wrong thing?

Whenever a game blew up in popularity, pirated knockoffs immediately flooded the market, sometimes even selling for higher than the official game.

Y-jun had actually been scammed out of nine Yuan before, only to download and end up playing Chinese checkers.

After asking around, she found out the real game was free while the knockoff cost money, and they were two completely different games.

She had been thoroughly annoyed back then.

She definitely didn’t want to play the wrong game and make a huge fool of herself.

Y-jun searched for King of Fighters again, checking back and forth like she was playing spot-the-difference.

“It really is the right one!”

“The title, characters, and author name all match.”

“That cinematic was at least dozens of gigabytes.”

“The game is only a few hundred megabytes? And it even supports console, handheld, and PC?”

Y-jun grew even more curious about what kind of game this actually was.

In less than two minutes, the download finished.

At the same time.

Y-jun plugged in her controller and turned on her stream and recording software.

Stream Title: 【King of Fighters Demo Play!】

“Hello everyone, I’m Y-jun! Today, I’m bringing you a side-scrolling 2D fighting game.”

[Wooo! Y-jun is finally live!]

[I heard this game is pretty brutal. Y-jun, spare yourself the torture.]

[You guys are obviously fake fans. That cinematic is blowing up, so Y-jun is just showing us some gameplay!]

[Mm… gameplay showcase sounds about right. Good luck, Y-jun!]

Seeing the bullet comments scrolling across the stream stoked Y-jun’s competitive spirit.

Having “two left thumbs” was practically her brand at this point.

No way.

Regardless of whether this game was good or not, Y-jun was determined to beat it!

The game loaded rather slowly.

Once it opened.

The graphics caught Y-jun and the stream viewers completely off guard.

[Holy crap? What kind of pixelated graphics are these?!]

[Straight back to an arcade twenty years ago…]

[Is this really King of Fighters?!]

[Did Y-jun download a pirated copy?]

[The cinematic was in Blu-ray quality, so how did the game turn out so trash?]

[If all games came out like this, my GTX 750 Ti could hold out for another ten years!]

Seeing the confusion in the chat, Y-jun patiently explained.

If she hadn’t investigated it like a detective just moments ago, she really would have thought she’d downloaded the wrong game.

[What more do you expect for 9.9 Yuan? Besides, you got to watch that cinematic for free!]

[Literally buy a movie ticket, get a game for free.]

[Still gotta see if it’s actually fun first.]

“I double-checked several times. This is definitely the official game.”

“The file size isn’t big to begin with, only a few hundred megs. I don’t think it’s demanding at all-any computer should be able to run it.”

After a brief interaction with the chat.

Without further ado.

Time to play.

Character select.

While the cinematic had featured a fixed lineup, the actual gameplay let players pick whoever they wanted, even skipping the main protagonist’s team entirely.

Y-jun knew how to stream.

She picked the three characters that had generated the most bullet comments and mentions under the cinematic.

The protagonist, Kyo Kusanagi, was an obvious pick.

The other two were Mai Shiranui and Yuri Sakazaki.

ROUND 1!

READY!

GO!

“Pfft…”

[The music is actually decent.]

[The soundtrack is pretty good, but these special effects are killing me.]

Y-jun only glanced at the chat for a second without watching her character, and she was immediately hit by a combo, losing nearly a third of her health bar.

K.O!

[LMAO, if you can’t handle it, let’s just drop it.]

[How about switching to easy mode?]

[Y-jun, why are you only throwing basic punches and kicks?! The opponent can use skills!]

[Yeah, yeah! It was in the cinematic! The protagonist can use skills, ura ura ye^[2]!]

[A cinematic is just a cinematic, and the game is the game. What’s in the cinematic might not be in the game…]

How could Y-jun have time to look at the chat right now? She was frantically scrambling at the controls.

She started mashing the joystick, X, Y, A, and B at random.

And against all odds, she actually pulled off a move.

[Not bad, Y-jun! You’re getting the hang of it!]

[Why can’t you pull off the ura ura ye?]

[It looks like the developers didn’t provide a move list. Are players supposed to figure it all out themselves?]

[Interesting. This game’s creator is seriously interesting.]

[Even though the graphics don’t match the cinematic at all, I think the gameplay is still really fun.]

[Keep at it, Y-jun! Another streamer has already reached stage two!]