Chapter 3: The Game Blows Up!

In just a single night, the video’s view count blew past five hundred thousand!

It claimed the number one spot on the trending chart!

From the creator dashboard, Su Cheng could see a flood of comments left on the video.

[Holy crap, I love Yuri Sakazaki so much!]

[Yuri Sakazaki had it rough. Her dad wouldn’t let her enter the tournament and gave her spot to his nephew instead, so she sneaked off to enter with Mai Shiranui.]

[My favorite character is Mai Shiranui. She hits every single one of my aesthetic preferences!]

[Mai Shiranui is my waifu from now on!]

[Why are there weebs simping over 2D characters everywhere I go? Save me!]

[I don’t get it. What does Mai Shiranui even see in Andy Bogard? Andy wouldn’t even team up with her for the tournament. Why keep a boyfriend like that?]

[Andy Bogard is a total scumbag!]

[Did anyone else notice that white-haired old guy holding a wine gourd looks a bit like someone from one of Jackie Chan’s old movies?]

[Right, right, right! I noticed that too! The look is super similar, and he even uses drunken fist!]

[The creator probably borrowed the master’s character design. Really adds to the immersion.]

The CG wasn’t top-tier, but it certainly wasn’t cheap or slapped together just to fool players. It was solidly above average.

Alongside the praise, however, were plenty of malicious attacks and doomsayers.

[Selling dog meat under a sheep’s head^[1]! The CG is gorgeous, but the actual game is pixel art, right?!]

[??? Isn’t it common knowledge in the gaming community that CG and actual gameplay are two different things? Besides, the dev never claimed they looked identical.]

[How is that selling dog meat under a sheep’s head? It’s not like they showed gameplay footage hyped to high heaven and then took a dragon-slaying blade to hack down the features and graphics.]

[The dev team probably spent the entire budget on the CG. I tried the game out, and it’s decent enough to play.]

[It’s only 9.9 Yuan, what more do you want, a bicycle^[2]? As long as you can make out what’s on screen, it’s fine. If you can’t, isn’t that what the CG is for? Just use your imagination!]

[To be fair, this game wasn’t made by a team, but by a newbie developer. For a lone-wolf developer like this, we players should be offering encouragement instead of constantly preaching doom. That’s just discouraging.]

[Well said, right on the mark!]

[Did the creator study art? The CG is so well done!]

[Doesn’t seem like it. If an art major made this game, the graphics wouldn’t look like this.]

[Not necessarily. Maybe they just didn’t invest that much time into it.]

Plenty of organic supporters stepped up to defend Su Cheng, arguing that the cinematic CG and the actual gameplay were completely separate matters.

Aside from that debate, many other comments pointed out that the game was extremely difficult to pick up.

[Guys, I played all night and still have no clue how to pull off special moves. What do I do?]

[I saw some content creators pulling off moves easily, but it takes me forever just to input one…]

[Don’t panic, you’re not alone. Just look at Y-jun, she mashed buttons forever before she could even pull off an “oola-oola-yeh.”]

[Sometimes when I fail to pull off a move, I get comboed to death in one go. It feels so awful…]

[The dev included difficulty settings, you know. Pick easy mode to practice first, or if all else fails, just go with novice mode.]

This was something Su Cheng had not anticipated.

On Blue Star^[3], no one had made this genre of game for ten or twenty years.

The new generation of gamers had no idea how to play games like this.

On top of that, Su Cheng hadn’t released a move list, leaving players to figure everything out on their own, which dialed the difficulty up another notch.

Beyond the CG controversy and the steep learning curve, there were also outright malicious remarks.

[The gameplay is so outdated. Isn’t this crap from twenty years ago?]

[Feels like a reskin to me. Ask me right now and I could rattle off a dozen games just like this.]

[From twenty years ago? Then just don’t play it. What are you doing here fishing for attention?]

[Exactly. You think that makes you special?]

[With the story backing it up, I think it’s pretty good!]

[When I played fighting games as a kid, I had no idea who was who. I just mashed buttons.]

[I think it’s pretty great. Well-optimized, low system requirements, and at least there are no bugs.]

[Yeah, the barrier to entry is super low. Look at traditional racing, shooting, and sports games, aren’t they all riddled with bugs?]

[Totally, even my ancient dinosaur of a PC can run it!]

Su Cheng closed Pilipili^[4] and opened his creator dashboard.

After a little over ten hours on the store, it had sold roughly twenty thousand copies.

There hadn’t been any sales in the first few hours.

The surge had only begun between three in the morning and ten this morning.

It was all thanks to the CG promotion.

Su Cheng shook his head.

This wouldn’t do.

A video approaching one million views had only generated around twenty thousand sales.

It didn’t even reach the criteria for completing the quest.

Hardware requirements were low and the barrier to entry was low, but most players felt it was a bit hard to pick up, which was the main reason holding sales back.

He had to boost sales!

“If I release a no-damage playthrough video with flashy combos, it’ll definitely stir up everyone’s urge to play. Plus, it’ll shatter the ‘rumors’ that the game is too hard to learn!”

Su Cheng selected Kusaue Kyo^[5], Benimaru Nikaido, and Iori Yagami, then recorded a PC playthrough video.

Immediately after, he rushed to a nearby retail store, bought a controller, and set to work recording a controller playthrough video.

…

In an apartment in Shanghu^[6].

Through intense practice, bolstered by her past experience with similar games,

Y-jun^[7] finally beat the game after an entire day and night!

After doing some light editing, Y-jun began uploading her clear video to the platform.

In the description, she wrote: [I admit it, I have butterfingers. Please go easy on me in the comments…]

In Y-jun’s clear run, two of her three characters always died, and the last one barely scraped by in the red.

Regardless, she had finally cleared it.

Surely no one had cleared it faster than her?

Excited after posting her video, Y-jun began searching the platform for videos related to King of Fighters.

She entered the search keywords: King of Fighters, Clear.

She wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t searched.

Once she did, it gave her quite a shock.

Someone really had beaten it before her!

There was a video titled: 【King of Fighters: Kusaue Kyo, Benimaru Nikaido, Iori Yagami Maximum Difficulty No-Damage Clear!】

Y-jun: ???

The maximum difficulty part wasn’t shocking, as she had chosen the highest difficulty herself.

As a content creator, she could never settle for playing on easy, let alone novice.

The crucial thing was the no-damage part.

What the heck was no-damage?!

Maximum difficulty combined with taking zero damage? Wouldn’t that take at least a hundred hours of practice?

At the very least, only a deeply skilled top player could pull that off!

The game had only been out for about twenty hours!

Y-jun clicked in and discovered the video had two parts.

Part 1 was a PC clear using WASD controls.

Part 2 was a clear using a connected controller with the joystick.

What kind of prodigy was this?

How had she never heard of this creator in the gaming section before?

Without watching the video just yet, Y-jun curiously clicked onto the uploader’s profile page.

Under this account, there were only two videos in total.

The first was the 《King of Fighters》 CG.

The second was the no-damage clear.

Y-jun: ???