Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron (はじめるセカイの理想論) Review

Everyone goes through a chuuni phase. When I was young I loved collecting “really deep, philosophical” lines, treated them as gospel, and quoted them constantly to look like I had some kind of inner depth.

Stuff like “humans are all selfish,” “humans are just animals driven by primal urges,” “society is dark,” “the world is one big conspiracy”… and so on.

Guess everyone’s got their own personal Black Myth going on.

Say that stuff now and it just feels embarrassing. It’s not that those lines are wrong—a lot of them are straight-up facts—but they’re all “correct nonsense.”

“Humans are ugly, selfish, profit-driven…” (sounds even better in Japanese, some 人類とは…… type shit)

Yeah, and? No shit. Does repeating it let you exploit these “human weaknesses” to make money? Or do you have some way to free humans from those “weaknesses”? If anything, the guy who keeps chanting about them is himself living inside them 24/7.

Once you’re an adult and you’ve seen enough, most of this stops surprising you. What you care about is how to make yourself feel good, in a more practical sense.

If something pisses you off, either change it, accept it, or put up with it. Anything else is just noise.

That’s reality, sure, but in games and films this kind of material still sells. In reality we’re powerless, but in a virtual world we can fantasize about saving the world. So even in the visual novel space, the “become a creator god” premise is popular—parallel worlds popping up everywhere, giving you that high-tier-being experience of watching the seas turn to mulberry fields, a thousand years in a glance.

Which brings us to Uzumaki-sha’s Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron (はじめるセカイの理想論).

Uzumaki-sha games have never scored high with me on story, and I don’t expect much. Everyone’s really here for Mizukagami-sensei’s art. They’ve made stuff that looked like plot-driven games before—world destruction this, world destruction that—and even slapped on route locks and a True End, but it still never feels like a “story game.” The narrative ability just isn’t there, the prose is weak, and it always reads like an erotic gag manga.

Then came the “Pieces” series, whose True End presentation hit like a truck and changed people’s minds. Even the follow-up FDs made people willing to take the story seriously. A successful pivot, honestly.

Having pulled off the pivot, Uzumaki-sha kept walking down its newly carved lane—except it wandered straight into “cult leader” territory. Later works got more and more cryptic, as if the studio had built its own Little Western Paradise and was now preaching Mahayana Buddhism. The selling point became: the plot’s absurdly high-concept, and nobody understands a damn thing. They probably thought they were elevating their themes, but it ended in a Waterloo. Anres Terminaria (アンレス・テルミナリア) now looks like pure clownery—I still haven’t seen anyone explain that game’s plot properly. Honestly the writer probably doesn’t know what he wrote either.

So after that painful lesson came Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron. Our scenario writer Oumi-sensei’s whole thing this time was listening to feedback: since nobody understood the last one, the big change here is making the plot accessible—committed to being understandable even to idiots.

The premise of Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron is insultingly simple. The male and female leads get summoned by a god to another world where an “Enemy of the World” attacks every day, and the leads are the resistance, fighting back with their special powers. Except the whole thing is a setup by said god, who wants to see what these chosen “protagonists” think an “ideal world” is—what kind of world truly qualifies—and use that as reference to create one.

The summoned leads actually come from all sorts of parallel worlds: the future, the ancient past, the Middle Ages, modern Japan. Each heroine interprets “ideal world” differently, but all their ideals are shaped by their own upbringing and are full of limitations—classic “you want whatever you lack.” Take SharkShark, a virgin: his ideal world is obviously one where he gets laid, but that clearly doesn’t apply to everyone. Each heroine’s route corresponds to her own pursuit of an “ideal world,” and none of those answers satisfy the “god.”

So the pressure shifts to our protagonist—the final True End. The “ideal world” he wants to build does consider many angles, but no matter what he picks, he finds he can’t satisfy everyone, and the world always ends in destruction. There’s actually something dialectical and philosophical here: everyone knows you can’t please all the people, you can only aim for the greatest common denominator—and under that logic, someone will always find the rules “not ideal enough.” Over time resentment turns into conflict, and the world meets its end…

The correct answer should be “a truly ideal world doesn’t exist,” but the game refuses to admit it—probably worried the eroge players wouldn’t get it—and instead goes for a grand moral: the ideal world is one where everyone can realize their own ideal.

It’s a mouthful, but read it a few times and you’ll get it. Think about it and it even sounds invincible, airtight.

What’s an ideal world? A world where everyone can realize their ideal is an ideal world!

Okay, so what if two people’s ideals conflict? Say my ideal is that all the idiots in the world drop dead, and Zhu Niubi’s ideal is to stay alive—those conflict. How do you satisfy both?

So the answer the True End gives feels like “correct nonsense.” Like asking me what 1+1 is and being told the result of 1+1 is the number you get after calculating 1+1.

Is the logic wrong? No. Is the answer useful? Obviously not.

That’s the whole thesis of Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron. I can tell the writer wanted to say something deep, to explore world unification and cosmic peace or whatever, but clearly his ability can’t produce a creative or convincing answer, so he defaulted to the standard positive-message ending, a big happy family—the eroge equivalent of wrapping dumplings together.

Honestly the blondie’s route is more interesting than the whole main story. At least it dabbles in tyrant logic, and you can even see a faint reflection of current world affairs in it. Everything else, True End included, is just lacking.

You could say Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron compromised in pursuit of “making the story understandable.” Or I could say the writer only has this much skill, can’t write anything profound, and can only play the cryptic-pretentious card. Strip away that fig leaf and the real ability underneath is honestly hilarious.

Just like me back in my chuuni days—thought I was so cool, when I was actually nothing, and probably looked like a total idiot to anyone calmer and more mature.

So sure, some people might think Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron’s story is good, but once they grow up they’ll look back and cringe. The game’s whole message is one line of correct nonsense.