Maboroshi no Dystopia (幻のディストピア) Review

In my whole life I’ve read exactly two power-fantasy web novels.

The first one I finished: Rice Wu’s I’m a Hooligan, which I followed all the way to its finale, I’m a Hooligan: Dragon War Starfield. The other one, also fairly famous, is How the Bad Guy Was Forged—and I didn’t finish that one.

To put it in terms the ACG crowd will get: the former is SAO, the latter is Log Horizon. I’m a guy who likes things punchy, so I finished I’m a Hooligan and dropped the other.

The protagonist of I’m a Hooligan is a thoroughgoing thug—does basically every bad thing there is—but when it comes to foreign affairs he stands up for the Chinese nation and wins face. Think punching India, kicking America, sweeping Europe, stomping Japan, that sort of thing… plus in chapter two the guy gets his cheat and spends the rest of the book flying around using superpowers to beat people down. He basically never takes an L, and even when he does he pays it back double. Sure, he’s a thug, but most of the people he fights are thugs too, so it reads a bit like criminals eating criminals. The author paints society’s idiots in exhaustive detail and then creates this thug protagonist to go beat them up, so of course it’s a pure dopamine rush.

As for the latter, How the Bad Guy Was Forged, the author seems to spend all his effort whitewashing the protagonist, crafting this “yeah he’s a bad guy, but he’s a bad guy with a heart” vibe. And to keep the plot twisty he drags out a ton of contrived settings to maintain plausibility. Even worse, he writes the protagonist several girls for romance, which is on a completely different level from I’m a Hooligan where the protagonist’s raw power just pulls women in—it feels off. Frankly the romance here is stiff as hell, about as stiff as The Irregular at Magic High School. The descriptions of female beauty made me nauseous—a girl sees the protagonist and instantly sticks to him, and the protagonist sees a girl and instantly goes soft. It turns into a full-on shitty urban idol drama. Made me sick.

Most important of all: since the whole thing is made up anyway, you’re still trying to maintain plausibility in the plot and conflict. Power fantasy is power fantasy—if you’ve got plausibility, how is it supposed to be satisfying? The result is I found it deeply unsatisfying, and with the bloated plot I dropped it.

Years passed and I never touched another power fantasy, because there’s just no surpassing I’m a Hooligan. It feels like it took the ultimate essence of the genre to its absolute limit—even the internal fantasy elements are enough of a highlight that they could stand on their own. After that, whenever I read 11-region shounen manga, Ma-retsu, SAO, whatever, I just felt they were nothing special, just average. Say what you will, at least none of them felt remotely “satisfying” to me.

All this rambling is just to say: even when writing a power fantasy, you have to hold to one thing—it has to be satisfying to read. The protagonist sweeps across the land, and sure he’s insufferable, but the ones he beats are even more disgusting. Do it the other way around and it just leaves you with a bad taste.

Maboroshi no Dystopia is a game I played recently. I’d played its demo a long time ago. The demo’s story: the future world is split into slums and a rich district, and the rich district itself has tiers—District 1 is the top, District 5 the bottom. The protagonist is a young master who transferred from District 3 to District 1—filthy rich, utterly willful, incredibly powerful. Every day he skips school, teases the maid at home, teases the ojou-sama at school, NTRs some loser’s goddess for fun, and throws money around to settle anything.

Honestly, maybe the developers wanted to create a piece of human garbage so you’d feel gratified. But clearly, I was not gratified.

Watching the protagonist openly say things like “Skipping school? Just slip the principal some cash and it’s handled,” my thought was:

“When does this piece of trash get his ass kicked?”

And then the demo ended.

Based on what I’d seen I could easily have said “what the fuck is this garbage” and thrown it out. But its name drew me in—specifically that katakana.

ディストピア: dystopia. Simply put, the antonym of utopia. Anti-utopia.

Dystopia—the style every pretentious work trots out to preach with, a style that’s been run into the ground. But even so, seeing that word in a game’s title, I fell into thought.

“If it’s a phantom dystopia, maybe the demo’s prologue is a deception?”

“If it’s dystopian, maybe there’s a huge twist later on?”

Honestly the game seems to deliberately write the protagonist’s daily life as smugly as possible—he’s fully in “I’ve got money, I do what I want” mode. オレはお金を持ってXXXXX勝手XXXXX has become his catchphrase. On top of that the protagonist is spectacularly rude—or rather, has no upbringing at all. Looking at him, it’s nothing but punchable.

But midway through the story, the reversals begin. First, the protagonist gets a girlfriend: Kagura.

He doesn’t actually like her; one day his butler tells him “You’re still young—do something youthful, like falling in love,” and then he goes out, runs into some loser, sees that Kagura is the loser’s goddess, and says “I’ve taken a liking to your goddess. I’ll NTR you.” And he does exactly that—daily money assaults and various displays of swagger, Kagura falls for it, and they’re together in no time, then start banging.

After the banging, the butler mysteriously asks whether he wants Kagura silenced, and the protagonist says, nah, just make her lose her memory.

So Kagura goes inexplicably insane and never appears again. The boy who admired Kagura hires a private detective to investigate the protagonist’s identity—he wants to know why the guy is so badass.

The detective’s finding is shocking: the protagonist’s young-master identity is fake. The detective found a family photo of the real young master, but the real one’s whereabouts are unknown and his parents died in an accident—the current young master is someone else impersonating him.

At this point I could smell the epic reveal coming—just the decryption left! Next comes the protagonist’s dark past, then the final plot twist, right?

But I was overthinking it. The story branches: four heroines to pursue, and aside from the District 1 ojou-sama Kurusugawa Yoko, the others have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot!

Nothing to do with it, you know what that means? It means the dark-past thing just stops there, and afterward it’s a pure romance story.

Suzumori Akari’s route has a tiny bit that approaches the main plot—the protagonist’s school forbids romance, and his relationship with Akari draws Yoko’s opposition. As Akari’s good friend, Yoko demands the protagonist stay away from her, and she investigates him too, with the same result: he’s an imposter.

Yoko says if the protagonist doesn’t leave Akari, she’ll tell Akari his real identity.

And then? The protagonist, after banging her one day, voluntarily tells Akari:

“I’m not really a young master. I used to be a poor kid, but now I’m rich. Even so, do you still love me?”

Akari doesn’t even think: “Yes!”

In the end the two go to Yoko and say, “No matter what you do, you can’t separate us.”

END.

What the fuck is this shit? Reality is already like this and you’re telling me about reality’s cruelty in a game too? Can’t I escape for a bit?!?!

Finally, Yoko’s route—the only one you could call a True End, because the game has no route locks so it’s hard to say what counts as the proper ending, but this one just has more content.

In Yoko’s route the protagonist suddenly tells the butler one day that conquering her is part of his life plan, so he gets to work wooing the ojou-sama.

Why her? Because her father is a top figure in District 1’s rich district—presumably the protagonist wants to climb high.

The wooing process I can’t be bothered to describe, because one, it’s boring, and two, it’s too realistic: dates, acting like a thug, heroically saving her, throwing money around. Fuck, being rich is great!

Also the protagonist is a weakling. In this route another young master shows up and fights him, and the protagonist can’t do anything but swagger—he gets strung up and beaten until he’s leaking. He only wins through petty schemes. Utterly nasty.

Eventually the protagonist captures Yoko and finds he’s developed a bit of feeling for her too. Then a similar plot appears: the student council vice president, another male loser, is secretly in love with Yoko, and seeing her taken by this piece of trash makes him unhappy, so he investigates the protagonist too—and hires the same detective again. (You only have one detective in this whole town?!), and of course gets the same info: the protagonist’s identity is fake, impersonation, magic trick, whatever.

Now Yoko’s father is alarmed—a famous District 1 upper-cruster, entrepreneur, economist, politician, whatever. He learns his daughter has been banged by some small-time thug and is furious, planning to deal with the protagonist.

In the end Yoko’s old man confronts the protagonist, and the protagonist suddenly says he did come from the slums, and that he and his companions used schemes to take over the identity of a capitalist’s son from District 3 and continued running their assets. Because he came from the slums he hates the rich district’s rich, so after becoming an upstart he stirs up trouble every day for revenge—and his goal is to become District 1’s top and utterly destroy this world that separates slums from the rich.

Then the game says: that slums place is called………….. ディストピア.

So there was no dystopia—it was just a name. Holy fuck.

And then Yoko’s old man, after hearing the protagonist’s speech, suddenly says: “ディストピア is a poor place, but the people who come out of it have strong bonds. I can understand that.” And then he forgives the protagonist, even chooses to cooperate with him, and the protagonist smoothly becomes the son-in-law of District 1’s most powerful man, ascending to the peak of life. The end.

What the fuck kind of dogshit plot is this?

What’s the point of this game? Besides the protagonist’s final speech, what was I watching the whole rest of the time? A rich guy flexing? A rich guy picking up girls? A rich guy NTRing people? Then why wouldn’t I just go play a nukige instead?

The plot makes no sense at all. If you told me it got axed mid-development I could maybe understand a little, but even so, the game disgusted me. First, the protagonist himself is disgusting. It’s written like a power fantasy, but it makes the protagonist thoroughly, purely “evil.” We all have some sense of justice—nobody wants to be genuinely “evil.” Oh no, even the Joker in Batman has his own logic and style, but this dipshit protagonist? Nothing. Besides saying オレはお金を持って、勝手する every day, what else can he do? Even for a swaggering thug or a small-time punk, the protagonist can’t even fight—he just gets strung up and beaten. He’s only good with his mouth, useless everywhere else. So the protagonist isn’t even “evil,” he’s just a pure “dipshit.” Tell me, where’s the charm in writing such a dipshit as the protagonist? What’s the point for the game? Was it made to tell players, “Look, even a dipshit can pick up girls—you’re worse than a dipshit”?

The OP and ED are decent, but they’re completely useless to the game. The art style is nice too, but also completely useless. The CGs are pitifully few, and the whole game is only 1.7 GB, which tells you what tier of product this is—you shouldn’t have had any high expectations in the first place, but I had a wrong idea. Today I really fucked myself over—why did I lose my mind and swallow this dogshit whole just because of the title?

After deleting the game, I still thought of the novel I’m a Hooligan. The protagonist there is equally domineering, but he isn’t a dipshit—he’s a smart person with tremendous power. By contrast the Maboroshi no Dystopia protagonist is more like a dipshit who happened to win 5 million—lacking the style of the rich at his core, lacking intelligence, doing things out of self-importance, utterly illogical.

Though come to think of it, the plot might not be wrong—after all, the protagonist’s identity was picked up off the ground to begin with…

But either way, wasting time watching this dipshit pick up girls and flex is not worth it. Playing this game was like one day seeing a pile of dogshit on the ground, but because there was a spoon stuck in it I thought maybe it was chocolate—and only after finishing it did I cry that I’d been had. Fuck, it really was dogshit.

Sigh, shit you eat yourself, you’ve got to swallow it all. I don’t know whether I should be glad this shit wasn’t poisoned.