Setting Entry 8: Sunraku Here, Sunraku There

Author's Preface

There are way too many settings for the protagonist alone, who the hell came up with a character like this?

・Sunraku (ShanFro)

The Sunraku Rakuro created in the familiar "Shangri-La Frontier." He sacrificed all sorts of things for the sake of his starting funds, and after this, that, and the other thing, a half-naked masked pervert was born.

On the outside he's an avian Vaaaan[*1], but on the inside he has Kratos installed, so anyone hostile to him gets cleverly beaten to a pulp.

In fact, in the initial concept I was plotting to make his playstyle straight-up kusarigama with Kratos-like movements, but at that point it'd stop being homage and start being plagiarism, so I may or may not have scrapped that.

Instead, the playstyle where he switches between weapons like Kratos in God of War III was ripp... used as reference material, yes.

Once he received Lycaon's curse, he gave up on an all-rounder stat spread and shifted toward a specialized build, and with the armor restriction naturally placing more emphasis on evasion than defense, the skills he picked up naturally ended up being a set that strengthened his movement and positioning.

For better or worse, he's a specialist build, so if he gets trapped in a bad groove he dies in no time, while if the gears mesh he can put up astonishing scores... but because the thing inside him is Kratos, he's astonishingly hard to kill. Incidentally, while farming loops, he dies astonishingly easily.

・Sunraku (Fae-kuso)

The Sunraku Rakuro created in "Faeria Chronicle Online 〜Prayer of the Fairy Princess〜," a game that manages to radiate presence despite existing only through fragmentary information. After countless setbacks he finally consulted a walkthrough site, so his stats are comparatively sane. Fast Eating is maxed, of course.

However, because he chose far too bizarre a strat for the last boss, by the time he cleared the game his equipment was the pervert's uniform of swim trunks and a mask, and the pre-ending event unfolded into an indescribable spectacle of a swim-trunks-and-mask pervert delivering a flying kick to a beautiful girl.

Incidentally, before the final battle he used normal armor and a one-handed sword... because if you don't keep one hand free, you can't deal with bugs that suddenly crop up.

・Sunraku (BenPi)

The playable character in "Berserk Online Passion," the game that led to his first encounter with Modor Katzo, a.k.a. Katzo, and a Sunraku famous in that community as a fighter who still retains a comparatively large amount of his humanity.

He mainly uses a battle style called the "Iai Fist Style," and by combining it with movement-related bug tech, he can land counters on inhuman opponents that split apart or multiply.

That said, new bug tech sometimes gets discovered without him even noticing, so his actual win rate isn't all that high.

・Pickled Tuna Sunraku (Love Clock)

The Sunraku who, as the protagonist trying to win over twelve girls in "Love Clock," a game that won't grant him so much as one-tenth of a second of peace, is also a sorrowful Pizza Slayer stripped of the right to "rest" until the instant he clears the game.

Incidentally, his surname comes from what he ate for dinner before pressing New Game; his dad caught the tuna.

Since the game has no character-creation system, the character's appearance is fixed from the start. He's the textbook "slightly baby-faced dating-sim protagonist who looks kind of frail most of the time, but has a decent amount of muscle when he takes his clothes off."

That said, according to players who cleared the game, while playing he does nothing but sprint at full speed, look at the clock, or check the route chart, and his face seems almost devoid of anything human... more specifically, he's been described as having the eyes of an ant or bee whose entire life is devoted to the functioning of its species as a whole.

・Sanraku (Cosmo Buster)

In the trash game "Cosmo Buster," which teaches you in the simplest possible form that battle is numbers, Sunraku descended into a world of unreasonable sheer quantity as the protagonist... codename "Cloud 1."

Since he's wrapped in standard-issue soldier armor, frankly there's nothing you'd call a distinguishing feature, it'd be like if Master Chief's armor were a mass-produced model.

There is a proper reason you can set your name and customize your character's face, but that gets completely overshadowed by the impact of being surrounded by a grand total of 6,800 enemies sandwiched in before and after the events.

Two-handed heavy weapons just put you on the losing end of a war of attrition, so he fought hordes of monsters with the fastest-reloading submachine gun and a melee knife, and in the first place, if you're carrying a weapon that interferes with running, you just get surrounded and annihilated, so even walkthrough sites call dual submachine guns the optimal solution.

・Sunraku (Survival Gunman)

"Update File 1.00," "The Day We Nearly Perished," "That Best-Worst Thing," "Trash Death Game"... a legend etched into VR gaming history for better and for worse, Sunraku took the form of a young girl and assassinated man and beast alike on μ Server, the one among the servers created from Alpha through Omega that retained the largest player population.

Truth be told, Saba-Gan lets you create multiple save files, so there are actually quite a lot of "Sunrakus."

If you get close before either people or beasts notice you and fire a lead bullet point-blank into the eyeball, they're one-shot, and to put this transcendent theory into practice, the character was made into a small and physically weak girl so her presence could be reduced as much as possible.

It's definitely not because he wanted a little-girl avatar, mind you; apparently he spent thirty minutes on character creation.

Because of when he started Survival Gunman, his raw player skill was lower than it is in the story's present, but even more notable was his "anything goes" playstyle, and from the initials of μ Server's Silent Kill Youjo he came to be called "μ-skY"[*2]. The author's hometown might be giving itself away here, but never mind.

This was probably when the protagonist was at his most berserk.

Author's Afterword

Truth be told, the motif for the protagonist's playstyle across games is "a slightly better-behaved Kratos," somehow, writing along with the flow turned him into a permanently half-naked masked pervert, though.

Translator's Notes

• [1] Vaaaan: An obscure Final Fantasy XI reference to a half-naked Elvaan with the Dancer job, whose movements were regarded as particularly bizarre. This is not a reference to Vaan from Final Fantasy XII.
• [2] μ-skY: The name combines μ Server, Silent Kill, and Youjo ("little girl") into μ-SK-Y, while also referencing μSKY, a Meitetsu limited-express train service, hence the author's joke about revealing his hometown.