Volume 3 - Prologue

─ There was once an RPG that I stopped playing halfway through.

It was by no means boring. In fact, it was so much fun that I was hooked. Yet, I’d stopped playing at the save point before the last boss. I’ve always wondered why I did that.

I’d been looking forward to seeing what kind of ending I was going to get, and I’d even leveled up to beat the last boss. But at the very end, for reasons I couldn’t say, my motivation suddenly vanished.

However, after I started dating Yuzu, I strangely came to understand.

I must have hated that the game would end. Because it was too much fun. I hadn’t wanted to be confronted with a definite ending, so I left the possibilities open. If there was nothing left to do in that world, the story would truly come to a close.

A conflicting paradox: I stopped playing the game because it was too much fun.1

Once I realized that, I felt stupid. I then played the rest of the game again and completed it only a few years after I started it.

It’s just… after all, the more fun something is, the harder it is to end it with your own hands. But exactly because it’s fun, you have to finish it with your own hands. Otherwise you’ll be trapped by that paradox, unable to reach anywhere. 

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– Time passed.

On that fateful Christmas Eve, I was reminded of that fact.