Love Collector Chapter 5

Oliver's fascination with dating sims went all the way back to his last year of middle school. He didn't play any naughty ones back then, of course, but it was a slippery slope that started off with innocent intentions.

Back then, and even now in the present day, Oliver was an awkward kid who had trouble fitting in. He didn't have many friends growing up. Though he got along well enough with the nerds who shared his interests in anime, video games, and TCGs, he was always that one kid.

You know the one.

The inoffensive kid who always hung out with your friend group, the one you didn't have any strong feelings toward. You wouldn't invite him to your birthday party, but you'd show up at his for the free pizza, and you also wouldn't say no to trading cards or battling catchable monsters with him on the playground. The kid who was always 'there' and nothing else.

Oliver never liked that about himself.

He had a low opinion of himself, making him a poor speaker and doing him no favors. It also didn't help that everyone else had things about them that made them unique, but Oliver didn't. He wasn't funny, he never had any noteworthy insights to share, wasn't good at any of the games he played, didn't have any exciting hobbies, nothing.

He could've lived with himself if things continued like that, but the friends he hung out with in elementary school started drifting away from him after they all entered the seventh grade.

Some grew out of their nerdy hobbies and moved on to 'normie' things like sports and girls. Others had conflicting schedules that didn't align with his, while others still just stopped hanging out with him for no particular reason. It felt like there wasn't anything he could do about it, but rather than simply accepting the situation and wallowing in his adolescent depression, he tried to take matters into his own hands and improve himself.

A simple search for 'how to get better at talking to people' pushed Oliver down the rabbit hole that eventually led him to dating sims.

He'd heard of them before that. Oliver watched a lot of anime as a kid and read a lot of manga in his school library, so knowledge of visual novels and dating games was among the many things he'd picked up through cultural osmosis. He'd never actually considered playing any before seeing a suggestion in a self-help thread, though. The kinds of people who played those sorts of games in anime were always depicted as losers even worse off than himself, but in the end, he figured he didn't really have anything to lose.

Oliver had his own laptop as a kid, and guides to emulation weren't hard to come across. He downloaded the English-translated ROM of the wholesome classic that once swept the nation of Japan, Dokidoki Monument, along with the highest-reviewed emulator. After a bit of finagling with the settings, he began his descent into a whole new world in the hopes of improving himself.

It worked until it didn't, but Oliver ended up with a lifelong passion even after he flew too close to the sun.

Dokidoki Monument wasn't like the more common style of visual novel dating sims where your player character made different conversation choices that dropped you in any number of preset story routes. It was a sandbox-style RPG in the classical sense. It was a game where you had stats that you needed to improve, where you had to manage your schedule and resources, and where every inch you gained with any of the eleven potential love interests felt like a mile because of how damn hard you worked to get there.

Oliver grew to enjoy the other kind of dating sim as his experience with the genre developed, but everything about Dokidoki Monument's constant drip feed of dopamine via the interactions with its heroines and its slow and steady 'number go up' gameplay clicked with him. Sandbox dating sims were far and away his favorite, which sucked because they just weren't as popular or easy to make as standard visual novels.

New releases in this subgenre were few and far between, and the vast majority of them in the modern era were Western-developed early-access titles that hardly ever made it to full release. More power to them and their chosen release models, but Oliver didn't like playing games released in chunks.

It was a big part of why he was so excited for Purest Love: Azure College Days leading up to its release. A brand-new, adult-only, fully voiced, sandbox-style RPG dating sim with seven sexy college-aged heroines to pursue, tons of amazing CGs, and a canonical harem route to work toward? How could he not buy that shit on day one?

And then the developers announced at the last second that they planned on releasing seven additional girls over the course of the following year, not only doubling but actually tripling the amount of available content because of all the additional threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes it would add to the base game. Figures.

It irked Oliver whenever he ran into any of the seven DLC heroines already in the game as NPCs, knowing he couldn't romance any of them yet, but his thirst for a new, expertly-made, sandbox-styled RPG dating sim overshadowed his preference to not touch half-finished games, and he didn't regret his decision thus far in the slightest.

Adding edibles to his favorite hobby was something he'd only done for the last few years after picking up the habit to treat his depression. It allowed Oliver to enter a tranquil, zen-like state of dull-minded bliss where his troubles melted away- where every line of dialogue was more interesting, and every CG or variation was more sexually arousing than the one that came before it. He also found that edging while high was significantly more rewarding than not, especially when it came time to finish himself off.

Oliver's game night progressed hour after hour as he sank into the repetitive and comforting world of Purest Love.

Mihiru from the school's literature club was still his primary focus for tonight's session, but he also made sure to take his time and get to know the other characters while engaging with the many side activities so that he wasn't rushing through the content. There was a lot to discover in the game world, and Oliver was rewarded for doing so, whether that was through items, job opportunities, stat increases, or intel about the heroines he could use to his advantage.

It was a simple gameplay loop but an addicting one.

Everything was designed in a way to keep you invested over long play sessions, and every element tied back to the girls and the lewd scenes you could have with them. You wanted to get closer to them, buy them outfits, sex toys, and take them out on dates, right? Well, too bad. Go practice a skill they're attracted to so you have more things to discuss with them and get a job while you're at it, you lazy bum.

Butt plugs, ball gags, and egg vibes don't buy themselves- and neither do the dozens of ordinary presents you have to give a heroine before she even accepts those kinds of things without getting mad at you.

Slowly but surely, Oliver was winning over Mihiru.

Heroines like her were usually pretty easy to get close to. The sheltered, bespectacled nerd girl who escaped her problems by reading every book she could get her hands on was a type near and dear to Oliver's heart. While there was nothing remarkable or groundbreaking about a bookish girl with low self-confidence, even though they were easily a ten out of ten every damn time, he was enjoying how things ramped up with Mihiru and all the different options the game gave him to tease her. It wasn't long before his player character was groping her in secret corners of the library and getting awkward sloppy from her underneath his study desk.

It was a little surreal to think about how fast this all went. Dating sims always had an exaggerated sense of time to them, sure, but Oliver found himself dwelling on it because of how high he was. He was approaching the first penetration scene after a successful movie date where he took Mihiru to see an adaptation of her favorite romance novel, and things were getting hot and heavy after they made their way back to his dorm room.

"Otokonoko ga wastashino oppai wo miru no ha hajimete desuuuu...!" The character on screen whimpered, her squeaky voice and incomprehensible language music to Oliver's ears. "Hazukashii kara sonnani mitsumeru no ha yama teeee!"

Oliver had only been going after Mihiru for four weeks of in game time, and here they were- about to get it on. Getting jealous of his own self-insert player character was pretty stupid of him, but there was no use fighting how he felt.

Dating sim protagonists had it easy. They were blank slates who could conform to the tastes of any girl they wanted to be with without breaking a sweat, picking up skills along the way that would take years of blood, sweat, and tears to develop in the real world. There were never any lasting consequences, either. Game characters had short memories. Every wrong dialogue choice was a single present away from being forgiven, and if you accidentally pissed off the wrong person because you felt like playing hero and subsequently fell down a mental health-destroying pipeline, well...

All you had to do was load an earlier save file, and boom.

Never happened.

"Ah... hah... ahhh... a-anata ha watashino omanko wo totemo fukaku hageshikutatai te i masuuu! Watashi... mn- yasashiku shiro to itta noniii!!"

Oliver had been idly clicking through the dialogue as his thoughts got carried away. Mihiru was now getting full-on railed, and the CG had evolved into a beautifully 'animated' Live2D scene, but he didn't really care. None of it was real, and it upset him that it wasn't.

Oliver closed his laptop and sat in the darkness of his cramped bedroom, gazing at the ceiling. There was always the off chance you might have a stupid thought that spirals out of control when you were high, killing your buzz, but man did this one suck.

He didn't want to be like this for the rest of his life. Oliver wanted to change, but he could only take baby steps because of his past. It wasn't enough for him, but what other option did he have? If only things were simpler... no- if only his life could be exactly like a dating sim.

"Heh, am I really that desperate...?" Oliver rhetorically asked the darkness.

It was a silly thought, but it wasn't long before he was fantasizing about how that exact scenario would play out. The fantasy consumed his hazy mind. Oliver envisioned what life would be like as the protagonist of a sandbox-style dating sim RPG in a world where every problem could be solved by raising a stat, buying the proper skill, or gifting someone the right present, and where beautiful girls were suspiciously open to the idea of sharing him.

How wonderful would that be to live in a paradise where he would never feel lonely ever again?

Oliver shut his eyes, smiling as he drifted off to sleep. He held close to his heart the vision of his hedonistic paradise, refusing to release it in the face of rest's black oblivion. Then, in the formless sea located between conscious and unconscious thought, he awakened.