“Thousand Roads” was a game in three acts. First act was the academy. Here, our hero would recruit allies and choose their route by way of which individual they accumulated the most points with. It also was how you built your character, as you accumulated skill points by taking classes at the academy, and used them to unlock their relevant associated skills. The only combat was 1-on-1 duels, either at the three year-end tournaments, or in a set of optional fights, either as part of the story or classes, which, if won, would grant better point gains.

The problems started with the second and third acts. Each were radically different depending on the route you locked in on in the first act. For example, on the Princess Zoenna route, act 2 consists mostly of a feud with the Sterling house, while act 3 is a war with another kingdom to the south.

Should one on the other hand choose the elf maid Lufe, act 2 will be navigating riots and tensions between elf and man, before act 3 triggers a fully-fledged rebellion.

The only thing constant is how the combat changes from each phase. Second phase would have you control up to six characters at one time, while you can gather a much larger number of people. It is still an RPG, but instead of focusing on one character, you now have to juggle more as you move them around on a grid in turns. And there is much less growth and decision-making in regards to how they are built.

Third phase will have each of the people recruited be commanders in your army, and the game shifts gears to an RTS, where you have to capture supply points that give you resources to recruit more armies for your commanders. More commanders are better, since the effectiveness of their boosts drop by a fair amount with each doubling of the troop size.

The problem arises with how I didn’t fully play the game and I am not the protagonist. Depending on what route the protagonist enters, I will either have a bit of foreknowledge and can act to secure my own position, or I will be on bare ground, fumbling through little else other than stories of the friend I had, who boasted a 100% completion of the game.

While I only ever attained normal and bad endings, there are a lot different endings to each route. First off, a variety of bad endings from wrong decisions can arise. Zoenna could be kidnapped by Hannibal or forced into marriage to stop the war from unfolding further, Lufe could be kidnapped by a noble who held a weird fixation on her, or she could be publicly executed as the cause for the rebellion.

Normal endings are merely cut and dry marriages with the respective girl, whose route you are on.

Then, come the Love endings. There are a variety of secondary encounters you can have naughty scenes with, but any of them lock you out from the true love ending. In addition, you need a full score from act 1, something I never achieved, mostly because of the character I am right now.

Winning the year-end tournament gives five points towards each target. The problem is the first year, where you only had a single year to grow your character. At the same time, Hannibal, who is two years older than the main character, will be on his final year and much more powerful than the main characters. My friend told me to just save-scum, relying on small percentage chances to proc on each turn, but I never bothered.

In addition, it required you to unlock their fetish, by hitting three of five possible points along the first year. I only did one of these, by chance. The elf Lufe has hidden watersports scenes and I quickly skipped over them, every time the yellow liquid came up in a scene. How anybody found that appealing, I wouldn’t know.

Each target also has a harem end, where they end up with their main target AND all of the secondary targets from the respective route, which also required a lot of luck and planning.

And at last, the True Harem ending, where you get all six targets, though that should only be possible if you play basically perfectly and have obtained the true love ending for each of the possible characters, something that was far beyond what a casual like me could obtain. I only heard a little from my friend, about how this one had an ancient evil, sealed millennia ago rise up once again, and that he could only be beat heroes holding both a massive amount of strength and love for each other.

In the end, I am still currently a child and can’t do much, other than focus on growing. Time passed and my incident was quickly forgotten. As I came to relearn all that Hannibal knew, I think it became easier and easier for the surrounding people to ignore it. The only two people who still thought something wrong was Holger and Alicia.

All of my lessons went strangely smoothly. I don’t know if I had some sort of talent, or it was the fault of the body I inhabited, but at age 12 I was regularly beating my swordsmanship instructor and only grew stronger from there.

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I remember the main character was also supposed to be a great talent, so for the Hannibal, that was a very tough opponent for the main character, I guess it would only make sense to be powerful as well.

I also tried to get closer to my sister, in order to correct her behavior. I never experienced it myself, but I remember being told she was an awful character in many of the female protagonist routes, similar to the role Hannibal held for the male character, except rather than competent, she was often just mean-spirited and cowardly.

It didn’t succeed very well. She was spoiled rotten and servants encouraged her sadistic tendencies. I shudder to think of what humiliating scenes one could have experienced with her in the game, had they unlocked her fetish, which would undoubtedly be sadism.

As such my attempt often ended in her assaulting me, and though I could easily handle her, Holger was sure to appear and escort us to Dolores, who would force us to hug and kiss. It was one day, after such an event, she turned to me.

“Why are you so mean to me? Why do you keep harassing me?” Alicia lamented. My real reason was that the Sterling house apparently collapsed in many of the endings, and though I could easily not be the horrible person Hannibal often was, my sister could still set us down that path. But I couldn’t very well say that and pulled something out of my ass.

“Because you’re my sister and I love you!” I stated. She was obviously taken aback.

“Why? How? If you love me, should you not give me gifts and praise me like you used to!?” Apparently Hannibal used to be very sweet and gentle, only to his sister. But I actually do think my way is what is best for her, so I can answer it.

“Have you not seen how people react when mother takes from them to give to us? And sure, one weird servant enjoys the abuse you dish out, but the rest tremble in fear. Our actions make people hate us, and if it continues, someone will surely hurt you one day and I can’t have that!”

Her face appeared genuinely astounded. And then she became a little red and flustered. “I… It…. But…. You are still a pain! St-stay away from me, okay?”

It was somehow effective and her reaction was incredibly adorable. I laid it on thicker.

“No! I will rather you hate me and be safe, rather than liking me and getting hurt!” I blathered out again.

“You!... You!... Do- do as you want!” She said, fully flushed and storming off. I think I just found my ticket. I was a little embarrassed being so earnest with a 10-year old girl, but it paid off. After that, she gradually came to heed my words, though her conduct was still really faulty, she would reluctantly correct herself after I bombarded her with words of love.

It turns out she was also slacking. I had figured it was simply because she was a girl that she didn’t attend many of the more offensive lessons, but in the game, there were plenty of female fighters. In fact, I think they were even more common than male ones, which wasn’t that strange given the nature of the game. Though “Thousand Roads” had both a female and a male protagonist, it was undoubtedly more popular among the male crowd, and I think the developers knew that.

Anyway, after discovering it was not due to cultural norms, but rather her own laziness and desire to skip, that had her locked out of lessons, and our overbearing mother that allowed it, she was slowly convinced to take a few up again. It only took me mentioning how I wish she could protect herself, since it would decrease the chances of her being hurt in my absence, and how sad it would make me to make her do so.

It didn’t appear to come as easy to her as it did for me. My training was constant, and that was apparently because Hannibal’s greatest wish was to become the strongest in the land. This was a fantasy setting, where excellent individuals could rival the might of armies, and Hannibal had clearly wished to be such a figure. I had merely run along with it, since I thought it was normal, but training most of the day, every day, was apparently outside the norm.

Not that I was without faults. I struggled somewhat in magic class. All I was told to do was to repeat chants, while firing off magic. Despite it being called magic, the lessons are extremely boring. When I was going over the basics of fire magic, for example, all I had to do was aim my palm at the target and repeatedly chant.

“Lesser shot of fire – FIRA!” and out comes a small ball of flame heading towards the target. It has no recoil, it doesn’t feel that powerful and it just makes my mind tired. I can’t help but carry the feeling that it is anticlimactic. I was at first stoked to be using magic, but compared to firing a gun at a range, it was slow, felt weak and was more exhausting. I kept at it diligently, though, since I remember the awesome power of late-game spells.

That brings me to the thoughts on the class system. In the game, during your academy years, you earn skill points in subjects by taking classes. Each swordsman class adds three swordsmanship skill, for example. Your class will at first be very simple. Either magician, magic sword or warrior, depending on how your skill points are distributed. However, whenever you get a 100, or max, skill in one subject, you unlock prestige classes and can switch to one of them. For example, a 100 in swordsmanship unlocks “Fencer” a class with high evasion and high damage, but frail and bad at magic.

Should one then acquire 100 in heavy armor, two new classes show up. For the 100 in heavy armor, the class “Knight” shows up, which is very tanky with low damage output, but the combination of 100 heavy armor and 100 swordsmanship unlocks “Samurai” A class that despite not using a shield, has immense defense and high offense. Not all combinations of skill has classes attached to them, but the more skills they require at 100, the stronger they generally are.

The issue is, I have heard no one even mention classes or skill points or anything of the like. It seems I will be only loosely following the ideas I have from the game.