Despite its title and synopsis, Sorahoshi's Past Life Countess, Present Life Otome Game NPC?! isn't necessarily a comedy. It definitely has moments of humor, but those don't make up the body of the work. Instead it's a look at why otome games seem to be so well-suited to people reincarnating inside of them, although again, that's not strictly the best definition of the book. Perhaps the best way to put it is that the novel takes the tropes of a particular popular isekai subgenre and looks at them from around a bend in the road, giving the book enough of a unique twist to make it both interesting and engaging.

The story immediately makes a hard turn with its basic premise. Urara Tendou, the heroine, lived her past life as Annerose Ortegamo, the eldest daughter of a count in the sort of world where heroines from our world tend to reincarnate. Despite her social status, Annerose's life was neither lovely nor perfect, and she wished that if she was ever reborn it would be as a regular person without the social strictures and elaborate backstabbing of the royal court. When she gets her wish, it's as the oldest daughter of a perfectly ordinary family in modern Japan, and Annerose, now Urara, genuinely enjoys her new life. Things only get weird when she hits high school, at which point she earns a scholarship to Saint Delia Academy. Almost as soon as she gets there, a girl starts grumbling and complaining that Urara is stealing all of her “events” – she claims that she's been reincarnated into the world of an otome game she loved in her past life, that she's the heroine, and that Urara needs to get out of her way!

So yes, Urara is in fact an NPC in an otome game world. Aritomo, the girl she meets on day one, is the heroine, and there are five love interests and a villainess that Aritomo sort of drags her into getting involved with. Before Urara can quite figure out what's going on, she ends up embroiled in Aritomo's attempts to land her favorite love interest (Mochizuki, whom she calls “The Prince”) by competing against Chouko, the lone girl in the romantic routes' friend group, in the so-called Ojousama Challenge, which honestly does sound like the sort of thing that would crop up in a low-rent otoge. And yes, this all does sound more like a comedy than anything else.

The question, therefore, becomes how author Sorahoshi manages to take what should be a very silly concept and make it into a story that has a surprising amount of emotional weight. In part this is done through what we don't know, which is the truth about Chouko, Aritomo, and Urara. There are hints seeded throughout the narrative about their respective pasts (Chouko's in this world) that slowly give us a fuller picture of why, specifically, they're all here now, in this certain place and time. While some aspects are certainly in line with the tropes of both the otome game genre in general or the reborn-in-an-otome-game isekai subgenre, others are almost unbearably sad or incredibly dark, which gives the story more heft than its title and back copy would imply. (If you've ever seen the 2012 K-Drama Rooftop Prince, there are some clear similarities.) Urara doesn't like to think about her past as Annerose, but she also can't escape it since not only does she retain all of her memories, but that life so greatly informed her wish for this one, and getting dragged into Aritomo's video game dreams brings a lot of her old skills as a noblewoman to the fore.

Also effective is the way that Sorahoshi takes the set roles for the stock characters and plays with them a bit. In her zeal to take her place as the heroine and her hyper-awareness of what the world is supposed to be, Aritomo almost turns herself into the villainess character to Urara's heroine, driving the boys away by dint of thinking of them strictly as their game selves rather than as actual human beings. In her rush to “win” she also discounts the fact that while in a game world details of characters' lives and pasts wouldn't necessarily be part of the narrative, in real life they almost certainly are, meaning that even though she played the game to 100% completion, she still doesn't know everything. That's most clear with Chouko, whose secret informs all of her actions, but also with the boys she's trying to win over, and the one she thinks she wants turns out not to necessarily be the one she ends up wanting, because real life doesn't have “routes.”

The romance plot is obviously an important one in the book, and while Aritomo is busy chasing her fantasies and realizing that the world isn't really a game anymore, Urara is working through what happened in her past and trying to overcome, or at least accept, the trauma of bygone days. Interestingly enough, the five romanceable characters from the game are divided between who likes Aritomo and who likes Urara, although the actual romantic interests are established fairly early on, making it less about “who” and more about “how.” This plays into Sorahoshi's theme of working just barely within the lines of the tropes almost surprisingly well, and the end result is a novel that uses the framework of a popular story type but ultimately becomes its own tale with an ending that feels rewarding – especially after the second extra story.