Back in the early '90s I had just moved (back) to the USA and was living on my own despite being a minor. I scavenged parts for a PC of my own from my job and was playing a bunch of life sims, most of them text based. This was in a bucket of such things I scraped out of Usenet, with the fan-made English translation packed into the ZIP (I knew very little Japanese back then). It was just... nice. It never really crossed my mind to do anything but try to be a good dad, so I totally missed all the "dark side" jobs and weird libidinous content that made it "scandalous" back when ecchi content was still exotic. For a runaway from a worn-torn place with nobody to really turn to, it was a flicker of light that said, yeah, it might be OK after all. Very weirdly, it taught me things like scheduling, and making a plan for self-improvement, that nobody had really had the resources or time to tell me about before. Unlike most video games, it made my grades go UP and even played a small role in me graduating from high school. Probably not an intentional outcome for the Ćyachi Electrics Microcomputer Club, but here I am: An engineer doing space and radar stuff in part because an imaginary anime orphan taught him about timeslot scheduling systems.