Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA's Incest

This is a long, rambling diatribe that has no structure and goes basically nowhere.  It's just a case of me wanting to get a bunch of crap out of my head to try to make sense of my reaction to 1 particular part of a game.  Not the first time I've done 1 of these, probably won't be the last, make of it all what you will.



Why, exactly, does the romantic and sexual interest that Simone has for her Aunt Raye, and the fact that Raye harbors similar feelings for her niece Simone, bother me?

Okay, sure, that seems like a silly question with an obvious answer: it’s incest, and incest is an idea that puts most people off.  Duh.  And I guess that’s correct enough.  I’m not a big fan of the general concept of incest, for pretty justifiable reasons, and given the choice between having it or not having it present in a piece of media I consume, I would generally prefer not having it, if it’s not genuinely an inseparably essential part of the work.

But that doesn’t really answer the question when it comes to Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA.  Because even if it’s not my general preference, I typically don’t allow the presence of incest in art to truly affect my ability to view the work.  I crack wise all the time about how Fire Emblem just staunchly refuses to not include some form of incestuous feelings in their games, and while it’s probably my most overused joke at this point, it’s not like Nintendo ever seems to be in a hurry to disprove the allegation.  But no matter how often I take Fire Emblem to task for it, my opinions on its titles are pretty much always formed independent of this quirk--it doesn’t keep me from liking FE4 and FE14, and it isn’t any significant factor into the reasons why I don’t like FE15 and am at best neutral on FE16.  I have, in fact, placed a few examples of in-family pairings in FE14 and FE16 on my lists of the top romances for each game.  Hell, Corrin and Camilla are sisters (albeit not biologically), and they’re my favorite couple in Fire Emblem 14, to such a strong degree that I actually wrote the F/F version of their S Support conversation in the esteemed and highly recommended Gay Fates add-on mod.  Relatedly (pun intended), I’ve expressed my general exasperation at RPGs as a whole for being so overeager to hook up the protagonist with someone who is by all rational counts their adopted sibling, but 450 games in, I think it’s safe to say I’m not letting this strange habit keep me away from the genre.

I like the original Star Wars trilogy and Back to the Future quite a bit, and even if it’s (thankfully) unconsummated, there’s definitely little teases of incest in both.  I think Kill la Kill is a fine enough anime, and the villainess of that piece is outright fucking her daughter.  Futurama is 1 of my favorite cartoons of all time,* and there's a point at which its protagonist goes back in time, porks his grandmother, and becomes his own grandpappy!  Revolutionary Girl Utena is among the greatest animes ever created, and it’s got no less than 3 examples of brothers and/or sisters displaying incestuous feelings for each other, each at varying stages--and 1 of those is at the point that they are boinking, and have been for literal ages.  And goodness knows there’s no shortage of other examples of incest to be found in movies, cartoons, and especially animes that I’ve seen, and whose worth I've judged independent of it.

And all of this is to say nothing of the amount of incest in classic literature as a whole.  Dear Draefendi the Huntress, the great literary minds of history can’t get enough of the stuff!  And I’ve certainly read and appreciated my share of classic stories and plays without letting this predilection with banging blood (and non-blood) relatives turn me away from reading.

Hell, in the Large Battleship Studios game that preceded this, A Dragon’s ReQuest, 3 of the 5 or 6 (depending on where you rate Chelisera) women involved in the game’s main polyamory are distantly related, and another one is, SPOILER ALERT, the result of an incestuous coupling!  And given that I’ve not only heartily endorsed ADRQ, but also charted this polyamory on my list of the greatest RPG romances ever, certainly none of the game’s incestuous aspects fatally bothered me.

So, why is it in THIS case, with Simone and Raye, that I don’t just roll my eyes and move on?  I’ve surely seen and accepted, even endorsed, stronger examples of relations wanting to have relations.  It hardly seems fair to hold Simone and Raye having and expressing romantic love and sexual interest for each other against AAAVXA, particularly since canonically it’s never actually acted upon, when I don’t allow my judgment of so many other works to be damaged by such things.

I grappled with this question for quite a bit as I played Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, and truthfully, I don’t know if I have arrived, or ever will arrive, at a fully satisfactory answer.  But I think the foundation of my discomfort and irritation with Raye and Simone is...well, okay, so, Fire Emblem, right?  Fire Emblem and a LOT of other games and animes that involve incestuous feelings and relationships?  For all their fixation on the subject, they generally hold incest at an arm’s distance, as this peculiar fantasy thing being applied to situations and characters that don’t have much presence in the real world.  FE4’s Lachesis having such feelings for her brother that she doesn’t want to marry any other man because he’ll never measure up to Eldigan is a silly, weird sentiment that rarely exists in any major, nor affecting, capacity outside of overly dramatic romantic fiction.  FE14’s Corrin and Azura are cousins who only met each other as adults, and the fact that they’re cousins is so under-expressed that you might easily just miss it altogether; it seems like it was only thrown in there specifically as an afterthought to make them more Fire Emblem-y.  All of the siblings that Corrin can marry aren’t actually related to her, but she only finds that out for 4 of them during the conversation in which you’re having them commit to a romantic relationship anyway--that comes off as someone on the writing team just goofing around with this idea more than taking any significant pro-incest stance.

Sure, in FE16 Byleth can woo and marry her grandmother Rhea...but while Rhea created Byleth’s mother and treated her as her daughter, the implication is that it was the result of some kind of magic and/or science, so it’s not technically incest, and Rhea is emotionally much more akin to a mother to Byleth during the game’s course but didn’t actually raise Byleth, and also, Byleth has Sothis’s soul crystal thing within her, which means that Rhea is, in a spiritual sense, actually sort of Byleth’s daughter (which is what she wants; she’s doing this whole thing of resurrecting her mother), but Sothis’s personality has not actually supplanted Byleth’s.  So Byleth can get together with a woman who’s simultaneously her mother, grandmother, and daughter, and also quite arguably not any of those things.

This is the kind of “incest” that Fire Emblem and a lot of other RPGs and animes and such engage in--it’s basically just a flair of exotica that they add for flavor and don’t think about or seriously commit to.  They’re dancing around the subject, wanting the benefit of the thrill of the taboo while being too cowardly to actually go in on it.  The lore says Alex and Luna from Lunar 1 were raised together in the same household, but there’s no part of their cold-as-a-dead-fish rapport that suggests they have any stronger personal ties or knowledge of each other than you’d find between people who happened to take a couple elective classes together back in high school, so their romance (such as it is) can proceed without the slightest complication of their being brother and sister.  If what you’re into is adoptive siblings getting the down-there feelings for each other, then hey, great for you, Alex and Luna will appeal to you on that level, but if it’s something you don’t want to see, no problem, the writers aren’t going to make even the slightest attempt to acknowledge the situation they created.  Same with countless other RPG adopted siblings--expect no more acknowledgement from, say, the flirtations of Lufia 1's protagonist and titular character, or Asahi's lightly implied crush on Nanashi in Shin Megami Tensei 4-2, of their having been raised together by the same parental figures.

Fixations like Lachesis’s idolization of her brother are overly romanticized, the incestuous part of Corrin hooking up with her adopted siblings or her cousin or her father figure is, contradictorily, both there for show and largely unstated, and I feel pretty damn confident that there has never been a romantic and/or sexual relationship in human history that would be accurately reflected by Byleth’s potential one with her grandmother-mom-daughter-sort-of, and most of it all can still pull the “Oops, not technically” card if backed up against the wall.

But the case of Simone and Raye is not one of this futzing around with incest as a weird fantasy thing that can be sprinkled onto situations and characters that don’t actually apply to the real world.  They flat-out ARE aunt and niece, and their shared life situation is realistic and familiar.  They understand and engage with each other with the familiarity (pun still intended) of close relations, they live in the same house and have normal-ish life schedules that intersect as one expects of family under the same roof, and outside of ones connected to Simone’s pining for Raye, their interactions are very much rooted in the familial and display a clear aunt-niece connection.  AAAVXA establishes very firmly in fact and in character that Raye and Simone are family; there’s no backdoor to this link between them that allows the audience to only approach the incest angle as much as is comfortable before ducking out with contrived and frankly ridiculous technicalities.  Raye and Simone are an aunt and a niece who are sexually attracted to each other and there will be no half-measures on the matter.  Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA doesn’t involve “incest” like Fire Emblem and its ilk do, it involves incest.

But on the other hand, doesn’t that actually make it more respectable, really?  AAAVXA actually takes the matter seriously enough not to fucking dance around it like some kid bugging his (platonic) sibling on a long car ride with “I’m not touching you!” shenanigans.**  When Simone and Aunt Raye talk about this attraction between them, they’re serious discussions, ones that Simone approaches with blunt honesty, and when Raye rebuffs her advances and pleas, it’s on real grounds with genuine emotional rationale, not just some cutesy “Oooooh, but its so forbidden tho, we just caaaaan’t, :O  ;)  :P ” nonsense.

Not only that, but a good chunk of the dialogue and scenes devoted to Simone’s love for her aunt is sincere, high-quality content.  For all its carefully earnest, envelope-pushing reservation, their date in Episode 6 is genuinely well-written, earnest, and I do daresay romantic. I've seen sloppier dates in RPGs, ones that had less belief and earnest wish for love in them, that were less aware of their problems and also less convincingly optimistic of a capability to overcome them.  Hell, I think the most romantic line of the entire game is a bid by Simone to her aunt to be with her: “I’m not tall or dark, but I could leave all this pretend childhood behind and be a woman, if I could be your woman.”  With the context that Simone’s college-age adolescence is a major part of her taking back what an abusive childhood stole from her and an essential part of her capacity to move forward with her life, that’s a declaration of tremendous weight from her.  It’s 1 of the top romantic lines in the game, in my opinion.  These feelings were treated as legitimate and important.

So Saint Bomber takes Simone and Raye’s feelings and situation seriously, and doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence about the matter.  Shouldn’t I count that as a positive?

Well, I mean, I do!  But it also means that I respond as an audience by looking at Simone and Raye as seriously as the game wants me to, and that’s a large part of what makes me uncomfortably dislike it.  Because the realism of their situation carries with it 1 of the most realistic obstacles to an incestuous relationship’s capacity to be healthy: there is a major power imbalance between them, and it isn’t something that can likely ever go away.

Aunt Raye is, in Simone’s eyes, the woman who swooped in and saved her from a truly horrific life that deeply traumatized her and stunted her development as a human being.  Raye’s the first person that Simone ever received love from (even if Miriam is the first person who ever verbally expresses love to Simone).  She’s the worldly adult that Simone goes to for advice and the perspective of someone at a higher personal vantage point.  In practical matters, it’s Raye’s house that Simone’s living in, and mostly Raye’s income that provides for Simone’s needs and wants.  And while Raye definitely has her own hang-ups and weaknesses, between the 2 of them, Simone is demonstrably the one who has a more dependent, turbulently traumatic, and vulnerable mental and emotional state.

Now, to some degree, this emotional and psychological inequality is lessened by the time all of the game is said and done.  Simone definitely becomes a stronger person and more capable of self-reliance.  Raye does eventually share things about herself, opens her vulnerabilities up to Simone.  There are revelations made which diminish some of the things that Simone most owes her for--in fact, in many ways it’s Raye who owes a karmic debt to Simone, one so massive that it can never be paid off.  In practical matters, Mille would undoubtedly allow Simone to live with her, Miriam would definitely do the same for her if she needed it, and both would make sure she had a livable situation overall, so Simone is not necessarily beholden entirely to Raye for her welfare.  And of course, Raye herself says that she doesn’t want Simone to feel an imbalance between them.

But the thing is, no matter how even the playing field may be made by all these factors, it doesn’t actually amount to anything.  The emotional power imbalance remains the same.  Because even after Raye confesses the worst parts of herself and fully lays her cards on the table, Simone makes it pretty clear that her love for Raye is no less and no different than ever--which means that regardless of anything and everything, her perception of Raye as the hero of her life that she adores is unchanged.  Perhaps ironically, the wonderful lesson about love that we got from Mille in this game, about how losing her initial and unhealthily intense infatuation with Simone gave her a chance to develop a deeper, more real and healthy love for her, provides a compelling argument for why Simone’s feelings for Raye remain disquieting to me: there’s been no such opportunity for refinement and maturity for this infatuation; it remains in its initial problematic state because Simone can’t stop perceiving Raye as she always has.

And not for nothing, but it turns out that the predominance of why Raye insists on their maintaining romantic distance is not so much born from a general sense of responsibility or recognition of the real problems inherent to their situation, but rather from a guilt-based perception of where Simone's feelings come from and the authenticity of their creation.  Frankly, the fact that Raye's reticence about allowing anything to happen between her and Simone isn't based on the actual ethical problem that should be restraining her, but just on self-revolving reasoning that Simone could make (fairly rational) arguments against, doesn't make me any more comfortable with the situation as a whole.

But oh my God, Arpy, SO FUCKING WHAT!?  What does that matter, when Raye and Simone don’t ever actually get together!?  Regardless of the validity of the denial's origins, if Raye is responsible enough to keep refusing to let them act on their attraction, then what’s my problem with this?  So what if Simone has the hots for her aunt, if nothing’s going to come of it?  The woman showed Simone what it was like to have joy for the first time in her nearly 20 years of life, got her help, and gave her a life that wasn’t founded on abuse and neglect.  It is pretty damn understandable that Simone would attach just about every positive feeling she could have to Aunt Raye as a result, including hero-worship-based love and desire.  Particularly when you factor in Simone’s established difficulty in not letting any positive and affectionate relationship she forms slide quickly into love.  Heck, she appears to possess no capacity for discrimination on this point; getting hot and bothered for your own aunt is downright relatable (lol again) compared to falling for Anastasia.  Hell, romancing the damn cat would have been less emotionally puzzling than Simone getting butterflies in her stomach for that acidic contrarian egomaniac.

Well, I do have to say, even if Raye and Simone don’t get together, and Saint Bomber firmly proclaims there’s none of that hoo-ha in the game, it feels like we’re meant to want them to.  Like I said, some significant effort goes into scenes and dialogue that convey their love and attraction, and the general feeling I get is that we’re supposed to not only view Simone’s adoration of Raye as legitimate--it feels like it’s meant to be seen as legitimate and viable.  Like the game’s narrative itself would have liked it to have happened, and would have seen it as a good relationship if it had.  As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of scenes and elements of Simone and Raye's interactions that make for genuinely romantic material.  Heck, I really think a good argument could be made that the narrative favors Simone and Raye's unfulfilled romance with noticeably more care and belief than Simone and Mille's love receives, in spite of the fact that Simone's relationship with Mille is 1 of the 2 main love stories of the game.  AAAVXA is sitting down and having a frank discussion about incest, and I respect that, but it does feel like that discussion’s happening because it’s got an angle it wants to push.

But still, yes, there's definitely an argument to be made that I need to suck it up and fucking get over this, because regardless of how its potential is portrayed and whether it would be healthy and so on and so forth, the fact is that Raye and Simone don't hook up in the game's canon,*** and when asked, Saint Bomber will even confirm that they continue to live separate romantic lives past the confines of the game and into the future--a fact that was, it seems, going to be confirmed in another, separate game project that never fully materialized, but still holds established weight in his works' lore.  My consternation over this matter may very well not be proportionate.  Nonetheless, the nature and potential (even if unrealized) of unhealthy dynamics in this scenario that has some weight of realism to it does discomfort me, reasonably or not, and the casual encouraging atmosphere that the game has about it doesn't help.

The fact that I'm uncomfortable with the emphatic attraction that Simone has for Raye isn't where my dislike for this aspect of AAAVXA ends, though.  Frankly, this angle of incest in their characters and relationship also annoys me somewhat, too.  Because, well, honestly, how much is it needed?

Look, I think I would object substantially less to this incest if there were some discernible purpose to it.  Some benefit or necessity it provided to the story that wasn't going to be accomplished as well or better by an easy alternative.  Let's return to Saint Bomber's previous game, A Dragon's ReQuest.  As I mentioned earlier, of the mutual polycule that constitutes the game's main romance, 3 of the women involved share a common semi-recent ancestor--the woman who was the grandmother of 1 of them was also the great-grandmother of the other 2.  Realizing this made my eyebrow raise so fast it might have been mistaken for a SpaceX rocket taking off--but also like a SpaceX rocket, it came crashing back down immediately after.  Because, you see, ADRQ is meant to be an homage to Dragon Quest's earlier titles, the second game in particular, and in DQ2, the party consists of the 3 descendants of the original Dragon Quest's protagonist, so having 3 of the main characters of ADRQ all be slightly distantly related in the same way is playing into ADRQ's cause of paying tribute to DQ2.  Granted, DQ2's party members weren't all fucking (at least not to my knowledge), and it's a pretty silly minor detail to insist on adhering to, and of course Dragon Quest is generally garbage that doesn't deserve to be paid respect anyway, but, ultimately, there IS an actual, recognizable reason for Hinoki, Garnet, and Aurellia to be mildly related, even as they fall in, and reinforce their, love with one another.

Hell, we don't even have to go as far as a different game for an example of incestuous feelings that I don't have as big an issue with because they serve a purpose.  Simone isn't the first family member with whom Raye's wanted to go deep-diving in the gene pool--Simone's mother, Raye's sister, was her first great love, and the history of those doomed feelings, the ways that Raye acted on them, forms the vast majority of Raye's character, motivations, and the gut-punching backstory of her villainy, as well as the secret foundations of Simone's own history.  Whether or not the idea of it is something I'm comfortable with, I don't begrudge Raye's lost love for her sister its place in AAAVXA, because it's an essential part of the story and characters that wouldn't accomplish what it does without being exactly what it is.  Raye's catastrophic love for Sadie forms the basis for several of AAAVXA's most important actors, functions as a load-bearing drama knot that's tied many of the game's most important plot threads into itself, and is frankly an outright impressive and even overpowering tragedy that makes Raye a great character and opens new dimensions of pain and sadness in the story.  No argument from me that this bit of incest earns its place in the game.

But Simone's adoration for Raye?  To be quite frank, I just don't see its necessity.  Given that Raye saved her from an utterly horrific and traumatic life situation, which occurred after Raye already having been the only genuinely positive recurring figure in Simone's life to show her affection, Simone's love for her would be just as believable in its strength, devotion, and utter adoration if there had been no angle of sexual attraction involved.  The talks they have as Simone seeks guidance from her knowledgeable adult figure, the way that Simone is affected by the revelations and twists related to Raye, her embarrassment at the ways she has to cover for Eva's secret and messy existence as it inconveniences Raye's home, their general shared demeanor...it'd all work just as well and remain more or less unchanged and intact if it were all based on platonically familial affection.  I might even argue that, the game being filled as it is with Simone's predilection for falling in love with any woman she forms a strong bond with, establishing a love as strong as the one she has for Aunt Raye without the attachment of Simone's knee-jerk thirst for romance might actually have added more narrative legitimacy and weight to it, made it stand out all the more.

And from Raye's side, just about all the interactions with and affection shown for Simone seem pretty straightforward and non-pining, at least on the surface.  She rarely mentions or displays any of her latent attraction for Simone if not pushed into having to acknowledge it by Simone herself.  Little to nothing significant would have to change by excising the incest angle on her side, either, as far as I can tell.

Mind you, I don't mean that you could just scoop all of the incestuous material out and just leave it as is; you'd at least need some character-building scenes and conversations to replace it.  This isn't 1 of those scenarios where you could literally just remove some aspect of the story without it making the slightest significant difference, like Raven's betrayal in Tales of Vesperia or 75% of Chrono Cross's cast.  There'd have to at least be some character-building content, this time of a platonic nature, put in there instead.  But the ultimate matter of who and what Simone and Raye are to each other, the authenticity and magnitude of their love and bond, the personality of their interactions, the soul and truth of their relationship, exist, I think, independently of their attraction to one another.  The substance of their relationship and all the important ways it shapes them and the story of AAAVXA does not need the gimmick of romantic and sexual tension to function.

But then again, who the hell am I to say what's "necessary" or true to Simone and Raye as characters?  They aren't my creations, and maybe they're real and valid enough to their creator that their narrative function isn't all that defines them.  I've said before that I suspect at least some of Saint Bomber's creations, from how relentlessly characterized and rounded they are as personalities, exist in his mind and develop into entities of their own beyond his conscious effort.  For all I know, Raye and Simone having the forbidden hots for each other might be less a choice on their creator's part than a simple instinctive calling on theirs.

For that matter, griping about whether something is "necessary" can be a very shaky complaint to begin with--it's the unnecessary flourish that lends personality and memorable detail to our creations, after all, and certainly some of the signatures of LBS games that I most appreciate and respect, such as the astonishing amount of reactive banter and monologue tied to investigating the games' settings, are wholly "unnecessary" embellishments.  Maybe I'm just being a colorless, arrogant twit in having this frustration.

But then again again, Raye and Simone's thing is far from the only reference or other content involving incest in AAAVXA, and even if I could make myself comfortable with their situation, I still think I'd at least find it tiresome that the game's so determined to include it so frequently.  I mean, besides Raye and Simone, you have Raye's backstory involving her sister, which I fully admit to being a legit and strong piece of lore and character depth, but you've also got a whole episode's adventure dedicated to confronting a vampire who's in love with her sister--a quest whose purpose seems mostly to be communicating the message "Look, look, incestuous love CAN be pure!  I have Proof: The Author says so!"  Also, it's never stated, but Hat Diviyan Keliya's lines during the game's true ending make me pretty sure that she's down bad for her mother.  AND there's that weird, genuinely unwelcome joke that Miriam's first mother, Gene, makes about testing out the bed with Miriam if Miriam's other mother, Bern, isn't there--the backtracking from it is awkward and uncomfortable, which it certainly should be, and I guess there are times when people make weird jokes and regret it, but it absolutely did NOT have to be there at all, it accomplishes nothing, and is frankly by all other observable personality metrics pretty out of character for Gene, and Bern not letting it go but kind of implying an agreement with the sentiment by using the same "cute" adjective with Miriam as she did about Simone a moment ago when implying an attraction for the latter...yeeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh that moment was weird and, frankly, just pretty stupid.

It's a lot, honestly.  There's a lot of teasings of, references to, and feelings of incest in Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA.  This isn't just a major character relationship story between Simone and Raye, and it's not just a startling and well-written origin story for Raye's role in the game's story.  It's also just a thing that keeps showing up, again and again, and not in the inescapably well-written capacity that Simone x Raye and Raye's history enjoy.  Hell, that stupid joke scene with Miriam's moms is just outright a negative, a small but annoying mark that counts against AAAVXA as a whole.  Even when allowing for my discomfort being an overreaction since it isn't consummated, even when dismissing my criticism of its lack of necessity as philistine, it's still hard at times to truly regard Raye and Simone's mutual attraction as much better than fetishy indulgence when the topic of incest keeps making its inapposite presence known for little to no other discernible reason again and again throughout the game like a pop-up for a service whose free trial period is soon to expire.

...Buuuut, I have to wonder if this still is a failure on my part.  There very well may be quite a fair point to be made that my consternation is my fault for simply not going at Large Battleship Studios games with the right frame of mind.  I mean, you know me: I take the media I consume pretty seriously as a whole.  I latch onto the highest level I can grasp of any storytelling art I encounter, and I instinctively look upon the whole from that vantage point, and sometimes that's not accurate or fair.  The fact that Saint Bomber's works contain fascinating material, heavy themes, and substantial emotional turmoil doesn't mean that that's all they are, that they're wholly a dramatic offering.  I never quite remember (or perhaps believe?) that these are, in significant regard, also simply indulgent romance simulators, and aren't especially pretending not to be.  And if I were playing a mildly gratuitous indie dating sim, it wouldn't shock me that an Aunt Romance path was there.  I'd, I dunno, probably just roll my eyes and move along; it's some people's fantasy and I'm not really here to kink shame.  But because AAAVXA is also a great and thought-provoking RPG, I just instinctively slide my headspace into treating it exclusively as such, and not a multi-path explicit romance fantasy game, when I should be treating it as both.

It's frustrating.  All these years later, all the growth that I had in my role as an audience thanks to Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, and I'm still finding ways to trip over a creator who wants to be both insightfully brilliant and unabashedly indulgent.  I'm disappointed that maybe I'm just not able to keep my perspective as open as I think I do.

Anyway, I think that's all the nonsense I have to spew on this matter.  Ultimately, the focus that AAAVXA directs to the romantic feelings that Simone has for her aunt and that Raye has for her niece makes me uncomfortable, and I find them to be a stumbling block in my otherwise smooth stride of appreciation for this game.  Maybe there are legitimate reasons for that, maybe I need to get the fuck over it.  Maybe it wasn't necessary, maybe it doesn't matter if it was or wasn't.  Maybe there's too much fetishy incest-baiting in the game to begin with, maybe that's just a pretentious perspective born of not engaging with the material in a reasonable way.  In all likelihood, 1 way or another, it probably all comes down to something in me that I think Accresciator Lasca puts best: "The fact that her world view doesn't line up with that makes me uncomfortable in ways I don't entirely understand."

Whatever the case, I've now regurgitated pretty much all the thoughts, reactions, and feelings that were warring in me over this matter as I played the game, and if anyone's still reading this far into this semi-stream-of-consciousness mishmash, hopefully you can make better sense of it than I've been able to.












* The first 6-ish seasons, anyway.  It definitely went past its expiration date.


** Actually, I guess that would still be bugging the sibling if they weren't platonic, too.  Probably even more so, in fact.


*** There IS a what-if scenario that shows an alternate route that destiny could have taken where they run away to be together, but as it's explicitly non-canon and forcibly undone by fate, one can't really count that.

La Pucelle Tactics's Prier's Strange Role in the Nippon Ichi Canon

Does the way that Nippon Ichi uses Prier in its classic multiverse strike anyone else as a bit weird?

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Prier is the protagonist of La Pucelle: Tactics, a demon-hunting heroine who leads her companions on a journey to save the world in a pretty cut-and-dry RPG adventure.  LPT moves forward with a recognizable momentum that from the start is clearly aiming for the typical good-conquers-evil the-day-is-saved conclusion that it arrives at.  From start to finish, Prier is depicted as the heroine of the tale, and while I was extremely disappointed with the direction her promising character went in, there's never any arc or event in the game, at least that I can recall, in which the fact that Prier is a good guy is thrown into doubt.  She starts her adventure, she follows it to its conclusion, the world is saved, the game is over and its story told.  Simple, straightforward matter.

Well, almost.  There WAS an optional, alternate ending to LPT in which, after defeating 100 demon overlords, Prier becomes one herself, due to, I dunno, overexposure to them or something.  It's a very quick, concise little ending thing, barely more than, say, the numerous little fake-out endings of Nier: Automata, or accepting the dragon's offer to keep guarding the door to the demon world in Breath of Fire 2 rather than going in to permanently resolve the situation, or the various alternate endings to Chrono Trigger achieved by defeating Lavos earlier than intended.  This matter of Prier becoming an Overlord is spontaneous, brings the main plot to a halt, and is presented as essentially a bad ending, albeit a secret one.  It's pretty clearly just there as a gag.

…Except that the multiverse of Nippon Ichi treated this as the canon conclusion of Prier's story!

See, every time Prier shows up as a crossover guest event in the rest of Nippon Ichi's games, it's always as a demon Overlord.  She's been a recruitable crossover easter egg character in like 4 of the main 5 Disgaea titles, and an optional boss in the odd Disgaea out, and every time, it's very distinctly been Overlord Prier, not Beat The Game Normally Prier that's shown up.  Nippon Ichi's made sure there's no ambiguity about it, either; these little crossover events come with small scenes and interactions with Prier to set them up, and it's stated outright that Prier is famously known for being an exceptionally powerful demon overlord who's always eager for a fight against a strong opponent.  If she's got dialogue during these appearances, it's terse and aggressive, focused almost exclusively on a desire to fight and destroy adequately strong opponents, which most certainly doesn't align with Prier's personality through the standard course of her adventure to its expected end.  And it's consistent across the Disgaea series (which is essentially the backbone of the classic Nippon Ichi multiverse, mind you); there's no appearance of Prier in any game after her own that involves any non-demon version of her, at least not to my knowledge.  From the moment La Pucelle: Tactics concludes, Nippon Ichi only utilizes Overlord Prier.

I mean, is that not just really peculiar?  After going through the all the work of writing an entire, full adventure from start to finish, creating and developing (albeit poorly) the character of its protagonist, and having that game take its place as 1 of the company's formative, foundational RPGs that strongly defined all that would follow it--I'd argue, in fact, that LPT influenced Nippon Ichi's RPG heyday far more strongly than their first notable title, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, did--the company basically just decided to disregard the expected conclusion of Prier's adventure that the game presents to the player, and canonize the peculiar, out-of-nowhere joke bad ending, instead.  The company actually went and invalidated the entire story of LPT, basically just packed it up and tossed it out on a whim!

That's crazy!  I mean, how often do you see an RPG developer just up and outright say, "Bzzzt, WRONG ANSWER!" to their own game's established intended ending?  I can think of a couple of times, but Shadow Hearts 2's canonizing SH1's lesser normal ending was a clever and tricky matter of retconning its own retcon to confirm SH1's best ending as canon after all, and Valkyrie Profile 2's complete slash-and-burn of the art and majesty of Valkyrie Profile 1's entire story was a horrible move that betrayed just how careless and incompetent SquareEnix is with their creations and writing (as if more evidence was needed).  Shadow Hearts 2 had creative and artful strategy, while Valkyrie Profile 2 was a catastrophe created by feckless and ignorant morons--but smart or stupid, these were choices made with a storytelling goal in mind.  By all appearances, Nippon Ichi torched Prier's story on a lark.

Oh, and they didn't drag their heels about it, either!  They committed to this in Disgaea 1, the very next major RPG they created after La Pucelle: Tactics.  That's strange in its own regard; the dust had barely settled on La Pucelle: Tactics's adventure before Disgaea turned it to, well, more dust.  It's like they were in a hurry.

And this, all of this, is just how the situation stood before the rerelease, La Pucelle: Ragnarok, actually doubled down on Prier becoming an Overlord.  Hell, "doubling" doesn't even begin to cover it; this is basically a 20x modifier being applied, here.  The remake actually offered a 4-chapter alternate ending route in which Prier wrestles with the darkness in her heart, overcomes it, then wrestles with it again later, and is like 95% of the way to overcoming it again when suddenly she just gives up and goes with it.  Prier becomes a demon, beats up all the good guys, stops the villain, Croix dies in her arms, and Prier is never seen again by her friends and family.

Yeah!  Yeah, that's actually what fucking happened!  Nippon Ichi took the joke bad ending they'd made canon, looked at it, and said, "Oh, no, wait, this won't do.  What were we thinking?  This, the canon conclusion of La Pucelle?  Crazy!  It's not nearly depressing enough."  From the dialogue we get from Prier in Disgaea 5--hell, from the fact that there IS dialogue with her, really--it is quite clear that Nippon Ichi's mainline series considers this new, updated version of Prier becoming a demon lord, this incredible bummer that concludes the colorful, oft-comical tale of a brash, spunky girl with a heart of gold in naught but despair and loss and loneliness, is canon.

Nippon Ichi actually went to the trouble of drafting out a 4-part saga just to turn a joke bad ending into a legitimate tragedy.  Adopting Demon Overlord Prier was no longer just a spur-of-the-moment joke that got out of hand, they deliberately went back to it and applied themselves to putting it on record.  Sure, you can play out the game to the ending it was originally intended to have instead, go ahead, knock yourself out, but as far as Nippon Ichi's concerned, following the script of La Pucelle: Tactics as it was written is some wild made-up lunacy, hogwash, what-if speculation, fanfiction.

And yet, what's even weirder about this situation is how easy it is, ultimately, to just take in stride.  I mean, if it were announced that the canon ending to Radiant Historia was actually 1 of the dead-end bad endings, I and anyone else who had enjoyed the game would be furious.  Can you imagine how livid players would have been if Bioware had come out and revealed that the secret game over ending you can get if you sit and wait out the timer in the Arrival DLC was actually the official ending to Mass Effect 2?  Or if they'd officialized the Dragon Age 1 DLC where you play as a Darkspawn and the good guys lose?  Just think about the reaction the gaming public would have had in a crazy reality where there had never been any more Star Fox games past the first, because Nintendo had arbitrarily decided that the joke ending where Fox gets transported into and trapped within another dimension where he fights a giant slot machine and then just keeps flying forever out in space was actually the real way that Star Fox 1 had ended.

But Prier's story being cut off just so she can be a recurring superboss in Disgaea?  The erasure of the final act of La Pucelle: Tactics's story, the sentence of a Bad End to its tale?  Eh.  I've always felt pretty indifferent, and it doesn't seem like it ever bothered all that many other players all that greatly.  And even with the remake having expanded the joke Bad End into a full 4-Act drama, it still hasn't seemed, over the years, like it especially upset anyone.  In fact, there was so little audience aversion to this matter that I didn't even KNOW that the remake had evolved the Demon Overlord ending; I found out about the new content via a comment on this very rant, went back, watched the new content, and then Frankensteined together some new paragraphs to account for the remake's stuff.  So if this rant seems notably choppy and disjointed, it's definitely still mostly because I suck at writing, but this time it's also partly because of the new stuff being crammed in.  But anyway, the point is, audiences had so little objection to Nippon Ichi canonizing a bad ending to La Pucelle that I went 17 years without even hearing enough discourse and scuttlebutt about it to clue me in that it had been renovated.

My guess is that it's just kind of a case of not much being lost by reducing Prier to nothing more than crossover fodder, nor even in suddenly ending her tale in tragedy.  Like I said, LPT, and especially Prier's role in it, was a disappointment to me.  The game's story was generic and uninspired, ultimately fixated on a love story that was thoroughly unconvincing and didn't really have anything to say.  Early on in the game, Prier immediately seemed like she was going to be 1 of the most likable and fun protagonists I'd ever encountered at the time--but her potential and personality were completely neutered well before the Overlord joke ending had a chance to cut her development off.  The plot demanded that Prier be diminished to a tiresome, lovesick idiot coward whose only thought, feeling, or character trait was having a spontaneous, completely inexplicable crush on Croix and trying to hide that fact for some reason--I've got more respect for that gutless emotional wimp Allen from Xenosaga than I do for in-game Prier--and the plot bent over backwards to fixate on this above anything else.  Aside from the fact that Eclair was a likable character, does waving a hand and making Prier's established personality and the final quarter of La Pucelle: Tactics either disappear or warp into disaster, really ruin much of anything that was worth having?  Heck, a fair bit of the updated story of Prier's descent to demonhood represented the first time in dozens of hours that she'd had a chance to be a character in her own respect rather than just a plot device for a shitty overbearing romance.*  Even if the expanded Demon Overlord path led to a depressing end, it was kind of nice just to be reminded for a bit that Prier did in fact at 1 point possess a personality of her own.

I can't help but feel that the lack of outrage I've ever seen at Disgaea's reshaping of Prier's canon is a confirmation that most people just kind of feel the same as I do on the matter.  Even among those I've known who did genuinely and bafflingly like La Pucelle: Tactics, I've never heard any serious complaint about Nippon Ichi's bizarre decision to essentially undo it for no particular reason.

It's still a really wild move when you think about it, though.  La Pucelle: Tactics was 1 of Nippon Ichi's major works, a formative moment in its early days as it began to get its foothold as a big name of 2000s RPG developers, and the company just turned around as fast as they could to obliterate the original, expected story of its heroine and instead embrace a weird, Easter egg bad ending as its accepted canon.  And then they stretched that out into a full-on bad ending, that they continued to wholeheartedly back instead of the main, originally intended, tonally consistent ending of the game.  Truly weird to me.













* Very fitting, by the way, that the thing which tips the scales and gets Prier to give into the darkness in her heart is someone mentioning Croix and her getting all panicked about not being able to save him.  1 moment she's confident, heroic, cool Prier, then the next second she's distraught and insecure as she completely disregards the value of everyone else around her, all because Croix entered into the conversation.  If that isn't just a perfect microcosm of 90% of what's wrong with La Pucelle, I don't know what else could be.  Every bad turn really can be traced to this stupid crush of hers.

Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness's Downloadable Content

A single add-on for an extremely obscure game that didn't really interest me to begin with?  Why wouldn't I want to spend my time ranting about such a worthy subject?



Tales of the Moon Cult: Yeah, don't buy this.

...

Oh, what's that?  You want me to actually put some effort and life into this rant and my opinion?  Well isn't that interesting: an audience that wants some investment from the creator they're giving their time of day.  What a crazy notion!  Well, if there's 1 thing that Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness has taught me, it's that audience engagement is strictly optional, so you're gonna just have to suck it, nerds!

Okay, look, I'm sorry, I'm being harsher than I should be here.  I don't actually think that Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness is a product of a lack of interest or effort.  But it IS a product of a lack of competence, and Tales of the Moon Cult suffers the same problems that the rest of the game does:

- The story has nothing in particular to say.  The main plotline of this DLC simply involves foiling some cultists' plans because bad guys are bad, and its sidequests don't amount to much more than standard fodder for killing time in an RPG.  And when the story has nothing below its surface level, the fact that said surface is narrated in a voice that's functional but lacks any real flourish comes across as lacking.  There's no satisfaction to this tale to be had in its conclusion; when it's all said and done, the only thing you'll feel was accomplished was that you put something sharp inside a bunch of guys who were bad enough that it wasn't immoral to do so.

- The lore and worldbuilding are uninteresting.  The new settings are generic, and even if they weren't, I'm not so enamored with Isilmerald that I'd be enthralled by a barebones island populated by cannibals* and another vineyard.  And the main antagonistic entity of the DLC is another evil cult?  Yeah, I'm sorry, but the threshold for evil cult fatigue in storytelling is actually remarkably low; once you've already got 1, that's it!  That's all the audience needs.  We're not gonna gasp and sit on the edge of our seats at the revelation that there're more 1-dimensional baddies in robes with curvy knives hanging out in a cave drawing pentagrams all day.  And even then, the evil cult of this DLC is functionally indistinguishable from the evil cultists you regularly fight in the main game; they're all violent nutters in service to a god/goddess who's a big jerk.  They give no greater personality or narrative weight to their deity than was already established, and the world of BGCoD is no richer for their inclusion.  The most weighty addition that this DLC provides to the game's world is that fish-people exist and they're not used to getting drunk, a fact which seems more interesting in this sentence than it does in the game itself.

- The cast as a whole is lifeless.  Most of the sidequests' characters are the NP'est of Cs.  The instigator and surprise villain of the main quest is so dull and by-the-book a questgiver and traitor that there is genuinely no possible chance that you'll ever be angry that I've just spoiled that twist for you.  The rest of the villains have no nuance whatsoever.  Now, I will at least give credit to Tales of the Moon Cult on 1 matter: your party members noticeably have more lines in reaction to the events transpiring before them than they did during the main game.  Whereas most of the main characters say very little during BGCoD proper, they're almost chatty in this add-on, and I do appreciate it when a developer takes a moment to address a flaw.  Unfortunately, it's a limited win, because most of the party members of this game have the same problem of lacking much personality that the rest of the cast has, and giving them more time only improves that situation so much.  Even the ones with a more standout personality tend to just use this extra dialogue to further hammer in their single and repetitive character traits--Jade's still being used for the same mildly sexual, mildly Addams Family-esque, mildly mild laughs, Rabinandera's still fixated on money and violence, and Phimm is still truly just the most titanic of douchebags.

So yes, the same flaws that made completing Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness a matter of determination rather than enjoyment likewise plague its add-on, and for all my blathering above, it really just comes down to the fact that this game's writing just isn't very interesting.  You follow the quest parameters, you kill some dudes and fetch some things, and once it's over, you'll never think about it again.  Frankly, the thing that most stands out about Tales of the Moon Cult is the fact that it's extraordinarily overpriced and oversold--they're really actually trying to say that 3 new map locations, half a dozen minor sidequests, and a maybe 2 hour main quest, constitute an "expansion" and justify a $12 price tag!  Hell, I don't even know how they justify calling it Tales of the Moon Cult; there's only a single "tale" being told here.

No.  This is not an expansion.  It is only a DLC.  And it is not worth $12.  $3, maybe.  If somehow Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness speaks to you in a way that it just never has to me.  But no more than that, and probably not even that.



Well, there you go!  A no doubt invaluable opinion piece on a DLC for a game you've never heard of and won't remember exists 10 minutes from now.  Well, I've rarely pretended that this blog is for anything in particular beyond my own amusement and satisfaction, and this little tirade gave me a chance to air out some of my overall frustrations with a game that I helped Kickstart, so mission accomplished!  Nonetheless, thanks for sticking with me through to the end all the same, assuming any of you actually did so.  Who knows, perhaps next time I'll be ranting about the add-ons of a game that some of you, any of you, might actually someday play!

...But don't count on it.










* Which, when I think about it, feels vaguely racist?

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE's Hatanaka's Lost Potential

It wasn’t exactly a surprise to discover that Hatanaka’s a pretty crappy, empty villain.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE doesn’t reach for the stars in terms of putting time, effort, and creativity into the creation and development of its major characters, so to expect it to do so for its antagonist would be naive.  That it’s obvious from the moment he’s introduced that Hatanaka is going to be the “twist” antagonist, that he’s only ever seen a couple times before he makes his big villain move and Exits Stage Death with all his motivation and character reduced to a hamfisted exposition dump in those last few moments, that he’s so flat and careless as an entity that said motivation which he clumsily announces is literally the only thing we ever know about him...it’s all completely unsurprising in as slipshod a product as TMS#FE.  If it ain’t a cookie-cutter archetype following its set path as generically as possible, it’s got no place in this game’s cast.

Hatanaka’s motivation is also unsurprisingly vapid and silly--although the game tries to play it like his cause is some kind of high-minded venture, or at least that he believes it to be.  Hatanaka’s basically some self-important entertainment specialist who enables Gharnef’s apocalyptic endeavors because he caught a bad case of Lazy Man’s Nihilism and thus believes that the end of days will somehow be the ultimate form of entertainment.  The man wants to destroy the world out of artistic vision.  It’s the kind of laughably ridiculous, pretentious idiocy that you can only find in an RPG villain, comfortably at home with other pompous nonsensical morons like Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth, Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, Tales of Vesperia’s Duke, and so, so many goddamn more.  Standard fare for RPGs that have no interest in putting effort into their storytelling and cast.

But the shame of it is that Hatanaka’s concept as a villain, silly and dumb though it at first appears, could have actually been refreshingly relevant, novel, and even thematically elegant...and it would have been so easy to make happen, had Atlus been bothered to put even just a little effort into getting this form of villainy right.

Because think about it.  We’re talking about a villain whose schtick is doing evil, harming others, for content.  Even if it’s perhaps not quite as epic and compelling on its surface as villainy born out of a thirst for revenge, or a desire to shape the world to better suit his own preferences, a villain like this is actually quite relevant in the current age.  I mean, each day, how many people get harassed by prank douchetubers looking to turn the annoyance and uncertainty of innocent fast food workers, retail employees, and unassuming pedestrians just trying to go about their day into views and subscribers?  How frequently do we read about a trend on Tiktok that involves showing off something you’ve stolen, or hear about a Youtuber getting arrested because he recorded himself trying to derail a train?  We live in the age of Jack Doherty and Johnny Somali; in the midst of a social epidemic of online assholes recording themselves making other people’s lives worse in the pursuit of clout, a villain who helps initiate the world’s end just for the sake of content has suddenly become a very suitable, relevant kind of antagonist.

But Atlus manages to completely drop the ball with Hatanaka!  Because they had to go and slap some high-falutin notion of his doing it for the love of the art on him.  Hatanaka isn’t an evolution of the shithead with a phone recording himself as he harasses a Chipotle worker, he’s some silly, theoretical snuff filmmaker who wants to bring his form of media to the next level.  The scum-sucking worm who records himself challenging random passersby to a fight and then either running away or letting his bodyguards intimidate his victim into backing down isn’t making other people’s lives worse out of cinematic passion.  That loathsome cockroach who ran over a dog because she was streaming herself checking her phone while driving wasn’t up all the night before as she carefully reviewed every angle, meticulously prepared each inch of her car, and crafted all details of what was sure to be her magnum opus of expression.  The loser recording himself breaking into someone else’s home for a Tiktok prank isn’t doing it because he has a vision.

These people recording and posting themselves behaving badly and harming others are just doing it because they want attention and they want the money that comes with audience engagement on social media platforms.  There’s nothing more to it; it’s that simple and that pathetic.  So unfortunately, even though the idea of Hatanaka as an escalation of this comparatively recently emerged real life villain would have been an easy narrative feather to stick in its cap, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE completely fails to manage it.  His potential to become a commentary on an actual new-age villain of our world lost, Hatanaka just winds up in the Lazy Self-Important Poser villain category in a genre already absolutely filled to the brim with his forgettable peers.

And I’ll grant you, most of the real-world individuals and trends I’ve mentioned thus far have occurred in the last few years, while Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was published in 2015, a whole decade ago and a year before Tiktok was even a thing.  But the 2013 - 2015 era of the internet was nonetheless more than rife with prank Youtubers bothering people for views and lulz (or even just pretending to do so--but staged or real, the concept ultimately boils down to the same thing for the audience’s engagement), so it was absolutely an established, disliked type of entertainer at the time that has only continued to progress since.  Not to mention, TMS#FE was rereleased in 2020 and had some stuff added and changed for it, meaning that they could have, had they the sense to do so, adjusted Hatanaka at the time to reflect the even-better-established-by-that-point clout-chaser kind of content-at-any-cost person.

And not for nothing, it’s doubly unfortunate that Atlus failed to see through Hatanaka’s potential as a clout-chaser villain because it would have elegantly fit into the overall dynamic of the game’s story and theme.  If Hatanaka had just been looking to create content through evil means for selfish intent rather than some crazy notion of art, then he could, with a little more narrative attention and involvement, have served as a good counterpoint to the heroes of the game.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE occasionally puts forth the idea that its heroes’ climb through the entertainment industry is a noble endeavor, that they’re doing it all for the sake of the fans and overall populace whom they entertain.  Well, wouldn’t it be a great thing, then, to have Hatanaka exist as a mirror to that idea, an example of a person who entertains only for his own benefit, to sell the desirable, noble heroism of the main characters all the better as they advance themselves in their craft specifically for the benefit of their fans?  It’d require a few more interactions with Hatanaka to set him up as such a foil, of course, but it wouldn’t be hard to accomplish, and he’d be so much more memorable as such, not to mention it would add a new dimension to the game’s overall story and theme that...well, TMS#FE would still be a long way away from being a well-written endeavor altogether, but it’d certainly be a step closer, at least.

It’s frustrating.  Atlus creates a villain who ends the world for the sake of content, right as the age of clout-chasing content villains has become established in the real world, and completely fails to give him relevance through a connection to that phenomenon when all it would have taken was the slightest rewrite of his motivations, one that would have made more sense in its own right anyway.  And in dropping this ball, they in turn miss an opportunity to make him a better villainous foil to the heroes that desperately could have used some basic storytelling artistry.  A Hatanaka with some relevance and narrative weight was right there, and Atlus just completely missed it.

General RPG Lists: Greatest Romances

Alright, folks, it's been a good 4 years now, and while that now seems like maybe a couple months to me because time just whizzes the fuck by once you reach the 40-ish range, the rest of the world seems to still treat the time between leap years as significant passages, so I reckon it's safe to give this ol' rant a new coat of paint.  Here we go yet again, as we advance this 15-strong list into a Top 20!

But I'm still lazy as hell, so you better believe I'm not fully rewriting the preamble to it, just touching it up a bit.  Enjoy the memories of yester-rant as we spin it all up again!



Y'know, when I went about deciding which couples would make it to this list, I found something out that greatly surprised me: there really weren't many strong contenders, all things considered. For a genre that throws at least one major love story, or at least a romantic interest, into the strong majority of its games, there's not many RPG romances that are worthy of note, comparatively speaking.  I mean, we're here today to celebrate a mere 20 (admittedly amazing) love stories out of a sample pool of 450 games--that's less than 5%, and again, the spots on this list are not nearly as competitive as they are on most other list rants I've done.

Most of the RPG romances I've seen are either pointless and silly/inexplicable, or just rather generic and/or under-developed, is what it is. I mean, where in the world does La Pucelle Tactics's Eclair and Homard's side romance come from? Do the romantic hints between Breath of Fire 3's Ryu and Nina serve any plot- or character-related purpose at all? Are we really meant to care about Tales of Phantasia's Cless and Mint's attraction when it's so bland and unconvincing? And how is it that, going back to La Pucelle Tactics, Prier and Croix so perfectly manage to combine all the problems above and have a love story that is pointless, silly, inexplicable, generic, AND under-developed all at once?

And don't misunderstand--I may have only mentioned the inadequacies of older RPGs thus far, but this is not a deficit disproportionately weighted in the past.  Most of the love subplots of Unicorn Overlord are spontaneously lackluster and phoned in, just as much as Eclair and Homard's.  The lightly implied thing between Will and Eupha in Metaphor: ReFantazio has no more direction or purpose than Ryu 3 and Nina 3 possessed.  Although Saint Bomber's romantic writings are usually quite excellent (as we'll see below, several times), I certainly can't find much more of an emotional basis or convincing chemistry between Simone and Anastasia in Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA than I failed to locate for Cless and Mint.  And certainly the distressing power imbalance and icky overall foundations of Futaba x Ren in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 is no less repugnant than the disaster that was Prier x Croix; if anything, creepy and unhealthy dynamics like the former makes me miss the simple incompetence of the latter.  Less-than-adequate romance is as alive and overpopulous in the RPG genre in present times as it ever has been.

Still, there are definitely some good and great love stories out there, too, and that includes several that didn't quite make it to this list. It just surprised me, and still surprises me to this day, that the number of quality RPG romances is as comparatively small as it is to how many are available to choose from. Here, though, are the ones that I think are sweet and emotional enough to soften the heart of even the grumpiest of haters.

Spoilers, naturally, as love stories in RPGs are usually pretty heavily tied into the general plots.



20. Beast and Belle (Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and Chain of Memories)

Okay, yeah, I know Beast and Belle weren't made up for RPGs, but they're still in 3 of’em (or more; I've not played KH3 yet)...and more importantly, they're really represented quite well in those titles. Kingdom Hearts had the foundations for this couple, obviously, but I feel that the games really worked with the material and gave us a better product than the original--Kingdom Hearts 1 impresses you with just how devoted Beast is to Belle, how she is, when everything comes right down to it, the most important thing in the world to him. Kingdom Hearts 2 expands on that by putting both of them back into their normal environment, where their situation is a little less extreme than it was in KH1, and takes the time to deepen their relationship realistically--which, I must say, is more than I feel the actual movie about them adequately did.* And then there's KH: Chain of Memories, which I think really went into some neat depth on these two, showing just how deeply involved with and devoted to one another they were.

This couple is good to start with, made great by the games' short but very poignant development of their relationship, and the fact that SquareEnix really worked at giving you strong, emotional material for them that wasn't just a rehash of the movie (while still, of course, keeping a strong tie to and respect for the movie's work). They could've just done a rerun of the movie and had a fine enough story, but the company instead put some effort into giving us a quality product--and it paid off beautifully.


19. The Grey Warden and Leliana (Dragon Age 1)

You're going to notice that there are 2 developers in particular that just absolutely dominate this list of greatest romances, and the first is Bioware. Back before they lost their way, back before EA had fully sunk its claws into the studio, Bioware knew how to make a solid RPG, and how to write a really touching, fun love story that made you feel good to witness. The courtship between the main character of DA1 and Leliana comes off as very genuine, and gives me warm and fuzzy feelings.  In all honesty, there’s really not many specific things I can say that put it above anything else, aside from the fact that Leliana’s interest in the Warden seems very real and present from early on, with earlier flirting eventually giving way to full-on love.  Additionally, her damaged yet hopeful and open character makes the romance all the sweeter, and believable as the Warden assists her in finding closure to her troubled romantic past and in reaffirming who she truly is.


18. Alison and Melody (Super Lesbian Animal RPG)

I mean, with a game title like that, you kinda have to come through with a good focus on romantic relationships, right?  And while Super Lesbian Animal RPG had surprisingly more all-around adventure to offer than initially expected, it certainly did deliver a solid, sincere love story with its protagonist and her girlfriend.  Alison and Melody have a believable dynamic between them, one that has recognizable chemistry, but also authentic miscommunications, too, which develop into roadblocks later to be worked through.  This is a great example of the rare cases of joining a romantic RPG relationship already in progress, and SLARPG explores that to its fullest potential, showing beyond doubt from the start that Alison and Melody care greatly for each other, while also taking the opportunity to show the weaker parts of their relationship's base and connection, which eventually will give out and require them to use their genuine love to communicate openly, support one another through their own emotional turmoil, and forge better, more honest and understanding foundations for their relationship.  Alison and Melody are a touching and engaging example of just how much interesting, authentic romance material you can get out of a love story that's past the getting-together milestone rather than all just being a lead-up to it, and how well it can mesh with an emotionally charged RPG adventure.


17. Garrus and Shepard (Mass Effect 2 and 3)

Another Bioware gem!  The easy, natural way that Garrus and Shepard's rapport and comraderie slides into a fun, meaningful back-and-forth is great, and Garrus's appealing and signature personality of confidence and uncertainty makes for a romance across both games that's equal parts playful, sweet, and endearing.  There's a lot of really good romantic content in the trilogy (Thane and Shepard were strong contenders for this list, too), even amongst its NPCs (Charr x Ereba is tragically beautiful), but Garrus and Shepard represent some of Bioware's best romantic work in Mass Effect.


16. Duchess Catherine and the Nereid (Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle)

And here we see the first entry of the other developer that charts over and over again on this list, Large Battleship Studios. If Bioware was the greatest romance-writer back in the day, LBS is the present king in the field--although the 1-man-show indie outfit was also producing wonderful love stories back in that same day, too, as evidenced by Catherine and the Nereid here.

While the majority of this couple’s interactions are simply the cute but largely insubstantial adorations of an amorous mermaid who can’t talk and just seems inexplicably smitten with Catherine, the final stage of this romance takes a sudden, very unexpected turn for the heavy and emotional, and establishes an abiding, unbreakable love across the distance of time and impossibility. Within a short time, we see that Catherine and the Nereid, to even their own surprise, share the kind of bond powerful enough to inspire a person to die in place of the one she loves. Powerful enough to inspire a person to devote the rest of her life and all her efforts to the benefit of the one she loves, even when she herself will never even be able to see the fruits of this labor. Powerful enough to mean that a person simply can’t bring herself to live without the presence of the one she adores. And powerful enough that the true depth of their devotion to one another is something that exists beyond what time and mortality can tear apart; it’s at their most distant that we see the greatest depth and authenticity of how much Catherine and the Nereid love one other.**


15. Dorothea and Manuela (Fire Emblem 16)

Since they already topped a similar list, I see no reason not to simply quote myself on the matter of Dorothea and Manuela:

From start to finish, the Support conversations between Dorothea and Manuela flawlessly extol to the viewer the perfect chemistry between them, as peers, friends, and so much more.  In the 2 of them we see a combination of women who inspire and better each other just by being themselves, without resorting to viewing one another as greater than each truly is--as much as they are about having such profound and overwhelming respect and affection that they’re each a role model for the other, Dorothea and Manuela’s interactions are also about acknowledging one another’s shortcomings and loving her no less for them.  Their sequence of conversations tells a heartwarming story of Dorothea chasing after the woman she loves and has always been inspired by, the one she wanted to stand alongside, and a moving and touching story of Manuela finding someone, finally finding someone, who loves her (and always has) for what’s good and great and important about Manuela, regardless of the shortcomings that come with that.

It’s a wonderful, warm joining of 2 people made for each other, each seeking the exact kind of love that the other can give, and who hold onto one another as a source of personal inspiration to better themselves.  And the A Support is just beautiful, 1 of my favorite scenes of tender love in all of RPGs.  Whoever wrote Dorothea and Manuela’s relationship, I hope you got a damn raise, because you raised the bar and gave me happy butterflies in my tummy.


14. Carmina and Duchess Catherine (Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle)

If this romance had started off better (to put it bluntly, Carmina is horny and forces herself upon Catherine in a shared dream, with Catherine's willingness being questionable at best, even if it's all glossed over later and made out to be something Catherine enjoyed to some degree), it would have been higher up on this list, because it is frankly just absolutely beautiful once it's properly gotten started. The love story of Catherine and Carmina’s got it all. They share their histories and personalities with one another, they possess a touching chemistry, they’re each willing to give absolutely everything up for the other (Catherine’s willing to make herself the enemy of the most powerful adventuring group in the world for Carmina and to use every resource she has to protect her, and/or go with her to the lands of the Dark Elves (the Drow, essentially, which any Dungeons and Dragons player knows is not a pleasant prospect for a human), Carmina’s willing to restrain her natural inclinations of evil for Catherine’s sake and give up on returning to her home in order to be with Catherine, etc), there’s a very touching aspect of Catherine’s taking a leap of faith in trusting her love to Carmina...generally I’d just have to say that everything about Carmina’s and Catherine’s romance is emotional, moving, authentic, and natural.


13. Arueshelae and the Commander (Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous)

Arueshalae’s journey to change her nature for the better, and to finally determine what she dreams of, is a wonderful and natural companion to the sweet, authentic deepening of her feelings for the protagonist into tender love.  It’s a genuinely lovely romance that makes you feel warm and content to witness, one that’s so right for who Arueshalae is and wants to be that her character arc actually feels incomplete without it; Arueshale and the Commander are simply meant to be together.


12. Maxim and Selan (Lufia 2)

Two people being together. It is, apparently, one of the most terrifying possibilities imaginable to a game writer, a scenario that frightens even the most hardened and stalwart creators of entertainment of all kinds: portraying a happy, reasonably stable couple. I mean, think about it--how often do you ever see what happens AFTER the main characters in an RPG (or practically anything else, for that matter) have hooked up? Yeah, not too often. The whole game’s spent building up to it one way or another, and then they only actually get together near or at the very end (if even then!), leaving no time for the audience to actually see the relationship they’ve been waiting for. Even in a game where you can complete a romance earlier than that, like, say, a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona title, or 1 of several different western RPGs, the love story’s subplot usually pretty much wraps up after the characters get together. You may get a few pieces of dialogue or even a very small scene as the game goes on that acknowledges that the characters are romantically involved, but the actual story of it is more or less done.

And that’s nice, and all, but, y’know, there’s more to relationships than just the build-up. There’s also the, y'know, relationship.

That’s what Maxim and Selan show us, and I think that they do it very well. While the actual act of them getting together is a bit generic, and a little rushed in some ways, the latter 2/3rds of Lufia 2 portrays them as husband and wife, reinforcing their devotion to each other and their son as the game goes on, showing their affection in a way that generally denotes the kind of confidence and trust they have in one another and one another’s feelings.

And in another refreshing take on this idea, once they’re together, all the forces of the universe that the writers can summon up don’t immediately start conspiring to tear them apart. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when folks get together before the story of a movie or show or comic or whatever concludes, it’s almost inevitable that some contrived, overblown drama is going to force them apart again, because as I said, writers are terrified of having a couple be a couple.

But again, Maxim and Selan buck this trend. They stand firm in their love for one another, and the writers don’t dump a load of stupid, unrealistic emotional bullshit on them to change that. But they’re also not static--the relationship has its hurdle to overcome, making it still enjoyably dynamic. It’s just that the hurdle is a TEST of their love, not an obstacle meant by the writers to weaken it. Maxim and Selan are touching, realistic, and very competently refreshing.


11. Bastila and Revan (Knights of the Old Republic 1)

It's surprising how well this works, honestly, because Bastila often kind of annoys me (as does any typical blind follower of flawed Jedi philosophy). However, she and Revan (male, Light Side Revan, I mean--regardless of how players want to play the game and interpret things, that's what's cannon) have a romance that develops itself at a relaxed, but steady pace, where you can actually see and understand the growing attraction instead of just having it thrust at you for a few seconds here and there, as is often the case in RPGs.

What really sells it, though, is later on, when the love they've built is tested and endures--as Revan talks a corrupted Bastila back to her senses, and she slowly returns, you really get convinced of how strongly they feel about one another. Not because TEH POWAH OF LOVE ALONE CONQUERS ALL, mind, but rather because it's love that lets Revan know Bastila so well to be able to convince her back. He doesn't just say some stupid crap like many other RPGs would that amounts to "Hey baby I know you're all into this ultimate power destroying the universe thing, and that's cool and everything, but you and I had a crush on each other once and THAT'S MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT." Revan talks to her and reminds her of what she used to want, who she used to be, and shows her the strength of the things she held important before--and also, as PART of that instead of its entirety, says that he wants her to come back to him because he loves her. It's like he loves her, instead of loving being in love with her, I guess, which is what I see quite a lot with these games. And when the scene is over, and Bastila's soul has been saved and she admits that she feels the same for Revan, feelings that have had to persevere against the code of both the Sith AND the Jedi, you genuinely feel, wow, they really, truly do love each other.



10. Argon, Aurellia, Fluorine, Garnet, and Hinoki (A Dragon's ReQuest)

Polyamorous relationships present all kinds of interesting opportunities, but, as might be expected with so complex and frankly uncontrollable a state and emotion as love, they're damned tricky to successfully make work, both in the realms of writing and real life.  But you CAN find the ways to genuinely make a romantic relationship between more than 2 people work, and in storytelling, it can make for a refreshingly different and no less compelling story of love.  I'm really pleased that most of the exceptionally few which I've encountered in RPGs have actually been very earnestly, passionately written by creators who clearly believed in their legitimacy.

Now as far as this particular 5-way love story (honestly closer to 6, really, as Chelisera's affections for the girls are treated as quite legitimate), Imma just quote a little someone I like to call "myself" here, as I like how I summed it up in my 2024 Annual Summary:

The love story of Hinoki and her companions is a long, engaged, and determined one that elegantly links the women in her life to her in genuinely touching scenes and dialogues that emotionally develop these superlative characters and their bonds with one another, while displaying each’s individual and nuanced social psyche.  The love stories that entwine in this polyamorous tapestry highlight and are born from shared histories, deeply rooted wants and insecurities, tender gestures of caring and understanding, personal traumas, moments of great internal courage and adventurousness, and undeniable chemistry.

Making it even better is the fact that this isn’t just a harem-esque polyamory centered around a single figure that all the others love (not that I don’t adore much of Duchess Catherine’s love life in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, mind)--it starts that way, with Hinoki as all the other women’s central figure of affection, but A Dragon’s ReQuest carefully, expertly brings Hinoki’s paramours together with their own moments and connections of love as time goes on, with each new couple in this love polyhedron discovering ardor for one another in their own, unique terms.

And no lack of effort or conviction is given to these “side” romances, either--Fluorine and Garnet’s feelings for each other are treated with the same respect and importance to them as people and as a couple with which each’s romance with Hinoki is treated, for example.  Honestly, one of most poignant scenes in the game (and one of my many favorites) is devoted to one of these "side" couples, the scene in which Fluorine and Aurellia allow physicality to finally find a way to connect and foray into new emotional territory together.  It’s lovely.  The whole game-spanning multifaceted love story of the main characters of the game is lovely.


9. Ai and Yu (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4)

You know, given how bland, rushed, and utterly unconvincing the rest of Yu’s romantic interests in SMTP4 are, it’s rather amazing how well they did with Ai. It’s also surprising that it can work so well when one of the individuals concerned is mostly a Silent Protagonist (characters who don’t actually engage in dialogue with other people don’t tend to be terrific at interpersonal relations). But Ai and Yu's romance is a sweet one that's nonetheless worldly and realistic, which I like, and she's the one romantic option in the whole game for whom the love aspect of her Social Link actually seems to make a difference to its course and her overall relationship with Yu.

What I mean by that is, unlike the rest of the love interests in SMTP4, whose Social Links stay the exact same until the very end when the option to romantically engage with the person is shoehorned into the second-to-last scene, the course of her Social Link events changes depending on Yu's approach to the idea of romancing Ai. For a true romance with her, Yu must care enough about her as a person, and understand who she really is enough, not to hastily dive into a relationship before she’s ready. When Ai first proposes the idea of entering into a romantic relationship, Yu actually turns her down, not because he’s not interested (assuming here that we’re talking about a player who wants him to successfully romance her, I mean), but because she’s not ready for it, still too caught up with the superficial to know who she really is and what she really wants. He’d rather wait until she knows him well enough and understands herself well enough to KNOW that he’s who she wants to be with.

It thus becomes so much sweeter, so much more right, when, after Yu has helped her to rediscover who she is and understand the importance of being true to oneself, she finally asks him again, not as a girl still obsessed with appearances but rather someone more in touch with herself, if he wants to be with her, and he can say yes. You don’t get many instances in RPGs (possibly ANY, I’d have to think about it for a while) where a romance isn’t just approached directly all the way. If there’s any hesitation between RPG characters on whether they love each other, it usually comes in the form of trite denial of their own feelings, not a case where one person cares enough about and understands well enough the other to know that they’re not emotionally ready for such a thing.

And Ai really sells it at the end of the game, too.  On Yu’s last day before leaving town, the other romantic options in the game basically tell him, “It’s been fun, Homeslice, maybe we can do this “being in love” thing again some day long from now when it happens to be convenient.”  Ai, by contrast, makes it clear that she’s never gonna give Yu up, never gonna let Yu down,*** just because he’s going away for a while, telling him that she’s very ready to pursue a long-distance relationship with him.

Overall, the romance between Ai and Yu shows surprising depth and realism for an RPG love story, and it really seems set to last.


8. Tidus and Yuna (Final Fantasy 10)

Tidus and Yuna  really have something special in their game. The way each shows his or her affections for the other is beautiful, and also a believable, real aspect of love that other RPGs rarely get at all into. I don’t mean the little glances and words and FMV water-smooch scene; that obvious stuff is what you'd expect. No, what really sells this love to the player is how Tidus and Yuna are so intimately touched by the other, so deeply moved by love, that they take on aspects of the one they love, becoming, as truly heartfelt lovers often do, akin to a single entity, entering into a union of emotion and spirit. Yuna's incredible devotion to the people of her world, so great that she was fully willing to become a sacrifice to give them a few years' peace and, more importantly, continued hope, never diminishes, but by Tidus's influence, she also comes to question the world as he does, to defy tradition that is wrong or makes no sense, which leads to her deciding to stand against her world's people in order to save them. At the same time, Tidus, while never losing his characteristic disregard for dogma and tradition when they oppose what's reasonable and right, becomes able to understand the kind of devotion Yuna has, the strength it takes to willingly die so that others can live better lives, and becomes, himself, a sacrifice to save her and the world she loves. While staying true to themselves, they become alike to each other, complimenting one another in love. It's really pretty damn cool, and very touching.


7. Bhaalspawn and Viconia (Baldur’s Gate 2)

This assumes a protagonist who is good and honorable. You can court Viconia while being an evil guy, and she’ll actually be far more enthusiastic about the idea, but it’s not very interesting or satisfying to do so.

While Baldur’s Gate 2 goes to good lengths to create an in-depth and emotional romance for all 4 of the love interests of its protagonist, the Bhaalspawn, Viconia’s love story is the one that’s truly touching and compelling, one that really gives her great character development in the process. It’s basically a tale of love’s redeeming power, with Viconia’s growing respect and affection for the main character creating an internal struggle within her as her harsh and evil philosophies wage war with the ever-growing emotional connection she has with the Bhaalspawn. She at first shrinks back in fear and revulsion from her growing feelings, trying to force them and the protagonist away from her with her typical venom and finding that she can't destroy her emotions so easily. It's good stuff, and when the romance picks up again during the Throne of Bhaal expansion campaign, it only gets better. With acceptance of her love for the protagonist comes the opportunity for Viconia to better explore her own conflicting inner nature, all culminating in the protagonist helping Viconia to change herself for the better, to change her philosophy of life from Evil to Neutral. It’s a massive personal achievement for her and, if my limited knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons is correct, a significant achievement by the rules of the universe itself. All in all, it’s a very touching and quite impressive love story, both penetratingly romantic and inspiring in its portrayal of love’s ability to improve those it touches.


6. Octavia,  Protagonist, and Regongar (Pathfinder: Kingmaker)

Right from the start, I thought it was really cool that the writers for Pathfinder: Kingmaker not only included options to pursue a polyamorous relationship in the game, without treating such pursuits with any disdain, or acting like they were a less legitimate emotional bond than the others in the game.  They didn’t treat the polyamorous romance like a punchline, they didn’t introduce it solely to argue that it’s dysfunctional or wrong or unnatural, they didn’t imply that it’s inherently something perverted.  Owlcat Games just wrote an actual love story for Octavia, Regongar, and the Queen/King of Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

And it’s really good!  While the other love stories of PK are no slouches (Nyrissa and the Queen/King came pretty close to making this list, too, in fact), this one is a fearsomely interesting and natural connection.  It establishes a pre-existing relationship between Octavia and Regongar that carries forward because of how genuine their feelings are, but is inherently flawed and out of balance.  But when the Queen/King is introduced as a third member of this relationship, we watch as she/he grows from a casual fling to someone that both Octavia and Regongar begin to sincerely love for her/his own sake...and in that growth, we also witness the Queen/King become the piece that’s been missing from Octavia and Regongar’s puzzle.  The game’s protagonist is the right kind of person to help Reg and Octavia each individually with their emotional conflicts and issues, guiding them to be better, happier versions of themselves--the right kind of person to be loved by each, for their own sake, you see.  And she/he’s also the right kind of person to help Octavia and Regongar to work out the issues in their relationship that keep them from being able to fully accept and give the love they feel for one another--the right kind of person to be an equal part of their relationship, someone who balances it and brings it to a greater level than before.

It’s a narrative balancing act of essentially writing 3 love stories: 1 with Regongar, 1 with Octavia, and a final 1 with Octavia and Regongar, all of which coordinate into a single emotional whole.  And it’s just great.


5. Shepard and Tali (Mass Effect 2 and 3)

I hate to do another cop-out here, but honestly, I feel like I got most of this right the first time I mentioned it in an Annual Summary rant, so I’m just gonna say what I did there:

Tali is adorable, sweet, and caring, and the chemistry between her and a Paragon Shepard is excellent. I like the fact that they've known each other for a fair amount of time before hooking up in Mass Effect 2 (she’s a non-romanceable crew member in ME1), too, giving the impression that this isn't some whimsical attraction that will fade, but rather a strong connection formed from a great understanding of each other.

What I really love about this romance, besides just how strong a chemistry and realism their connection has--few characters seem to so perfectly mesh with and bounce off of Shepard's personality as Tali does--is that there's a strong element of sacrifice involved with it...basically, a member of Tali's species is put at mortal risk when he/she removes his/her environmental suit due to their extremely finicky immune system, meaning that such activities as sex (in the traditional sense, at least) are dangerous. Shepard knows all about Tali's species thanks to Tali's time in his crew in ME1, so for him to pursue a relationship with her, he's knowingly choosing a partner that he can't regularly make love to in a "normal" sense, so, as he more or less says himself, he’s choosing to be with her because he feels that on an emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual level, she's worth giving that up for. And of course, Tali takes a huge risk by deciding to make her and Shepard's first time natural, with her removing her suit--she does what she can to lessen the danger, but she's still endangering her life to show how much she loves Shepard.

Stupid? Well, yes...but romantically stupid.

...See what I was saying earlier? Between ME, KotOR1, DA1, and BG2, classic Bioware owns a full quarter of this list rant. What the hell happened, guys?


4. Aigis and Makoto/Kotone (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, Q1, and Q2)

Another strange couple to make it onto the list, for a couple reasons. The first is that in SMTP3, there are several girls for the main character, Makoto, to get together with, and likewise several boys for the other potential main character, Kotone, to date, and neither Makoto's nor Kotone's relationship with Aigis is technically acknowledged as one of these romances. The second is that Makoto and Kotone are a silent protagonist--at least, in their own game; they DO speak and reveal personality traits in the SMTPQ spinoffs.  And silent protagonists are not exactly known for their stirring speeches on undying love, or any other subject.

But this relationship really is very touching, far more so than the other, "real" romances of the game (although I did like Mitsuru's, I'll admit). Aigis, who is a fantastic character as a whole, seeks to make sense of her existence and come to understand and embrace her limited humanity, and Makoto or Kotone helps her in her search for herself. She's already absolutely devoted to him or her, and from that devotion and the time she spends finding herself with his/her aid, you can see her love for him/her grow in proportion to her self-discovery. In a sense, her identity as a human being instead of just a machine is directly linked to her immense love for Makoto or Kotone, and as she comes to be more and more an individual who can feel, so too does she become more and more an individual who can love.

Of all the final romantic Social Link scenes that you see in the game, in which the love interest involved invites Makoto or Kotone to their room, gives him or her a gift, speaks of how much he/she's changed their life for the better, makes their love for Makoto/Kotone known as best they can, and then spends a long while alone with him/her (this last part is where you're left free to interpret, although let's be real, it's pretty definitely meant to imply love-making), it's Aigis’s which is the most spiritually touching.  She does the same as the other girls or guys, and reaffirms her love for Makoto or Kotone (which she confesses earlier, and earliest of all the other romantic interests), and then has him/her take out her main memory chip doohickey, the tiny piece of her circuitry that makes her who she is. In this way, by leaving his or her fingerprints on this piece of her, Aigis is asking the one she loves to forever leave a mark of him- or herself on her very soul.

I admit that the protagonist's side of things in this romance isn't especially noteworthy (although done well, considering the no-talking limitations and the fact that Makoto and Kotone seem like pretty mellow folks to begin with (at least in SMTP3; Q2 reveals that Kotone's actually pretty chipper)).  But Aigis is so convincing in her affections for Makoto and Kotone, and her character development, which I mentioned is closely tied to this love, is so great, that it makes this whole thing one of the most beautiful love stories I've seen in the genre.


3. Miriam and Simone (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA)

As a preamble note: I love Mille's connection to Simone and Miriam, and I wholeheartedly believe in them as a throuple.  Mille's side of the love story, however, while definitely good, is not on the same level of excellence as Miriam and Simone's, so it's the latter 2 that get the placement here.  By no means, however, should this be seen as a belief that Mille is excluded from this -amory, she merely adds to the romance in a positive way, just not positive to the same level that earns Miriam and Simone their spot here in the list.

Anyway:

As marvelous as I find much of Large Battleship Studios's love stories to be, they're prone to diving right into the deep end of emotional and physical intimacy, either skipping or drastically shortening the earlier steps of the parties gradually figuring out that they like each other, contemplating that, dilly-dallying about communicating and committing to that attraction, etc.  Which isn't usually a problem for LBS couples, because

A: The intensity with which Saint Bomber writes romantic and sexual love fits a focus on its later stages where the real emotional meat can be found,
B: The means by which these early steps are passed by are legitimately written and clearly not just being lazy (relationships already in progress, characters having already necessarily known each other and had feelings for one another for years already, sex-first-but-then-we-realized-there's-more-to-us-than-just-that introductions, etc.),
C: As I mentioned earlier, there's an overabundance of RPG love stories which never even get past the early phase of romance anyway, considering their job done when the infatuated parties express and validate their feelings for one another only seconds before the final curtain falls.

But that doesn't mean that Saint Bomber can't start a love story from scratch and go through the traditional build-up of interest and deepening of connection, and Miriam and Simone's relationship shows that he's just as apt at the ramp-up of new attractions and deepening feelings as he is at portraying love in its established stages, too.  From the start, Miriam and Simone's connection and rapport is engaging and sweet, and it only becomes all the more touching, compelling, and lovely a meeting of hearts and souls as each girl gets to know each other through conversation and shared adventure.  You can see their chemistry advance and grow as each provides what the other needs, be it fun, sympathetic or, at times, frank and uncompromising.  Miriam and Simone's magnificent devotion to one another is formed quickly but with demonstrable authenticity, as they're there with and for one another through the truly good times, but also for their very lowest moments, too, neither allowing the other to sink any lower to despair, self-hatred, or shutdown, each instead raising the woman she loves up, sometimes by force and through pain of her own, above that which threatens to tear her down and asunder.

Love as it is when shared between Simone and Miriam is uplifting, tender, and genuine.  Much like Tidus and Yuna, you can see the influence of each woman upon the other being made as their story unfolds, only they go even a step further, for the traits that Miriam adopts from Simone and Simone from Miriam sometimes weren't even present in the other to begin with--they're instead taking on the heroisms and kindnesses that they perceive in one another, even when those traits are brave faces put on for the other's benefit.  By trying to be everything that she believes the other deserves, each makes it possible for the other to be the best self of a person she hadn't even known she could become.  Miriam and Simone's love story is just truly spectacular.


2. Gabby and Marine (Quantum Entanglement)

...I swear Large Battleship Studios isn’t paying me to do this.  Saint Bomber really is just this good.

Gabby and Marine’s story is a marvelous example of a romance that has both a compelling love-at-first-sight fated-to-be dimension to it, and the care, effort, and skill invested into their interactions that really sells you on its authenticity.  The subtle but undeniable way that Marine and Gabby’s feelings deepen for one another--or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, that those feelings settle comfortably into where they’re meant to be--over the course of QE is touching and genuinely enjoyable to witness, and everything about how they interact with one another, supporting each other, connecting and re-connecting, realizing the perfect ways their personalities fit into the grooves of the other’s...it’s easily 1 of the most organic and genuine love stories I’ve seen, and the strength that each woman derives from the devotion and support of her partner in turn uplifts the player, reminding him or her of just how powerful and wondrous love can be, as it reaches across lives to entangle 2 souls meant to be as one.

Hell, you know you’ve done something truly right with your love story when I write an entire rant just to heap praise upon it.  Check that one out if you want a more comprehensive look at why Gabby and Marine are an insanely wonderful specimen of romance.


1. Dagger and Zidane (Final Fantasy 9)

I have a habit of topping rant lists with an example that's not so much original in its founding idea as it is a fantastic execution of a supposedly tired cliche (Grandia 2 being the best RPG, Ryudo being the best hero, Chrono Trigger having the best ending, and so on). And that's the case here. Dagger and Zidane's romance is not something you haven't heard of--it's a story of a lovable rogue winning the affections of an upper-class, proper woman (almost always a princess). It's usually good for a nice, lighter love story with some laughs (who doesn't love Han Solo and Leia's bickering in the original Star Wars trilogy, I ask?), but it's not usually something really stirring and deep.

Well, Dagger and Zidane make it that way. They start out about the way you might expect--Zidane's feelings for Dagger don't really extend much past the "Oooh, pretty" stage, while Dagger usually has enough sense not to take him seriously. But where most stories would just have them trade witty dialogue to simulate attraction, or possibly not even do that much, Dagger and Zidane's relationship grows throughout the entire game. As he comforts her when she's hurt and lost, stands by her, protects her, and helps her in whatever ways he can, and shows himself over and over to be a pure, noble man who helps people and innately understands what's right with almost childlike simplicity, Dagger comes to appreciate Zidane for his excellent quality as a human being, taking him more seriously as he proves that he is serious in his affections for her, and falling in love with him slowly, carefully, but completely.

And Dagger also wins Zidane's love just as well. What starts off as a mild attraction that probably doesn't exceed anything he feels for any random pretty lady crossing his path becomes a devoted, full-blown love for Dagger as he spends time with her, listens to her, comes to know her and understand her more and more. His interest in other women dwindles as he becomes fascinated with better knowing the one in front of him, and his appeals for her affection become less playful flirting and more genuine wooing as time goes on. Theirs is a love of labor, a romance realistically developed slowly and in detail, an attraction that draws them almost reluctantly into a deep, intimate connection of souls. These two are truly self-made soul mates, and well deserve to be at the top of this list.


Honorable Mention 1: Alice and Yuri (Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 (Mostly 2))

I like to put in these Honorable/Dishonorable Mention picks just to find a different perspective on the list's subject. It's fun. And so, we have Alice and Yuri. Specifically, from Shadow Hearts 2.

Now, SH1's portrayal of Alice and Yuri's love is nice enough. I can believe it and it'll make you feel as warm and fuzzy as any other reasonably decent RPG romance. But it's Shadow Hearts 2 that really portrays just how incredibly in love with Alice Yuri was. The funny thing is, though, that Alice isn't in SH2--she's dead. Yuri's love is seen in his mourning for her. We see his utter inability to find a place in his world without her, and realize that she, as the love of his life, gave his existence meaning. Although he can appreciate and fight for morality and friends, in the end, he feels empty, protecting a world because his beloved Alice loved it, yet has now left it behind. He can't even conceive of loving another person no matter how earnestly they may feel for him, he can't find a reason to keep doing what he does, and he would much sooner die than live without the memories of her. There are scenes in SH2 regarding Yuri's love for Alice, and how much she loved him, that are some of the most touching, heart-wrenching moments in the entire RPG genre.

Shadow Hearts 2 shows through Alice and Yuri an incredibly moving story of romantic love, after its end, and it deserves a mention here.


Honorable Mention 2: The Hero of Halferville and Persi (Shadowrun The Caldecott Caper Mod)

The Caldecott Caper is an unofficial fan work, so I can’t really give it an official place on the list.  But to deny this romance the due recognition of its excellence entirely would be an absolute sin, so at the very least, we can offer the mod’s creator, Cirion, an Honorable Mention.

The romance between the protagonist of The Caldecott Caper (later referred to as The Hero of Halferville) and the character Persi is poignant, sweet, and lovely.  It’s a genuine portrayal of a fast-forming but true bond between soulmates, and even if the rest of The Caldecott Caper weren’t awesome, this romance would be reason enough to play the mod.  And credit where it’s due--Cirion’s ability to write a love story is great pretty much every time he exercises it, not just with Persi (there’s some tough competition from Arelia’s romance in the following mod adventure, Calfree in Chains).  The love stories to be found in the Calfree Trilogy are amazing, beautiful connections of affection and passion that make your heart flutter in romantic sympathy, and make no mistake, Persi and the Protagonist aren’t just here in the Honorable Mentions out of pity--they’d probably have placed seventh on the list above, right between the Bhaalspawn and Viconia, and the Pathfinder: Kingmaker trio.  And Arelia and the Calfree in Chains protagonist would’ve probably placed only a few spots below them, for that matter.  I sure as hell hope that Cirion is a writer for the game industry or has plans in place to enter the field, because he’s damn good at what he does.



Always a fun time, to revisit this list.  1 of my favorite narrative subpots is a quality love story, and when the RPG genre gets it right, it gets it right.  It's just a shame, as I said before, that it seems to the exception rather than the norm.

Also interesting, when going through this list again, just how skewed the field is in terms of who's capable of producing great romance in RPGs.  Like I noted earlier, if you take the Honorable Mentions out of the equation, half of this list is populated by love stories from games created by just 2 developers.  And even the remaining half gets clustered up, too; of the 10 romances above not written by Bioware or Large Battleship Studios, 3 came from SquareEnix (assuming Belle and Beast count), 2 from Atlus, and another 2 from Owlcat Games--none a huge number of contributions, but really, when I'm drawing from a pool of over 400 games, you'd think, even with as much overlap of developers within that pool as there is, that the odds would be against more than 1 or 2 of them hitting the list even a second time.  Yet here we are with a total of 8 developers being recognized on a list of the 20 greatest RPG love stories.  I suppose personal bias probably figures into it substantially, as it always does, but still, it's surprising.

Anyway, it's been fun!  See y'all again in another 4 years or so, when we update this thing again!











* Look, it's a fine romance and I have nothing particular against how it's done, but going from confused and awkward acquaintances to terrific friend-crushes in the space of a single musical number just doesn't give this relationship the development time it needs.


** The concept of love so indelibly inscribed into the souls of those engaged within it that it reaches across and cuts straight through intangible infinities like time, space, reincarnations, and non-existence is a recurring theme with romances written by Saint Bomber, it seems; other couples further up on this list that he’s created have loves that similarly defy the impossible and reach across iterations of infinity.  We love to view the concept of love as something that exists as a universal, cosmic power unto itself, that can exist beyond the ravages of any obstacle, and Saint Bomber knows how to work that angle beautifully over and over again.


*** :D
...Also, it took me more than 10 years to realize that another reason why this pairing is totally the true romance of SMTP4 is because the characters’ names are phonetically “You” and “I”.  I mean, that’s either gotta be intentional, or it’s the kind of cosmic coincidence that implies a higher will guiding the course of fate, and either way, Imma take it as proof that these 2 are meant to be.