Pathfinder: Kingmaker Unfairly Punishes You for Romancing Regongar or Octavia

I’ve made the claim before on multiple occasions that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a great RPG for a number of reasons, and I will damn sure stand by that statement.  And I’ll also stand by the statement I made in an Annual Summary rant that the polyamorous romance that PK’s protagonist can engage in with Regongar and Octavia is well-written, romantic, sincere, and touching.  I genuinely applaud Owlcat Games for their accomplishments with their first Pathfinder RPG--their first RPG, period, even--and I’m looking forward to experiencing this level of storytelling quality in their next Pathfinder title with great excitement.

At the same time, though, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that there’s nothing significantly and distressingly wrong with the love interest situation regarding Regongar and Octavia.  And it would be hypocritical of me to criticize Fire Emblem 16 on its lack of gay romantic equality, and not complain about the same problem afflicting another game just because I happen to like the latter more.  So today, let’s talk about how incredibly shitty it is of Owlcat Games to punish players for romancing Reg or Octavia, rather than Reg and Octavia.

So here’s the deal: male or female, the protagonist of Pathfinder: Kingmaker can engage in a romantic relationship with Regongar, Octavia, or both of them at once.  And if you opt to be involved with them both at once, it actually shapes up to be a really great love story.  I said it best in that Annual Summary, so I’m gonna just quote myself because I’m super lazy:

“Not only is the romance that the Queen/King pursues with both Octavia and Regongar pretty solid on both sides of the relationship, but Pathfinder: Kingmaker manages to make it feel like an authentic case of three people finding one another to be mutual soulmates--Octavia and Regongar’s relationship can function without the protagonist’s presence (thankfully, since there are other romantic options and it wouldn’t be fair to hold these characters’ happiness hostage), but it’s only once the Queen/King gets involved, develops feelings for each of them, that both Octavia and Regongar come to terms with certain aspects of their own relationship by seeing it through the eyes of another who equally loves them. I’m reminded of Aika, Fina, and Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, in that any combination of 2 of them would work very well as a romantic couple, but none of them feel like they’re truly complete in love without both the others. Except whereas SoA’s trio just sort of naturally and almost surely accidentally developed that way and thus the game doesn’t ever overtly confirm (or even recognize) this, Pathfinder: Kingmaker has knowingly created such a situation. And it’s done it quite well!”

But here’s the other side of the coin with Reg and Octavia: if you only want to romance 1 of them, the other will die.

Yeah, for real.  At the end of the game, there comes a time in which you’re separated from all your party members, and things get real hairy for each and every 1 of them.  Depending on how you’ve treated them through the game to that point, they may or may not survive the individual trials that Nerissa has put before them.  Regongar and Octavia share 1 of these trials, and if you haven’t fully earned the trust of either of them, done all you can for him or her to be a friend and leader, then he or she likewise will perish.  But, if you’ve been a true ally and helped them each with their issues, both separate and shared, then both will survive, and rejoin you.

...Unless you romanced one, and not the other.  Then, regardless of all else you may have done for her or him, the un-romanced one is gonna up and croak.*

In and of itself, that’s kind of a lousy thing of Owlcat Games to do.  It’s absolutely true that Regongar and Octavia work best and are at their happiest as a package deal, there’s no denying that.  At the same time, though, I can fully understand and sympathize with a player who clearly finds Octavia more charming than Regongar, and doesn’t really find the aggressive self-esteem issues he brings to a relationship compelling.  And on the flip-side, I can fully understand and sympathize with a player who feels a strong connection to the way Regongar needs an open, understanding heart to help him work through his personal problems and be able to give and receive love on the terms of the one he cares about, not just his own limited ones, and doesn’t really care all that much for Octavia’s outgoing and sassy style.  It is very understandable that a player of Pathfinder: Kingmaker would want to romance 1 and not the other of this duo...and yet most of those players also don’t outright dislike Reg or Octavia enough to actually wish harm on them, so the fact that they’re punished with the death of the one not romanced regardless of any other factors is unfair and dismaying, and it comes across as mean-spirited on Owlcat Games’s part.

That’s honestly bad enough already that I would feel compelled to point out that it’s rotten, but that’s not where this ends.  In fact, I’m far more irritated by the next part.  To me, this is the part where what Owlcat’s done gets really shitty.

See, if you want to play a gay male protagonist in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Regongar is your only love interest.

This is already annoying, and represents an unfortunate trend in games that include homosexual love interest options: there’s always noticeably more lesbian options than gay male options.  I mentioned the inequity in my recent rant on Fire Emblem 16’s romances, and it’s an unfortunate tradition stretching as far back as the days of Knights of the Old Republic 1, which technically allowed the possibility of a female Revan and Juhani falling in love, but no possibilities of a male Revan and any of the male party members doing so.**  And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see multiple options in a game for female characters to fall in love with other women, and I don’t want any less of that--I want substantially more, in fact.  But where possible, I want to see an equal number of options for male characters to fall in love with other men, too.  I mean, within narrative reason, at least.  If, say, Dust from Dust: An Elysian Tail had a gay romantic interest, I wouldn’t demand that the game also include an option for Dust to be a played as a woman, and subsequently able to romance a woman, because DAET is specifically set up as a story to be the personal journey of Dust himself, a character specifically designed to be, among other things, a man, so going to such extremes would be silly and detrimental to the story’s integrity.  But for a game like KotOR1, FE16, or Pathfinder: Kingmaker, in which the game’s entirety, including its love interests, is written around the possibility of its protagonist being of either gender, there’s no defensible reason to have such romantic imbalance.***

It doesn’t even make sense in PK!  Why in the world would Tristian not also be an option for a man to romance, when he’s a love interest for a woman protagonist?  The entirety of Tristian’s romantic subplot is his discovering what non-religious love even is, and how mortals go about it.  The concept of romance and passion are not just new to Tristian, they’re utterly alien to him, a function of mortality that he has to understand and feel from the ground up.  It ain’t like, say, Valerie, who’s a regular human with enough self-experience to know she prefers men.  Tristian is a romantic and sexual tabula rasa, a being who has to actively choose to pursue an understanding of mortal love in order to feel it.  His starting point is one at which romantically loving anyone is a completely foreign concept to him, so the fact that you can inspire and guide him to do so at all should, logically, mean that you can do so as a woman or a man.

But anyway, this case of only a single gay male love interest is especially problematic for Pathfinder: Kingmaker.  You want the queen of the Stolen Lands to be a lesbian?  Cool!  You can have her pursue romance with Octavia, but if you don’t want Regongar to die as a result, the queen has the option to find love with Kalikke and Kanerrah, or, if you’re up for a challenge, with the antagonist Nerissa herself.  Yeah, K+K are DLC characters and Nerissa’s very tricky, so it actually is still a bit of a problem that the most accessible lesbian romance option inevitably leads to another character’s death, but tricky or not, those options are there, at least.  But if you want the king of the Stolen Lands to be a gay man?  Cool!  Octavia is doomed.  Because Regongar is the only romantic option for such, Pathfinder: Kingmaker punishes you for being a homosexual man with the death of 1 of your team members.

And that’s pretty fucking shitty.

Look, as a whole, I applaud Pathfinder: Kingmaker for a variety of reasons, and far from the least of them is the fact that it makes a serious effort to include a polyamorous romance, and in doing so, also provides an opportunity for a player to very distinctly embrace and showcase his or her bisexuality.  That is unequivocally good, and it’s even better that the love story Owlcat Games created for it is of great quality, arguably the best the game has to offer.  And I applaud that they’re forthright about this being an actual polyamorous relationship--a few RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 and Fallout 4 allow for the protagonist to court multiple characters, but only do so by largely having all the main character’s love interests ignore this fact; you’re never gonna see MacCready, Preston, Danse, and Hancock all sit down and discuss the fact that their shared husbando Nate may, in fact, have an addiction problem with man-meat.  That Queen/King x Octavia x Regongar is there, and that Owlcat Games isn’t afraid of the fact that it’s there, is great.

But the the way they handled romancing Octavia or Regongar individually, punishing you with the death of the other no matter what else you’ve done, is just plain wrong, especially so in that it punishes any player who wants to play as a homosexual man.  I’m willing to accept that this was an oversight, rather than a malicious act, but I sincerely hope we don’t see a repeat of a situation like this in the next game.



EDIT, FROM THE WORLD OF TOMORROW: We did not see a repeat of a situation like this in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Owlcat Games did, in fact, seem to make sure that there would be multiple romantic options of both (main) genders available to a protagonist of either (main) gender.  So while my disapproval and complaints within this rant were and are still, in my view, fully justified, I do want to to make an observable note here that the developer learned from this misstep and corrected their future actions appropriately.

Dear Desna in Elysium do I ever wish that could be said about the average video game company.














* Actually, apparently there IS a very slight work-around for this?  From what I've been able to figure out with the assistance of reader Corelion777, you can sort of trick the game by initiating a polyamorous relationship with Octavia and Regongar, but not following through on it.  The way Corelion777 worked it, he/she got the point that his/her character shacked up with both Octavia and Regongar at the same time, but after that point, he/she only pursued the relationship any further with Octavia, and not Regongar.  As best as we can figure, this sort of tricked the game into thinking the polyamorous romance was still in progress, and thus the game didn't decide to arbitrarily kill off Regongar during the end-game, even though the only actual romance that was followed to its conclusion was with Octavia alone.

This is the only way I've ever heard of getting the game to allow both Reg and Octavia to live through a romance with only 1 of them, so I think it's fair to say that it's a case of gaming the system, not actually an intentional option created by the developers.  So my points in this rant are, I think, still fully valid and justified.  And even if it were a fully premeditated allowance on the part of Owlcat Games, it's still a work-around that requires the player to compromise a monogamous attraction to Regongar or to Octavia, which may be objectionable to how the player views and values Octavia's or Regongar's romance.  Additionally, it may also force a player to compromise the sexuality that the player desires for his/her protagonist, since this workaround puts the protagonist into a situation, early on, of being attracted to both Regongar and Octavia, even though the player may want their protagonist to very distinctly be gay or straight.

So yeah, even if there's a cheat to get around this problem, I think my problems with this situation are no less substantial than they would have been had it truly been, as the developers clearly intended, impossible to romance Octavia or Regongar separately without the other dying.  MAJOR thanks to Corelion777 for letting me know about this, though!


** I say “technically” because a glitch in dialogue flags made this gay Juhani romance very difficult to achieve.  I didn’t even know it was a possibility until over a decade later, in fact.


*** Yes, I know that canonically, regardless of how the player wants it to be, KotOR1’s Revan is meant to be male.  But if anything, that just makes it more questionable that the female version has more romantic autonomy, doesn’t it?