Fallout 4's Use of Religion

Hide your children and delete this blog from your bookmarks, because I’m about to commit that grave sin once more: I’m recycling a comment I made on Youtube into a rant.  Because I’m fucking evil, that’s why.

A few months ago, a small quest mod for Fallout 4 showed up on the Nexus, and as I still like to keep up with promising user adventures for the game, I checked it out.  It was a fairly decent little adventure, centered around religion (specifically Christianity), and its creator clearly put some time, effort, and most of all, sincerity into the work.  I didn’t personally get a lot out of it, but I can appreciate the work for what it is and intends.  The thing that interested me most, however, wasn’t within the mod itself, but rather the stated intent of the creator--he essentially was surprised at the lack of religious themes and content in Fallout 4, compared to previous games, and felt that there should have been more, making the mod to fill that gap a bit.

This interests me, because I feel that it’s quite the opposite.

Now, to clarify, the gentleman isn’t wrong on the point that religion has been a significant theme in the Fallout series prior to Fallout 4.  It certainly has.  The original Fallout 1 and 2 made mention occasionally of prewar Christian beliefs having slight holdouts here and there, albeit now passed along more through family than outright cultural communities.  More significantly, The Master’s army is as much a cult worshiping him and the ideals of super mutation as it is an actual military force in Fallout 1.  Fallout 2 ups the religious theme quite a bit by making the Hubologists (basically the Scientologists) a significant entity, incorporating tribal spiritual and paranormal beliefs frequently into characters and groups (such as Sulk* and Arroyo), and establishing a (largely ignored, admittedly) pseudo-Christian priest as a prominent figure in the major city of New Reno.  Fallout 3’s entire plot centers around a verse from the Bible, and introduces a cult of radiation worshippers, while Fallout New Vegas incorporates a decent smattering of tribal beliefs, introduces the Bright Brotherhood (which is yet another cult, but a refreshingly benign one), has a few more references to Christianity here and there, and gives Mormonism a substantial.background presence in its Honest Hearts DLC.  So yeah, while it’s never really a huge focal point of the game (the Master’s cult is a secondary revelation to the discovery of his military ambitions so the religious side isn’t the major mental image the player has of his forces, and Fallout 3’s Bible passage is significant for its poetic concept, not specifically for its religious nature), religion’s a definite part of the series.

And in a sense, he’s not completely wrong in thinking that there should have been more religious content in Fallout 4.  I agree from the perspective that Fallout 4 is about Boston and the surrounding area, and the fact of the matter is that the cultural history of Massachusetts, and by some extension the United States as a whole, is (unfortunately) hugely influenced by having been founded (or invaded, depending on your perspective) by the Puritans.  Given Fallout’s core premise of analysis of American culture and history, there really should have been some thematic spotlight shed on the whole Puritan thing.  Preferably one that emphasized what a bunch of self-important, philosophically self-defeating whiny dickweeds they were, but I’m not picky, I’d take whatever as long as it’s written well.

However, to get back to my main purpose, I strongly disagree that Fallout 4 is lacking in content utilizing religion.  I think, in fact, that it is the installment of the series with the most focus upon and influence of religion!

It’s just not blatant and outright proclaimed, that’s all.  Like, if you’re looking for narrative road signs spelling out who’s believing in what and which holy book’s influencing what faction, then yeah, there’s not much to be found--there’s a preacher in Diamond City who can wear whatever religious hat you want him to, the Children of the Atom are unfortunately mucking about here and there, and you can do a couple minor quests for some Hubologists in the Nuka World add-on, but that’s about it, and it’s all exceptionally tiny and mostly irrelevant.  If what you want is some overt, surface representation of religion, yeah, Fallout 4’s pretty weak.

But just because you don’t see it as obviously, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, and in great quantity.**  Remember how Shin Megami Tensei 3 didn’t so much directly analyze and fixate upon any specific, outright belief system (like most of the rest of the series does), so much as it made its focus the underlying, core approaches that religions are built off of?  Similar situation here with Fallout 4.  If anything, I would argue that the theme of religion plays a greater role in Fallout 4 than it has in any previous entry of the series...in the form of the Institute.

They may not wrap it up in the usual trappings that we think of being religion-related, but the Institute is basically a corrupt religious institution, in all the ways that matter. Its members blindly follow its single leader (even when they’re privately unsure of his vision), for starters.  Next, the leader they’re virtually unquestioningly following is a man who has used carefully selected language and rhetoric to refine the group's behaviors, and viewpoints on other people, very specifically to serve the organization's convenience and restrict the ability for different viewpoints on human nature to grow--this can be primarily seen in the Institute's terminology regarding Synths.  While not solely the property of social faiths and belief systems, there’s no denying that these kinds of manipulatively dogmatic behaviors are most iconic of religious groups (especially, though not exclusively, cults).

Then there’s the fact that the Institute is utterly, adamantly convinced that it is the sole salvation of all humankind, whether the rest of humanity agrees or not. It sees those not within it as unenlightened and in need of guidance because they're simply unequipped for self-determination.  From little grassroots compound-based cults on up to world-spanning titans of faith like Christianity, that one there’s a particular favorite of religions.  Tell me you’ve ever, ever seen any group wholly unaffiliated with a social religion engage in as much self-congratulatory back-patting over being the autonomously-appointed saviors of humanity (again, regardless of how humanity itself feels about the matter) as the Institute does.

Additionally, the Institute operates with fanatical devotion to ideals and goals that are almost completely undefined, described in vague terms of a better, shining tomorrow that only they know how to bring about, while having no concrete description of what that 'better world' end result will look like or how they'll know it when it comes about. And, for that matter, they carry on with this certainty of being the ones who will bring about this completely nebulous utopia also while lacking any concrete plan or set of steps specifically and logically leading to their desired conclusion.  Essentially, the members of the Institute all labor out of faith and faith alone that they're going to save the world.  Again, pretty big, signature behavior and belief of religious organizations, here.

These are not just random quirks of this faction--they are the most signature characteristics of the Institute and the ways in which it is run! And not a single 1 of them represents or even resembles the behavior of an actual scientific organization. These are the actions, mentalities, and methods of a religion, and a very worrying one, at that. Technological progress and fixation on scientific discovery are the Institute's trappings, yes, but these clothes don't cover up the fact that its members' behaviors, goals, beliefs, attitudes, and hierarchy are that of a cult , with Father as its charismatic leader.

And since the Institute functions as the faction upon which the strong majority of the game's lore, personal conflicts, philosophical questions, and narrative events are based, and as both the home and, effectively, genesis of the game's primary antagonist Shaun, I think it's reasonable to say that religion has never been a greater factor in a Fallout game than it is in Fallout 4.














* The game even commits to canonizing some degree of Sulik’s belief in the spirits as a fact of the Fallout universe.  While the Hubologists are as full of crap as the real-life cult they’re based on, and you can kind of disregard certain minor paranormal events and quests as being questionable at best as to whether they’re meant to be taken seriously, Sulik’s spirits are straight-up spitting facts.  When you ask Sulik what the spirits tell him of locations you visit, he occasionally relates insights about the area that he really couldn’t possibly know on his own.  And it’s hard to discount these as something intended not to be given real consideration as canon, because a lot of these bits are fully voiced, major lines of his dialogue--quite a lot of resources to put into something not intended to have any weight.  It’s certainly not the only time the series validates paranormal factors (The Sight of Mama Murphy and that Ug-Qualtoth nonsense, for example, are both validated to differing degrees on multiple occasions), but it’s significant for being the first, and perhaps setting the precedent that allowed those other examples to come about at all.


** As my sister, who graciously wasted way too much of her time listening to me blather on in this rant and is at least 90% of the reason it’s not garbage, as she is for almost every rant, pointed out, this is actually a good bit of Christianity right here--finding the non-overt factors of religion in Fallout 4 is perhaps not dissimilar to the whole thing of seeing God in the subtle and understated happenings of His works, and whatnot.

Horizon 0 Dawn's Expansion

Well, I finally got around to, and finished, playing Horizon 0 Dawn, and while the setting didn’t initially wow me, which made its first third seem kinda slow, it turned out to be a really great RPG once the story really started to unfold itself and its themes started to line up.  I can definitely see why it was successful and lauded.  But of course, with even the slightest whiff of monetary reward comes the inevitable extra cash-ins, and so, H0D has a downloadable expansion.  The quality of the original game makes me hopeful that its add-on would be good, too, but of course, past experience has proven conclusively that that doesn’t mean much.  Let’s see how H0D’s shakes out.



The Frozen Wilds: This expansion sees Aloy traveling into Banuk territory, and exploring Yellowstone National Park as she sorts out a matter of aggressive, “possessed” machines separate from the main game’s events.  There’s a main quest, and several sidequests, errands, and exploration...basically, The Frozen Wilds is like a smaller iteration of the game as a whole.

The main story is...well...it’s alright, I guess.  I mean...a lot of it is sort of a retread of Horizon 0 Dawn’s main narrative, with the whole malevolent-outside-entity-taking-control-of-and-creating-an-aggressive-army-of-machines thing.  And honestly, it does have a bit of a weakness in that the 2 major entities who drive the plot of The Frozen Wilds forward, Aratak and Ourea, aren’t all that interesting.  They’re not boring, mind you, but the best personalities of this adventure are all relegated to sidequests.  Likewise, of the stories of the Old Ones’ you find in the vocal and log entries, the ones connected to the main quest left the least impact on me.  Again, none of it’s bad (and that’s an accomplishment for an add-on right there, sadly), but only the very ending of The Frozen Wilds’s main story (being able to speak to CYAN) really held my attention.

With that said, the surrounding elements of The Frozen Wilds are really good!  The sidequests have a lot of compelling characters who are fun to interact with--the hunting trio’s name gimmick was quite amusing, the conversations with the painter and the pipe-player were cool, the stories of Ikrie and Inatut are interesting glimpses into the Banuk culture, the payoff for finding the animal figurines is fun, the story of Concrete Beach Party was really touching and easily the equal of even some of Fallout’s best examples of posthumous log-entry storytelling, and I just absolutely loved Gildun.  Getting to hang out with Gildun probably makes The Forbidden Wilds worth it all by itself.  If there is any justice and joy in this world, we’ll see more of Gildun in Horizon Forbidden West, because he is honestly just great, a laugh-a-minute character who’s thoroughly, gently endearing.

I also like the fact that you can talk to CYAN at the end not only about the events of The Frozen Wilds’s main story, but also about the content of its sidequests, and even about major elements of the main game’s plot.  CYAN’s conversations are a great little way to acknowledge the side content of the expansion as relevant and important to its whole, and I really appreciate that they deepen the lore of the game, and tie The Frozen Wilds more significantly to it.  It reminds me of some other really great add-ons, like Fallout: New Vegas’s Lonesome Road, in that way.  Likewise, the fact that once you’ve completed the main quest of The Frozen Wilds, Aratak will show up as an ally during the finale of the main game, is a good way of making TFW seem like more than just a disconnected side story to the game--while still maintaining enough distance that H0D doesn’t feel incomplete without it, which is important (screw you and your Dragon Age 2 Exiled Prince, Bioware).

Finally, there’s an element to The Frozen Wilds that I appreciate, which wasn’t really present so much in the main game: the Fallout Americana approach.  1 of my favorite parts of the Fallout series is that 1 of its core focuses is an examination, analysis, critique, and celebration of the culture, history, and soul of The United States.  Each major Fallout title (besides that worthless festering colostomy bag 76) shows off the region in which it takes place, doing its best to capture the physical and emotional essence of that part of the USA, and I really love that.  This isn’t something that Horizon 0 Dawn does to any great degree, past portrayal of basic ecosystems and certain similarities of its tribes to indigenous North American tribes of the past.  And don’t get me wrong, that’s not to the game’s discredit; H0D isn’t Fallout, and it isn’t intended to be.  It’s its own thing.

Still, it’s kind of neat that The Frozen Wilds represents a Fallout-esque treatment of Yellowstone National Park!  While not nearly as in-depth as a Fallout title would get, TFW seems to be taking a similar approach in its portrayal of and appreciation for Yellowstone--the posthumous logs are specifically related to the setting, the area is clearly designed with an intent to show some appreciation for North America’s wilderness, the main quest and some of the sidequests are founded on the signature geology, fauna, and physical ecosystem of the area, the most notable new machines of the expansion are based on arguably the most iconic animal of the North American wilderness, the bear...

Hell, even the choice to use the Banuk as the focal tribe of this expansion is thematically tied to the heart of Yellowstone National Park.  The Banuk, after all, are largely defined by their spiritual respect for the machine creatures of their world, and the machines in H0D are sort of the stand-ins for natural animal life.  As the predators, primary vehicles of ecosystem recovery, and prey to be hunted in Horizon 0 Dawn, the machines are thematically far more the animals of the world than the actual flesh-and-blood critters you encounter.  So the fact that the Banuk are the stars of The Frozen Wilds is, I would say, a neat thematic tie to the setting, because the Banuk’s philosophies and beliefs of reverence for the machines are, ultimately, similar to the very foundational idea of Yellowstone National Park--conservation of and appreciation for the natural wildlife of North America.

So, The Frozen Wilds feels like a light, but very artful and elegant, tribute to and celebration of Yellowstone National Park and the spirit behind its existence, and I really like that.  If Fallout: New Vegas's Honest Hearts DLC (which featured the Grand Canyon) had been much better, I think it would've looked quite a bit like this.  Really, this expansion is like I got a tiny nugget of some of Fallout’s best qualities, and it’s a precious gift in these times of Bethesda bungling.  I kind of hope we’ll see more of this approach in the upcoming sequel.

Oh, yeah, 1 other thing that I applaud this expansion for?  It’s more of a personal thing, but I’m really happy to finally see some major piece of media actually paying some attention to the Yellowstone Caldera.  Because, like, it is just me, or should we really be more concerned with the fact that there is a supervolcano hanging out a few feet under the middle of the USA, just waiting to blow, that could goddamn END OUR CIVILIZATION?  How the hell doesn’t this come up more frequently in pop culture?  All we have to do to avoid like 60% of apocalypse scenarios is just make the choice NOT to be giant dicks to each other, but by all means, writers of various mediums, keep focusing on nuclear wars and genetically engineered virus outbreaks and so on, and ignore the seething ash-and-arson armageddon currently bubbling beneath our toes that we’re doing basically goddamn nothing about!

Anyway.  The Frozen Wilds is a solid, high-quality expansion, and even if its main event isn’t especially anything to write home about, the sum of its total parts is a respectable piece of work.  Now, originally it was, to my understanding, sold for $20, and I do take a bit of issue with that, because I’m pretty sure you’re only gonna get about half of that many hours out of it, maybe 15.  You should never be expected to spend more dollars than you’ll get hours out of an add-on, in my opinion...but The Frozen Wilds is good enough that one could reasonably argue that it’d still be worth that much.  And it’s an irrelevant concern nowadays anyway, because as of this moment, it is, to my understanding, sold for $10 if you buy it through the Playstation store (and it’s automatically included with H0D if you buy the game for the PC, or buy the game new altogether through Playstation).  $10 is definitely a fair price, so The Frozen Wilds gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me.



Well, that was nice!  It’s an all-too-uncommon treat to find a high caliber add-on, and one that’s actually priced appropriately.  This was just the sort of pleasant change of pace I needed after the crap of the last couple games with Downloadable Content (Deus Ex 4 and Fire Emblem 16) I played.  I’ll be sure to savor this experience for as long as I can...

...because my next add-on rant will be about the DLCs for Pokemon Generation 8.

Fuck.

General RPG Lists: Worst Romances

I suppose it was inevitable, really, that my list of the greatest romances in the RPG genre would, someday, get this companion piece.  Inevitable because I’m lazy and unoriginal, certainly, but inevitable also because, to be honest, love stories are not where RPGs shine.  Yes, to be sure, there are quite a few good romances to be found in RPGs, and a decent handful of truly great ones!  But the fact is that by and large, RPG love stories are subpar.  You’ve a better chance of the major love stories in an RPG being uninteresting, unconvincing, unimportant, and/or outright unhealthy, than you do of finding a believable couple with good chemistry.

It’s a problem as likely to affect a good RPG as it is a bad one, interestingly.  Sure, you’d expect a halfhearted, unnecessary, undeveloped, insincere romance like Cless and Mint, and Arche and Chester, from a game with as little significant character development as Tales of Phantasia, or Kid and Serge from a game with as little skill or care for its writing as Chrono Cross.  But is Chaz and Rika’s out-of-nowhere infatuation in a great game like Phantasy Star 4 any better than Freyajour and Lyon’s limp little thing in a subpar title like Suikoden 5?  Is Agnes and Tiz’s forced, trite, out-of-character romance in the otherwise excellent Bravely Default and Bravely Second superior in any regard whatsoever to a Kemco game’s tepid, boring little love subplot?  From its worst to its best, the entire RPG genre is beset by spontaneous, lazy couplings between characters who have no mutual spark nor any noticeably great emotional bond.

Still, it could be worse.  Cyrille and Toma from Shining Force EXA may not strike me as a good example of 2 people falling in love, and there may be no real point or positive quality whatsoever to Alette and Egil getting together in the The Banner Saga trilogy.  Edge and Rydia’s love in Final Fantasy 4 may not actually seem compelling or believable.  But at least such couples don’t actually cause harm to their games, even if they don’t contribute to them, either.

The RPG love stories below, though?  They are actively negative things, trash that doesn’t just contribute nothing to the playing experience--they actively worsen it.  The horrible, rotten perversions of the concept of love to be found in today’s rant are toxic, venomous, corrosive; they significantly worsen everything they touch.  These are the worst 10 RPG romances, and the world is a poorer place for their existence.

Important Note: Intentionally bad love stories do not qualify here.  A romance that was written with the conscious decision to be an example of a damaging, unhealthy love, will not be included--for example, romances like Final Fantasy Tactics’s Delita and Ovelia, and Planescape: Torment’s Diadora and the Nameless One, wherein 1 individual is heartlessly manipulating the other for his own ends rather than engaging earnestly in love, don’t count, because we’re not supposed to view these as acceptable examples of love.  The Valkyrie Profile series's Lezard may be a disturbingly creepy fucking loser, but his 1-sided obsession with Lenneth isn't gonna show up below, because this dirtbag's neurosis of infatuation leads him to be the clear and despicable villain of VP2 (and frankly, he wasn't exactly being cast in a great light in VP1, either), so we're not intended to see his behavior as worthwhile.  This list is an indictment on every single writer whose work contributed to its occupants, not a validation of effective storytelling of something bad.



10. Edea x Ringabel (Bravely Second)

Poor Edea gets a real shit deal in the romance department.  I wrote a whole rant about this, so I’m gonna let you refer to that for the main details, but to summarize it: Edea, a person who is clearly shown during the game’s course to feel the pain of being romantically alone, is expected to be completely and fully contented with a love interest who intends to only be present in her life at times when she is in mortal danger and needs Ringabel to save her.  And given that Edea’s the greatest warrior in the world, either a friend or commander of almost all the subsequently strongest fighters, the head of the strongest military, and an ally of all the other major militaries, she is effectively the least likely person on the planet to find herself in a situation more dangerous than she can handle.

Again: woman who emotionally suffers from being romantically alone, expected to settle for a boyfriend who will only be around her when her life is in danger, circumstances which are less likely for her than literally any other person in the world.


9. Eclair x Homard (La Pucelle Tactics)

This is a love story between Homard, a guy whose age I can’t find listed but who gives every appearance of being a fully grown-ass adult man, and an emotionally-sheltered 13-year-old.**  The stages of this relationship are as follows:

1: Eclair meets Homard and they argue.
2. Eclair clearly dislikes Homard.
3. Eclair and Homard continue to argue.
4. Homard’s position, despite being logically inferior, turns out to be the one that the game is going to go out of its way to prove correct.
5. Homard makes sure to point out his rightness to Eclair.
6. Somehow this means they’re into each other.
Bonus: At some point Homard drools over how hot the 13-year-old’s dark half is.

The romance between Eclair and Homard is classless.  It makes no sense whatsoever for either of them and makes no attempt to explain its transition from mild hostility to unquestioned mutual affection.  It’s creepy as hell--because even if it turns out that Homard is somehow a minor as well (it’s a JRPG, for all I know the guy’s just an unusually tall 6-year-old who shaves), the fact is that Homard presents as a fully grown man, while Eclair, in spite of her C-cups that 50% of all anime girls develop by the age of 10 because Japan, definitely does come across as an underage young woman.  And it’s got a disturbing emotional power balance even outside the age thing, because Eclair has had to admit to Homard’s knowing better than she does about what they’ve argued over, while Homard has had no need to concede that Eclair has any respectable knowledge or expertise.  The most he’s had to give for their relationship is barely restraining himself from making a cartoon wolf howl at seeing Dark Eclair for the first time.  This side love subplot is truly just garbage.

...And this isn’t even the worst romance that La Pucelle Tactics has to offer.


8. Byleth x Jeritza (Fire Emblem 16)

What you have here is a “romance”, if you really want to irrevocably abuse the word by associating it with this garbage, which is built entirely on a foundation of Jeritza really wanting to kill Byleth.  And this foundation is as far as they go; there’s no structure built upon it: killing Byleth is Jeritza’s reason to be around her/him, it is the desire from which all his feelings for and understanding of Byleth develop, and it is the ending goal and intention of their relationship.  This relationship has every vice and weakness of any 1-dimensional love story where a romance is built on a single, solitary factor and nothing else, and the extra bonus of that 1 factor being homicidal urges.

And man, does Jeritza ever yammer on and on about this stupid shit.  Jude in Wild Arms 4 has less of a fixation on the evils inherent with being an adult than Jeritza has on stabbing Byleth and/or being stabbed himself.  And since Byleth is a shitty conversationalist even by silent protagonist standards, there is nothing to distract Jeritza from this subject, ever.

Honestly, where the fuck does a romance like this come from?  What slobbering, deranged dipshit at Nintendo believes that a desire to kill someone is an adequate basis for a love story?  And why is this sick imbecile allowed near a word processor?


7. Rinoa x Squall (Final Fantasy 8)

There can’t possibly be anyone that didn’t see this coming.  Hell, I would be legitimately shocked if even a single reader saw the title of today’s rant and didn’t immediately think of Rinoa and Squall, first and foremost, by knee-jerk instinct. Because it’s obvious.  It’s obvious that Rinoa x Squall is going to be here.  Their romance is sincerely awful, on every level, in every way.

As a piece of writing, it’s utterly incompetent--if other romances that come out of nowhere do so from a starting point of 0, Rinoa x Squall starts from further back than that, in the negative numbers, because right up until the very second before the I Love Her Now switch is flipped in Squall’s brain, he genuinely, demonstrably finds Rinoa to be annoying, and little else (and who could possibly blame him?).  There’s no reasonable, emotional basis for their feelings of affection, nothing about their personalities that mixes well, nothing about how they interact that gives any indication that they actually love who the other person is--it’s all tell, no show, unless the intent was to show us 2 dimwits in love with the concept of love that they’ve clumsily stapled onto their mental image of one another.

As a love story, it’s nauseating, and unhealthy.  “By-the-numbers cringy teen romance” barely describes this crap; I’m genuinely shocked there isn’t an “I love YOU more” scene at some point.  And nothing is gained for either of them, as people--Squall is just replacing his first 1-dimensional archetype with another equally shallow non-personality, and their relationship actually feeds some of Rinoa’s worst qualities, since Squall is heaping undivided attention onto an obnoxious, dysfunctional psyche that already can’t allow for anything not to be about her.

And as a part of the story as a whole, it’s damaging.  Once Rinoa x Squall is on the scene, it is center stage at all times, chewing the scenery and violently shoving all competing character dynamics and plot threads out of the limelight.  The game is about their love and that is IT; any other subplot or narrative factor is secondary, a hound begging for scraps of screentime from the main romance’s table.

There is 1 reason, and 1 reason only, that this romance is not further up on this list: the fact that Final Fantasy 8 was already an awful mess of an RPG, and that Rinoa and Squall were already terrible, shallow, thoroughly dislikable characters well deserving of one another.  Their romance completely overtaking every other aspect of the story worsens the game, but, to borrow a quote from Community, ruining Final Fantasy 8 is like letting poop spoil.  Really, the losses inflicted by this romance are so low that if it were just a little less nauseatingly, infuriatingly terrible to have to sit through, it might not have been on this list at all.  But it is, and it does richly deserve its place of shame.


6. Julian x Luciana (Laxius Force 2)

The romance between Julian and Luciana is the kind of love story that makes you feel deeply uncomfortable to witness.  It so clearly, unequivocally shows an emotionally harmful, destructive mindset toward relationships, and yet, the way it presents itself is so earnest and blithe that you find yourself genuinely concerned that some more impressionable audience might see this kind of relationship and think that it’s as okay as the game indicates--and even if that never happens, it’s legitimately worrying that the writer himself seems to view this as an acceptable approach to romantic affection.

Julian is a scumbag who does not take no for an answer, and is incapable of considering that Luciana’s comfort and wants are things that have any relevance to her own love life.  This romance kicks off with him staring at her and creepily approaching her when she thinks she’s alone to confess his interest--you know, 1 of the classics of the narrative playbook for love stories--and progresses into a series of extremely pushy, inconsiderate interactions in which Luciana is badgered into progressing further and further into a relationship, regardless of her own misgivings and its feasibility.  It basically goes like this:

Julian: We should be together!
Luciana: This is so sudden.  With the world at stake and our lives in constant danger, maybe it would be better to concentrate on the matters at hand, than divide our attention on a sudden physical attraction.  As the only 1 of the main 4 cast members with anything approaching a functional brain, I have the actual weight of the world on my shoulders.  And frankly, I’m not sure how I feel, or whether I’m ready to be in a relationship at all.
Julian: There’s no need to hesitate on this.  I’m sure of my feelings for you.
Luciana: Yes, okay, that’s very nice, I appreciate it, but as I said, this is sudden and I’m just not sure of my feelings for you.
Julian: But I’m sure of my feelings for you!
Luciana: ...Yeah, got that, hear you loud and clear, message received, roger that.  Your feelings are not in question.  My hesitation is coming from my own doubts and--
Julian: But I’M sure of MY feelings!
Luciana: ...

This exchange repeats itself, until Luciana is finally bullied into accepting Julian as her boyfriend.  And then it happens again when, 20 minutes later, Julian proposes to her, and she refuses, and he tries again, over and over, until finally she resigns herself and gives in.  Every time Julian wants to move forward with their relationship, Luciana, as a person who isn’t mentally incompetent, makes the very rational observation that they haven’t known each other for long enough, that there are WAY more important issues to concentrate on, and that she can’t be sure whether what she feels for Julian is the real deal.  And every time she does, Julian just responds the same way: HE’S sure of HIS feelings, HE’S sure that this is the right move.

The idea that Luciana’s feelings and consent to be dating are a factor isn’t just something Julian doesn’t view as important--he seems to actually be incapable of acknowledging its existence.  Her feelings are such a non-factor that he can’t even consciously register them--he doesn’t hear her telling him that she’s not sure that her love is the real thing, he hears her telling him that she’s not sure that his love is the real thing.  It’s like the concept that another person could autonomously exist, complete with their own mind and feelings, is an impossibility to Julian.  His mind just isn’t even capable of processing it.

It’s tiresome and awful to witness, not to mention legitimately disturbing, because you know that its creator saw absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of 1 individual in a romantic relationship steamrolling the emotional and logical concerns and hesitations of the other.  In the mind of Laxius Force’s creator, there seems no discernible difference between courtship, and selling a used car.

Luckily, it all does actually work out pretty well for Luciana, in the end.  Julian gets brutally murdered by a giant mosquito (no, really) fairly soon after their wedding, meaning that Luci only had to put up with the jackass for a couple days, most of which she was out adventuring and working on stuff that was actually important, and she gets an entire kingdom at her command out of the deal.  Nigh-invincible, man-eating mosquitos notwithstanding, however, this is an incredibly shitty love story defined by an extremely unhealthy attitude toward romantic partnership.


5. Croix x Priere (La Pucelle Tactics)

In and of itself, this romance is stupid, pointless, and lacking any substance, but it’s not truly awful.  It basically just amounts to Priere arbitrarily deciding 1 day, with no emotional preamble, that she’s in love with Croix, and her spending the rest of the game in gutless emotional constipation which both prevents her from thinking about any other thing whatsoever than her crush on him, and gives her a mortal fear of actually giving Croix any indication of her feelings.  Seriously, Priere is such a tiresome romantic coward that even Lita from Atelier Iris 1 would tell her to goddamn grow a pair and tell Croix she likes him.  The average person has less hesitation about publicly admitting that they’re into Sonic the Hedgehog OC incestuous inflation porn than Priere has about admitting that she likes some guy.

With that said, while that’s annoying as hell to watch, certainly it’s not so horrible that it deserves the shame of a spot on this list.  But what is that horrible is just how incredibly damaging to La Pucelle Tactics this romance is.  I did a rant about this a while back which covers the bases adequately (and also reiterates my disdain for Eclair x Homard), so you can check that out, but the gist is, the game’s shift to fixate entirely on Priere’s cowardly crush greatly lessens the quality of the story as a whole, and it utterly ruins her as a character.  And unlike FF8’s Rinoa x Squall, LPT had the potential to be a solidly good RPG, and Priere gave every indication, during its early chapters, of being a singularly likeable, interesting heroine who could likely have been 1 of the greatest protagonists in the genre.  Croix x Priere strongly worsens an RPG that could have been great.


4. Berkut x Rinea (Fire Emblem 15)

So let’s see.  The predominant content of Berkut and Rinea’s interactions are basically him making it quite clear to her that she’s less important to him than his expectation from the universe to be the most special powerful man in all the world.  At no point could Rinea reasonably infer from anything Berkut says or does that he cares even nearly as much about her as he does about satisfying the raging, juvenile demands of his pitiful ego.  

And it only gets worse from there.  Once this pathetic, 1-dimensional worm of a man discovers that he’s no longer gonna get to be emperor, Rinea rushes to him to try to save him from his own pomposity, speaking sincerely from the bottom of her heart of her (completely inexplicable) love for him and how it never mattered to her whether or not she got to be empress, only that she would be able to be with him always.  And how is she repaid for this desperate appeal to his better nature?  Why, Berkut decides to take offense to this proclamation of love, and sacrifices her soul to a dark god then and there.  Yeah, that’s right, Berkut throws her sentiments of love and loyalty back in her face, and feeds her fucking SOUL to a deific abomination.  And because even THAT isn't enough douchebaggery for Berkut, he engulfs Rinea's body in constantly burning flame, because nothing says "romance" like trapping the person you love in the same searing hell as Ignus from Planescape: Torment, a character whose purpose was to express the game's theme of torment as the embodiment of physical agony.

And don't give me that crap about how the game's implying that, at that point, it's largely Duma in control of Berkut.  Doesn't fucking matter.  Not enough, at least.  Berkut already showed, on his own time, that his feelings for Rinea are inconsequential compared to his desperate, pathetic need to feel like a special big boy, and he made the offer, of his own volition, to pay whatever price Duma demanded in exchange for power.  Berkut did 90% of Duma's legwork in cruelly destroying his girlfriend, so this shit is still on him.

The thing that separates Berkut from other love-sacrificing douchebags and makes him eligible for this list, however, is that the game still tries to legitimize this romance.  Fire Emblem 15, in fact, basically gives this worthless asshole the same free pass that Shin got in Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon.  Once Berkut’s finally defeated, Rinea descends to him from the afterlife and comforts him.  Makes it clear to him that she’s still in love with him!  Rinea is STILL IN LOVE with the guy that tore out her SOUL and turned her body into an eternally burning murder puppet--and all for the sake of his delicate, fragile vanity!  She wants to guide him into the afterlife so they can be together forever!

And rather than use this as an opportunity to show just how chilling it is when a victim has internalized the psychological abuse she suffers so much that she has become her own jailer, Fire Emblem 15 presents this as some touching moment between them.  Rinea is trapping herself for all eternity in the arms of the arrogant scumbag who murdered her, and we’re expected to rejoice.  How truly and outrageously disgusting.


3. Felicia x Jakob (Fire Emblem 14)

Jakob is a vile, egomaniacal pile of refuse who wouldn’t be able to string together 2 successive sentences if he couldn’t be verbally and/or emotionally abusive in either.  I’m certainly not interested in devoting more mental faculties to thinking about him than are strictly necessary, so I’m gonna just quote myself with some excerpts from a previous rant on this matter:

“Jesus Christ, Jakob! What the fuck is your real, actual problem?

As unpleasant as he is to others in general, as much of a jerk as he is to Hana and Setsuna, it’s his “romance” with Felicia in which Jakob truly hits his stride as a veritable superhero of douchebaggery. Jakob’s “love” for Felicia begins with reinforcing her low self esteem by reminding her of how awful she is at her job, and then develops this foundation through the next few conversations by expressing that she is not only completely terrible, but also hopeless, incapable of improvement without his help, and later he even goes further and indicates that she’s hopeless even with his help.

...not only is he insulting Felicia at every turn for her completely harmless shortcomings, he’s going a tremendous step beyond that and saying that her flaws are inescapable no matter how hard she tries.

...And then, of course, once he’s been a merciless asshole for 3 conversations, the S rank proposal starts with him reaffirming how utterly hopeless she is of improving herself, and suggesting...that he do Felicia a favor and marry her because only a husband would be able to devote enough time to Felicia to make her less of a monumental fuck-up.

...In this entire conversation chain from start to finish, in only a single line, at the end of the S rank marriage proposal, does Jakob express any actual, significant positive feeling for Felicia, when he claims, completely without basis, that he does want to marry her out of love. And he immediately follows this single, solitary moment of positive emotion with another low blow by reaffirming that her tea-making (a part of her job and thus something personally important to her) is “truly a nightmare.” The ending line of this romance--not making this up--is Jakob reassuring her that together, they’ll be able to wake up from that nightmare.

Just...what an unspeakable, monstrous piece of shit this guy is. Corrin and Gunter may be unhealthy and disturbing to the very core, but by God, at least it isn’t horrible, abusive garbage like this. Congrats, Jakob, you really are just the fucking worst.”

That about covers it.  Jakob is seriously the most hateful, shitty romantic partner in Fire Emblem, and an outright, unequivocally abusive boyfriend.  A decent human being encourages his beloved, raises them up; Jakob tears Felicia down.  A healthy lover wants his partner to depend on him out of love and desire for him; Jakob wants Felicia to depend on him because she feels herself too worthless to persevere alone.  A respectable, affectionate person proposes marriage to his equal; Jakob makes it clear to Felicia that he’s marrying an inferior, a failure, a project.

I feel nauseous.  I’m not kidding.  I am not exaggerating.  I have actually made myself ill by describing Felicia and Jakob’s relationship, by acknowledging how sickeningly horrible it is.  I’m actually, really upset, physically upset, by it.  I am going to go lie down for a bit.


2. Aerin x Tommy (The Princess’ Heart)

It took me more than 2 hours to come back to this rant, after Jakob, and you wouldn’t think that there could actually be a worse couple than 1 that physically nauseated me.  But against all odds, against all hope for decency and dignity in this world of ours, not only is there an inferior RPG relationship than Felicia x Jakob, there are 2, and they are both exponentially worse.

I’ve gone into the morally repugnant nature of Princess Aerin’s actions and relationship with Tommy, in multiple rants.  So I’m only going to summarize here, and you are more than welcome to check those rants for more details.  The long and short of it is, Aerin makes a contract with the devil to brainwash her ex-boyfriend into loving her again, then, when she gets cold feet about giving up her immortal soul as part of that bargain, she hauls her mind-controlled beau along with her on a life-threatening journey to beat up the devil and avoid all consequences of her actions.  When she’s finally successful, Tommy wakes up, is mildly put out about having his right to self-determination and consent violated for months on end, and leaves Aerin...for all of like a single evening, until, in the morning, he changes his mind and decides that he loves her after all, because they’ve both grown as people to the point that they can make this work.  I’m not sure HOW they’ve grown as people, since Aerin didn’t experience any repercussions for her actions whatsoever and Tommy was a little too busy being mentally and emotionally compromised for the entirety of the journey to have the opportunity to develop as a person...

...But who am I to question true love, right?  The (Princess’) heart wants what it wants!  And what Tommy’s heart wants is a remorseless sociopath who demonically roofied him for weeks, put his life in danger without a thought, equally carelessly endangered the immortal souls of her friends and innocent bystanders, and indirectly caused the deaths of her devoted servants.  And Aerin’s heart wants a guy who, she thinks, cheated on her, and who, to get some alone time with Aerin, poisoned his own attendants, drugged her, and kidnapped her to an abandoned cabin in the woods (let’s be clear here: while nowhere near Aerin’s level, Tommy is a thoroughly awful human being in his own right), all without even the faintest hint of hesitation or regret.  Truly, a goddamn love story for the ages.

The silver lining, I guess, is that this rant was pretty heavy with relationships made horrible and disgusting by the man involved, but Aerin is an atrocious enough girlfriend and human being to completely balance the gender scales all by herself.  Hooray for equality.  Wheeee.


1. Kevin x Shion (Xenosaga Trilogy)***

Sometimes, you’re just untouchable.  You’re at the top, or bottom, and you’ll always be there, because nothing could even come close to challenging you.  There’s never going to be a better villain than Knights of the Old Republic 2’s Kreia.  There’s never going to be a better add-on than Neverwinter Nights 2’s Mask of the Betrayer expansion.  And there will never, ever, ever be a worse romantic partner than Kevin Winnicot.  

I’ve joked before.  I’ve said Jakob gave Kevin some competition for Best Boyfriend Ever.  I’ve said that Aerin and Tommy’s romance might actually unseat Kevin’s and Shion’s for how ethically horrifying it is.  But that’s all they were: jokes.  There’s never actually been any competition.  No question who was going to be seated here.  It’s Kevin.  It’s always Kevin.  It always will be.

And it’s not even a close call.  Kevin x Shion is the worst RPG romance of all time by virtue of just 1, single part of it.  Forget everything else about it, this couple is the worst ever simply because Kevin knowingly, intentionally, and without any indication of regret causes the woman he loves to experience the most powerful pain in the universe.  For a second time.

You may think that’s an exaggeration, but according to Xenosaga’s own lore, it’s not.  The Gnosis were summoned by Shion as a child, and then, thanks to Kevin, Shion as an adult, when she experienced a psychological, emotional pain so unimaginably great that it broke the walls of fucking existence itself.  By Xenosaga’s own word of God, Shion experienced the greatest pain a human being ever has or could.  And Kevin deliberately, willingly, of his own decision and accord, caused her to relive it.

Try to wrap your head around that.  Because if you can, if you can actually fully comprehend the full scope of just how disgusting a thing that is to do to someone, let alone someone you claim to care about, then you’re certainly my mental superior.  Ringabel’s carelessness means Edea might get a little lonely sometimes.  Julian’s impatience and inability to consider others’ needs made Luciana uncomfortable and, had he not died in a satisfyingly grisly manner, could have lowered her sense of self worth over time.  Jakob made Felicia feel like incompetent dirt beneath his heels.  Aerin did all but rape Tommy.  Berkut even murdered Rinea.  But none of them consciously devised and executed a long, drawn-out plan with the specific intention of causing their significant other to experience mental torment so great that reality itself backed the hell away from it.  None of them knowingly gave the most intense emotional pain in all the universe to the person they claimed to love.  What Kevin did to Shion is canonically the worst thing it is humanly possible to do to another person.

And while that by itself earns Kevin’s place at the top of the Shit Romances list, now and forever, let there be no mistake: that’s not the end of what’s wrong with Kevin x Shion, not by a LONG shot.  This thing’s almost some kind of miracle of toxic, unhealthy relationships; you can look at it from any and every angle and find something repulsive about it.

Dangerously possessive?  Kevin manipulates Shion into turning away from her friends, and convinces her that her strongest and most positive relationship, that being her connection to KOS-MOS (which should have been romantic, goddammit I am not going to let go of this), is killing her with plot sickness (which, by the way, never did seem to be provable, or go anywhere).  The end result, of course, is that he’s the only person she’s got left.  He’s also more than willing to beat the shit out of her friends in front of her when they won’t give up on her.

Unhealthily clingy?  Kevin wants to undo reality and remake it to only include him and Shion.****

Inconsiderate of her needs and feelings?  Kevin lets Shion painfully mourn his loss for the better part of a decade before bothering to tell her that he was brought back to life--and even then, he only let her know because it was part of his plan to give her the mother of all mental breakdowns.  Already a horrible thing to do to someone who loves you, this only becomes worse when you consider the pain of loss that Shion’s already suffered in the past, with the violent, terrible deaths she witnessed of her parents and Febronia--Kevin’s loss no doubt affected her all the more for its reminder of the losses she’d witnessed in the past, and he just let her live with it for years.

A generally bad influence on Shion’s mental state?  The first time Kevin met Shion, when she was 8, he berated her for trying to make people she loved happy and attempted to get her to believe that people are terrible and the world is a dark, cruel place.  My mind still boggles at the idea of being such a worthless trash heap of a human being that you’d go out of your way to pick a fight with an 8-year-old in an attempt to destroy their ability to enjoy human connections for the rest of their lives.

Just vaguely creepy overall?  It hardly even registers as a problem compared to the rest of this crap, but a friend of mine that I made recently (yes, I was surprised, too), named autumnmycat, pointed out to me that Kevin is, at the time of their initial relationship, Shion’s boss, and there is the whole thing of his having met her when she was 8 and he was 14.  I mean, any halfway decent relationship-writing can very easily clear the hurdles of those scenarios, but halfway decent relationship-writing ain’t what Xenosaga’s about, so yeah, it IS a bit creepy.  But it’s nice to know that Kevin x Shion is bad in all the little ways, too; don’t want to lose sight of that while we wrest with his inflicting dimension-shifting agony on her.

Doesn’t respect Shion’s right to make decisions of her own?  The moment Shion’s mental state starts to pull itself together enough to decide that she’ll side with her friends after all, Kevin decides that she’s only saying that because her friends are confusing her (relating to the possessiveness I mentioned above).  That’s fucking rich, too, considering that part of his reasons for utterly destroying her psyche was to make her more compliant to what he wanted.

Doesn’t respect Shion’s right to be a part of their decisions as a couple?  Kevin didn’t bother consulting Shion about whether she’d want to undo every other living thing in the universe in order to get some ultimate alone time together.

There is just no level of their romance in which Kevin is not a perfect example of a toxic relationship red flag.

Do you know, when I thought about it, I realized that in the entire Xenosaga trilogy, there is only a single, solitary scene of Kevin interacting with or being in the same place as Shion that does not directly cause her stress and/or anguish?  There’s the scene of him giving her the necklace (which, by the way, still feels hollow and manipulative, even if I can’t objectively point to anything specifically wrong with it, so don’t get the idea that this is a positive scene or anything, it’s just not outright negative for her), and that’s it.  Every single other time in the Xenosaga trilogy that involves some interaction between Kevin and Shion, whether he intends it or not, be it in a major or minor way, Kevin is responsible for Shion feeling worse.

Jakob x Felicia might shake my belief in the idea of love.  Aerin x Tommy might make me sure it doesn’t exist.  But Kevin x Shion is so utterly horrifying that it has renewed my faith in love as a concept.  For -1 to exist, we must acknowledge the concept of 1.  For there to be such a thing as debt, there must be the existence of currency, or you could not owe it.  And so love must, indeed, exist, for if it did not, how then could we witness its utter, outright antithesis in Xenosaga?


DISHONORABLE MENTION: Plot-Centric Bad Romances (Various)

While the romances on this list have generally been way beyond the mundane, standardly bad love stories that the RPG genre is unfortunately riddled with, it bears noting that even otherwise inoffensive, only-mildly-poor ones can still be damaging to a game, when the game decides to hinge too much of its plot to them.

You take a game like Lunar 1, for example.  If Luna and Alex’s joyless little infatuation had been just a side-story, thrown in to check a box off a list more than for any purpose, then it would just be a forgettable, pointless little waste of time, and nothing more.  But, about a third of the way through Lunar 1’s entire story comes to revolve around Alex’s supposed love for Luna--rescuing her is his main motivation for his journey, and their fit of Since We’re Not Related, It’ll Be Okay is the game’s final, major bid for dramatic weight in its end, with their love conquering all so that Alex can go home with Luna and blah blah blah.  And all of that falls flat because Alex’s love for Luna is flat, as is basically everything about Alex.  Guy’s got the personality of a bran muffin, and similar interpersonal skills.

Likewise, RPGs like Lufia 1 and The Legend of Dragoon stake major hinging points of their plots and protagonists’ character development upon notions of heroes and love interests defying destiny based on their feelings for one another...so it lessens the power and enjoyability of those games when their main romances are soulless and, fairly often, kind of annoying.

Basically, if the most important, driving aspect of your story and/or message is tied to the romance, then you should endeavor to make that love story believable, enjoyable, and emotionally stirring.  “Good”, in other words.  And if you think this is obvious, then there’s a good chance you’ve never been on the writing staff of an RPG.
























* Of course, I suppose that this mindset of romance as a necessary box to check for an RPG’s story isn’t entirely unwarranted.  The audience is and always has been pretty damn clear about what they want.  Even if a game contains not the faintest trace of a love story between its 2 main characters, players en masse will often just assume there is one regardless.  It’s not even intentional, really, it’s just a reflexive assumption people seem to make.

Don’t believe me?  Look at The Legend of Zelda series.  There have only been a bare few titles in the franchise that make even just a soft implication of any romantic feelings on the part of either Link or Zelda for the other, and those titles have almost all been ones released in the last decade of a 25-year-old franchise.  Yet the unquestioned, hard-coded assumption in its audience’s mind since Day 1 has always been that every iteration of Link and Zelda hook up.  Never even occurs to most people that Skyward Sword was the first game in the series to unambiguously even hint at Link and Zelda having romantic interest in each other (ironically also the first TLoZ where Link can actually romance a character, and she isn’t Zelda).  So while it’s an example of bad writing, without question, I can’t really say, I guess, that there’s no cause whatever for a creator to feel like a romance is a requirement to an RPG, because clearly it’s the general sentiment of the audience that it is.

And that’s all before you even factor in fans’ unquenchable lust for shipping.

 
** And by the way, I’m not sure that Eclair actually IS as old as 13.  That’s what the Wikipedia lists for her, so I’m going by that, but when I originally played the game, my own mental reckoning figured her to be 11.  Now, that was ages ago and I’m not great at even basic maths, so I definitely could be wrong about that, but I still have my doubts that Eclair is even a technical teenager.

Although I guess it’s not all that much more or less creepy either way, really.  1 way or the other, the writers behind this romance are overdue for a Chris Hansen sit-down.


*** You could argue that, since Kevin is a villain and it’s part of the story of the game that Shion get over him and move forward to the bland, unfulfilling emotional porridge that is a romantic relationship with Allen, this couple shouldn’t be on the list, as it’s not as earnestly and mistakenly seen as “good” as the previous entries.  That’s a decent point, but I would counter that A, Xenosaga very much treats Kevin as a sympathetic antagonist, and his being a villain is not really for any of the horrifying nasty things he does to Shion, and B, Shion’s decision to leave Kevin has nothing to do with how he treats her.  Her 1 and only given motivation for turning against him is that, regarding his plan to restart the universe with only her and him in it, she couldn’t allow herself to be happy at the expense of others.  The implication is ENTIRELY that she ONLY opposes Kevin’s intentions for the sake of others; there is absolutely no indication whatsoever given that she or the overall narrative voice of Xenosaga considers the way that Kevin has treated her to be in any way objectionable--to the contrary, she still regards being with him as something pleasant.  So Kevin x Shion absolutely does still qualify, because the only parts of it that the game views as bad have almost nothing to do with the scope of what is actually wrong with the romance.


**** This isn’t relevant to him as a romantic partner, but this is also proof that he’s the biggest asshole in existence, too, as he basically wants to kill every person in the universe who is alive, has ever lived, or ever could live.  So, y’know, just an awesome guy altogether.