How many years ago was it when dating-sims were believed to be the realm of body-pillow hugging Otaku ? 5? 10? It wasn’t too long ago that the dating-sim genre carried a pretty nasty stigma and very few companies outside of Japan would even produce a game that focused on interpersonal relationships. Fast-forward to today, where few RPGs don’t have some type of dating-sim-esque relationship mechanic. While modern shooters are slathering leveling peanut butter all over their gun chocolate, RPGs are coating their salmon dragons with dating-sim cream cheese (lox and cream cheese is delicious! Try it!). It seems that companies like Atlus and Bioware have figured out that meaningful and memorable character interactions are valuable components of story-driven rpgs, and they have put mechanical weight behind those characters as a result. In RPGs of old, character interactions would either be wholly scripted or largely scripted with a handful of dialog choices peppered in. How these few choices affected the game may not have been readily apparent for hours, or at all. However, the modern convention is to make relationship systems as transparent as possible-- to gamify even basic character interactions. While this makes for more compelling gameplay, I’m worried that modern relationship systems overlook a few facets of actual human relationships in their rush for fun. So I thought I would show a few of those areas for improvement!
1. Relationships with Finite Endpoints Before the End of the Game- One of the biggest problems with modern relationship systems is that it is often possible to “finish” a relationship well before the end of the game in question. In Persona 4 you can max out multiple relationships by the second dungeon; after which, there is no reason to ever spend time with those characters again. Once you reach relationship level 10 with a character in a P4, you never need to spend time with that character again. The main character is officially best-buds forever with whoever that level 10 friend is. Mass Effect also suffers from this problem, especially Mass Effect 2. In ME2 every mission in the game is inevitably followed by Commander Shepard making rounds through the Normandy, talking to the various characters in your party. Every mission holds the promise of new dialog and character development; but, characters will all too often have nothing new to say. Instead, they greet you with a hello and a permanent “investigate” dialog choice that leads to nowhere.
In both of these games, the character development systems do a great job of mediating your relationships with various characters, but the limitations of how the systems work act to highlight each game’s artifice, rather than diminish it. Actual relationships don’t just grow to a climax and then enter a happy holding pattern. In fact, most friendships die from long-term apathy, rather than some single, traumatic event-- starvation rather than murder. Yet, these games treat relationships as linear progressions that have finite end points. Even worse, you can reach a relationship’s end before the end of the game and stay stuck in that best friend/lover limbo for hours. In effect, you are disincentivised from spending additional time with the characters who you are ostensibly supposed to be the closest to, since any time you spend with them is essentially wasted. It seems to me that the fix here is simple: always have at least as many scripted character moments with a character as you have opportunities to hang out with that character.
2. Sex as a Reward- At the end of games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Persona 4 there is often one last story moment right before the game’s conclusion where the relationship decisions you have made over the course of the game reach their climax. In every game in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as well as and Persona 4, this moment is highlighted by sex between the main character and their significant other of choice (in the Persona games sex is strongly implied, rather than explicitly shown). This sex as win-condition brand of game design is troubling for a whole host of reasons. For one thing, it treats physical intimacy as the ultimate reward of a relationship, rather than as a step in a long journey. The Mass Effect series makes this especially odd considering that you can have the same significant other for multiple games, yet only display physical affection during one cut scene per game. While human relationships often slowly build over time, the relationships in Mass Effect move in fits and starts if you look at them as one long relationship over 2-3 games. Every game sets Shepard and his/her significant other back to square one before culminating in another sex scene at the end of the game.
Even worse, by setting up this sex as reward situation early on, each of the games in these series have gotten progressively more laissez faire in who and what you can date, at the expense of plausibility and characterization. While the early games in these series had relatively modest romance selections, the sequels upped the ante in full fan-service fashion. Mass Effect expanded from 2 potential romances per gender in the first game to 4 in the second (not to mention the carryover from game to game). As a result, by ME3 you could have dozens of different relationship histories that all follow the same general arc, despite the actual participants in each relationship being wildly different. Dragon Age expanded from 3 romance options per gender in the first game to 5 in the second. Furthermore, in DA2 every romance-able party member also happened to be functionally bisexual. It feels like this decision was made so that every player could make sexy time with whomever they chose. While the bisexual characters in DA1 made bisexuality a part of their characterization, many of the characters in DA2 seem to be bisexual as deference to the whims of the player. In Persona 3, romantic relationships had consequences; if you attempted to juggle two romances at once, you risked both parties finding out and breaking up with you. In Persona 4, you can date every female member of the main cast at once without issue, before choosing one “lucky” lady on Christmas Eve to spend the night with. Ultimately, these clear bits of fan service harm the later games in the series by undermining their believability and by undermining sexuality as a characterization tool.
The best example from these games of how sex can be used as something greater than a reward is in Jack’s character arc in ME2. If you play as male Shepard, Jack is overtly crass and sexual. She will attempt to seduce Shepard relatively early on in their relationship. If Shepard accepts those advances, the romance will end in a one night stand and Shepard will be left with a distanced relationship with Jack; she will never actually date Shepard if he takes that bait. By making sex with Jack an option early in their time together, the developers were able to convey Jack’s warped view of the role of sex in her life: an emotionally distant source of physical pleasure. By applying this lesson across multiple characters a developer could adjust the trajectory of romantic arcs and create very different feeling relationships. Sexuality is a powerful part of the human experience and locking it in a treasure chest at the end of the game is far from the most compelling or realistic way to deploy it.
Well there are two not so small observations about modern relationship systems that I came up with. Does anyone else have any other things they would like to see change about these systems? Or perhaps any modern games that avoid the problems I articulated here? Thanks for reading.
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