February 5, 2014 by

Valentine's day: The love in the games


                With Valentine's Day right around the corner, let's look at the topic of romance in video games. While seeing your favorite characters pair up can be romantic, looking at the kinds of love portrayed in gaming is more interesting. The four types I've come seen are the Silent Love, Obvious Love, Devoted Love, and Realistic Love. However, much like love itself, it's hard to stuff everyone into one category.


Silent Love


                When you're theorizing love between two characters, entertaining the thought of them being together, this is silent love. One of the most popular theories is an attraction between characters like Mario and Peach, and Link and Zelda. These heroes go to such lengths to save these women, and yet they say little and get nothing in return. They don't hesitate, and don't back down from any challenge, so how can that not be love? It takes a strong devotion to another character to fight against such odds to save the damsels. While clear love is not expressed in the story at all, it's easy to look at the characters and all the subtile hints of love spread across the games.


Obvious Love


                The second kind the obvious love can be rather annoying. It's when you have two people that when you first see them it's obvious that the game will put these two together.  The first moment they meet the game doesn't take long to have them express some sort of strong emotion towards one another. Some examples include, The Last Story, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, and others where the first time the main male and female characters meet there's some sort of chemistry or hatred that seems a bit excessive for a first encounter. Anyone can easily deduce what the plan is for this and while sometimes it can work, most of the time it just makes an awkward progression as they go through the steps of falling for each other way too quickly. Makes it harder to get into the romance of the characters that way.


Devoted Love


                If the lead character will go to the ends of the Earth for the ones they love, then this is our third type of gaming love, the devoted love. The Xenoblade Chronicles is a fantastic example- Shulk is willing to defy beings of nearly infinite power just to protect the ones he adores. His love for people he meets is so great, that he summons power that would have never been obtained had it not been for that. Devoted love is the most understandable as it is the most detailed, drawn out form of love in video games, with how it mimics the storyboard of the kind of romance between any two people- so completely natural to watch as it progresses.


Realistic Love


            Our explanation of the different types of love in video games is coming to a close with our last type, realistic love. Games like Mass Effect, and Fire Emblem: Awakening give you several options on who to fall for so the player can choose which character they like best and have romantic interest that way. While ideally this seems nice, but since you're given so man options, your choice in option weighs heavily on your game. Romantic developments are shorter, making it really hard to get into the love story and feels like an add-on. In Fire Emblem, and Mass Effect, it's nice to have the choice for characters to fall in love in just four conversations, it feels done for brevity's sake, putting more weight on the choice rather than the characters itself.

Romance is interesting that's for sure, adding a lot of dimension to a game and it's character dynamics. What games do you enjoy for the romance, and what games have romance that just makes the game so hard to play?

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