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Best romance subplot in an RPG
- Thread starter BearBomber
- Start date
MasterSmithFandango
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2008
- Messages
- 7,269
Luzur
Good Sir
never been much for romance in games but it had it moments.
Viconia just had her period all the time.
kingcomrade
Kingcomrade
:DRoguey said:
Krash
Arcane
The ONLY good romance(s) in RPG setting are in the Sengoku Rance series. Where else could you find tastefully done voluntary rape? You are all cumguzzling faggots
EDIT: Fuck beaten; there is hope after all
EDIT: Fuck beaten; there is hope after all
Multi-headed Cow
Guest
Twinkle
Liturgist
Multi-headed Cow said:
BULLSHIT!!!
Now, that's truly deep multikult relationship. :wink:
laclongquan
Arcane
FF8: Quistis-Squall. Talk about bittersweet onesided love.
Multi-headed Cow
Guest
KalosKagathos
Learned
Thanks for the heads-up.Drakron said:
Azrael the cat
Arcane
Warning: tl;dr spiel ahead. Skip down if you just want my nominations.
I'm going to be a complete storyemofag and give a serious answer. I can't think of any 'great' crpg romance, but there's a few that have been good and a lot that have been terrible. The worst have been the Bioware ones, consistently. Every single one is a pathetic fantasy fulfillment. Firstly, they're almost all massively predictable - when did you ever play a Bioware game with a romance without knowing exactly how it was going to end up? There's never any question that they're going to get together after the token saving of the damsel in distress. And they're all the kind of thing that a dateless and lonely teenager might think of as his/her fantasy before they've ever actually had a relationship.
I've got a theory on that. Folks who are miserable about they're own love lives enjoy cliched fantasy-fulfillment because it's a replacement for their own pathetic state. Added to that is that such people, as a broad and probably unfair generalisation, often lack a lot of opposite-sex friends and so find it easier to swallow the games' cliched depiction of a relationship. Those who are in, or have had, long-term relationships, or even regular friendships with the opposite sex, simply can't swallow those depictions as 'real' relationships. There's nothing attractive to them about hooking up with a childlike wingless elf, or 'no-really-I'm-a-bad-girl' Morrigan, because you know how fucked up that kind of relationship would be in real life (not to mention a tad paedophilic, with the tendency of gaming females to act like teenagers regardless of their in-game age).
So people in the 2nd (overly generalised) category tend to like, to use Avellone's term, 'hatemances' - stories of doomed relationships and fleeting stands, because for someone in a happy long-term relationship, the fantasy of being single, emo-tastically in doomed love etc is appealing, even if you wouldn't want it in real life.
So with that aside, my nominations are:
(1) The threesome and the gay sex in Bioware's Jade Empire - what? A Bioware romance just after I ripped on them? Well what I like about the threesome and gay sex options in Jade Empire is that there isn't any pretence of 'romance'. Nope, it's just the hero getting laid. No improbable 'omg we've only been travelling for 4 days but I love you!' schtick, just 'hey, I wonder if I get BOTH these chicks into bed!'. If you can't do it well, at least don't take it too seriously. Bioware should have taken the same approach in Mass Effect - it would have fitted Sheppard perfectly for the 'romances' to be replaced with James T Kirk-esque 'strategic diplomacy'.
(2) Ravel/TNO: already been mentioned. A romance that has absolutely nothing to do with inspiring desperate 14 year olds to write fanfiction. That in itself is remarkable - add that it's one of the only game romances that ACTUALLY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FREAKING PLOT, and subtley pulls off the 'epic love story over thousands of years', and it's lightyears ahead of anything else in gaming.
(3) Visas/Exile: Most crpg 'romances' fail because (a) they're too afraid to be anything but wish fulfillment, failing to realise that romance plots can't work unless there's at least a possibility of tragedy, and (b) they try to cram into a several day/week timeline an emotional connection that would ordinarily take many months to foster. Visas/Exile works because it never gets off the ground - there's no relationship per se, just an acknowledgment of what might have been under better circumstances.
(4) TNO/FFG/Annah: I'm including the two of these together, even though Annah falls squarely into the 'bad teenage fanfiction' territory.I wasn't a fan of the ingame 'romance' either - a bit heavyhanded and out of place in a subtley written game. As hatemances or doomed almost-romances, though, they work well. Every member of TNO's party suffers a torment that he's caused. Ravel points out that falling in love with TNO IS Annah's torment. But it isn't until the end of the game that TNO's curse upon FFG materialises (she has plenty of torments before then, but they all predate TNO's involvement) in the form of her swearing to return to hell in an impossible quest to find him.
(5) Under a Killing Moon (adventure game): Forgot her name, but you rescue the girl from assassination, head to a moonbase and take out legions of bad guys without weapons, fighting ability or basic hygiene, and at the end she hooks up with your millionaire arrogant git of an ex-boss. Bitch.
(6) Raynor/Kerrigan (yes, RTS): Ok, I was a bit younger when SC first came out. And it's been so overdone and overcopied that it's a bit lame now. But before all that, Kerrigan was popular for a reason. Mengsk's betrayal and Kerrigan's re-emergance (and repeated sparing of Raynor) were fucking awesome the first time I played the game.
(7) Alleycat / the female housecat in Alleycat (platformer): Ok, so it was a 1983 Atari game. With no dialogue, and the romance consisted of the player's alleycat sneaking into the housecat's room, out-manouvering the other 'suitors' and getting some feline action. But there's not many games around where getting laid is not only a sidequest but the game's main goal (there's multiple other challenges, but getting laid advances you to the next level).
I'm going to be a complete storyemofag and give a serious answer. I can't think of any 'great' crpg romance, but there's a few that have been good and a lot that have been terrible. The worst have been the Bioware ones, consistently. Every single one is a pathetic fantasy fulfillment. Firstly, they're almost all massively predictable - when did you ever play a Bioware game with a romance without knowing exactly how it was going to end up? There's never any question that they're going to get together after the token saving of the damsel in distress. And they're all the kind of thing that a dateless and lonely teenager might think of as his/her fantasy before they've ever actually had a relationship.
I've got a theory on that. Folks who are miserable about they're own love lives enjoy cliched fantasy-fulfillment because it's a replacement for their own pathetic state. Added to that is that such people, as a broad and probably unfair generalisation, often lack a lot of opposite-sex friends and so find it easier to swallow the games' cliched depiction of a relationship. Those who are in, or have had, long-term relationships, or even regular friendships with the opposite sex, simply can't swallow those depictions as 'real' relationships. There's nothing attractive to them about hooking up with a childlike wingless elf, or 'no-really-I'm-a-bad-girl' Morrigan, because you know how fucked up that kind of relationship would be in real life (not to mention a tad paedophilic, with the tendency of gaming females to act like teenagers regardless of their in-game age).
So people in the 2nd (overly generalised) category tend to like, to use Avellone's term, 'hatemances' - stories of doomed relationships and fleeting stands, because for someone in a happy long-term relationship, the fantasy of being single, emo-tastically in doomed love etc is appealing, even if you wouldn't want it in real life.
So with that aside, my nominations are:
(1) The threesome and the gay sex in Bioware's Jade Empire - what? A Bioware romance just after I ripped on them? Well what I like about the threesome and gay sex options in Jade Empire is that there isn't any pretence of 'romance'. Nope, it's just the hero getting laid. No improbable 'omg we've only been travelling for 4 days but I love you!' schtick, just 'hey, I wonder if I get BOTH these chicks into bed!'. If you can't do it well, at least don't take it too seriously. Bioware should have taken the same approach in Mass Effect - it would have fitted Sheppard perfectly for the 'romances' to be replaced with James T Kirk-esque 'strategic diplomacy'.
(2) Ravel/TNO: already been mentioned. A romance that has absolutely nothing to do with inspiring desperate 14 year olds to write fanfiction. That in itself is remarkable - add that it's one of the only game romances that ACTUALLY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FREAKING PLOT, and subtley pulls off the 'epic love story over thousands of years', and it's lightyears ahead of anything else in gaming.
(3) Visas/Exile: Most crpg 'romances' fail because (a) they're too afraid to be anything but wish fulfillment, failing to realise that romance plots can't work unless there's at least a possibility of tragedy, and (b) they try to cram into a several day/week timeline an emotional connection that would ordinarily take many months to foster. Visas/Exile works because it never gets off the ground - there's no relationship per se, just an acknowledgment of what might have been under better circumstances.
(4) TNO/FFG/Annah: I'm including the two of these together, even though Annah falls squarely into the 'bad teenage fanfiction' territory.I wasn't a fan of the ingame 'romance' either - a bit heavyhanded and out of place in a subtley written game. As hatemances or doomed almost-romances, though, they work well. Every member of TNO's party suffers a torment that he's caused. Ravel points out that falling in love with TNO IS Annah's torment. But it isn't until the end of the game that TNO's curse upon FFG materialises (she has plenty of torments before then, but they all predate TNO's involvement) in the form of her swearing to return to hell in an impossible quest to find him.
(5) Under a Killing Moon (adventure game): Forgot her name, but you rescue the girl from assassination, head to a moonbase and take out legions of bad guys without weapons, fighting ability or basic hygiene, and at the end she hooks up with your millionaire arrogant git of an ex-boss. Bitch.
(6) Raynor/Kerrigan (yes, RTS): Ok, I was a bit younger when SC first came out. And it's been so overdone and overcopied that it's a bit lame now. But before all that, Kerrigan was popular for a reason. Mengsk's betrayal and Kerrigan's re-emergance (and repeated sparing of Raynor) were fucking awesome the first time I played the game.
(7) Alleycat / the female housecat in Alleycat (platformer): Ok, so it was a 1983 Atari game. With no dialogue, and the romance consisted of the player's alleycat sneaking into the housecat's room, out-manouvering the other 'suitors' and getting some feline action. But there's not many games around where getting laid is not only a sidequest but the game's main goal (there's multiple other challenges, but getting laid advances you to the next level).
In an RPG ? I can't remeber a single "romance subplot" in a computer roleplaying game that is not terribly bad and/or cheesy. Viconia in BG2 already mentioned several times is cheesy in a good way but as a romance it is laughable.
A honorable mention - QUEST FOR GLORY IV - SHADOW OF DARKNESS. Evil vampiress Katrina sacrificing herself at the end to save the goody-two shoes Hero (you) was quite interesting.
It is only an adventure-rpg hybid at best not RPG tough.
A honorable mention - QUEST FOR GLORY IV - SHADOW OF DARKNESS. Evil vampiress Katrina sacrificing herself at the end to save the goody-two shoes Hero (you) was quite interesting.
It is only an adventure-rpg hybid at best not RPG tough.
DriacKin
Arbiter
I'm genuinely surprised at how little love Gann from MotB is getting.
laclongquan
Arcane
How can you ignore Ran-Rance? Rape in the night? Sleep-raping? Consensual Rape?
DriacKin said:
I know, considering Gann was written by MCA. Technically it's the closest way any codexer could ever get to actually romancing him.
Admiral jimbob
gay as all hell
Viconia was hilarious for how, after getting the PC into bed in one of the early conversations, she proceeded to insult his skill in bed and mock him for having a tiny dick.
It was priceless to imagine legions of desperate Bioware fans, frozen as they hunched over their keyboards with dong in hand, gently starting to weep and slowly softening.
It was priceless to imagine legions of desperate Bioware fans, frozen as they hunched over their keyboards with dong in hand, gently starting to weep and slowly softening.
kris
Arcane
Bastila in Kotor, mostly because I am a big star wars fan/fag.
It also worked well since it was written into the story.
It also worked well since it was written into the story.
ironyuri
Guest
Atton Rand > Bastila Shan > Carth Onasi
Moray
Scholar
DriacKin said:
Most likely it's because, since most players are typically male and play male characters, most wouldn't really find themselves interested in the "homosexual relationship" aspect of it. Personally, I found both Gann and Safiya particularly enjoyable companions, romance sub-plot or otherwise.
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