Video games where NPCs try to win your character's love?

March 6, 2017 2:15 PM

I've played some games where a goal, or sometimes THE goal, is to get an NPC to fall in love, or lust, with your character. And this is accomplished by ME learning a lot about THEIR likes/dislikes, giving gifts, doing quests/favors, saying just the right thing at the right time, and putting up with a lot of rejection for some puny scraps of romance. Shades of real life! Just once, I want to be the one being courted, not have to do all the work in this relationship myself, damn it!

So where are the games where the NPCs give ME the gifts, woo ME with sweet words, and in other ways, make me the pursued rather than the pursuer? How about several at once, and I must choose between the suitors vying for my affection? And if I happen to click one wrong option on a dialog tree, they don't go off in a huff forever, but keep trying, because I'M WORTH IT.

I would prefer ones which are not limited in what/who your character is. For example, I gather Geralt of The Witcher has hot babes throw themselves at him all the time, but I would rather play a female.

PC games are preferred but if you know of a good game on another platform, please share anyway!

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Both the Dragon Age series and the Mass Effect series have romantic stuff as completely optional side fun (I'd usually rather be blasting evil aliens or smashing evil goblins, YMMV). In both, there are characters that WILL flirt with you a a fair amount without any provocation, and characters that will rebuff all but the most dedicated charmers. Dragon Age in particular has a nice gender/race/species/age agnostic system, where anyone can potentially get together with anyone (though some matches are harder to make), and you can pick your character to be any quite a few gender/race/species combinations. While I think they treat romance fairly ok as a side option, I'd probably not recommend them just for that.

I can think of one game that is all about suitors competing to woo a female player character: Hatoful Boyfriend . But it is a little weird, in that the dudes are also pigeons. Or something.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:28 PM on March 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

These are called reverse harem or otome games, and here's a wiki on Giant Bomb with a bunch of games... a lot of them are probably Japanese only.

Here's a crunchy roll forum post with a whole bunch of free online otame games...

Here's a site dedicated to English-language otome games.
posted by Huck500 at 2:51 PM on March 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

A lot of the earlier games with romance basically had, as your most attractive feature, PROTAGONIST_FLAG=1 hardcoded onto your avatar. These were problematic to say the least. It could be disturbingly hard to send some signal to the NPCs that you weren't interested, usually waiting towards a mid-to-late game dialogue tree to "end" a romance you never started.

Baldur's Gate 2 falls into that category, at least for the male PC, who would have up to three women in the party basically fighting over him. (Female PCs only got one option, although he was even more immature seeming.)
posted by mark k at 7:37 PM on March 6, 2017

Dragon Age Origins has what you want. Just chat up Alistair on the reg and he'll swoop you off your feet. Note: it's dark-ish fantasy, so there's the potential for heartbreak in the end depending on the choices you make. There's tons of guides out there if you want to know exactly how to avoid the sad endings.

The next two Dragon Ages also have several lovely romances of varying levels of wooing. You do have to 'initiate' a romance by choosing a flirt option first. DAI in particular has two that are practically Disney prince/princess in their sweetness and cuteness, plus a giant cow man you can climb like a tree (and he's into bdsm...). Oh, if you play DA2 and romance Anders, break up with him and then romance Fenris, they'll be snarky with each other over what's best for you.
posted by lovecrafty at 10:30 PM on March 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Dragon Age has been mentioned a few times but you do still have to do a great deal of the pursuing and gift giving. You should play it anyway because its a great game and I really did fall in love with Alistair.
Leliana is probably the most flirty though, I wasn't even trying to flirt with her but it ended up going that way and I kinda went with it for that conversation but then I fell in love with Alistair (he's so different to most male NPCs in RPGs, he's neither the square jawed hero or the loveable rogue - I read that the writers wanted him to be somewhere between Malcolm Reynolds and Xander Harris) and then just as we're about to go fight a dragon she interrupts wanting to talk about our relationship - like woah, what relationship?!
posted by missmagenta at 2:33 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Seconding the Otome games. In some of them, the men throw themselves at you and you get to pick.

Hatoful Boyfriend is broken down into two parts: the regular game and uh, something else. The something else mode is really, really good.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 11:04 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]