You have to establish a budding friendship before someone becomes your partner. Stardew Valley is all about love, so wooing prospective life partners doesn’t move too quickly. Luckily, six bachelors and bachelorettes are looking for romance, and you might just be their perfect match. But tending to your crops can get lonely.
Your character escaped the hustle and bustle of the city for a quiet, comfortable life on the farm. Stardew Valley, the product of one man’s quest to make a Harvest Moon-style game, offers one of the more realistic depictions of courting romantic partners in games.
The Mass Effect Trilogy is available on PS3 and Xbox 360 and is backward compatible with Xbox One. Who do you want standing beside you when you save the galaxy? The bonds you choose to pursue evolve organically, using branching conversation options and relationship-building missions throughout each game. Mass Effect 3 gave male Shepard nine and female Shepard seven (unfair, we know). While the original Mass Effect only gives players two options for both male and female Shepard, Mass Effect 2 increases this to six potential romantic partners each. Over the course of the series, Shepard’s romantic options expanded and became more integral to the Mass Effect experience. This clever system allows for courting successes, failures, and those ambiguous moments when you don’t know where a relationship stands. The many conversations you have as Commander Shepard not only affect the course of the story but also your relationships with other characters throughout the series.
Silly sequences like this reveal how and why Tidus and Yuna feel the way they do, and we feel it with them.įinal Fantasy X is available on PS4, PS3, PS Vita, PS2, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.īioWare’s Mass Effect series (sans Andromeda) builds exceptional characters through quality writing and, more importantly, player choice. While it’s often mocked as awkward, over-the-top, and unusually long, it serves an important purpose, showcasing Tidus and Yuna’s tangible connection. If you need further proof of Tidus and Yuna’s great love, look no further than the infamous laughing scene. We get to see Yuna, a grand summoner, and Tidus, her guardian, meet and fall in love rather than simply declare their romantic feelings for each other. More importantly, FFX tells an actual love story. Star-crossed lovers Tidus and Yuna’s relationship stands at the center of a much larger tale. Nearly every entry in the series includes a love story, but out of the 13 entries (excluding the MMO), Final Fantasy X is the only one that feels organic. Rounded out by a stellar soundtrack and a bright, welcoming art style, it’s incredibly relatable and one of the best examples of a love story done right in video games.įlorence is available on iOS and Android.įinal Fantasy is known for its intricate plots, eccentric characters, and “save the world” storylines. And then it catalogs the fall of the relationship, with equal deftness. Florence accurately remarks on the perfection we feel when we first find that truly special someone. It’s subtle, but it paints a surprisingly vivid picture of what it’s like to fall in love for the first time. The number and shapes of the pieces change based on the tone and difficulty of the conversation. Each dialogue bubble must be put together using puzzle pieces. The interactive elements of Florence are simplistic but profound. Then, she stumbles upon a cellist in the park named Krish, and their relationship begins to blossom.
The main character has fallen into a monotonous routine of work, TV dinners, and disagreements with her mother over the phone. An interactive visual novel, Florence tells the rise and fall of a relationship between two twenty-somethings. The best games to play with friends onlineįlorence does more poignant storytelling in its hour of runtime than most AAA games do in 30-plus hours.From time to time, however, developers have found ways to offer layered, heartfelt stories of romance, and if you want to play a game where you can watch love bloom, we have a list of romantic games you should check out. Even now, many games fall back on superficial tropes and nods toward love rather than trying to show it in motion. Portraying love and the process of falling in love have never been easy in an interactive medium, though. Romance is an essential theme in all types of artistic expression, even video games.