Sudden/Random Romances in Games

[Uhura]

On topic: Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) comes to mind. Carla goes from thinking Lucas is a cold-blooded psychopath to falling in love with him over the course of about an afternoon.

Yeah, I have to go with Fahrenheit too. That sex-scene is awkward as hell and it's pretty much the only time I've really been blindsided by a game romance. It just feels like a really pointless, last minute addition to the story.

 

[sethisjimmy]

One I still to this day don't understand is LA Noire. It's been a while since I played the game, but essentially what happens is...

Spoiler

Cole "meets" this woman singer in a bar during an investigation. This is about half way through the game. Later on he meets up with her and cheats on his wife with her at her apartment. He happens to get caught and this becomes a major twist affecting the latter half of the game. We're given no idea why he did this, if they knew eachother beforehand, no inclination of any relationship in the first half, no idea of his relationship with his wife

I feel like I must have missed some key details there because it just came absolutely out of left field. It's always been one of my bigger gripes because in a game heavily story based this kind of hamfisted forced "twist" just seemed so illogical

 

[Lord Garnaat]

Most romances I've come across in games have been fairly good, but the one in LA Noir was utterly ridiculous. To even call it a "romance" would be inaccurate: our intrepid hero Cole Phelps is introduced to a rather unattractive German singer woman, has exactly one conversation with her in which no important dialogue is shared, and then he goes to her apartment out of nowhere without any buildup. Despite him being married, and never expressing anything other than happiness in his current relationship.

What the hell, Phelps?

I didn't even realize what was happening at first. I just got an objective to meet with the ugly German, and then he goes in her apartment and everything fades to black. I refused to believe that the game was doing something so completely out-of-character and stupid without giving me any way to prevent it, but sure enough a bunch of characters start talking about how Phelps was doing the no-pants dance with the girl. And the worst part is this ends up causing the whole plot to be derailed! All for the sake of something that was never even hinted at, and only as a cheap device to make the audience feel unsympathetic towards Phelps and add a female character to the drama - one that still didn't contribute anything!

Urgh, it still burns me up to thing about it...

 

[OctoH]

Binary Domain, the relationship with Faye. Man...that was so poorly written. Also Anders in Dragon Age 2.

 

[RaNDM G]

@Garnaat: Did you watch the cutcenes? Phelps often visits the Blue Room between Homicide and Vice cases, and you can see he's enamored with Elsa watching her sing. That relationship never needed to be outright stated.

I always thought the relationship between Guybrush and Elaine in Monkey Island came from left field, considering they start after Guybrush steals something from her. The two characters do play well off each other though.

 

[Dalisclock]

For me it was the first Broken Sword. George is in Paris, almost gets killed in a bomb blast, meets nico when she is investigating, and they team up to solve it because they have common interest in the case. However, George and Nico really interact that much, with George doing all of the legwork on screen and nico presumably doing research offscreen. The relationship is stated to be pretty professional, though there are hints that George is infatuated with her, seeing how he feels about her ex who gets involved at one point. That's about as bad as it gets for most of the game.

Suddenly, near the end of the game, they're involved with each other, making kissy talk and about ready to marry each other and it feels like I missed quite a few steps somewhere along the line. The remake/rerelease helps this out a bit by giving Nico a bit more screen time and shows she's having feeling for George but not as much as it could.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

I'm seconding people's choice of Bioware. Ugh. I talk to Ashley once ONCE and that was enough for us to fuck, apparently.
Then there's DA2, where everyone is fighting and having hissyfits because everyone is bi and therefore you can't make ANY friends without them wanting to fuck you.
With that out of the way, I'm actively trying to court Chihiro in P3P. With that said, I haven't played in nearly a year...

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Well, Mass Effect dialogues go from relevant and somewhat natural conversations to suddenly "Since you talk to me all the time, you must like me, is this true?" and all instances thereafter are "There's not much to talk about, really." It's silly.

But sillier still is Dragon's Dogma, which assigns you a romance based on how many times you've talked to an NPC, without there necessarily being anything between you during the game. This could be vendors, innkeepers, questgivers, who have never had a warm sentence to say about you. Worse, however, is that if you want to complete the game with all quests done, you have to do the princess side missions, which basically means the useless princess is your romance. I went for Madeleine once because I thought that'd be a nice change, so I talked to her a lot and gave her a few gifts and did her missions until she was visibly glowing with acquaintance. But I still did the princess side-missions, and got assigned to the princess once again.

Another thing I hate about the romance in Dragon's Dogma is that in an incredibly lazy way rather than out of tolerance for alternative sexualities, the game unfailingly treats you like you're having an affair and are romantically interested in the princess, regardless of your character. I think it should have been human concern as the default narrative motivation, and romance if you want, optionally, but no.

 

[J-meMalone]

Probably Steiner and Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX.

Although I personally don't mind and I found the scene between them hilarious.

To be fair, although we don't see them interact much on screen, they've obviously been colleagues for years.

Plus, their confessions of love have this playing in the background!
From a quick glance of my game library, Ezio's romance in Assassin's Creed: Revelations was pretty sudden. He just sort of sees here around a few times and apparently that's enough to convince this massive womaniser to settle down. Similarly with Haytham in Assassin's Creed 3 now that I think about it...

Sort of Persona 3.

Spoiler

Junpei and Chidori have the Romeo and Juliet thing going on. I was just surprised really. Junpei is kind of a douche so him suddenly being 1. in love and 2. suddenly likable because the entire romance arc is fantastic comes out of nowhere to me.

I assume some people would call the romance the very moment they randomly met in the mall or something. But hey i'm blind to this shit

I've been playing Persona 3 recently (not finished it yet!) and I sort of got the impression that Junpei developed a little crush on her since she actually reacted decently to his advances, and was so nice to her after because he wanted to prove

Spoiler

that he was good for more than just killing shadows and would have still have a purpose if the Dark Hour was gone

 

[maconlon439]

Benethor and Morwen from Lord of the Rings, The Third Age.

 

[scorptatious]

Probably Steiner and Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX.

Although I personally don't mind and I found the scene between them hilarious.

To be fair, although we don't see them interact much on screen, they've obviously been colleagues for years.

Plus, their confessions of love have this playing in the background!

Yeah, that's true.

There are probably better examples, but I can't think of any at the mo...

Oh wait! I got one!

Starkiller and what's her face from The Force Unleashed. The chemistry between them was almost non-existant from what I remember, and my brother and I both groaned when they actually did kiss before the final level.

 

[Vern5]

I didn't realize so many people playing Mass Effect 1 have such trouble reading the "signals"

Signals? What signals. In the example I gave there's a scene where you complete a quest for the 'consort' and she gives you some bullshit rambling as a 'reward', at which point your options are "Gee Thanks!" and "Is that it, seriously?", which if you choose leads to random ass sex with some skanky Asari prostitute.

I just wanted money or something, she's obviously wealthy after all. Wonder if that's how she responds to every other disappointed customer, in which case no wonder she's popular: "Hey lady, think I got the wrong amount of change." and BAM, sex!

Liara was annoying as hell in ME1 too, practically all the does is fawn over Shepard from the moment she's brought on board the Normandy and there's almost no reason for it. Takes like two, maybe three dialogue before you're having sex. Meeting women at a bar takes more than that!

Of course I did find Liara improved over the course of ME2 and 3, but her introduction in the first game is still just plain annoying to me.

Yeah, the consort was a major letdown. Sure, the "signals" were hardly ideal but were mostly there in the script. Obviously, the consort isn't going to reward you with money when you ask her to go the extra mile. She's the Consort. Sex and companionship are high-demand commodities. To put it simply, nobody ever shakes down a prostitute for her spare change.

Liara does spend the majority of her time on the Normandy like a lost lamb. I'm not sure about the attraction there. At least Ashley had some fire to her. The poetry was a big turn off, though. Realistically, both of those romance options suck.

And, for the record, you can get a woman from the bar to the bed in less than three dialogues.

 

[Terratina.]

Mass Effect. Kaiden practically comes onto Sheperd after the first mission. I was just like, "WAIT, what?"

Dude doesn't waste time, I'll give him that.