Essay – On Romance
The Best Is Yet to Come
Love is, without a doubt, the most powerful force in the universe. Beyond any physical distance, through any barrier, across chasms of time and space that defy mortal ken, it binds two hearts, two minds, two souls, in eternal awe. No matter or energy can match its influence, and none can break it. It is the song of life sung in duet, voices finding a harmony that echoes forever. Love, and in particular, romantic love, is frequently the focus of all forms of media, and videogames are no exception.
Now, when I mention romance in videogames, most people are going to think of one of two things – RPGs with romanceable NPCs, or dating sims. The RPGs are some of the most popular of our time, with the various romances figuring prominently in their reception and impact – Dragon Age, The Witcher, every Persona game, hell, in Fable you can technically woo and marry any NPC in the world. Dating sims are more niche, but far more focused, with every action, player choice, and design decision devoted to depicting the development and pursuit of romantic love.
There’s more than a little overlap between these two if you dare to scratch their surfaces a little – dating sims can be imagined as an RPG with romances, stripped down to only the bits that ‘matter,’ while RPGs with romanceable NPCs tend to have those relationships tacked on, in a matter that barely interacts with the rest of the gameplay, a minigame of sorts you can engage with to get your self insert and favorite character to knock boots and update their Facebook profiles together.1
But there’s something a bit off about those examples, isn’t there? It doesn’t feel quite right. There’s a deep perversion at work, a sinister megalomania being encouraged, in being presented a ready harem and told to pick your poison. This convenient stable of studs and babes, all standing around you with their ‘to-do-me’ lists in hand, waiting for you to gleefully size them up like cakes in a shop and pay with a completed checklist, does not a celestial resonance make.
To ‘pick and choose’ a romance… well, as the bon mot from E. B. White says about analyzing humor, so much the same can be said about finagling, forcing, engineering a love affair: like dissecting a frog, it can be done, but it kills the frog. When you woo a character in such games successfully, how is that determined? By saying the right things, by prioritizing them over others, by presenting enough gifts, enough tokens, enough weighting in the mathematical model to tell the program that you have at last earned their love.
But love, true love, in all our greatest tales, and thus revealed to be so in our own hearts, is no such algorithm of attraction, no chemical confluence of horny organisms, but a union of destiny and fate. Romance, the kind that we dream about, the sort that makes us sigh, cannot be reasoned or determined from prior cause but emerges, erupts, explodes out of our souls. It transcends rational thought, biological imperatives, and even the otherwise unconquerable will of Man... and so it cannot flourish in the ultimate domain of agency that is gaming. Unless, of course, it is bound within the grounding force of games, the link to the immutable Cosmos that structures a game beyond mere mechanics and random-access memory… if it is not a part of the player’s choice, but a feature of the world itself. Great romances can exist in games, just as they can so easily in more passive media, if they are written in.
Romance, after all, is at once both deeply personal and amazingly universal. Our empathy, our memories of loves yearned for and lost, they let us feel the love between two characters as if it were our own, and those stories are themselves imbued with a measure of that love from the authors, their romances informing the eternal portrayal immortalized for posterity. So it is with plays, with books, with movies and music and television, and of course, it is again with videogames.
To illustrate my point, I thought it’d be a nice way to celebrate this day, where we mark and marvel in, revel and reflect on our own great loves, to list out, in ascending order, my choices for the greatest romances in all of videogaming.
4: Solid Snake/Sniper Wolf, Metal Gear Solid
Love can bloom, even on a battlefield.
One of the things that makes Metal Gear Solid such a timeless classic is the way it plays with tropes and builds on them, a simple world expanded over the course of a playthrough, until it becomes something so much more. Action movie cliches are given justification and grounding, social commentary is layered onto philosophical introspection, characters that are modeled as simple archetypes reveal hidden depth. One of those characters is Sniper Wolf.
Initially presented as a stock femme fatale to round out the cast of FOXHOUND’s elite future boss fights with poor situational awareness, she’s a sniper with a bad case of misandry and a cruel sadism. She wounds Meryl to bait out her target, mocking Snake when he surrenders to save Meryl’s life, and she refuses to do up all her shirt buttons. She ‘marks’ Snake, insisting that she’ll be thinking of him until his life is hers.
During Snake’s interrogation, though, the mask slips a bit, and she feeds Snake a small bit of hope, and a promise that they’ll meet again. Ocelot remarks that her fixation on prey is intense, an obsession that he claims is indistinguishable from love.
Sniper Wolf is encountered again, and cannot be defeated without mortally wounding her. In her final breaths, she unburdens herself to Snake – a lifetime of war and death, her only solace the detachment of a sniper scope. The deep familiarity with targets she was fated to kill ironically intensified as she watched them for hours waiting for the moment to pull the trigger. Snake recognizes in her his own trauma, his own yearning for an end, and reassures her that there is no shame in her choices. Though fate has brought them together as combatants, they form a bond of respect, of longing, of love.
3: Otacon/Sniper Wolf, Metal Gear Solid
Death is not defeat.
But Snake is not the only one who has been touched by Sniper Wolf on Shadow Moses Island. Otacon, chief engineer of the Metal Gear REX project, was held hostage during Liquid’s insurrection, and met Wolf while being forced to work on REX. When she intervened in the destruction of the wolf dogs kept in the facility, Otacon saw beneath the mask of detached contempt. She was not a mercenary or sadistic killer, but a noble soul, capable of compassion but forced by circumstance into withdrawal. She saw the same of him, and made accommodations to give him a looser rein, to feed the animals they now protected together.
When it becomes clear that Snake and Wolf are on a collision course and no compromise can let them both walk away, Otacon wavers, torn between his sense of justice and love for Wolf. He confronts Snake, asking him to answer one of the greatest romantic questions of all time… and Snake responds in kind.
After Wolf dies, Otacon is wracked with grief, knowing that he was unable to protect the woman he loved, but unable to blame the man who pulled the trigger. Lost, he leaves to wrestle with the questions that haunt him… and then, with love’s guidance, he finds those answers.
Otacon grows through loving Sniper Wolf and watching her go – he realizes that life is a fleeting grace, and the marks you leave on other people are what really matter. He continues to aid Snake, knowing that, though brief, his love for Wolf was meaningful, a faint ray of kindness that helped pull him from the dark.
2: Solid Snake/Meryl
A new path.
But you can’t talk about Metal Gear Solid without mentioning Snake’s relationship with Meryl. Another pair of soldiers meeting on the battlefield, their fates entwined, but these two bound together with a united goal. After Meryl is captured, Snake resolves to save her at any cost, and the depth of his commitment is not lost on his other compatriots.
Rescuing Meryl is one of the primary goals of the second half of the game, and the crux of the pivotal torture scene. Snake endures unimaginable agony to protect Meryl, and if your thumb is calloused enough, you can survive to see her again.
The ‘good’ ending of the game is not subtle in the least – Snake and Meryl escape, relieved and ready to strike out on a new course together, literally riding off into the sunset in an embrace.
And if you fail, if you give in, and let Meryl die to spare yourself nerve damage, the game is even less subtle. Snake is left howling in despair, his agony only soothed by his friend Otacon, who too has loved and lost in that place. Otacon reminds Snake that love goes on, beyond death, and that he can return that love best by finding a way to honor it through living himself. And that, of course, brings us nicely to...
1: Solid Snake/Otacon
A new purpose.
The greatest romance in Metal Gear Solid, in the whole franchise, even the whole of gaming, is that of Solid Snake and Otacon. Two lost souls, yearning for meaning, finding themselves again and again used, pawns of the power hungry tyrants dictating their futures, until they meet each other. An unassuming friendship between two utterly unlike men that blossoms by the end of the game into a deep companionship, the two bound to each other by shared loss and a hope for brighter days.
As with the Meryl ending, Otacon’s ending shows the two finally dropping their guards after escaping the traumatic revelations and confrontations of Shadow Moses, and relaxing in each other’s company. Unlike Meryl’s ending, though, this moment endures. In later installments, it’s shown that, though Meryl canonically survives, she’s not the one Snake shares a new life with… it’s Otacon.
Metal Gear Solid 2 reveals that Snake and Otacon have made good on what they talk about in their ending, and found a way to honor those they’ve lost, divorcing themselves from the system they’d been a part of and taking a stand against it. They have resolved themselves to a new way of living, not merely in redeeming the past but in shaping the future. And they continue to shape the future, including by raising their adoptive daughter, Sunny, as shown in MGS4.
They push each other to overcome flaws, to stay the course, and support each other time and time again. No matter the danger or the difficulty, whether the entire world is against them or reality itself seems a staged farce, there’s one thing you can count on: Snake and Otacon will have each other’s backs. Could you say the same about your bros?
I hope you enjoyed this ranking, and its prelude. Today, consider the great fortune you have, even if you spend the day alone, to have the chance to experience these and many other legendary romances through videogames.
The world is full of love, abundant and freely shared, and that extends to virtual worlds as well. Enjoy Valentine’s Day, and remember: love can bloom, even on the battlefield.
Is this a dated reference yet?
Great essay. Modern game design really does treat romance like any other secondary game mechanic, and it's become so standardized and familiar that it's practically expected from certain genres regardless of surrounding context. I don't think I can name a single light farming sim from the past fifteen years that doesn't feature that sort of deterministic, process-driven approach to cultivating relationships. If you released a Stardew Valley-like without it, I reckon half the audience would react as if you'd left out watering cans.
I guess MGS (terrific premise, by the way) goes to show that, contrary to most intuitions about good game design, effective romance is a function of selectively limiting player agency in the storytelling. Consequently, it's hard to name many game designers and writers who have both the talent and the balls to pull it off. A couple of the Yakuza games stand out in my memory, but I'm not sure anyone's done a better job than Kojima.
“Love is, without a doubt, the most powerful force in the universe” then swerves into something more interesting ,a critique of how videogames simulate romance. great metaphor on how “saying the right things… enough gifts… enough weighting in the mathematical model,” they turn romance into an algorithm. is like “like dissecting a frog… it kills the frog.”