Heard on Kotaku about this strategy RPG from Idea Factory/RED called Record of Agarest War. At first tender romantic blush, it's a strategy RPG -- but it turns out you can propagate your heroic DNA with the game's heroines to create a successor, whose stats will be a combination of yours and hers -- depending on which babymomma you choose.At first, it's something to tee-hee about, especially when you hear you get a "special movie" once you've captured one of the ladies' hearts and get to the breeding. But think about it for a sec.
Writing about H-games, I hear a lot of people rationalizing and justifying playing 'em by saying they're not sex games. They're deep, emotional story games, and the fact that they show sex, which happens among lovers in real life, only deepens the emotional connection and story realism blah blah blah. But maybe there is something to be said for that; nearly every RPG, even the ones that are little more than a profusion of stats that'd make an Asperger's sufferer blush, features attractive women and some kind of romantic tension, even if it's flimsy. The character usually has a token love interest, if not more than one, and yet, the genre has been disappointingly lacking in treating these relationships beyond 2D cartoon sketches.
I'm thinking in particular right now of textbook jRPGs Final Fantasy VII through X-2 -- there's a clear love connection going on in all of those games, and while we get cutscenes that depict the characters gazing mooningly at each other or leaping in anguish to one another's salvation, we never quite get that sense of sincere relationship development throughout the story. It's always a little ambiguous -- especially in FFVII. C'mon, Cloud --Tifa or Aeris? The game seems to encourage you to pick, but you're really offered very little decisive reward in the case of either. (SPOILER: AERIS DIES).
I always say that the thing that most defines an RPG is not a turn-based battle system, a party system, random encounters or the inclusion of a world map (though these are all key). The core element is character growth -- start out a kid with a stick, end up a man summoning God to do your bidding. It's a sort of fantasy metaphor for adolescence -- and isn't falling in love part of that? And isn't having kids often a part of becoming an adult?
RPGs have treated some pretty visceral topics, too -- loss of self, madness, murder, abuse, and on and on. Why should it subject us to melodrama yet gloss over sex? I certainly don't claim that they should show all-out hentai scenes in T-for-teen RPGs. But I think that the idea of having a kid is an important element in the truly sophisticated game that's long overdue.
