There are a lot of games with romance options these days - for many players, they're a defining part of the RPG experience. Choosing your lover is as important, or maybe even more important, than designing your character. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fire Emblem, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life is Strange, Persona, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stardew Valley are all lauded for their romance options, with fans playing each of these games multiple times in order to see all of the options the game has. But no game quite serves up a buffet like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Saints Row 4.
Saints Row 4 doesn't take romance too seriously, but then that's probably fitting for video games as a whole. While those games listed above are the exception, most are also not built around romance primarily - you can play each of them and remain smoochless, if you're rizzless. Games built around romance specifically are few and far between, with violence populating the vast majority of these titles. Only Life is Strange and Stardew Valley are free from the blood-drenched combat of the others, and even then, in Stardew Valley your first love will always be the farm. Don't make me choose between you and the soil, baby.
Saints Row 4 casts you as the President of the United States during the invasion of a Shakespeare-quoting alien race of overlords, and gives you superpowers to fight them off. It wants to be ridiculous. So, rather than a soulful romance built on a slow-burning anticipation wherein you must say the exact right response, finish an array of specific side quests, or provide the right gifts, you simply push a button. Once a crewmate is on your ship, you have two options: press a button to talk, or press a button to romance. If you press to talk, you'll get to learn a bit more about the character, maybe have a small cutscene, or get a quick sound bite if you've exhausted all of the options. If you press to romance, your character says "wanna ****".
The whole thing plays out as a parody of a lot of the games listed above, particularly Mass Effect, whic♚h was then seen as groundbreaking for what we now look at as pretty vanilla attitudes to sexuality. Changing it to a single button press was deliberately poking fun✤ at how all games reduce romance down to pushing the right buttons in one way or another.
There are no restrictions on gender, and characters will always be down to pound. There's even a sentient eye robot you can recruit and 'romance', which involves them going down on you and vaguely wiggling around your crotch while telling you it will "ravage you". What's great about these is each scene is just about true enough to character that you see their personalities shining through, but not enough to pump the brakes in the name of realism. Matt will ask you to call him Nyte Blade and Kinzie will punch you in the face before leaping into your arms, but no one refuses your advances.
You can cycle through as many of these options as you want, romancing the whole crew in a single playthrough if you like. While most games can't keep up with Saint Row 4's humour (not even the latest Saints Row) and wouldn't suit playing each kiss for laughs, we could do with a better variety in romance than having to spend the whole game committing to one character, looking up each interaction and reloading if the wrong choice is made, turning romance into another objective to be crossed off the list just like storming the base at the end of Act 2.
Some fans say it should have just been Shaundi for a male Boss and Johnny for a female Boss, but that misses the point. You are one big incestuous family in Saints Row 4, and it wouldn't work any other way. The lack of convincing any of the characters to swing whatever way you want them to only adds to the charm.
A game that had romances more casual, or even added dating sim elements before committing, while still having depth elsewhere (Boyfriend Dungeon already does this well) could expand our horizons. A Saints Row game that took romance a little more seriously, letting us work to win Kinzie's heart, would be welcome too, but we have enough of those already with a bunch of other characters and I'd much rather they learn from Saints Row than for Saints Row to copy them whenever i🐻t is eventually al🔴lowed out in daylight again.
So🍸metimes you want to fall in love, and꧙ sometimes you just want to be gay with the homies. Saints Row gets that.