But not escalating to romance at least once feels like a rejection of the premise to me. I can understand why the developers would offer the option to never escalate, to please people who are hardcore ace and would rather not feel pressured into romance in what is ostensibly a romance game. If you wanted, you could simply go on platonic pal dates with the weapons instead of making the game about love. You never are forced to escalate any story into romance to beat the game. Falling in love can feel too abrupt in some visual novels. This combat-romance combo really worked for me in Fire Emblem: Awakening, and this feels like a different take on that premise. The dungeons are full of spontaneous hangouts that trigger dialog depending on the weapon you’ve chosen, which also gives you opportunities to give gifts to your weapon friend or find out more about them. Overall, though, I do like the idea of a combat segment serving as a downtime in which you get to know a person. There’s also only two dungeons in the game, which felt a little abrupt, and overall left me with the feeling that more effort was put into the boyfriend part of the equation than the dungeon part. This felt weak as a hook and was a little undercooked, though it was a perfectly fine excuse to mash attack buttons at things. The premise for the dungeon enemies is kind of Persona-inspired: it is supposed to consist of abstract representations of your own fears attacking you. Afterward you go out and get coffee or whatever, triggering another visual novel date, and repeat the cycle until you have maxed out your relationship points with one or more of these person-weapon hybrids. But then after a date, you can go on a dungeon delve with your weapon paramour, turning the game into an action-roguelike that works like a very lite Diablo with a talking weapon. Date scenes are played out via a standard visual novel interface. Once arriving in the swanky big California coast city of living weapons, on your first summer so far from home, you meet and date various living weapon people. Your character can be male or female, or neither – but the text to me, and my admittedly heteronormative biases, read as written for a lady. You play a college-age human being on summer vacation. This game is set in a world where some people – not all people, but some people – turn into melee weapons. If you missed out on all the conversation, let me start by explaining the premise and mechanics of the game. Well, now that people were upset about it, I had to play Boyfriend Dungeon.Īnd, readers, I enjoyed Boyfriend Dungeon! Apparently all the edges weren’t filed off, the trigger warnings weren’t strong enough, and people were outraged at the level of evil and villainy that went unremarked upon in this game. Those games that are so focused on Positive Representation that they don’t seem to have a coherent message, and instead seem to be aimed for the middle-of-the-road, frequently strawmanned, sensitive person on Twitter (who used to be the sensitive person on Tumblr), and therefore, don’t seem to be for anybody real, in particular.īut then I saw something miraculous on that same segment of Twitter: Everyone was mad about Boyfriend Dungeon. As a connoisseur of sloppy pulp, I tend to turn my nose up at games that have the edges filed off. It wasn’t messy enough, and therefore, just wasn’t horny enough. Something about it seemed too… wholesome, too focus-grouped for my taste. But for both non-binary options to be the odd one out just feels a little disappointing.The first time I played Boyfriend Dungeon, I was actually pretty sure I wasn’t going to want to play the rest of Boyfriend Dungeon. Boyfriend Dungeon is superb, not just in terms of representation but also its hilarious writing and surprisingly complex combat mechanics. I have already written in defence of Kitfox, Eric’s character, and the trigger warning, so this isn’t me trying to kick the game when it’s down. Eric, the character in question, is brilliantly written, and an important inclusion in the story. Kitfox Games, the developer of Boyfriend Dungeon, has already come under fire for including a character that stalks and manipulates you, despite having a trigger warning for stalking and manipulation in the game's opening moments. Related: Queer Stories Are Complicated, And Gaming Needs To Show That I scream it from the rooftops “I’m nitpicking!” - but these are important nits to pick. I understand that complaining about non-binary love interests, in a game that offers you two distinct choices and has no problematic tropes, seems like nitpicking.
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