It’s the official day of love, you can’t love on any other day ok!!! It’s time for us to stop being a group of pessimists and talk about that thing that keeps the world turning, NO not money!….. Love and Romance. This Friday we’re discussing our favourite on screen or in game Romantical relationships. So get the tissues out…..FOR YOUR TEARS.
Romance in video games. It’s an odd one for me, I don’t really pay attention or care that much. I was invested in Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Bayek and Aya, but ultimately it went awry. There’s also Conker and Berrie, but if you’ve played that game you know it doesn’t work out either. So with this in mind, my pick is: any Evil Dead game with Ash and his chainsaw (and his bit on the side, his BOOMSTICK twelve gauge double barreled Remington, S-Mart’s top-of-the-line). Ash uses these tool to great effect and they clearly mean something to him, especially if you’ve seen the criminally cancelled Ash vs Evil Dead.
My pick is Andy and April Dwyer from Parks and Rec, very fresh in my mind from recently (finally) finishing this amazing series. What I love is although parts of their relationship are absolutely insane, for comedy reasons, you can tell they’re really into each other and in the last series they realise they’re adults who are growing old together and are truly in love! Huge parts of their interaction reminded me of my own relationship and life and it warmed this salty boy’s cockles!
If I had to pick a video game romance it would be Alexios and the whole of Greece, absolute elephant-dicked lad!
My choice is more of a bromance. Between two characters I absolutely love. Captain John Price and John ‘‘Soap’’ MacTavish. First seen together in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and continuing to appear together in the games two following sequels. Their mutual respect for each other is evident and apparent throughout the series with brilliant dialog and banter. Which makes the fate of one in Modern Warfare 3, even more harrowing, as I got to know and love their camaraderie through the series. And made the final mission all that more personal. And after recently completing the campaign for the new soft reboot of the franchise, simply titled; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it was awesome to see Price back in action and hear the mention, and tease the return of, Soap.
Kim (no fancy picture yet)
Romance on screen can come in all different shapes and size that is why mine has to be Elias Ainsworth and Chise Hatori from Ancient Magnus Bride. Brought during an auction, Chise is to be Elias’s apprentice Mage but also his bride, though only through Elias’s poor understanding of what a bride is. One of the reasons I love this paring is because it is an unusual one. He is a creature that is neither man nor fae and has little understanding of humans or feeling and she is a 16 year old girl who has never had a real home. Chise is unfazed by his appearance and starts to fall in love with who he is on the inside and as Elias learns more about human feelings and his own, he starts to understand his own feelings towards Chise. Towards the end of the anime you see their relationship start to bloom into something more than they both were expecting. I really like this romance because it’s not bound by looks or materialistic thing it is a connections of two lost and lonely hearts.
The most iconic love story in gaming is clearly Roman Bellic and his love of bowling, but I’m going to talk about something less aggravating with my pick of Dante and Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno.
I’m yet to see anyone else in games who is willing to try to rescue their significant other from the depths of Hell itself, let alone fight Lucifer with Death’s own scythe. Granted, Beatrice ended up in Hell because of Dante, but you’ve got to respect the legwork he puts in to rectify his sin of cheating on her. It’s a poor defence, made worse with the revelation it was with a prisoner of war while on a crusade, in exchange for letting the woman’s husband live. Dante believed he was acting by the will of God in punishing the prisoners, branded heretics, when he was actually a war criminal acting off false assurances of full absolution by a lying and corrupt Bishop.
Fuelled by the desire to redeem himself in Beatrice and God’s eyes, he throws himself into Hell, and begins a violent descent through the Circles to rescue his wife. Not the most touching of love stories I’ll grant you, but it has to be one of the most impressive.
Just as a final word to the wise, anyone that is happy to use a phrase, Bishop or not, like ‘Your immaculate father hereby absolves you of all your sins’ is definitely going to turn out to be a wrong-un.
Romances, Huh? For me there are two romances that instantly jump into my mind and that’s Tidus & Yuna or Nero & Kyrie.
Tidus and Yuna definitely has to be my favouorite romance in all of Video Games and this tale of sacrifice for love and the story of love triumphing all is something that really has appealed to me ever since I was a young(ish) boy.
Then Nero & Kyrie just make my heart all warm. My favourite bit of DMC V was when Nero called home to Kyrie at the end of the game. It made me pretty satisfied seeing this after saving Kyrie about 50 times in my playthroughs of DMC IV.
TBH though, I am a sucker for any romance in any form. I love love.
I’ve got a big ol’ soft spot in my soul for a little romance, and while i think Valentines day is a con to make people buy red and pink shite, I guess I can wax lyrical for a bit about the precious love between Jackie Estacado and Jenny in The Darkness. Coming out around about the same time I had my first serious girlfriend, and at the height of my emo angst phase… I loved the downplayed relationship between the two, no destiny or flashy declarations, just a couple in love and enjoying each others company. There is even a section of the game where you can simply sit and watch TV with Jenny for as long as you like, its heartwarming!
This all obviously comes crumbling down later on as Jenny is murdered simply to anger Jackie, but her soul continues to guide him to the lighter path! What a lass!
Right, I’m going off the rails a little here. Everybody above has brought up great on screen romances in the world of video games and beyond. Mines going to be a little more personal though… I present to you my own personal budding romance with Adebayo Akinfenwa. Yes that’s right, the giant Wycombe Wanderers striker. It all started on a romantic summers evening during one of my live FIFA streams. I was playing as Exeter City (to please some of the Exeter lads here) and was in need of a big strong target man, well they don’t come any bigger or badder than Akinfenwa.
Originally I signed him purely because I wanted a player with power and strength who would survive the rough tackles of League 2 football. Plus he is one of the only lower league players to receive the full ‘starhead’ scan and looks amazing in-game! What I didn’t expect though was for the main man himself to go on to score a hat full of goals and essentially be my star player, hell I even captained him. Not only did he capture my heart but also the hearts and minds of all my viewers (all 12 of you) and is still a legend we miss to this day. Needless to say my heart was shattered into a million pieces when I booted up my FIFA 20 career mode only to find Akinfenwa is unapproachable due to the game putting him into retirement. It is a breakup I will never recover from, I love you Adebayo Akinfenwa.