Baldur’s Gate 3 works wonderfully as a dating sim

destructoid.com:

Larian Studios’ seminal Baldur’s Gate 3 launched over a month ago, and despite other solid releases being sprinkled after, I keep returning to Faerun. It captured my imagination in a way I haven’t felt in games since I was a kid.

I wondered why this was until I thought about how it handles romance. When I shipped Karlach and Lae’zel together, I compared Baldur’s Gate 3 to dating sims rather than other RPGs and everything clicked. This is a fantastic RPG, but more importantly, it’s an awesome dating sim.

There was a time in my life when I loved playing visual novels. I still play them to an extent, but not nearly to the degree I played them as a kid. This was when I was most into anime and collecting weird games, with various otome being the most prominent.

For anyone unfamiliar, otome is just the name for dating sims that cater to a predominantly female audience. Above any action game or RPG I played, otome felt like a power fantasy, since several attractive and successful guys wanted my character’s attention. The stories also interested a teenage me, so explaining why I enjoyed these games was convenient.

More than anything, I found them comfortable to play, like a warm blanket with cocoa. The individual stories had plenty of twists and turns, but the structure was predictable. Myself and the guy whose route I’m choosing will probably go through hell, but unless I messed up badly, things would turn out fine.

This mentality returned in Baldur’s Gate 3 because, while the game’s story was fantastic, everyone was also really hot. Just as I fell hard for Hakuoki‘s depiction of Souji Okita and Hajime Saito, the likes of Shadowheart and Lae’zel stole my heart. My tastes may have changed over time, but coming to this