Elex 2 Handles Romance Better Than Anticipated

gamerant.com:

In any video game where player choice is a major aspect, the worst absolute thing that a developer can do is ignore or violate that player choice. One example of this in recent years was when, in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, one DLC forced Alexios or Kassandra to settle down into a straight relationship—even if their character had been pursuing gay romances only. Players were not happy, and Ubisoft acknowledged, apologized, and addressed this fact. At first, it seemed Elex 2 may have been making the same mistake, but it’s handled really well.

Per the various Elex 2 trailers, players learn that Commander Jax has a son, named Dex, with Caja. The problem had romance options in the first game, and players could have picked Elex’s Nasty over Caja. This seemed, at first, that player choice was being ignored to canonize events. Truthfully, it’s complex to balance game mechanics with narrative. The simple answer to this sounds like that Elex 2 should have made it where Dex could be born from either Nasty or Caja, but then that doesn’t really work in the game world nor would that be easily implemented from a video game standpoint.

Latest Elex 2 Trailer Shows a World Full of Choices

How Piranha Bytes handles this is best described as a stroke of genius. What Elex 2 did respects player choice, works around it, and handles it really well—despite formalizing a sexual relationship with a potentially non-romanced character. POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD.

First things first, Elex 2 limits the relationship and birth of Dex to events that place after Elex 1 and before Elex 2. It’s implied that Jax sets out on a new quest to warn Magalan’s factions about the Skyands, but it doesn’t go well, with Jax eventually closing himself off from the world. This