![]() Now, in 2021, Joss Whedon, the author of this self-insert, is a known villain in his own right, and most of the culture has turned on him. Horrible was a creepy stalker in a white coat who was also totally the protagonist of the musical miniseries he starred in. If I were to mention a character from another work that Eric most reminds me of, I’d say, he’s Dr. This, I can imagine, could be quite triggering to a lot of people emotionally because it does feel like a realistic scenario to be in. The way you are allowed to respond to him consists of some shut-downs and put-downs, but occasionally is quite realistic, with the sort of appeasing compromise that a woman would make with an unwanted come-on in this kind of scenario. He’s written as a stalker and a creep who is “just being a nice guy.” He’s pretty annoying to deal with at best. This is the guy the Discourse was all about. ![]() Let’s first talk about Eric, the villain of Boyfriend Dungeon. Now, I’m about to get into some spoiler territory with regard to a few specific love interests, and the main plot of the game. If this sounds like your kind of thing already, maybe stop reading. You retain the option to break up at the end if you still aren’t feeling the vibe, which is good. 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. 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.
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