I basically agree with Jeff. I play a lot of strategy games where I take over a planet or the entire galaxy. I'm playing a game now where I've led my NFL team to 30 straight Super Bowl wins. Those are complete power fantasies. For adult games, I always think of a harem ending as being the true ending. If they don't have a harem ending, I generally think they should. I remember seeing an interview with the developers of Koihime Musou. They said that canonically all routes are assumed to happen at once. In other words, a super harem. But for gameplay reasons they had to put limits in place. I thought that was a really interesting take - they wanted to give even more of a power fantasy to the players than they ended up doing. Games like the Mass Effect series where the developers set up the player to be able to have a harem and then script it so it goes horribly wrong (like it probably would in real life) are shocking to me. And that "more realistic" method has never helped my opinion of the game, because it seems anti-player. I think the chemistry casino idea could work great, but I haven't played many games that incorporate many of those concepts. About the best I get along those lines is where the player isn't exactly picking a partner. But their actions lead them to be with a specific character because A) the other characters can't get along with each other for some reason or B) the player needs to travel in a very small group which eliminates other characters from the story.
I basically agree with Jeff. I play a lot of strategy games where I take over a planet or the entire galaxy. I'm playing a game now where I've led my NFL team to 30 straight Super Bowl wins. Those are complete power fantasies. For adult games, I always think of a harem ending as being the true ending. If they don't have a harem ending, I generally think they should. I remember seeing an interview with the developers of Koihime Musou. They said that canonically all routes are assumed to happen at once. In other words, a super harem. But for gameplay reasons they had to put limits in place. I thought that was a really interesting take - they wanted to give even more of a power fantasy to the players than they ended up doing. Games like the Mass Effect series where the developers set up the player to be able to have a harem and then script it so it goes horribly wrong (like it probably would in real life) are shocking to me. And that "more realistic" method has never helped my opinion of the game, because it seems anti-player. I think the chemistry casino idea could work great, but I haven't played many games that incorporate many of those concepts. About the best I get along those lines is where the player isn't exactly picking a partner. But their actions lead them to be with a specific character because A) the other characters can't get along with each other for some reason or B) the player needs to travel in a very small group which eliminates other characters from the story.