1332: Sweet Otome

I started playing the PSP game Sweet Fuse: At Your Side after finishing Corpse Party and it’s been an interesting experience, particularly given my gaming background.

Sweet Fuse is what’s known as an “otome game”, you see — in stark contrast to “bishoujo games” that tend to have a male protagonist and a veritable harem of dateable female characters, otome games are the complete opposite: female protagonist, veritable harem of dateable male characters. (There are also yuri variations where the female protagonist can date female characters, much as there are yaoi titles for men, where a male protagonist can date male characters. But let’s not get off the point: Sweet Fuse is an otome game in its purest sense.)

I was somewhat intrigued by the prospect of playing Sweet Fuse since although I’m no stranger to playing female characters in games, where romantic options exist I will still generally pair up my heroine with another woman in preference to anything else — my Dragon Age character made a beeline for Leliana, for example, while my LadyHawke in Dragon Age II went for Merrill, as I recall. Sweet Fuse, being an otome game, was going to make me (or rather, my female protagonist) date a male character and like it. And although I’m fairly open-minded about such things, I confess I did feel somewhat skeptical about whether or not I’d feel the same degree of emotional engagement seeing a relationship grow from the opposite way around to how it’s usually depicted in this sort of game.

Why shouldn’t I, though? In your average dating sim or visual novel, you are not playing as the protagonist; you’re along for the ride and making occasional decisions on their behalf. You see stuff unfold and occasionally get frustrated at the protagonist not doing things exactly as you would have done them — but therein lies a sense of dramatic tension. In practice, the only thing that is different between a bishoujo game and an otome game is the fact that the voices are all female in one and all male in the other; and the same for the on-screen portraits of other characters.

That is a reasonably big difference, to be fair, but the fact is that in both cases, you’re still watching two people who aren’t you get together rather than pretending to get off with some virtual girl/dude from the first person. In that sense, it’s not really any different to reading a novel with a love story, or watching a movie with love scenes. So why should playing as a protagonist of the opposite sex who becomes attracted to people who are the same sex as you make you feel weird?

Answer: it doesn’t. In the admittedly limited time I’ve spent following the adventures of Saki Inafune and her six gentlemen friends as they attempt to defuse the bombs a terrorist who is also a pig secreted in her uncle Keiji Inafune’s theme park — yes, that is indeed the creator of Mega Man — I’ve been surprised to find myself feeling much the same as I do when playing a bishoujo game.

Specifically, I’ve found myself playing “favourites” with the cast of dateable characters. I can’t quite pin down if it’s due to actually finding them attractive, or simply liking their characters, but I’ve naturally found myself gravitating towards one of the characters in my first playthrough, much like I would in a typical bishoujo game. (I tend to “go with my gut” for my first playthrough of this type of game, then go back and systematically pursue the remainder of the cast/endings one at a time in order to see everything the game and its stories have to offer.)

It helps that Sweet Fuse has a cast of male characters easily as diverse — possibly more so, even — than your average bishoujo game. There’s the cold, stern detective; the young boy band idol; the aggressive, overly-compensating male escort (who reminds me of Kanji from Persona 4 to a distracting degree); the world-weary reporter; the shut-in; and the “mystical guy”. The latter, a guy named Urabe, is the one I have my eye on for this first playthrough, but we’ll see where it goes.

I’m only on the second “stage” of my first playthrough so far so there’s probably quite a way to go yet. There’s some interesting mechanics in the game that I’ll talk about a bit more on another occasion. In the meantime, if you have the slightest interest in character-centric, story-focused games — and a PSP or Vita — then you could certainly do far worse than check out Sweet Fuse. Full review coming soon over on USgamer.