Your Hottest Video Game Girlfriends

  

Let's talk ladies, specifically digital ladies. This is one of those lists that wouldn't even be possible when I first got into video games, even 10 years ago it would have been incredibly short. We've come a ways, I'm not willing to say a long ways just yet because there's this huge road ahead even if the distance traveled so far seems long because there's all this other...yanno what enough waxing poetic. This is about awesome digital ladies you can hang with in video game land and right now, the world needs escapism. Seriously, reality has gone nucking futs--go play some games.

Liara T'Soni -- Mass Effect

Like the picture? It's a desktop wallpaper--just sayin'

That's Doctor Liara T'Soni, hunnie! Okay, she's not that kind of doctor, but she is the doctorate holding kind. I think it's something to do with ancient archeology or communications since she goes full Shadowbroker in Mass Effect 2. She evolves from being an unsure academic to a confident, galaxy saving badass in the course of three games and a couple DLCs. There are other ladies in the Mass Effect series that can make space seem not so vast and cold (Specialist Traynor and Kelly Chambers) but they're light years behind Liara. Aside from being one of the most powerful biotic squad members, she's integral to the story and Commander Shepard's character development. There's also a very real possibility she's the smartest person in the game by a wide margin and she'll explain so many things in a velvety voice that gives silk over glass competition in smoothness.

Rating -- total wife material (even though she's going to live 900 more years after you die)

Piper Wright -- Fallout 4

Did I mention girl's got style?

Bethesda did a lot of fun, creative things in Fallout 4 that they'd hinted at doing in Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim. One of the fun things was making one-size-fits-all romances by utilizing nicknames and easy pronoun swapping in the scripts. That means every romance option is available to both genders and it'll be seamless every time! Everyone knows, when it comes to girlfriends, there's like and there's love. I like Curie and Cait, but I love Piper. She's a reporter, a big sister raising a kid sister after they were orphaned, and she has a beautiful mix of self-deprecating humor, ego, and altruism. She's kind of goofy in vulnerable moments in the most endearing way possible, and how refreshing is that in a game that takes place after nuclear Armageddon? She also has her own thing going on, mostly looking into the mayor of Diamond City as being a possible Institute collaborator and while she's helping you on your journey to find your missing son, she does continue her own work as a reporter, which sets her above most NPCs in complexity of character. Speaking of her newspaper, she's a talented writer. There are several issues of Publick Occurrences to collect throughout the game, and I suggest you actually read them.

Rating -- total wife material (especially if you could get her to quitting smoking...not that everything in the Commonwealth isn't a carcinogen)

Chloe Price -- Life is Strange

Probably not going to prom

Life is Strange is a departure from the big guns, big cars, big explosions, big swords games in every sense. No space marines here, just high school, a photography hobby, and time alteration super powers...okay, so that ones a big deal. There's a mystery, time travel, survival (both high school drama and literal life/death kinds) all while Max is trying to figure out who she even is and what is going on with her teenage angst. Enter Chloe Price. Do you remember that first time you met someone as a young queerling girl and she's the coolest fucking person and you can't tell if she's actually into girls or if you want her to be so badly that your mind convinces you she must be because that would be the only explanation for why she's so freaking cool? That's Chloe and it turns out she's into Max, but in that laid back, older girl, dyed blue hair, wild child sort of way. She comes with a slew of her own problems, an old truck, an over developed sense of adventure, and energy, lots and lots of energy. Yes, I'm describing a manic pixie dream girl, but why shouldn't lesbians get one too? If you missed out on the teenage smitten stage of pining for a cool older girl, here's your chance to find out what it feels like to be a sidekick wishing to be a love interest for a punk rock princess.

Rating -- first love (...and second and third and really as many times as you want since you can turn back time at will)

Sera -- Dragon Age: Inquisition

She's full of these technically-true-isms

There's a hole in the sky. Demons are attacking peasants and livestock. Mages and Templars refuse to get along. An ancient evil is trying to remake the world. What you need is a crazy girlfriend that has next to no clue what's actually going on! So maybe she's never getting a Fulbright, or graduating college, or...okay, she's probably going to be a huge liability on your bar trivia team, but that's not why you love her! Sera's strength isn't in her brains, it's in her sense of humor, straightforward approach to everything, and bizarre, but defined, moral code. Sera is afraid of magic, likes tall women, solves most of her problems with arrows, and creates chaos for shits and giggles, making her a wild ride, in more ways than one if you play your cards right. It's hard to figure how she would fit in with something called the Inquisition and someone called the Inquisitor, but maybe that's a good thing. A girlfriend that likes pranks, jokes, and a clear, if someone basic, grasp of the situation can be helpful for a woman trying her best to save the world. There's nothing quite like the crazy ones, am I right?

Rating -- long term girlfriend or wild fling (that depends on your capacity for shenanigans)

Honorable Mentions

Not every game builds a full romance for you, but there are several games that offer at least some kind of girlfriend option if you're willing to do some of the work yourself or don't mind brevity.

Your Sims Girlfriend -- The Sims

Come on, we all did it. The Sims is basically an elaborate dollhouse and for little gay girls, that's going to mean little Sim girlfriends getting together and doing a lot of interior decorating, pet collecting, and eating grilled cheese sandwiches. The quality of your Sim girlfriends may have varied and some may have died in cooking fires or drowned in swimming pools.

Random Villager -- Fable 2 and/or 3

Want to marry a random village woman? What about a noblewoman? A shopkeeper? A prostitute? Knock yourself out! Want them to be in any way discriminate from other random NPCs? Tough luck. Most of their personalities will be broken down into a two to five word description, but you can date, marry, and get lucky in Albion in the most technical senses. Skyrim offers the same experience with better graphics, if the visual quality of your random NPC wife important to you.

Shaundi -- Saints Row 4

Mostly, the "romance" in Saints Row 4 is done directly to make fun of Mass Effect. The whole game is designed to lampoon basically every video game franchise, popular movie, and TV show they can get their hands on. The strange little blip of a thing with Shaundi on the ship (not fun Shaundi obviously since she only exists in the simulation and our memories) is surprisingly sweet in comparison to the obvious joke "romances" with the other gang members. There's a single cute conversation, implied sex, and a ton of hanging out and blowing stuff up together and that's a kind of relationship, isn't it?

Bioware must have a whole "rendering hot butts" development team

There are a ton of Bioware in game girlfriends I could have written up: Silk Fox, Juhani, Leliana, Merrill, Isabela, Peebee, Samantha Traynor, Kelly Chambers, Vetra, Suvi, Avela, Lembda Avesta, and Lana Beniko. But honestly, it'd get repetitive for some of them and time consuming for the SWTOR ones. Feel free to mention anything I missed in the comments or give love to your favorite digital paramour!

Pay for Gay

A Bioware MMORPG based on Star Wars should have been a no brainer of a game for me. That's taking three things I like and shoving them all into one package, and then adding a free to play option, which I guess adds four things I like together since I'm kind of a cheapskate. I have fond memories of playing the Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) games when I was a kid. I like Bioware games in general. I even like MMOs. And when the game was released a couple years ago, allegedly it was going to have same sex relationship options!

That's pretty much where the excitement ends.

I'm no game reviewer, so I won't go into the particulars of what I like/dislike about the game itself. Plenty of professionals have already done that and done it well enough that they don't need me amateuring up the joint. I am going to address the same sex relationship promise that was kinda, sorta, not really delivered on this year. It seems appropriate in light of the recent DOMA and Prop 8 decisions. The news here is good, but what about long ago in a galaxy far away?

Rainbow lightsabers would go a long way with me.

Forget the promise of same sex relationship being in the game at launch. Didn't happen. Not even close. Not even a little (maybe the tiniest amount if you hunted like a Fett and have an incredible imagination). The developers were very sorry and promised to get them in later.

Years passed and nothing happened. And I don't just mean the same sex relationships didn't get put into the game, although they didn't. I mean NOBODY that worked anywhere near SWTOR would even talk about it. No updates, no comments, complete radio silence. A same gender relationship thread on the official website reached into the thousands of posts without ever being commented on by a developer.

I skipped the game at launch. I was excited about the possibilities, and then I was ticked when I was essentially left out of the only unique aspect of the game. It's an MMO, and the only real difference between it and any other MMO at launch was the inclusion of an interactive storyline and character relationships...that I wouldn't be able to participate in unless I was going to fake straight. Bioware has been pretty inclusive to LGBT gamers to this point (which I outline here in part) so it irked me enough to skip the game entirely.

Then came free to play (F2P). Apparently I wasn't the only one to skip the game. I doubt the reasons I skipped it were the predominant ones everyone else had, but whatever the reasons, people just didn't play SWTOR or if they did, they didn't play very long. Good launch subscription numbers, dwindle, dwindle, dwindle, almost gone. So then came the free-2-play option. I figured I'd try it at this point. With F2P at least I wasn't paying to be excluded. And this is when I saw the scope of what would need to be changed to include a same sex relationship after launch. The story in SWTOR is huge, entirely voice acted by some fairly notable names with recognizable voices, and that's when I gave up on the game entirely. Game designer was my original dream job before I ended up being a writer. I have a decent concept of what would be required to add a same sex relationship into the game on par with all the others and I knew they didn't have the resources or the inclination to go through with the massive undertaking.

Recently, they released an expansion called Rise of the Hutt Cartel where they added a planet with some same sex relationship content. Here's where the pay for gay comes in. It's a $9.99 expansion for subscribers and a $19.99 expansion for F2P. Yep, if you want the same sex content promised at the outset of the game, you had to wait several years and now pay extra money. There's also other complicating factors that made it unappealing for me aside from the slap in the face of the price tag. The game is split into light side and dark side, and apparently lesbian relationships would be on one side while gay relationships would be on the other. My highest level character (which matters since the content is WAY down the line from the start of the game) was on the wrong side to access the lesbian content. Pay extra, start over if you're on the wrong side, have the content remain on one tiny planet...nope, not gonna participate in that nonsense.

As a funny side note of how stupid Fox News is, they released an "article" on their official website (which looks like a poorly formatted blog) where they refer to Makeb (the planet in the expansion) as the "gay planet." And, despite the fact that there is very little evidence to support the claim, they say that the gaming populace was largely outraged at the inclusion of gay content! I guess Fox News has to take the bigot/racist/sexist side of an argument even if it doesn't exist or is a tiny minority. Oh sure, the Family Research Council (frothing at the mouth homophobic fringe group) hated that SWTOR included this tiny scrap of nothing for the LGBT community, but they aren't gamers. Really FRC? You don't like the gay content in an MMORPG? Which server do you play on? I'm looking around for a character called Bigot Fett or Sith-for-brains, but I can't seem to find you in the game.

Maybe it's the DOMA decision. Maybe it's the Prop 8 ruling. Maybe it's a matter of my time being more valuable now than when I was in middle school playing KOTOR. Whatever the reason, I'm just not interested in being treated like an afterthought as a gamer anymore.