For those of you who have known me for a while, you may know that I’m really interested in game narrative, micro-narrative and industries created on shilling these things to the public. I like short fiction magazines; I like interactive fiction and narrative games; I like ARGs and Echo Bazaar, which don’t seem at first blush like bedfellows but are, I do think, part of a similar umbrella enough to be grouped together. I’m going to be doing a multiple-part series highlighting a game made for the market of the Teenage Girl – a market I am passionately interested in on heaps of levels – casually exploring otome, the common narratives of otome games, story incentivizations and the pay-for-chapter model.

More under the cut!

Oh no.

It seems you clicked.

Hopefully what just happened is that everyone serious, thoughtful and academic who stumbles over this blog would have looked at that and gone, Ah, yes, a worthy topic, but I don’t wish to read yet another reception-studies homebrew article on Tumblr when Kotaku exists. Thus winnowed, they would have gone off retaining the sense that Tamsyn Muir is a hip modern author with dignity and self-respect.

All lies. For the last couple months I have been stuck in a tawdry, glitter-smeared boy orgy, and I have paid for the privilege.

In my defense, INDUSTRY-RECOGNISED™ WELL-REGARDED™ SFF authors V. Isabel Yap and Alyssa Wong first brought this game to my attention courtesy Twitter. “Oh sure, I love otome games,” I said. “I’ve played otome games you people wouldn’t believe. Princess Maker on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched Cute Knight Kingdom glitter in the dark etc, etc, etc. All those moments will be lost in time, like the hours of my life I have spent pursuing louche anime folk.” It was called Shall We Date?: Wizardess Heart. Time to die.

Shall We Date?: Wizardess Heart is one in a series of Shall We Date? games, whereupon you’re given a selection of dubious hotties to pick from as you go through your daily life at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry only here it’s called the “Gedonelune Academy” and you are a “wizardess”. These games act like visual novels in which you’re given lumps of text followed by various choices which influence how your dude feels about you. You follow the story with story tickets, a currency that refills slowly and seems to be needed approximately every three lines of dialogue. You’ll know you’ve won when you’ve successfully romanced your anime moppet and have a happy ending. 

This style of game is incredibly popular and has been for a long time – dating sims began in 1984 with Girl’s Garden and continue today in a splendid rainbow of opportunity, so that you can now famously date pigeons and go shark at independent schools for the disabled (to be honest, that one’s much more sincere and respectful than it sounds). Shovelware for the mobile market has resulted in games that render down politics between the sexes into Seven Hotties, All My Husbands, a game title so good I want it to win a Hugo. I hope we can all agree that whatever we’ve done in our lives, it’s not Seven Hotties, All My Husbands.

There is also a game called “Be My Princess Party” and there is a man you can romance in it called Roberto Button. Don’t thank me

Some riders before I continue:

• These games are often poorly translated. I will do my damndest not to make this an invitation to laugh at the translation, as I find that a low form of humour and frankly if I was the localisation team for Wizardess Heart I wouldn’t be making this my artistic magnum opus either.
  
  
• I am aware that playing a mass-produced mobile dating sim and expecting relationship nuance is like getting take-out from Macca’s and expecting haute cuisine. Friends, my expectations were as low as only a woman who grew up playing 1995′s True Love’s can be. Watch my low, low bar somehow remain unmet.
  

Anyway, shall we…. date??

PART ONE: IN WHICH I NAME MY WIZARDESS AND PICK MY MATE

The first thing I do in Wizardess Heart is give my wide-eyed brunette tot a name. She looks like this:

The game wants me to call her Liz.

TOO BAD! THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

Slaughter Deathblood will prove miserably unworthy of her name, but that’s fine. I pretended throughout her helpless bumbling that it’s all a front for her satanic murder desires, and that got me through a lot of sighing and cake.

When you first get into the game you are greeted with this mess of bargain-bin hunx:

A Poundland Draco Malfoy.

A roguish broccoli-themed person.

An eyepatch.

Malfoy Sr.

A kindly brine shrimp.

An asymmetrically-haired Squall Leonhart.

Alyssa Wong was already locked in a heartfelt embrace with the first Malfoy knockoff and I decided to leave her to his tender mercies. Eyepatch looked like he had a brooding backstory where probably his mother had died, so I viewed our future as a tapestry I had unfolded multiple times in previous dating sims. (Editor’s note: I am wrong. Eyepatch is a sad and kindly furry.) Malfoy Sr’s hair had fainted. I couldn’t date anyone called Randy despite his being a slapdash flamingo man, and I’d already dated Squall Leonhart in 1999.

I figured that the broccoli person, with his slight smile and bad-boy mien, was the one for me. I did not even read his profile card, which was a mistake.

Introducing Luca Orlem:

That dire piece of cheap Claire’s tat hanging from his right earlobe should’ve been a massive red flag. Elias’s smouldering diatribe against him should’ve also been a massive red flag, as I was about to enter a horrid world of unrealised same-sex schoolboy tension. Like A Separate Peace had a baby with Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by way of Naruto.* My spouse went to an all-boys’ school and kept smiling at the barbs in sweet erotic nostalgia. I think “HE HATES ME AND HE KNOWS I DON’T LIKE HIM TOO” is pretty much an invitation to prom. 

It’s also misleading because, as you will see, Luca never evinces the slightest bit of hatred for Elias: he’s too busy doing the Just Dance® “Careless Whisper” routine up on him 2000% of the time. But later, later.

THEREFORE, IMPORTANT FIXES:

* I don’t know what this means.

I plan on posting my exploration chunk by chunk over the next week. If you’ve made it this far, I invite you to join me on a retrospective into two weeks of my life I will never get back following one of the most incomprehensibly dull fantasy-school plots of all time. Help me understand why I became genuinely interested in the plight of Slaughter Deathblood, preliminary student at the world’s least pastorally-minded wizard academy. Accompany me on a journey featuring a boy, a girl, a hot roommate, poignant and nuanced explorations of teen sexuality, and Slaughter Deathblood’s mom fixation.

Spoiler: she does not resist that finely chiseled face, but I like to think she has regrets.