Love is many things: It is kind, cruel, complicated, fortuitous, tragic…and in some cases digital. In the land of games, there are many tales of heroes saving countless worlds from invasions, or seeking revenge upon those who have wronged them. But sometimes our trials and tribulations are much more personal.
We here at GR sat down and looked deeply into our hearts to choose those games that gave our heart-strings that little extra tug that completely endears their characters and stories to us. Then we quickly took those feelings and made an arbitrary list of those games so that we too could get in on the profitable fun of exploiting emotions that we've come to know as Valentines Day. So without further adieu, here are the gaming couples that mean the most to us.
Ico and Yorda
One of the most brilliant and artistic games to ever be made also holds one of the most endearing stories of companionship and co-dependency ever. Yorda speaks some crazy language that our horny little hero (what? He has horns on his head) can't understand, so their main means of communication are gestures and touch. It's hard not to fall in love with these two underdogs and you'd have to be some sort of cold, heartless shadow monster to not find yourself rooting for these two crazy kids to make it in a world that's out to get them.
Link and Zelda
Sometimes it's hard to tell if these two are more than “just good friends”. They've had so many incarnations with such varying roles that it gives them that will they or won't they hook up nuance that made Cheers' Sam and Diana oh so popular (ask your parents, kids). But even with all these varying persona, very little changes between the two, it's as if they share a -ahem- “link” of some sorts that expands beyond time and space. Truly theirs is a love for all ages past, present and future.
Dom and Maria
Oh poor, poor Dom. You spend just about all of Gears of War 2 searching for your lost love, and when you finally find her in, (spoiler alert!!!) the poor girl has been tortured and emaciated to the point of being nothing more than a shell of a human. So you do the only thing you can do to ease her pain: put a bullet right between her eyes and end her suffering. You loved her so much, that you ended her life instead of letting her suffer anymore. (sob) It's so tragic. I think I'm going to cry…(grabs tissue box)
Cloud and Aeris
So just about every Final Fantasy game to ever exist contains the self-serving story of tragically star-crossed loves, but I went with FFVII's doomed lovers for one specific reason. Their tale is so well known amongst gamers that even I, who has never played VII before is aware of the story and its intricacies and it's much more compelling than say, Tidus and Yuna.
Poor Cloud, It's gotta be a pretty shitty day when your old boss stabs your GF with a sword, but I guess dems the breaks sometimes. At least he was able to take that pain and channel it into saving the world. So even though he's left holding his ladyfriend's corpse in the end, just like in almost every FF game, it's the only way to save the world. And hey, we don't know what he did with her body in between cut scenes, so maybe it didn't end too badly for him.
Mario and The Princess
Our red-hatted, mustachioed hero is a plumber, so he sure knows how to lay pipe. Maybe that's how he was able to get such a disproportionately hotter girlfriend who seems way out of his league. Mario certainly wasn't the first video game character to be sent on a mission to rescue a princess, but he's definitely one of the most unique. He's not a knight or a super-hero, and he's overweight, and on top of that, it seemed like Princess Peach was trying to ditch him all throughout SMB with her consistent excuse of “being in another castle.” But our man wasn't going to take no for an answer and in the end made her the Mario's. She still seems to get “captured” by other guys an awful lot though. Still, this classic couple set the standard for the generations of video game couples to come after them, and for that GR salutes them for being the ultimate gamer love story.
