Romantic options in storytelling can add quite a bit to the experience. For one thing, it's a lot more natural. People bang and fall in love when they spend a shitload of time together in stressful situations. A story with no romance or at least bromance will more often than not feel forced and robotic. Also, romance adds further stakes to the story when done correctly, because the protagonist is no longer just fighting for the sake of the overall conflict, they're also fighting for a personal investment in someone they care about.
The problem with modern Bioware and indeed many big modern games, is that they don't spend even remotely enough effort on crafting these scenarios. In ME1, for example, you get about 3 scenes with each character that could be described as "romance," before a scene where you go to the bonezone. Worse still, the scenes are typically of the unsubtle variety. It isn't characters looking back and forth longingly, or waiting in awkward talks because of anxiety, or finding excuses to be alone together, or asking about how they feel about certain personal matters, or anything else that might lend humanity to the situations. Na, your main character just makes a flirty comment, which is usually followed by a flirty response, rinse and repeat for each scene until they decide to mak attack in the last scene. Beyond that it never comes up in any other part of the games. Other than a stray comment or two no one seems to give two shits about your characters life. Which may be painfully true of real life but doesn't make for compelling storytelling. As a result, you get abrupt scenes that are vaguely romantic, with too little emotional investment, and absolutely too little drama. Indeed, the best romantic relationship in recent Bioware history is Tali, simply because there's an actual romantic problem to contend with; it's basically impossible for you two to go to poundtown.
And it's further compounded and exemplified in just about every Bioware game since. Love interests are just one of a selection of waifus, none of them are given the individual attention they required to be meaningful or unique or interesting.
Outside of story, the romances in many RPG's simply don't have enough gameplay implications, and this is probably the biggest strength of the 3DS Fire Emblem games. While their romances storywise are far too simple to be meaningful, the relationship of the characters improves their strengths and abilities as they grow together. You can even change classes and get unique items for certain interactions. To top it all off, certain characters will have children, and depending who they sack up with will depend what skills and classes the child can pick. It feels very fun and lends a bit of strategy to who you want to pairing up with each other.
Since I am also on this topic, I really want to mention the romances of BG2, which are NOT perfect, but are FAR more effective than what we get right now. They're not perfect in that the characters you romance are really dry, few interactions occur with any sense of levity, and the path to the end of each romance is linear and relatively obvious, save for maybe Viconia. However there are major differences to how they are handled.
First and most important is that they are LONG. You probably talk with each romance character 10 or 15 times before it becomes clearly romantic, and then 20 or 30 times after that, more if you include Throne of Bhaal. It takes place at certain time intervals during rest periods, rather than inorganically after hitting certain story goals. Each stage of it has clear points where it can be failed if you say the wrong things, and each step feels like it's effectively developing the relationship. When you finally hit the point of the slamjam, you should feel like these characters earned this moment. And it doesn't revel in it either, you do the horizontal tango off screen. Great thing about that though is that it doesn't end there. The characters spend time talking about the dirty deed, thinking about what they mean now, and what the future might hold. The best part of the system is that it comes up in the main quest. If you romance a character, they will be used against you late in the game, but if you don't romance anyone it's a part of the scenario that doesn't come up. This is the kind of depth that is sorely lacking in modern romance, so even though BG2 doesn't have particularly great romances, I care far more about them than almost any modern game's romance.
As a TL;DR summary, I really think romance is okay, and in many cases could be a huge positive. But I think developers simply aren't giving romances the attention they deserve. Much more time and effort needs to go into making them feel organic and meaningful, rather than just another point on a list of story beats. Romances need more conflict and drama, as well as having some pull in the main story. And I think romances could be far deeper from a gameplay aspect, lending to game scenarios and designs much more than they do now.
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