If you think about it, the concept of a “dark cozy game” isn’t as new as you’d think: Rune Factory’s been doing it since 2006.
-One of the townspeople is a veteran with PTSD, and the only reasons he hasn’t ended it all are his library and his child.
-Said child was orphaned in the war he fought in and came from the “enemy” country. She doesn't know this yet and doesn't understand why the only other member of said country hides her racial traits. Make of that what you will.
-The only other child in this game doesn’t know that the nice man who runs the general store is his dad and presumably never learns this unless the main character gets involved.
-Everybody either has only one parent or is an orphan (actually, this is a staple for the whole series).
-The reason the main character has amnesia is because he was abducted and experimented upon by a foreign agent who’s emperor wants to invade and take over the main character’s homeland and nearly succeeds.
-The main character’s brother finds him but never tells him the truth out of fear of burdening him. But even if he did tell the truth, nothing would ever be the same between them because there’s no way to get the main character’s memories back.
-And, oh yeah, the evil emperor suicide baits his own general.
-The hot, gloomy neighbor turns out to be a defector from the military of the evil empire the main character fought in the first game and has horrible PTSD from his time there.
-A soldier from said evil empire barges into town looking for said neighbor to drag him back to the empire and only fails because he decides to engage in pigtail pulling-ass shenanigans with the main character instead.
-The main character is forced to kill a potential love interest’s pet in front of her at the behest of another potential love interest.
-A third potential love interest got gifted kid burnout so badly that she lost the ability to do magic.
-A fourth potential love interest is a runaway princess whose departure from her homeland threw it into chaos.
-This game allows you to fatshame a potential love interest and even portrays it as a good thing 🤢
-I haven’t finished Frontier yet so idk for sure, but apparently two of the love interests were originally one person whose trauma was so horrific that she split into two???
-One of the potential love interests has an eating disorder and nobody says or does anything about it.
-Another one is forced to marry an asshole if the main character doesn’t marry her.
-The reason the asshole is an asshole is due to past experiences of fantasy racism against him.
-The main character, previously thought to have abandoned his family, actually sacrificed himself to keep said family and the rest of the town from being obliterated due to a prophecy. His child, the new main character in the latter half of the game, has to go through hell and back to pull him back to the world of the living almost completely by themselves and almost no one’s the wiser.
-The fantasy racism hinted at in previous games comes to a head here, as the main character has to hide his half-human, half-monster nature from literally everybody for the majority of the game.
-Later on in the game, you learn that the Univir were forced out of their home in Sharance and into the desert by the humans. And there are only two Univir characters in the entire game, so make of that what you will.
-One of the major characters had his hometown destroyed, which is why he now lives in the desert with the Univir.
-Just when things start to look up, the main character’s fiancée gets kidnapped and he has to fistfight a god to get her back.
-Said god not only reveals that literally everything that’s happened, including the main character’s amnesia, is part of his master gambit, but he also forces the main character to choose between getting his full memories back or his fiancée.
-Can't say much here because I haven't played Tides/Oceans yet, but I do know that it involves the main characters being isekai-ed into another world with no way of getting back home and body snatching.
-The main character FALLS FROM THE FUCKING. SKY.
-The main character is tricked by the local god into unplugging all the human sacrifices who willingly served as batteries for who knows how long to keep said god alive at the cost of their lives and humanity. Doing so nearly kills the god.
-Even after being freed, the four former sacrifices still retain vestiges of their monstrous forms and are temporal fish out of water, with everyone and everything they’ve ever known and loved being long dead and gone.
-Also, one of the townspeople is a spy for the evil empire from 1 and Frontier and even breaks into the main character’s house to try to kill the god, who he thinks destroyed his hometown.
-Turns out it was really the empire who destroyed the spy’s hometown. When called out on it by the spy, the emperor's just like:
-The empire also invades the country for the second time.
-The emperor casually reveals that he committed genocide against the main character’s people because he’s a fuckass sore loser.
-He also possesses the local god and turns into an eldritch abomination that the main character has to kill in a weird inter-dimensional realm. Killing him KILLS THE GOD THE MAIN CHARACTER HAD LITERALLY JUST SAVED FIVE MINUTES AGO. (She gets better thanks to the main character pulling an Orpheus gambit (the second in the series!), but STILL.)
-On a lesser note, two potential love interests have mommy issues out the wazoo. For one of them, said mommy issues could’ve been completely avoided if said mother had just had one normal conversation with him. For the other, her mommy issues are nothing in comparison to the shit her father puts her through—including sabotaging her relationship. WHY.
-Another potential love interest accidentally got betrothed before he sacrificed himself, and he feels extremely guilty for leaving his accidental intended behind. That same potential love interest occasionally doubts that anything he’s experiencing right now is real and occasionally uses the main character as a reality check.
-A fourth potential love interest is married to the job thanks to workplace sexism threatening her position.
-A fifth has chronic fatigue so bad it fucks with her job and possibly even her self-worth.
-A sixth has anxiety. This is played for comedy until she develops a fear of outliving the main character and loses her voice.
-The local MILF and her daughter fled from something so horrible it killed the MILF’s husband. NOBODY EVER ELABORATES ON WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE FLEEING FROM.
-The parents of two potential love interests vanished over a decade ago, forcing the elder of the two to grow up way too quickly and serve as the younger’s parent, leading to him becoming a workaholic that even his boss can’t stop.
-The “sexy foreign transfer student from an 80s/90s sitcom” trope potential love interest is constantly running away from a curse and thus can never stay in one place.
-The horny potential love interest the main character saves halfway through the game is starving herself (or is at the very least under-eating) to avoid getting kicked out of yet another town. She’s also passively suicidal.
-Another love interest developed agoraphobia after being trapped in a dungeon with a monster as a child.
-The hidden princess love interest and the knight love interest are on a secret mission to save the country from bring taken over by the princess’s evil, incestuous uncle who’s hellbent on marrying her.
-The stepmother of another potential love interest almost dies from an epidemic because the cure to said epidemic is illegal.
-Thanks to the genocidal maniac from the last game, the main character in this game is the last of their kind.
-The villain in this game tried to brainwash the populace into complete obedience by manipulating a goddess into helping him. He also told her that the main character killed her sister, so she tries to kill the main character in retaliation. When the villain’s initial plan falls through, he abandons her to die.
-One of the reasons he did this is because he witnessed the horrors associated with the evil empire collapsing and became disgusted with people’s depravity and violence against each other. The other is that he made a Faustian bargain with a nasty-ass fish eldritch abomination, and said abomination would really love to break out of its cage and devour the world right about now.
-The goddess’s sister was severely injured during their awakening (revival?) and now suffers from permanent chronic fatigue and possibly chronic pain, too, to the point where she can’t sustain her true form for too long.
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