Pic vaguely related. When playing persona 3/4/5 it slowly dawned on me how it's kind of fucked up that the game incentivizes you to always tell people what they want to hear and change your personality constantly to match the situation (swapping personas). It further encourages this by granting gameplay benefits for ranking relationships up, and at least in the case of 4, locking the true ending behind being the most efficient at getting people to like you.
I haven't played many visual novels/dating sims, but from my limited experience the interesting ones tend to acknowledge this in some way. Doki Doki gets kind of close with it's meta fuckery but the focus is more on how being a visual novel character would suck than about player manipulation. Echo nods in this direction in some scenes where people notice how off the player character is acting, but it's mainly about gay trauma and some other stuff I think I don't get because a) I'm not from a decaying american small town and b) I'm not a furry. Not in the genre, but I thought that was where Deltarune was going with the weird route, but the recent lore dump points more in the direction of commenting on sequence breaking/glitching the game for some as of now unknown purpose.
I feel like the premise of a game calling you out for acting creepy as fuck is obvious enough that something like this must already exist. Does it ?(reccs for good VNs in general are also appreciated)
I don't know how much Hades is considered a VN but Zagreus seems sincere in most of his interactions and only gets cheeky when he's speaking with his dad until they come to a reconciliation. There's not really any choices to be made aside from something that doesn't seem to alter any further conversations but it's fun unlocking the dialogues, there's something like 20k lines of voiced dialogue.
I haven't played many visual novels or dating sims but I would also recommend Hatoful Boyfriend if the idea of being a human trying to date intelligent birds and maybe one of those birds is a cannibalistic wizard is appealing to you.
Seconded on Hades, right now I am trying to get Zag to date Thanatos and correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no benefit to starting that relationship, right? So I am choosing to date Thanatos solely because I want to: (that, and I feel too weird with romancing a boss I fight on the regular).
It doesn't impact the game as far as I know, I definitely opted in to having a emo twink boyfriend though. If you also date Megara there's a scene where they're both waiting in your bed chamber for a threesome. It does unlock dialogue I believe where Zagreus is feeling a little guilty about being poly and Megara tells him it's just something that Greek gods are into.
Yeah also
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it further doesn't really matter because you don't have to "pick one" in my game I am in a relationship with both Megaera and Thanatos.
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I was a little disappointed that Dusa is ace but they handled it really well and I didn't get my feelings hurt too bad.