People have children. This is an obvious fact of Real Life—you wouldn't be here reading this if it wasn't, after all. And every once in a while, this aspect of reality will leak into video games, especially in the Life Simulation Game and Raising Sim genres.
Sometimes, as part of your reward for completing certain tasks in the game, your player character is given their very own bundle of joy to raise — they become a parent. Very often, having children is the ultimate end reward for completing a Romance Sidequest — the player and their chosen Love Interest get Babies Ever After. However, this isn't always the case. Sometimes, the player is given the opportunity to adopt a Heartwarming Orphan (whether or not they have a love interest), or magic is used to give the player character a Wonder Child. These two options can be useful for giving the player character a child who's already old enough to walk and talk, skipping the "baby stage" entirely, and is useful for making the child more of a character. What matters most is that having a child is something that happens to the player over the course of the game — they don't start out as a parent.
What having children actually does for the player varies from game to game, though they tend to do one or more of the following things:
- Romance Endgame. In some games, having children is the reward for completing a specific sidequest (again, very often a Romance Sidequest). They may largely be a Cosmetic Award, offering little to no gameplay benefit. However, they may still have Relationship Values and be characters the player can interact with.
- New Party Members. In some games, having a child is a way of unlocking a new party member or Assist Character. Very often, the child will inherit abilities based on which Love Interest your player character hooked up with. This has some similarities with Creature-Breeding Mechanic, but usually, games that allow your Player Character to have children will only allow them to have a small, limited number of children. A Creature-Breeding Mechanic can usually be done as much as the player likes.
- Raising Sim Elements. In some games, raising a child is an entire mechanic to itself—like a Virtual Pet, but with kids. You must take care of their needs and wants, and can influence their abilities and personality.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Platform
- In Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics, Joe and Mac can each get married with a girl and have a baby with her (who just looks like a baby version of them).
Farm Life Sim
- The Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons franchise has had this as an important feature since its very first installment, and it's a Trope Codifier of this mechanic. Every game in the series with a Romance Sidequest eventually allows you to have a child or children:
- Having a child in Harvest Moon is actually very challenging and requires getting married very early in the game. This child is a baby "forever," though the original game only lasts for two in-game years. Naturally, doing so is part of getting the Golden Ending.
- Harvest Moon 64 and the rest of the "Mineral Town" games (Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, More Friends of Mineral Town, and their remake, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town) were the first games in the franchise to make your child into a character in their own right, with their own likes and dislikes.
- Harvest Moon 3 let you have up to two children, but only if you're playing as a boy. If you're playing as the girl, the game ends with marriage.
- Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and its girl counterpart makes raising your child a major part of the game. You can influence what hobbies and skills he or she has, and this influences which ending you get and what career he or she decides to pursue. The games with the "DS" subtitle, being rough counterparts to these games, also have your child grow up into a full adult in the course of the game, though you don't get to influence their personality.
- Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility lets your child help out on the farm. In the New Game Plus mode of that game, you play as your grown-up child, who looks exactly like you. Its sequel, Harvest Moon: Animal Parade lets you have two children—their personalities are determined by Dialogue Trees when they're babies, and they can help out around the farm, with their skills being determined by their personalities. You can also have them walk around town with you to play with you.
- Harvest Moon: A New Beginning has your child naturally grow into a toddler. However, the Harvest Goddess will make them magic candy that lets them turn into a teenager for about a month, letting you decide what age to have your child be.
- Story of Seasons (2014) is the only game in the franchise to let you have twins—naturally, male and female fraternal twins.
- Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town uses the same child system as the original game it's remaking, with your child being a toddler forever. However, there's one small change: If your spouse is the same gender as you, you get magically given a baby by the Harvest Goddess, without having to wait for it to be born.
- Rune Factory, as a spinoff of Story of Seasons, naturally has this too:
- In the first Rune Factory, a child simply appears in your wife's arms after you've been married for 150 days. The child doesn't even get a name and is perhaps the least interactive child since the franchise's first game.
- In Rune Factory 2, after having a child, there's a Time Skip, after which your child becomes the main character. Their abilities are based on your original PC's.
- In Rune Factory 3, you can have up to three children—the largest number in the series. They have one of three personalities, but don't act as other characters do—they can't fight and don't accept gifts.
- In Rune Factory 4, your child becomes a possible party member for you after they're born. They inherit abilities from your spouse and can be quite the Badass Adorable if leveled. There's even a special equipment that gives your child the same stats as your PC.
- In Rune Factory 5, you can once again have up to three children—the first child can be either male or female, but the second and third will always be male and female fraternal twins. Their personalities are determined by dialogue options before they're born. Like in 4, they can also be potential party members.
- The Harvest Moon (Natsume) games feature this as well, as they're a competing franchise with the original Story of Seasons. After getting married, you'll have a child with your Love Interest. Notably, this series takes the time to explain that the Harvest Sprites are looking after your child when you're busy working, to avert the uncomfortable implications of your player character leaving their baby alone all day while they work.
- In My Time at Portia, you can have up to two children after being married. The game gives you the option of having them biologically if you're in a heterosexual relationship, but you can also always adopt from the Church of the Light even if you could potentially have biological children. Biological children's appearances are based on you and your spouse's appearances, while adopted children have a randomly generated appearance. Your children don't do much, but they do grow a little, and they do have Relationship Values you can increase by giving them gifts.
- In Roots of Pacha, you can pray to Pacha to bless you and your Union partner (spouse) with a child, and you can have up to two children. A few days later, the baby magically appears in your bed, and for the first two weeks, they'll cry for your attention between 3-4PM. Bonding with your baby will help them grow into a toddler, but missing their cry for the day will make them fussy the next morning, making you tired and thus lose stamina.
- In Shepherd's Crossing 2, you'll have a child one year after marriage. Said child looks exactly like your player character.
- In Stardew Valley, you can have two children after getting married—biological if you married someone of the opposite gender, or Happily Adopted if you married someone the same gender. You'll always have both a boy and a girl. They don't have any dialogue, though they do have Relationship Values. Notably, if you decide you don't like them, you can use dark magic to turn them into doves... and potentially get some creepy scenes for doing so.
Other Life Sim
- In The Sims, Sims can add children to their families if you're so inclined, and you can help them raise their children. In The Sims, there was no aging; child Sims were children forever. There were also no biological families; all children were adopted. Starting in The Sims 2, Sims aged; your Sims could now get pregnant, and children would eventually grow up and become adult Sims themselves. Sims 4 eventually added the abilty to have "Science Babies" where a sim could send away a DNA sample, with or without a partner's sample and have a test tube baby grown off screen for them to raise. The parents don't have to be romantically involved and sex doesn't matter.
- In World Neverland: Daily Life in Elnea Kingdom, you can have up to six children with your spouse, providing you have a big enough house and are lucky enough in conceiving. Having children is important, as you'll need to pass down to one of your children eventually in order to keep playing the game, as your original player character will eventually grow old and die. Your children will ask you for special favors no other characters will, they have special dialogue for playing with them on festivals, and they'll sometimes ask for help with their schoolwork.
- In Life: the Game, there's one level where you have to help your wife give birth to quintuplets. In the next level, they've grown up and you're babysitting your grandchildren.
- In Cattails, you can have up to four kittens with your mate. The number of kittens you have is dependent on how many gifts you give your mate, so you'll need to be very nice to them if you want a large family.
- In Elona, you can marry and have a baby with any one of your party members. This is referred to as "making a gene."
- WolfQuest: After completing the first chapter, Amethyst Mountain, you're taken to Slough Creek with your NPC mate, where, after finding and choosing a suitable den, you will have up to four pups that you have to protect and feed.
Turn-Based Strategy
- Fire Emblem:
- Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War introduced child mechanics to the series, where almost all female units could be paired with a male one by raising their Relationship Values. If paired up, the girls would then have two children each before the Time Skip half-way through the game, and when the story picks up again 17 years later, these now grown-up children pick up their parents' swords (literally) and continue their fight. If any of the girls aren't paired up by a certain point, their childrennote are replaced in the second half of the game by considerably weaker, but Suspiciously Similar Substitutes. Needless to say, this system served as a major inspiration and a prototype for Awakening.
- In Fire Emblem: Awakening, after you pair your main character up with their chosen Love Interest, you'll have a child... in the form of a Kid from the Future who comes back in time to assist you. They inherit abilities based on who your Love Interest is and become important party members. Your other party members can also have Kid from the Future visitors after you pair them up as well.
- Fire Emblem Fates, inherits its child mechanics pretty much wholesale from its predecessor Awakening, though this time it is justified using "Deep realms", pocket universes where time moves signifigantly faster.
- The core premise of the Agarest Senki series. You romance one of 3 potential brides who will afterwards produce the child who will carry on your legacy in the next generation.
- As befit a feudal ruler, in Crusader Kings rulers have to direct the education of their children and their wards.
Eastern RPG
- Conception: Please Give Birth to My Child! and its sequel Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars is about creating magical children using the energies of your main character and his various Love Interest characters in order to become party members. You form a party of yourself backed up by several "Star Children," and their abilities are based on which love interest helped you magically create them. They're stronger the higher your Relationship Values with each girl.
- In Dragon Quest V, by the end of the game, your character has kids who join Mom and Dad in the adventuring party, but the player has no input in how they grow up except for them having different hair colors depending on which girl you choose to marry.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers:
- Completing jobs with a reward marked as "???" can give you a Pokémon Egg that will join your team once it hatches.
- After completing the "Surrounded Sea" for the first time, the player will find an egg that hatches into a Manaphy.
Western RPG
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The DLC Hearthfire allows you to adopt up to two Heartwarming Orphans. They live in your house, and you can bring them souvenirs from your adventures, give them allowances, and play games with them.
- Fable: Starting in Fable II, the Hero can have a child by sleeping with an opposite-sex spouse; Fable III adds the option to adopt. The Hero's spouse manages the day-to-day work of raising them, but children's personalities and Alignments are influenced by the Hero, and the Hero needs to maintain their relationship with them through dialogue and Sidequests. They're killed off in the Fable II main quest, but the player has a choice to revive them at the end.
- In Baldur's Gate II, if you romance Aerie, she will eventually become pregnant and give birth to your son between that game and Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. The baby doesn't unlock any additional gameplay or story content, however, except for permanently occupying one of Aerie's quick-item slots.
- Divinity: Original Sin II: If the Red Prince completes his personal quest with his prophesied mate, he hatches his first child — the first of a new line of Great Red Dragons, which can join him as a Bond Creature.
MMORPG
- Prius Online, also known as Arcane Saga Online, was a discontinued Korean MMORPG where virtual couples who met online could give birth or adopt a virtual child.
Visual Novels
- The “good” Amanda ending in Daughter for Dessert involves Amanda getting pregnant, then flying to Hawaii with the protagonist to start fresh away from everyone who knows them.
- In Double Homework, the best ending with Johanna and Tamara involves both of them getting pregnant.
- The Family Ending in Melody, which sees the protagonist and title character together with a baby, is an inversion. Melody's pregnancy makes it impossible for her to go on tour to promote her new album, destroying the possibility of a perfect ending for the couple.
Non-Video Game Examples
- At the end of Horton Hatches the Egg, the titular elephant becomes the parent of an elephant-bird that came from the egg he hatched.
