- Alone in the Dark (2008): The rather forced relationship that develops between Carnby and female companion/sidekick Sarah Flores. Flores is surly, useless, and basically does nothing but complain, and Carnby really isn't much better. They have basically no chemistry whatsoever and know each other for just a few days. Before long, though, it's kissing time.
- The relationship between Apollo and Rhea in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Case 5: Turnabout Substitution seems to progress unnaturally quickly. However, it eventually turns out that it was simply a ploy on Rhea's part to get inside information on the case. Lampshaded when Apollo, after learning that Rhea is the serial killer, curses himself for trusting her so easily when they only met days ago.
- Almost every single Official Couple in the Aveyond series have been considered as such due to the fact that Amanda prefers pairing up her characters in an unconventional way, which frequently means that the couple barely interact and have better defined relationships with other people.
- In Ahriman's Prophecy, Devin would canonically marry Alicia rather than his Childhood Friend Talia. In the game, it's possible to have Devin marry either girl, but Alicia is an Optional Party Member (while Talia and Devin are Required Party Member), and due to Complacent Gaming Syndrome, she's not a preferred addition to the party (her stats are just average, and she doesn't have any useful abilities like Jack's lockpicking and Frederick's shapeshifting), so many players would finish the game without her involvement at all.
- In Aveyond 1, Rhen's canon love interest is Dameon, but aside from the briefly flirting with her when they first met, he rarely says or does anything important throughout the whole journey (he flirts with her some more if you buy the manor in Sedona, but that's optional). In fact, an earlier build actually allows the party to avoid recruiting him altogether (although he would suddenly show up in the Final Boss battle anyway), making their status as the designated Official Couple even more bizarre. In any case, many players have complained that Rhen falling in love with him that she would be tempted to join the dark side alongside him feel very forced.
- Aveyond 3 gives Edward three possible love interests in Mel, Stella and Lydia, but Word of God states that he would canonically end up with Stella. This is despite the fact that he spends more time interacting with Mel, especially in the first two chapters. The "canon" prologue of the third chapter even has Edward almost marrying Mel before the wedding was sabotaged by Lydia, implying that the two were a couple.
- In Aveyond 4, fans were quite baffled that the Hi'beru and Phye were even included as Ingrid's potential Love Interests, because 1) Phye was only introduced in the last portion of the game and barely spoke to Ingrid at all, and 2) Hi'beru had a much more meaningful interaction with Rowen. Not to mention, it's quite an odd choice that Ingrid, who has a Single-Target Sexuality for Boyle, is the one who has the multiple Love Interest options instead of Boyle himself, who doesn't want to have anything to do with her and needs to find a True Love to be free from Ingrid's curse.
- At the end of Bayonetta 3, Bayonetta and Luka undergo a last-minute Relationship Upgrade near the end of the game a little while before they both get dragged down to Inferno together. Now, with this game introducing The Multiverse to the franchise, it's also revealed that Bayonetta and Luka had gotten together in other timelines and sired a daughter in the form of Viola, so there were plenty of opportunities to show how the various stages of the relationship between the alternate Bayonettas and Lukas developed. But this is never addressed. In the prime timeline, their relationship amounts to not much more than a Last-Minute Hookup. Throughout the entire series, their relationship had been portrayed as vastly and lightheartedly unequal, with Luka being a dorky everyman and Handsome Lech chasing after Bayonetta, with a lot of flirting and Belligerent Sexual Tension along the way. With this setup in mind, many fans felt that there just wasn't enough chemistry between the two to make the pairing believable, and even those who were in support of the pairing felt that the execution of their romance ended up betraying the pairing's main appeal.
- Catherine actually punishes players who attempt to put this trope into practice. Throughout the game, your interactions with Catherine and Katherine will affect a meter — acting like you're in love with Katherine tips it to the Order end of the meter and the same goes for Catherine with Chaos. However, through a series of questions near the end of the game, it's possible for Vincent to choose either girl (or even neither) no matter what your position on the meter is. But, the game checks the results of your questions against the meter, and if it doesn't match up — for example your answers suggest that Vincent wants to stay with Katherine, even though the meter reflects that he's acted more in love with Catherine — you will get a bad ending. (On the opposite end of the scale, if your answers perfectly match up with Vincent's meter, you get a "true" or better-than-good ending.)
- Kid and Serge in Chrono Cross. Kid is a unique example in that the player isn't initially forced to take her into the party. It's entirely possible to refuse her at several points and opt not to come to her rescue, but she shows up at all the major plot points anyway. The story justifies it by saying that she just follows you around because you're tough and can clear the way for her, but it mostly means she shows up at exactly the right time to make a dramatic speech and run ahead of you, only to end up imperiled and need to be rescued — at the player's discretion.
- Out of all the Official Couples that get together in Criminal Case, Carrie x Enzo is probably the least popular among fans, largely due to the series being Cut Short forcing Pretty Simple to rush through their relationship without having time to develop any proper romantic build-up between the two. Their relationship goes like this: Enzo asks Carrie out on a date, but he offends her by his egoistic remarks, and she leaves before the date even starts. After a few cases of them tiptoeing around each other, Enzo takes care of Carrie when she gets sick, and this is enough for her to look past his chauvinistic personality and reciprocate his advances. Two cases later, they get engaged.
- Cyberpunk 2077: The romance between a straight, female V and River Ward, a hard boiled cop, comes across like this. It takes place in a very short period of time while the pair search for River's nephew who was taken by a paedophile serial killer and left to die. The focus is on finding the child rather than River as a person. His storyline is entirely optional, isn't connected to the main questline like the other major romances are and River is a very Flat Character in a game filled with larger than life personalities.
- David Cage has gained a fair amount of notoriety for this trope:
- Beyond: Two Souls generally tries to push Jodie with her CIA handler Ryan Clayton no matter the decisions you have her make. Most notable is how the game goes from the first time they meet, in which he's incredibly insensitive towards her and basically forces her into the CIA to a scene taking place roughly more than a year later, where Jodie states that she's in love with him. This becomes PARTICULARLY annoying if you've shut down Ryan at every opportunity and chose to die. Jodie will STILL act like she has feelings for him. Similarly, it's possible for Jodie to end up in a romance with Jay in the ending despite only knowing him for about two days.
- In Fahrenheit, Carla is an NYPD police officer pursuing Lucas Kane, who she believes to be a psychotic murderer. Some developments in the case eventually led her to doubt his guilt, but she remains suitably skeptical and logical. She finally meets Lucas at the grave of his long-time girlfriend Tiffany, who had died two days before. Within about a month, Carla has risked her job and her life to help Lucas, begun to trust him implicitly without her previous intelligent questioning, declared her love for him, and gotten herself knocked up with his zombie child, all entirely offscreen. And this happens on all three endings, including the good one. Not to mention you can actually get back together with Tiffany without averting any of this.
- And in Heavy Rain, we have Ethan and Madison. This one has the benefit of being sort of optional in that you can turn her down, but Madison spends most of the game nursing Ethan back to health after the Trials and believing, for very good reasons, that he may be the Origami Killer with a very deep-seated mental illness. The clock is ticking on Shaun Mars's life, Ethan is emotionally and physically wounded, Madison hasn't slept in days due to insomnia caused by PTSD, but as part of Quantic Dream's celebrated history of completely inappropriate and nonsensical sex scenes, Madison decides this is the perfect time to get horizontal. With an injured man who openly admits he might be a serial killer who drowns little boys.
- It's made even worse in the endings of the game where Ethan hooks up with Madison but Shaun dies. They go to the cemetery to visit Shaun's grave, where Madison tells him, while they're still at the grave, that she wants Ethan to bear her child and wants life to go back to the way it was before the game. This insensitivity ends up being extremely cathartic when Ethan takes this extremely badly and shoots himself, and many players who got this ending were flabbergasted with how insensitive Madison was in suggesting that after Shaun had died shortly before.
- In Detroit: Become Human, while slightly less blatant than the other examples it is still shockingly easy for Markus to romance North (as in, have her Relationship Values jump from "Neutral" to "Lovers") even if he repeatedly goes against her tendencies towards violent revolution provided that you do not deliberately go out of your way to fail.
- This is done on a meta-level in Doki Doki Literature Club!.
- In the first act, no matter who you spend time with, the game will always allow Sayori to have a love confession to you, even if you ignored her the entire time. Conversely, if you dedicated every scene to Sayori, you are forced to spend the weekend with either Yuri or Natsuki and share a very intimate scene with them in spite of barely sharing any emotional connection with them previously.
- In the second act, Yuri forces her way to the center of the story (even if you select words that cater to Natsuki). Though at that point, the game is so glitched and Yuri's reaction is the same whether you select yes or no.
- Final Fantasy:
- Squall and Rinoa's romance in Final Fantasy VIII can come off this way, as Squall's extensive emotional issues keep him in heavy denial about his feelings for the first two discs of the game until Rinoa's coma forces him to start confronting them. Player choices may exacerbate this further: by not taking Rinoa along as a party member and/or missing certain plot events which provide Character Development for the pair, and by refusing the occasional dialogue options indicating that Rinoa's efforts to coax Squall out of his shell are making headway, the player can bypass much of the buildup of the relationship, causing Squall's sudden fixation on Rinoa in Disc 3 to seem as though it comes out of nowhere.
- A similar example can happen in Final Fantasy X, which clearly intends to ship Tidus/Yuna, but inexplicably includes a relationship system that includes Yuna, Lulu, and Rikku. Thus a number of scenes can take place implying Tidus' attraction with one of the other two girls before the game takes over and pushes him back to Yuna instead. While not nearly as extreme as the Rinoa example, as Yuna and Tidus have plenty of mandatory scenes throughout the story that build them as a couple and Yuna is always in the party when the game needs her to be, it can feel a bit ham-fisted if the player made choices aiming for one of the other two women and yet Tidus always ends up with Yuna, Lulu always ends up with Wakka (which comes out of nowhere in its own right), and Rikku always ends up in the sequel single and refusing to talk about her relationship with Gippal.
- Final Fantasy XV: Noctis and Lunafreya have a relationship that is seen by fans as poorly drawn out and unfocused. This couple first met when they were kids after Noctis had a near death experience and they had not met again until the events of the actual game when they get betrothed as a result of a treaty between Lucis and Niflheim that turned out to be a sham. Even then, Noctis only interacted with Lunafreya before the eighth chapter through a notebook that they kept delivering notes to each other with Luna's dog, Umbra being the carrier. Noctis doesn't even meet up with Luna again until Ardyn murders her. The game's epilogue even shows them after they died, dressed in their wedding clothes and sharing a kiss. All of this is really not helped by the fact that Luna in general gets very little screentime, and Noctis spends almost the entire story hanging out with the actual main adventuring party, all of whom get their relationships with him fleshed out extremely well — meaning the love story that's meant to be seen as the core of the narrative to the point of being the game's logo is also the least interesting relationship in it.
- Fire Emblem:
- In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Finn and Lachesis are nearly an Official Couple; Finn gets a conversation with Lachesis's daughter in the second generation if he's her fathernote , and they're one of the pairings in the Oosawa manga adaptation. In Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, it's strongly implied that Finn and Lachesis were in love and that Finn continued to search for her. The only hitch is that during the time both characters are playable in Genealogy of the Holy War, they have no conversations together, not even if they're married in Chapter 5 (admittedly, Finn isn't there for plot reasons). It's like the devs somehow forgot to put it in there. Then again, it's also heavily implied in Thracia that Beowulf was Lachesis's "canon" lover, which makes things even more messy — given the timeframe, it's not impossible that Finn and Lachesis could have hooked up between the timeskip for a brief period, but it's not very likely, either.
- Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Roy's supports with his teacher Cecelia focus on him growing as a leader and tactician, and end with her concluding: "From now on, you are not my student. You are my colleague and friend. If there’s anything I can help you with after the war, I would be glad to assist you." This results in them getting married in the epilogue, despite the huge age gap between them. Roy's other love interests have more clear romantic development in their supports.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening mostly averts it — you can only get your characters married after they spend a lot of time on the battlefield together (which can never be less than four battles, and will usually be more), watch multiple conversations that give reasons at least somewhat believable for the two falling in love (with more conversations implied), and even then you have to make the final push for the characters to get married yourself. Except Chrom. For storyline and mechanics reasons, he gets married to whichever one of his prospects he has the most support points with after Chapter 11. One of the characters Chrom can marry, Olivia, is made playable right at the beginning of that chapter. So if Chrom has no support points with any of his other prospects or they are unavailable due to permadeath or marrying someone else, he can marry Olivia very shortly after meeting her with all of one support point — not even enough for a C-Rank conversation! There's also a chance the player could get to the point of Chrom's marriage in the game and not have any of his potential brides still available, in which case he'll marry a random villager the player never hears from again. This even gets lampshaded:Lissa: "Turn my back one minute and you're married. The next minute? A baby!"
- The game also makes an effort to Hand Wave why Chrom is suddenly forced into marriage (besides the plot reason of Lucina needing to be born to set up "Marth's" reveal as future her). He'd recently ascended to ruler of Ylisse and was the last with a rightful claimnote , so there was popular pressure for him to take a wife and produce a child to visibly secure the nation's future.
- While Fire Emblem Fates mostly averts this as well — you have to pair the prospective couple in battle together lots of times, watch conversations that make the pairing somewhat plausible, and have to physically confirm that you want this couple to get married — some of the supports are so oddly written that this trope can only really be in play. Especially egregious are the Avatar's supports with his/her own siblings. Yes, granted, it turns out on both sides they're Not Blood Siblings, but still, given that half of them grew up with the Avatar as a sibling and the other half (aside from Ryoma, who knew the truth the whole time) thought the Avatar was their blood relative, it's a bit hard to believe that they've 'always been in love' with the Avatar.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a clear aversion. The game shows that months pass between support milestones, more intimate bonds can only be finalized after a lengthy Time Skip (and casual friends who continue to fight together after that time don't necessarily have another support tier), and Byleth can only propose to someone they've built an appropriate bond with after the final battle.
- In Fire Emblem Heroes, Fjorm was initially introduced as an earnest, loyal defender of her homeland, but over time she came to be defined more and more by her romantic feelings for the summoner. This was already rather controversial, both for fans who wanted to see more of her original personality and those summoners who would rather her attention not be directed towards them, but it reached new heights in the Fire and Ice Tempest Trials event. If the associated Ascended Laegjarn is summoned, many of her lines and even her confession speech talk about Fjorm's feelings for the summoner, even threatening to hurt them if they let her down, which was heavily disliked by players who much preferred Laegjarn herself. Even Laegjarn's newfound protectiveness of Fjorm was criticized, due to the two barely meeting in the original story, and not exactly having any opportunity to become close during the Trial event. It doesn't help that since the Summoner is a Heroic Mime meant to represent the player, any "romance" can't lead anywhere due to being merely the player characters avatar.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has this as a plot element. Meet the right circumstances and the gal will fall head over heels with you. At least with the first one, it's rescuing her from a house fire (that you started). With others, it's simply that you have six pack abs or she has a chubby fetish.
- Grim Fandango: Manny escorts Meche to the Underworld, briefly talks about her life and is suddenly so in love with her that he spends the next three years searching for her, ignoring any other woman that has an interest in him. Though it's possible he's doing it because he feels guilty about dragging her into a massive conspiracy and ruining her afterlife.
- Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life has this happen if you don't marry anyone by the end of the first year. If such a thing happens, you end up proposed to by whichever marriage candidate has the highest affection, regardless of how little it is. Celia is usually the character because she gains affection from just buying from Vesta's, with Rock being the default in Another Wonderful Life. However, this is averted if it's Nami, who agrees to marry you so she can stay in Forget-Me-Not Valley since she's otherwise forced to leave because of a lack of money.
- Hero of the Kingdom: The romance in the second game falls into this. It's given very little focus, and it seems to come rather from out of nowhere when the hero suddenly announces narratively that "I have to tell her how I feel." Prior to this, it's shown that he thinks she's beautiful, but she doesn't even seem to like him, yet he confesses feelings the player didn't know he had and she responds by kissing him.
- Hyrule Warriors: A common criticism of the story is how the heavily inconsistent Reincarnation Romance angle of Link and Zelda's dynamic is suddenly blown up to a guaranteed thing between them, despite the fact that there are multiple titles in the series where Link and Zelda meet and barely form a relationship (never mind a romantic one), and even here, they have maybe two or three interactions tops that push the Implied Love Interest label on them. A possible explanation for this is that the only people who comment on their "fated union" are Cia and Lana, both of whom have story reasons to invest in that idea; Cia uses it as an excuse to lash out in jealousy and seduce Link over to her side, while Lana plays it up as a reason to cajole herself to stop pining for Link and start focusing on her duties again before she too has her affections turn toxic and used against her. However, that line of reasoning does bring up the question of why Lana would even need to maintain the mantra in the first place if she still had a chance with Link.
- Illusion of Gaia has Will suddenly narrating that he was developing feelings for Kara after they share a meal of fresh fish together while drifting on a raft. Beyond this, there's little to show in-game that they even are falling in love, due to any potential romance arc being sidelined by the main plot, and how Will is able to get to his next destination once his business in the current area is finished.
- The ending of Kingdom Hearts II and the credits of the 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue HD collection indicates that Roxas and Naminé, Nobodies of Sora and Kairi, are intended to be a romantic pairing. The problem is that whereas Sora and Kairi share a history and close friendship, Roxas and Naminé have only a few interactions that are largely based around plot exposition — Roxas himself shows much more closeness with Hayner, Pence, Olette, Axel and Xion than he ever does with Naminé, so pairing them together comes out of left field and only seems to be on the basis that if Sora and Kairi are in love then their Nobodies have to be. Kingdom Hearts III seems to tone this down a little by having Roxas's focus on Axel and Xion, and later Hayner, Pence, Olette, and Isa. Meanwhile Naminé is seen interacting with Sora, Riku, Xion, and was mentioned to have contacted Terra.
- On the topic of Naminé, her feelings for the Riku Replica create an example... for the real Riku, as he seems to reciprocate her feelings in his clone's stead. What makes it this trope is that, over the entire length of time Riku had to develop those feelings, he had infinitely more important things on his mind.
- L.A. Noire: Some fans don't take the lack of relationship development between Cole and Elsa well.
- The Last Story suffers from this. The player is supposed to believe that Zael and Calista fall in Love at First Sight and that that's a good enough reason for them to be together. While this could very well be the case, the problem is that there simply aren't enough scenes that show them interacting together. Meanwhile, the Beta Couple (Lowell and Syrenne) inverts this. They similarly don't get many scenes together but they do have a lot of in-game banter and a long history together which helps to affirm that there is indeed a romantic attraction there.
- In Left 4 Dead, Francis has seen Rochelle for a grand total of three seconds, they want each other (although in a snarky way). Ellis and Zoey could be an example, but Zoey won't always return the sentiment.
- Dart and Shana in The Legend of Dragoon hook up at the end of Disk 2 with very little build up. While Shana clearly has feelings for Dart from the beginning, Dart states several times that he doesn't see Shana as a romantic interest at allnote and considers her his baby sister. Then in the last ten minutes of the second disk, Dart declares that he loves Shana as well and they share a kiss under the stars. That Shana gets Put on a Bus early in the next disk for the rest of the game doesn't help.
- Lonely Wolf Treat: The relationship between Danny and Chai. The two officially meet and become friends in "Dreaming Treat", with Chai helping Danny through their gender identity issues. In the next game, Mochi discovers that the two hooked up without proper buildup to it. However, Tropes Are Not Bad in this case as their subplot doesn't affect the story and fans seem to love the ship regardless.
- The hero of Mad Paradox ends up married and raising a family with a completely nondescript girl he's rescued from the Big Bad. She only appears once in the beginning (in the background of a vision) and once at the end (after you've defeated the Big Bad). And they treat this as some sort of grand romantic ending. Meanwhile, the hot green-haired True Companion girl who's accompanied you for most of the game through good and bad, battling evil and putting it on the line for you...just sorta wanders off with a pithy "It was fun, bye-bye". Most unsatisfying ending ever.
- Mass Effect:
- One complaint about the first game is that, because the dialogue menu doesn't list the player's full lines before they're selected, the player could start a romantic relationship with a crewmate on accident by just being nice. Later games rectified this somewhat by making it clearer when that selecting a choice would start a romantic relationship.
- In Mass Effect 2, the Normandy's pilot, Joker, and the ship's self-aware AI, EDI, start out hostile to one another. They butt heads frequently (and comedically), but eventually develop respect for one another as comrades and equals. Come Mass Effect 3, after EDI gains a humanoid robot body, the two rather quickly start a romantic relationship if the player tells them to go for it. Some fans found the jump from "comedic pilot/computer duo" to "soulmates" rather bizarre and quick.
- Metal Gear:
- In Metal Gear Solid Snake and Meryl have a scene where they meet, they separate, then have another scene later on that expands a bit on Meryl's character. Almost immediately after is the Psycho Mantis fight, at the end of which Mantis claims out of nowhere that Snake has a large place in Meryl's heart (ironically coming ten minutes after she herself claims to have had psychotherapy to destroy her interest in men while in training — so much for that). They have another conversation, then Meryl is shot and she's not seen again until the finale, where they're suddenly having a romantic moment and riding off into the sunset. However, Meryl is a complete no-show in the next game (the only hint of her even still existing is a purely optional Codec conversation between Otacon and Snake, where the latter comments that he has "had enough of tomboys" in regards to Olga Gurlukovich vaguely reminding Otacon of Meryl), and in MGS4 it turns out the two broke up rather quickly afterwards.
- Metal Gear Solid 2 has a rather infamous example with Raiden and Rose. Rose is introduced as Raiden's girlfriend, and most of their conversations are about their relationship, ranging from how Sickeningly Sweethearts they are to her being a nagging girlfriend asking him to remember an important date. By the end, this is actually justified, as it turns out she's a spy for the Patriots who has changed her looks and personality in order for him to fall in love with her, with much of their relationship being scripted on her part. The ending has them both swear to help each other discover their true selves and form a more genuine connection, but that doesn't stop most players from being irritated to hell and back by the forced nature of their relationship.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 has similar issues with Snake and EVA, though it's less prominent as EVA is a radio contact for most of the game so at least they have more than a few conversations. Completely justified as EVA is a spy and deliberately throwing herself at Snake to manipulate him.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4 the relationship between Otacon and Naomi came out of nowhere and was poorly handled whenever it cropped up. Somewhat justifiable, as it's later revealed that Naomi was throwing herself at him in order to advance her and Ocelot's goals. But then it's implied she did legitimately have feelings for him... post-mortem. Go figure. Also, Otacon has a habit of reacting to any overtures of friendship and kindness by immediately dedicating his body and heart to the giver (see also his completely one-sided attraction to Sniper Wolf in the first Metal Gear Solid)... a not uncommon trait among victims of child sexual abuse, as he's revealed to be late in MGS2.
- Monster Rancher 4 has a relationship system with the various female shopkeepers which also lets you get discounts, but at the end, you end with your aide no matter what.
- Jumin's route in Mystic Messenger. While every romance route in this game suffers to some extent from taking place over only 11 days and having to be sidelined at times for non-romance plot developments, Jumin's gets the worst of it. Basically, he goes from being so disinterested in women that he was rumored to be gay to being so obsessed with the female player character that he's displaying wedding rings as his profile picture after less than two weeks of knowing her before they've even gone on a proper date! Not only that, but while Zen and Yoosung act flirty with you from Day 1, Jumin doesn't even begin to show clear romantic attraction to the player character until they meet in person on Day 5 which means that he's seriously contemplating marriage with her after only six days of actual romantic interaction with her. To be fair, in order to avoid getting a Bad Ending with Jumin, the player is required to call him out on how possessive he acts towards her and Jumin's Character Development focuses on not only learning to love someone, but also how to manage said feelings without going overboard — in his route it's also called attention to how doting he is to his cat, Elizabeth the 3rd, but at one point Jumin mentions that he was using her as a Living Emotional Crutch and she can't reciprocate because she's a cat — he even tries to return her to V before V and MC convince him not to, but just to treat her as a pet from now on.
- Neverwinter Nights:
- In the last act of Hordes of Underdark, there is a sleeping angel who awaits his true love. When you later find the Knower of Names, you can pay an extravagant sum to find out who his true love is — if you're female, there's a chance it's you. If you go along with it, the epilogue will talk a bit about your subsequent passionate romance, none of which will ever happen during play. Turns out quite silly if the Sleeping Man's true love is Evil!Aribeth.
- In the original campaign there's Aarin Gend, the spymaster. If you're female, you can talk to him on multiple occasions in act 2, and he'll talk about his troubled and criminal past, how Nasher took him in, and the woman he fell in love with but lost. You get a tacky heirloom amulet after one conversation and it gets upgraded a bit in a later one (nothing you'll have much use for, though). Then your journal outright states that you're Aarin's lover. Sorry, did I miss something?
- Neverwinter Nights 2:
- The romance between the male Spirit Eater and Safiya in Mask of the Betrayer is slightly better-done than most examples, but the whole Reincarnation Romance element pushes it into this territory. Very little build-up, minor and completely optional flirtatious remarks, and just like that... instant romance.
- It happened in the original campaign, too, with the Designated Love Interest for a female Knight-Commander, Casavir. Even if you rarely spoke to him, and expressed the exact opposite of his opinion when you did, he would always want to jump your bones, regardless of your species, class, or alignment. You could be a Chaotic Evil half-orc blackguard with 6 Charisma and Intelligence who bludgeons orphans to death, and he'd still give it a shot if you were female. That last one is particularly jarring, seeing he's a paladin... is it any wonder the female fans prefer Bishop? For all her problems, Elanee will at least give up if it's clear you don't like her. This is possibly caused by cut content.note
- ObsCure has a few couples in the game, and most of them are standard high school and college romances, or one-sided but believable crushes. However, Stan gets one with Shannon. The two of them have no interaction with each other until Stan helps her kill a mutated Kenny. All of a sudden, they're making out.
- In Persona 4 and Persona 5, it isn't until the penultimate event of a character's S-Link or Confidant that you have the option to either pursue a romantic relationship with them or keep it platonic. While some S-Links drop in enough Ship Tease to make it plausible, others are almost entirely chaste until this last moment. It's particularly noteworthy with non-party characters, who you have much less interaction with.
- Averted with the male character's S-Links in Persona 3, which become romantic by default at a high enough level and are thus written to lead to romance. Played straight with the female protagonist's S-Link with Ken in Portable, since the player has the option to take his precocious crush completely seriously and begin dating a 12-year-old.
- The Prince and Kaileena hook up at the end of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within despite having only a few interactions over the course of the game and none of them are really romantic with the possible exception of the scene where the Prince offers her to leave the island with him once he defeats her mistress the Empress of Time. Worse, Kaileena actually is the Empress who spent the entire game plotting his death and only changes her mind when the Prince saves her from the Dahaka. The ending where this happens is considered the "good" ending because apparently The Prince saving this woman he barely knows supercedes everything. This is seemingly deconstructed in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones when after being captured by the Vizier, Kaileena narrates that the Prince who currently tries to rescue her isn't driven by love but by loyalty. He made a promise to protect her and is only motivated to ease his own pain. Kaileena is eventually murdered by the vizier and the Prince is implied to end with Farah, his love interest from the first game
- Psychonauts: Unless you watch all the cutscenes where they interact, (some being trigger-cutscenes) you'd be very confused at how fast Raz and Lili hook up. Downplayed, since it's all very lighthearted and chaste due to them both being preteens.
- Radiant Historia has a couple that goes through one via Romance Sidequest. This one has some justification on one side since the echo effect between timelines means the time-traveling male half has unknowingly been charming the female half twice over the entire time without realizing it. His reciprocation is genuinely out of the blue, however.
- Resident Evil – Code: Veronica has Claire and Steve, both which were prisoners on Rockfort Island. Their first encounter has Claire pointing a gun at Steve due to him mistaking her for a zombie and shooting at her, causing her to angrily scoff at his apology. As the story progresses, it's clear that Steve starts developing a crush on Claire and even makes a few passes towards her, but she brushes it off and, even as she warms up to him, seems to view him as nothing more than a new friend with no noticeable romantic intent. Near the end of the game, Steve gets captured, transforms into a monster, and nearly kills Claire until his humanity wins through, though Alexia fatally wounds him. Steve apologizes for the trouble he put Claire through and then dies, causing Claire to bawl her eyes out over a young man that she didn't seem to care too much about for most of the game.
- The Secret of Monkey Island has this happen to the Official Couple of Guybrush and Elaine. They meet once (after he's just broken into and trashed her mansion no less!) have a brief conversation then, when they meet again, they're suddenly acting like Sickeningly Sweethearts and declaring their undying love! The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek like the rest of the game so most players don't mind much.
- In Shining Force II, at the very end of the game, it's revealed that the Princess can only be awakened from her magical sleep by a kiss from her true love. An NPC then informs the main character that they're talking about him. Which is good because, until that moment, there's been no indication that the Princess would have been able to pick him out of a line-up, let alone been in love with him. The princess gets one line appreciating the hero's bravery, then literally right afterward is pulled into the Demon World and stays there for the next 4/5 of the game, only appearing again after the Big Bad is defeated and the kissing matter comes up as mentioned.
- One of the endings of Silent Hill 2 shows James suddenly deciding that he had strong feelings for Maria and wants to be with her. This comes out of nowhere because, even though Maria flirts with James constantly throughout the game, James always responds to this behavior with confusion and irritation. It makes more sense when you realise that she is just a version of his wife that Silent Hill created.
- SoulBlazer suddenly springs one between Lisa, a minorly important NPC in the game's first location, and Blazer, the protagonist. After leaving Grass Valley, where Lisa lives and was awoken by Blazer to progress the plot, she is no longer focused on for a good chunk of the game. In the penultimate area, Lisa is brought back on screen again for a scene and after watching her father die in front of her, she makes it clear to Blazer and the player that she has fallen in love with him. The Stinger of the game then implies that, despite a year having passed since the final battle, Blazer still has feelings for Lisa. Blazer being a Silent Protagonist and no dialogue option appearing that would imply romance, the fact that the two characters are implied to end up together, now both as regular humans can come across as very hastily written.
- Spyro the Dragon:
- In The Legend of Spyro, Spyro and Cynder go through the trilogy not showing any romantic interest in each other and then suddenly in the climax of the last game, Cynder says she loves him. The explanation for this is that Spyro and Cynder weren't supposed to hook up but a part of the fanbase wanted them to, so they decided to Throw It In!.
- In Spyro: A Hero's Tail, Ember had a clear crush on Spyro, which carried over to Shadow Legacy. Then an armadillo named Bandit saw her, immediately fell in love with her and had Spyro deliver a love letter to her. When Ember got the letter, she immediately dropped her crush on Spyro and fell for Bandit, even though the two barely interacted and would not again for the rest of the game.
- Possibly in Star Fox. Krystal inexplicably becomes the love interest for Fox, despite randomly finding her on a planet in a rushed re-theme of a game that originally didn't even have Star Fox in it.
- The Tales series:
- Tales of Destiny: Stahn and Rutee in the original game. While Rutee's crush on Stahn is established somewhat early on, Stahn shows no interest in her romantically at all, instead going on a date with Ilene Rembrandt and seemingly being genuinely happy with her before they have to part. Stahn and Rutee's most important late game conversation shows the pair's relationship at its lowest point yet after Rutee says Ilene deserved to kill herself, earning a What the Hell, Hero? speech from Stahn. They never truly make up from this fight and yet the sequel has the two Happily Married with no further explanation. Even worse, it was possible for Stahn to have romantic moments with both Philia and Mary in the original game (as well as the Ho Yay between him and Leon), making his ending up with Rutee even more confusing to audiences.
- Tales of Eternia: Throughout most of the game, Keele is cold, rude, and flat out racist to Meredy. She is initially kind to him, but faced with constant rudeness from him begins to withdraw from him — Until 9/10ths of the way into the game, where Keele suddenly begins to warm to Meredy and decides to remain in the world of Celestia to be with her. While in the Japanese version there are some skits that show Keele's defrosting attitude earlier on, these were removed in the English version, making the pairing come off as Pairing The Spares.
- Tales of Symphonia: The player can invoke this if they bungle Colette's Relationship Values and then chooses to kill Zelos off to get Kratos back in the party, since Colette is the default love interest and the scene where you choose which ending makes you reject everyone you actually have had Lloyd show chemistry with in order to pick him.
- Tales of Graces, from a series that's normally really good at averting this trope and playing romances subtly. A lot of people were unhappy with the Asbel/Cheria romance for this reason, especially after Graces f. In the main game, Asbel seems to be ignorant of Cheria's crush on him. But in the Future arc, he's suddenly blushing and stammering around her like an idiot. The extremely vague development in the original game coupled with the awkward, unprecedented and shoehorned romantic scenes in the Future arc turned a lot of people off. It doesn't help that Asbel/Sophie and Asbel/Richard have a lot of fan support and at least a bit of subtext each.
- Deconstructed in Tales of the Abyss. Legretta loves Van Grants... a love mandated by Because Destiny Says So, and she hates it because she wants to fall in love by her free will. Thus, she wants to destroy the world's concept of destiny. Fortunately for her, Van wants the same thing, so she has an actual reason to follow him and fall for him.
- Tales of Xillia took the little Graces fiasco above and turned it up higher when it comes to Jude and Milla. Their supposedly romantic scenes come off as rather awkward fan-pandering. Neither of them admits anything out loud, making their status as Official Couple rather questionable. This is not helped by their voice actors having very little chemistry and certain scenes making use of originally subtext-laden dialogue Lost in Translation, making the English dub's version even less believable. The sequel decided to start its pandering, again, in the later Character Chapters for Jude and Milla, suddenly adding a lot of too-obvious nudges at the two. This included scenes that are supposed to be romantic, but once again fail due to the previous problems or feel out-of-place with what's currently going on in the main plot.
- Tales of Xillia 2 has an implied case with Ludger and Lara Mel Marta in the Good Ending. It is unclear how they got together in the other dimension, but were implied to be Happily Married and had Elle. Over the course of the game, there's the revelation that Elle comes from a fractured dimension that is a few years ahead of the prime one, meaning she hasn't been born yet. In the Neutral Ending, when Ludger hears Lara Mel Marta is here to see him, he rushes towards her and it's implied that they will fall in love. To the player, it makes their relationship seem to serve no purpose other than to have Elle be born into the prime dimension.
- Torin's Passage: Torin and Leenah meet for all of five minutes and are hopelessly in love. Then, when Torin goes down to Asthenia, she heads back to Escarpa and we never see her again. Presumably, this would have gotten fleshed out more in the sequels that never came.
- Until Dawn: Chris/Ashley is this for some people. Despite Galadriel Stineman's claims that they connect in a lot of ways, we know nothing about their relationship prior to the one-year anniversary apart from "they both secretly have a random crush on each other". Also, if Chris tries to shoot Ashley after she literally begs him to, she purposely leaves him to die. And if Chris survives but Ashley somehow doesn't, he doesn't even mention her or ask where she is or if she's okay in the end credits.
- Wild ARMs 2 has a ridiculous example of this. If you pick up optional character Marivel, she suddenly effectively shacks up with Tony when everyone else is having romantic scenes that make sense. Tony is a minor NPC, and they didn't even share a single line of dialogue before suddenly being set up as a couple.
- It can be argued that the Matchmaking mechanic in Yandere Simulator is this trope in action, due to Yandere-chan manipulating events so the rival of the week falls in love with another character in one week so she would leave Senpai alone for Yandere-chan herself. The alpha builds have Kokona fall for her fellow drama club member Riku but there will likely be pairings where the rival barely knew her love interest until Yandere-chan started pushing them together (and indeed, the first official rival, Osana, and her suitor Kyuji didn't know each other unless and until Yan-chan pushes them together). Matchmaking is in fact the canonical 'elimination' for Chigusa Busujima in 1980s Mode, in which Ryoba helps one of Chigusa's many admirers get together with her.
- Yesterday has this with John and Pauline. Much of their romance happens off-screen, with the player sort of joining In Medias Res to their relationship. This may be mitigated a little bit with the fact that prior to John's amnesia, they were in love with each other.
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