What Is This Thing You Call Love / Video Games

Robotic Examples

• In Fallout 4, medical robot Curie can upload herself into a Synth body, at which point the Sole Survivor can hit on and romance her. She struggles to process these "confusing" or "distracting" feelings while getting used to something as simple as breathing.
• Chadley, a teenage cyborg, in Final Fantasy VII Remake freaks out upon seeing Cloud Disguised in Drag: he gets jittery, starts stammering, and says that he's "experiencing an emotional response" in a tone of legitimate surprise.
• HK-47 in Knights of the Old Republic understands what love is. "'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope." What makes this awesome is that it is actually a subversion; when he elaborates on the meaning of his statement, you realize he does actually understand what love is, even if he must express it in his sociopathic terms.
  • The Consular can confront a sentient hologram about her feelings for one of your party members (the party member in question treats her as his cherished assistant and girlfriend, even though he has to take care of physical needs with short-term flings). The hologram mocks the question and is very insulted you asked it of her in the first place.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, when asked about why it specifically chose a piece of Shepard's armor to repair itself with, Legion reacts with what seems to be its version of a blush and says: "No data available." And he sucks at Dating Sims despite clocking in 75 hours of gameplay. No joke.
  • In Mass Effect 3, as the Quarians and Geth are in the middle of one of the largest battles in history, Legion comments to Shepard. This is meaningful not just for Legion, but to the entire geth, considering that despite the quarians' intention to lay them all to waste, the very memory of Shepard welcoming Legion on their crew bolsters them into enduring their difficult situation and continue pursuing peace and self-determination:
    Legion: Hope sustains organics during periods of difficulty. We... admire the concept.
  • Realizing she is capable of this and coming to terms with it is a major part of EDI's character arc in the third game.
• TEC in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door spent the entire Peach sub-plot asking this question. He struggles with this at first, but figures it out by the end of the game when he pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to try and save her. If you go to visit him after beating the game, it's implied that The Power of Love saved him from dying.
• In Persona 3 FES, the player has the chance to have a social link with the resident robot girl, Aigis. Throughout the social link, she begins to slowly understand what it means to be human. On the final day of the social link, she confesses her love to the main character, believing that she has found out exactly what it means to love. D'awwwwww. Takes a turn for the worse in "The Answer". After the main character's death. Aigis' grief causes her to subconsciously wish she could become an emotionless machine again rather than deal with it. This wish manifests as her Evil Counterpart.
• In Super Robot Wars V, Nine struggles to know what love is which makes the other series characters dance around the question as it's too embarrassing for them to say what it is. The Final Boss Nevanlinna also struggles with this concept and goes berserk when she sees Yuki Mori showing her affection to Mamoru Kodai while fighting for Earth.

Alien Examples

• Mass Effect:
  • Commander Shepard lampshades this trope and Mars Needs Women in a bit of optional dialogue, commenting that, according to old movies, humans have everything an alien species could want: "Oceans, beautiful women, this emotion called love..." Which is in itself a direct shout-out to an old Star Trek episode, where Kirk invokes (and pretty much epitomizes) this trope to the Green-Skinned Space Babe of the week.
  • Played a different way with the salarian aliens who, thanks to their relatively short life expectancies, are not known for holding emotional stances for long periods of time (salarians have "reproduction contracts," not marriages, since they can't maintain feelings of courtship to serve as the icing on the commitment cake), not that they aren't completely incapable of it however. The most obvious example of this is perhaps the salarian talking to his asari daughter on Illium about buying a gift for his asari wife so she will have something to remember him by (as the asari have some of the longest lives of any species, up to around a thousand years).
  • Ultimately, this trope is largely subverted, as while some species' hats may preclude the existence of love, you can always find examples among any species that understand the concept.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X:
  • There is an Insectoid Alien race called the Orpheans. The have no gender and think logically, and they "reproduce" by splitting. However, through human interaction, some of their offspring became females. Soon enough the males have this really "odd" feeling and some of the females laugh at their denseness.
  • A member of another alien race, the Zaruboggans (a race that absorbs pollution and detoxifies them, and they have no gender and reproduce through their detoxifying process), develops a feeling towards a female human. You then help out said alien handle this feeling.

Human Examples

• In Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, Chief Bajari, while not unaware of the concept of love, has difficulty applying it to himself, being unable to identify the reason he feels so strange when interacting with Tana. Chief Chemi'n has convinced him that the reason he gets anxious even thinking about her is that she has put a curse on him. Morgane sets him right on that issue.
• Everyone in Digital Devil Saga. Why? They are all A.I.s, created solely for combat, with no emotional responses included, leading to a battlefield full of emotionless androids based on certain humans. The Demon Virus kick-started the development of their personalities, up to character strengths and flaws, along certain viewpoints on the original people. It is specially poignant to see The Spock finally thaw and grasp the concept of honor and love, and everyone having to lose it all through an increasingly brutal chain of Heroic Sacrifices. Mind, it's also quite an emotional scene to see The Lancer struggle with love and jealousy when he has no idea of what the hell he's doing.
• If you sleep with Morrigan in Dragon Age: Origins and subsequently get her to warm up to you, she will pose this question.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Half-human, half-esper Terra from Final Fantasy VI spends quite a part of the game trying to understand love (she only gets it after some time taking care of a group of orphaned children).
  • Dirge of Cerberus has Shelke confused about love. After she had spent ten years with Deepground, it ain't no wonder that she hasn't learned what love is. So when Shalua sacrifices herself for her and Vincent tries to be her friend, she first reacts with coldness and surprise, and then with curiosity. She eventually learns what love is by the end.
  • The Warrior of Light from Dissidia Final Fantasy, who is very emotionally stunted on account of starting life as a emotionless clone, manages to fail to realize there might be more to his natural disposition to be at Cosmos side than mere loyalty. This is shown best when he is genuflected before her, he sees she's in pain and raises a hand to seemingly comfort her, but quickly retracts said hand.
• Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days: Roxas has a diary entry titled, "What is love?" after witnessing a scene between Belle and Beast on one of his missions. Since he couldn't make sense of what Xaldin was saying about it, he tried asking Axel about it — but didn't get any real answer. He wrote that he felt like Axel kept dodging questions he didn't know the answer to just by saying that he could not understand it without a real heart. Xigbar tried to set Roxas and Xion up (they look the same to him), but while Roxas was fond of her, he could not understand what Xigbar was trying to do.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Paya is such an Ingenue that when she suddenly develops a crush on Link, she initially thinks she has contracted some illness, to the point that she asks her grandmother and their two bodyguards for some medicine and advice. Her final journal entry reads that although she knows her love may never be requited, she is still grateful to have experienced it.
• This trope sums up the character arc of the heroine of Lunar: Eternal Blue. She begins as an Emotionless Girl completely focused on accomplishing her mission and gradually defrosts. Emotions prove to make some aspects of her mission more difficult, but in the end, she needs them to succeed.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Jedi Knight Nariel Pridence, who the Republic smuggler meets on Tatooine, is so steeped in the Jedi teaching of emotionlessness that she completely (and usually comically) misses the intent of any flirting done toward her.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the denizens of the Agnian and Kevesi nations are born into short lifespans, which are dedicated almost entirely to warfare with one another. As such, nobody on either side has any inherent concept of romance or sexuality, and, when they feel either for the first time (such as when Kite first encounters Juniper), they're unable to comprehend what it is.
• In Wario Land: Shake It!, Love literally is in one of the treasures chests in the game, and is actually represented by the word 'love' itself; but the treasure's listed name is merely "Something important." It is assumed that this name comes from Wario's own view of the subject.

Demonic Examples

• Sanctus from Devil May Cry 4 mocks Nero and Credo on their efforts of rescuing Kyrie with "Held back by love" and "Love..? For a sibling?" respectively. While Sanctus was originally human, he's all but demonic by that point.
• Disgaea:
  • Laharl from both the Disgaea: Hour of Darkness game and anime goes through this due to his encounter with Love Freak Flonne — the success of his evolution in the game depends entirely upon the state of your Karma Meter during the story, with endings ranging from a somewhat twisted Happily Ever After to downright horrific. The anime mixes parts of several of the game endings together for a Heroic Sacrifice moment with a twist.
  • The trope is also featured in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories with Rozalin, with her defrosting treated in much the same way.
  • It gets spoofed in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, when Mao tries a more scientific approach to figuring out love.
    Mao: Acidic or basic? What's it's formula?

Villainous Examples

• In Baldur's Gate II, Viconia does have a concept of what love is but, being from a race where sex is used for either only pleasure or to have power over somebody, is quite unfamiliar with the more intimate aspects, such as cuddling, and is quite confused when she starts to "feel an ache" whenever you're apart.
• Slight parody in Team Fortress 2 with one of the Soldier's Halloween lines:
  Tin Soldier: I AM A ROBOT. BOOP. WHAT IS LOVE?
• In Captain Blue's story in Viewtiful Joe, Alastor demands this of Blue after Alastor finds and reads a love letter Blue wrote to his wife.
  Alastor: Tell me about humans... and that thing you call love!
  [after the fight]
  Blue: Love is a potent force. It is what I fight for.
  Alastor: Love is power... I'll remember that.

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