Bye, Boyfriend! is a monthly column where Xiao Qing abandons her healthy relationship with her human boyfriend to find love in a dating sim. This month, her boyfriend buys her a dating game to prove that he is completely okay with her writing this column.
“Is your boyfriend okay with this?” is a question I get a lot whenever I say I play dating sims. And I don’t blame them — I get really invested in the story and romance every time I load up a game. If it’s good enough to make me swoon, I will make these 2D characters my personality for however long I’m into them.
My boyfriend’s not really the jealous type, though he loves joking that I would replace him with my several other partners if they were real. The only appropriate response to that statement is, “Then step up your game and love me as much as they do.” Duh.
Jokes aside, he’s actually very supportive of this column. In fact, this month’s dating sim was chosen and paid for by him. The man must love getting cucked.
Just kidding.
Five Hearts Under One Roof (Five Hearts) is a Korean full-motion video (FMV) dating sim. If you’re unfamiliar with FMVs, they’re similar to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, where the scenes feature real actors and your choices determine how the story unfolds.
In Five Hearts, you play as a male protagonist named Yuman, whose parents task him with turning their home into a sharehouse while they’re away on a business trip. And being the incredibly charming and charismatic man that he is (note the sarcasm), Yuman manages to convince five hot women to move in with him, and naturally, they all fall in love with him.
I’ve never played a dating sim geared towards men before, but I went into Five Hearts with the suspicion that it wouldn’t hit the same as the dating sims I had played in the past.
The Male Gaze
One of the things I love about dating sims geared toward women is that there’s usually some actual courtship involved. Love interests tend to have intricate backstories and problems that existed long before the player entered their lives. They feel like people who have lived full lives outside of their relationship with you.
Take Blooming Panic, for example. Your love interests already have problems long before they meet you, and they’ve found ways to deal with those problems, albeit sometimes unhealthily. The character you play as gives them the extra push they need to figure themselves out, but their lives don’t revolve around you.
The women in Five Hearts, by comparison, feel remarkably flat. They’re built around familiar archetypes designed to appeal to the game’s male protagonist: the childhood best friend, the busty dominatrix workplace baddie, the relentlessly positive hardworking girl, the younger girl who says exactly what she’s thinking, and the “born sexy yesterday” type whose innocence borders on childishness.
It’s time we talk about Seungyi.
Seungyi is a 23-year-old woman who has secretly been living in your attic for years. Yuman’s parents took her in when she was younger, but rather than introduce her to their son, they kept her hidden away and never sent her to school.
As a result, when Yuman meets her, Seungyi has the emotional and social development of a child. She primarily drinks milk, struggles to communicate, and almost immediately falls in love with Yuman.
Who in their right mind would date this woman?!
More importantly, what the hell is wrong with Yuman’s parents for allowing this girl to grow up completely isolated and uneducated? Did they kidnap her? When Yuman confronts his mom about Seungyi, all she says is that Seungyi is “a poor girl”. Yeah, no shit — you’ve locked her up in your attic for two decades without letting her go to school or interact with anybody. In her character profile, it says she’s a convenience store clerk, but the girl doesn’t even know what ramyun is — and I’m supposed to believe she works at a convenience store in a country where they sell a billion types of ramyun?
Why isn’t Yuman’s first instinct to call the police? Why does he feel the desire to date her?
I’ve been blaming Yuman for being a fool this whole time, but I’m starting to blame his parents for his stupidity.
And I just have to accept that this is the kind of guy I am in Five Hearts?!
Seungyi is the most egregious example, but the other characters aren’t much better. Gran, Five Hearts’ dominatrix workplace baddie, has a mini subplot involving an arranged marriage. We learn about it in the first chapter, and her fiancé shows up briefly in chapter three, but that’s it. If you successfully romance her, it’s as if the arranged marriage never happened and the two of you live happily ever after.
It’s frustrating because the game occasionally gestures toward the kind of character development I want from a dating sim, only to abandon it in favour of the fantasy that this stumbling, incompetent man somehow has five women desperately competing for his affection.
But I guess I’m not the target audience for this game.
She’s The Man
It wouldn’t be fair to Five Hearts to critique it so harshly without truly immersing myself in its world. I had opened my heart to a bunch of cockroaches before, so why couldn’t I do it now?
I am a lustful man.
I am desperately in love with women.
I… am Yuman.
With this newfound identity, I decided I would go after my busty manager, Gran.
There’s not much to hate about Gran — she’s hot, she’s capable, and she’s incredibly independent. The woman berates me every chance she gets, which makes me want to gain her approval as much as possible.
In the climax of her route, Gran reveals that her sharp tongue comes from being an extremely logical person, and falling for Yuman has thrown her completely off balance. It’s one of the few moments in the game where a character’s romantic feelings actually feel like they’re disrupting an established sense of self.
Naturally, being the lustful man that I am, I spend our text conversations the following day saying increasingly perverted things to her in the hopes that she’ll have sex with me at work.
Even though I’m shown to be stupid and incapable throughout the entire game, I somehow manage to appease her father — the CEO of the company we work for — and take over his job because he thinks I’m a great man.
And you know what? I am a great man.
Sausage Party
As with most dating sims, there’s also a queer route in Five Hearts.
In the first chapter, you meet Sausage Man — that’s his actual name — who mocks you for going for a job interview. In retaliation, you can choose to kiss him on the cheek, which starts his route.
It’s adorable how shy Sausage Man gets after you first kiss his cheek. He offers you sausages and words of encouragement, and if you choose the right options and gain enough affection points, the two of you eventually share a meal at an internet café.
Finally, some semblance of courtship in this game.
Unfortunately, Sausage Man’s route runs into the same problem as the women’s routes. Because his romance is treated as a “secret ending,” you don’t actually get much of a chance to know him. He has almost no personality outside of his interest in Yuman.
Who is this man? Is Sausage Man even his real name? Why does he like me? Do we actually know each other?
Is this love?
Or are we just two men who kissed once and decided to see where things went?
There Must Be Something Better Out There
Objectively speaking, Five Hearts is a poor dating sim. Its love interests are underdeveloped, the romances lack meaningful courtship, and even as a game designed to appeal to horny players, it doesn’t offer much beyond the most basic visual cues.
Don’t even try to tell me that it’s because I’m a woman; I LOVE women and would date one if I could. It’s just unfortunate that I’m currently dating a man.
(Babe, if you’re reading this, this is a joke.)
But seriously, men: you cannot tell me that seeing a woman’s breasts or seeing her bent over is enough. There’s got to be more to sexual attraction than putting a woman in a revealing outfit and calling it a day.
Still, it wouldn’t be fair to write off playing dating sims geared towards men because of one bad game. What kind of critic would I be if I did?
So reader, this is my promise to you: I will keep my heart and mind open to male dating sims. There has to be more to these games than just gooning.
Five Hearts Under One Roof is available on Steam.
