It was the big moment.
After dozens of hours traveling with my companions, I had made it to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s “date” sequence. It would be a moment of quiet before what I expected to be a heavy conclusion, one where I’d get to see which of my party members I’d formed the strongest bond with and take them out for a night at the Gold Saucer. I couldn’t wait to see who was waiting for me behind Cloud’s hotel room door. Would it be Aerith? Did I do enough to woo Tifa? I swung the door open and didn’t see anyone at my eye level. My eyes panned down to the floor.
No. It couldn’t be. I was going on a “date” with Red XIII!?
It should have been an anticlimactic moment. Rather than getting a smooch, I’d be trapped in a Ferris wheel with an overly enthusiastic wolf child. Even Cloud seemed disappointed, slumping his shoulders as Red XIII dragged him over to the Skywheel. It felt like a punchline built to poke fun at me for blowing it with Tifa. But my night out with Red XIII wasn’t a joke. It’s the moment from my entire playthrough that I remember most fondly now, one that helped me accept a part of myself that I’ve been struggling with for years.
A night on the town
Like some of its RPG peers, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth contains a social bond system. Throughout the adventure, Cloud can upgrade his relationship with each party member by completing side quests or chatting with them. Compared to games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, it’s a sparse system. There’s no chart that tracks friendship levels and no big rewards tied to increasing them. The big payoff happens near the end of the story at the Gold Saucer where Cloud goes out on a date with whomever he has the strongest bond with. With the right party member, that can end in a smooch on the Skywheel.
That’s not what happens if you spend the night with Red XIII. In my scene, Red skitters around the Skywheel pod marveling at the holograms and fireworks outside. He’s so happy that he’s panting. “Hey, you’re gonna drool on the seat!” Cloud quips as he sits back and watches with his arms crossed like a bored parent keeping their kid in line. The two talk about Aerith, with Red making Cloud promise he’ll keep her safe. They shake on it (“They are soft,” Cloud mutters when touching Red’s paw), and that’s the ride. It all ends with Cloud giving Red a head scratch and sending him on his way.
It’s not a romantic scene by any means — Red XIII has the maturity of a child, after all — but it is sweet. It’s a sincere moment of friendship that lets Cloud drop his unaffected persona for a brief moment. While initially annoyed by Red’s enthusiasm, there’s a sense that Cloud recognizes that he’s experiencing a moment of true, unbridled joy. I’m left with the sense that I’ve given a friend the best night of their life when they need it most.
As it turns out, that means more to me than a fleeting kiss with Tifa.
Discovering asexuality
Ever since college, I’ve had an uncertain relationship with my sexuality. My identity seems pretty simple when taken at face value. I’m a straight man who has gone from one monogamous relationship to the next for decades. I’ve always been comfortable in that. But starting in my early 20s, I began experiencing some complicated feelings about sex. When I started doing it consistently in committed relationships, I found that my sex drive wasn’t as high as I’d always anticipated it would be. I still enjoyed the act, but it wasn’t something I was itching to do most nights.
For a very long time, I pushed that feeling as far back into my mind as I could. I figured I was overthinking it. After all, I still was having sex consistently and was satisfied every time I did. Surely I was just overreacting to a normal thing everyone else experiences. Nobody’s in the mood all the time, right?
The older I got, the less I thought about sex. As an adult, I never found myself out at a bar flirting with someone and inviting them home. It’s not a thought that ever crossed my mind. By the time I’d hit 30, I had never had a random hook-up outside of a relationship. It wasn’t because I was too “traditional,” but because sex simply wasn’t top of mind at any given point. I wasn’t disinterested in relationships, though. On the contrary, I loved the process of getting to know someone and building intimacy with them. It’s just that the moments that meant the most to me were the quiet ones, like cuddling on a couch with the static from the TV lightly illuminating the room.
For the first time in nearly 15 years, I felt normal.
That attitude only became more apparent as my relationships got longer. Each new one would follow the same structure. There would always be a lot of sex early in the relationship. I’d point to that as proof that I had a normal, healthy sex drive and push any doubts to the back of my mind. As the months went on, my sexual desire would slow. First, my partner and I would be having sex twice a week. That would inevitably dial down to one. Each time, I’d find myself making a concerted effort to maintain that even when I wasn’t feeling it. Sex would often become a scheduled routine driven by a need to keep up appearance rather than a fluid expression of intimacy. That pattern would always crack eventually; sometimes a month would go by without me having any drive.
My frustration over what I increasingly perceived as a failing of my own body came to a head in 2020 when my relationship of five years came to an abrupt end. It was a split expedited by the difficulty of being locked together for most of a year during a tense pandemic, but my waning interest in sex was a driving factor. I was left feeling ashamed, unable to grasp why I was struggling. My therapist at the time tried to chalk it up to a few generic reasons that didn’t exactly match my reality. I felt lost.
One afternoon while stewing over all of this, the word “asexual” flashed into my head. I’d entertained the idea of being asexual at various points in my life, but it never felt right. At the end of the day, I still did have a sex drive even if it wasn’t up to par with those around me. I once floated the thought to my therapist, but she laughed it off. I felt embarrassed to have asked, so that was that. But now, locked in a state of isolation, it felt like the right time to revisit the notion.
What I quickly learned was that there was much more nuance to asexuality than I’d realized. It wasn’t a term used to describe those who simply don’t have sex, but a spectrum. As I read about all different identities housed under the term, one finally resonated: gray-ace. “Graysexual” is a shorthand that describes those who feel somewhere in the middle between sexual and asexual. It acknowledged that one’s relationship to sex could be fluid. It felt like I’d found something that described how I felt. Just knowing that it was a common enough identity to earn its own term instantly removed the shame and inadequacy I felt off my shoulders. For the first time in nearly 15 years, I felt normal.
Asexuality in gaming
It was only once I accepted that identity that I became more hyper aware of how my gray-ace tendencies were even apparent in my gaming playstyle. Any time a game has a romance mechanic, I tend to avoid it. I didn’t experience any steamy hookups in Baldur’s Gate 3. I’d often just feel too uncomfortable to pick the obvious come-ons in dialogue wheels, leaving me with a party of platonic pals. That always felt right to me, but it’s another area where insecurity tends to creep in.
For many players, sex and coupling can sometimes be the selling point of a game. Romance mechanics become a common water cooler conversation when talking about games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard. When I reviewed Starfield, one of the first questions someone asked me was who I romanced. I didn’t have an answer, and it made me feel like an outcast.
It’s not that I have any problem with sex and romance mechanics in video games. On the contrary, I’m thrilled anytime a game features an inclusive system that lets a wide swath of players explore their sexuality in digital space. For some friends, video games have been crucial to helping them come to terms with their queer identities. What’s become disappointing, though, is when games featuring those systems don’t feel like they make space for people on the other side of the spectrum. I bounced off Baldur’s Gate 3 earlier than I would have liked to because I too often felt like every character was constantly hitting on me. There was a pressure inherent to the game design for me to work toward a sex scene and be rewarded for it. Trying to treat everyone as a good friend felt like a handicap.
Very few mainstream video games have really broached the topic of asexuality. Sure, there are plenty of games that don’t feature romance mechanics, but that’s not quite the same thing. It’s difficult to find social systems in games that represent intimacy in ways that don’t hint at, or explicitly end in, sex. It’s so rare, in fact, that it’s headline news when it does happen. The Outer Worlds famously includes a companion, Parvati, who stands out as much as she does for being one of the only explicitly asexual characters in a big-budget game (a Wikipedia list of asexual video game characters only includes six names currently). It is a foreign identity in games, and one that can feel even more distant when standing on the outskirts of community “hornyposting” around games like Hades 2.
It’s with all this weighing on my mind that I now find myself in the Skywheel with a slobbering Red XIII. At first, I’m gutted. It’s not because I haven’t landed a date with Tifa; it’s because my knee-jerk reaction is that my choices — and, by extension, my identity — have been reduced to a punchline. It’s only after the scene concludes that I stop to reflect on it.
While the scene with Red XIII begins as a bit of a joke, it unfolds into something unexpectedly sincere. There’s a real moment of character growth in Cloud, who begins the scene annoyed by the arrangement, but ends it by dropping his guard and giving his pal a friendly head pat. There’s a sense that he walks away from the Skywheel happy; he’s done something kind for a friend who needs it. It paints a picture of a different kind of bond that I relate to, one in which intimacy is just as much about the little things as the grand gestures. It’s presented in the context of a strictly platonic relationship here, but it’s something that is central to my romantic ones.
The more comfortable I’ve become with my sexuality, the more conscious I’ve become about all the ways I can express what my partner means to me even during periods where my sexual drive is empty. It is in the most unassuming moments. It’s when I go to the grocery store and buy my girlfriend an Oreo-flavored Coke on a whim because I remember her enjoying a sip of one at a party the week before. It is in the quiet evenings spent at home playing Dragon Age side by side on the couch on different screens, each of us trading stories. Those are the quiet expressions of love that are so vital to me but are so seldom represented in games that have romantic components.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not an asexual text, but I can feel something familiar in it. You can make it through the game without kissing Tifa or Aerith, but you’ll still be able to glean how much Cloud cares for both just the same. Physicality isn’t an endgame condition needed to validate their relationship. You can end up on the Skywheel doing something kind for a friend and still feel like there is the potential for romance in Cloud.
My evening with Red XIII wasn’t the night out I hoped for, but it’s the one I needed to have.
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