Gigantic List of Otome Games

... This took a lot less time than expected. I checked over this list so many times, I'm honestly not sure whether I should be proud or ashamed. Haaaa~.
So. In case anyone hasn't noticed, we seem to have a colossal otome game fanbase here. Hence this list.
I've listed games with the same protagonist together and mostly kept games made by the same author/company together.
I considered omitting the games I thought weren't exactly top quality, but then I realized that would be disrespectful to the creators and honestly otome games are still such a niche genre that chances are there are at least a few people willing to play any that they can get their hands on. Just remember I'm not promising quality.
Parody games, fangames, and completely linear GxB games have been omitted (There are games with only one available love interest, but they do have at least two endings).
Games with possible character deaths are marked with an asterix (*). Take note if for whatever reason you want to download an otome game for a younger sibling while shielding the child from the pain of death.
If I need to add any or remove any, please stab me in the stomach hard let me know, please and thank you!
So, without further ado, the list:

... So don't ever complain "but every single otome game ever has been LPd already" because these are just the ones you can play in English.
(Japanese DS games listed here)

I love you.

I know.

My firstborn will be named after you.
I will hold festivals in your honor.
My people will sacrifice a goat in your name every moon cycle.

Oh Donmai~

Thank you so much for this list! I stuck a link in the Visual Novel Recommendations thread, if that's OK.

It's A-Okay~! Just as long as I made it clear that this isn't a list of good otome games, it's just a list of otome games. For example, I would not recommend Kidnapping Love as anybody's first VN considering the bad ends are "the love interest kills you and everyone you love" and "the love interest violates you then kills everyone you love. And then you kill yourself." Fantasia: Requiem of the Abyss, on the other hand, is quite nice, even with the iffy art and occasional typo. That's just my opinion, though, not to step on any toes here~

Don-ami Donmai, would it be possible for you to label the games that have bad shit in them? Like rape-y/violate-y things? It would be nice to know ahead of time what to avoid without running headfirst into it screaming. C: <3

Got it! For the ones I've played, at least, so again, if I miscategorize anything, please let me know!

2nd Teen Story has

not sure if that counts as a trigger. In Your Arms Tonight has a premise of what might or might not count as cheating at the start.

...
So many otome games involving death that I marked them with an asterix instead of noting all of them... Ahaaaaa...

Also, I'm expecting people to look up the titles on their own, so considering the premise of In Your Arms Tonight outright states that it involves cheating, it doesn't look like I'll need to worry about that? Thanks a bunch, though!

Brb, gonna squeal. And then cry because Disney bought Star Wars.

Donmai, thank you.
Thanks to you I found my favourite game that I had forgotten the name of.

Donmai, this is brilliant! I think I will be referencing this in the future!

Also,

You got DeeDee to come out of the LP forum after she said she was scared to! I didn't even have to poke her! Brilliant!

This subforum developed so fast.

Donmai, you are the most bestest.

Do you accept suggestions? I know a bunch of "romance is not the object" games that aren't on this list.

Perhaps we could have a separate list of non-romance VNs with female protagonists? I know I'd be interested in such a list. :)

Same. The ones I'm thinking of, though, are the same sort of thing as Avalon Code. They've got a bunch of romantic interests but getting with one of them isn't the object of the game.

I'll just post them here.

GBA

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 (Went a little overboard with this one. Some of the names on the pics don't match the localized ones. For example, "Varila" is actually "Varil")

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2: Same sort of thing as SN:SS 1, just with different characters

PSP

Persona 3 Portable: VN plus dungeon-crawler plus pokemon, basically. Protagonist's gender is choosable and you can date a bunch of NPCs, both platonically and romantically.

Fate/Extra: Sort of like P3P minus the calendar and the social links. Can choose your gender. Hints of romance between MC and summoned servant.

DS

Summon Night: Twin Age: Like SN:SS but an isometric action-rpg rather than a tales-style action-rpg.

PS2

Soul Nomad and the World Eaters: Choosable gender (though the female one is canon). Can obtain endings (some romantic) with multiple characters.

Other (Bioware-style games, basically)

Mass Effect Trilogy (PC, 360, PS3)

Dragon Age 1 & 2 (PC, 360, PS3)

Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 (PC)

Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 (PC)

KOTOR 1 & 2 (Original Xbox and PC)

Jade Empire (Original Xbox and PC)

This is golden.
GOLDEN.

Oh, also, Dandelion (a commercial Otome game) was released in English yesterday for PC.

Thanks a bunch, Nebty! Alrighty, I split the list into "games geared towards romancin' some menfolk" and "games where you have a goal other than romancin' menfolk but you can totally choose to romance menfolk anyway"~! Yaaaay~

Probably worth noting that there is no romance in vanilla Baldur's Gate (unless you count Delainy/Durlyle); it's only if you install romance mods. In BG2 you've got Anomen, but again, it's mostly mod stuff.

Hierofania has a female protagonist and no romance focus (though I guess one of the endings might count as the start of a something).

Remember11 has a female protagonist for the entire first half of events, though it's easy to tell she's been written by a guy going by gender stereotypes a lot of the time.

Wait, really? I thought the protagonist was that knight guy?

Nope, it's a knight girl :33

Edit: I do believe, there's also the RPG game called "Star Ocean: Second Evolution" for PSP.
http://englishotomegames.tumblr.com/post/30552367915/star-ocean-second-evolution-2-release
Never played it, but it's mentioned as an otome game and you can play as a girl.

A new game for the list that just came out today.
It's called 'Number Days Sim Date'.

Yaaaay, Patchesis!!! *U*
WONDERFUL.

It gave me intense feels.

I played it and... wow... FEELS!
xD Patchesis and her games get more and more awesome with time.

I just played for about 20 seconds and I am really impressed. This is 50 steps up from her previous games.

I think Number Days even manages to beat Chrono Days, my former favorite Pacthesis game. It's the first time I've liked every path almost equally.

This game. I accidently made two boys like me. And then I had to choose. God no I can't choose I can't break their percious little heaaaarts X_X
The facial expressions at the group scenes were a killer, I didn't know you could do stuff like that with flash!

I gotta say tho, I was expecting the whole thing will turn out to be more... grim, I guess? It's actually a rather happy (if not exactly light hearted) story.

About Loren the Amazon Princess in the Commercial section...

If you've got Hanako Games in there, you can't forget about Long Live the Queen and the Cute Knight series! They're sorta like Princess Maker except you're the girl and not her father.

In Cute Knight Kingdom, you roam around the land trying to find yourself a destiny. There's a ton of peripheral material - you can do jobs to raise stats and adventure, sure, but there's also a lot of other things to do like learn how to cook or how to make weapons or clothes or jewelry, all of which tend to help your other pursuits. The magic system alone is pretty cool - you learn new spells via experiencing the world, some you can find just walking on obvious points on the map, some can be learned by doing the right job once your magic stat's high enough... And of course there is romance. There's a good handful of dudes and one lady in-game who you can woo and get special endings for, but you can bypass the romancing and become a dashing knight captain or a con artist or a dressmaker if you like.

Long Live the Queen is milder on the romance, as your major goal is basically DON'T DIE. It's pretty much Game of Thrones with a PG rating. There's a lot of ways to avoid near-weekly assassination attempts, and a lot more ways to not avoid said assassination attempts. There's stat building, and an emotions system which influences how easy it is to level up in something - for instance, if Elodie is angry, it's harder to train in history but easier to train in weapons. And there's DRESSUP. I love the dressup aspect. She looks so cuuuute in her pimped out royal gowns and tuxedoes and frilly magical girl outfits and itty bitty military uniforms.

There's a lot of replay value and secrets to find depending on what choices you make, and being smart and polite and confident can be just as successful as training swords and magic and dueling everyone who crosses you to the death. Plus, with the recent update, you get adorable miniCGs of Elodie dying in various terrible ways. I love this game so much; it blends my love of cute and my love of OH GOD THAT'S HORRIBLE perfectly.

I found another Voltage game:

A Prince's Proposal (with some creepy art)

Damn, that is some creepy art.

You know, now that we have all of the iPhone dating games, I've found myself becoming rather disenchanted with the genre. I mean, most of them are just so dumb. The iPhone games in particular are like the video game equivalent of a drug-store romance novel. And while that's fun to laugh at once in a while, I find myself liking the RPGs with dating game elements much more overall. Looking back, those are the ones that I've found the most emotionally engaging, even if the romance isn't as involved as it is in the dedicated dating games. Perhaps it's because the "game" part isn't limited to the romance, so I can better appreciate the romance when it's there. It feels like more of a companionship thing rather than an end goal when it's paired with gameplay besides "say the right thing to win dude's heart".

Thoughts? Which genre do you guys enjoy more, and for what reason?

I'm a very desperate person, so my standards are pretty low, I think, regardless of Sturgeon's Law. As far as I can tell, the Shall We Date series isn't terribly different from long-running shoujo manga, and I keep reading those~ Not good enough to start a cult over, but still adequate to get published and all that. I much prefer visual novels that split off in a more natural way than "and now pick your route!" though, and stories that still let you be friends with the other guys without friendzoning them.

Mostly, though, I just want to see the player character and the love interest act super lovey-dovey together without uninteresting/unnecessary drama because I'm still going to be a teenager for the next few years, so I am going to continue squeeing as much as I can until it is socially unacceptable for me to do so. As for RPGs, I'm absolutely terrible at Western RPGs (I spent more time customizing my character in Skyrim than I spent being alive. And that was the last time I borrowed one of my brother's games.) so I can't judge there. I really enjoyed Avalon Code, though, and how the romance actually tied into the storyline without seeming forced (see: Rune Factory 3. You have to propose to a girl to complete the game. I kind of wish there was a chance to bropose to Zaid or something...), but the problem there is that the romance is ignored completely in the post-game. You don't break up or anything, love interest still loves you, occasionally drops by in the middle of the night to declare his love, appears in the New World, et cetera, and the game is still plenty fun, but please, Duran, can we have our first normal date without you or the world dying...

tl;dr: Donmai is a hopeless romantic and has no taste.

I'm a sucker for plot and good chemistry between characters. I'm all about the dynamics between them.

Basically, I much prefer story driven games with very good characterization and inter-character relationships.

That doesn't stop me from playing games where romance is the main focus, but honestly, most of those games aren't done well, which saddens me.

Point is: I'm not picky about the game's genre, I'm picky about the elements within the game and how they're used.

I like romances in RPGs because sometimes running around killing everything gets boring. But I'm glad I discovered that dating games were an actual genre, because sometimes I don't want to have to spend 30 hours running around and killing things just to get to the next bit of romance.

I tend to like the pure-VNs better, unless it's an RPG where the gameplay is first and the romance is second. The most shallow romances to me always seem to be the ones in raising/dating sims, with the exception of Tokimeki.

But generally speaking, and hard as it is to believe considering how much I like reading, commenting on and writing otome games, I'm not that much of a romantic (my genre of . I like to see human relationships, whether romance or no, portrayed in a realistic-feeling light, awkwardness and bumping teeth and laughing at the other person for always wearing their shirt inside-out and all. When it comes to pure slice-of-life genre especially, the more genuine and believable the friendship and romance and what-have-you between the characters feels the more I like the game. I hate shallow characters, cheap drama, and hamfisted-in chemistry no matter what the genre.

That being said, my favorite VN subgenre is utsuge. MAKE ME WEEP, UROBUCHI/KID

Utsuge for the win. And I full-heartedly agree with you, DreadCop.

Indeed. That's why I like games with dating elements so much, because they usually facilitate some great character interactions.

As for pure VNs, I do like them but I don't really classify them as "games" per se. They're basically novels with a few extra bells and whistles. I also think they're at their best when they're relatively short, because I just can't relax in the same way when reading a VN than I can when reading a book. The music, the pictures, the voices, etc, make the experience a bit of a sensory overload. Juniper's Knot, for example, was just right for me, whereas something like Shikkoku no Sharnoth really dragged.

Another problem I have with a lot of female-oriented dating games that I've played is that they pretty heavily enforce gender stereotypes. The protagonist is always either helpless, passive, or dependent upon her love interest in some way. Now, there are some games that subvert this (Magical Diary, for example), but from what I've seen of Otome games in general those games are the exception. However, I've found that many of the RPGs are inadvertently better in this regard because your gender is selectable. The protagonist is treated like a person first, and not just a woman, because the writing has to fit for both males and females. In Summon Night: Swordcraft Story, for example, the protagonist is equal to any of his/her friends, love interests included, and you're never talked down to by the game. You get to be an ass-kicking Craftknight in your own right and not just some chick who marries a prince, or a person who has to be protected by handsome dudes. But the game also allows you to form a romantic relationship with someone, or get to know the characters better.