More Friends, More Benefits



So you're playing a game that for whatever reason rewards you for pursuing a romantic partner. All well and good: increasing Relationship Values that have beneficial effects, some game-mechanical in nature, others less so, has a long and time-honored place in games about relationships.

But what happens if you get these bonuses for seducing everyone who's even mildly interested in you, rather than developing a single intense relationship?

In these games, the ultimate path to power involves rolling every relationship up into a massive Love Dodecahedron, Katamari style.

Remember that this isn't limited to romantic relationships. If getting your friends to trust you results in gameplay benefits, that's this trope as well.

This is basically the gameplay-motivated Tenchi Solution. Often a Game Breaker. See also You Lose At Zero Trust.

Not to be confused with Friends With Benefits.

Role Playing Game

 * In Thousand Arms, your Relationship Values with each girl determines what spells and abilities can be given to your weapons. You need those spells to survive the later stages of the example. For example, if you don't get a more powerful Heal spell, later enemies will hurt you faster than you can heal.
 * The actual value of the More Friends More Benefits in this game is dubious though, because you need Master Points to be able to go on dates and imbue weapons with spells, and by the time you do all the level grinding necessary to give even one character every spell, they've essentially ceased to be useful.
 * Persona 3. Nearly every female Social Link winds up becoming of a romantic nature, and since maxing out each Social Link allows you to create the best Persona of that Link's Arcana... yeah. The game does punish you if you try to, erm, "level up" two girls at the same time (they get jealous), but once you hit max Rank and create an "unbreakable bond" you are free to resume building your harem.
 * One of the improvements Persona 4 made on this system was to add the option whether or not to pursue a romantic relationship with any of the available girls, complete with a warning if you were about to move beyond friendship -- especially if you already had a girlfriend. (You could still end up two-timing if you wished, though if you attempt such a thing .)
 * The female MC of Persona 3 Portable defaults to Just Friends with various potential Love Interests or moves into romance via a Guide Dang It set of choices.
 * Similarly, the RPG / Dating Sim Brave Soul gives each party member LevelUps as you pursue them romantically. Once you have sex with one, though, no more dates (and thus level-ups at Intimacy 5) can be pursued with any other girl... Thus rewarding the pursuit of all of them before finally choosing your girl.
 * The newer Fire Emblem games give you bonuses for developing relationships, and while a character can only have one A-rank relationship, if you surround them with their A, and the rest Bs, they become an unstoppable weapon of destruction.
 * It's effective to the point that people have created charts detailing how to arrange and ship your army in order to get optimal stats. Many of the relationships make little-to-no sense, in-character.
 * In the GBA games supports are predetermined and not all end in actual relationships, just friendships or deeper backstory.
 * In all games to use the support system, you're limited to a total of five support conversations. You can only have one A and one B, or two B's and a C, etc.
 * Except Radiant Dawn, where you're only allowed 1 support per character and it can be with any other character. (However you can delete and change said support if you wish.)
 * The latest game removes all limits on how many supports you can have, even A-level supports. S-level supports, on the other hand...you only get one of those.
 * Ar Tonelico isn't a heavy offender on this -- for starters, because it only has two normal love interests and a secret one -- but there's points in the game where you're forced to use the girl besides the one you're focusing on romantically, and if you haven't at least gone through the motions with the other girl, the game suddenly gets harder and more tedious.
 * Ar Tonelico 2 is a bit better about this. While the first allows you to go through the entire cosmopshere of each girl complete with the concluding levels that are basically marriage ceremonies, the second only allows you to progress past the halfway mark with one girl, and choosing to do this irreversibly locks you in to her ending.
 * Ar Tonelico 3 reverses it, though. While you can't complete everyone's Comsosphere, you can go most of the way (and complete one if you turn down her confession). It does, however, fit more strongly than the first game in other ways: the girls can turn into other girls this time, and how deep you've Dived determines how much they'll strip for you in battle. (Seriously.)
 * If you want your entire team to survive Mass Effect 2's suicide mission, you're advised to obtain their loyalty by doing each party member's personal Sidequest. However, you can only date one of them. Note also that they receive an extra ability once they are loyal, so it has more direct benefits.
 * Well, date one of them plus Kelly, who will then feed your fish for you. (the likely reason for most Kellymance!)
 * Echo Bazaar. Particularly in the Persuasive area.
 * In the RPG-Dating Sim hybrid Sakura Wars series, each character's combat stats are dependent on her relationship with the player character. Been neglecting one of the girls? Hope you weren't banking on her being any help to you in the next boss battle.
 * While most of the relationships aren't romantic, gathering Brotherbonds in the Mega Man Star Force series increases your link power, which allows you to have more stat/ability bonuses. The effort needed in order to get a Brotherbond decreases as the series goes on. In the first game, getting one is a story event, which first occurs roughly a third of the way through the game, while in the third you get them from virtually every NPC who gives you a sidequest.
 * In Star Wars:The Old Republic you have companion Affection which you gain by saying things your companions like and giving them expensive gifts. The benefit is a significant time reduction in how long companion missions take, more chance of a critical result, and a slight improvement in their combat effectiveness.

Simulation Game

 * In The Sims 2, if you choose the romance aspiration for your sim, one of their goals will be to "woohoo" with twenty different sims, which gives you points. It's even possible through very careful planning to juggle that many relationships at the same time. Heaven help you if you get caught cheating, though.
 * The Sims 3 makes it even harder: the entire town exists, rather than separately loaded lots, and to make matters worse, if you get the Late Night Expansion Pack, rumors will spread. They don't even have to be true!
 * A non-romantic example is the necessity to befriend people to get job promotions, a mechanic that has existed in all three games. However, it varies between jobs (the Slacker career introduced in Night Life almost entirely revolves around making friends instead of building skills), and while in the first two games you could befriend anyone and it would count, in the third it's changed so that you need to build your relationship with your boss and/or co-workers specifically.
 * The original Harvest Moon and Harvest Moon 64 rewarded you in the final evaluation if you had all five of your potential brides at Red Heart level (and the original gave you a "Ladies Man" ending if you didn't marry any of them.) In fact, in HM64, you had to have a certain level of friendship with the other brides to get them to marry their alternate suitors. (And in Karen's case, keep her from leaving town). Later games eliminated this by locking down affection points once you got married. Friendship was a separate score and still counted.

Stealth Based Game

 * In order to get Hundred-Percent Completion of Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, it's necessary to complete the date with both Paz and Kaz, and certain Extra Ops won't unlock until you do; they also both yield various useful items, some of which can only be obtained by achieving maximum affinity with them. Ironically, the prize for successfully seducing Paz (the girl) is Big Boss's fanservice outfit, but the prize for successfully seducing Kaz (the man) is a bikini for the female characters. Since Big Boss dating a man causes mass Squick with certain fanboys, it's not uncommon to hear the instructions for obtaining the Patriot blueprints euphemistically described as 'knock out and pat down the lone soldier in Extra Ops 68'. Dating them doesn't impact on the plot or change the relationship between Snake and the character at all, but since the dates are only unlocked by completing the main story, this isn't unusual.

Tabletop Games

 * The only stats you have in Bliss Stage are Relationship Values - if you can get high-Intimacy, high-Trust relationships in most of La Résistance, you're unstoppable in your Empathic Weapon Humongous Mecha.
 * Likewise in Bliss Stage First and Final Act. If you manage to get the stable triangular relationship - you have TWO pilots, each with TWO weapons at maximum power!

Turn Based Strategy

 * In Record of Agarest War it is possible, through judicious use of a guide, to have all 3 love interests at intimacy 5 at the end of each generation. You can still only marry one, but having all of them at level 5 lets you choose any bride.
 * Sengoku Rance is essentially More Friends More Benefits on steroids. And for good reason, too befriending (for males)/romancing (for females) the Loads and Loads of Characters nets you most everything for a particular character: personal powerup, squad powerup, H-scenes (girls only, naturally) and backstory. Some characters can even be turned into Game Breaker tier characters.

Wide Open Sandbox

 * In Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, CJ's girlfriends each have their own bonuses for dating them. There is a cop who lets CJ keep his money and weapons after getting arrested, a nurse who does the same if he becomes incapacitated (even if the incident doesn't happen in the ladies' jurisdictions), a mechanic who fixes and paint his cars for free (but only if you go to her garage in San Fierro), and a few others with minor bonuses. At some point you can even drive your girlfriends' cars, despite the fact that they're never returned in one piece (if at all.) Dating one of the girls is necessary to complete the game; the rest are optional.
 * Niko Bellic can do the same thing in Grand Theft Auto IV, though his girlfriend perks are substantially less useful. He can also maintain limited relationships with male friends that are substantially more profitable, but no more in depth than drinking or darts. Truth in Television.

Anime and Manga

 * Mahou Sensei Negima, wherein the protagonist kissing/forming a pactio with as many girls as possible is highly incentivised, though not so much for his sake as theirs: it allows them to borrow his magic energy for self-defense, communicate with him telepathically, and grants them a unique magic item related to their abilities.
 * In fact, several of them (especially Chisame) have noted that no matter how pure his motives in this are, he's going to be causing a lot of heartbreak later.
 * In a strange subversion, by the time of the fight with the Big Bad in the magical world, several of the girls have effectively used Negi to get the cool toys & powers without having hardly any romantic feelings for him. It's just one kiss, after all.
 * Played straight in later chapters, when Negi obtains the ability to use the magical items of all the girls he has formed a pactio with.
 * It's also implied at later on that, the stronger the feelings between the two people are, the stronger the artifact will be. Though it hasn't at all been on purpose, Negi has been building up his army very well.