Identifying appeals in interactive romance through user-generated reviews of otome games

Purpose This study identifies the appeal elements that otome game players articulate in user-generated reviews. Otome games are narrative-heavy romantic games primarily distributed as visual novels, yet they remain underexamined in library and information science (LIS). The paper extends readers’ advisory and collection development practice into this digital-game format and asks what these appeals reveal about romance fiction genre progression across media. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected 17,183 user-written reviews of top-selling and top-rated otome games from Steam. The corpus was analyzed using BERTopic, a topic modeling approach for large text corpora. Resulting topic clusters were interpreted through a readers’ advisory appeals framework and later extensions to digital contexts. The design pairs computational text analysis with LIS theory on genre, appeal and user preference. Findings The paper shows how players articulate appeal in an interactive romance genre. Otome player reviews function as advisory texts on two levels: extending established romance fiction appeals (character, story, tone, sensory) into a new medium and surfacing format-specific appeals tied to interactivity. The findings suggest that otome game appeals signify a shift in the cross-media progression of romance fiction and expand understanding of contemporary romance audiences. Originality/value This is among the first papers to apply a readers’ advisory appeals framework to otome games using BERTopic topic modeling on player-written reviews. It treats interactive romance media as a legitimate object of LIS study and links game-format appeals to romance fiction advisory scholarship. The contribution is to readers’ advisory, collection development and genre studies, with relevance to game studies and romance scholarship.