This is something I’ve had a couple conversations with @Mewsly about, cause both of us really enjoy the romance aspect in these games but we both agree that we’d be alright playing a game without it as long as the game still had good character development that was accessible without romance. It seems like a lot of the time, a lot of a character’s development and backstory are sort of romance-locked, so you can’t really get to know them on a deep level, or sometimes even a moderate level, without romancing them.
For a non CS example of what I’m talking about–look at Jack, in Mass Effect 2 and 3. You can still get to know her, but the culmination of her ME2 character arc is behind a romance wall. You still meet her in the same place in ME3 regardless of that, so clearly she still found a way to help herself without Shepard, but it still kind of sucks that she’ll only really open up to a character who’s shown romantic interest. In CCH1, the MC only has the opportunity to find out what Dirty Girl’s secret is if they start dating–and you get a key insight into her character’s motivations during her romance content in CCH2 that’s missed completely if you’re platonic with her, unless I’m misremembering or missed it.
It isn’t that it doesn’t or can’t make sense–romantic partners are commonly kind of more intimate and close than platonic friends, or can be at least, but I still make friends and then open up to them. (And tbh I wouldn’t even call these that great of examples–I mean CCH still has a book left so maybe if you aren’t romancing her you’ll barely get to say hi to Dirty Girl in book 3, but in both of them you still get to know the character pretty well even if you aren’t romancing them. I’m really hesitant to name more egregious examples–I know of games I’ve played where I felt like the characters I didn’t romance just kind of disappeared from the story, or where I only got development with characters I romanced, but those were usually games I didn’t enjoy much so didn’t replay often if at all, so it’s completely possible that they had more or better content than I remember, or got a patch that fixed some of the issue, or something like that.)
@Fiogan touched on this over in the Sexuality and NPCs thread,
So it isn’t that romance in and of itself is necessary for my enjoyment, but a way to get to know and appreciate the characters is, and oftentimes romances are written as the only way to do that