A collection of tenaciously unique sidekick games that turned gaming's oddballs into protagonists, leaving console generations yearning for more.
Center: Yoshi And The Mysterious Book . Clockwise from top: Knuckles , Freshly-Plucked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland , a Slime from Dragon Quest , and Daxter There are few roles in video gaming less dignified than the sidekick.
At best, you’re destined for the role of Player 2, helmed by whichever weak-thumbed child, indulgent spouse, or weird visiting cousin that the second controller inevitably gets pawned off on to; at worst, you spend your entire existence becoming intimately familiar with the contours of an overweight Italian plumber’s taint, before gettingEvery now and again, though, sidekicks make good enough to get their own games, free from the tyranny of the bland and focus-tested protagonists they typically labor under. Maybe there’s a bit of experimental gameplay that a development team wants to try out, without risking the reputation of their flagship hero.
Maybe the parent company has a new handheld system that needs a semi-recognizable face to sell it. Or maybe the Real Perverts have just finally gotten their hands on the mechanisms of franchise control. In any case, it’s a gaming tradition stretching from: the sidekick game.
Usually smaller, almost always weirder, and with an occasional tendency to indulge in the dreaded specter of “edutainment,” they’re the oddballs of any great gaming franchise, operating under their own set of rules and conventions. Here, then, are 12 games that tell gaming’s various radical hedgehogs, angsty fantasy heroes, and sword-toting chosen ones to take a hike: Today, it’s the sidekick’s time to shine.
If you squint, there’s an insult hiding right in the title of Nintendo’s slightly cynical effort to ride’s crimson coattails way back in the early 1990s: Obviously, the Japanese gaming company would never let perpetually lesser Mario brother Luigi lead his own video game—even an action-empty geography trivia exercise like this one—except, well… The fact is, Nintendo mascot Mario has spawned more spin-offs from his various relatives, employees, and tangential hangers-on than any one of Bravo’sof innovative puzzle-platformers—without that spin-off factor. ) But sometimes, even Nintendo produces a game so lousy or strange that it needs someone else to take the fall for it. And, really, what else are younger brothers for?
Sure, Prinnies might make for terrible platforming heroes, what with their tendency to die in a single hit, or explode when thrown. But that’s why the game gifts you with a literal thousand of the poor bastards to blow through as you navigate its devious monster-filled levels, cheerfully burning through your hordes as you go.
Sensibility-wise, it’s all perfectly in tune withplayers to sacrifice these lackeys for quick material gain. It’s just that, this time, you’re the lackey. Have fun dying, over and over again! We should probably feel grateful, given both the breadth, and the boisterous irritation potential, of Sonic The Hedgehog’s supporting cast—looking at you, Big The Cat—that he hasn’t spawnedsidekick spin-offs.
Buddy Tails had the most individual outings, having helped flesh out the Game Gear’s handheld library back in the early ’90s with games like’s echidna deuteragonist runs with his own, even suckier crew of sidekicks, literally shackled to his side. Released for Sega’s short-lived 32X add-on for the Sega Genesis,stages and the franchise’s pseudo-3D bonus levels.
It’s just that it’s spending all that increased power to lovingly animate characters like “Vector The Crocodile” and “Charmy Bee”—raising the horrifying possibility that somewhere, decades down the line, Sega might get around to making anSony’s PSP handheld holds a special place in the pantheon of bizarro spin-off games: As the PlayStation company’s first foray into the low-power, innovation-demanding world of portable gaming, the little system played host to a lot of very odd spins on classic franchises.
Set in between Insomniac’s open-world and its 2023 sequel ,has many of the hallmarks of a sidekick game. It’s much shorter, for one thing, telling a more self-contained story about Miles coming to terms with both his past and future. It futzes with new mechanics, playing on this Spidey’s unique powers.
. And, maybe most importantly, it keeps the series’ “main” hero, Peter, way the hell away from the action; after all, nobody needs a protagonist suddenly barging his way into a perfectly good sidekick adventure.is a celebrated state prosecutor, while main series hero Phoenix Wright is simply a lowly private defense attorney. And yet, even more thangames fit the “sidekick game” template best.
Part of it is simply the perspective flip, as players watch Miles and his allies perform the government’s side of Capcom’s whacked-out take on a criminal justice system, trampling all over crime scenes to try to unravel mysteries.
But there’s also a significant effort to change up the series’ occasionally rote “spot the contradiction” gameplay, one pointedly rooted in Miles’ character: Rather than the seat-of-the-pants Hail Mary’s that save the day in thegames, the much colder Edgeworth is all about logic and debate, engaging his opponents in behind-the-scenes conversations and interrogations to successfully smarm his way to the truth.series in service of sending him off on a run of fairly dull interplanetary James Bond riffs.
Shockingly,violates one of the key precepts of the sidekick game genre: It includes a decent number of sequences where you play as usual protagonist Ratchet while he’s stuck in the prison Clank is trying to break him out of—possibly because not even Insomniac wanted to spend an entire game stuck as a tiny metal dweeb in a tux.
” meta-series has a fair amount of spin-off games lodged inside it, many of them awkwardly spread out over the publisher’s various mobile game efforts. It’s a blessing, then, that the best of the bunch is still relatively accessible: 2007’sthat started life on the PSP and has now migrated to modern systems.
Like many sidekick games, it’s a study in contrasts: Hero Zack Fair is a sunny, smiling dude where his eventual friend Cloud Strife is a taciturn grump; his gameplay, meanwhile, is compulsive hack-and-slash action as opposed to the original game’s more traditional RPG mechanics. a footnote in Nintendo’s console history, though, made it a great showcase for games likespin-off that began by stripping away that series’ most famous verb: Jumping. Receiving a trial run via a series of bonus levels in 2013’s, the good Captain got his own full title the following year, navigating beautiful little diorama levels in search of treasures and veggies to hurl at foes. Like many sidekick games,is a celebration of the cool things that can come from embracing limitations: Captain Toad may not be able to cover whole landscapes in a single “WAHOO!
”-ing triple jump, but his game is a lovely little dose of puzzling for players to relax with.franchise is something like 50 percent spin-off by volume at this point, as the series continues to accrue remakes, side stories, and the occasional oddball light gun game in abundance. One of its earliest experiments is still one of its most pure expressions of the sidekick game ethos, though, as 2001’szombie-hunting buddy Barry Burton for a stab at compressing the franchise’s undead-slaying gameplay down onto Nintendo’s teensy Game Boy Color.
There are some genuinely interesting ideas at play in—most notably its combat system, which shifts from a very distant top-down look to a first-person perspective to maintain some semblance of horror, whileserving as the world’s most gore-soaked rhythm minigame—but sadly for Barry-heads, its story has since been ruled too strange even for’s nonsense-filled canon.
, the series finally answered the question of what they’d get up to without all these sword-toting humans around in 2006, with the answer turning out, against all odds, to be “waging surprisingly complicated tank battles with each other.
” A Nintendo DS sequel to a Japan-only Game Boy Advance game,franchise, as the heroic Rocket uses a magic flute to command his fellow Slimes in tank combat with an army of invading platypi. Quick-moving and entirely unserious, it’s a joyous reminder that even gaming’s most traditional franchises can afford to cut loose and let their little weirdos take the reins every once in a while. It’s not clear, exactly, what makes Tingle “freshly picked,” but it certainly sounds unwholesome.
And we’re not just saying that that because this oddest ofabout Tingle and his quest to reach a hedonistic Nirvana called Rupeeland is unsettling, from his perpetually rosy cheeks, to the overtly capitalistic nature of his trial, to the way he’s gifted a magical secretary who looks like a PG pin-up model… in a Tingle costume. Only released in Japan and Europe,what it is in favor of letting its designers go incredibly deep on one strange little dude they somehow got obsessed with.
The intensity of that conviction—that people really would play a game about an odd little pervert who floats around attached to a balloon, overcharging for cartography—is almost enough to make us wish that the game’s 2009 sequel, a riff on
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