Mario & Luigi franchise

I’ve played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga so many times, I keep forgetting that video games make me as bad tempered as a goat and as apt to spout obscenities as a small electronic box with buttons that swear when you press them. It’s one of those clever RPGs, the ones that realise that there’s nothing more tedious than wandering around and waiting to be pounced by endless hordes of monsters you can’t see or avoid.

There are two ways to deal with this without ruining the RPG standard; one is to have lots and lots of cheap in-game insect repellent taking up most of your practically endless inventory space, as can be seen in Breath of Fire. The other way is to program in an “auto” option – the option that literally translates as: “You know the drill, game. I’m strong enough to just stand here and take a beating without healing all battle and I’m only ever going to use this one incredibly expensive weapon which I upgrade every time I arrive at a new town or settlement, so there’s no point going through the charade of pretending I’m going to use any magic or special items until my next boss fight. And even then, there are no guarantees.” This is normally accompanied by excessive and anal healing after every ten battles of so, or as soon as the numbers turn red.

Phoenix Wright

Phoenix Wright is not a game series it’s easy to find fans for in daily life. I’ve got two brothers, one of whom hates slow paced games with lots of dialogue and the other is so lazy he won’t even take a game suggestion from me because that would involve borrowing a DS and putting some time aside to play it. It truly is a mystery. Anyone would think I was asking him to dig me a military war bunker lined with currency that’s been out of circulation for thirty years.

In any case, Phoenix Wright is one of two franchises I’ve played that was heavy in dialogue. The other was Zone of the Enders on the GBA. Ah, what a nostalgia trip that is. The repetitive witticisms. The character clichés. The endless text-scroll boxes. The incomprehensible storyline. The insultingly easy game play. Phoenix Wright is much newer and better and is more like an interactive story than a traditional video game. There’s no shooting the thing or poking the squirrel or whatever it is you do in popular entertainment nowadays.

Pokemon Black / White

Close, but just falling short of the mark: 4/5

Pokemon. A franchise you either politely and determinedly ignore, like a yelling homeless man on the London Underground, or one which you follow with an insane glint in your eye and a fire in your heart that may well turn you into that yelling homeless man on the London Underground. I fall into the latter category, I fear. An avid Pokemon fan since the age of eight when I stole my brother’s version of Blue and used his Venusaur to destroy a Persian, I am hooked and lost to the world.

The franchise has continued, rightly or wrongly, for fifteen years, spinning off shows and toys and comic books, plus a whole host of other gimmicks, interesting for five minutes and hanging around for just as long. Yes, at one point I really did want a Pokemon themed N64. But we won’t talk about that. After all, Pokemon is a collector’s game; now with 650 little critters to collect, I’d say you’d have to be dangerously obsessed to keep on going.