Illusion of Gaia

Again, we have a Japanese game where the main character is a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. Again with the yin-yang universe crap. But here's the fun part: You bludgeon your enemies to death with a flute.

You're an adolescent bad-ass with a flute and psychic powers! Hellz yeah!!!

I'm not going to go too much into the plot here. This game was made by the same folks who brought us Terranigma, so there are some similarities. (Okay, a LOT.) The main character's name here is Will, he's telekinetic, and he has a bunch of useless friends who tag along with him as he explores various ruins looking for his dad or something. You really don't care.

There's a princess involved, but the unique twist with this game is that she has a pet pig who, late in the game, throws itself on a fire to feed some hungry villagers in Cambodia. This totally makes the game worth playing, just to see that moment. You can almost smell the sizzling pork. Actually, as I write this, it's making me a little hungry.

So what I'd really like to focus on here is just how useless buddies can be in video games. I know that in a lot of games, when the controlled character is paired up with someone, that partner plays some sort of function like, I don't know, carrying all of the shit you accumulate on your journey. They must have access to some magic portal that leads to a dimension containing the most organized closet ever. But not Will. Nope. His stuff just hangs out somewhere, presumably the Dark Space that they keep babbling about in the game. And his friends just tag along, two girls fight over him.

As the game goes on, Will's buddies reunite with him on some legendary Incan ship, and one of them falls into the ocean and gets swallowed by something called a Riverson. I'm thinking it's a big fish or something. Then they just get picked off one by one by various things and annoy you, the player, along the way. Will, onscreen, seems to take this all in stride, probably because he's essentially just an amalgamation of pixels.

After getting your ship destroyed by some monster that ate your buddy, you end up floating on a chunk of wood with the princess, eating raw fish, and getting scurvy. You drift into a town, reunite with all your buddies (except the dead one, of course), and have to get one of your buddies' memory back.

Then there's an adventure involving going through a vampire couples' underwater palace. What they're doing underwater, I don't know. But when you make your escape through some tunnels, someone starts banging on the damn walls from the outside. Turns out it's your dead buddy, who has been reincarnated into the Riverson somehow. I'm still not sure how that works out.

You do that, then wander over to another town, where another buddy finds his papa. Two buddies stay behind. But always tagging along is the damn princess.

I can't even remember how the last buddy drops off. Maybe you just leave him somewhere in the desert.

Luckily, though, you generally only have to babysit the buds between levels. You don't have to herd them about while whacking the shit out monsters with your damn flute.

And speaking of the damn flute, every time Will has to use his telekinetic abilities, he twirls it. He twirls it two-fisted like he's at the head of the most bizarre parade ever.

Maybe I'm obsessing about the flute a little too much. As the game goes on, Will can change shapes into some kind of pupil-less knight and plasmic being, so the flute will not be your only weapon. But it's all Will's got in his normal form. He's got telekinesis and a flute.

Can you imagine what happened when those monsters went to their afterlife?

Monster 1: "I got stabbed by a sword. What happened to you?"

Monster 2: "Oh, burnt to a crisp by a fireball spell. What about you, Mr. Skeleton?"

Monster 3: "Some damn kid bludgeoned me to death with his purple flute."

Monsters 1 and 2: "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! WHAT A BITCH-ASS WAY TO DIE!"

And so Monster 3 is teased for eternity. Hope you're happy, Mr. Bludgeons-Everything-With-A-Flute.