By Ian and Reid

Once upon a time, a comp-sci major realized that he needed actual friends to play Dungeons and Dragons, and this was a dilemma for him. So he turned, as always, to punch-cards or magnetic tape or whatever nonsense people in the information dark ages used to code with, and created computer programs that would act as dungeon masters. Thusly the video game was born, for there is no older recreational use for computers than slaying goblins and collecting experience points. Okay, pornography. But goblins are a close second.

Role-Playing-Games or RPGs are the oldest and, usually, most dreadfully complex kind of computer game there is, and over time they’ve evolved to become the games with the longest playtimes and most ornate universes you can find in a silly time-wasting bit of software. Part of this depth comes through in the characters you meet in any adventurous stat-building type game; sometimes cheery, sometimes spooky, often dreadfully bland but occasionally intriguing characters who make the grunt work of RPGs and the fight after fight after fight seem worth it. The characters are what make the stories work- they’re the role part of role-playing, so they’re pretty damn important in these games.

Being immense nerds, Reid and Ian have played a great number of RPGs and have compiled, for your reading pleasure, the fifteen best examples of these characters they’ve come across.

15. Quina - Final Fantasy IX: Sure, fine, Final Fantasy Nine was just Final Fantasy Seven but you can have four characters instead of three, I’ll admit it, but that’s honestly not a bad formula for a fun game. And it’s a shitload more fun than the abortion that was final fantasy eight. Anyway, just like every other installment of Square’s flagship series, there’s an optional comic relief companion in FFIX, this time a big blubbery harlequin-frog creature named Quina Quen who’s of indeterminate gender, wears a chef’s hat and loves eating stuff. That sounds like a lame character you’d never use, right? Wrong- Quina is funny to lug around, sure, but s/he also has “blu magic”, an ability that lets him/her learn a HUGE list of new techniques and magical moves from literally eating your enemies. A couple of the abilities gained this way are almost required to survive some of the later parts of the game, and the fact that along the way you have a goofy companion that talks in broken English about “yummies” is icing on the cake. I have yet to play through the game without having Quina in my party as much as possible; basically all the time except for the numerous parts where s/he is forcibly removed from your company (always a sign that the developers realized “oh shit, this character is WAY too good, let’s throw in some handicapped parts).

14. Wrex – Mass Effect: While it’s no surprise that five of our top fifteen RPG characters come from BioWare games, towards the bottom of this list we were kinda stretching for games that we hadn’t used yet. Thus, Mass Effect! BioWare’s latest game, though generally awesome, has a pretty generic NPC base compared to their other games. Wrex, a big scarred lizard man, fills the role of the gruff-talking jerk mercenary who joins your party because he wants to kill people and you seem to do a lot of that. What makes him more interesting than the other characters is in your interaction with him. If he’s tagging along, he’ll often make jokes at the enemy’s expense, making it impossible for you to choose the most diplomatic dialog option, or he’ll just flat out kill guys when you choose to spare them. He doesn’t really share your goals, he just likes sharing your kills. The craziest thing about Wrex is that you can actually kill him in the course of the game. Just… shoot him point blank in the face if he disagrees with you. That deserves a little something, doesn’t it?

13. Cait Sith – Final Fantasy VII: Make fun all you want. Nobody likes poor Cait Sith, the absolutely ridiculous cat with a megaphone riding a magic stuffed animal, standing in total opposition to the stupidly gritty and boring other characters of perhaps the most popular console RPG of all time. What people don’t realize is that Cait can be a really strategically powerful character- his/its best weapon, the HP shout, deals a precise and high amount of damage, and some of his limit breaks can (albeit unreliably) be forceful too. What really landed the goofy little guy on this list, however, is the fact that his background story is utterly bizarre- a fortunetelling cat in a symbiotic relationship with a magic toy, then turns out to be a robot being psychically controlled by the enemy to infiltrate your ranks and sabotage your quest from the inside out. Video game villains are very rarely bright enough to pull something like this, rarely smart enough to figure that it’s much harder to suspect an absolutely bizarre magic stuffed animal/robot/house-pet as a double agent than just some guy with a knife or something. Points to S.H.I.E.L.D. or whatever the villains in that game were called (forgive me, it’s been like a decade since I played it) for the whole “if you want to hide something, make it obvious” double-logic that only truly well thought-out villainous plots incorporate.

12. Sheogorath – Oblivion: This is another bit of a stretch, and I blame it completely on the fact that I had just finished up playing through the expansion with Sheogorath when we made up this list. Sheogorath is the daedric prince of madness, which means that he’s a crazy god. He takes the shape of an old guy with a cane and a silly jester suit who’s always smiling and talks like the most intense bipolar man in the world. He’s really not that far off from being a character Kirk and crew might’ve met in the original Star Trek. He’s interesting because he never really seems to know what he’s talking about, enjoys the merciless slaughter of his own people, and most of all loves his power to summon his depressed aide to his side at any time. He giggles emphatically when he teaches you the ability and forces you to use it several times in a row for no reason. The fact that the Shimmering Isles expansion (which is entirely in his realm and all the main quests are given by him) is the best part of Oblivion has a little to do with his inclusion as well, but I’ll tell you what doesn’t: His slow clap after you complete a mission. What a douche.

11. Crassius Curio – Morrowind: The problem with games that have a whole shitload of NPCs is that too often you run out of character traits to distinguish them. Crassius Curio, a nobleman that gives you a lot of higher level quests for one of the fifty or so affiliations you can align yourself with in this crazy-long game, is a notable exception to Bethesda’s usual lack of interesting anything, and for a very simple reason- he’s a complete and total pervert. Author of “The Lusty Argonian Maid”, a book you can find in the game and which turns out to be some very blunt pornography about lizard-people, Curio will constantly refer to your character as “sweetie” and make passes at you, no matter what your gender is. One of his missions, in fact one of the LAST missions he gives you, is just to take off all your clothes and chat with him for a while. It’s off-putting, it’s creepy, and it makes you wonder about the writing session that created him, but by the time you meet the guy you’ll be so tired of mindless fetch quests and “kill the rats in my bar!” type jobs that humoring a lecherous old dandy is a nice break in the non-action.

10. Rampah – Baldur’s Gate II: Rampah? Who the hell is that? I’ve played that game a billion times and I don’t remember anyone named “Rampah!” … is what you might be saying. Well, prepare yourself for the greatest and most minor character ever. Rampah is a pale, crazy homeless man the likes of which are all over the dock district of Baldur’s Gate. You talk to him briefly once in the course of an optional quest, and his information is almost completely wrong. As you and your fellow detectives are looking into the identity of a local mass murderer, you run into old Rampah, who tells you that there’s a local armorer who’s been making some interesting types of leather recently, and gives you a sample. IT’S NOT HUMAN SKIN!! he attests, making quite a fuss about it, and in the end it turns out he’s right. It’s elephant skin, but the guy he leads you to is making his own Silence of the Lambs ladysuit anyway. For the best line to scream for no reason in a crowded movie theater, Rampah gets spot #10.

9. Tubba Blubba – Paper Mario: A real joy of any game intended for younger players is when a concept actually borders on being really cool of its own merits. So it is with Tubba Blubba, a big goofy purple monster in Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64. He’s a silly turtle-dinosaur-thing, sure, but his backstory is surprisingly neat. Tubba Blubba was once a timid coward, frightened by the mischievous boos (ghosts) that wouldn’t let him be. So what did he do? He pulled his own heart out of his chest and hid it so as to become invincible (a’la that cool giant in the Jim Henson’s Storyteller episode that gave me nightmares when I was a kid). With his new found invulnerability, Blubba then set out to eat every single ghost he could find, turning the tables and becoming a feared monstrosity that the undead and even his own fellow soldiers in the Koopa army were frightened of. Of course Mario comes around and fucks everything up, as per usual, but still- a Faustian tale of redemption and corrupted revenge, that’s not what you’d really expect from a game aimed at 7-year-olds.

8. Frog – Chrono Trigger: Chrono Trigger is one of those awesome Super Nintendo RPGs that’s a testament to the genre. Great story, great gameplay, just a fun time all around. It’s also been a really long time since I played it, so everything I say here may be completely made up. Of the five characters you get to help your generic spiky-haired hero, Frog stands out as being the only frog knight among them. The idea is that he was a valiant knight, and he was turned into a frog by an evil witch, and etc etc. You know that story, right? Well, unfortunately for him, he joins up with time-traveling you and it ends up having nothing at all to do with his curse and/or turning back to normal. For him, this whole game is like a side quest. And that’s fucking awesome. Also, he’s a great character to play with and manages to be the one with the most dignity in the entire game. Poor robot…

7. Stan – Okage Shadow King: Now here’s an obscure one. Absolutely NOBODY played this rare playstation 2 title, which is a shame seeing as it was a surprisingly fun and challenging RPG with a lot of surprisingly novel twists on the conventions of the genre. Plus, that rarest of rare traits for a video game- it was honestly very well-written and funny. At the forefront of all of these traits is Stan, the titular shadow king, a demon who was once the scariest thing in the world but was banished to a bottle hundreds of years ago. The game’s main character, a ludicrously trodden-upon boy with the worst parents in the world, ends up with evil king Stan possessing his shadow as part of a bargain to “save” his sister (really all that was wrong with her was that her shadow had turned pink, but Mom and Dad figured selling their son’s soul to a demon was worth it to fix this “problem”). The rest of the game unfolds as a quest to smite the lesser demons that have arisen since Stan’s banishment and taken sections of his former power, so in essence he becomes a whiny has-been of a demon lord trying desperately to be taken seriously as he slowly regains his former glory. As long as the main character is in the party, so is Stan, sticking to him like… well, like his shadow, since that’s what he is. There are all sorts of neat facets to this weird relationship; for example Stan’s power in battles depends on the time of day. Since when the sun is setting the shadows are longer, Stan is thusly at his peak, but he dwindles in force around noon. If you want to have conversations he isn’t privy to (often a necessity since he has his own agenda), you just have to walk into a dark room and he disappears completely. You can use a flashlight to beef him up- it’s all really unique stuff and combined with the idea of a washed up demon king it makes for one of the stranger characters you’ll ever interact with in a game.

6. Hagnk – Kingdom of Loathing: The Kingdom of Loathing is the only online RPG represented in this list, and not only because it’s the only one we’ve played. Well, okay, yeah it is, but KoL is an awesome game and it would’ve gotten on this list anyway. Ian and I debated long into the night about which character should get the nod, and we finally decided on poor Hagnk, proprietor of Hagnk’s Ancestral Mini-Storage. Hagnk (pronounced “Hank,” the ‘g’ is silent, as he’s a gnome) has been around since the beginning of the game, and in that time his shop has been hit by a comet, flooded after that comet melted, and had a temporal rift opened into it to a time when everything was on fire. However, recently the players of the game got together to build him a new, better store out of moon metal that’s supposed to be impervious. I’m just waiting until the next disaster strikes…

5. HK-47 – Knights of the Old Republic: While Bethesda seems unable to make even remotely interesting characters most of the time and Square concentrates everything into one guy per game, Bioware prides themselves on their characters having depth and facets and all that loveliness. And then there’s HK-47, the anti- C3PO, a robot that tags along with your party of vaguely semi-interesting Jedis and aliens in this Star Wars game and acts like a fucking psychopath. I wouldn’t say HK is a one-dimensional or throwaway character, he has some plot relevance. But what makes him really great is the fact that he’s coldly and efficiently evil, offering to outright murder a great number of people you come across. There are QUITE a few conversations in Knights of the Old Republic where, if HK-47 is acting as your translator or is just in your party at all, an additional option along the lines of “shall I kill him, master?” will show up. And he’ll do it, too- the game has a built in morality system that lets you turn to the dark side if you like, and having HK in your party is just an endless font of opportunities to build up your points towards this goal. Plus he refers to living creatures as “meat-bags”, which is, frankly, awesome.

4. Minsc – Baldur’s Gate: I love Baldur’s Gate and everything it stands for. It’s basically just a computer port of Dungeons & Dragons… hell, there’s no basically about it, that’s EXACTLY what it is, straight down to being franchised in one of their official game settings (I don’t remember which one, though, like it fucking matters). Apart from that, it’s got a great story and an even better sense of humor. Nothing exemplifies that better than Minsc, a ranger with amazing strength and astounding stupidity. Minsc’s animal companion (as all rangers have) is Boo, a miniature giant space hamster. Yes, those things exist in D&D canon, however we’re lead to believe that Boo is actually just a normal hamster and Minsc won’t admit it because of his often complained about head injury. Apart from being hilarious and having battle cries like, “Go for the eyes, Boo! THE EYES!!”, Minsc is a great character to play with, and unless you’re playing truely evil, there’s no reason at all not to have him in your party. You get a choice of about 20 different companions over the course of the game, and I’ve only played once where Minsc didn’t stay by my side the whole time (again, evil). His only drawback is that in the first Baldur’s Gate game, you have to have his witch that he’s bodyguarding with you all the time, too, and she kinda sucks. Still, you gotta love Minsc.

3. Booster – Super Mario RPG: In Super Mario world or land or whatever the place is called technically, it takes one hell of a guy to make abducting a princess be novel anymore. I mean, damselnapping is their primary export. Luckily, Super Mario RPG revitalizes the old standby with gusto by way of Booster the Seventh, a bat-shit crazy cross-eyed little guy with a Grizzly Adams beard and a viking hat. Right at that bemoanable part in any RPG where you finally have enough characters that you can choose your party and thusly the story interactions have to become homogonized, Super Mario RPG compensates beautifully by introducing Booster and his strange little tower. It’s there that he’s keeping princess Toadstool captive in preparation for their wedding, along with his huge collection of model trains, captive beetles, high explosives and other oddities. Booster’s so insane that he’ll actually see you a few times while you try to sneak in, but he immediately loses interest in the heroes and moves on to some other bizarre activity like trying to learn what cake is or opening and closing his curtains obsessive-compulsively. He earns such a high spot on our list partially because his portion of Super Mario RPG is possibly the most fun aspect of an already incredibly fun game, partially because his insanity is just so over-the-top, and partially because where he’s placed in the overall story of the game works so damn well. Mostly, though, it’s because Booster is so crazy that he actually tries something nobody else who’s ever kidnapped the princess has ever thought to try- he actually books a chapel and a priest and GOES THERE TO GET MARRIED. No sitting around with your bride locked up forever, no constant threats and basically begging for Mario to show up (he doesn’t even know who Mario IS), Booster the seventh is bonkers enough to actually go through with the plan. Crazy like a fox, I guess. Which brings us to…

2. Kang the Mad – Jade Empire: Strangely enough, our number 2 choice comes from a game that got quite a bit of negative/neutral reviews. Jade Empire was a fun game with some neat ideas, but none of them were really fleshed out all that well. The fighting system was incredibly simple and the basis of all the strategy at the same time, which was not a good combo. In any case, it did have Kang the Mad, a crazy scientist and inventor in this ancient Chinese setting who invents a magic plane you fly around in (and do odd Galaga minigames in), as well as a bunch of other things that shouldn’t be around in the time frame. Though Kang is an NPC who joins your party, he never actually accompanies you as a fighter. He does have a whole sub-quest devoted to figuring out his past, which he just forgot, and he’ll comment on the things you’ve done, but that’s about it. His hare-brained commentary, desire to blow everything up, convenient amnesia that covers up the fact that he’s actually a GOD, and the phrase, “Make him fall down a flight of PUNCHES!” make Kang a close second as our favorite RPG character.

1. Mr. Saturn – Earthbound: Zoom! Boink! Earthbound for the Super Nintendo MAY be the best role playing game ever made. It’s fun, it’s intriguing, it’s easy to learn but parts of it will challenge even the most die-hard number-crunching RPG fan. It’s the kind of game you can easily get lost in for days, scaring you at the darker parts and getting legitimate belly laughs at others, and a great deal of that entertainment value lies in the enormous cast of strange and interesting characters. The Runaway Five (Everybody knows ghosts hate blues music!!!), Ukiki the nessy-riding bubble monkey, the mountainous living city Dungeon Man- there are too many to name. But atop it all there’s a little guy named Mr. Saturn… or, actually, a BUNCH of little guys.

“ALL ARE MISTER SATURN! ZOOM!” they’ll say. Except Dr. Saturn, who proclaims proudly “I AM FIX YOUR BODY! BOINK!”. Big-nosed bodiless heads with whiskers and feet and a single hair with a bow in it, the Mr. Saturns are one of the few characters in Earthbound you somehow know you can trust. They live in houses shaped like themselves, they put their telephones on the tops of tall ladders, they eat peanut cheese bars and drink hallucinogenic coffee in the hot-springs of Saturn Valley, and oh, did I mention? They talk in a bizarre, almost illegible font. Combine this with their constant Pinkyisms and you can barely understand the little guys at first, but after a while it comes naturally. Once they’ve built a time machine for you (again shaped like one of them but gray and enormous), it becomes obvious- the Mr. Saturns are the best friends a team of psychic monster-besting 7-year-olds could ever have. You won’t mind at all saving them from an anthropomorphous pile of living vomit that shits zombies and thinks three minutes of silence is a good password into his lair. You’ll cry when you see them shackled to the computerized walls. You’ll laugh at their ATM machine that looks, once again, like one of them but choking on a white rectangle and bugging its eyes out as it dances. Mr. Saturn (any of him) is so unique, so captivating and so endearing a little guy that he just had to be our number one pick for best RPG character of all time.

So there you have it, our top fifteen NPC RPG acronym extraordinaire! Don’t ask how we picked these things or why we excluded X character from Y game because, well, we don’t really care and it’s not something that really matters. Seriously. Just enjoy it and move along. Jerk.