Happy Monday, everyone! Welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread, and the first of what may be many 2024 Wolfman Jew headers with personalized Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door screenshots. Maybe I won’t go overboard. You know, add a little bit of spice.

Anyway, If you look at the header, you’ll see one of my favorite bits of this game. See, while Mario is off on an exciting adventure to disparate lands and genre mix-ups, Luigi is doing the same. In fact, he’s basically going on an offscreen parody of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, complete with gimmicky challenges, dungeon crawling shenanigans, and a multiple part McGuffin. In between each chapter, you can run into him in the hub, alongside the latest sidekick he accrued and with a saga to tell. But, things aren’t quite as clear-cut, and to get the full story, you’ll have to hear both characters’ sides of the story. So why does Blooey the Blooper seek vengeance on Luigi? Well, you’ll have to get the game and find out yourself. Seriously, though, totally do that. This game rules as hard as it did twenty years ago. Actually, should I just use my privilege here and start recommending games more directly in these openers?

And so, here is the prompt: offscreen side adventures in a game, and which are your favorite. I realize this is a somewhat odd and ultimately limited question, but bear with me. There are a lot of games like The Thousand-Year Door that have this, this idea of offscreen quests or stories that you only get second-hand (hell, Luigi’s far from the only character who has his own weird story going on in the background). For instance, in the Mass Effect Trilogy, emails and broadcast voices on the Citadel may mention what’s going on with characters you met in this game or the last one. That’s how Mass Effect 3 just completely fridges minor but nonetheless charming intrepid reporter Emily Wong. And while this seems to be most common across RPGs, it’s not exclusive to them. The impression I get of a lot of fighting game franchises is that their heroes’ stories evolve in the time between entries, something certainly true of Resident Evil. So that’s what I want to hear about, the adventures of which we only get hints.

Beyond that, what I’ve spent the weekend playing is fairly obvious. But what about you?