Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Today, we’re going straight into things (because I had a bad headache last night, only started working on this after it subsided at about 10:30 PM, and would like to use this image. I’ve had it on my computer for months). Here’s Yoshi, so excited to be in a mainline Mario game again after six years. Now, Yoshi himself was pretty lucky; he was the star of Yoshi’s Island, which is sometimes a mainline Mario game, and basically every other Mario spinoff game too. But his excitement is fair, and it got me to thinking.

There are a lot of long-running gaming franchises, and almost everyone here is invested in at least a few. Most of them have a lot of characters, especially the ones with a lot of games or spinoffs or are built around having new settings and casts for every entry. And so, a lot of characters get left behind. If you’re lucky they’ll get a fun cameo or supporting role, and we’re definitely in a climate that supports that. So many multiverses and metaverses and games that are built around honoring history. I mean, I’ve been on and off playing the Castlevania DLC for Vampire Survivors, and there are some wild deep cuts there.

This is not about whether these practices are good or bad or flawed or whatever. Maybe I’ll ask for something more philosophical next time. What I care about is this: tell me about a character from a series you love, one who barely shows up or who’s been absent for a long time, and then tell me why they should be brought back. I wanna hear about your favorite second- (or third-) stringers.

I guess I’ll start. So in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, there are these evil, vulture-like bird enemies called Kargaroks. They’re really big and nasty, especially in Twilight Princess, but I really like them. Probably because I became a dye in the wool Zelda fan around when those games came out. But they’ve never been reused outside of spinoffs like Cadence of Hyrule and, inexplicably, Nintendo Land. I think they provide a neat counterpart to the many other aerial enemies of the Zelda games like Keese and Peahats, and… I dunno. I think that’s cool. I was kinda surprised they weren’t in Echoes of Wisdom, since that game basically did this to like a dozen other hyper-obscure Zelda enemies.

…Okay, fine. For a more traditional example of “character,” I still wanna know what happened to the original Ace Attorney characters by the time of the Apollo Justice games. I don’t need to know about what happened to the likes of Dick Gumshoe or Franziska von Karma, but it’d be nice, you know?

Whether or not you want to engage with this, and honestly I don’t blame you if ya don’t, what did you play this weekend? And hey! Lily Bones’ Game News Roundup just came out! So go ahead and give it a read.