How far are you in Legends ZA? Thoughts on characters or anything?
i've beat the game now! for specific character thoughts...
corbeau is so fun to me. i'm weak to gangster with a heart of gold-type characters and the noble mob boss trope, to start; i'm aware that IRL the yakuza and organized crime in general sucks shit, but i'm into "what if there was a sexy mob boss who was like, noble at heart" a little bit, as well as the tropes around "ohoh, this guy is Actually Dangerous but has taken a shine to you". plus he's like, a short weirdo. it's incredibly funny of the pokemon company to both go with the various tropes around a sexy mob boss but ALSO. he's a short weirdo with a bug. 10/10.
WITH THAT SAID. i can't stop imagining the dynamic of... so the thing is. by the time in-game i hit corbeau and he's trying to hold taunie's debt over our head. and he goes "i'll send the rust syndicate to... have some pokemon battles at the hotel if you refuse". straight-up my response was "i could take 'em". and that REMAINED my response. they're clearly poison and steel themed and i have like, a mega excadrill, they don't got shit on me. which leads to this really funny dynamic where the protagonist is like... kind of just going along with this because they feel like it?
this happens a lot in video games (protagonist character OFTEN has to be on a level well above everyone else in the game for like, the plot), but it's such a fascinating wrinkle to the "mob boss who becomes dangerously interested in you" trope to me, because like. corbeau is NOT the strongest person in that room. and he's increasingly less the strongest person in that room the later in the game you get because this game's curve goes above 70 that's straight-up cynthia levels and even in-universe that's basically treated as an insane peak. like, it leads to this vision in my mind where corbeau is desperately holding on to pretending he's in charge when finally faced with someone he ABSOLUTELY CANNOT force to do anything, ever, they don't want to, because if he pushes too far they have a team of six nuclear bombs at their disposal.
and then. and this is ALSO key. that guy is like... a teenaged tourist. who runs around town doing errands and chaos god shit. because they're a video game protagonist in a game written mainly around side quests.
anyway my point is: already the fandom is making corbeau too Cool and Hot for the in-game dynamic and i get it but it's WAY funnier if you throw in that he's way in over his head thank you for coming to my ted talk,
