One of the necessary elements into character creation for video games is, a comic relief character. Most well balanced games have characters where you can laugh at what they do, how they act, and in general everything about them. Without these comic relief characters you have mediocre comedy which can get boring and dry up easily. The one aspect I dislike about comic relief characters is that you need to give them depth as well, if all they are able to do is make people laugh… well you do not have the greatest or most valuable character in the game.

Take Pascal from “Tales of Graces”, when you first meet this character she is sleeping under a tree, and randomly runs up and hugs you. Because the game is in Japanese I do not have much of an insight of what they say, but a lot of random characters pop up, a few hearts, she gets hit a lot and yelled at, and BANG she’s in your party? Honestly, I laughed, I had no idea what she was doing, but the whole time throughout the game I was glad she was in my party.

For one comic relief characters give you funny emotes half the time, cute little animations, and funny sentences.

Final Fantasy IX has the character Quina, where the sex is labeled as “???”, who runs around and eats frogs, has a slur in “its” speak, and also gives very childish sentences “Zidane, I go play now”. But oddly enough its one of my favorite characters, just for the fact that its cute and funny (and if able to master, extremely useful in battle). The clothes of this character is very odd, as is Pascal’s, they tend to stand out more then the regular characters (except the protagonist of most games these days where half revealing clothes trying to make the player foam at the mouth at him, but seriously most players are men… give it up).

Lastly, comic relief characters have been in video games every since the 90’s. Think of Mario Party, or even Mario. When you destroy the villain, Mario (or Luigi) does his quote and then the villain will whine and run off admitting defeat for the “lulz”. Without this though, players would be discouraged to play, or even get bored. It’s a sense of entertainment within entertainment.

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