Video Game Piracy
May. 5th, 2010 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatI don't mean people who pirate software, but rather pirates who appear in video games. There are many of these, but I'm choosing to focus on two of my favorite game franchises, Final Fantasy and Mario.
The original game of the former has pirates appear in Pravoka, the second town you can visit. Their leader is Bikke, and he sics his crew on the Light Warriors.
While there are nine pirates serving under Bikke, they all have quite low hit points and are easy to dispatch. After you've beaten them, Bikke will give you his ship. The pirate captain also appears in 8-Bit Theater, a web comic based on FF1, in which he has a larger role than he does in the game. He's one of the group of four Dark Warriors, who are all generally incompetent and not too bright, but Bikke is an idiot among idiots.
He's illiterate, can't swim, wants to be called "The Claw" despite the fact he doesn't have one, and killed off his own crew by feeding them nothing but Cheetos (they died of scurvy). Another web comic in which the buccaneer shows up is <http://www.captainsnes.com/2001/11/17/056-bikke-the-pirate-unmasked/>Captain SNES, although his role in it is minor.
While on the subject of FF pirates, there's also Faris Scherwiz, a captain who becomes a permanent party member. As it turns out, Faris has several secrets. While pretending to be male when captaining the pirates, she's actually Princess Sarisa of Tycoon, sister of another party member named Lenna. I've only played the Game Boy Advance version of the game, and I think the cross-dressing angle doesn't go over that well when most of the characters look kind of androgynous anyway. Maybe it was more apparent in the FF Anthology version for PlayStation? I don't know.
The list I posted earlier features two pirates from the extended Mario universe. One is Jonathan Jones, the pirate shark from Super Mario RPG who befriends Mario when he's bested in battle.
The other is Captain Syrup, who's essentially Wario's arch-enemy. I haven't played the first two Wario Land games (or ANY of the Wario games, for that matter), but I find the Captain to be an intriguing character. Like Faris, her gender is also left ambiguous at first, although the way she dresses suggests that she's quite willing to flaunt her femininity.
It's Wario's own ignorance that makes him surprised when he finds out Syrup is a woman. Wario first runs afoul of the captain when he raids the Kitchen Island, where her Black Sugar Pirates have hidden the treasures they've stolen over the years. Not surprisingly, the greedy antihero wants them for himself. In Wario Land 2, she tries to get revenge by robbing Wario's castle. While she hasn't appeared much since then, she's apparently a popular subject for fan art.
The original game of the former has pirates appear in Pravoka, the second town you can visit. Their leader is Bikke, and he sics his crew on the Light Warriors.
While there are nine pirates serving under Bikke, they all have quite low hit points and are easy to dispatch. After you've beaten them, Bikke will give you his ship. The pirate captain also appears in 8-Bit Theater, a web comic based on FF1, in which he has a larger role than he does in the game. He's one of the group of four Dark Warriors, who are all generally incompetent and not too bright, but Bikke is an idiot among idiots.
He's illiterate, can't swim, wants to be called "The Claw" despite the fact he doesn't have one, and killed off his own crew by feeding them nothing but Cheetos (they died of scurvy). Another web comic in which the buccaneer shows up is <http://www.captainsnes.com/2001/11/17/056-bikke-the-pirate-unmasked/>Captain SNES, although his role in it is minor.
While on the subject of FF pirates, there's also Faris Scherwiz, a captain who becomes a permanent party member. As it turns out, Faris has several secrets. While pretending to be male when captaining the pirates, she's actually Princess Sarisa of Tycoon, sister of another party member named Lenna. I've only played the Game Boy Advance version of the game, and I think the cross-dressing angle doesn't go over that well when most of the characters look kind of androgynous anyway. Maybe it was more apparent in the FF Anthology version for PlayStation? I don't know.
The list I posted earlier features two pirates from the extended Mario universe. One is Jonathan Jones, the pirate shark from Super Mario RPG who befriends Mario when he's bested in battle.
The other is Captain Syrup, who's essentially Wario's arch-enemy. I haven't played the first two Wario Land games (or ANY of the Wario games, for that matter), but I find the Captain to be an intriguing character. Like Faris, her gender is also left ambiguous at first, although the way she dresses suggests that she's quite willing to flaunt her femininity.
It's Wario's own ignorance that makes him surprised when he finds out Syrup is a woman. Wario first runs afoul of the captain when he raids the Kitchen Island, where her Black Sugar Pirates have hidden the treasures they've stolen over the years. Not surprisingly, the greedy antihero wants them for himself. In Wario Land 2, she tries to get revenge by robbing Wario's castle. While she hasn't appeared much since then, she's apparently a popular subject for fan art.
