Welcome to this week’s article of The Good, Bad, and What The?, where we took a good, long look at characters in movies, video games, anime, and books and put them on the judgement table to see if they are worthy to be in their respective stories. I strongly believe that well developed characters are more important than anything else in a good story, so I always judge them hard. At the end of every character’s evaluation I will give them one of four ratings: Good for those characters that are developed and deserve their place in the story, Bad for those characters that have no place being made or interacting with anyone else in the story, What The for the characters I just can’t figure out, and then the characters who are dull as dishwasher will get the rating of Sack of Potatoes. Today on the judgement table: the horseman of War, the main character of “Darksiders.”
The story of “Darksiders” is pretty straight forward. Heaven and Hell have a lot of issues with each other, as always, and like to battle it out. These all powerful beings known as the council don’t like things being unfair, so they have their all powerful trump cards; the horsemen of the apocalypse. When these seven seals are broken, the four horsemen will ride out and beat the daylights out of Heaven and Hell so they stop fighting. The plan is that once humanity is ready to be part of the fight, Heaven vs. Hell. vs. Humans can begin and the horsemen don’t have to be involved. Well, of course, things go bad and War gets summoned, but he was the only one called (for some reason) and the seventh seal wasn’t broken. War gets yelled at by the council because he left home without permission and he now has to go redeem himself.
War is basically how you would expect him to look and act. He is a massive, big-shouldered, huge sword swinging space marine…man? He isn’t really human, so not a man, but you get the idea. He is a big, burly, male protagonist voice done by the English voice actor for Garra from “Naruto”. He checks off as standard for basically all the default, main cool main character ideas. I’m not joking when I say Space Marine; he has got gigantic shoulders with huge limbs and armor so big no normal person would be able to even walk in it. But hey, he is the horseman of War, so I guess he should be big and scary looking. All these things had me somewhat sad that he is so plain, but at the same time I kind of expected it. To be fair, when I think of a horseman of War, something along these lines is pretty much what I think of, but it would have been cool if they did something more realistic or normal. Imagine if he was a normal-sized guy who fought like Mewtwo, swinging a sword around that he never actually touched, or used crazy magic instead.
So, what about his personality? Maybe he just looks generic, but acts more interesting. Sadly, that isn’t so. He looks dark and brooding and fearsome and acts just the same. He says cheesy, raspy lines and threatens people with his big scary sword all the time, and just generally acts like a warrior of great battle. He even has raspy battle shouts that sound like Garra, which I understand but is still funny. I was hoping that maybe he would do some sort of thing that was kind of interesting, but War literally does not develop in any way. He is angry in the start because he was betrayed, and then gets more angry in the end when he finds out it is true. He kills a bunch of Angels and doesn’t care, he shows how big and tough he is after a bunch of big bosses insult him; the usual stuff. Like I said, I’m not super surprised, but a guy can hope, right? The one thing that gets touched on a very tiny bit is that he seems to care a lot about his brothers, the other horsemen, but it isn’t really explored as they don’t actually show up in the game and War isn’t going to talk about feelings. I think they could have made it a more interesting angle if there was some show of brotherhood and family from the four horsemen, if at least one other one showed up or maybe was held hostage; something like that. Other than that, though, he is literally just a big dude who kills things with a big sword and throws out occasional raspy retorts. He barely even does that, actually; War needs to work on his smack talk.
So, what is the verdict? War is a big old Sack of Potatoes; not even like good ones, he is an old sack that got left outside too long. Although the main character is duller than any dishwater ever, the game itself is actually really good. If you ignore most of the cheesy dialogue, the game is a really good, “Zelda”-style action game. It took very heavily from the “Zelda” series, having you go through dungeons to get new weapons and collect things called life shards that are the exact same as heart pieces; you even need four. There is also some “Devil May Cry” influence in the combat and upgrades part of the game, so if you like those two series it takes from, it is a really solid game.
