Bird Party: The Voting Was Rigged
The MTV Multiplayer blog has this strange fascination with ranking video game animals as of late. Maybe they’re planning some sort of digital ark and need to get their priorities organized. Who knows. But first they did dogs, then horses, then fish (how did Seaman not win that?) and now birds. Birds. Any sensible human knows that there is only one obvious game bird (uh, video game bird) that should occupy the top position: Blathers the owl from Animal Crossing. But, tragically, that was not how things worked out.
Leave it to the Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time fanboys to come out of the woodwork and push their respective birds over the top. What purpose do cuccos and chocobos actually serve in their respective game worlds? In Legend of Zelda, the cuccos (which oddly resemble chickens–’oddly’ meaning ‘exactly’) hop around and that’s about it. You can pick them up and throw them, or hit them with your sword until they use their hen-sense to call upon a swarm of other cuccos to vigilantly end your life. Oh, and you can use them as a hang glider despite the fact that they only weigh about three pounds. In Final Fantasy, chocobos serve whatever purpose the designers drunkenly cook up on any given day of the week. They race each other or get stuck in storybooks or dungeon crawl or play CCGs or end up slathered on some worthless crap SquareEnix wants to peddle to their fanbase (“Chocobo Ponchos? Now I’ll never get wet… just like Boco!”). You can even breed them in a extensive and uncomfortable sidequest (the black chocobo is inferior to the gold chocobo, FYI).
Blathers, on the other hand, is undeniably awesome. He works in a museum. He wears an argyle vest. he sleeps during the daytime. He’s everything I aspire to be. I mean, the guy took a correspondence course in fossil identification. How bad-ass is that? He’s an owl that can teach you about dinosaurs. There is no doubt in my mind that he’s the coolest fictional bird to ever appear in a video game.
Also, Birdo is creepy and the Chozo are extinct.
What I’m saying here is that Zelda and FF fanboys should be excluded from important matters like this. Just like professional wrestling fans shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the Time list of most influential people. How the hell is Eddie Guerrero more important than Jesus, Einstein, and Satie? The people who voted for him are going to feel really stupid when it turns out he was abducted by aliens and returns to the ring as an evil pregnant post-op with a goatee, or whatever plot twist they have planned for sweeps. Then we’ll see who’s more influential than Hitler!
And what about that crow that smoked cigarettes in Earthbound? He was so cool when I was twelve.