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Fun Club Which Platforming Mascot Has Your Favourite Group of Shitty Friends?

Which of these series has your favourote supporting casts?

  • Mario

    Votes: 25 36.2%

  • Sonic

    Votes: 8 11.6%

  • Donkey Kong

    Votes: 11 15.9%

  • Kirby

    Votes: 7 10.1%

  • Mega Man

    Votes: 4 5.8%

  • Wario

    Votes: 12 17.4%

  • Crash

    Votes: 2 2.9%
  • Total voters
    69
YoboD

YoboD

Koopa
Famiboards, I'm sure we've all heard the online discourse about Sonic's various Shitty Friends over the years. You know the common talking points, which of them are actually good, at what point did there become too many of them, are they just an easy scapegoat to blame the series' up-and-down quality on, which one of them you want your OC to make out with, etc. One counterpoint I've started to hear bought up in discussion lately has been 'Well Mario ha a bunch of Shitty Friends too, why don't people complain about them'?

This then had me thinking about how there are quite a few platforming stars that now have amassed quite a large group of supporting characters over the years that are loved by their respective fanbases. So I thought we should put it to a vote to see which crew the community prefers.

Your contenders:


Option 1: Mario

fa7595811e18501917fdbebbaa417f3f.jpg



Option 2: Sonic

d7d71d43f2e4260dd04d5bfdf594713c.jpg



Option 3: Donkey Kong (Why is there such a lack of good Kong Family Images? Half of them are missing!)

The_kongs.jpg



Option 4: Kirby

339


(If anyone knows who this artist is, please let me know so I can credit them. I just found this on Know your Meme).


Option 5: Mega Man


206461-FarewellMM-Header.jpg


(There are too many god damn Mega Men. Just pick the one with your favourite supporting cast)


Option 6: Wario

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Option 7: Crash

Crash_Team_Racing_One_Year_by_Garlopet88.png



So what do you say Famiboards, which group of Shitty Friends is the best? Are there any that you have a particular disdain or appreciation for? Let's find out.

Apologies if I have missed a platforming series and supporting cast that anyone is fond of, these are generally the ones I'm most familiar with. Also when I refer to all these characters as Shitty Friends, please know that I do so affectionately. I think all of these characters have merit except for Dingodile, fuck that guy and the Crash crew by association.
 
Are we asking which whole cast is best here? Or we know the worst people suck, but we like them anyway?
 
It's Kirby by virtue of the animal buddies from KDL2/3. Wario might have won on a different day.
 
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Best cast I really have no issue with: the Mario group. No one really stinks here unless there’s like too many Toads. The solo careers of most of the group are legendary in their own right.

The best worst friends: I have no opinion on Crash (never played his games) and don’t have a strong opinion on who Megaman’s core cast of friends is or who reoccurs the most so I can’t speak to those. Kirby’s core cast is strong and his extended friend group is largely good, but also barely around enough. The closest to clunkers are like Magalor and Gooey. I’ve come around on Bandana Waddle Dee.

That leaves Sonic, DK, and Wario. I think Wario probably has the best group of weirdos. They are all so different, basically everyone has a favorite. Most of them are better people than Wario himself and we get such small snippets of them that they are hardly egregious. Sonic is the other extreme, here we have this huge cast that regularly shows up a lot in both mainline games, spinoffs, and other media. Some put in some great work some of the time to the extent they are probably the most realized group of friends. But I think what makes them the worst, is that often Sonic has the best gameplay, so here these friends come along and regularly mess things up either by mixing up the genre poorly or just not having as well designed a moveset for regular Sonic tasks. They drag the poor hedgehog down too much. Lastly then we have DK who is kind of his own, lesser mess. DK has changed hands/visions so much that a lot of his friends get regularly left behind. Like you can point to Kiddy Kong being a werido, but then he never shows up again. You then have someone fun like Lanky and he never shows up again either. Then you have Candy Kong who is just very weirdly sexualized or odd lore like Wrinkly Kong passing away between DKC3 and DK64 so she’s a ghost now and Tiny Kong growing up mysteriously for the DS version of Diddy Kong Racing.

So here we have it I guess: Wario has the best and most consistent weirdos, Sonic has the worst friends who drag him down even if you like some of them some of the time, and DK has the weirdest friends with the most chaotic track record. So Sonic wins best worst friends and DK wins best worst friends, while Wario has best weirdo friends.
 
Megaman, because Rush is such a cool helpful friend and is also a dog. When I was a kid, I always wanted a dog and Rush was the closest thing to it for many years. Loyal, comes when called, turns into a spring, hoverboard, submarine, spaceship, whatever you need.

Rush is my favourite sidekick ever. Of the other MM animal companions, it’s nice that Beat and Tango mess up everything on screen, but Rush is the best (boy).
 
0
It could be argued Wario is the only one here is really needs his friends for the games to happen. Without them he wouldn't be able to finish development of any of his Wario Ware titles.

But you're also going to get some who will hate them because they represent Wario moving away from his platforming series.
 
0
The Mario extended family includes Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong, all of which have sustained their own IP that include some of the greatest platformers in history.
 
0
Classic Mega Man has my favorite supporting cast in all of video games. Even taking the tongue-in-cheek title of this thread seriously it wins because Bass and Proto Man are the Ultimate Shitty Friends.
 
0
The overall best is the Mario cast

The overall worst is the Crash cast

The "so bad it's good" cast is Donkey Kong. I mean come on you got Surfer Kong, game show Kong, grandma Kong who dies, and a clown Kong. If you write it down it's so stupid sounding but it's actually a lot of fun
 
Despite some of them never appearing in any platformer game, Diddy's personal friends are my absolute favorite:
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I mean, how could you not like Pipsy the Mouse?
 
Wario has the best cast. I wish Nintendo wasn't afraid of including them in Sports spin-offs
 
It did not occur to me that Mario essentially has his own troupe of shitty friends until I thought about it.

Nintendo's been a lot better than Sega with quality control in terms of when these shitty friends appear, and a lot of these friends show up in best selling party games and what not or have games of their own, but outside of Luigi and Wario, I'm not really a fan of a lot of the shitty friends. Yoshi? Not a fan. Waluigi? sorry! All the extra playable characters in Mario 64 DS wasn't interesting to me. I just wanted to play Mario, maybe Luigi.

come at me bro
 
0
I voted Mario. Everyone in the cast is too iconic. Doesn't really feel fair lol.

I do think Beenox did a great job with Crash's extended cast in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. Definitely not my answer to the question but I wanted to say something nice about them since nobody's really had anything nice to say about them in this thread lol. I thought they did a good job breathing life into the group. It's not enough work for them to be high on this list, but there's some potential there going forward.
 
0
I was gonna say Sonic because I have a fondness for those characters but then I remembered that Mario's supporting cast includes Bowser, who is my absolute favorite video game character.
 
0
I played Star Allies and thought the Star Allies were fun so I'll give it to Kirby.
 
Cranky Kong gets, like, a doctorate or something post-retirement. Could a Toad do that?
 
0
Peleo said:
Wario has the best cast. I wish Nintendo wasn't afraid of including them in Sports spin-offs
Click to expand...
Man I wish we got them in Mario Kart. We already have Diamond City in one of the arcade ones so it’s not like they don’t like referencing WarioWare.
 
0
Kirby introduces a new character every single game now, and they're all winners. Every single one.

Hard to beat that.
 
0
I absolutely love a lot of the designs of the extended Sonic cast, it’s just a shame that they’re in Sonic games
 
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