This week, I want to write about weapons - videogame
weapons, that is. In a conversation with Random V, the topic of the dumbest
videogame weapons came up. When talking about Final Fantasy VIII, a game that I
rather enjoy and she hates, she said that Squall's Gunblade has got to be the
dumbest weapon ever. This prompted me to explore idiotic weapons and come up
with a worst weapons list.
Now, it's easy enough to list weapons I personally don't
like (oversized shiny BFG-types), or weapons that are impossible for a human to
wield (Cloud's Buster Sword), or that just are outright silly in the context of
"weapons" (the South Park snowball), but instead I propose a simple
process. We must ask: Is it a ridiculous weapon in the context of similar games?
Then, is it a ridiculous weapon in the context of the franchise? Finally, is it
a ridiculous weapon in the context of the game? Weapons that answer
"yes" to all three questions will be included, while weapons that
answer "yes" to only one or two will be considered. Also, they can't
be joke weapons. Just useless or ridiculous. If there are several weapons in a
single franchise, we will use dual entries.
For example, let us consider Squall's gunblade. Within the
real world, yes, a sword where the user presses a trigger to fire up the target
that they have already cut in half is stupid. However, when taken in the
context of sci-fi RPGs, a futuristic sword isn't ridiculous. In the context of
Final Fantasy, a specialty sword is pretty much an everyday thing. And in the context
of Final Fantasy 8, it can be argued that the Gunblade is actually one of the
better weapons.
So then, with that in mind, let us explore the crappiest
weapons in videogames.
