Yoshi's turn: 12 oddball games where the sidekicks take the reins

This reference wasn’t especially current in 2006, either, by the way.

Sony’s PSP handheld holds a special place in the pantheon of bizarro spin-off games: As the PlayStation company’s first foray into the low-power, innovation-demanding world of portable gaming, the little system played host to a lot of very odd spins on classic franchises. (If Konami ever wants to stop screwing around with re-releases of main series Metal Gear Solid games and get serious with a remake of the PSP’s card-based Metal Gear Ac!d titles, they’ve got our money.) On that score, 2006’s Daxter is actually fairly conservative: It ably recreates all the basic running, jumping, and “smacking stuff” beats of Naughty Dog’s Jak And Daxter games, serving as a bridge between the story of the first and second games. It also, maybe even more amazingly, manages to do all this while not making Max Casella’s title character—a weasel-esque schemer who usually handles the series’ motormouth duties while his buddy Jak does the monosyllabic heavy lifting—so irritating that you’d want to reach through the system’s then-state-of-the-art LCD screen to strangle him.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020)

Speaking of Sony tech showcases: The company was quick to tap another pinch-hitter to show off the power of its then-new PlayStation 5 hardware when the console launched back in 2020. (Although, given how massively popular Miles Morales has gotten in the 15 years since he debuted as a new take on Spider-Man over in Marvel’s Ultimate line, it’s more like Brooklyn’s Finest was dropping by to do the gigantic corporation a favor.) Set in between Insomniac’s open-world Marvel’s Spider-Man (which established this version of Miles as a trainee superhero under Peter Parker’s tutelage) and its 2023 sequel (which saw him take over New York-protecting duties on a more full-time basis), Miles Morales has many of the hallmarks of a sidekick game. It’s much shorter, for one thing, telling a more self-contained story about Miles coming to terms with both his past and future. It futzes with new mechanics, playing on this Spidey’s unique powers. (Most notably his electric Venom Blast). And, maybe most importantly, it keeps the series’ “main” hero, Peter, way the hell away from the action; after all, nobody needs a protagonist suddenly barging his way into a perfectly good sidekick adventure.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (2009)

Of all the characters highlighted here, none would bristle at the designation of “sidekick” more haughtily than Ace Attorney’s Miles Edgeworth, who would disdainfully remind anyone who asked that he is a celebrated state prosecutor, while main series hero Phoenix Wright is simply a lowly private defense attorney. (Who he occasionally deigns to help.) And yet, even more than Ace Attorney’s other assistant-focused spin-offs, the two Investigations games fit the “sidekick game” template best. Part of it is simply the perspective flip, as players watch Miles and his allies perform the government’s side of Capcom’s whacked-out take on a criminal justice system, trampling all over crime scenes (and using futuristic hologram tech of dubious provenance) to try to unravel mysteries. But there’s also a significant effort to change up the series’ occasionally rote “spot the contradiction” gameplay, one pointedly rooted in Miles’ character: Rather than the seat-of-the-pants Hail Mary’s that save the day in the Phoenix games, the much colder Edgeworth is all about logic and debate, engaging his opponents in behind-the-scenes conversations and interrogations to successfully smarm his way to the truth.

Secret Agent Clank (2008)

Another PSP concession to the limits of small-scale gaming, Secret Agent Clank detaches its title character from Insomniac’s Ratchet And Clank series in service of sending him off on a run of fairly dull interplanetary James Bond riffs. (That being said, we should probably consider it a blessing that the game’s running, gunning, and gadgeting doesn’t confine itself to the pint-sized robot’s typical gameplay in the mothership titles, which usually involves awkward stealth sequences that serve as an unwanted break from roasting bad guys alive with the franchise’s innovative arsenal of weapons.) Shockingly, Secret Agent Clank violates one of the key precepts of the sidekick game genre: It includes a decent number of sequences where you play as usual protagonist Ratchet while he’s stuck in the prison Clank is trying to break him out of—possibly because not even Insomniac wanted to spend an entire game stuck as a tiny metal dweeb in a tux.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (2007)

Square-Enix’s awkwardly titled “Compilation Of Final Fantasy VII” meta-series has a fair amount of spin-off games lodged inside it, many of them awkwardly spread out over the publisher’s various mobile game efforts. (Which hasn’t stopped Square from liberally using elements from those games—including characters from never-released-in-English mobile games like 2004’s Before Crisis—in its Final Fantasy VII Remake games, possibly in an effort to drive Western completionists insane.) It’s a blessing, then, that the best of the bunch is still relatively accessible: 2007’s Crisis Core, a prequel to the original FF7 that started life on the PSP and has now migrated to modern systems. Like many sidekick games, it’s a study in contrasts: Hero Zack Fair is a sunny, smiling dude where his eventual friend Cloud Strife is a taciturn grump; his gameplay, meanwhile, is compulsive hack-and-slash action as opposed to the original game’s more traditional RPG mechanics. (And, sure, you could argue that 2006 PlayStation 2 action title Dirge Of Cerberus, which focuses on one of Cloud’s party members, instead of a character from his shady backstory, might be a better fit for the “sidekick game” title—but that would involve acknowledging Dirge’s existence, something neither we, nor Square, seem especially inclined to do.)

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (2014)

In hindsight, Nintendo’s WiiU system felt a bit like the sidekick game of consoles: Innovative, decidedly odd, and never quite in step with the times. Qualities that made the WiiU (with its built-in touch-screen and relatively low performance power) a footnote in Nintendo’s console history, though, made it a great showcase for games like Treasure Tracker, a Mario spin-off that began by stripping away that series’ most famous verb: Jumping. (Its title hero’s backpack is simply too stuffed with supplies and goodies to get off the ground, natch.) Receiving a trial run via a series of bonus levels in 2013’s Super Mario World 3D, the good Captain got his own full title the following year, navigating beautiful little diorama levels in search of treasures and veggies to hurl at foes. Like many sidekick games, Treasure Tracker is a celebration of the cool things that can come from embracing limitations: Captain Toad may not be able to cover whole landscapes in a single “WAHOO!”-ing triple jump, but his game is a lovely little dose of puzzling for players to relax with.

Resident Evil Gaiden (2001)

Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise is something like 50 percent spin-off by volume at this point, as the series continues to accrue remakes, side stories, and the occasional oddball light gun game in abundance. One of its earliest experiments is still one of its most pure expressions of the sidekick game ethos, though, as 2001’s Gaiden tapped original Resident Evil zombie-hunting buddy Barry Burton for a stab at compressing the franchise’s undead-slaying gameplay down onto Nintendo’s teensy Game Boy Color. (Barry does eventually end up teaming up with series-regular protagonist Leon Kennedy, but there’s a lot of monster-infested cruise ship to get through before that meeting of the meatheads can occur.) There are some genuinely interesting ideas at play in Gaiden—most notably its combat system, which shifts from a very distant top-down look to a first-person perspective to maintain some semblance of horror, while also serving as the world’s most gore-soaked rhythm minigame—but sadly for Barry-heads, its story has since been ruled too strange even for Resident Evil’s nonsense-filled canon. (Some elements of the tale, including Barry’s starring role, and the presence of a young girl with the ability to sense monsters, would eventually be salvaged for 2015’s Resident Evil: Revelations 2.)

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (2006)

Dragon Quest’s signature Slime monsters are some of the most iconic designs of creator Akira Toriyama’s legendary career, a less-is-more approach that quickly made the little goobers the googley-eyed mascots of the long-running RPG series. After letting players begin recruiting friendly Slimes in Dragon Quest IV (and then more robustly in V), the series finally answered the question of what they’d get up to without all these sword-toting humans around in 2006, with the answer turning out, against all odds, to be “waging surprisingly complicated tank battles with each other.” A Nintendo DS sequel to a Japan-only Game Boy Advance game, Rocket Slime might be the single weirdest game in the entire Dragon Quest franchise, as the heroic Rocket uses a magic flute to command his fellow Slimes in tank combat with an army of invading platypi. (No turn-based battles here: You’ll spend large chunks of your playing time running frenetically around in your tank’s interior, loading ammo—or yourself—into cannons to fire at your opponents.) Quick-moving and entirely unserious, it’s a joyous reminder that even gaming’s most traditional franchises can afford to cut loose and let their little weirdos take the reins every once in a while.

Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland (2006)

It’s not clear, exactly, what makes Tingle “freshly picked,” but it certainly sounds unwholesome. And we’re not just saying that that because this oddest of Zelda spin-offs—centered on a weirdo who became an unlikely fan favorite after selling actual hero Link some maps in 2000 Nintendo 64 title Majora’s Mask—begins with the 35-year-old fairy wannabe sitting around in his boxers,  literally scratching his ass. Honestly, everything about Tingle and his quest to reach a hedonistic Nirvana called Rupeeland is unsettling, from his perpetually rosy cheeks, to the overtly capitalistic nature of his trial, to the way he’s gifted a magical secretary who looks like a PG pin-up model… in a Tingle costume. Only released in Japan and Europe, Rosy Rupeeland may be the most extreme expression of the sidekick game mentality possible, tossing out almost everything that makes Zelda what it is in favor of letting its designers go incredibly deep on one strange little dude they somehow got obsessed with. The intensity of that conviction—that people really would play a game about an odd little pervert who floats around attached to a balloon, overcharging for cartography—is almost enough to make us wish that the game’s 2009 sequel, a riff on The Wizard Of Oz titled Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip Of Love, which horrifyingly puts a large amount of its focus on dating game elements, had managed to make it out of Japan. Almost.