Weirdest Spinoff Games Starring Popular Characters

Sometimes, video game makers decide to try something different with the tried-and-true characters we love. And, as so often happens when imaginations run wild, some of the resulting spinoffs get weird:

Toad is one of those Mario characters you love, but forget almost instantly when you're not playing the game. He's no one's favorite — a small mushroom-looking dude who squeaks when he talks, yet somehow Nintendo decided he would be the best candidate for a new game!

In Toad, which emerged as a spinoff of a mini-game from Super Mario 3D World, instead of focusing on defeating Bowser and rescuing Peach, you explore different worlds and find coins and gems. Ya know, like some kind of Gem Getter. However, unlike basically every single Mario game ever, you can't actually fight back. Or even jump! It's all about exploring, solving puzzles, and trying very hard not to get hit by things. Man, if most Toads are this weak, no wonder Bowser kidnaps them all the time. It's like taking candy that is a baby.

You know what the best part of the Fallout games are? Slow, methodical, chess-like combat! Wait, that's not the best part? That's not even a part, you say? Well, dang, then you have obviously never played Fallout Tactics, which combines the world of Fallout with the action-adventure of playing chess against your uncle. You take turns moving your characters — who belong to the militant Brotherhood of Steel — as you burn through the postapocalypse Wasteland, but without all the fun of actually wandering the Wasteland.

Even a lot of hardcore Fallout fans aren't big fans of this game. It's not hard to see why — it has bad graphics, a pointless story, and the most notable thing you could say about it is that it appeared in this article. The one thing we'll say is that, like all the other Fallout games, it does have multiple endings. None of them are as stupid as Fallout 3's "kill yourself because of reasons" ending, so it's officially one completely different game away from being a decent Fallout game.

Ah, Halo Wars: the game that no one knew they wanted. Because they didn't. It's a real-time strategy game (basically, you're a commander telling dozens of different troops what to do), which is exactly the same as the other Halo games in exactly zero ways.

While the Halo games revolutionized shooters, this game revolutionized how little people could care about a Halo game. As an RTS it's fine, but about the only people who play RTS games are the nerds who D&D players picked on in high school. Thankfully though, only one was made, so we can forget about this game forever and ev– oh, there's a sequel? *Sigh*, of course there is.

Above all, Halo Wars is maybe the silliest title of any game ever. Like, we get it: Halo is about a war, you don't need to remind us a second time through the title. Just show us the damn war!

We really wanted this to read "[ERROR: MISSING DATA]" but our editors decided that's too meta. So, we have to talk about Mario is Missing.

Imagine all the fun, joy, and excitement of an old NES-era Mario game. You thinking of the gorgeous level designs, the great music, the excellent platforming? Now, throw all of that in the garbage, and replace the levels with small towns, Mario with Luigi, and all that boring excitement with you walking into different towns, attempting to find Mario. Because he's missing.

Do you do anything fun in these towns? Oh, hell no. Seriously, all you do is walk around, talk to people, answer basic history questions (because this is an educational game, AKA the one thing kids wanted less than coal for Christmas), and then go fetch things so they'll give you items you can give to other people to give you more items and on and on and eventually you find Mario if you haven't broken the cartridge already.

Mario is Missing is what you gave your kids if you were too scared to say "I hate you," but still wanted to make it really clear.

Okay, fasten your seat belts, kids. We're gonna talk about Tingle. Tingle is the man who desperately wants to be a fairy in the Legend of Zelda games. He's incredibly obnoxious, overbearing, way too important to the games he appears in, and pretty much a bad Japanese caricature of a gay man. No one in America likes him, but seemingly everyone in Japan loves him, which is why he's gotten multiple Japan-only games all to himself.

But the one with the best title is Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, which is just what it sounds like — a hellish nightmare of a game. In Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, you try to find rupees in the game while retaining your sanity in real life, as you navigate through the Zelda world as someone who isn't even a little bit interesting. You can beat up people, cook stuff, and at the end, a fairy gives you ... the happiest of happy endings. Seriously, he walks up to her, starts bobbing his head hither and thither, and then all we see are hearts and moans. Your ending is sex.

Meanwhile, poor Link can barely get a peck on the cheek from Zelda. What's your secret, Tingle?

There are a bunch of games out there that let big-time popular game characters take a break and play some sports. However, Megaman Soccer is undoubtedly the weirdest.

Soccer's plot is that a sports event was attacked by robots so you, as Megaman, have to put a stop to it ... with soccer. Because, you know, why not? Aside from literally all the reasons. You then turn into dozens of copies of yourself and play soccer against the killer robots. That's not a joke, but we think it's ridiculous enough that, honestly, we can't think of a better one.

As you might have guessed, Soccer is nothing like the main series. You can pick which robot to fight, but that's about the only similarity. What's more, the idea of Megaman sporting around somehow makes less sense than Mario golfing and go-karting with his mortal enemies. For one, Megaman Soccer is set in a horrifyingly nihilistic world, one where humanity is all but enslaved, and robots either serve, kill, or go through existential crises. Who has time for sports in a world like that?

More importantly though, those weird Mario games are — for the most part — actually pretty good. You know what's not? This freaking game.

Chocobo Racing takes one of the most interesting, and silliest, mainstays of Final Fantasy — the rideable, adorable Chocobos — and throws them into a gorgeously cartoony world where you race them. Yep, someone made a racing spinoff of Final Fantasy, but instead of featuring any of the main characters, it features random NPCs. And, instead of you riding the Chocobos like the title implies, you race them ... in go-karts. Because when you're a species that can run around the literal world without once getting tired, you need nothing more than wheels and gas to get around.

You know how there are cult films and you can't tell if they're good or bad, but either way they're great? Chocobo Racing is the gaming equivalent of that. It's weird and fun and pretty damn awful. Like most spinoffs, now that we think about it.