4 hours ago
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Greetings, loyal Treehouse tenders and Horace huggers! Today is a bank holiday in the UK, which means we are probably asleep, but we've scraped together a little themed conversation piece article to comfort you in our absence. Specifically, it is Easter Monday, which isn't a bad time to talk about resurrection - for 'twas on Easter that the worshippers rolled back the chocolate egg from the Cave of Character Creation and discovered that the Easter Bunny had started New Game Plus.
I hope the faithful among you will tolerate this attempt at humour and proceed immediately to discussing your favourite reborn, resurrected, or revived videogame character. No, you are not allowed to object that technically, every videogame character who isn't subject to permadeath counts as resurrected, providing the player fails at least once. Pac-Man is not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
Julian: While not technically a resurrection and more of a rebirth, the gaming moment that comes to mind for me is the hour after Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic's big reveal. If you'd rather remain spoiler free, I'd skip this entry.
I vividly remember the moment in Bioware's Star Wars RPG when you learn your true identity: that for the first half of the game you've been playing the Sith Lord Revan. Defeated in battle, captured by the Jedi, and wiped of your memories, you've been retrained as a Jedi and sent out to find and overcome your acolyte Darth Malak.
It's an excellently delivered twist and one that forces you to reassess everything you've played up to that moment. I'd assumed the suspicion with which the Jedi at the academy treated me was because my character was too old to become an apprentice and unusually strong in the force. In hindsight, they were on edge, looking to see if there were any cracks in the memory blocks they'd installed in my brain, and scared I might still be a dark lord simply pretending to be a clean slate.
I think of it as a rebirth because in the hour after the reveal, every planet I visited I arrived with a new sense of power and choice. I had been playing as a light side character, making choices I believed were honourable Jedi choices, but learning my character's past felt like it opened the door to me playing another way. There was now significant new context to every choice I made: either reclaiming or denying my former identity.
Though, maybe the true reason I associate Revan's epiphany as an Easter-worthy rebirth is because the first time I played Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic it was over the school Easter holidays. Just as vivid an image as stepping off the Ebon Hawk into the Tatooine ship bay and donning the black cloak of Revan's former life, is the picture of me sat on a sofa in my old bedroom beside a repurposed ice cream tub filled with the shards of shattered Easter eggs. I'm sorry Bioware, I don't mean to diminish the hard graft of your team by saying all your memorable efforts are equalled by a large tub of chocolate, see it as the worthy competition for a child's attention that it is.
Mark: Ok, so this is two things. Me stretching the definition of this perfectly good bank holiday feature, and me totally reverting to type by resorting to yacking about Bethesda games. I know, I’m beyond satire. But seriously, the populations of Skyrim and Cyrodiil won’t stop coming back to life.
With the exception of everyone who has an important role still to play in their stories, the Elder Scrolls games have famously developed the ability to let you kill anyone and everyone. You can head to the village of Blankenmarch, just outside of Leyawiin. You can walk up to the Breton bard Floyd Nathans, whom the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages tell me is “one of the few NPCs to have a randomly chosen wardrobe” - the game picks between five middle-class shirts, three middle-class pairs of pants and five middle-class pairs of shoes to deck him out in. You can bash his brains in, likely causing them to leak all over whichever middle-class shirt he’s wearing.
Then, you can whip out a spell like reanimate or the Staff of Worms. Boom, Floyd Nathans rides again. He’s fundamentally changed by his demise. He now won’t attack you if you happen to hit him by accident, no matter how many times you accidentally hit him. Though, since he’s part of the Blankenmarch faction, he may smite you if you dare bother his neighbours - Hanz gro-Hubrag and Philip Franc.
Prior to his resurrection, he lives - UESP again backs me up on this - “a very quiet existence”. At 6AM, he gets out of his bed, goes outside, and spends the day walking around Blankenmarch, sometimes pausing to chat with Hanz and Philip. At 8 in the evening, he goes back indoors, eats for two hours, then settles down for bed at 10.
Post-resurrection, he’s either the most loyal protector a person could wish for or he burns with lust for your blood because you’ve snuffed out one of the two people he was truly close to in his previous life. Floyd Nathans is metamorphosis, revolution, and transformation. He is the reborn, the changed, the distorted. He’s also a guy whose name feels like it might be the wrong way around. Wait, could his resurrected self be Nathan Floyds? We’ll likely never know.
Edwin: I mean, of course, I was going to choose Raziel. I think it's part of my contract, now, that I have to mention Raziel a certain number of times a year, lest the wheels of history grind me to paste like the wanton paradox I am.
Soul Reaver's protagonist is my favourite reborn character because he's so grandiosely and quotably pissed off about the whole thing. He doesn't have a jaw, his once-graceful wings are in rags, and he's prone to disintegrating whenever he's hit too hard… which has the admitted benefit of warping him into the spirit world where he can eat souls and creep into spaces unavailable to beings of flesh. It certainly gives voice actor Michael Bell plenty to get his teeth into.
The other reason Raziel is my favourite resurrectee is that it takes him several hundred years to pull it off, which makes for a comprehensive change of atmosphere from the cheesy Gothic vibe of the original Legacy Of Kain. Raziel steps from the crypt to find Nosgoth transformed, his brothers mutated into colossal fishbeasts and arachnids, his clan dominions gutted and forgotten. The world is a failing body and he is the final germ. Tremendous.
Over to you. Any favourite reborn corpses to share? Here are some we missed: the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls, Gabriel Belmont, and of course Jesus Christ, star of Jesus Simulator .
English (US) ·