Picture this: you’re four hours into a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. You roll your window up, look out, and all you see is blue, blue, and more blue until you reach the horizon. And then, suddenly, the plane falls from the sky and it turns out there actually was a spot of green. You’restranded on a desert island. You will need to scavenge any food, and you don’t see anything except the odd in-flight dinner.
The cabin, it turns out, was entirely populated by video game characters. Since this is a long-term survival scenario, you don’t want to only make this decision on the basis of which video game characters look tastiest to eat. You also need to evaluate which video game characters, if eaten, will feed the most passengers and keep the survivors fuller, longer.
10Inky, Blinky, Pinky, And Clyde
Pac-Man
Pac-Man’s sworn enemies, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, are candy-colored and shaped like gumdrops, so you might expect them to rank a little higher on this list. Unfortunately, this is as high as they can go.
These tireless ghosts present our brave survivors with a bitter irony. These ghouls are best-known for being eaten. It is their raison d’être. And yet, they are incorporeal. Though they are consumed time after time, round after round, they provide Pac-Man with fleeting rewards and little sustenance. For our purposes, they are useless.
9The Ice Cream Pokemon
Pokemon
Vanillite, Vanillish, and Vanilluxe would melt near the top of most lists of video game characters you’d like to eat. ThesePokemonlook delicious, but would they really help in your quest to stay alive long enough for help to arrive? Unfortunately not. You also want to keep foods that aretoo fillingto a minimum, too.
If your plane crashes in a remote location, you want to have energy to move around, scavenge, and place rocks to spell out S.O.S. Vanillite, Vanillish, and Vanilluxewould be great snacks, not so great as rations.
8Slimes
Dragon Quest
Dragon Quest’s Slimes rank above the Vanillite and Friends because Slimes are Jell-O, while the Vanilla Gang are ice cream. If you’re in the hospital, Jell-O can be a meal. If you can’t hold down solid foods, they give you Jell-O. It agrees with the tummy and the tastebuds. It’s squishy, yet firm; wet, yet solid.
On the other hand, ice cream can only be a dessert. You get ice cream as a reward for getting your tonsils out, not to keep you alive. Therefore, in this scenario, theiconic Square Enix monstersget the sustenance edge.
7Jigglypuff
Like the ice cream monsters near the start of this list, Jigglypuffwouldbe much higher if ranked on aesthetics alone. It looks like it would taste great, like cotton candy or maybe freeze-dried strawberry ice cream.
But that tasty exterior is exactly what makes Jigglypuff a low-ranking choice. Dessert is great, but it doesn’t give you the strength to pull in the fish nets your crafty passenger pals have knit together from bikini tops, dentil floss, and chewing gum. Jigglypuff would make an exquisite snack, but it isn’t long-haul material.
6Kirby
Kirby
ForKirby, ditto everything I said about Jigglypuff. He’s a big pink ball of goo. His little red shoes kind of look like cherry-flavored fruit snacks, too.
And look at the picture above? He doesn’t look the least bit out of place surrounded by actual dessert items like strawberries, cake, and cream. Nintendo knows he looks delicious. It knows you’d eat him right up without a second thought. Like Jigglypuff, Kirby looks like he would be plenty comfortable getting served up in an ice cream scoop. And come to think of it -
- ditto Ditto.
Actually, Ditto looks more like bubblegum, if we’re being honest.
It doesn’t actually matter which sweet treat Ditto most resembles, because Ditto’s power is the ability to transform into other things. Have a Pokemon in mind that you think would be more nutritional? If you have Ditto around, you have that nutritious Pokemon around, too. But, even the default bubble-gum-looking Ditto would be good to have along because chewing gum is a great way to keep your mouth busy so you don’t think about how hungry you are.
4GLaDOS
Portal 2
This is where we get into video game characters that would actually provide sustenance. Potatoes, specifically boiled potatoes, arequite filling. GLaDOS — whose consciousness is grafted onto a spud inPortal 2— would be higher if we had some way to reproduce her genetic structure.
As it stands, she’s justonepotato. No matter how filling a food is, one of it is only going to go so far. Despite her past wrongs, cooking GLaDOS wouldn’t go very far, and would be an act of sadism, not a path to satiety.
3That Deer Ellie Shoots
The Last Of Us
We extend an honorable mention to the rabbit that Ellie also shoots inThe Last of Us. Winter was a tough time, but the eating was good (by plane crash standards, at least).
If you’re stranded and need to find food, lean meat like venison is a good choice. It’s high in protein, but it won’t slow you down.
You could dehydrate some, too, and store venison jerky for later. You never know how long you’ll be stranded. Of course, this is only one, regular-sized deer, though. That’s why I recommend…
2Bowser
Super Mario
When you’re trying to feed all the surviving members of a traumatic plane crash, you need to consider how to get the best possible bang for your buck. To that end, turtle meat is high in protein, with no carbohydrates, and little fat.Mario’s archnemesis Bowser is a big flippin' turtle.
Though Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (unhelpfully) doesn’t give a unit of measure for its weights, Bowser weighs the most of any character in the game at 135. That’s a lot of meat that would go a long way.
1All 16 Colossi
Shadow Of The Colossus
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention these guys were all hanging out in the front of the plane, enjoying those spacious first-class seats. Come to think of it, that weight imbalance might have been what sunk us in the first place. Best not to dwell on it now…
If you’ve playedShadow of the Colossus, you’ve already slayed these massive beasts. Don’t get on your moral high horse about eating them. And I hear if we kill them, we may be able to raise our lost love. More importantly, it’s a lot of meat.
