Yeah, uh, so I write fanfics. Shut up. The reason I'm revealing this and plunging my approval rating into the negatives (rather, further into the negatives) is because last week I made fun of the Valiant Nintendo Comics of olde...but I shouldn't. At least not all the time. It's really not easy to create a story where there is none.
Not to say that every creative endeavour should automatically get an A for Effort. The Worlds of Power books based on games like Mega Man 2 could have been a lot less stupid. On the other hand, when your cover art is defaulted to a game's box art (in other words, a flamer in blue spandex), I guess you may as well pound a few and see what you can come up with.
Valiant's Nintendo comics had moments that made my eyes ache, but at the same time it did a couple of things really well. For instance, Samus.
Samus has always been a girl of few words, except in Metroid Fusion when she caught a case of the chatties and wouldn't shut up about her ship, her mechanical love interest and her pet dog, Sparky. She's mostly been silent since, with Nintendo/Retro Studios preferring to leak bits of her past through subtle, adorable means. But at the beginning of time, Valiant had their own take on the female bounty hunter: brash, violent, cocky and greedy. And it was pretty cool.
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