The 'Shroom:Issue XLIX/Character Reviews

Character Reviews by

Hey guys! Welcome back to Character Reviews! I’m gonna try out a new, quicker, format this week. I reread some of my sections and it looks like I’m doing a lot of rambling… so I’m going to turn the entire thing into a one‐paragraph format. But the upside to this is that I am going to start increasing the number of characters reviewed (for now) so that we can finish up this TTYD runthrough faster. This month I will be covering Vivian, Marilyn and Beldam and Magnus von Grapple; covering an entire chapter in one month! Anyways, let’s get on with it!

Vivian
Vivian is the most prominent of the three Shadow Sirens. She appears with all of the other sirens throughout Chapter 2, but later in Chapter 4, she joins up with Mario and becomes his partner. She is a very prominent figure, has excellent design (looks like a villain and a hero) and she has excellent character development throughout the story; starting off meek and scared and eventually getting braver. I think her interaction with her sisters is very nice and I love the humor that goes on between them.

Marilyn
Marilyn is the dumb grunt of the Shadow Sirens, she speaks once during the game and is big and strong like most grunts (and nobody had better be thinking Pokémon right now). She isn’t really part of the Beldam‐Vivian interaction and mostly just watches, so I would say she’s the least prominent siren. I can’t really find much I like about Marilyn, I wish she, and Beldam, had been battled more often than they were but oh well.

Beldam
Beldam is the leader, and second most prominent, of the Shadow Sirens. She is definitely the funniest of the three Shadow Sirens and my second‐favorite. My only complaint with her is (other than her design, I think she should have been tall and skinny, not short) that she is, despite organizing the entire plot, battled only two times in the entire game! She should have been battled a lot more than that, but what am I to do.

Magnus von Grapple
This is technically just Lord Crump in a robot suit but I’m going to treat it as a separate boss from him. Magnus von Grapple is definitely, like Hooktail, end‐boss material. If you can’t have a gigantic Dragon as your end‐boss, a robot controlled by the main villain’s second‐in‐command is the runner up. So I think that Magnus von Grapple is pretty good. He could have been a bit more powerful but overall, he’s a good idea for a boss. The only gripe I can think of is that putting a robot in a tree is a horrible idea; they could have moved him to another chapter and used some kind of spider.

Total
Until next month! MG1, out.
 * For Vivian, and her amazing character development, I give a 9/10
 * For Marilyn and her amazing mass and… that’s all, 6/10.
 * For Beldam and her interaction with her sister, 7/10
 * And for Lord Crump, and his power, 8.5/10.