Some Heavenly Inspiration

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Also we got some Wii branding problems.

So I was just at the Chabad for Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the day when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. They encouraged people to come by having a "dairy buffet". You know what that means? ICE CREAM! It also means a lot of little kids.

So to get to the ice cream, you gotta go through the service, which consists of reading the part of the Torah where the Ten Commandments are given and read. After that you read a part out of the Book of Ezekiel. And in there are the chayot and ophanim, which are in a vision the prophet Ezekiel has. Their exact meaning are up to debate, but they're quite fascinating.

The wheel is the ophanim, and the four-headed angel are the chayot.

Now we've seen some ophanim-like inspiration enter videogames, such as the Aether Ring from Nintendo's Kid Icarus: Uprising and the Enchant from Platinum Games's Bayonetta.

"Vehicle of the gods", the Aether Ring. It IS the wheel to His chariot.

The ophanim has eyes for some reason, so this fits?

 

Wheelie? I don't think so. You need a wheel within a wheel.

 

I find the chayot more fascinating. They have four faces — Eagle, man, lion, and ox. They also have four wings, no knees, and they didn't need to turn around when they walked. So I guess they levitated in the direction of the face. There is more to their description if you're interested. There appear to be less references to these guys that I could find. You'd think they'd be Pokémon by now. Shin Megami Tensei II from Atlus has inspiration from the chayot, and that's all I could find!

Erroneously, the name of this enemy is "Ophanim" instead of "Chayot".

So I'm suggesting that we start seeing some more inspiration here. Instead of the Boss Remains being lame in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the bosses could've been an eagle, ox, humanoid, and lion, and then during the final boss fight they could've all been combined into the tetraform instead of being floating disposable losers. Hey, if Nintendo wants to "leave luck to Heaven", they could take more inspiration from that namesake! These are cool!

By ArnaTornwolf on deviantART

So eventually I got my ice cream, right? And the little kids, can't be older than six (they were eating cake with their bare hands instead of plastic spoons/forks!) asked me if I had a Wii. I said yes, and I also have a Wii U. I wasn't wearing any Nintendo memorabilia on me or anything so I guess he just asks everyone this question. He asked me if I had "Wii Baseball". Surely he couldn't be referring to Wii Sports, right? Everyone has that. And no one plays it for the Baseball, they play it for the Tennis or Bowling. So I said no. I hope he wasn't referring to Mario Super Sluggers. (He also asked me if I had an Xbox 360. Hey, Microsoft, are you a KIDDY company now?!) Whatever he was referring to, it's not the name of a real game. Nintendo has gotta work on makin' sure the kids know the names of games! How is word-of-mouth going to work if they can't get the names right?

Speaking of Sluggers, I'd like to note that Namco made Mario Superstar Baseball and its sequel WITHOUT putting Pac-Man in the game! So this means we have hope for Super Smash Bros. 4 to not suffer from bad character inclusions like Pac-Man, right?

Maybe not.

When he's not attending religious services, Ludwig probably isn't on Miiverse because he has other things in life. But when he IS on, he's probably being interesting in some way. Follow that interesting at NNID PrinceOfKoopas!


We may have to pray for Pac-Man not to be in. Ludwig does that.