Gameoverse Character Designs: The Video Game Homages Explained

It’s like Wreck-it-Ralph meets Mighty Cat Masked Niyander in the best ways possible.

Gameoverse is the latest 3D-animated offering from Glitch Productions, the team behind Knights of Guinevere and The Amazing Digital Circus. In a similar environment to its predecessors, Gameoverse has already managed to build a very large fandom, which is impressive given that all the hype that has surrounded the franchise has only come around after a single episode, which aired on YouTube.

Characters in the Gameoverse hail from game worlds, where achieving the win condition usually results in the world being destroyed. Given this premise, there are some characters that take some noticeable cues from established characters in various video games. Here is a list of who each character takes inspiration from

1 Kit Fuses The Best Parts of Ratchet the Lombax and Mega Man

Kit is the protagonist of the show, and is marred with guilt over not being able to save her own game world. Gameoverse games exist in a particularly brutal ruleset, in that each game world’s win condition, when initiated, would lead to the destruction of the game world. Kit was one such character who was unaware of this until she and her partner, Kaboodle, were saved by Dusk.

Kit’s physiology is pretty similar to that of Mega Man, having an already-iconic arm canon that she regularly employs in combat. She is also able to modify herself thanks to Kaboodle. The partnership of a yellow, cat-like creature and a robot friend that functions as a backpack is something that is very reminiscent of Ratchet and Clank. These two characters seemed to have influenced a very capable protagonist in her own right.

2 Kaboodle is The Clank To Kit’s Ratchet

A more mean-spirited, but with the same amount of heart as the famous robot companion of Ratchet from the Ratchet and Clank series. Kaboodle also has streaks of helper characters that existed in games in the late nineties and the early two thousand. His dynamic with Kit implies a long in-game history, and it can be seen that that has only been cemented in the time since Dusk rescued the duo on Kit’s home world.

3 Gobbles Looks Like Barney the Dinosaur’s Second Cousin

What seems to be the latest addition to the group, Gobbles, is a character from an educational video game. His status as a magenta dinosaur that is the star of educational content takes clear cues from Barney the Dinosaur. Clearly traumatized by the end of his world, given that he comes from a children’s game where such concepts are not really discussed, the character ends up bringing a lot of value to the team, especially when Kit has to deal with failure.

4 Flappers’ Game Is An homage To Ecco The Dolphin

Ecco the Dolphin was an action-adventure series that was one of the more lucrative games that Appaloosa Interactive developed. The game serves as the main inspiration for Flapper’s Game, which has more in common with Gobbles’s world than that of an action-adventure. Imagine if Baby Shark could run a kiddie version of Doom, and you are there. Flappers ends up being recruited by the team after his world is destroyed, not for the lack of trying from the protagonists to champion the villain of the game, Snappers.

5 Z, Sephiroth, and Alucard Come Together To Make Dusk

Dusk is the character that people know last about in the story. Appearing at the beginning of the pilot to rescue Kit, that is all fans see of the character, but given his design and his role as an overseer, who even dispatched Gobbles, Kit, and Kaboodle to Flapper’s game, has immediately drawn comparisons from fans.

Thanks to his elven ears, black attire, and ominous names, he has been pegged as a triangulation of three characters: Alucard from Castlevania, Sephiroth from Final Fantasy, and Z from Xenoblade. Little is known about the game that he originates from, or how he came to know about win conditions destroying worlds. Further, it is not known how he escaped the destruction of his world.

6 Miss Information Is An Evil Nell From Nintendo Wars

Miss Information is a through and through helper character. However, she is currently siding with the Syntax, which has very different goals from Farcade, the faction that Dusk, Kit, and their allies belong to. Miss Information, in her dressing sense and character archetype, makes her feel like Nell from Advance Wars. However, she also has a lot of shades of Jessie from the Pokémon franchise, being a young woman henchman with a goofy male counterpart

7 Malice and Mayhem Are Like Reaverbots from Mega Man

Second only to Dusk in the amount of screentime that they have received, Malice and Mayhem are characters that take their inspiration from the mooks that appear in Mega Man games, especially the Reaverbots. What these characters end up doing is serving as the roadblock to the win condition in Kit’s game. While it is believed that they are dispatched at the beginning of the game, it turns out that they too survived the collapse of the game, and are looking for vengeance against Kit.

Character	Expy Of
Kit	Ratchet from Ratchet & Clank Mega Man from Mega Man
Kaboodle	Clank from Ratchet & Clank
Gobbles	Barney The Dinosaur from Barney & Friends
Flappers	Ecco from Ecco the Dolphin
Dusk	Z from Xenoblade Sephiroth from Final Fantasy Alucard from Castlevania
Miss Information	Nell from Nintendo Wars Jessie from Pokémon
Malice and Mayhem	Reaverbots from Mega Man

The pilot for the show has picked up a lot of steam online, and there is no confirmation on when the next episode is going to drop. However, there will likely be a push from the studio to get more of the story out one way or the other, given how popular the IP has already become.

What other characters do you think the show could parody in the future? Let us know in the comments.

Gameoverse can be watched on YouTube