{"id":2551,"date":"2009-03-16T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2551"},"modified":"2009-03-16T13:00:22","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T17:00:22","slug":"overlord-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2551","title":{"rendered":"Overlord: Ending"},"content":{"rendered":"

After playing through the end of the game and reading through the comments of my previous Overlord post<\/a>, I’ve found a few more words have been jostled loose. <\/p>\n

Reader JW mentioned in the comments<\/a>:<\/p>\n

You need to mention how cute the minions are. After the first time playing it, my wife and I spent the better part of a week saying, “For me?” “For youuuu!” whenever we, say, passed the salt at the dinner table.<\/div>\n

Don’t hate me because I’m awesome.<\/td><\/tr>
Don’t hate me because I’m awesome.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>We had a similar experience at my house. We occasionally do the “For me?” \/ “For yoooou!” thing after I’ve been playing the game for any length of time. I will say that the minions are probably the most charming and quotable peons since Warcraft II. I remember when quoting the Warcraft peasants was something I was compelled to do at various points – usually when I was handed work – and the minions in Overlord seem to demand a similar level of imitation.<\/p>\n

Actually, the voice work was pretty good all around. (Although Jewel and Kahn sounded a little stiff. I couldn’t tell if that was on purpose, though.) IMDB doesn’t say, but I’m fairly confident that the voice of Oberon Greenhaze is the same guy who voices Serious Sam. I love that guy.<\/p>\n

The ending was surprisingly good and quite unexpected. It tied together a lot of earlier developments and even had a bit to say about the nature of heroes. I’m not suggesting it was a profound insight or a revelation on human nature, but it was clever and fun and wrapped things up nicely. <\/p>\n

It turns out the story was written by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of Sir Terry Pratchett. I have to confess that I’ve never read his stuff. I know it’s something geeks are supposed to do, but the list of things you must do to maintain your geek cred is getting impossibly long these days. Besides, I was a lot less interested in his work once I realized that his Discworld series is pretty much a blatant ripoff of Halo.<\/p>\n

I was already happy with the story before the end came along. It was straightforward and generally funny and delightfully subversive of genre conventions. (Halflings as piggish and mean little imps.) So when the ending rolled around and mixed things up I was pleasantly surprised. I took a look on Wikipedia and read about how each of the major characters ties into one of the seven deadly sins, which vaguely reminded me of the movie Se7en<\/a> in the way that they fulfilled one another. I feel sort of thick for not picking up on that sooner.<\/p>\n

(Just kidding about Pratchett ripping off Halo. I’m open to suggestions if anyone wants to recommend one of his books as a good starting point for his work.)<\/p>\n

EDIT: I stand corrected, Ringworld is the “Halo ripoff”, not Discworld. I’m afraid I was confusing one [shape]world series with another. That gives me an idea for a book: Sphereworld! It’s about this ball-shaped planet where stuff happens…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After playing through the end of the game and reading through the comments of my previous Overlord post, I’ve found a few more words have been jostled loose. Reader JW mentioned in the comments: You need to mention how cute the minions are. After the first time playing it, my wife and I spent the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[161],"class_list":["post-2551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-overlord"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}