Sometimes the best scares come from the most unexpected places.
When we’re playing a horror game like Resident Evil, we’re always on edge, expecting something
spooky to come out at any moment.
While they definitely do scare the hell out of us, we already know they’re coming.
Now, when they come from a cute and cuddly “kids” game, well that’s a different story.
So today, we’re gonna take a look at some of the characters that brought out these moments
in N64 games.
And we're going to talk about one game per entry, because that's more fun.
These are 7 unnecessarily horrifying characters in kid-friendly games.
The Ghost of Wrinkly Kong from Donkey Kong 64
Wrinkly Kong is a kindly old gorilla who appeared throughout the Donkey Kong Country series.
Unlike her husband, Cranky Kong, she actually tries to help the Kongs by offering them advice
about the games items and objects.
Through her life she was very caring and intelligent, being a faithful wife to Cranky and a possible
grandmother or mother to Donkey Kong.
That’s still a bit up in the air.
Unfortunately she passed away after the events of Donkey Kong Country 3.
Throughout Donkey Kong 64, we are left with sad reminders of her life through these Wrinkly Doors that--
Holy shit!
Alright, so Wrinkly Kong does make a posthumous appearance in Donkey Kong 64 as a ghost.
While she assures you that she is not there to harm you and you shouldn’t be afraid,
those bone-chilling sounds of her spirit coming forward were enough to make any child actively
avoid every single Wrinkly Door they came across, no matter how helpful her advice was.
It’s almost a shame how freaky she is in this game, as she is still just as sweet as
she was in life, even being the only Kong in the game to offer her help for free.
Despite being dead, Wrinkly Kong continues to make appearances in Donkey Kong games,
even being featured as a playable character in DK: King of Swing, DK: Jungle Climber and
Donkey Kong Barrel Blast.
Thankfully without that hellish ghostly shriek.
Clanker from Banjo Kazooie
Back in 1998, an instant classic was released in the form of Banjo-Kazooie.
The worlds were fairly small, contained and cute, as seen in the first two worlds ‘Mumbo’s
Mountain’ and ‘Treasure Trove Cove’.
When entering the third world for the first time, it seems to be the same case.
You enter a small sewer system with some ugly crabs walking about, when suddenly you find
yourself in an enormous body of water… and you clearly aren’t alone.
You’re greeted by a pair of big of creepy eyes, and an even bigger set of sharp teeth.
This is Clanker, Gruntilda the Witch’s garbage disposal system.
Clanker is a tragic character that only becomes terrifying when you begin to realize what
he truly is.
While he may seem to be a completely mechanical fish-shark thing, when you enter his body
you find organic organs and bones inside.
Just what exactly was Clanker before Gruntilda found him?
He is completely submerged under sewer water when you first meet him, despite him having
to breath through a blowhole, so it’s clear that he is not being treated well.
After helping Banjo find the rest of the jigsaw pieces in the area, he is never seen again…
until ten years later in the 2008 title Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
In the level ‘Banjoland’, which is a museum of every Banjo level from the first two games.
Clanker makes an appearance here… cut up into many, many pieces and scattered throughout
the level.
Taking his organic-interior into account, this becomes incredibly gruesome.
He’s still alive too, meaning that he has to live with this horror now.
In some pre-release footage of the original Banjo-Kazooie, Clanker appears to be a fully
organic shark.
So what happened to him that turned him into this monstrosity?
The god of this world is truly cruel to Clanker.
Brain Andross from Star Fox 64
At the beginning of the Star Fox series, Dr. Andross was a simple well-intentioned and
respected scientist.
However, his lust for power turned him insane, and was eventually banished to the planet
Venom, where he began his conquest for the entire galaxy.
Andross is the final boss of Star Fox 64, and playing through a normal route has you
face his monstrous creepy monkey face in some drug-induced nightmare arena.
Making it to the end of Venom has you facing Andross as normal, until you obliterate his
face, revealing… this disgusting abomination.
The true final fight is with Andross’ disembodied floating brain and retinas.
It’s one of the most disgusting final bosses in a Nintendo game, and is incredibly unnerving
seeing it move around… especially those retinas.
It’s sad just how far Andross has fallen from grace, going from a respected scientist
to an eldritch abomination.
And if that wasn’t enough, they managed to make him look even more grotesque in the
3DS remake, Star Fox 64 3D.
Luckily, Brain Andross is absent from the second remake, Star Fox Zero, instead being
replaced by a metallic robot Andross.
Although it feels a bit wrong to not have him around anymore, but perhaps it's for the
best that we didn’t see him in HD.
The Killer Piano in Super Mario 64
Sometimes our assumptions can get the best of us.
For example, assuming that there won’t be anything horrifying in a series as playful
and wholesome as Super Mario.
We were all guilty of this before playing Super Mario 64.
Never again now.
When entering the level “Big Boo’s Haunt”, the atmosphere feels .. incredibly uneasy,
one that feels almost out of place in a Mario game.
But whatever, it’s probably just the standard Mario ghosts, like Boos and Dry Bones, right?
Well…
Meet the Killer Piano, infamous for making a generation of kids shit their pants collectively.
This seemingly normal piano becomes a musical greeting card from hell the second you get
too close to it.
Horrible jagged teeth protrude from it as it stomps towards you, while making sounds
that sound like someone is smashing all of its keys at once.
It’s impossible to kill this piano as well, despite the official Nintendo Power Player’s
Guide stating that it was possible.
That was a lie.
Maybe it was a typo, or maybe it was meant to instill false security.
Who knows.
Perhaps it's the latter, because the developers had the nerve to place a red coin behind this thing.
Thankfully, the Killer Piano has only appeared in Super Mario 64 and its DS remake.
While it did make cameos in both Mario Party 2 and Mario Party 8, it was luckily detained
behind the invisible walls of the game boards.
Dead Hand from Ocarina of Time
Unlike the Mario series, The Legend of Zelda is a bit more realistic… well, as realistic
a Nintendo game can be.
Having said that, scary moments were a bit more commonplace in the series by the time
that Ocarina of Time was released, such as the Wallmasters from A Link to the Past.
However, no amount of creepy pixelated hands could prepare you for this disgusting mess
of polygons.
In the second half of the game, Link must venture through the sewer system beneath Kakariko Village.
This sewer system is full of corpses and enormous spiders, which really gets even worse when
you realize that the entire town has been drinking corpse water this entire time.
But anyways, towards the end of this mini-dungeon, you enter a small room with what appears to
be long, bloody pale arms sticking out of the ground.
Getting too close to investigate causes them to grab you by the head, revealing the horrifying
Dead Hand to rise from the ground!
Dead Hand is hands-down one of the most disturbing enemies in the entire Zelda series.
It appears to be a mass of flabby flesh covered in patches of dried blood, slowly crawling
towards you as it's horrendously long hands, complete with overgrown red fingernails, pins
you down so it can gnaw at you with its gaping large mouth.
Eventually, Link is able to overcome the abomination and gains the Lens of Truth.
However, even after it is killed, its body does not disappear like most other enemies
in the game.
Instead, its body lays there, convulsing as if rigor mortis is setting in.
It’s insane how much they went out of their way to make this one enemy so goddamn horrifying.
It appears that Dead Hand was somewhat censored in the 3DS remake, having less bloody patches
on its body.
However, now it just looks like a big blob of flabby skin.
You either need to go all the way with this guy, or not at all.
There’s no in-between for Dead Hand.
O2 from Kirby 64
Despite its cute and cuddly exterior, the Kirby series has some seriously fucked up enemies.
From Marx Soul in Kirby Super Star to Star Dream in Kirby Planet Robobot, it seems they
try to outdo themselves in every game by having the most unexpectedly terrifying final boss
to appear in a game about a cute pink marshmallow.
Today, however, we’ll be looking at perhaps the most well-known final boss of the Kirby
series, and possibly the creepiest.
Zero first appeared in the Super Nintendo title ‘Kirby’s Dreamland 3’ as the true
final boss.
Virtually nothing was known about him at the time other than the fact that he is the creator
of Dark Matter, the final boss from Kirby’s Dreamland 2.
He is destroyed at the end of the game, likely to never be seen again.
Except he is seen again, in the form of 02, the final boss of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.
It’s unknown how exactly Zero was reincarnated, but two things are certain; he’s back and
he is pissed.
Taking on the appearance of a fallen angel, complete with a halo and red wings, 02 actually
cries blood in his concept art, and small splotches of what appears to be blood come
out of his eye with every hit it takes.
This is the first and only appearance of blood in a Kirby game, and it definitely gets the
impact it was looking for.
After his defeat, 02 and the Dark Matter deteriorate into nothing, and are finally vanquished for good.
However, Dark Matter recently starting seeping back into the games in Planet Robobot…
Perhaps Zero will return as 03 someday…?
The Zombies from Conker’s Bad Fur Day
While not exactly what you’d call a “kids” game,
Conker’s Bad Fur Day is still not the kind of game where you’d expect to be legitimately scared.
It’s a mostly raunchy and comedic adventure, taking jabs at Rare’s usual cutesy gameworlds
as seen in Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, complete with googly eyes on damn near everything.
However, things get a little spooky whenever you enter the aptly named “spooky” chapter.
In this chapter, Conker travels to his great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Count Batula’s mansion.
An angry village mob soon arrives at the front door, revealing that Count Batula is a vampire.
Shocker.
Conker and Batula team up, and put the villagers into a grinder, killing them and feeding their blood directly to the Count.
Eventually the Count becomes so overweight, and ends up falling into the grinder himself, killing him.
Afterwards, Conker is left alone in the mansion, when suddenly the dead rise to attack.
These Zombies are presumably the remains of the villagers from earlier in the night, and are actually quite frightening.
They have unpleasant gurgling moaning noises, and feature bloody and decaying flesh all over their bodies,
in addition to a rotting eyeball hanging from their eye socket.
Soon enough, the mansion is full of them and the only way out is through them.
Like many Zombies throughout different forms of media, these Zombies can only be killed with a shot to the head
The gameplay switches to a third-person shooter for this segment, completing the whole ‘Resident Evil’ feeling this chapter oozes.
Again, while not a children's game, let’s not pretend like we didn’t all play, or at least try to play this game when we were younger.
I guess this level put us back in our places, running back to our Super Mario 64s and Banjo-Kazooies.
Although they had their fair share of scares too, so it looks like nowhere is safe.
The Moon From Majora’s Mask
Honestly, we could fill an entire list of entries just from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
The game has no shortage of absolutely horrifying characters, from the Skull Kid, to the Happy
Mask Salesman to the Majora’s Mask itself.
But for now, we’re going to be looking at the one character who is with you for your
entire journey.
The constant reminder that looms over your head to make sure you know that time is running
out, and everyone you know will be dead soon.
The Moon from Majora’s Mask makes sure you feel rushed and panicked everytime you look
up in the sky as he gets closer and closer with each passing day.
Visible from just about every outdoor area in the game, the Moon slowly creeps down towards
Termina until the third and final day where it makes impact with the ground and kills everyone.
Furthermore, the Moon has a constant look of pure anger as it stares down at you.
It’s unclear if this is the actual moon from the sky, or an original creation made by the Majora’s Mask.
It is rather strange how small it is compared to the actual moon in other Zelda games, but
this could be explained by Termina being a in different dimension from Hyrule.
There is no mention of the Triforce or Zelda in Termina afterall.
Towards the beginning of the game, a gem falls from the Moon, called the Moon’s Tear.
Did this thing cry? Could it be possible that the Moon doesn’t want this?
Is it being forced down to the ground against its will?
Is it even sentient?
These are all questions that have no answers, and perhaps its best that they remain unanswered.
Despite its obvious rocky exterior, the final area of the game takes place on the surface
of the Moon, depicted as a sunny meadow with a single large tree in the middle.
Butterflies float about as four masked children run around the tree, with a lone child wearing
the Majora’s Mask sitting underneath the tree.
The Moon is truly an enigma in the world of Termina.
Early screenshots of the game show a faceless moon, with the ugly face we’ve come to fear
being added in later.
Well, it certainly made those short three days feel a lot shorter, so I guess the face
got the job done.
Let’s be thankful that the Moon doesn’t have a face in any other Zelda game.
Or in real life for that matter.