Top Ten Video Game Swarm Masters

[Music] welcome my lovelies the green scorpion here ready to present another spooky scary selection of spine-tingling species look I know I didn't get this out for Halloween but is that so surprising at this point in the past we did a big old monster month about the most famous creepy culprits but fear comes in all shapes and sizes instead of the big chasers what about something unsettling that hits you when you're at your most vulnerable the silent critters creeping around what you can't see if the name and my favorite animal didn't make it obvious I think insects are pretty cool I thought I got the whole tiny terror vibe out of my system when I wrote top 10 parasites but while working on my last topic beast masters I had a bit of a relapse I could have broken that list into smaller categories people who use dogs people who use Birds etc I kept most of them together but I found so many examples of bug users that I felt it needed its own separate countdown a category I'm calling swarm masters the premise is simple one small fly is one small problem a hundred small flies is a thousand times that problem some sick practitioners have weaponized our planet's petite organisms into a force that's seriously hard to fight you got a sword that's great but what's it gonna do against a million creepy crawlies not that they have to be insects any kind of vermin is fine with me rats bats arachnids if you can call it an infestation I call it a swarm other than that the same rules apply though unlike some beasts masters swarm masters aren't usually picking up a new animal minion on the fly instead they usually cultivate a collection which they keep prepared somewhere on their persons or can call in a moment's notice like you know Chino from Naruto he'd be my perfect example but this is a list about video game characters so he'll have to sit this one out oh and content warning if you're freaked out by bugs this is not gonna be a pleasant experience no shame if you flake out on this one because bug spray and handles are not gonna save you these are the top ten video game swarm masters [Music] we're putting the Pokemon discussion at number 10 this week it made more sense with Beastmasters but trainers don't so much use a swarm of Pokemon six at the most and the smallest they get our foot baby or Joel Tech still I really wanted to talk about bug type Pokemon the bug type has a stigma of being one of the weakest types in the game especially if you've been with the franchise since the beginning everybody caught a Caterpie or wheedle and even after fully evolving them they found their power grossly underwhelming even the cool ones like cycler went down pretty quick they'd add some better ones here and there but it wasn't until generation five that we started getting more consistently good bug Pokemon same goes for the bug catchers notably weak trainers you battle in the early game forests all three bug type gym leaders are kind of jokes and while one guy managed to sneak the type into the elite bore even he's underwhelming then we have Sun and Moon which decided to hand the type off to its villainous Team Leader interesting move Kuzma is the head of team skull admittedly one of the least effective teams in Pokemon history but there's a reason for that we find out that Guzman was once a young trainer like us taking on his Island trial around the same time as Professor kook we with the intent of one day becoming a captain at some point he went off the rails and dropped out deciding that instead of being successful by the standards of ancient Aloha and tradition he'd be a success on his own terms he filled in the ranks of team skull with disassociated Utes and had them steal every short of begin E&Z so that he'd be the only one to ever use it he laughs at ku Cui's mission to establish an official pokemon league because what's the point of trying to succeed in anything am i right so we eventually get the chance to fight this slacker what you got bro a spewpa or venomoth or oh my god what is that thing Kuzma ace GLE isopods is the evolved form of wind pod which is pretty much generation sevens Magikarp a useless pile of suck that becomes fierce if you put the time in interesting that a guy who gave up on his dreams is using the poster boy for Harvard potential as the game goes on he adds to his team with some of the heavier hitting blood types in the decks the lightening charge Vica volt a pincer that he actually mega evolves if you meet him at the battle tree and though master rein was never what I call a good Pokemon his at least has some surprises like ice beam tucked away and with begin iam Zee Guzman olds the key to the ultimate bug type move savage spin out your psychic and dark types are doomed but to get back to his character what's the point of team skull most of its members are other kids who have dropped out from their hopes and dreams maybe goos most arted team's skull as a haven for all these wayward washouts they're all like little wind pods just waiting for someone to put in the time and help them but somehow Guzman lost his way and rather than giving the kids an alternative way to grow he's just helping them wallow in their lack of a future prospect at least until you save Guzman from ultra space after which he immediately disbands team's skull and lets the little bugs fly free there's definitely some subtext there and as a guy who will help you fight the rest of the villains in the Pokemon series he certainly shows off the potential of the bug type and honestly I don't think it's the weakest type anyway that it probably be ice or rock for having so many common weaknesses bugs one of my favorite types actually it's a surprise counter pick and Guzman is a surprise counter filling I'll be honest I had some trouble picking the last entry for this list at first I was thinking about Sadler from Resident Evil 4 who captured the Plagas Queen to control las Plagas and anyone they inhabit thereby turning a swarm of bugs into a swarm of people with his eventual sights on world domination then you got the gravemind who with the flood is planning the same kind of thing on a galactic scale there's a lot of overlap we can do with top 10 parasites actually but those are more long-term military strategy where I want characters using bugs moment-to-moment in the heat of battle and again they don't always have to be bugs which brings us to Diablo 3 the witch doctor combines elements of some classes from past games mainly the sorceress druid and necromancer so he's got a lot going on but mainly he's made up of the kind of creepy forest stuff that usually gives the heroes trouble on an indie Anna Jones movie I've always been interested in that term though witch doctor originally the job of a witch doctor was to provide medicine against witchcraft they were strictly non magic because magic is scary and bad and I don't want that but with European explorers misinterpreting these practitioners and their herbal remedies within different indigenous tribes the term witch doctor became synonymous with well witches kind of ironic really and this is the approach that Diablo takes with its witch doctors just a whole bunch of unsettling spells but at least the doctors not based on any specific cultures in this world they're more like spiritual bouncers able to sense the flow of life and death through the realms and when demons are killing too many people at once well the witch doctors got to step in to tip the scales back to normal acting as a summoner the witch doctor has a lot of pets some of which I wouldn't really count in this category such as zombies and skeletons but other than that they're like a best of Moses plagues you got armies of frogs that explode on contact sprays of flaming bats spiders that burst from the corpses of defeated zombies and even a swarm of locusts that will jump to new targets when they're done with the first one there's certainly variety here and rather than keeping one army on the field at a time the witch doctor constantly switches to new pests while his other spells cooldown and yeah I know I keep saying he but that's because the quote-unquote canon witch doctor is a gentleman named nazeebo he represents the class and heroes of a storm bringing along some toads and spiders and gargantuans which are pretty much voodoo golems yeah that definitely doesn't count as vermin but I think he still has enough to qualify as a swarm master even if he doesn't put all his eggs in one basket or all his egg sacks in one phylum [Music] speaking of MOBA games ah no sorry I still haven't played smite not really anyway I know I'll mousse and cob is a thing and he's got a whole lot of bees but I'm gonna have to pass on that what I was going to say was dota 2 and how after a couple of years it finally reintroduced one of my favourite heroes from all-stars the brood mother pretty simple in concept she's a giant spider who commands a crap ton of smaller spiders which buy spider standards are still pretty freaking big spiders if you look back this bends a rule I made in Beastmasters that the master has to be of higher intellectual order than the animals they control I think that's still true here she's a spider commanding other spiders but her children are newly hatched they don't really have sapiens yet but anyway brood mother is an agility based champion mostly used as a strong Lane pusher this means that while other heroes might be trying to get early game kills Broodmother focuses on destroying the turret so that the army can move closer to victory it's a numbers game with brood mother's ability to inject her foes with her young if the target dies in the next few seconds they'll burst into obedient spiderlings the quantity growing as you level up that skill competent Broodmother players will max this ability first and spend the first several minutes of the match turning enemy minions into her apocryphal Posse the spiderlings also get this ability so they can harvest enemies to get even smaller spiders though fortunately the third generation offspring doesn't reproduce that'd be nuts what is nuts is when broodmother poisons her foes to lower their movement speed meaning they spend a lot more time covered in spiders and with a vampiric aura the spiders can actually heal by attacking making them deceptively resilient another ability is spin web letting you create a sizeable area of silk that can't be destroyed in this zone all spiders are faster fiercer and unless they're attacking invisible granted your opponent can see the web even when they can't see you but that also means that they're always afraid of you even when you're not there with all this combined Broodmother has a tendency to take over whatever lane she starts in and if she can get properly fed early on she'll be a bit help in the late game in theory you could command your arachnoid separately and try some kind of pincer maneuver but you really don't have to just buy some or items and keep them all in a unified pot of terror and if this sounds overpowered well it's not while fierce under the right conditions spiderlings do award golden experience to those who kill them so you can't just throw them at heroes without a plan and any kind of area of effect shuts her down fast but other than that she is a fun if somewhat gimmicky hero League of Legends would eventually make their own version of this champion Elise and while I don't say this often I actually think dota did it better it's a stupid concept and the game just lets you be stupid with it welcome to the Forbidden Forest kids come meet the family [Music] one thing I've always admired about the Castlevania series is how it pulls its monsters from so many different sources even in the first game we were mixing Greek mythology with gothic horror and by the time we got to the DS titles plenty of Hebrew demons join in on the fun and wow these have to be some of the scariest take Don of Sorrows Abaddon for example his name is actually taken from the fifth angel of the end times who is prophesized to open an abyss in the earth and call forth locusts the size of horses with human faces and lion teeth that would leave plant life alone but torture mankind for five months straight that shit's in the Bible revelations chapter 9 look it up glad they didn't teach that part in Sunday school I'd still be having nightmares in comparison dawn of Sorrows Abaddon is rather tame and suave dare I say rocking a tailcoat over his cricket legs and directing lines of normal shapes but still quite large locusts with the conductor's baton and that well that's really the whole package right there not much to him once you get past the horriffic source material like a lot of bosses in the later Castlevania games he can be really difficult if you're not prepared and absolutely trivial if you approach it the right way such as life such as death he does grant some of the fifth plague ability once he dies so now soma has his own little posse of bugs to shoot it's tough I always liked abilities like this like remember the forunate chaser in Mega Man 9 loved that thing Hornet Man is a similar concept but Abaddon does it better with longer more complicated patterns of bugs and he even makes a reappearance in portrait of ruin I guess it's also worth mentioning there's a boss by the same name in lords of Shadow too but besides the fact that he has minions that spawn from these gross cocoon things they really aren't following the same bug motif he may be simple but I rather respect the dapper grasshopper man he's a Meister of the McCobb here to play you a swarming symphony [Music] now let's have some fun as your striker gunvolt made by the team behind Mega Man Zero gun bolt placed similarly except instead of robots you and your opponents are all adepts which in this world means you have superpowers there's usual boss themes you might expect like ice and fire but they get pretty creative with some of these case in point Stratos and his power of buds in his file straddle septum--ah or power is listed as the fly and while it's unclear what practical applications that would have on its own like the other bosses he was taken in by the evil corporation sumeragi and given a glaive a kind of transforming sword that increases in adepts power and gives them a crazy robot body now Strato scan convert his body into a swarm of fruit flies to get around or just shoot fruit flies from his hands and I mean a lot of fruit flies a cool thing about this game is how the bosses usually start messing with you before you even get to their boss room and in stratasys level screen filling waves of flies occasionally passed by your electric shield will protect you but God help you if you're caught off guard without any energy to keep the bug zapper on you'll be eaten alive speaking of eating each boss of the sumeragi 7 represents one of the seven deadly sins something that made me feel really smart when I put it together but then I realized that the sin is right there in each bosses title the prideful silhouette the slothful conjurer so then I just felt dumb for not realizing it sooner anyway Stratos is this group's gluttony and I gotta say this is a pretty cool take on my least favorites in most of these sin themed rogues galleries would have gluttony be some big fat guy the lowest hanging fruit imaginable but Stratos is gaunt starving and that only makes his ravenous appetite worse plus it's not just food he's after he's addicted to an experimental drug called C and after you destroy the only source of harvesting it Stratos decides your flesh can help him detox look I know man withdrawals hard but so is this boss fight waves of gnats filling the screen cocoons that explode into heat-seeking cicadas and his battle armor even transforms into big gnashing jaws not bug fiend but it does fit the gluttony thing just fine all-in-all a memorable one-off villain and a nightmare for anyone growing crops [Music] now there's a difference between being a swarm master and just waxing the whole bug motif like sadirah lots of really cool spider moves but she actually isn't using a swarm or a brood or anything just being bug like Devorah on the other hand walks that line a lot better introduced in Mortal Kombat X Devorah is a kite in a species of insects that bond together into a relative shape of a human and form a singular consciousness she's got a lot of big bug weapons shooting venom growing membrane wings and stabbing with her extra spider legs that double as ovipositor x' but like Stratos she mixes her own disconcerting melee attacks with tons of summoned bugs also like Stratos Dvorak kind of is the bugs but she also refers to the bugs as her children so I guess she's only some of the bugs I don't know I'm still wondering why I tin his hive mind would wear high heels and I'm not gonna think about that too hard in Mortal Kombat X 2 of Devorah stances especially focus on her miniscule minions there's her brood mother variant which can drop the isopod like crawlers hard to block and great for mix ups and then there's her swarm master variant yeah that one speaks for itself in mortal kombat xi she's moved into pulling giant hornets out of nowhere which is just a big ball of nope nowhere near as nope as her fatalities though she's currently my number 1 for the cringe iasts and most disgusting execution move in this series [Applause] well I'm not eating tonight for number four meet the 10-foot tall walking war machine general Rahm from Gears of War I may not be a Gears fan but you can't deny how much it influenced the shooter shootie bang bang genre so I'd be remiss not to talk about ramen those games first and looking over the first game yeah Rahm is an absolute unit he's a general of the locust who after generations of living passively in their subterranean civilization have decided to invade the humans on the surface and despite the name locust Rahm and his people aren't actually bugs they're more reptilian but locust does perfectly describe the sheer ferocity of their attacks and they utilize a lot of weaponized creepy crawlies like the spider like Reavers this Alaskan bull worm and of course the krill clarification number two these krill aren't those aquatic micro organisms that whales like to eat they're more like piranha bat moths what is with gears in its alien names misnomer are not the krill are kind of terrifying they can eat a man down to nothing in a matter of seconds and tend to show up in the millions of krill storm as they call it their one weakness is their sensitivity to light but once the Sun sets they're practically unstoppable which leads to one of the more memorable missions in the series for how macho this game is seeing the Cod's utterly helpless against these things leaves an impact so what does all this have to do with raw well it turns out he can command these little buggers and this isn't a common thing for locusts either we've seen them get krill to death - to the best of my knowledge there's not a real reason ROM can order these bats around so I guess it's just something that the elite guards can do his krill can even follow him into the daylight and I'm calling hax on that one most of the time they buzz around him as a protective shield so between the krill the heavy armor and a thick skin rom is basically bulletproof sadly he and the entire population of krill are killed in the first game leaving score to run things in his stead who's not nearly as interesting but rom was brought back fully playable in the gears of three DLC rom shadow and it's just a massive power trip and on that note let's look at Killer Instinct while ROM is often known to carry around a turret gun like a crocodilian heavy weapons guy for his fighting game debut he decided to play fair and bring only his serrated combat knife oh and several hundred krill they can absorb attacks for him start grapples and any attack with them leaves a swarm on your opponent that causes great damage until they can get a hit on wrong this can trick your opponent into a desperate state and cause them to make some easily punishable mistakes it's amazing how much rom controls the flow of his fights and during his instinct mode there's the krill storm constant constants gray damage unless they're hitting wrong were you watching that fight because I can barely see a thing now he may not be one of the faster fighters but he really doesn't have to be his pets are doing all of the work so he's just got to throw in a little elbow grease not even crest high walls can save you now [Music] the Legend of Zelda series is beloved for many reasons but one that doesn't get enough credit is its sense of personality particularly with NPCs I've already talked about how memorable at shopkeepers are but each game also hosts a hive of one-off quest givers that'll stay with you for years to come sometimes fans really cling to one particular character like they did with this little weirdo Agatha from Twilight Princess there's not a ton to her she's just a little girl who really likes bugs really really likes bugs like I'm talking morbid obsession she claims she's the princess of insects has invited 24 golden bugs from across Hyrule to attend her ball but they must have gotten lost on their way there surely a strapping hero like link can gather them up for her and that's about as far as it goes find some bugs and you'll get some rubies and wallet upgrades it's just the way she talks about them though like apparently she can really talk to them she sings songs for each bug you bring her implies that she really likes it when they sting and bite her and I don't know about anyone else but I think this girl might need a little help maybe we should stage an intervention or something so yeah one off character at the end of it all if Nintendo wanted more bug themed quests in the future games they to point them to new NPCs like Stritch and Skyward Sword that's what makes each game feel so fresh but wait go back set the franchise that design is way too interesting to just be the girl who upgrades your wallet and apparently Tecmo Koei's agreed and chose to continue Agatha story in Hyrule warriors in Twilight Princess it kind of seemed like her title was self proclaimed Agatha wasn't really bug royalty she just liked them a lot or maybe she was the ambiguity is part of the fun but in Hyrule warriors yeah Agatha is back and ready to show you her true power not only can she finish her basic attack strings with lines of butterflies she can summon giant butterflies to ride on or enormous Rhino beetles to crash through enemy battalions she even grows golden bug wings for one of her Musou attacks I always thought the gold colour was just to make the collectible bug stick out but now it makes total sense that they're somehow mad and small hilarious detail Agatha can pick locks you find this out during the Twilight invasion scenario and she claims that she learned it from termites so how do we compare ROM who's practically unstoppable to Agatha who's maybe more vulnerable but also takes out enemies at a faster rate well Rahm usually has a minigun or something and Agatha besides a basket a parasol and some small-time magic fights mainly with bugs so yeah a giant hulking harbinger of destruction just got beat out by a little fairy princess I have a weird job [Music] three years ago in a list about ghosts I made this joke we've just hit about every other member of the Cobra unit now I just have to find a countdown to talk about the pain top ten B wheelers well anyway I've held on to that idea ever since and finally here he is and boy am I glad he's so close to the top the pain not to be confused with the phantom pain is a boss in Middle Gear Solid 3 apparently at a young age he caught a parasite that caused him to secrete a be controlling pheromone not something you usually see on a resume but as a result he became a Hornet soldier oh god I hope he's the only one and was hired as a member of the Allied forces Cobra unit alongside a sniper a poison user a Pyromancer a ghost and a tragic boss fight hey I said my job was weird I never said I didn't like it through a combination of his pheromones and a captured Queen Hornet in his back pocket the pain commands his swarm with shocking accuracy he directs them towards snake with pheromone grenades uses their buzzing to cover the sounds of his movements and like ROM makes himself bulletproof by forming them into a kind of flak jacket a Yellow Jacket if you will they're easier to blast away with a shotgun or grenades but he's got some extra tricks up his sleeve such as having to swarm copy the shape of his body and act as a decoy uh be coy he's outfitted himself into a living hive with the Hornets living in his clothes and even his body this is the closest we're gonna get to Shino today and nothing can prepare you for the bullet B's this dude can spit bees that move as fast as Hornets and can burrow into snake and eat him from the inside out according to some cassette tapes he can actually control all kinds of insects but he sticks to Hornets since they're his favorite you gotta commend that dedication he's covered in stings and welts all the time but since his parasites also produce extra adrenaline it's not really an issue he's not winning any beauty pageants but he'll always be queen bee to me now if only they made some kind of repellent for these jokes seriously if we're sticking to purely bugs and purely things much smaller than oneself then yeah the pain takes the cake a cake that's probably really infested by now but there's one more candidate that although a little unorthodox I just could not see the top spot without Hornet swarms krill swarms golden butterfly swarms all shrivel in comparison to the single-minded offensive of a swarm of Pikmin trapped on an alien planet with a toxic atmosphere captain olimar lowly delivery man of the Hoka tate freight company hitched up his bootstraps and asserted himself as the leader of a subservient race half flora half fauna maybe not what you'd think of as a swarm and shouldn't swarm asters be bigger than each individual swarm member well remember that a swarm doesn't have to be bugs the krill aren't even Arthur pots and nazeebo has all kinds of mammals and amphibians mixed into his collection and as for size Agatha's biggest attacks are with freaking Mothra pigmen are only about an inch tall and it just so happens that so is Olimar and he regularly uses them to topple beasts ten times his size Pikmin may be humanoid but they behave with a hive-like mentality following orlimar based on the light on his antennae and the frequency of his whistle orlimar certainly fits the swarm asterbilt but is he the best and what does that even mean for this list well by virtue of the fact that he's basically commanding a tiny little army of mites orlimar is pretty good at what he does while at home he's bossed around by the company president here on pmf 404 he's the king the CEO and the commander in chief flinging Pikmin onto his aggressors so they can latch on and beat the beasts to death or just calling his posse to bum-rush as targets I'm sure you know the different classifications by now you got your fire proof red Pikmin your insulated high-arcing yellows the seafaring blues the poisonous whites the heavy weight Purple's thick skin rocks and aerial winged pikmin I know those last two premiered in Pikmin 3 which start a different group of pig masters but orlimar still uses all varieties in Pikmin 3 Stalin's mode and he's got more games under his belt than louie alpha and any other pilots maybe Olimar is not the most formidable threat on this list that still might be wrong honestly but all Amar's movesets are completely committed to his swarm no knives no guns not even a parasol just some sprays that accomplish nothing without his pigment around and a little punch which I admit I've used a few times to solo enemies when I was too afraid to lose Pikmin especially in Pikmin 2 that game has some scary enemies but that's just a testament to what Alomar's overcome the Emperor Bal blacks the men at legs they'll freakin water race and of course Smash Brothers you've probably heard discussions like this before if the characters were able to do everything they could in their original games who would be the strongest well I don't know if Alomar could realistically take on Bayonetta heck it's charitable enough for the game to scale him up to people sighs but imagine if Alomar was allowed to keep up to 100 Pikmin with him like he does in his own games I'm overwhelmed just thinking about it and that is why orlimar takes the throne as the greatest swarm master in videogame history I don't know if that's a question that needed answering but now you know I'm the green scorpion and thank you for joining me for this pair of animal themed countdowns next time we'll look at something a little more human well about 50% more time to gear up [Music]

Channel: The Green Scorpion

Views: 40,984

Keywords: greenscorpion64, The Green Scorpion, Top Ten, Video Game, Swarm Masters, gameplay, commentary, review, playthrough, countdown

Id: gN7ES5taw2E

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019