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Square Enix’s Gordon Galaxy is a brilliant, if legally reckless, parody of Guardians Of The Galaxy"I am good!"
“I am good!”
Gordon himself is similarly spot-on, resembling Chris Pratt’s character Peter Quill, but hurriedly reimagined as a Danish porn actor over the course of a weekend. He even has a superhero sobriquet (“call me Stairmaster”), which he constantly tries and fails to make into a thing, despite it being embroidered onto his red leather jacket.
Honestly, the character designs are razor sharp. Taken individually and out of context - say, on a courtroom projector screen - none of them would immediately make you think of Guardians. Even Wrinkly Rodeo manages to avoid looking too much like Rocket, with a horrid little beard that feels like it would be more at home in a rejected Pixar short about woodland stoners. But see them all as a group, squint a little, and you can’t miss it.
That’s all well and good, but where Gordon Galaxy really kicks into gear as satire is when you see the characters interact. Or rather, when you hear them. Because theynever shut up. In thegameplay footagebroadcast duringSqueenix’s E3 showlast night, we were treated to a sequence where the crew walked from their spaceship, the Milanoo, down to a plain of weird yellow hillocks, in the rain. Just five characters, walking down a rocky slope, for a full minute and a half - a seemingly absurd amount of time to spend on something so literally pedestrian, given what I presume the airtime cost.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy | Gameplay First LookWatch on YouTube
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy | Gameplay First Look
In this piece de resistance of a final shot, the reveal trailer implied that Gordon done fucked an octopus, in a merciless skewering of the “Chris Pratt sure does love to shag” bit that’s so fundamental to Guardians.
When I did clock on to the fact that most of the jokes were just, well… vaguely adversarial statements, it made me wonder if Marvel movies are actually as tightly scripted as I think they are, or whether the good jokes are just strung together with enough relentless, hollow sass to make it feel that way.
I can only imagine the situation in the legal department of the House of Mouse right now. I imagine quite a lot of emails are being sent, and a lot of positions considered. I’m sure Square Enix’s legal team know what they’re doing. Hell, they already pulled this off once, with their game aboutthe Avengers as painted on the sides of British funfair rideslast year. But it was a bloody close call, and with the case only just having left the courts, it feels like they’re sailing damned close to the wind doing it all again.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but root for them. Just like Gordon and his Mates, they’re a crew of plucky, outspoken underdogs with a seemingly impossible mission - how could you not get behind that?
