10 Video Games With Unimaginably Complicated Lore

The Mushroom Kingdom has problems.

Already cursed with far too many princesses and no recognizable monarch, the air is filled with smiling bullets, flying squid creatures, and spike-covered eggs. Troops of a lizard king (oh, there was a monarch after all) roam around and the only heroes the land can rely on are a couple of plumbers from another world.

I say heroes, but how often are Mario and Luigi even there? One or the other of them always has some excuse to do other things like cosplaying as a ghostbuster or go-karting with their friends. And, even when they are on the job, they spend more time punching bricks to get money than they do saving the princesses.

This raises two immediate questions: why are these plumbers the only heroes of a kingdom that should have soldiers, and why do these floating blocks have money in the first place? The answer to both lies in the manual of the original NES game, which states in its story page that "the quiet, peace-loving Mushroom People were turned into mere stones".

That's right, folks. When Mario punches a block, this "hero" is actually smashing apart a corpse for the few pennies it once held.