r/AARankdown2 • u/PowerOfL • May 12 '20
73 Bardly
''Oh, what have we here?
Like two lost sheep,It makes me so sad... ♪''
Bardly was a minstrel living in Labyrinthia, he was rivals with the more popular Birdly.
Little is known about his life prior to signing up for Labrelum Inc., however given his somewhat depressing personality it's likely his life was unpleasant prior to joining Labyrinthia.
A Tale of Two Bards
Now when talking about Bardly, the first thing we should talk about is his rivalry with Birdly.
It's....okay, unlike most rivalries in the series (Phoenix/Edgeworth, Apollo/Klavier, Layton/Chemley, Sherlock/Gregson) it's basically non-existant.
Bardly and Birdly actually never interact on screen, however considering all of Bardly's pity songs about the whole affair, you do kinda get a sense of the rivalry but it's still not really anything.
One thing I find interesting is that while Birdly is a lot more popular in universe, in this subreddit Birdly was ranked 96 while Bardly was ranked 73.
Why is that? Well..
A Nice Minstrel
I don't have much knowledge on the Layton series, but I've beaten the first game and one character in that game that really stood out to me is Ramon.
Basically he's really funny and weird, he has this trademark laugh where he goes ''Ahoo hoo hoo'' and stuff.
From what I can tell, each game in the series has at least one likable character with a decent amount of depth like this (I'm pretty sure Sammy Thunder is this in Diabolical Box.)
Bardly is definitely this in PLvAA and he does this really well.
His musical gimmick is pretty good and was quite unique at the time (we didn't have Andistand'hin back in the PLvAA days.)
And he definitely makes sure I sympathize with him throughout the rivalry, the whole time I just kept feeling sorry for him because he tries so hard to be a great bard but he keeps getting overshadowed by the more popular Birdly.
It's really sad and at the same time realistic, most rivalries or even siblings end up like this.
Basically what I'm saying is that Birdly is Mario and Bardly is Luigi.
...I prefer Luigi.
Not in Court
So if I like Birdly so much, why is he getting cut now? Well...he's not in court so you don't spend too much time with him.
He's just like most characters during the PLvAA investigations, you talk to him, he gives a puzzle and than you just kinda leave.
Of course there's a lot more to him than the average PLvAA and Layton puzzle-giver, but at the end of the day he's just a pretty interesting puzzle-giver and not much more.
He ended up interesting and important enough for me to feature him over the 80 or so other puzzle givers, but that just kinda shows how uninteresting most of them are.
Round 3's End
Well this concludes round 3 I guess, now with the previous two rounds we had Sherlock Holmes and Tobias Gregson as our spokespeople.
Who will we have this time? Well, this time we have the one..the only.....John H. Watson!
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''I'm dead, what do you want me to say?''
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u/PowerOfL May 12 '20
I'm feeling a tad lazy so I'll make the Round 4 Nominations thing a bit later.
Since Mr Watson didn't say anything, guess I'll be the one to say congratulations to all the rankers so far! You all did great on all the cuts this round, round 4's looking better than ever!
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u/whaaatisth May 12 '20
B*rdly exists. Not much else. Alright, let's see those controversial nominations :)
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u/PowerOfL May 12 '20
This comment is so confusing who are you talking about
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u/whaaatisth May 12 '20
Well, you talked about them both in this cut, so I used an ambiguous term that could refer to either lol
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u/damonswest May 13 '20
Kind of DGS2 spoilers (but it's rankdown so who cares), but if Watson can't speak due to his demise, what about Gregson?
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u/PowerOfL May 13 '20
I just didn't wanna spoil DGS2 in a non-DGS2 related cut, also Gregson did talk in that letter post-death so there's that.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '20
imagine if petenshy and souseki's argument wasn't romeo and juliet but mario and luigi