Wall Meat (Castlevania)

Plenty of games feature food as a powerup, but it’s particularly weird in the Castlevania series. Why is a fully-cooked chicken hidden inside a brick wall?

And why does Dracula, who feeds on human blood, have a bunch of chicken “to-go meals” hidden in his castle? It’s insane!

Kuribo's Shoe (Super Mario Bros. 3)

Kuribo's Shoe is arguably one of Mario’s most powerful items, allowing you to jump on spikes, crush your enemies, and take extra hits.

But if these shoes come from Goombas, why don’t all the Goombas wear them and become unstoppable? And why doesn’t Mario wear the shoe all the time?

Imagine a Goomba boot stomping on a Koopa face—forever.

Cup of Life Noodles (Earthbound)

Earthbound is a game that elevated “weird” into an art form, but the Cup of Noodles is strange even by that game’s standards.

One taste of these noodles and all your health is replenished. It doesn’t make any sense, but it would explain how college students always have so much energy.

Bottled Fairies (Legend of Zelda)

Mechanically, the fairies in The Legend of Zelda are pretty straightforward. They just replenish your health. And in later games, you can actually bottle fairies up for later use.

However, we also know that fairies are intelligent creatures with their own culture, so the games just casually transform our hero Link into an enslaver who exploits defenseless fairies for his own benefit.

If we ask Link, maybe he’d tell us his war with the fairies was simply about "states' rights?”

Mallet (Final Fantasy)

Final Fantasy has many confusing elements and items, but one of the strangest is the Mallet. You can use Mallet to cure anyone that has been inflicted by “mini.”

Imagine how this must look. Your teammate has been shrunk down, and the only way to fix them is to beat the hell out of them with a giant mallet.

Somehow that still makes more sense than the plot of Final Fantasy VIII.

Cardboard Box (Metal Gear Solid)

The cardboard box is the most iconic way that Solid Snake sneaks around. It’s funny, but what does this tell us about his enemies?

We're meant to be scared of this deadly “Genome Army” in the first game, but this box trick confirms that these guys have the object permanence of a newborn child.

Power Pellets (Pac-Man)


Pac-Man
is an iconic game, but very little of it makes sense, especially the Power Pellets.

Pac-Man spends the entire game dodging ghosts and eating small pellets, but when he eats a bigger pellet, he can suddenly eat a ghost.

Why does Pac-Man become a god-like creature that can consume the dead like some reject from an H.P. Lovecraft story?

The BFG9000 (Doom)

There has arguably been no game as influential to the FPS genre as Doom. The original Doom games had many iconic weapons, but the strangest was the BFG9000.

It could still damage enemies if your shot missed, but it all depended on where you were standing and whether the enemy was in a proper 45-degree cone in front of you.

If you need to invoke a math problem to explain how a weapon works, then that's a damn confusing weapon.

Triforce (The Legend of Zelda series)

The Triforce is always the MacGuffin in the Zelda games, but can anyone explain how it works?

Sometimes it’s in pieces and sometimes it’s in people, and it is used to maintain peace while always, always causing chaos.

The only thing more confusing than the Triforce is trying to explain how this series has shown or mentioned over a dozen different Links.

Jelly Beans (A Boy and His Blob)

A Boy and His Blob features a cute and simple premise. The boy feeds jelly beans to the blob and the blob transforms into different useful items.

But why do jelly beans give this alien blob powers? And how did he find this out? Could any blob from his planet gain bean powers here like rogue Kryptonians do from our yellow sun?

So many questions and exactly zero answers.

Hookers (Grand Theft Auto 3)

We hate to objectify women, but Grand Theft Auto 3 literally uses hookers as powerups. Sex with a hooker will replenish your health, which is funny...right up until you think about it.

Your guy is nearly dead, bleeding out from a dozen gunshots, but then he is as good as new after sixty seconds of backseat sex? Whatever your character paid her, it wasn’t enough.

Tanooki Suit (Super Mario Bros. 3)

The Tanooki suit is already confusing on its own. It turns Mario into a mythological creature that almost no one outside of Japan would know anything about.

Even weirder is that this suit lets Mario turn into a statue to defeat enemies. It might help you stomp the occasional Goomba, but I’m holding Mario and his suit responsible for creating an entire generation of furries.

Pistol (Halo: Combat Evolved)

The Halo series is largely driven by the quest to find bigger, badder weapons. Which is why it makes no sense that the first game starts you off with the best weapon of all: a tricked-out pistol.

This was especially true in multiplayer, where players would skip most of the other weapons in favor of the overpowered pistol that could drop someone in five shots from across the map.

Keyblade (Kingdom Hearts)

At first, the Keyblade looks simple enough. You wail on enemies with it, and different Keyblades can enhance things like your reach or your damage.

But once you get into these blades opening dimensional barriers and swapping owners, you get sucked into the utterly baffling stories of the franchise, making this the most confusing weapon of all.

Power Sneakers (Sonic the Hedgehog)

Sonic is all about speed, and the sneakers powerup lets him go even faster, right? Well, the instruction manual for the first Sonic game specifies that his speed comes from his existing sneakers.

That means the powerups are even faster sneakers that somehow don’t last very long. Also, Sonic magically has his old sneakers on after the new sneakers’ effect wears off.

It makes about as much sense as a guy with animal friends constantly eating chili dogs.