Collider put together a ranked list of the best video game duos of all time, and it's the kind of thing I can't scroll past without arguing. Two characters who only work because of each other is a harder trick to pull off than people think. Squaresoft understood this in the '90s, Nintendo understood it from the start, and when a studio nails it, you remember the pair for decades.

The obvious heavyweights are there. For most players, Mario and Luigi defined the video game duo, going back to Mario Bros. on the arcade cabinet in 1983 before Luigi got top billing in his own weird ghost-hunting game 18 years later. Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us are the modern gold standard, a pair whose whole arc is about what two damaged people end up meaning to each other. That relationship carried an entire franchise, and you felt every beat of it because the gameplay kept them physically tethered together.

Ratchet and Clank belong on any list like this too. The brawler-and-brain pairing has been running since 2002 and it still works because Insomniac never stopped writing them as actual friends rather than a hero and his talking backpack. Same deal with Banjo and Kazooie, a duo where the mechanic IS the relationship, you literally cannot separate the bird from the bear without breaking the game.

I want to say my personal soft spot in this genre goes back further than most of these picks. Final Fantasy IV gave me Cecil and Kain in 1991, a friendship that gets tested, broken, and rebuilt across the whole game, which was heady stuff when most stories on the SNES were still "save the princess." When I finally ground through the Japanese versions of the early FF games with a dictionary in my lap, the party dynamics were the reason I stuck with it.

What makes a duo actually great, in my view, is interdependence. Two characters who just happen to share screen time don't count. It has to be a pair where removing one collapses the other. Sonic and Tails work because Tails changes what Sonic can reach. Ellie changes what Joel is. Even Pac-Man and the ghosts, if you want to get philosophical about it, define each other completely.

Check the full ranking over at Collider and see where your favorites landed. Have you played Banjo-Kazooie lately? Still holds up, and the bird has all the best lines.