Help: I need to tell you about this excellent parody of the Friends sitcom opening made in Baldur’s Gate 3, but all I can think about now is really bad puns.
Your love life’s D&D?
When the brains start to pour?
Bhaal Be There For You?
I’m clearly not as skilled at punsmanship as VTuber Sho is at video editing, judging by their recreation of Friends’ iconic season one opener. It’s pulled in some two million views on ex-Twitter and another 78,000 on YouTube in just the last couple days and attracted the attention of Larian publishing director Michael Douse. “Can’t believe they data-mined our original opening cinematic,” he joked.
It’s a great fan edit, using a garden in Baldur’s Gate complete with a fountain that’s a dead ringer for the Friends’ intro’s and swapping in a bench for the couch. It’s day rather than night and the fountain isn’t actually flowing, but once the origin characters start popping up in ’90s clip style with the Friends font underneath them, I was sold.
Sho passed up an obvious opportunity to time a clip of Astarion clapping to the clap in the song, but as someone who has unfortunately seen every single episode of Friends I can confidently say the actual show openings passed up the same opportunity until part way through season one, when they changed up the intro clips. So it seems only fitting that a few months down the line we get an alternate clip with everyone clapping to the beat.
The important question Sho’s fan edit raises is—which Baldur’s Gate 3 companion is which Friends character? After deep consultation among the PC Gamer team, by which I mean two of us discussing this for less than five minutes, here’s what we’ve come up with:
Ross :: Astarion
Rachel :: Shadowheart
Joey :: Karlach
Chandler :: Wyll
Monica :: Lae’zel
Phoebe :: Gale
Sorry Halsin, Jaheira, and BG3’s other companions: You’ll have to fight over Friends guest star leftovers like Richard, Julie, Susan, and Gunther. And I guess someone has to be Janice.
