The Power of Three

[Twili Kid]

Someone brought to my attention awhile ago that almost everything in video games comes in threes, and lots of things in real life even. So now I'm going to fully test that theroy and have all you guys try to find as much as you can in video games that come in threes.

Example:3 starter pokemon
3 sides of the triforce and 3 heros/villans that repersent them.

[Sparky]

Yes, but a whole ton of other stuff in games comes in twos, fours, fives, sixes, sevens occasionally eights and sometimes nines and once in a while, tens.

Just picking on threes and ignoring the rest seems like a weird choice to make a thread about, its just as common as most of groups of numbers.

Take the Fused Shadows and Mirror Shards. Sure you have to collect three of each, but theres four in total for both. So I could make such a case for the power of four.....

[Pocket Asian]

How the Pokemon games came out is one example:

Kanto: Red, Blue, and Yellow
Johto: Silver, Gold, and Crystal
Hoenn: Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald
Sinnoh: Diamond, Pearl, Platinum

[fredthehylian]

Another example would be in Earthbound Zero, there is always a maximum of 3 party members. It goes like this:
Beginning
P1:Ninten
"Level 2"
P1: Ninten
P2: Pippi
Mid
P1: Ninten
P2: Loid
P3: Ana
Mid-mid
P1: Ninten
P2: Ana
P3: Teddy
End
P1: Ninten
P2:Ana
P3: Loid

This is just because of the limitations of the NES or Itoi's scripting I imagine.

Oh yeah, and Zelda has the constant pattern of "First collect these three things, then collect these 7-12 things" A Link to the Past has you get the three pendants then the maidens, OoT has you collect the 3 sacred stones then the sages, etcetera.

[Master Kokiri 9]

Yes, but a whole ton of other stuff in games comes in twos, fours, fives, sixes, sevens occasionally eights and sometimes nines and once in a while, tens.

Just picking on threes and ignoring the rest seems like a weird choice to make a thread about, its just as common as most of groups of numbers.

Take the Fused Shadows and Mirror Shards. Sure you have to collect three of each, but theres four in total for both. So I could make such a case for the power of four.....

Don't forget MM with four of just about everything.

But yeah it does seem that a lot of gaming comes in threes. In Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story you have three playable characters, in most Zelda games you start things off by getting three items, in Super Mario RPG you have three maximum fighters at once, and so on and so forth.

But considering 3 is a magic number even outside gaming (three genie wishes, three wise men, three blind mice, etc.) it makes sense that the number three is pretty powerful in gaming.

[Sparky]

Words.

Yeah, this seems kind of spoilerish.

I haven't played said game, and if i actually wanted to, you'd of just ruined the game for me slightly.

[Ganon]

My wife and I were discussing this while playing New Super Mario Brothers. We talked about how, in all the Mario's we could think of, you have to bounce on the enemies head three times.