For this month’s QOTM, a very punny feller called Luke asks what the best gaming crossover of all time is.

Huh.

Well… I mean, I think nobody would be surprised if I said that my favourite gaming crossover was a certain game mashing up Disney with Final Fantasy… but I sort of feel like that misses the spirit of the question. Yeah, it’s a game that crosses over two franchises, but only one of those franchises is itself based in gaming, so I don’t know whether I can call it a ‘gaming crossover’. For this question, I wanna find the best game that combines elements of other games, and that’s a bit trickier for me. I’ve not played the recent Mario-Raving Rabbids crossover, though I hear that’s pretty brilliant, and I bet someone’s already taken Smash.

I’m gonna go for something a bit off-piste, actually: an entire new franchise created by crossing things over: the LEGO games.

So the entire premise of the LEGO game franchise is a crossover between our favourite blocks and a bunch of other stuff: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Marvel, all that. Within those games, you often spot characters from other franchises hanging about – there are a ton of Mario-themed objects in Lego City: Undercover, too. The games are usually pretty good, actually; they’re great for co-op, and they mix a sweet little sense of humour with homages to the properties they’re drawing on and intuitive, fun gameplay that more often than not revolves around hitting stuff to break it, then building it into something cooler and more useful! What’s not to love?

These days, there’s also LEGO Dimensions, a Skylanders-type thingy that lets you purchase a bunch of characters, objects and levels from all sorts of different franchises and put them all in a big melting pot to achieve maximum crossover-edness. I dare say that with the sheer number of purchaseable components they’ve got out there, you’ve got to assume that the LEGO games overall make up one of the most financially successful gaming franchises of the modern era. The games are defined by accessibility, meaning they can be played by parents and kids together, but they’re complex enough that you need to do a bit of creative thinking. In short, there’s pretty much universal appeal, unless you just hate LEGO.

There ya go, then. Surely one of the best crossovers in gaming, no? Check out the QOTM post on Later Levels for details of how to join in, and see what other answers people have come up with!