Alphonse

Alphonse is one of the Characters in Owlboy. Alphonse is a gallant pirate in a red suit, carrying a powerful fireball musket.

Description
A gallant and friendly former pirate who loves theatre and poetry. Alphonse's shotgun shoots a fire blast that burns trees and damages enemies. It has an 8 second cool down rate per blast, and functions like a lighter between cool downs that can be used to burn down barriers of plants, lighting lanterns and lamps found throughout some caverns, and igniting explosives.

History
Alphonse began as an optional character - but after going through the steps to unlock him, he would be so much more powerful, he’d overshadow Geddy completely. The devs noticed that players would stop using Geddy immediately once Alphonse was unlocked as Alphonse could simply do everything better.

The devs started discussing what they could do to make the party dependent on each other. One solution would be to use obstacles that only Geddy´s blaster could penetrate, but that didn’t seem like a satisfying solution. After a little planning, they introduced a new gameplay mechanic in which they ended up making Alphonse’s musket attack EVEN more powerful, while adding a cool down to it! As the shotgun blast was charging, the player could then use Geddy to continue attacking. It was a simple solution, but it solved all our problems! Suddenly the players would use both characters in almost any situation, and Geddy and Alphonse would become essential members of the team. Each was focused a different aspect of Combat. In fact, he became so essential with this new system that he was made into a non-optional character. This meant that there could be more interesting combat and puzzles that forced you to switch intelligently between the gunners and use their strengths to progress.

Otus
joins him after being left behind by Dirk when their ship crashed.

Geddy
Was given a Rather Informal speech on why he should help them and yes, it actually worked

Dirk
They both considered each other friends and both were so damn awful at showing it that it was kind of toxic and Dirk held a grudge until he tried to kill alphonse.

Twig
Holds no ill will nor judgement as someone who had helped the pirates himself.

Trivia

 * Alphonse is at least 900 years old, in fact he still remembers the building of the Hex-Machine.
 * He always wanted to be a dramatic actor
 * He prefers acting and cooking
 * Alphonse shares visual similarities to Alphonse from the popular anime and manga, "Fullmetal Alchemist"