Sunny Smiles is hands down the greatest person in the Wasteland.

Sunny is more than just the tutorial character in Fallout: New Vegas, she’s easily the best Wastelander I’ve ever encountered. By which I mean she’s the nicest, and the most upstanding, and the most badass.

First, she has a dog.

Second, she gives the best tutorial.

Starting a new playthrough in any RPG can always be frustrating when you have to go back through all the introductory lessons you’ve already dealt with. Sunny is aware of this and gives you the rare option of skipping the tutorial completely.

And even with that option, her tutorial is still one of the best I’ve ever seen, to the point where I never skip it. She gives you a gun, pays you for hunting critters with her, and then points you in the direction of loot and the Goodsprings cemetery. That last point being subtly important because that’s where you find main plot evidence for later, and a valuable trinket to sell.

It hardly feels like a tutorial at all, just a good quest to get your bearings. A+ game design.

Next, she is quantifiably a good person.

Morality is a hard thing to judge. We live in a gray world where nothing is ever simple. Fallout especially oft requires us to make gruesome decisions that really question what good even is. Do we really know what’s going on behind Sunny’s smile?

…actually we do, because this is a video game and Sunny’s code shows that she is one of the few characters in the entire franchise to have a Very Good karma stat.

No ulterior motives, just a good person. She doesn’t hesitate to help out the protagonist or the in-hot-water Ringo. Her day job is also protecting the town from mutant varmints, and when dynamite wielding gangsters roll up she doesn’t hesitate to stop them either.

And all this from a lifelong Wastelander too. Fallout often portrays surface dwellers are hardened by their experiences, while good-for-goodness-sake types usually grow up in functioning Vaults. But Sunny’s been surviving all the surface chaos her whole life and is still measurably a better person than almost every other NPC via the game’s karma system.

And lastly, she’s so nice and capable that she’ll give you her only gun.

This is anecdotal evidence, possibly due to a glitch or a weird mod interaction I experienced in a recent playthrough. But this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen playing Fallout and I must submit it to the collective archives.

In the tutorial, Sunny will give one of your first guns. She then asks you to go hunting with her. While we were hunting, I noticed Sunny was not using a gun. She didn’t even have one equipped. Instead she was punching the geckos to death with her bare hands.

Given the context of our earlier interaction, I’m left with the assumption that Sunny gave me her only working gun. She took one look at the protagonist, who had just woken up from a traumatic brain injury, and said to herself:

“Boy, this poor sap has been through the ringer. They need this gun more than I do. I’ll manage without it, I have a dog and these hands.”

She then proceeded to fistfight her way through the rest of the gecko swarm. At least until she picked up a nearby shovel, which she proceeded to use to beat the remaining geckos with like a steel chair. And she continued to use that same shovel into the tutorial’s finale, where she ran screaming into an assault of dynamite wielding gangsters with nothing but a gardening tool and lived to tell the tale.

In conclusion, step aside Lucy McLean. Sunny Smiles is the character I want to see headline a Fallout show.

And you know what, the show is going to New Vegas next season…

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you had fun and learned something! If you liked this then you’ll love my other Fallout articles. And make sure to come back for more quality edutainment!

Fallout is the property of Bethesda Softworks. All references and images utilized in fair use.