Why Pharah Is My Main: An Ode To The Overwatch Sky Queen

Overwatch has a ton of characters. Offense, defense, tank and support classes are well represented but the real magic of Overwatch is in how unique these characters are and how they balance against each other. Odds are you’ve played the game, or at least heard of it. And a glance at the roster provides an overwhelming amount of options, often based on shallow choices. Some characters look SO EFFING COOL. Who wouldn’t want a game with Winston? Or Reaper? Or Genji? But once you get below the surface and start playing with characters you’ll eventually find one that really speaks to you. An Overwatch character that really fits your style of gameplay, whatever it may be. This character will become your main, and you will become obsessed. My main is Pharah.

Look at her. Anyone who’s got a Metroid-sized hole in his heart will be moved to experiment with Pharah. But Samus she is not, no, she is instead an aerial superpower and one of the most disruptive characters in the game. See, I’m kind of a sneaky fuck when I play Overwatch. I don’t love head-to-head combat. I like to take enemies by surprise and kill them fast. Or play mind games, and frustrate them to the point of blind, sloppy-aim rage fits where all they want to do is shoot me out of the sky. Fuck the payload. Fuck the objective. Kill that annoying ass Pharah who keeps distracting us so we can finally focus on what’s important. I prefer to think of myself as a wasp, buzzing above the fray to the great annoyance of just about everyone.

Except Soldier 76. My nemesis, the perfect counter to Pharah who is either to be avoided or dominated at all costs. Some Soldiers are just bad, they can’t aim well at a distance and you can rain misery upon them. Others, though, are dead-eyed sentinels of anti-air authority who drop you like a pesky fly early and often, usually forcing me to switch to a different character I’m less skilled with. But that’s the beauty of Overwatch, I guess.

Pharah isn’t just about her ability to hover and fire rockets, or her nifty secondary attack that can bump enemies a few feet in a given direction (including off a cliff or into that well on Ilios). She has a killer backstory. She’s the daughter of Ana, the resident matriarch of the Overwatch organization and a wicked sniper/healer in her own right. They have a contentious relationship that plays out across a handful of lines of dialogue where Ana voices her displeasure at her daughter’s choice to follow in her mercenary footsteps. Ana was a soldier, and thought it meant her daughter wouldn’t have to be. She was wrong.

Fuck the payload. Fuck the objective. Kill that annoying ass Pharah who keeps distracting us so we can finally focus on what’s important.

What does this mean for me? I have a strange amount of sympathy for Pharah. Her stiff, guarded demeanor seems to imply that she never had the chance to be anything other than deadly serious. Growing up the daughter of a legendary soldier likely meant a childhood fraught with change and peril. Pharah doesn’t seem sad, really, just resolutely aware of what she’s missing. I’m drawn to her to give her purpose, in a sense, as she feels to me like one of the only characters who wouldn’t be comfortable doing anything else. Sure, we got a glimpse of her social life during the holidays, but without context the insight is meaningless. There’s still a lot I don’t know about Pharah and I want to find out.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to botch my ults thankyouverymuch.