CSB323: Persona 4 Remake: Gay 4 Pay

Yo, yo.

Yo, dude, what's up?

What's happening?

Club Obscure beaten.

Want to talk about it at the end?

That's definitely got to be at the fucking end.

All right.

That is the end of the show.

Expedition 33, Game Beat Spoiler Cast at the end of the podcast.

You can talk about the game part.

Yeah, well, I mean,

Game of the Generation.

I'm giving a thumbs up to the camera.

Game of the Generation, potentially one of the best RPGs ever.

No qualifiers.

Paige asked me because I was listening to the music and I was like reading about it afterwards, and she's like, wow, you really like that.

I'm like, this game feels like it came out in 1998.

Is the best compliment I can give it?

Is like, this feels like a game that came out in 1998.

Yeah.

As far as what video games do, Disco Elysium hit me as an RPG in terms of writing and like soul grabbing, you know, existential everything

in a brand new way.

This game is on every single level, carrot level.

Every level.

Every single level just was one of the best things ever.

And

yeah, again, no qualifiers needed.

Just yep.

Everyone who enjoys the video game should play this game at some point.

Done and done.

And if you haven't played it, you should definitely not listen to anything we have to say at the end of today's podcast.

How about this?

This is what happens when you take ex-Ubisoft developers and you unchain them, right?

Just let them

breathe.

Just cook.

Let them breathe.

Instead of telling them to shut their eyes or grit their teeth.

You know, what you could have, right?

You could have had a bad bitch.

It's crazy

how much good work people can do when they're not afraid of being bad touched by their boss.

It's wild.

It's amazing.

Or just being trapped in the dungeons, really.

I mean,

realistically, for all the dumb fucking sekuhara that we touch on every single time Ubisoft comes up.

No,

the day-to-day experience of the people I know that work there and just give the, you know, the vibes on stuff is like, yeah, you get like locked on a project as a dungeon in a way.

And you're just like, if you have aspirations and you do too well,

you're not going going anywhere and that feels bad so I think uh the one that that makes me think about it is think of all the studios and all the cool new interesting things we could have had that just were fed into the gaping maw of call of duty mat packs

just like there are like five six developers that were just fed directly into the call of duty beast I mean one thing I know for sure from like you know working external and then internally at studios is you get to see how many talented people inside the studio are like, I'm above the gig.

I'm, and I do my own stuff for fun.

That's like way higher concept, way more interesting, you know, offs work time.

And I'm in here because I'm competent and get paid quite well and have

at the time, quote unquote, job security.

But it's like, if you're an artist with amazing talent and like you want a reliable paycheck, you can absolutely go work internally at a team and

hopefully if the dice rolls right, you'll get a chance to put that passion that you care for things you care about towards a thing that you're

really able to pour yourself into.

Make sure that the company doesn't own your thoughts while you're there.

They all do, right?

That's a clause, you know?

Oh, just have your thoughts right after you quit.

Just have every thought that you had the day after you quit

all at once.

But yeah,

it's always kind of interesting in that like you

get to have as much,

you get passionate about like the first version of the project that you're on.

And then

eight sequels later, you're kind of just like, all right.

You're punching in and you've taken somebody who you've given that job to because of this amazing talent they have and you just beat that burning spirit out of them, you know, by nature of the industry.

And it's like, you then, and then they, they, they get let go, shit gets shut down, whatever, and then all of a sudden, like a phoenix from the ashes, that spirit rises again, and the inspiration to make cool, creative shit that you've been like tinkering away at and keeping away from the eyes of the bosses, hiding it behind the poster, you fucking, uh, uh, uh, you see this, this, the same like energy that was there when you hired the person rise up again, and they make a fucking banger-ass game.

And also, like, a lot of these people are like new.

Like, this is a team of relative amateurs, which makes it double crazy.

Incredible.

Double bananas.

I mean,

first gig for the composer, first gig for the writer.

You know, we're definitely looking at the,

this is the standing on the shoulders of giants bit, right?

Like, people that have been playing games their entire lives, certainly.

And like, first gig, writer, and composer and all that stuff, you're coming in going, okay, but we know the games you played and loved.

And you like.

That's very obvious.

And you studied that shit aggressively, you know?

Fantastic video game.

We'll talk about it later.

What else is going on?

I think

there's a huge discussion that we have somehow avoided for a long time.

I can do this.

What do you got?

And it's, you know, it's kind of...

It's kind of embarrassing that we haven't like just gotten straight to the nitty-gritty.

All right, I can do that.

Of all the people to talk about it, let us be.

Let us be the official final word.

Pat, which Devil May Cry Orb is getting the best head?

Give me a second.

This is the question, right?

The meme doesn't show you the complete list, so here you go.

I can do you one bad one.

I have the entire chart.

There you go.

Oh, did you just send me?

Oh, I just found that instantly.

It's very important.

Okay.

So

it's not any of the ones from four and it's not any of the ones from dmc see it's not any i well i i disagree because i think four

is super fucking

all the ones from four have the same face but that face is is loving it that face is going nuts um four in particular though all the ones from four in particular are like jaw agape go screaming screaming at the world right ah like oh she keep going right that's that's yeah but like um, the, the, the real, the, the meat and potatoes, I would say, comes in when you get to like three, because three.

Three has a unique face for every single one.

That's what I'm saying, right?

The ones from three,

the ones from three actually change it up, and so you get a more interesting discussion out of three because, you know, three red is got the teeth gritting,

right?

I think three red is a contender.

Three red is like

about to

just leave.

Vane is about to pop.

Vane is about to pop.

I think the three's Porb.

Three's Roarb.

Three's Roarb might be contender, I would say.

I have a different contender.

It's also a red orb.

It is fives.

Five Rorb.

Oh, shot.

Rorb is screaming, and their hair appears to be getting blown back.

Hair getting blown back is a good qualifier.

Eyeballs are exploding out of face.

That's good.

That's good.

Three Porb is kind of like watching someone else do it and enjoying it.

Three Porb is hiding in the closet with a Superman outfit on.

Three Porb is the guy with the Sickos shirt on.

Big Sickos energy coming from Three Porb.

I would also like

3

Warb

is

absolute stoicism.

It's the worst

they've ever had.

It's the only one that's like, nah, man.

Not at all.

Not at all.

You know what this chart actually is?

This is the first time I've realized it ever.

DMC Devil May Cry doesn't have blue orbs or purple orbs at all.

Well, there's that.

Also, Devil May Cry 2, the most unexpressive, bland,

nothing going on, sauceless orbs.

Yeah, one of them's just an eyeball.

Is that just someone's face on the team?

Is that just like Ninja Tam's photo?

Like, is that, you know, what's going on there?

Yeah, I'm going to go with DMC 5's Roarb

5 Roarb?

Okay.

No, I think I'm saying 3 Roarb.

Definitely red.

That would have been my number two.

Unless you want to say...

Would be the Devil May Cry 4 orbs.

Unless you want to say DMC Devil May Cry, where it's like, it's so good it turns you into an alien.

Oh, like it, you've become like you've enlightened yourself past the ascetic qualities

of getting ahead.

Hey, you've tried, you've transmogrified and left our plane.

I would say so.

Um,

yeah, alternatively, alternatively,

if we're going down that way, then the person who's getting the best head by via a level of enlightenment is definitely Devil May Cry 5 yellow orb.

Yeah, yeah,

where you ascended into a fucking tetrahedron.

This,

yeah, okay.

Post-judgment nut.

You become a tetrahedron.

You're no longer...

Yes, okay.

You're no longer

by conventional lines and geometry.

You're now a biblically accurate angel.

You look like an Ava enemy.

You look like an angel.

And yeah, that's going to be it.

That's going to be it.

Ramiel.

becoming like nutting so hard you fucking trigger the the the third impact

thank you all right done and done

i knew i needed to at least a a rough agreement on this the red orbs are definitely having the best time overall yes they

they are they are but like i'm i i knew that we could do that within five minutes right oh yeah easy light work trivial light work not a problem okay

You know what else is light work?

What's that?

Carrying your team in Night Rain.

Bro,

I have

a sentence from Gene Park, friend of the show, who I played Night Rain with also two days ago.

Right after I played it with you and Reggie.

And he really summed up everything about how I feel about the game in like a single sentence.

This game sucks when you lose and it's awesome when you win.

And that's kind of it.

Sure.

Like, like,

I've had like a couple of runs in which everything went great.

I was like, oh man, this game's awesome.

But as soon as it goes off the reins, huh?

The night rain.

Yeah.

As soon as it like you're having like a not great run, like just every part of it just starts to become like hostile and miserable and fucking awful.

I'm having a really weird time with single player for two reasons, right?

And it could just be because

which single player?

So expedition with

one player mode on.

No, I mean the single player

from

fucking

Sunday to Friday to Sunday or single player from Monday to now.

Oh, I don't know.

What changed?

They completely overhauled the balance of the solo mode literally yesterday.

Oh, well then definitely not yesterday.

No.

Okay.

Prior to

pre-patch.

So for one,

the feeling of

the stress just accelerates so much higher when you're on your own, right?

Well, it's two forms of stress, right?

There's the stress of coordinating with your team and your team being a bunch of shitheads and all that thing.

That's gone.

But like the performance stress is times 10.

It, like, it's all on you now.

And, and I'm, and I'm doing it, even though I'm in my brain, I'm like, okay, I'm doing this to learn, right?

I'm doing this to learn areas.

So, I also wanted to play solo, right?

I wanted to, like, figure out how the map worked.

Exactly.

Like, even if things change and don't change, you still familiarizing yourself with the pieces will, you know, be helpful.

And I found, like, I'm like, oh my God, it's like, it's way, it's just way trickier and harder to like get places in time.

Taking shots on bosses and not having.

So, I mean, overall, the thing that we've known about every Souls game is the ability to fight a boss whose attention is drawn elsewhere is crucial.

It's humongous.

And that's a difficulty.

It's the difference between a 10 out of 10 difficulty and a 5 out of 10 difficulty.

Maybe even less.

Maybe even 3.

You know what I mean?

If it just happens to never.

And

that as a major factor being like, oh, every boss fight has to become like do it the perfect solo run.

It's like, oh, shit.

Like, imagine doing a deathless run in a Souls game.

Like,

that's, but you also

find out.

You know, you also get to find out as a solo player, just what it feels like to be the Dark Souls boss fighting multiple opponents at once.

So when you load into a boss that's built for three people and it's like, okay, this is actually a triple boss fight.

The whole time.

Yeah.

And you have to split your attention three ways.

You're like, I can see why I was was able to stomp on bosses with co-op partners because this is really fucking hard to keep track of.

Uh-huh.

And so, what I kind of did was, I like, I kind of found myself being like, okay, let me map familiarize more than taking on these bosses directly because I'm just like, oh, like, this is, there's no time for me to like, cause water boost.

Solo beating a boss involves a lot of calm down, learn its pattern, dodge effectively, don't get greedy.

But you don't have time in these contexts, you know?

And if it's the end of the, and if it's it's the end of the run, boss, you have hopefully another shot in 40 minutes.

Maybe.

Yeah, I

so the pressure is up.

So there's that part of it that that's like definitely a weird one and it's going to take some getting used to.

And yeah, it's the anti-lab.

I find I like all the all the biggest, sickest moments for me in the Elden Rain, Elden Rain God, whatever, in the base game originally, were like having these

sermon sessions with the, you know,

Millennia or Lord of the Frenzied Flame, or you know what I mean?

All that you like, it's like you and me, we're locked in here, Moog, and we're just going to spend our time fucking doing it.

And this game is directly leaning as hard as possible into the opposite direction, where it's like fucking no time, gank run, go.

You know, it's 1 a.m.

on a Sunday night, and I don't have to get up early tomorrow.

I'm going to sit here until I beat you, Radon, or Melania, or Melania, or

whoever.

I'm just going to do it, and I'm going to move around my fucking bullshit and see if

that helps.

And

I can look up a statistical variation.

What are you weak to?

Do I have rot shit in my inventory?

Let's go.

As opposed to...

You're going to do it now or you're not going to do it.

And you're going to do it with the reward you got last time, which is not the one you were hoping for, but oh fucking well, right?

And so a little, and so because of that little

binding of Isaac sort of, you know, like, ah, I didn't get what I wanted.

The boss didn't drop the thing.

There's a little bit too of like, okay, well, fuck this run.

Like, if I get there, I get there.

But I've already given up on this run if I don't see two decent rewards in the

early on.

So you're not guaranteed rewards of the element at the place that you go to, which seems insane.

Like, I'm fighting Galadius.

All right, I'm going to go to the holy ruins to get a holy weapon.

Not a single holy item in the entire place.

Wow, I'm glad I spent like six, seven, eight minutes of this

trying to get a fucking oh shit.

Oh, fuck.

And after that, first, after we beat the first boss there, and then the elements get introduced, I drop back in and it's like, hey, the bird is just going to drop you on a lava pit.

And like, and everything around you is not like starter enemy.

Like, it's a bunch of perfumers that are actually like, they want you to be a little bit tougher before you fight them.

So the, the, um,

the, the, the, there's four types of changing like environment.

I've only seen the lava pit, uh, but all of them are for like day two.

They're all like super, super, super for real.

It's the, it's the, what they should, it's the, how Lord of the Rings should have ended with the fucking hawks dropping the ring.

Yeah.

It's just, but you are the ring dropping into lava, and then you run out and then get perfumed in point blank.

And like, that was the first like five minutes of the game.

You know?

So me and Gene had like a batch of like incredibly shitty runs where we just fucked on it really bad.

And we came to two conclusions that no matter how they fix this game up, I feel like I'm going to hold on to.

One, if the whole fucking team dies

at any point,

the fucking run should just be over.

No redo.

Because once the whole fucking team dies, it feels impossible to fucking possibly get back to where you need to be.

I would disagree.

I would say if the team wipes and you can't get your souls,

if you can go pick them up.

Yeah, if you can go get them, you can salvage it.

If you can't go get them and those levels are all lost and you're fucked, then like, yeah, just

The reason I say that is because

there's no way

to

fucking leave

the game in between the night bosses.

Oh, if you give up.

One of the things that I find is definitive about the battle royale genre, which I've played a ton of them, is when I'm playing them battle royales and I get killed in the Fortnite, I'm like, oh, I'm not going to get my Victory Royale.

okay i'm back queuing up within 90 seconds

i i'm back in a new match in 90 seconds and i'm dropping in 90 seconds you can vote to abandon that is a feature you can yeah that's a thing how i it's it's one of you i think you press start and like go to like you know if everyone agrees then we all abandon it i had that happen during the demo yeah

no is it i i saw that during the demo i didn't see it during these but i maybe it's not here I believe you, I saw that during the demo.

I don't remember seeing it in the full release so far.

So the number one was like, there needs to be a way to, like, it needs to be meaner.

We also think that

the rain should be slower.

Am I lying?

Hold on.

You might be.

Hold on.

You might have invented that in your mind.

No, because someone mentioned it, and I was like, oh, yeah, there was a game that I saw something pop up during that demo run.

Let me just confirm because maybe I'm misremembering.

I think you can just quit to title and that counts as like rage quitting.

Apologies if

spreading misinformation.

Hmm.

There should be a way to then run to fellow players to agree.

No.

Okay.

You quit.

So is it that when one person quits and then

is there a message that pops up after one person leaves forever or something?

I think so.

And it does alter some of the statistics.

Okay.

You know what?

I apologize.

I don't remember.

I do remember seeing some message of some kind when somebody left.

And it is not what I just described.

So sorry about that.

The other thing was that me and Gene are very much of the thought process is that the matches.

So the matches should be longer overall with the ability to just fail out because

that cavern, that gigantic zone that's this massive cavern, is this enormous wasted pile of real estate because the only goal is to get to the absolute bottom and fight the boss at the tippity tip bottom and get the reward from there.

So you have this massive bespoke area that has all these mini bosses rolling around and churches and like a mini boss you have to fight to get through a fog door, etc.

And you are just sprinting your ass off the whole way down

the whole time

because going down there is like best on like the second half of day two.

So you have 50, you have 15 minutes to do it.

You got to go.

So I suspect that like some of this like getting dropped into fucking insane environment bullshit and the spiking and difficulty is also

based on the idea that you're supposed to get better relic rights.

And I think that the relic rights are supposed to drastically affect your build and not be like.

I've seen some relic rights that would drastically affect my build.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

again, getting sacred, dropping in with sacred right off the bat is nice.

You know, a lot of the basic ones are like throwing items get better, which is like whatever.

But anything that like adds a decent stat sounds massive.

The remembrance ones give you new character abilities.

So

I got one for Wilder where his ultimate leaves a flame puddle on the ground, which does a bunch of damage.

Okay.

And I got one for Wilder that when you

hook in with the hook shot, you get a unique

flame series of attacks.

Sword stays on fire, but only for Greatsword.

Nice.

Interesting.

Okay.

Getting those two made Wilder way stronger.

Okay.

So there you go.

Yeah.

That feels like, you know, so you're dropping in, and immediately you can actually be a contender, you know?

Yeah.

And then a second.

The game's remembrances are so broken.

Okay, got to go look further.

Okay, so here's how it works.

You ready?

When you load up a remembrance, it gives you like a little quest.

So the Wilder's first remembrance, which is the one most people are going to do, is go to the mine in the southeast of

the environment and get like a slate whetstone off the wall.

Okay.

Yeah, I loaded up one for the summon girl, but I didn't actually go into that.

For him, that's what it is.

And then, as a result of

him having that quest active, it causes a mini boss to show up in that spot that

wouldn't be there otherwise, right?

The reality of that is that only one person can ever have a remembrance active at one time,

which means that if you have a remembrance active, which everyone does because it's the best way to complete quests, your matchmaking pool is cut by like 90%.

And once you complete the remembrance, it says the quest is over as well, right?

Yeah.

So if so, I saw you unlock the

summon lady.

I forgot her name.

Yeah.

And for her, it was beat the Cerberus

or go to this and beat a night captain.

And it's like, okay, if you can get the team to join you in helping you go beat the night captain, then fucking good luck.

But most people are trying to go beat the Cerberus.

So at least that first one was like, hey, our goal is in common, you know?

But the ones where it's like, yeah, everybody come help me do my specific thing.

But also, you guys have to turn your quests off.

Yeah,

that seems counterintuitive.

Completely nuts.

There are tons of things

in this game that are like, like, really structurally messed up.

um

i don't know what the fuck they were thinking that like so they rebalance solo on on

monday they they rebalance solo by the following things um you gain 50 more runes as a solo player overall

okay just straight up 50 increase which uh which makes it so that

it evens out because you don't have three people killing things.

You have one person.

They increased the rarity of items you get on the third day from the merchant or from drops.

Okay.

And they made it so that you have one

free life a day during the night boss.

Just a freebie.

Okay.

Just a built-in resurrect.

And they also have it in solo.

So you got one of these items,

the gold item that resurrects you once if you die?

Yes.

In solo, you can just buy those off of merchants.

Oh, for money.

Interesting.

Okay.

And they cost 10K.

So it's relatively cheap.

Okay.

So I

bought a Gladius

last night.

Yeah, last night.

And just to fuck around with it.

And I rolled into Gladius with four lives.

Like the freebie for the third day and two

of those lives.

Oh,

yeah.

Okay, Solo is asking you to go those chances.

Okay, that makes a bit more sense then.

And the other thing is that I discovered that Gladius,

and I'm sure we'll figure this out over time,

when he's not running around with a billion health, fighting everyone in every direction, actually has like a really simple moveset by Dark Souls boss standards.

Gladius was which character again?

It was the three-headed dog.

Oh, oh, oh, okay, okay.

It's the first nightlord.

Yes, yeah, yeah, the nightlord, yeah.

All right.

Actually, he has a really,

really

like simple moveset.

So, one of the things that I noticed is that because

his big jumps and big sword attacks always leave him really far away,

he always rushes you and always does like the same bite attack.

So, the way that I beat him is that I just like rolled on every single one of those.

It was super easy and then stabbed him and then did like a jumping attack.

And then when he split into three, I would just run.

I would just run to the absolute edge of the arena until he reformed.

Yeah, you know what?

I'm not surprised to hear that because as we were saying, like the, I don't, like, consort Radon is on the basis of, again, you are getting married to this boss.

You know, you are locking up.

Consort Radon is as far as they could ever push it, ever.

And I think when you're doing the whole time limit, fuck you, chance limit, etc arcade mode thing a simple boss is probably going to be

yeah because you could be all of it with like a massive numerical disadvantage in fact it feels like um uh uh marget is actually an outlier in how many moves he has and how complex he behaves compared to the rest market seems like the hardest thing in the game yeah that like every other boss is kind of like on a fairly limited bar yeah no agreed because he he plays like one of those real super uh hard lock-in bosses from the original game.

Most of what you're running into in terms of fucking, you know, bell-bearing knights and four skinned knight warriors and all that shit is like, yeah, okay, we know

it's the kit.

It's the four or five main moves.

So the other part of this that I found quite strange, and, you know,

by nature of the game being a spin-off kind of title, by nature of it being so rushed in its like gameplay design and panicky,

I find myself less engaged with the lore at the very least.

As far as like souls goes,

I'm not taking it anywhere near as seriously as I've taken every other game.

You know, reading the description, going over and thinking about the connections, I'm just going like, yeah, button next, hit.

I'll leave that to Vati to put out a video in like two weeks, and then we'll watch it, and we'll be like, oh, that was Night Rain.

Yeah, you know, you have a little thing you read that says, hey, here's what the characters are up to.

Do their remembrance to find out more about their origins.

And you seem to get more pages as it goes.

Talking to them, they say some little tips here and there.

But I'm completely like, I'm treating, you know, the way you treat Souls game after you've done it all in your new game plusing and you're just, you know, running around, engaging with the mechanics.

Like, you were already there on launch for this, you know?

Oh, one of the other things that they patched yesterday of massive note is that they made it so that jumping and mantling on the climbable surfaces is better now.

It's a big million times more reliable.

Yeah, I got to go see that.

There's a bunch of dumb jumps.

It's terrible.

Mashing jump and then seeing you fall over and over again sucked.

Yeah, no, it's way more reliable now.

And it really feels like the patch that came out yesterday was like the day one patch, but five days late.

What I was going to say, just back on the lore bit, is that the moment where you go to untalk to the summoner lady,

It's going to take me a minute to get the class names in, you know.

But that's my point.

That is my point, right?

I don't have their names locked in.

And like, I'm looking at her as the ghost and you go talk to the ghost and then you fight her and get it.

And I'm like, you know, if this was the proper LP, we would have been like, oh, she's staring at a painting of Radon.

What does that mean?

You know, like,

you would actually stop to go, oh, yeah, she's actually hanging out in this room.

What are the implications of that?

And, you know, and now we're like,

you know,

whatever.

It's just, it's interesting that, like, things that usually would matter currently don't because the nature of the game is shut the fuck up, put in quarter, go now.

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

And, and, you know, maybe, I'm sure there's going to be cool shit when, you know, the, the, the poster like boss shows up eventually or, you know, the, the night lord of the, whatever.

I've seen the night lord.

I've seen the night lord phase transition.

It's fucking cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and like, you're gonna,

you're gonna see it, and you're gonna care after you see how cool it is for sure, like Artorius, you know, but

in the meantime, I'm just surprised.

This is the first time I'm like, I've booted any of these games up and just been like, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Get mechanics, you know?

So one of the things that's like of note is that like, unlike your average Souls game,

people have freaked on this game harder than they've ever freaked on a from software game before.

There were people by the end of the weekend being like, I beat everything and I did all the remembrances.

What the fuck?

Where's the rest of the game?

Jesus.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like normally I'd be like, go outside.

Like genuinely, normally I would be like,

go outside.

With one change is that this is supposed to be like a multiplayer game

that you play over and over.

It's weird that there is such a definitive end to the game's campaign, which is, did you beat the nightlord?

All right, you're done.

Which is why it's good that today

they announced that they are going to have new kings of the night versions of those bosses

coming next month.

Great.

I mean, look, it's also a genre and company that have conditioned the most anti-grass touching, you know, into its player base.

So

you'd have more stamina if you went out and touched some grass.

Yeah, I can't look at, you know, oh, oh, you mean eat it like as an item?

That, yeah, I remember those.

Yeah, okay.

Um, no, I just, I'm like, I'm not gonna say that, like, if someone sits down and just fucking bleeds out their eyes to get there within one weekend, but you know, that that's not fromsoft's fault for anyone going that hard on the game.

Um,

but the uh, uh, in the meantime, though, you know, I do hope that the end experience does kind of build into this weird Isaac style thing of, yeah, if you beat the game and you go back in, you're going to have enough random variation with some friends that it can still be fun, you know?

Well, I would say, by the way, I played a couple of runs solo yesterday, and the changes they made to solo have been a fairly dramatic improvement in that experience.

It is now a game you could be like, I have no desire to play it multiplayer.

I'll just play it solo.

And I would go, yeah, you can do that.

Well, they bought it in Duos now.

It's been in less than 24 hours.

So Duos is coming for realsies in a month.

Yeah.

I am curious if the end game is

basically people

reducing RNG with relic rights and other.

Oh, it is.

Okay, so you really have less variance in your character.

The single best relic in the entire game is

start with a stone sword key,

increased rune acquisition, and decreased cost of items in the store.

Okay.

So you get more runes and buying things cost less runes and you start with a stone sword key that you can use to get a shit ton of runes right away.

So basically

the best item is get tons of money to spend it to just get what you want

from the store because i was looking at the inventory you know when you're in the the roundtable hold and i was like are you gonna be able to like get a weapon before you even leave on the expedition you know like would they would they is that gonna be a part of the and it's like not in the shops we've seen you know um and then how far do the relic rights go do they do they replace your entire like yeah starting uh uh uh armor or you know what i mean i think it was i think it was vati or maybe it was iron pineapple i forget who it was but um you can get multiple of those rights.

That is start with a weapon that does ice or start with a weapon that does poison.

And I believe what he had was he was playing as, I forget who it was, but it was the executor can start with his katana that does bleed,

that also does poison, that also does frost.

No, no, no, no, no.

And then you just, then you just run to upgrade that with Smithing Stones.

Two relics that conflict with each other don't stack on your weapon.

If the weapon itself has a base thing that applies with the extra but I put on a relic that had sacred and I put on a relic that had fire and there was an exclamation mark next to it and said and it said no yeah

so both it specifically highlighted the sacred one to say this one is on and the fire one is off you know so

that sucks because i i would love to stack that shit like you in base game you can definitely do that you know um

and and or if you you want it and like i don't know if you can choose which one either because if you want the other skill it seems like you're kind of stuck with whichever one is in first priority slot which sucks um

but yeah that i'm i'm i'm curious if like the end game relics are like massive build changes from the moment you drop in in that regard you know um but yeah no like brainless fun poke around it poke it with a stick you know the game oh um one other thing you should know uh they changed the way boluses work

so Oh, staunching boluses and whatnot, yeah.

Yeah, it's like, oh, I pop it.

I've started eating them right away because whatever.

Yeah, so they

have permanent buffs now.

Permanent.

Oh,

they give permanent resistance to the thing.

Okay.

Just eat it immediately.

Yep, that's correct.

I'll tell you what, though, I fought the absolute shittiest boss I've seen in Night Rain yet solo last night.

Scarlet Rock.

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking.

It was Wormface.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

And Wormface has a permanent Deathblight aura on them

that you have to constantly manage.

And in order to deal with that permanent Death Blight aura, it spawns in ads constantly the entire fight that all drops.

Death Bolus.

Yep.

Fought that.

Fought that during the demo.

Sucked.

That is like

one of the worst design boss encounters I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah.

I did two runs trying that, and I'm never, every time I see it now, I'm like, fuck that guy.

I killed all the ads, and I picked up the bolus.

I'm like, all right, I'm ready to go.

I bet I can do it.

And then, like, the ads all showed back up

because they need to have a way to drop the bolus.

Nonsense.

It's super weird fighting bosses in the field that are meant for torrent on foot.

You know, it's, you can, like, like.

There's mobility issues.

There's mobility issues, absolutely.

And

in the main, in the demo, I think is where we discovered that

the intended game loop or the intended way you're supposed to move is sprint through the map.

But when you're in combat, use your circle button sprint.

No, because the real sprint's like three times as fast as your circle button sprint.

So even with the stamina lost.

With the stamina loss.

The only time getting there in time is with the sprint.

Well, what I was about to say is when Marget's tossing fucking kunai at you, like 10-10, your regular sprint doesn't feel like it's cutting it, you know?

You can try the timed rolls and such, but like just hoofing it ninja style to the left or right

is more effective, but your fucking stamina management is dog shit at that point, you know?

But like, but switching between the two sprints for optimal stamina management, I guess is like...

I don't know.

I think it's intended.

It's also like the legacy way

sprinting worked in those games, you know, so

I can see why they wouldn't necessarily completely get rid of one or the other, but you're so much slower doing a saunter jog versus

get in.

It's also more awkward because you have to hold the circle button.

Yeah.

And when you have, if you're playing with somebody who downs the opponent and they're too busy to get the counter hit in, you got to fucking dash in as quickly as possible.

So

yeah,

anyway, I'm sure optimally that'll look a little bit different, but it works.

I think the game's going to look like really different from month to month.

Just to see how people are playing it.

I think the fact that we got like a balance, like genuine balance changing patch within like five days, and they're going to add a new mode and like harder difficulties in like a month.

I feel like when this game is maybe done in like two years, it will be a significantly better game.

But I think that it has like really, really core structural problems.

And the biggest one is that I kind of like vibing in From Software's environments more than I like running point to point to fight shit.

I don't disagree.

I know what you mean.

Yeah.

Sitting and looking at that distance and then making a decision.

I like inhabiting a different planet that's violent and hostile and weird more than

fighting the big boss, which is crazy because I love fighting those big bosses.

But ironically, you say that, but like, and

i think the game design here is taking into account how the most hardcore people have been streaming the game as absolutely twitch challenge runs

yeah you know so it's like yeah

we're aiming this at the the meme run runners essentially you know uh more than anything and i wish they had actually just put like the randomization at like the speed run mode or like the randomization as like a mode and base elden ring like that would have been a much more

new to me that could have been interesting certainly, after you've learned it all.

The

thing, I feel, I mean, who knows what the future would hold, but I wish that there was more clean synergies between classes.

It'd be super sick if there's double techs, you know?

I would love it if what you described about the wilder and the fire hook, if you could like.

Kind of is, but they're soft double techs.

Like,

certain people's people's moves just work better together, right?

Okay, like, restage works on any

alt.

Yeah, any big alt, yes, for sure.

Restage is great in combination.

Um, and more moments, but more moments of like intended synergy would be, would be really cool.

Um, you know, it's just it's a little something that, like, even in the most passive way in Marvel Rivals, it's like, oh, that's that's cool.

Okay, we get some good synergy together.

Let's let's grab these two and you know, um, gamma energy on Iron Man or Fastball Special or whatever.

Jump on Croot's shoulders.

You know, I think little things like that

would have been fun to see.

I think that the game's overall design is kind of a mess and the game has huge problems, but

I want everyone at From Software to look at the roster in this game and realize it's really cool to pick classes in a game that they make that feel different.

That really actually feel different.

That is by far the best part of the game is playing as Guardian and having a big heavy shield and a terrible dodge.

Or playing as Duchess with a double dodge or playing as Recluse with a super long weird dodge or people who have different movesets with different Raiders axe is such a unique axe compared to regular generic axes.

The double claws that you do as summoner are

very different, very unique moveset comboing around.

Like, yeah, no, the uniqueness between the classes is wonderful.

Sizes and how that affects your hitbox.

Like, the wild jersey.

Do you know the Guardian has a charged guard counter?

Oh, I think I did.

If you hold R2, he does a really, really big guard counter, but with Halberds only.

Interesting.

Cool.

And I think about, like, man, I just backport these fucking characters into the fucking base Elden ring.

Awesome.

Awesome uniqueness going on.

100%.

Someone's probably working on that right now, actually, come to think of it.

I mean, modding at the very minimum.

Well, because I think about, like, remember when you picked a class in Elden Ring and you're like, do you play as the confessor or the prisoner or whatever?

Like, if they just fucking played, like, this cast,

that would be fucking awesome.

Do you then get to change, modify them back into whatever as you

do?

Whatever.

Respect it.

I don't care.

It's a cool set of abilities.

Have them feel super different from the jump.

I agree.

No, look, we love character select screens, and especially ones where you have abilities that change and matter.

100%.

That's way more fun than a couple versions of dress-up for the main

naked look you get.

Also, yeah, starting you out like two-powered in those games is also what they don't do.

You have to kind of suck with whatever.

So you got a shitty knife or a shitty sword or a shitty spell, you know, is also the thing.

Or whatever the fuck.

So you being weak at the beginning is different from this game where you're supposed to start out kind of

your damage is low, but your kid is finished.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's the intention.

Um, so this is made by a separate team.

This is made by like uh new people, like like young developers on the Elden Ring team who I don't believe are working on Dust Blood.

And uh, it's really interesting because I saw folks saying, Oh, you think they're gonna use the lessons they learn from Night Rain and apply them to Dust Blood?

And no,

actually those games are being simultaneously developed

even talk to each other across the office.

I mean, you know, we'll see if they have a completely different design philosophy for that one, too.

You know, Miyazaki said in an interview a while back, I'll never be able to find it, but like the reason why you always had to go back to the hub to level up instead of doing it at the bonfire is he didn't know that mattered to people until before Elden Ring.

Hmm.

Like, he just didn't know.

Because feedback's for pussies, I guess.

i kind of respect that uh what we do know is whatever the game after this that they make the multiplayer will have significant improvements because they're gonna have two fucking test cases running running live to figure it out so that'll be interesting um

it's also gonna be interesting to see these games competing you know with very different beasts but at the end of the day they're elden rans or their they're multiplayer from software games at some point it's gonna be like are you do you do you load up your Switch and go for the fucking Bloodborne Nintendo at home?

Or do you do your Souls run because they just dropped another, they dropped another fucking

Dark Souls character into it, you know?

Hey, look, it's Locktrack.

It's fascinating to me.

And me and Gene were laughing ourselves silly because we couldn't stop talking about Marathon when we were playing Night Rain.

And the reason why we couldn't stop talking about Marathon is that like Marathon had one of the biggest things, like, man, you gotta put fucking solos and duo modes into this fucking game, dude.

Like, holy shit, are you insane?

Three people only, and we're playing Night Rain, and like, from Software has the mandate of heaven, like, from software couldn't be more blessed by instant success, no matter what its flaws.

And you look at the Steam reviews and you look at the way people are talking about it, and it's like, give me a fucking duos mode, you fucking psychos.

Holy shit, goodwill

and not lifting your entire texture pack

from a website.

It's like this game that is just like sold almost 4 million copies right now.

It can't escape from like, no, put a fucking duos mode in.

Make it playable.

Solo.

God damn it.

It took Apex years to do that.

I saw a tweet.

I saw a skeet from Lumen on Screwy on Beast Guy said, just realized there's going to be a game or series of games shown off at the state of play

that

are going to be far longer than intended because the runtime originally belonged to Marathon before advertising got yanked.

Bro.

Oh,

boy.

Oh, boy.

Ooh, we got a fill for time.

Hey, you got any more like pre-rendered footage going on?

Anything else?

Any interviews?

Demo of some indie game you never heard of that doesn't look that good, but hey, it's not marathon.

We're not getting sued.

Can you double that vertical slice length?

What are we doing?

Yeah.

Oh my god.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah, no.

Night rain.

Night rains.

Night rain's fine.

Night rain's fun.

I had like a I finished my stream with Gene.

I was like, I don't think I'm ever going to stream this game again.

And then they fucking patched it literally the following day to make solo way more playable.

And then I streamed it again.

And I was like, okay, well, this is a lot better.

So hopefully that exact trajectory continues.

Yeah.

Because that first patch is a massive improvement.

It is really pretty dramatic.

It's funny, though, because like the intent, the game is designed for streaming for low effort,

like just

drop in and do a run.

Absolutely.

But I like

the, like you said, the chill taking in the lore, dissecting bits of these games.

Well, you don't have time to talk.

Yeah, and that changes the appeal.

And I think, you know, so when I saw some folks, like, I saw some people were discussing, like, oh, how are they going to handle like playing this game?

And I'm like, I'm going to stream it once or twice, and that'll be that.

I'm not going to commit to uncovering all these bosses on camera over time.

Absolutely.

Like, me and me and Gene were gabbing our asses off, and then we started playing, and the entire conversation for like an hour and a half just boiled down to like, okay, what artifact?

Okay, holy, okay, we're going to go here.

Okay, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Faster, faster, faster.

Does anybody have a stone sword key?

No, okay, go, go, go, go, go.

Like, that was the whole thing.

It's a blessing if you're not a variety streamer, though.

If you're somebody who's like, like, a soul's particular.

Then you're going to just fucking blast through the crush it too hard.

Done.

Well, yeah, but then you start bringing your own stupid rules in.

Like, okay.

Soul level won this thing.

Okay.

You're like, I'm like, yeah, archer only, no bow and arrow.

Fucking, you know, like, you start working on whatever dumb

extra weighted chain rules.

So,

anyways, good stuff on that.

Weird game, flawed game.

Gonna keep playing it.

Gonna keep complaining.

Okay.

That's my review right now.

I'm gonna keep playing it and I'm gonna keep complaining.

That's fine.

That's fine.

You know what?

That's actually the sign of a good game is if you're still playing, but you're still complaining about it, right?

In this day and age, you know, it's much worse to just have engagement.

No complaints and dropping off is actually the worst possible outcome.

If you think about it.

No engagement, no thought, no whatever.

I don't have anything to say about this.

I'm actually just completely done, you know?

So speaking of weird games,

the Hunter-Hunter Nenpact

demo has just...

It's a feature in the game.

Nenpact is the name of the system, actually.

Okay.

You know, so I'm going, I'm going with Nenpact according to what Aiding has decided.

The Hunter, Hunter, Fighting game put a demo out on Steam and you can go play it.

And this shit is super funny because originally this game was going to be out a lot sooner, but it got delayed because they're adding rollback.

Good.

Right.

Great.

Good.

Excellent.

But the team definitely intended for it to be in people's hands a lot sooner.

And as it's coming out in about a month or two, the idea of waiting too late for people to get hands on it is bad for marketing.

So they released the demo with a tutorial, a single player mode preview, and labbing, but no online in the demo, which is really, really wild.

So it's a full training mode.

The Ned Impact has a full training mode, and you can play local versus up to six with six characters, but you don't play online in the demo for this fighting game.

Very funny, right?

I'm like, all right, so the rollback ain't done yet, and they don't want to show it off bad.

You don't want to give a bad impression.

That's fair.

Get it out of the game, but people have to start playing it, though.

Okay, well, give them a lab, you know?

So, yeah, I mean, you can just have your own local little fucking skirmishes and so on.

It is what it is.

Also, hilarious is that the tutorial,

there's a story mode, and there's also tutorials.

And the way that all comes together is there's it's just screenshots of the anime right

so um the you start the tutorial for the mechanics and you're getting blasted with spoiler spoilers from future arcs immediately right and i'm like god damn it can i just learn how the mechanics work without finding out

about greed island spoilers like dude nan yeah yeah yeah yeah that's like way later

there's nothing you can do right it is what it is then you know what you're playing a dragon ball game you're gonna see some colors, and

they mean what they mean, you know.

But it is, it's just funny that, like, if you go into a particular story mode or whatever, like

quests, and you, you could get hit with like recreations of story moments in any fighting game, you're like, of course, that's what that's for.

But this tutorial to learn how to play is showing you scenes from far in the interview.

Here's what happened: here's, here's, I have a direct,

one-to-one explanation of what's happening here.

The game's called Nen Impact, and everybody uses their magic Nen moves.

This is the equivalent of you playing JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

all-star stand battle.

And you start up, and they start explaining to you what stands are, and you're like, I'm only halfway through part one.

No, no, no, you can't.

Ah, fuck.

It's a stand shit.

It's not that part.

The part I'm trying to emphasize here is that the tutorial goes hard into just like

screenshots of the anime.

That's it.

Punch ghosts.

What the fuck is that?

It's it's as opposed to the like just like the breakdown and then the context is you know fucking whatever uh uh Dio and Jo Toro staring at each other, you know?

If you go in, it's just it's the mode that I find that hilarious to do that in, right?

Um, also, tutorials in general don't have story segments in them, like you just that's true, it's weird to have two story segments in that mode.

Um,

So, bah.

That aside, gameplay is 3v3.

It is Marvel style.

It is fast.

It has got assists and all that stuff.

And

I find it feels weird.

I'm not super duper hooked on the way it feels.

And

I should say JM Play right now.

I'm not.

It's definitely like dividing people because some people really love love it and I've I've seen people talking about how it's great for their old man reflexes because you float so slowly when you get launched up in the game and So much of it has like the moment you like it's very fast and chaotic like it's fast and chaotic when you're

Point blank mixing each other up and stuff, but jumping around and like hitting landing hits it becomes a lot slower

Characters kind of bounce really through the air and kind of float for a a while.

Yeah, I'm noticing ground bounces have characters bounce off in like this nice smooth parabolic arc that gives you all the time in the world to hit them.

It's quite, it's, you know, and then on top of that, you have

this other thing where some characters, like I mentioned, the kids are all beautiful, Joe-sized, and also the stages are huge.

So when you stand at both ends of the arena, facing each other, there has never been more space between two characters in any other fighting game I've ever played.

Like, it feels

like you, you took uh, all the characters are pretty small, actually.

It's crazy.

Well, I mean, so Uvogian and some of the bigger, you know, people are going to be there to like feel a little more

tank-sized and normal-sized.

But with the kids that have really stubby limbs, they have a couple of buttons that make them fly forward.

But you really just get this feeling of like you were staring at each other from super far away.

And

you know, imagine any like

arena fighter running to the two walls of the arena.

You know, it feels like you're kind of that distance from each other.

So there's a little bit of weirdness with the spacing going on too.

And yeah, look, there's some,

there's 100, 100 net impact.

They said that the budget of the game that Aiding had for this, I think it was like rumored to be like 400K or 600K or something like that.

You know, they didn't have, they had a whole lot of resources on it.

You can see it.

Yeah.

You know, and it's like, okay, so just work on the gameplay and making sure that that's fun.

And it's Aiding.

Aiding has made a ton of, they've worked on so many amazing fighting games over the years.

They know what the fuck they're doing.

They're behind Bloody Roar.

They worked on Street Fighter 4.

They worked on Marvel.

I mean, you know, they're one of the Aiding and Dimps are basically the secret developers that get called in to make some of the best fighting games.

And then they kind of, you know, they go not uncredited, but like secret credited, you know.

But in this case, this is one of those cases where it just doesn't, I don't find it's grabbing me, you know?

And that that sucks because I wish, you know, for all the lore and bullshit with me in this series, I wish there was more of a pull towards it.

But there just kind of currently isn't.

It also, you know, we'll see what the full roster, maybe I'm going to like some of those characters a bit more, but right now I'm kind of not super drawn and falling in love with any one of them in particular.

No, you have it backwards.

You fall in love with the characters and then you play the fighting game and play the character you want.

Of course, of course, but that's that's my point, right?

I like Uvogan.

I think he's cool.

I don't know about the rest.

Karapaka is also pretty chat chill too.

I like Karapika, but in terms of like carrying my interest into the game, I'm like, I don't know, man.

But the weird part is that you talked about how

games from 1998 were.

If I played Hunter-Hunter Ned Impact on the PlayStation 2, I would have been going like, yo, y'all remember Ned Impact?

That fucking crazy Hunter-Hunter game that came out on the PS2.

Wow, what a fucking weird, goofy, fun game, right?

If it came back, if it came out on the PS2, this energy would have been super different.

But coming out, coming out alongside everything else right now, it's like, yeah,

it might not be for me, man, you know?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, learn a bit more and, you know, get a team so that I can play it when it comes around and stuff.

But I, I,

there's just, there's just, there's that feel, you know, You talk about that sonic jump feeling, you know, there's a little bit of that feeling going on here where it's not, it's just not hooking me in.

And there's a larger problem, too, I would say, aside from all of that.

We are now in the space where you can play a fighting game on any controller you want, and no one can say, like, oh, don't use a pad for that, or don't use a hitbox, whatever.

Anything works on anything, right?

Everybody,

we're in a controller-agnostic universe.

Have fun, it's great.

Yep.

I

now have to put an asterisk for this game because if you play on, like playing Mortal Kombat on a stick, you kind of run into this issue where like play, pressing the supers of the two trigger buttons together, it really wanted you to do that on a controller and now it's getting weird

on a stick.

This is kind of the worst case of that because the game has

technically

eight buttons to use

and seven if you count the main ones and most fighting games are like, we'll do it all in six, right?

You're on a stick, and then you'll do combinations.

Your hand comfortably rests on the first six buttons, you know, and then that's kind of what it's always sort of been.

And now this game has light, medium, heavy.

It's got the NE button, which is your shield and launcher.

Then it's got assist one and assist two.

So that's your six buttons.

And that's just like Marvel, right?

But it adds

a super button, which is a special move button, which is basically modern mode, you know, tilts to for your special moves.

And that's it.

You need to use that button.

You can't just do quarter circle Hadoken inputs or anything.

The shortcut button is mandatory for doing specials, so that requires a seventh button to be on your stick, which is weird to reach out to, much less to hit in the middle of a fast combo.

And this is also really weird, but the game has auto combos where, you know, that's become more standardized.

But the auto combos that you do with the the auto combo button are full damage, unscaled.

There's no downside to just doing them instead of doing

real combos type of thing.

And they do 50% damage.

Oh, yeah.

Just off the auto combo, off a light in some cases.

You know, honestly, I remember

you didn't have the same feeling that I did with a City of the Wolves, but like, this is very similar is that when I was playing City of the Wolves on pad?

I like couldn't get a button layout that I was happy with.

And like it, it like massively brought the game down for me.

And hearing, like, I'm looking seven, seven man, that's too much.

Even on the pad, that's too much.

Yeah, the, I, I mean, you, I, that's too much.

I get used to shortcuts on the shoulders for sure.

I mean, so with City of the Wolves, I didn't bring it up, but with City of the Wolves, with City of the Wolves, there were a couple like, oh, this could work if you wanted to bother but i think it's we're past that point um for making sure that you could press both buttons together to get your ex's out um but yeah i think here we the problem that this game is has with the stick thing is just most of the time if you wanted to press the button to do a hadoken you could also just do

you know down quarter circle forward and then punch and it would be fine too and you don't have to think about it but now when you force them to use the shortcut button it's like oh god your hand has to fly all over the stick now.

And that's like, you don't want to make people unable to use a stick with your game.

You know, that's not a great decision.

I think that

in a game genre that is so

vitally defined by

player input

that fucking around

with like known button combinations is particularly dangerous.

Like

the goal for every fighting game is to have the controls disappear for most players.

Yes.

And become a

train-to-game direct connection.

100%.

And so when you're telling me you're sitting there with your stick that you love and you have many years of practice on and going, ah, seventh button.

And the thought process.

Not for like an experienced fighting game player.

And the thought process there is essentially them going, every like people aren't buying sticks as much as they're just playing on pads.

So let's just design around the pad.

But like a good design, a good control scheme will allow both to work.

You want to give people the ability to play on a fucking DDR mat if they want to.

That's the fun of these games, too.

Somebody shows up with a fucking keyboard or guitar and it actually plays well.

And you're like, that's crazy.

You're insane, but it actually works.

And then we have to figure out this auto-combo situation because

in the one hand, I've seen it's like, oh, it's like, it can teach you how the characters move string together, and you know, that can be a useful kind of guide.

And then, if you can do it on your own, you can just do way more damage manually.

But it is kind of funny to have a game where you're like, yeah, if you wanted to just auto-combo someone twice, they're dead.

So, yeah, just do it.

You can just do that.

It's been figured out, Wooly.

Yeah,

there's no downside, you know?

Or if you want to, like, go halfway through the auto-combo and then switch to a manual one, you can, you know?

That sounds like it's been figured out.

What's there to figure out?

Um, I guess the idea is just like, is there going to be touch of deaths?

Which someone found some bugs where you could do like, you know, what hit kills with Leorio.

And I think, um, what are the, if you're going to do a like drop your combo in the middle of your, you're, of it, and mix the person up with like a crazy left-right thing, uh, that's possible too.

But right now, auto combos have never been more real.

And like, the only thing telling somebody, hey, man, don't rely on that is like your pride, which is like,

okay, whatever.

Yeah, okay, I'll have pride in my win.

Thank you.

So, uh,

they're going a weird way about this game, and these are veterans of the fucking genre, you know.

Um, I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't tell what they're going for, but we will find out.

I think what they're going for is that uh, Hunter Hunter has never had a fighting game before, so they want Hunter Hunter fans to be able to do cool stuff with the characters they like.

Has it really had nothing?

It's had nothing.

What video game

has been crazy underrepresented in video games?

You'd think any fucking Shonen Jump franchise would just get the cash behind it to even come out with like a shitty Game Boy Advance thing, you know, like at some point.

But yeah, okay, fair enough.

And yeah, okay, here, sure enough, there's a ton of Hunter Hunter video games, but they just kind of never went all in that.

Jump superstars.

Yeah, cameo characters there.

Weird shit.

We'll see how it launches.

But the

yeah.

When we talk about the magic of a game with a lower budget, and in this case, it's like even with this budget, some of the decisions just didn't have to be what they were, regardless.

It shouldn't factor in.

The game with lower budget doesn't apply equally to all things.

And I think

I think a game with a lower budget being paired with large rostered existing property that everyone wants to see everyone on is maybe one of the worst combinations.

Expectation for existing IP

crammed into limitations as opposed to zero expectation brand new IP.

Because when I see a hunter-hunter fighting game, my expectation is that the fighting game part is okay

and that it has every character I would want to play as.

But I don't want the misread on this to be, therefore, games with established IPs always need to be quadruple A because I do not want that.

No, I think that I think that Hunter Hunter should have, I think that giving it to like Cyber Connect to make a goddamn Naruto All-Stars or whatever the fuck those games are called.

I can't even remember.

What are those fucking games called?

Fucking

Great Ninja Clash.

Great Ninja Clash.

I think that would have been like a better use of everyone's time and money because I look at that roster and I go, well,

where's so-and-so?

Where's Kurepika's brother?

I didn't even know that was a character.

Where's fucking

where's Pito?

Like, fucking...

Fuck off.

Where's Kurapaka's?

Not Kurapika.

Sorry.

Where's Kilawa's whole fucking family?

Oh, the Zoldic family.

Yeah.

Like, where's the whole fucking family?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Like,

sorry, I got Kurapika and Kiliwa mixed up.

Where's that octopus sniper that had that really emotional part during Chimera Ant?

Where's that guy?

Behind a season that is of DLC that can't come out because the performance is not going to reach that level of success.

And the chameleon guy who turns invisible.

All right.

Well,

there's a lot of

like

aiding has a legacy, and like I trust them in a lot of cases, but you know, and I feel like this.

We'll see how the launch goes, but like it feels like

a rare miss for me at this point.

But

I'm, you know,

I'll make a final call once once it launches, you know?

Oh, wait, Moreau is not in the game?

Are you serious?

Is the fucking, is, is the big guy with glasses and a giant pipe not in the game?

Should I take my headphones off

for future shit?

I'll just like you let me know when it's clear.

Morel, Morel, my mistake.

He is?

Okay.

Okay.

I can't remember anybody's fucking name in that show.

That's crazy.

So that's all on Nenpicked.

The only other thing,

beat Cyberpunk.

Nice.

Super enjoyed.

Is it good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And bugs were fucking rife the whole time.

In fact.

So

now that you're done and you've bugged it out real hard,

I'm going to say it once more for people in the back.

When you have a PC save file that you pull mods off of, that save file is probably fucked forever.

Pulling mods off does not make everything back to pristine state.

Yeah, that could be the case.

Although, again, I did go and start a fresh one.

What is fresh on PS5?

I did

the transfer over for the character

because I had the character model or whatever early on in.

But

after a point, I just made a fresh character.

Okay.

So the game is still busted as fuck.

And I saw, like, even people were going into threads going, like, oh, is this an SSD issue or installed on a secondary thing?

And it's like, no, no, no.

This is a PS5 version, right?

Right.

This is a console.

And they're like, oh, yeah, even on a secondary draft.

I was like, no, no, no, nothing's on any secondary draw.

Like, there's the game is built in like shit, and it's and you can see it falling apart.

And

you can try to reach for any other reason why I did something stupid and fucked up the process here.

But what you're seeing is the game running on a PS5 and running like shit.

I don't know what else to tell you.

You know, a broader question.

You can guess actually relates a lot more to my life

than you would think.

So, you and Paige

are

the only two people I've ever met in my life like this.

And I don't know what it is about the both of you, but you both produce what I would call never-before-seen results.

Yeah, I don't know.

Every time you interact with technology,

I have walked out of a room and heard a noise and like a fucking device will be on fire and Paige will be like, I didn't even touch it.

Yeah.

Made me a great QA.

What's going on?

Made me a great QA tester.

I was really good at my job.

I was very good at QA.

That's the, you know, that's the best I can say.

But

this, the, the start of this whole thing, because you just reminded me, because I kind of forgot about it until you brought up the whole save file bit.

But the amount of fucking audience gaslighting on, no, you idiot, it's your fault for doing it whatever way you did because you heard old news was some of the most frustrating, annoying bullshit.

It was so stupid and shitty.

I hated that.

That sucked, right?

When I'm like, fucking clean the thing, boot the game up, buy it, start the game, game, make, save, go, and has nothing to do with it.

Because, because what happens is word travels slowly and things, whatever I say.

So you hear about the, oh, you're doing the Mass Effect thing again and you're doing mods.

Why are you doing mods?

You don't want to do the respect, but it's whatever.

Okay, fine, right?

All that mess comes and goes.

And we go, all right, fine, fuck all that.

Let's just go with the PS5 console version.

There shouldn't be any issues there.

And like after that point, it doesn't matter.

Everything I do is stupid in some way that's going to be a problem.

And like,

I hate that shit, man.

I'm playing on a clean file and the game's fucking up and you got to go like, no, it's because you installed it to an external hard drive on your PS5 or some shit.

Fuck off.

That shouldn't matter.

Right?

That sucks.

Don't be an asshole.

Anyway, the game is done.

I'm sorry if I came off extra critical.

No, it's it reminded no, it's more like the amount of bullshit going on at the beginning of that was like

anyway, it completely unreasonable for

We have moved on to an entirely different like setup that has nothing to do with how I how I was playing it on PC and there are still problems, problems but because it's me they're all my fault no matter what I do okay that's that's a fair take that's reasonable sure you know

um

anyway the uh uh uh the game is done and I definitely enjoyed how uh

going through it

the choices you make with some of the with a lot of these characters are you know they weigh on your decisions and then any like I imagine a good Western RPG always has these moments of like gray with all the characters.

And, you know, you follow.

Same project's like particularly good at it.

They're so vaguely like, oh, you can't feel good about helping anybody.

You can't.

For the Witcher games,

they have a really excellent time making sure you never get a clean win.

Like, you can get, like, yeah, you know what?

I got most of the things I wanted.

And then they're like, okay, but what about this part that you don't like actually that came along with that?

Yeah,

it's very clear that like Night City is, of course, your main character.

Therefore, you should not feel good about your, you should not feel clean.

If you feel too clean morally about your decisions, maybe you're not considering a certain part of it, right?

If you're too, if you're like, yeah, Johnny is, let's go with Johnny all the way, right?

He's right.

And we got to fight the powers because corpos suck, you know, and you're like, what about the fucking bodies that got cooked with a nuke?

You know, no, man, don't you get it?

And, and, uh, and that that applies across the board, you know, and so, like, when it came to uh, Phantom Liberty, I'm not gonna like spoil any of the choices, but uh, some people were confused by like the way I played it and like why I did what I did, and like, kind of like were going, like, oh, did you think this or that, or whatever?

And I, I eventually clarify on in terms of like what I did and why I did it, because they're like, they completely filled in the gaps on something that was not the case with with why I chose to help and not help certain people and why.

But

something that also happens in games sometimes when you have a crucial decision to make is like

there's a there's the way you would decide in real life and then there's the video game version where you're like

Narrative stories sometimes give you a little invisible thread where you would expect there to be none.

You know, sometimes they give you a little ladder.

and it's like, oh, if you're, if you find it, then maybe you can, but you have now closed the door to all ladders.

So the idea of like letting that kind of like, maybe I can find a way out if I keep fighting to find that way out happens in video games a lot.

I would, so how far did you get into Baldur's Gate 3?

We got, I mean, you know, everyone joined the party.

This is the second act.

Just tell me if you got to act.

No, no, no.

We didn't get to act two.

No.

Okay.

So at some point in act two,

I encountered a scenario that is very similar to what you describe.

In which, how would I actually deal with this in my personal life if I was a Dungeons and Dragons character?

I would make an impassioned plea and just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk forever, right?

Because that's how I try and solve intractable problems.

I just keep talking until it's solved.

Everyone tells me to shut up.

Rhetoric up.

And in Baldur's Gate 3, I grasped the tiniest implication of a hint of a whisper to maybe not do that.

And then didn't.

Okay.

And that was not how I would have ever, in almost any other game,

done that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it all depends on the creator of the game and how they view the world and what they, you know, want that to be, right?

But there are cases where, you know, a game will be like, you know, make a choice here.

None of them feels great.

And like, you got to internally go, all right,

I'm going with this and I'm standing by it.

And here are the reasons why, because ethically, this is worse or whatever the case is, you know?

But then

when there's those moments where it's like picking the one that seems wrong or seems like,

you know, more, more selfish or whatever the case is, but then there's a little like, but if you, if you struggle, you can find that way out or so always makes me go, oh man, well, now you can just as easily go, you're an idiot for giving up when you shouldn't have given up, right?

That's the kind of the idea.

It's like some people write stories in a way where it's like, never give up, no matter what.

And some people write stories in a way where it's like, no, there's a time and place to give up and accept that because life is hard.

And you don't know who you're dealing with and what kind of story they're telling you, you know?

So let me ask you, because I haven't, I played about, so I only really played the first chapter of Cyberpunk, right?

One of the things The Witcher series does very excellently is

they give you

decisions that don't really seem all that important

for only for you to later realize that

they did have more value than they expected.

And it's not like.

It's not like, well, because you went to the bar instead of the graveyard, so-and-so died,

right?

It's

this affected your relationship with the character, and therefore the character had a different motivation, and the character went on.

Okay.

This game is the opposite.

This game has multiple choices that always feel drastic, even when you have a way out after you've committed to them.

Sometimes you make a drastic choice that feels like binary, but then you can still RPG your way into a different outcome.

And then sometimes with the moment you choose it, it's set,

So Witcher 3 does something really interesting.

Its ending is incredibly opaque in

how you get it.

There's no like

choose the color of your juicy fruit like mass effect at the end of it.

Like Witcher 3's ending is a direct culmination of acts that happened like way back, like a dozen hours beforehand.

And so you arrive at your ending and it is the ending that you have built for yourself and described for yourself.

Yeah.

And then it gives you like little flashbacks to the choices that you made that mattered.

Okay.

And none of them were presented as if they were important at all.

Ah, interesting.

Okay.

All of them were like really, really simple.

One of the most interesting ones.

And this is just, do you accompany someone to a conversation that should be private or do you let them do it by themselves?

Okay.

And miss out on the cutscene.

Right, right.

And that's one of those things that like leads in.

And it represented this thing where people got to the end, and some people were like outraged

that they got the ending that they got because it was like a downer or it was like not what they wanted.

And then they, then you, well, what did you do here, here, here, and here?

I'm like, you played your Garrett like an asshole.

So, so, so, but you were given like a dozen opportunities, and you played him like an emotionless, callous freak.

Okay.

So the ending is going to represent that.

Okay, interesting.

So two things that come to mind here.

One,

there's one major part of the game that does what you're describing, which is your relationship with Johnny in the game is very subtle.

And you're like putting him down or agreeing with him or what you say, choosing to chew him out or not are all decisions that matter that are much more subtle compared to the other relationships and choices you make, right?

There's a lot of like life and death, walk away or stay here, kill or don't kills.

And with Johnny, it's kind of like we're having conversations about whether or not we like each other and

whether or not I trust you, you know, and that there's an actual Johnny meter when you pause the game to see what percentage,

you know.

So that one part of the game is treated differently.

And it's cool how subtle that is, right?

In contrast, what you're describing is like, I would say that, like, not in defense of this, but if the game game presents itself with enough uh robustness in its quest making and giving that you that you don't feel like playing it like a video game and turning your brain off is just the optimal way to go right exploring all dialogue options and then you know as opposed to like commit to the one and never say the others right you know games where it's like you have five things to say and you can always go back and hear them all and it won't mean anything versus the game that's like no the one that you said matters and the others go away but what about the game where you say the one that matters but you can go back and say the others and the saying this one makes them like you less and you just did it to explore what the character would say but now you've created a consequence of that actually i'm a big fan of like hey don't ask me about my face yeah you will go through all the discussions and ask about their face you're like i told you not to ask me so you fuck off so it depends but you don't know what the game is like and who's making it and why they're making it in that way right and if you have these unintended consequences where you know it's kind of like when i talk about a game has stealth and you're like okay what what does this video game consider stealth?

Is it lighting?

Is it crouching?

Is it crawling?

Is it sound?

Is it line of sight?

How many different things are this video game taking into account so that you don't have to just crawl at the slowest possible pace out of sight in the dark in the bushes, you know, to still be invisible?

You don't know what matters or what doesn't.

And the moment you do, you just game the system because video games work that way.

So, what you're describing at its worst, in my opinion, let's go back to it for a second: the fucking hold the line system in Mass Effect 2,

right?

Where the whole game plays a certain way, but in the finale, all of a sudden, you want to get subtle about things, you want to be more deep and interesting about what the representation of these characters is than the rest of the game applied.

And now, these invisible metrics kick in in a way that's abysmal because you've been playing the game with zero amount of this subtlety.

I think, um, and it falls apart.

Nightmarish.

Suicide mission in Mass Mass Effect 2

exists in two states.

There are two versions of that system,

and there's nothing about the system that changes.

Like, it's all with the same numbers.

The question is its context.

Playing Mass Effect 2's suicide mission

within like the month of its release

with no plans to play the third game is very different than playing through that suicide mission as part of the Mass Effect trilogy.

Because one is, oh man, that was a crazy ending I got.

I can't believe Thane and Morden didn't make it.

Oh,

rip in peace, guys, versus, oh, let me look up the numbers so I can do it again so that everyone can survive.

Oh, good.

Those contexts dramatically changed everything about how that works.

Yeah.

Nobody, nobody rolled into a fucking file Mass Effect 3 with only Shepard alive, you freaks.

The absolute obtuseness, you know, it's so it's the writing equivalent of the moment where you have to walk up to the party in the James Bond mission and where you have to walk up to a window and shoot it to break the glass.

And I remember I was describing this as like, pause, let's talk about game design.

Is glass breaking anywhere in this series a part of the franchise at all?

Is shooting through glass anywhere in our brains in this world?

Or have we internalized the idea that glass is just glass and then you have to move around it or whatever, right?

So why this one sudden moment of shooting the glass?

You're crazy.

You're crazy if you train the player to expect something and then suddenly go, no, do the other thing.

That's real life, isn't it?

And you're like, you asshole, you're a video game and we know there's limitations.

And

I can understand when like drawing assumptions about things are going to lead you down, down, you know,

a well and you could use that as a trap in a way where if you expect the game to play a certain way and then they can use that against you to subvert your expectations, that's cool sometimes, right?

It depends on how you execute it, right?

But

the moment I'm describing what the way the rest of that game played was such a like, this is not at all the same thing.

This is not what I've been doing for the last few hours.

This is super weird to expect the person to intuitively just come to this conclusion.

And that's what's going on in that fucking obtuse ass suicide mission, you know?

Like, you can't suddenly at the last minute decide you want your game to be more subtle and deep than it actually is.

So if you're describing The Witcher in a way where from the jump, you get a sense that the game cares about and or is paying attention to things that you otherwise might overlook in other games like this, that's good.

Because then you're like, I'm on edge the whole time I'm

playing this and thinking a little bit more about it.

Kind of like in disco when you fucking trip over the old old lady and do the double deuces.

Right off the bat, I'm like, oh, failure is something special in this game.

You know?

So the very first choice in Witcher 1

is

the Caramoran is being attacked by goons who are trying to steal all the Witcher's magic bullshit.

And they go, okay, do you go down to the basement to head off the goons?

Or do you fight off the gigantic fucking monster that's attacking your friends?

And that is a different, like, that just seems like it wouldn't matter all that much, right?

You fight the big monster and you get like the monster parts, which can get you an upgrade.

But then you get to the bottom and discover: oh, they had extra time to steal more shit, and enemies in later missions will be more mutated as a result because they got to steal more

super busy.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you find those consequences out like how soon?

A full chapter later.

Like 12 and a half hours later

okay okay like like okay like way way in there way too late in there you find that okay

okay

because because again like it's like i don't i'm not against you know game design and the the plat the writing and such planning that to be the case but you you can't go one full way and 180 at the last second and expect a good result there and expect people to enjoy that you know?

So all this to say that,

you know, in a game like Cyberpunk, when you like,

the more you kind of

feel self-satisfied with the choices you make, I think perhaps the more wrong you're going about this.

You shouldn't feel okay with any choice you're making, you know, for most, at least for the, for the major players in terms of who you're supporting and what.

But with that, I think it's great.

I think it's very cool.

And

I like the journey through this world.

The one thing I will say that like,

I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I was expecting a bit much, or maybe CD Proiakt playing, you know, taking a world that already existed in the original Cyberpunk tabletop universe and then expanding on it didn't want to like, you know, crack open the sausage too much, right?

I'm not sure.

But

there's a couple moments in the game where I found talking with like Johnny and a couple other characters throughout the LP, like I'm like, the idea of how cheap and disposable life is in Night City is such an interesting discussion to me, right?

And it's the part that hits the hardest, and it's the moment in Edge Runner's episode fucking one where David gets handed a package.

And it's like, yep, here you go.

Here's the remains.

Bye.

It's like life isn't cheap.

Like, life has actually no value at all.

Therefore, if we're going gonna care about people who should we care about and why right

what is

the

world's viewpoint on this is the is the is the giant fucking you know pen in the sky as cynical as the world it within it or does it say to like have meaningful relationships with who you can for the time you can because that's all you get right or is there something else to it i don't know i don't know right i'm but i'm always curious to find out what the players and pieces on the board feel about the the game that they're in and do you feel like this applies to like runners or like literally every person in night city

in this game you get to experience so i go you know what runners lives are like and and then in this game you get to experience life as a solo right so you know how bullshit that can be but the average person just wandering about the streets going about their life is suffering horribly because every time you do an NCPD mission, every time you do a cyber psycho hunt, every time you do a fucking random side mission of gig of any kind, it's filled to the brim with normal people living normal lives dying for no reason because life means nothing in the city.

I mean, to be fair, that's like kind of like

regular life.

Sure.

There's not death races drifting around with people gunning full-speed mad max at each other around

the Dakari Expressway is not getting me riddled with bullets for going for a hot dog just because I went to the wrong street but people do live in like Los Angeles like that is like but there are places there are places right make no mistake some places are more death raced than others um

but yeah the the overall feeling that you get is like if you think this is localized to people who are like oh you picked a dangerous life right live by the sword but i by the sword no this is everybody, right?

It's all.

Because there's a crazy amount of collateral damage all over the place.

Non-stop.

Insane.

Insane amounts, you know?

And overall, you get that whole, again, the corpse on top being like, whatever, cost of doing business.

We don't give a shit.

And you know, that's the vibe.

So...

How the pieces on the board feel about the pieces, about the game they're in is like, I love that.

That's such meat on the bone, you know?

And that's why I love Kreia so much, because she has the most shit to say about the world she's in, right that's why she's my favorite fucking star wars character because oh my god spit spit granny spit i think i think kreia is is one of my favorite star wars characters but for like maybe the opposite reason that you're saying right now maybe like krea believes that at the end of kreya is like south park made manifest in in fucking uh what do you call it um

in star wars where like she would rather complain about how everything is is stupid and dumb than actually do anything.

Like, she's, she's wrong at the end of the day, but she wants to, there is something she wants to, she is wrong, but there is something she wants to do.

And the deal is that her version of the, the, the, the world that she lives in, basically, what if Johnny is shitting at the corpse, but the corpse are a walking, living, breathing group of people called Jedi and Sith?

You know, the world we live in is shaped by these assholes.

Who are the assholes?

Arasaka and Militech?

No, the fucking Jedi and the Sith.

We don't give a shit about your stupid war.

We're trying to live normal lives and we fucking suffer because you're too busy having your religious bullshit, which, you know, and going off.

And we don't give a fuck, man.

Don't kill me and my family.

You know, it's interesting, right?

And so I'm super like always down to hear

the cracking open of that idea in the world and where that goes, right?

And Johnny's like, so let's drop the nuke and fuck fuck plans.

Let's just go for it.

Who cares?

And you're like, okay, Johnny, like, is, you know, frying collateral damage, aka called protein is getting more protein involved in the terrorist attack a good idea, you know?

And you kind of run into other people who are similarly minded and you go, oh, oh, how badly do you want to make your point here?

right

because if you're down to fucking fry entire innocent families for simply standing in the way to make your point maybe get it man it's about the system

right maybe

right and maybe i don't want to stand next to you while you're spouting off about that right maybe i just want to like pretend that i just met you outside i don't really know you that well you know yeah we agree on the problems but what are do we agree on the solutions it's very important that we agree on the solutions, you know?

There's a lot of that in the world today where, oh, you and I, oh, we agree on the problem.

Oh, that's nice.

What are your solutions?

Oh, oh, interesting.

Hmm.

Okay, cool.

Right.

I'll be over here.

Go fuck yourself.

You're just as bad.

Right.

So

I kind of was hoping to see that get cracked open a little bit.

And it dances and touches, but it doesn't quite fully lean into that amount.

He's smart enough to engage on this topic in the level that you want him to.

No, it's not too.

And V doesn't have to get to that point.

It just needs to happen in the logs we're reading.

It has to happen in the conversations in the background.

It has to happen when you're chatting with the leaders of the Militech or Arasaka corporations or, you know what I mean?

Just, we need to kind of, we need, just, just, just, give me, give me something to chew on, you know?

And, and I, there was a lot to chew on, and I didn't scrape the game to a hundred percent.

And there's always like fun little bits and pieces of lore that I was missing.

And when I find stuff off camera and read it, I'd be be like, ooh, yeah, okay, that's good stuff, you know?

But the narrative of the main story of V was not about what I'm describing, you know?

It touched on it because that's what life and night city is.

And it's interesting that like Edge Runners is kind of distilled into that one screenshot.

You know the one.

And that's kind of what people feel.

And they like that when it's like, oh, that song starts playing and people feel away about that song because of what it makes them feel.

That's exactly it, right?

I'm like, why do we feel that about this?

And do we feel that about that?

You know and and there's a there's a part of this too where of course you're a video game character so you're going to go through this in tomb raider mode like

mowing down a cult of people on an island you know where like you're like okay the the story wants to pretend she killed like four people but it's closer to 400 you know

So all this to say that like without scratching that most interesting itch of the cyberpunk world, I still was satisfied with where the game goes and how you get there.

You know, and then, you know, beyond that, you kind of just like, a lot of it depends on how hyped are you for fuckboy Johnny to just be a fuckboy and be wrong and have a point, but be super wrong about it.

Do you enjoy that aspect?

You know, and

then within that too is like,

do you want to, you know, kind of just, how much are you enjoying being in this setting and this world, scanning things, looking at

different cultures as they crash into a cyberpunk world.

Yeah, right.

So we get to see Buddhist monks mixed in with a cyberpunk setting.

Awesome, right?

Japanese like Zaibatsus crashed into a cyberpunk setting.

A quintessential has to be there, you know?

And all these little bits and pieces where you get that.

The voodoo boys, the Haitian culture crashed into a cyberpunk world.

Super fun to see.

Do you, does that just like feed your brain and give you the right feel, the right synapses firing?

The jitters, okay, cool.

This, you're going to enjoy the ride regardless.

So let me ask you a question.

You had a very, very, it sounds like you had an excellent overall time with cyberpunk, and you're extremely happy with what you got out of it.

I recognize the flaws for what they are.

And I also, right, and there are bigger flaws I didn't touch on yet, mind you.

But in terms of just getting the feeling of this world right and

walking away from it going like, oh man, it fucking sucks to live there.

Yeah, they nailed it.

But also, you had like fun playing it.

Like, it was an enjoyable romp, and you were like, Yeah, good CD Project makes good games.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well,

with an asterisk, but go ahead.

So that's my lead up.

So, with that being said, and the technical problems that you ended up having

multiple years after the game's release, how excited are you to hop on Witcher 4 day one?

Oh,

because let me tell you, man,

as somebody who's done, who's ridden this ride four times,

every single one, huh?

Every single one.

Done every single game they have ever put out, massively,

crazy fucked up.

Like, fucked up enough that I was like, I'm going to wait like a year.

Yeah, no reward for early adoption.

If you can, you know, deal with dodging big lore points and potential.

I'm watching

a tech demo of Witcher 4 today going, I will play this game when my son is in high school.

Is it usually a big patch that gets announced, or is there like a proper re-release where you go, that's the stat?

Traditionally, it's called the Enhanced Edition.

Okay, the

release.

The first time around, it came with Phantom Liberty, but they didn't call it an enhanced edition.

They called it version 2.0.

You remember that?

Yep.

Yep, yep.

Yep.

Well, so, you know, what I'll say to

some of the stuff I kind of wanted out of the game that I didn't get gameplay-wise is like...

It's almost I don't want to ask too much or be unrealistic in the demands, but one thing that I went into the game kind of like initially I was kind of overwhelmed.

I don't know if you remember my first sessions being like, oh man, there's there's so much and I don't know how to handle all these choices and builds and stuff.

And then when I went off camera and I went through it and I kind of came back and I went, oh, you get three classes.

Three OSs are going to decide the majority of how you play.

And then on top of that, you can pepper that with melee weapons of different kinds or different guns, you know, but for the most part, your OS determines what you are.

And

I wish there was more, you know, I wish there's more variety to that.

I wish that maybe you could choose to dual wield and pick a gun with a different gun.

Well, I mean, there's three classes: swords, alchemy, and magic.

I'm sorry, we're talking about cyberpunk.

I meant melee, shooting.

Yeah, okay, right, right, right.

Yeah, I mean, in this case, fucking time stop, you know, melee, and magic.

So, um,

and then it turns out that back in the original game, the classes were based on your job.

So, you could be like, your whole playstyle was based on, are you a like medic?

You know, that makes sense.

That's your gig, that's what you do, and then everything else after is a sub-choice from that.

But this story about a particular person going through a particular adventure, it would be way too ambitious and way too hard to be like, oh, yeah, here, this is a, um, you know, you're a corpo that spends the whole game being a corpo, but still have the story of V.

It wouldn't make sense with the way the game is designed uh so i i you know you kind of go like i understand why they did and i look forward to seeing how they expand on what they do maybe more subclassing you know because again you can pick up a sword and still hack things you can you know uh grab a whip that that hacks people or or pick up a gun and and do berserker stuff but um

more implicit like baseline variety I think would be a lot of fun even if it means like taking out how far down the the path the road you go and making it a little more shallow but widening the base.

And then I go, oh my god, fucking Larry and Baldur's Gate 3, though.

That's

you can't expect anyone to hit that.

Subclasses?

You can't expect anyone to do that.

That's unfair.

That's an unrealistic amount of open, you know,

and if you want to go even further, you can be like, you can look at a game like Pathfinder, Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous, and be like,

here

here is more subclasses, abilities, feats, etc.

than you could ever hope to possibly understand, but you're trading that for a game that fucking barely works for multiple years.

You know,

but when you're not doing that stuff, you're walking through somewhere in the city and conversations around you are great and interesting, and you're picking up garbage that tells you about the setting and fun stuff is happening around you.

You're like, yeah, this is cool.

You know?

And And what I would say, too, is like my own personal love for the genre and that's sort of like, you know, what's rad about it.

This is the part where in an open world game, I might get bored already by seeing the pieces.

You can see where the NPCs spawn and walk in their circles.

You can see where the chariots, cars, or horses spawn and then run throughout.

And you know, you're kind of like, yeah, okay, we get it.

It's big, it's empty.

You know, there's story happening over there, but there's a whole knot of nothing in between.

And in this case, I'm like, no, like, there's enough in this that's like cool about the setting that kept my interest peaked, even off the camera.

I think CD Project makes really incredible spaces.

Like, I think, even in Witcher, I think Witcher 1 takes place entirely in the city of Vazema.

And it is like a 2000s-era PC game in which characters, like, are most characters that walk around are like completely faceless, nameless, like, whatevers.

In fact, there's only like 10 separate character models.

And the people you actually have to talk to mostly stay in one spot.

It's a really great interior space.

Okay.

It is a really fantastic explorable space, even within its own limitations.

And so I'm curious because like when you walk around, I don't know, fucking

random, like just cause.

Sure.

You're not expecting to be like, ooh, look at this city and its living, breathing vibes.

The city is there to be blown up.

Fucking whatever, right?

And then I, you know, I know that the earlier GTA games, certainly, you kind of like, you see the bones for what the city is at a certain point and it stops being interesting.

Does a game like Red Dead Redemption actually have interesting things happening out in the wilds where with random animals and forests and dark, you know, in the woods?

Like, does it actually, is the money in that game keeping the like spaces interesting in the same way that you're describing?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

You can do that.

You picked the one

single example.

They did it.

Proves the point in the other direction.

Okay.

No, it's okay.

I'm legit.

No, because I'm legitimately curious because I know not every studio does this, right?

Some places just like go, like, grab tree generation, grab grass, and stretch a mile in that direction and go, you know?

And this in Cyberpunk, you're like,

what the fuck does that sign say?

What is this conversation happening?

You know, there's enough interesting going around that you don't kind of feel that, you know?

Ooh.

One of the things, though, it's like

there's a really fine line

in most.

I made a little oopsie spill.

Give me a second.

Oh, okay.

Do you want to keep talking, or did you really spill it?

No, I'm going to get a napkin.

Hold on.

BRB.

Okay, I'll pee while we do that.

Right.

Excuse me.

Yeah, anyway.

So, so

I think those are kind of

the points that worked and those that didn't.

And as far as cyberpunk goes,

this is an enjoyable experience, and I hope that one day a maybe

cyberpunk Kotor 2 type moment will happen.

Or maybe it's got to be cyberpunk and/or.

I don't know.

Whatever the equivalent is, but I would love to see that material get analyzed and handled and treated in ways by

different folks.

Kind of like Edge Runners, you know, where you get to just explore an interesting world

and kind of

think about what all these things mean, you know?

Because if we were to like take on Star Wars again as our case in point example here, you're just like, there's good and there's bad, and good is good because the fucking spirits of the universe say that's what it is, and negative angry feelings are bad because that's what, that's just the way, I don't know, fucking Midichlorian.

Shut up, dude.

Good vibes only.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know,

so someone else coming in and going, like, yeah,

let's talk about that.

Let's see what that actually means in a setting like this is a lot of fun.

Thinking about cyberpunk and like joking about how the game was finally finished, and then as you were playing it, they still fucking patched it a couple more times.

Dude,

being a fan of this very specific style of genre, which is

like large-scale computer RPGs, is absolute suffering.

Like, Baldur's Gate 3 is currently the peak, but like, we didn't cover it.

But the Warhammer Skulls event was like two weeks ago, and they showed off a bunch of stuff there.

And they were like, hey guys, here comes the last expansion for Warhammer 40k Rogue Traitor by Alcat.

And I'm like, fucking sick.

I'm finally going to be able to.

And before I could even finish the sentence, they're like, here comes season past two, ending in 2026.

And I'm just like, oh my God, why?

You fucking pieces of shit.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Listen, this is.

This is one of my first experiences with completion of a full-on Western RPG.

Right?

And they're not, and like, even you, even all that time, and then them saying, it's done.

We promise it's done, it's done, it's done.

I mean,

like, I don't think people would believe me if I didn't have it on camera that it's like I took on max tack, beat everybody, tried to get the secret weapon or whatever, didn't get it, but still cleared the hardest challenge possible and drove away, and the game exploded as I did my victory lap.

You know, like you hit that five stars and rollout, and the game just goes, ah,

and it crashed so hard that it took like five minutes before the PlayStation 5 actually went, oh, shit, you crashed.

It didn't even do the catch right away thing, you know.

Incredible.

Um,

there is, there is no reward for early adoption

15, 20 hours, and be like, this is a good game.

I'm going to play it later.

Like, what happened with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?

Like, I'll wait till those DLCs are out.

And I hope to God they don't announce another set of them because then I'll be sad.

Yeah, I look if games like continue to discourage like people from early adopting them in this way, it's like

it sucks because they're not going to get there.

There's people that are going to be like, I would buy that, but now's not the time, clearly.

You know,

it'll hurt them in the long run, but also like, cool, like things can chill.

I'll spend, I'll look elsewhere, you know?

Let the world come to my pace.

Let everybody join me over here.

Where we're like, yeah, no rush.

You know?

Like, Night Rain's one of those games.

Kick your feet up, grab a Mai Tai.

Right?

There's no rush on Night Rain.

Wait till Night Rain, like, if you're like, I don't know about Night Rain, just fucking wait till it's like $15 on a Steam sale and has a year's worth of updates.

I mean,

till that character select screen has a scroll wheel on it.

Yeah.

Anyway, so yeah, big, big games for some of that stuff.

We are going to

go into, yeah, like I said, Cyberpunk, not Cyberpunk, Expedition 33 spoiler cast at the end.

So

coming up on the channel now that this is done, we've got a couple more like alternate pathways for some of the endings and Phantom Liberty stuff to watch through.

There's just, you know, some

epilogue work.

But

the

plan this Saturday, we're going to have a special Game Gamp to Fighting Games.

I'm going to be joined by buddy Freddy Loco, an old CVS2 player from the arcade days.

He's going to come play through some Capcom vs.

SNK2, which is on the Capcom Classics collection.

We're going to dive into that, as well as Elena, who's coming out.

So we're going to explore.

Her costume 3 looks fucking amazing.

Looks great.

Super cool.

Everybody's costume three looks great.

Love those, love, love that look, you know?

Did I give you, by the way, on those costumes, did I give you, did you hear the reason potentially why it's taking so long for Street Fighter 6 to do these things?

I do not, actually.

I do not know this.

So, apparently, the reason why,

I don't know if this is confirmed, but at least it's rumored.

Floating in the ether?

Floating in the ether is that there is a team of people that are like, there's a Korean dev team that's hired that's just working on the world tour costumes, and those are outsourced.

And their job

is to deliver 400 people.

And their job, well, their job is to deliver those costumes, you know, once every two months or so, right?

And the main team working on the fighting ground main mode don't want to outsource the costumes because they want to quality control them and are making sure that they themselves do it, but their hands are full with the game itself that they can't get around to costumes as often as the team who's hired to just spit costumes out.

So the outsourcing team is like, we're just doing our jobs, right?

We got hired to make content frequently and we're doing that.

That's why you're getting a bunch of world tour stuff.

And the main team is like, we'll get to these costumes when we get to them, but they're not the highest priority for them.

And this creates a super weird, disparate feeling of one mode getting ignored and the other mode getting a ton.

Because if you're not communicating that, like, oh, they don't want to trust an outsourcing team to make sure that the quality of the costumes is high, then you're just going to get them way less frequently once a year.

It's really a shame that Capcom doesn't have that many staff that are

experienced in working in creating assets for the proprietary engine that every single game and the company uses.

I mean, that there's just nobody at Capcom that could possibly

help with this.

I mean, clearly the priority

is not leading to them grabbing anyone off a fucking Monster Hunter or Resident Evil to bring it on.

Sure.

In fact, it's going the other way around.

They're sitting down to go like, yo, Akuma better be faithful as fuck.

And he is.

He looks incredible.

Akuma is insanely detailed as the 15th weapon or whatever they're saying you know like he's basically just a whole play style amazing um

but yeah that reasoning makes sense but it just feels like shit for people that for anybody that's like but i like i want to not have this asymmetrical amount of attention you know and i and the question is is like do you then go all right let's outsource the main costumes and then some of them are going to be fucking stinkers but they'll come out more often you're not going to do that absolutely not.

Right.

It's just, it's just such a massive gulf from like Street Fighter V where you'd get 10 new costumes every single day.

That's what it is.

And some of them would be stinkers.

Some of them were absolute dog shit, but some of them were great.

You know, it's a mixed bag and you'd be like, I don't know.

But here they want to make sure they're all solid.

They're all good.

But this is the exchange.

And like the outsourcing team, it is kind of funny because they're just like, what did we do?

They hired us to do a thing and we're doing it.

What?

You know?

But it's like, yeah, people don't, you know, you're not going to advertise.

Capcom's going to say, I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, this game is actually separate games being worked on by different teams.

Perception is everything.

Anyways, all this to say, we are going to be checking that out.

And then we're going to start our next LP.

Oh, I see.

This is fun because sometimes I know what the next one is, or like you've implied to me, but I don't have a single fucking clue today.

So I'm just, I'm with everybody else.

I'm excited.

What do you got?

What's well, I've gone back and forth on this, and I've to admit, I've changed my plans a couple times, right?

Like, there's I was originally going to

for whatever, it doesn't matter

the details.

Um,

hey, guess what?

El Shadai,

Reggie's gonna play Expedition 33.

Oh,

don't let Reggie listen to today's show, He won't.

Important

Act One.

What do you mean?

We're going to play Act One.

Just the first Arctic.

Well,

Act One for now, and we're going to work the rest in schedule-wise as possible.

Oh, so you're going to treat it like three different games or two and a half different games?

For now, we're announcing Act One,

and then

we'll figure out the rest.

You know?

So

they're there.

Yeah.

So that's the plan.

Okay.

I wonder if his takeaways on that game will be

different with a little more time to sit

with Act One.

Perhaps.

Because you and I just went, whoo, like, zoom.

You know, and, and, and, you know, we just, I did also just, the way I hit the end of Cyberpunk was by hitting as many back-to-back sessions of that game as possible without starting a new LP, right?

So we,

we compressed as much as possible into that.

Um, in this case, well, just, I just want to let people know the

like

by by having by just by by saying just act one for now, we at least have a end finite point that is not the infinite horizon future of a big RPG that allows us to kind of plan when to start the next part and/or

if we're going to mix things up or so.

So, more details on that later.

How's Reggie's parrying in general?

Better than ours.

So, okay.

He has better, he's a better fighting game player than both of us.

He's has the best reactions and abilities of, yeah, absolutely.

All right.

I'm interested to see if he goes down the same path that you and I did.

Dude was

chain grabbing

knots all feasts.

Dude was chain grabbing space animals all day in melee, man.

Like he's, he's, he's fine.

Like,

you know, it's there's no question there.

There's a bigger question that I'm going to ask, and I'm really curious to see how we go with this one.

But the bigger decision is what language

because it might be very interesting to play through that game in French with a French speaker and to have that be a part of what we do, you know?

I think

it's interesting.

It's, yeah, I think it might be fun.

A lot of people at this point know that the English voice acting is 10 on 10.

It's phenomenal.

But how many people have gone through it in French, right?

That could be interesting.

I think that that would.

I think that if Reggie was playing that by himself in his house, that would be an incredibly interesting experience.

I think

you guys playing it on stream

are going to end up in the situation where tons of people are going to be like, dude, I'm doing the dishes in the other room just listening to you.

I don't know what the fuck any of these characters are talking about.

I know.

I dealt with this with Naruto back in the day when I wanted to hear the Japanese voice acting because that's what I was used to from the characters, and I never had the adult swim experience with it.

And I remember the pushback on that.

And,

you know, I do fully understand that this might be the case here.

So it's not set in stone, certainly, but I am entertaining the idea because if

you're overregion, so like, ew,

like, I, I, like,

I understand that, I understand that the background listening experience kind of gets compromised in that way for some folks.

And that

is,

that sucks.

I do not want it to be harder for people to enjoy that, but I'm also super curious as

you know, again, going through this game with a different vibe from

the rare French dubbed game.

It's not, it's such a rare art thing, you know, it might be a really cool, different experience.

And if people are willing to have the subtitles up you know in a way that like you do when you're going through japanese games then it could be fun it could be cool you know but i don't know i don't know we'll see right i can already look over and i can see some people are like that sounds cool let's do it and i can see people going unwatchable unlistenable experience so

i i I am loath to trust literally any voice I see scrolling past my eyes because I remember a long time ago you was you was like hey should we do this I forget what game it was should we do this game and then you immediately followed up with okay but if we did do the game would you say you wanted us to do it and then just never watch it because you thought it was cool

and tons of people

are you just saying yes but then you never actually bother

oh fuck yeah that was me yeah that was me i lied

and and i for sure i can understand the part where like if you're on phone on your phone that might be

a thing too as well.

So, like I said, I'm not married to that idea.

I'm just floating it out there, you know, as an interesting concept for how we could do this.

And we could do it in a way that's different from the other people play El Pleam the game right now, you know?

Um,

and it has, and again, we're French speakers, so like it has a extra personal fun connection.

Oh, dude, I can't understand any of the shit there in that fucking game.

Like,

like, you know, people were telling me

to listen to the lyrics of the songs.

Yeah.

And I was like, I don't understand the lyrics in the songs because I don't have subtitles and it's a different dialect.

I don't know what the fuck they're saying

until I listen to the songs on Spotify with subtitles and I can read it.

I can't hear Parisian and understand it.

Like, period.

I can read it.

But I can't understand that shit by ear at all.

It's definitely more difficult for me than other

slower

forms of Quebecois French, for sure.

But and again, as an Anglophone, I still am like, I'm not 100%.

Like my brain has to go through a translator every time.

But like I said, I'm just, I think the idea is an interesting one.

At the very least, you know, he's going to make a call on how he feels about that.

We'll see.

Again, we know the English is amazing.

And, you know, this might be another situation too where it's like, okay, like it could be one of those ones where it's like you do it and then it comes out and then you see a bunch of people going like, oh shit, that's cool.

But then like a massive shitstorm of overwhelming amount of people go, I hate this, this is the worst.

And then you're like, okay, maybe we should switch it after session one or something.

And then you got to do the whole thing over.

You know, well, no, you don't, but like, you know, you, it could be, it could be one of those bits.

When I played it myself, I did do a set, I did do an offline session and then switched it.

The intro, I did the intro and then switched it back and tried to see what it was like in both.

So I don't know.

You know, this is going to have to, I guess, rely on some audience feedback for like how many people are like absolutely nuclear on the concept of

being there everyone who is listening to this part of the show reach out to woolly on his social media for your feedback but if it comes asking for your feedback oh god

if it comes down to sessions of uh starting it in one language and then switching over for the next one you know i mean look we know that like the amount of people that are like

People that want it in either language that wouldn't care are not going to be like fighting for it to be in French per se, right?

But people who are like, I don't want to watch because it's in French are going to be like, it's an on and off switch.

So

anyways, that's what we're doing.

Should be fun.

Expedition 33 Act 1.

Tell you what, man, this game is fucking special.

We're going to be talking about it for a while.

It is

pretty good.

And yeah,

in my

opinion,

Act 1 is a much more linear experience.

Oh, it definitely definitely is.

So you can get there within a couple sessions much quicker than you could handle the opening up.

Yeah, I feel like I spent half my time in Act Two.

Cool.

So that's coming up

over on Wooly versus on Twitch and on YouTube.

And yeah, just also while we're at it, a reminder, the

Castle Super Beast archive is now up and pretty much it's up to the latest ones.

If you've been waiting for the feed to not be taking over your entire fucking sub-box, you can do so safely now.

Oh, did you fucking just go for it?

I warned.

Well, that's what I kind of soft-launched it because I warned everybody because like the VOD apocalypse happened.

And then I said, look, we're going to have to release 100 videos in one shot in two big drops.

So

it's the way the channel works, right?

Watch CSV, fuckhead.

And, you know, so that, that, that's happened.

So you're not going to have that happen anymore, you know?

So, yeah.

But that's what's going on for me.

All right.

So, hey, here's what's going on with Pat.

I beat Expedition 33.

That was like 99% of what I did.

The other thing that I did is me and Paige went through and beat Chapter 2 of Deltarune, which good that we did that because it's been been a couple of years since that, and turns out we forget like most of what happened in chapter two of Deltarune.

Like, damn, damn near forgot almost all of it.

Like, we forgot the fucking ending of the fucking chapter two of Delta Rune, okay, the lead into the thing, like, Jesus Christ, like, good thing that we did it.

Yeah, me and Punch Bomb are going to have to refresh on what's going on in that game, too.

Yeah, no, it's been a while.

Um,

and um,

we played that night rain.

Uh, that's the that's the things.

Uh, what's more interesting with what I'm doing this week is what I'm doing this

coming week, which is the busiest week I've had in like a year.

So

today is like day 24, 25, or 26.

I'm not sure which one it is of me streaming literally every single day.

It just ended up working out that way.

Which will then be followed by this tomorrow Sony state of play,

followed by two days of me and Paige no-lifing the absolute shit out of Deltarune's chapter three and four on the fourth and fifth.

The babysitter is locked in for fucking eight hours on both of those days.

So we are going to do it.

We're going to fucking dodge all of social media.

We're going to fucking just go and just do it.

We don't have anything to do.

I have a question.

Come and then fucking play Deltarune.

I have a question.

Yeah.

If you were experiencing burnout, would you even know?

Oh, absolutely.

Okay.

Is it an invisible status in the background?

You know?

Oh, yeah.

No, it's this.

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

What it is?

It's really simple.

It's me sit down.

I go, okay.

And then I, okay, OBS.

It's all right.

And uh,

okay, all right.

That's what it is.

That's the start.

That's, that's the fucking just like,

just like the big, it's, it's, I'm eating, you know what it is?

I'm eating a bunch of spaghetti, and then I look at my spaghetti and I go, and I have a big sigh,

and then I have another bite of spaghetti, and I have another big sigh,

right?

Yep.

But as

so, today's like, what, I don't know, it's day 25 since May 9th or whatever,

May 10th.

I was like fucking jazzed to come.

I slept like shit last night.

I slept terrible and I woke up like, fucking good morning, everybody.

Today I get to do the fucking Expedition 33 spoiler cast.

Today's going to be a fucking good to hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

See, what you might have, so the fun thing that I still get to experience over here is

what we used to have a long time ago, but you might remember, the ding-dong.

Hey, how's it going?

Like, right?

Like, like, hey, Reggie comes in.

Hey, Reggie, how you doing, man?

Okay, got it, got it.

All right, you know, let's feel out today.

Let's look at the clock.

Let's see how we're doing, you know, or vice versa.

Right?

So, after

Jeltar Rune, after Deltar Rune on the fourth and fifth, which Hage and I are going to know life the fucking shit out of it,

God throws the Summer Games Fest on June 6th at us.

You're allowed to do anything you want in life.

And then on Sunday is the Xbox and PC games show.

Is it?

And then on June 9th, My Nintendo Switch 2 will arrive in the mail.

That's crazy.

Incredible.

And on one of those days, they're going to shadow drop Silk Song.

Song.

It's just, it's so fascinating how little I care about everything you just say.

Yeah, I know, I know.

No, I mean, not actually,

but more than that.

No, I don't, I know, not that I'm saying things and you're like, fucking whatever.

No, no, no, you're like, I don't give a fuck about Summer Games Fest or T-Box.

You know, we'll just, it'll, we'll get, we'll get around to the, to the most of the time.

Dude, I love that shit.

I love add.

Give me more ad.

I love that shit.

I love that shit.

Though I did have a fun experience because I was streaming yesterday and somebody in my chat was like, hey, dude, why didn't you put the Xbox show on your schedule for the week?

And I'm like, you fucking bitch.

You lie.

You invented that to fuck with me.

No, no, they were right.

And then this morning, Sony was like, by the way, there's another show tomorrow.

Yeah, that's right.

It's right before your Deltarune stream.

That's right.

Right before your Deltarune stream, dumbass.

I mean, again, just to see the lack of the marathon should be here segments, it's kind of curious.

Oh, I'm excited for that.

It is a curious watch, I have to admit, you know.

Someone in the chat asks, why'd you put the awful PC Gamer show in there?

Because the one that I don't watch is the one that will have the Silk Song Shadow Drop.

Dude, Paige didn't wake up with me to watch that fucking Nintendo thing, and Silk Song was there.

Like,

the superstitious

is Silk Song in the room with you right now.

It was.

It was there.

It was there.

The superstitions work.

Well, I hope it's magic or something.

I don't know.

I hope you got a good reaction image out of it.

I sure did.

I always do.

I have a very expressive face and a big mouth.

Oh, boy.

The one that usually people clip is I put my hands on the sides of my head.

Yeah, yeah,

look at them.

That's a pretty good one.

That's a pretty good one, too.

Yeah.

I got a fucking Expedition 33 fucking fucking pog face out of

something.

And it's this.

It's all my hands on my bald.

Oh, no.

Man, that was so great how that game had a trailer.

And I went, what is that?

And I was like, oh, that looks cool.

And then it had a late, and then there was nothing.

And then there was another trailer.

And I went, whoa, that looks really good, actually.

And then there was nothing.

And then the game came out.

And it was like, yo, wow, this game's great.

And it was just like, hey, look, it was just a normal

kind of like an idealized, like it was just a normal product release that we all enjoyed.

You know, there's only one part of the

Expedition 33 PR cycle thing that came up.

But it's a spoiler.

So I'm not going to talk about it.

Oh, sure, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

right.

A difficult, difficult challenge for any HR department, or PR department, rather.

Cool.

All right.

Shall we.

Go down to twitch.slash TV

Pat show, Pat stares at, and Pat'll be on.

Pat'll be on.

The show will be going.

I mean, no empty chair tech yet, right?

Not yet.

Okay.

We are quickly approaching

the empty chair tech streaming era.

Quick word from our sponsors.

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Nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

All right.

So, a couple things

this week.

We already touched on it, but yeah, Akuma and Monster Hunter is a pretty incredible integration.

It's like a 15th weapon.

Yeah.

It's fucking weird.

It's just a full-on, it's the character with all his his moves playable.

And it makes me feel like the things from the past, like Dante showing up, were just kind of like lazy by comparison.

You know?

Or like.

Oh, I mean, it's their own guy.

Of course, of course, of course.

But what I mean to say is, is like no other guest costume got that treatment.

Right?

That is a super in-depth

integration that is a lot more fun than just the cosmetic or, you know, a weapon or so super cool i i hope this leads into like

a punch weapon for monster hunter i mean

you have to look like him to use that moveset right yeah but hunters are freaks but i know but i mean like they like you can't just be like i want the akuma moveset on my own character yeah you can yeah oh it's not screw it no no no i want that i agree with you but they're not letting you currently do it is what i mean what i mean later, they could just have a fist weapon and be like, Yeah, I know your shit is buff.

I would like it if they let you just do the Akuma moves with your own character.

That would be fantastic.

Modders let you do that already.

Well, modders let you do all sorts of things.

Exactly, yeah.

I think my asshole just fell out.

Oh, boy.

Can you give me a second to poke it back in?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, it was my phone.

Oh.

Oh.

So I heard a large clamor hit the floor, and I thought it was my asshole.

I see.

It's important.

You don't want that to happen.

Sometimes.

That was my telephone.

Okay.

Well, sometimes things fall out that people were not supposed to see.

That's true.

For example, what the fuck is Yuri Lowenthal up to over on his Beast Guy?

Like, man,

don't tell voice actors shit.

Okay, so, okay, but are you on that shit where you're like, this is way too

weird to not be, it's coordinated, but I don't know if it's like, it clearly, it's not an official thing, it wouldn't be, that's insane.

But what is the, is it, why so, like, is this an aggressive, passive, you know, like, are you trying to like bully them?

Is that the goal of this type of message?

So, first of all, let's just break it down.

Yuri Lowenthal on his social media is,

guys, I'm not going to voice Yosuke in the Persona 4 remake.

I really wanted to, and I asked them if I could, and they told me no.

And then that tweet, and then that tweet gets deleted, and then Aaron Fitzgerald.

Aaron Fitzgerald shows up and goes, For those of asking, I have not been asked to reprise my role as Chia in P4 Remake.

Rip, I'm blessed to have recorded as many games as I have playing her.

And you're like, so like,

is this because of P3 Reload?

Sector also said the same thing.

Okay, okay.

So, the unconfirmation, right?

Kind of like P3 Reload.

We're doing this as a preemptive announcement.

Here's what I believe happened.

A third one hit the ball.

What I believe happened is that Yuri Lowenthal did, in fact, hear that, you know, through the grapevine that there was going to happen.

And he contacted Atlas and was like, hey, I love that character.

I would love to be that character.

And they went, no, we're going to go with all new guys.

And so he was like, I'm sad about it.

And then someone somewhere asked him,

hey, man, are you going to do it?

And he got like a B up his bonnet because he was upset about it and responded to that person non-directly.

And then once that happened, everybody just started hassling all the other voice actors.

And they just immediately responded right away, going, okay, I'm not going to be in it either.

Because

if this was that theory of like, this is a stunt that is being part of the intended marketing for the game or whatever.

No, dude, that's good that game's going to be announced on fucking Sunday.

And also just like, it seems insane because that's bringing bad energy immediately to the thing that you want people to be excited about because you're kind of like the response to that from the people following them will be, well, that sucks.

I love you and I want you to come back as those characters.

Why would they do that?

It's a kind of antagonistic framing immediately, which is why it doesn't work as a stunt, you know?

But

it certainly is like multiple of these actors are coming out being like, ah,

and it's just like, yeah, everybody is Dan Southworthing all over the place.

It's going to like, don't tell voice actor shit.

Just never tell a voice actor anything ever.

Never do it.

They're not even allowed to know their own character.

Just read the lines.

You know, so Persona 4 remake, again,

is now super fucking, super confirmed.

And it's going to be really interesting because it's Pride Month

and Persona 4 Discourse is terrible.

But

more than that is like, do you think they're going to put the gay Yosuke stuff back in?

Oh,

oh, yeah, okay, right.

I was like, I was like, I'm like, if we're talking about S-Links again, I don't want to do this.

But if

we do the gay, are we deleted?

Deleted, deleted voice lights.

Let's find out.

They're not going to do it.

Oh, come on.

DLC.

Pay for it.

Pay for pride.

Come on.

Do it.

Pay.

Shell it out.

You want it.

We'll do it.

But you have to fucking.

It was already there.

It was already there.

Recorded things for it in English.

Yeah,

Persona 4, gay for pay.

Doesn't count.

Doesn't count if it's for pay.

Oh, no, not like that.

Man, listen.

Whatever the fuck, whatever the fuck they do, like the idea of

some of those characters not sounding the the way they do currently, my brain is going to have to rewrite that.

So I thought that that was going to be the case for Persona 3 Reload.

And man, a lot of the new people did like absolutely incredible work, not just in general, but also emulating the old style.

Yeah, I remember Akihiko was a big one.

And then I was like, you know what?

No, he's doing a great job.

I get it.

You know?

I didn't finish Persona 3 Reload either.

You get to that point around that game's 80% mark where it's like do 80 to 100 more fucking floors.

Yeah.

And I just went, ah,

I already know what happens.

Yeah, so I've been kind of like, like, Punch Bomb has been working her way through it.

So I'm kind of vicariously just checking in on how that's going because I just want to see that final,

you know, fucking NYX bit, right?

See how that's handled.

But I'm like, okay, you can absolutely cast people that'll do a great job and then you, you know, like re-releases and stuff here.

Culprit needs to have a level of pathetic

in it.

There's one person I know who can do it.

And he has to do both, just like the original, and it's got to be Alex Lee.

Alex can do anything.

Alex can't do anything.

It has to be Alex Lee doing both voices again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, you know how you said take Alex Lee as Yosuke.

Okay, you said don't tell voice actors anything, exception.

You can tell Gianni anything and then just have him lie about it.

Yeah,

no one believes anything he says, except he lies.

Just have him horf some bullshit up on the timeline and call it a day.

Let's see.

Let's see where this goes.

But wild.

I'm telling you right now, that's going to be announced on fucking Sunday at the Microsoft thing.

Hey, so like Persona 3 Reload coming out, I was like, wow, that's a good game, and I'll play it.

Persona 4 or whatever coming out,

I have a very different emotional response to that.

I have a

fucking hook it up to my fucking, shoot it between my scroat and my toes.

More, though.

Give me more.

Please look forward to the video of Ben Starr applying for Chia.

Oh, dude.

Oh, my God.

You're totally right.

Don't think, feel.

Oh, man.

I love Ben Starr.

Ben Starr is a good actor.

It's just meat.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Let's see what we get here.

And, you know, and getting into full cosplay as well and committing 1,000% to the bit.

Anyways,

speaking of not committing to the bit,

rip

to Cliffhanger Games who were working on a Black Panther game for EA.

And just like Respawn just lost 300 people and canceled a Titanfall game, they are ripping through their other studios, and Black Panther game is now cancelled

from the team.

Did you ever even see that game?

Nope.

Never got to look at it.

It was

Cliffhanger Games made Shadow of Mordor.

So they were the ones that held the fabled

nemesis system, right?

They're the ones that had access to it.

This is so stupid and sucks so much.

Okay, but the

fucking funny and dumb bit here,

because it's like,

okay, EA is continuing to be the absolute shit show and just laying off people non-stop.

And hey, guess what?

It's the latest fucking story on Castle Super Beast.

More people got fired in this fucking industry, right?

Do you think they would have canceled White Panther?

You see,

Pat, you're supposed to think it and have that show up in the title beneath you, but then you don't actually say it.

Oh, okay.

You're supposed to just go, ah, yeah, you know what?

It was like, dude, what the?

Yeah, yeah,

I'm just going to go.

I think that might be the funniest thing.

I'm just going to go.

Mega 64 has ever done in my entire career.

It's the funniest thing they've ever done.

Rocco walking into the studio.

The video name is called Why No White Panther.

And in the video, no one acknowledged.

Everyone is just like reacting to the title of the video, going, Yo, what the fuck?

And the dude's like, oh,

yeah, yeah, no, no, yo, you're right, you're right, I know, I know, yeah, I

uh incredible, incredible.

Um,

anyways, so yeah, this got canceled, and uh the

the the bit is that we talked about the fucking nemesis system for so long and now sure enough

They absolutely were working on the evolution of the nemesis system in this game.

Wait, but we're talking about EA?

Cliffhanger Games, the studio that made Shadow of Bordor.

Am I wrong about that?

Is that not part of what was going on here?

Didn't Monolith make that?

Because Warner Brothers owns the Nemesis system.

Then, let me pull up what I was reading.

The Shadow of Mordor Nemesis system

was going to be expanded on

in the Black Panther game.

What?

But that's the wrong

That's the wrong company.

Was it founded by former staff?

Did monolith people move to Cliffhanger?

No, the people who made Cliffhanger Productions made Jagged Alliance Rage and Shadowrun Chronicles Boston Lockdown.

All right.

Let me pull up the article.

So there's one.

Here, I have three.

Who are we blaming for this?

Well, I'm currently sidetracked on what's going on because I don't.

inventing my shit here.

I'm just thinking about the Wonder Woman thing.

Uh, let's see.

There's a, an article with

Bloomberg.

There's this article over here from Gizmodo.

Oh, no, Cliffhanger Games was was a brand new company in 2023 that was only made to make the Black Panther game.

Okay, so the fact that Shadow of Mordor devs were on this team means that I guess a number of staff came from there?

Is that what I'm to understand?

Cliffhanger was led by Kevin Stevens, who oversaw production of Middle-earth, Shadow of Mordor, Middle-earth, Shadow of War at Monolith.

Okay, so ex-Monolith staff were on the team, and that's why the Nemesis system was being mentioned.

Warner Brothers owns that Nemesis system.

Okay, because the Bloomberg article

mentioned essentially that EA executives were frustrated that the game had not left pre-production phase phase after nearly four years in development.

The studio.

Shit, yeah, cancel that.

What the fuck?

The studio was building evolution that would expand on ideas like the Nemesis system from Shadows of Mordor, and players would take control of heroes like T'Challa, Killmonger, and Shuri vying for the Black Panther mantle to fight off the Skrulls.

Holy shit, canceled

that now.

I am reading what is in front of you.

So I think the.

So, well, what was the dev time on Avengers and uh

Guardians of the Galaxy?

Was it any different?

I bet it wasn't fucking four years of pre-production.

People put out fucking games in four years.

I mean, it looked like they were go-Marvel was trying to get a bunch of uh third-person action games going for various uh uh

IPs and spin-offs.

What are we looking at here?

Man, that should just...

I don't know why it's so hard.

Black Panther's cool.

I don't get it.

Okay.

Well, we never got to take a look at the game.

And

there's a couple details about it.

And maybe this is one of those things where something will hit a big MP4 will hit fucking Unseen64 at some point or something to that effect.

And

yes, okay.

Several alumni from the Lord of the Rings duology reunited to form Cliffhanger Studios.

That's how the studio came to be,

which is why part of why that came up.

And it was an open world game, single-player open world.

And

I guess the idea was going to be, yeah, exactly.

Basically, both both Black Panthers and so on.

I mean,

mismanagement is a single easy word for that kind of thing.

Okay, I did it.

We did it.

Um,

am I crazy for thinking that like four years working on a game is it's that's not it's the high end of what you should be doing for like an IP title

pre-production is completely insane.

Uh

I think it's like the definition of like

pre-production specifically.

Yeah, okay.

That's that's that's like if you have a working prototype in four fucking years, you're fired.

Get the fuck out of here.

No, no, no, that's fair.

That is fair.

Correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

I would have enjoyed seeing what a fucking Wakanda setting would have looked like, but whatever.

See it never, I suppose.

One goofy little bit is there's a toy company that's currently working on a number of Assassin's Creed figures, and they had all of the assassins lined up, but for some reason,

Edward Kenway was not on the table.

Oh, that's weird.

And then when they asked asked them, hey, why is Edward not on the table?

They basically went, oh, well, it's no secret that something is happening with Edward.

So, you know, and then they went, is that announced?

And then they're like,

well, there's articles about stuff happening.

There's rumors out there.

So everyone sucks at this, dude.

Everyone sucks at this so bad.

It's like, all right, black flag is getting remade.

Sure.

Like, you and me are like people who know like a couple of things, and we've never fucking slipped up, and we're dumb idiots.

Like,

I mean, I think there's

so hard.

I think there's a voice that we turn on that is the I am slipping up voice.

Whoa,

what the break the girl?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, maybe if.

Wouldn't it be fucking crazy if

when we start talking like goofy, like, yeah, but but no, um, there you go.

Basically, soft confirmation that a black flag remake is happening.

So, that's so fucking, I gotta tell you, man, picking like singular Assassin's Creed games to remake is just like the absolute peak of a collapse of confidence.

It's so fucking lame.

Well, I find this is an interesting peek at the idea of like the discussion we have where you go, do you remake the games that need it the most, or do you remake the ones that people love?

I remake Assassin's Creed

every time,

It's the same game.

But like,

the option to like, like, okay, of the franchise being like, whatever,

the repetition.

In this situation where you're like, if you grabbed the predecessor, you could save the past or you could re hit, re you can re-release the hits, you know?

Like, which game needs more saving?

Assassin's Creed 3 or Black Flag?

Okay, but what would people actually buy, I suppose, right?

And then you have that argument.

So

I don't know that you're ever going to see a large IP go for the game that needed fixing over the one that is

already fine.

I think with Assassin's Creed, it's a totally moot point because every Assassin's Creed is the remake of the last one.

Also, Skull and Bones

and that whole thing means

Skull and bones, but maybe we need to get boats out here because people want their boats, because they're not going to get the boats that we promised the boats they'd be getting.

First quadruple A game ever.

So,

what happened to those boats?

Quadruple A.

Yeah.

So, this was just funny, but

you know, just a little earlier this morning, Gene,

yeah, again, shout out Gene Park is just like, so

I played the Welcome Tour at the Nintendo Preview event, and the game is deeper than we thought.

Oh, dude, he was telling me about that on my show a couple days ago.

He's like, the most excited game to play is Welcome Tour.

Welcome Tour pilled.

There's potentially tons of zones with fun minigames to find and beat.

Wanted to play it more than Mario Kart.

No time to unlock it all.

I don't think I was a quarter of the way to finishing it.

If this is a demo, it's packed with games.

It still should have come with the system, yes, but it might be a longer game than Astro's Playroom.

Okay, I'm going to tell you this right now.

What the fuck is happening?

I'm going to tell you.

So we had this exact conversation on Sunday, right?

That's so insane.

He was like super like, no, Welcome Tour is the shit.

Welcome tour.

And

he told me about one of the games in Welcome Tour, and it might be the single best

demo thing anything has ever had ever.

So in Welcome Tour, you can walk up to a bouncing ball, and the Welcome Tour challenge is for you to correctly answer which of the bouncing balls is running at 30, 60, and 120 FPS.

And you can correctly guess it a couple of times.

It gives you a little badge to put on your character and unlocks more mini-games.

Whoa.

Damn.

Okay.

I mean, look, but who's going to know this?

Who is going to look at Welcome Tour for $40 and be like, wait, what?

It's not.

It's seven.

Oh, wasn't it?

Sorry.

It's $7.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well, then

it's extra insane that it's not a pack-in game.

Okay, okay, all right.

That's it's crazy that this is like he's like, nah, this has more going on than Marlo.

I just changed it to 10 bucks.

Okay, yeah, it's $10.

Okay.

Man,

welcome tour is packed with content.

Fucking L.

It's so funny, dude.

I just, okay, so word of mouth is going to have to spread that there's stuff to see here.

Yo, there's stuff in Western.

This is assuredly Niyamoto just fucking stomping his feet and going, No, we made it.

It's got money, right?

And Reggie doesn't work there anymore, so Reggie can't be like, You dumb idiot, you gotta put a fucking package.

But also, like, if Nintendo's gonna acknowledge like a tech demo and/or show off more technical things, it has to do so in a fun, Nintendo-like, friendly, Nintendo-like way.

You can't just talk about frame rate cold, you know?

Yeah,

yeah,

Crazy.

All right.

Let's take a couple letters.

Hey, if you want to, oh,

there's a small thing.

Ubisoft's having court stuff, and they all sound like horrible criminals.

So you can go look that up if you like.

Oh, yeah.

I just didn't bother with that.

We'll see what it is.

Yeah, no, it's just exactly all the stuff that we've all heard for years and years and years.

But now in a courtroom, so they're having a really good time with it.

If you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Hello, it's Pat the Sloth and Woolly the Turtle.

May says, I've been on a mecha kick lately and I decided to go through Zone of the Enders games to stream them with a friend.

To a friend.

While I was playing the first game on Emulator, I decided to play Mars Remaster of Zoe 2 on Steam.

Both my friend and I immediately noticed just how much faster it was than the original.

As I played only an hour or two, only an hour or so of Zoe 2 many years ago, I thought it was a massive increase in speed from one to two.

I thought the massive increase was normal.

Every battle was incredibly fast, and we were impressed at how quick and fluid the gameplay was.

It was hard, but it was fun.

However,

when I got to the final fights, the difficulty increased tenfold, and I spent hours on both fights with Viola,

including the battle where you must parry the boss to delete the virus without killing the orbital frame.

It was absurd.

It was absurd that developers would throw the player into a small arena arena and force them to learn how to parry 80% of the way through the game let alone parry in such an incredibly fast game 60 plus attempts later I was victorious spent the next two hours on final bosses after more than 70 attempts at 133 total deaths I beat the game and sort of never touched it again from the amount of pain I felt afterwards in my arm I checked out YouTube videos to see what I could have done differently and I wondered why all the gameplay was so slow did a little research and found out that the game ties its logic to the frame rate if vSync is turned turned on.

As I was running the game on a high-end PC and 165Hz monitor, I was playing Zoe 2 at 275% speed, which explains why every battle was a Dragon Ball fight.

Had I checked earlier, I might have saved myself some frustration and pain, but my stupidity ascended me to Mecha Godhood as base Zoe 2 feels too slow now.

How do you not like

interpret that the game is running in fast forward?

Well, I guess, like, like, wouldn't dialogue or any other assets also

be super strange?

I

mean, cutscenes might play out a weird way, but I would assume every other conversation or asset played would tip you off that something's really wrong and off.

Can I look at a fucking.

I'm going to just play amazing.

But now regular

fight at two times speed.

But now this looks like Looney Tunes, and this is only 200%.

How could you possibly think that it was normal?

And now their brain is broken because regular speed is too slow.

They've conditioned the whole game off of 275.

That's psychotic.

That's not those weirdos that are listening to us at two times speed right now.

God forbid.

Listen, folks, if you're going to open up a fucking emulator and and do this shit this way isn't even an emulator, right?

He's describing the the PC release, like the Steam version.

Uh, they mentioned the emulator at first, but then the Steam release of Zoe 2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay, right,

right, right, right.

Uh fuck,

yeah, I'm watching like the final boss of Zoe 2 right now on two times speed, and it's it's it's nonsense.

I don't know how anyone could think

that on 75% more than this, it's like wow, this game's really intense.

Um, I know that with older games, too, you run into that constantly.

Anything you run on a fucking DOS box or whatever is going to be super subjected to that problem, but I didn't think the Zoe 2 PC remaster was so old that that would happen with it, you know?

It's not a very good version of the game,

tough times.

Um,

all right, let's see over here:

High cross-up and frame trap.

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing how demanding games can be on game design.

You were discussing it.

And one of you gentlemen brought up Arma in passing.

I am the At and Dance Manager and partial game master of an Arma 3 clan with 50 consistent members.

And I'd lend my 2.5k hours of Arma playtime since 2019 to confirm just how right you are.

The unit isn't the type

to require that we LARP as actual military, though many such units exist.

But we generally respect the command structure so that we can smoothly play with our weekly two-hour operations, and above all else, we are picky as hell.

Bohemia Interactive couldn't possibly meet our demands for realistic Mill Sim sandbox.

Guns and their likenesses are protected intellectual property, after all, let alone the work hours required to make everything we want in an armor.

So we get what we want by doing it ourselves.

I'm confident when I say that armor modding scene rivals Skyrims in terms of depth.

Oh yeah.

I believe that.

Untold swaths of gun equipment and Mio vehicle mods, map mods, ragdoll physics, frame physics, ambient sound, AI behavior, depth.

The list just goes on.

It's crazy.

Well, there are entire genres of games that I look at and I go, did some armor weirdo fucking spin this off from something?

Well, I uh uh

a lot of these mods also have multiple versions of different uh people with uh different coding approaches.

At this point, the community sentiment is that modders are responsible for all the game's content.

We're so specific about it, and we don't even ask the devs to make content anymore.

We just want them to make a better platform for the mods.

At a certain point,

does the game hobby get more complex than just joining a militia?

I don't know.

That's crazy.

This isn't like death of the author.

This is like murder of the author.

We don't even give a fuck what you have to release anymore.

Make, make sell us a canvas and we'll do what we want with it.

Yeah, I guess that's I love that there are people out there doing that weird shit.

I love it.

I don't want to do it.

That's fucking crazy, but I love that they're out there.

And one last one over here.

Todd the Rod Johnson says,

Dear Woolly,

no, you're not going to get these dumbs.

No, fuck that.

Anyways.

Oh, yeah.

Good start.

I heard your request for better emails.

Well, your titling

is garbage on that.

Oh, sick.

The question is, how do you feel about brushing your teeth in the shower?

Is it fine?

Is it gross?

In my short 30 years of life, I've done it a handful of times, usually when I'm in a hurry, thinking I'm saving time.

I know Pat's weird about doing things a certain way.

You're not even saving time.

Because they have to be done a certain way.

How do you feel about this?

What the fuck are we doing?

I don't like to brush my fucking teeth with warm water.

That feels disgusting.

What are we doing?

I just

like save time.

Or why don't you just do all your bathroom tasks at the same time?

What overlap at all?

What are you talking about?

Like, just shit in the toilet.

Oh, look at Pat.

He shits in a toilet because he always has to do things a certain way.

Also, some showers and or tubs, depending on what you're in, like a tub will usually have like a decent like drain and that'll, you know, whatever, everything will go.

But some like stand-up showers don't have like the most

open grating.

So like spitting out foam from like brushing your teeth, the foam will just kind of sit on top of the grating.

That's nonsense.

Do you know what I mean?

Like if you have a shower that's a stand-up shower with a really thin, slow training thing, then you're just going to have a bunch of like toothpaste foams collecting and gucking it up.

That would suck.

Also, I brush my teeth more often than I take a shower.

So, like,

how are

I guess the idea is

the idea behind it is you're late for work and you're getting up and you're like, oh God, I have time for nothing.

So, you're just doing everything at the same time.

But, yeah, no.

Also, I use an electric one.

So, like, I don't want to fucking have that getting water on it and killing me in the process.

I don't think that's a reasonable fear.

Well, it's not a radio, but still, why would I hold an electric device under the shower if I don't have to take that risk?

That seems dumb.

So, like, I agree with you, but I

don't think there's a risk there, man.

Okay, well, the risk is that my thing will stop working.

How about that?

Yeah, no, that's a much closer risk.

Yeah, okay.

Well,

that, I don't.

This

seems like, oh, I saved so much time and then

you just didn't.

How much?

Oh, you, what, you saved fucking

45 fucking seconds?

I don't, I

yeah, I don't know.

Like, people, people, people, what people do in the showers is

my consciousness is expanding.

You know about shower beers?

You've seen that?

You know, that's a thing.

Yeah.

Shower beers is a thing.

People are doing shower beers.

People are doing all kinds of shit that you're not supposed to be doing in the shower.

You should be washing your ass in the shower.

That's what the shower is for.

Anyways,

do your thing.

Yes,

these are just called alcoholics.

I mean, yeah, I mean,

no, it's a shower beer.

No, it's just refreshing, you know.

It's a way to relax.

It's so, it's just a different feeling, you know, when you're, when you're shaking and then you have it.

You know, when you're relaxing and you're being belted by hot water and you're like, what if I got to drink an extremely warmed up beer in this scenario?

Yeah.

And then the nerves go away.

And then the nerves stop, you know, it's really relaxing when.

Yeah.

Anyways, all right.

Good stuff, everybody.

Wonderful.

That'll do.

We'll see you next time.

The Expedition 33 spoiler cast will commence right now.

Okay, so this is going to include spoilers for literally every single thing in Expedition 33.

So if you don't want to hear anything that could possibly spoil you about the Expedition 33 Claire Obscure, the video game, it would be a really good time to stop listening to us right now.

Goodbye.

And leave and turn your ears off and do whatever you need to do.

Giving them a nice little, little delay.

There you go.

Everybody out.

You know what?

If you type I'm out, you're taking too long.

Just go.

Yeah, you've already taken far too long to be like,

if you're saying goodbye and you still get spoiled because you're taking too long to type it, then too bad for you.

And we've given you like way

usually do.

Okay, so here's where I'm at.

FYI.

The only thing I have not done is Simon.

Yo, that dude's a motherfucker, man.

Simon.

Simon is a fucking problem.

Oh, man.

Hey, could you not tell that they liked from software games?

Holy shit, dude.

I wandered up.

As I said, I was scraping through Act Three and I wandered up to Renoir's drafts.

And I got to the end, and I was like, okay, I can see this room is meant to be a challenging,

heavy, heavy damage.

Everything in here is like a super freak.

Everything is crazy.

But not as crazy as doing 11 million damage.

And then you walk down and fall to the bottom of the abyss, and Artorius is sitting there,

you know.

And he's got the French Moonlight Great Sword.

And you're like, oh, it's the guy who made the map look like what it looks like.

It's the guy who committed an atom bomb on the fucking axon, you never get to fight.

Exactly.

And I'm like, let's see what it's about.

And then the first form goes down like nothing.

I'm like, oh, no.

Oh, yeah, it's not that bad.

That's like a real fight.

And then the real fight begins.

And you're like, oh, they're waiting.

This is the fight that's left for the stupid freaks, the ones like us.

This is like, hey, listen.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to mandate something that only like two bosses in the entire game do, which is parrying within your own parry animation.

I mean,

like, and putting strings of variable timing out there that are like 10 hits long, you know, with double timing on all of them.

Yep, yep, yep.

There's the, there's the ghost swings, right?

Uh, and then

you just get the like, oh, did you go down and have a

turn go by?

Bye, party member, you're removed from the canvas.

So I was like, okay, okay, this is real.

This is the last real thing.

I can tell.

I can tell.

And I will be back.

He's breaking the rules.

It's it's like he is smashing the rules of the system.

Yep, yep.

Um, so uh, I don't know.

Did are you getting back to it, or did you do it?

Oh, I killed his ass.

Oh, you did it?

Okay, fucking cooked.

So, uh, I did you get to phase three, huh?

Did you get to phase three?

No, no, I didn't.

Okay, so I got to phase two, and I was like, all right, like, I'll be back later.

I think phase two is crazy.

Yeah.

Phase three

is so crazy that I built my party around skipping it.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Wow.

Okay.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Phase three is so nuts that I built the entire team around feeding Mael.

Okay.

So she could do a 25 million point hit

and just fly through the entire thing.

So that Min told me that there was a bugged out damage on Stedthall, Stedhall.

No, that's not it.

Okay, because he told me that there was a bug on the amount of damage that you could one-shot everything.

And I was like, and he said, I just did that.

And I was like, oh, so you like the fight skill.

Stenhall was bugged to do way, way, way, way, way more damage, but it was patched by the time you ever got to Stenthall.

Okay, okay.

No, what I did was I used Roulette

and every single damage buff Picto that the game allows

and every damage buff thing that my party can throw on and I hit him with fucking Gomage

Gomage and just evaporated his fucking ass.

Okay, Gomage would do it.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I'm like, I have all the damage on.

I have none of the life, and I have all my stats geared towards maximizing the scaling and,

you know, damage points, escaling on the weapon, et cetera.

All of it cranked.

And I'm like, I don't know what's going to hit for that number unless he's stunned.

And so then, yeah, that would make sense.

So that is called every variation.

So I did mine was 25 million.

Some people in the chat are saying 100 million.

Some people in the chat are saying like a billion.

Whoa.

There are two ways to fight Simon.

You get through phase one, everybody learns phase one.

Phase two, you can either

do the fight normal and learn phase three, at which point you are going to learn pain like you could not imagine,

or you will see that one time like I did and said, I'm not doing that.

Okay, and build your character around blowing through the health bar so hard that you don't get to see the third phase.

I look forward to it because I'm glad that

at this extent, right, Guillaume and Crew went, we know that people like you and I exist, and this is for you to sit here and fucking throw your ego at it, right?

Because here's the bit.

You talked about it many times and like, yeah, for sure,

it's been clear.

You got to throw that painted power off when you're walking around a lot of that map.

Hey, do you want to do the reacher fight with Alicia?

Well, turn painted power off if you actually want to have that fight and fucking do it.

And here's the thing.

I turned painted power off on a lot of those, but I still had such turn-skipping fuck builds that I still evaporated.

Okay, so

what I did, like at a certain, I've never had such a wild experience where you want to talk about feast or famine.

By the end of this game, I'm playing.

You're playing with your food, right?

I'm literally like, I started stopping.

I wasn't doing moves anymore.

I was just doing single hits.

And then I'm like, let me skip my turn because they're going to die before before they say all their dialogue.

Well, I got to a point with Verso where I was doing like a burn build for Verso, and it was like double burn on break, base attack breaks, combo attack for cheater, and all the all the crit buffs.

Yeah, and like enemies were getting like fucking burn stacks of like 300 to like 900, and they were taking like millions of damage a turn unavoidable.

Huh.

I was like, oh, I can't.

So I didn't even lean into burn in that way.

I tried it out a couple times early on, and then I saw some stuff that attracted my attention much more.

And what I thoroughly enjoyed was

the

break and then unleashing full power, virtuous max damage nukes on broken enemies.

Monaco, with his level three,

will fill and break, right?

So you just immediately go into life bar evaporation on everything you can see.

Honestly, they're all busted.

Like CL was a character I didn't use for a lot of the game, and then I built her up at the end.

And the reason I built her up at the end is because she can just make someone else's turn do double damage.

That's the point.

Yes.

I was going to say, like, I tried to find her highest, like, DPS kind of thing.

Her highest DPS is to feed Mael.

Yeah, her on her own, it just wasn't working.

You know, even when you're like doing her strongest abilities and critting every turn and using something that like adds extra foretell for critting, none of that was anywhere near the level of damage the other characters are doing.

So I'm like, okay, you're just passing off the bottom.

I don't think almost any, in a game that's built in this system, I don't think anyone could ever beat the other character does twice as much damage.

Right?

It's it's just put put a meteor behind your meteor.

Yeah.

You know, and

Verso as well was obvious like he had like five different ways to do annihilation level damage infinity damage.

Yeah.

I started liking like I'm like which one of these has the coolest ending animation, you know Phantom Stars looks sick when you finish it off with it, you know So

is it ever vital that you pull off painted power for a bunch of things?

Like the final confrontation.

I've I beat the final confrontation once with painted power off and had a grand old time.

That was a great fight.

and it feels like a fight that was built assuming you had painted power off

and then i fought that fight again with painted power on and it and like the fight broke you don't see any of the cool shit the cutscene like straight up like broke yeah i okay so i i did it on you killed first for you killed renar first phase and then um everyone's all tired and going he keeps healing and i was like oh shit whoops you know and so then i i reloaded and i turned it i turned it off and then i was still like okay i'm gonna hit you for 999 apiece but you're acting once every like 15 turns that my characters get yeah because you're

i'm like i have destroyed the system

i pulled cheater off i i had picked like you have to work to make it a fight and so here's the thing like The game, it's fun to be busted and cruise through it.

Because I do admit, I'm like, anytime an enemy has nothing new to show me i'm like delete delete delete delete you know who cares but yeah you could oh dude i ran through an entire dungeon with death bomb on all my characters

and second chance uh death bomb is which one auto death death bomb and second chance so i would enter into the fight everyone would explode and die and kill all the random battles okay and then they would revive so that they counted as a win and i just ran through like an entire dungeon with that shit on yeah and i even see i was like i don't care you can't fight me Well, at the end, I saw the one, you know, and I was like, oh, this is just for that extra flex.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The one is incredibly powerful.

When you're at one of one.

It's super strong.

So it's 105% crit, which is like, I'm already stat critting maximum.

But

when you're at one of one HP, does that count as low health?

It counts as full health.

It counts as full health.

Okay.

Which means you can put on the 20% damage boost when at full health.

Picto?

Yeah.

Also, it means that

moves that take percentages of your HP and stuff like that don't do anything.

They're just free.

Moves that take percentages of your health don't do anything.

Like Verso has a move that puts him to A rank, but puts him down to one HP.

Yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, guess what?

I'm at one HP.

So I'll actually get free A rank at the start of the fucking fight.

Oh,

okay, okay.

The subtraction moves.

I see.

Right, right, right.

Because there's start the fight with high health damage boost and there's low health damage boost.

So I was like, well, just pick one or the other.

Fight number one.

The first fight you ever do with the one on, everyone is set to one and one HP.

The second fight you do with the one on, you are one of your existing masks HP.

So depending on which one you actually want to do, you can build it for full health builds or low health builds.

The one lets you do either or.

Okay.

It's super good.

Because I saw it drop me to one of my whole bar.

Yeah, that's because that was the second fight you did.

So then only the first fight you do after equipping it and resting, you have one of one HP.

All other fights after that, you are one of whatever your real HP value is.

So you can decide to use that picto to either have full health 100% of the time or have like the tiniest amount of health 100% of the time.

Oh, and you choose to heal or keep it.

Yeah.

Oh, you can't give you

a really good ability.

Well, that is not explicitly stated in that little text.

I mean, yeah, yeah, that's a lot of extra depth to it.

Interesting.

Okay.

That is, yeah, that, that, that doesn't, that, that sounds confusing, but I, I get what you mean, but like, it's meant to be used in one or the other ways.

Yeah,

Um

in any case uh

so uh I mean

mechanically I don't know like there's not much else to say besides just like it's incredibly fun to parry things and obviously I love that a lot.

I love the um

like the the challenge in like did you

Can you adapt to an animation immediately the first time you're seeing it?

Well, now sometimes yeah, sometimes no.

Well, how about you we're gonna start fucking with right?

And then also, sometimes a slam is like in like three frames, and sometimes it's like nine.

And you're like, oh, god damn it, you wound up and you came down way slower, you liar.

I think there's one fight in the entire game that is like explicitly poorly designed from a numerical perspective, and it's Klea.

Um, because of the healing,

no, not because of the healing because

she has way too much HP to not use painted power.

But but if you do use painted power you evaporate her in like two hits

like she's the medium she exists in a middle ground for no one

maybe there needs to be painted power 2 where you can cap at 9999 i was talking to people i think there should have been painted power 2 painted power 20k 100k 100k cap yeah yeah yeah that middle ground uh i think so i think so um

it because yeah i as i'm doing these these final cinematic moments, you're just like, oh,

I'm playing with my food at this point.

The final conversation, I stopped playing to let them talk.

I'm skipping five turns and doing one poke and then letting them talk.

I would like two things from this game ever in the future.

I would like a patch to ink to put loadouts into the game.

I think that would make everyone's life a lot easier.

Absolutely.

And I would like a harder difficulty that needed to be be there.

That tones,

it doesn't increase any of the values.

It just tones you down.

Agree.

It gives you like hard maximums on Lumina and stuff like that because

Visage and Siren are insanely poorly balanced for their own spot in the game.

And that sucks because they're awesome.

The interesting reveal that is like, if you are a Devil May Cry player, like the director,

this game, you can fucking stomp it so hard that it it can't keep up with you.

You know?

Fortunately, the actual story going through this is fucking fascinating.

It's fascinating.

It's interesting.

It is so much more interesting than its own synopsis.

Right?

Like,

so hey, here comes the big spoiler.

It's a painting.

It's all a painting.

What is that?

It's the matrix.

And

I got into a yelling match with my chat over and over.

And my main thing was

the question of are people in the painting even real is like so boring and pointless.

Every character in the story treats all the people in the painting as if they are real.

Renoir, in the final conversation of the game, listens to Ciel and listens to Lude and says that they're right,

but you don't care.

Right, though you may be.

And I was like, oh my God, right.

And so that's, yes.

And I think too, as well, the framing of it as a painting makes it weird for like,

it tricks, I think,

people, because if you were to call it, like you said, you're the matrix or something, if you were to call it like a full realized reality that you're playing God in, that's one thing.

But you think of it as, no, brush strokes on a canvas.

That's no big deal.

That's disposable, whatever, you know?

And then you have to internalize the idea that the logic of the world is so realized that people that were just stroked into existence had children who grew up normally, lived full lives,

and had kids and passed away and had nothing different from your own life because the cycle of life is that realized in

the setting.

It's also exclusive.

painted people have

free will.

A billion percent.

Because Eileen did not paint an entire society of people with the hidden desire to come kill her ass.

Right.

Okay.

Right.

That was reached as a societal reality of what was going on in the painting.

Unintended consequences of these are realized individuals with the most free will.

And to the point where when you get down to the ethical question at the end, and it's such an interesting way to put this, you're like, It is the most interesting ethical question I've ever seen.

It's so fascinating because it's like, are you a dumbass who's just going to stick by the idea of like, no, this doesn't, none of this matters, you're just distracting yourself?

Like, no, you're choosing to sacrifice one or the other, right?

There's no in-between here, right?

Yeah, no, the just, oh, it's not real, this is obvious, is like so not a conversation, so boring, right?

And, and, and, uh, that's, and that's that's the bit is where you're like,

the conversation between...

The villain doesn't even believe that.

The conversation between Mael and Renoir is so much more compelling than the version between Mael and Verso because you're like, Verso, dude.

Verso, you know this.

Right?

You're like, come on, dude.

Right?

And I think we all.

But here's what's so interesting, too, is the idea that, like, for him on his version, because you did both, of course, right?

Of course I did both.

Okay, which did you do first?

I did my L's.

Okay, same.

And then I went back and did Versos.

And then I did Versos, and then I reloaded my save to keep my L's.

So, yeah, I kind of, I did both, and then I kind of want to go back and do that as well, because

that's exactly it, right?

And the thing with Versos, because when we were talking earlier about Cyberpunk and giving people that, like, seeing their perspective on it, and in this game, it's super interesting interesting to see like everyone's um why they're convinced and to believe what they believe and everyone at right admits we only care about the ones close to us while we're making others suffer right every single character every character all the painted characters all the painted versions of existing characters all the all the real world versions of those same people all the painted people who have no analog the gestrals the fucking ice dudes every single person is a hypocrite and they say it out loud

we are all hypocrites we'll just keep doing this to each other right what i find so go ahead so every single person is right in their own mind yes because all of their priorities are different

Every single one goes, this is the thing that I care about.

Yes.

Here are my reasons that this is what I care about.

Yes.

And nothing you say will change my mind.

Convince me to change my mind.

And all of them are compelling.

Every single one of them is compelling.

All I have to do is move my perspective over like an inch and go, well, if I was a painted version of me, and all I had was a real dead family out there that was killing themselves, the only thing

that is my real family.

And that's the beauty of like Renor's final bit, where he's basically like,

he's being lied to, but he's like, I want to believe in my daughter.

It's going to just bring my heart a little bit of peace to believe that you mean what you're saying.

He knows.

He knows.

But he's choosing to be like, oh, okay, you know?

And you're like, fuck me, that's so much more painful, right?

The Verso question is one where he's...

I need to stop you for a second.

We all can agree that Verso is like one of like history's greatest monsters, right?

I'm not there with you on the

flying piece of shit that's ever been.

I'm not there with you on it.

I see where he's at.

And I know, I know, because I can see how it's like the game is meant to be like divisive and have these these messes.

And he has one that's very, very hatable on the surface there.

But I think, to me, at the very least,

I think his problem is, there's two things.

You see him going through the whole game being like undecided.

And you see it.

He's like,

right?

He's looking at like what he's compelled to do, what he's painted to do, and you're looking at him seeing his family and having all those

memories and stuff and kind of being like, I'm okay

with the bad outcomes here, and I'm not exactly trying too hard to

stop that, right?

His old message about how he had to fucking kill his girlfriend, but it's like, it's okay.

Once we fix this, we'll just bring everybody back.

You see him, you see that look on his face constantly of him being like, I don't know, I don't know.

It's really interesting, right?

And I feel like the moment you finally get to know him is the last, last, last lines.

It's him on the ground suffering, just being like, I can't live like this.

I can't.

I can't.

It's the most, it's all this, it's the most selfish in the moment, purest form of where he's at the whole time.

And to, and to be fair to him, his circumstances are completely different from everyone else's.

And they're, they're awful.

They're terrible.

Like, he was born out of like a sorrow of a wish of an image of a dead person.

And the and the remnant of the original is left to be that child in Omelas, the one who must sit there doing this forever in order for the system to work, right?

You tell the kid that needs to sit there the whole time that that's your job forever now, right?

And you don't get enough of that kid's like, you get the energy that it's like, he's like, I maybe I should,

you know, but he's also willing to listen to Verso.

Yeah, Painted Verso,

you do rarely, very rarely get to talk to Painted Verso.

And usually you don't know if you're talking to Painted Verso.

So you

be the one that tell him that he needs to go through that forever, you know?

Here's the thing.

He doesn't want the painting to go either.

There is a line of dialogue.

He feels that the people in the painting are real and he loves his painting.

Painted Verso's primary issue is that his painting is destroying his real family.

And it is.

Yes.

It is destroying his real family.

And he knows that

the memory, also, there's two things of him, right?

There's two things going on.

One, there's the baseline idea that immortality is torture, right?

It's just very from software.

Right.

Discussion.

Clear.

Then there's the idea that the memory of

who I'm based on is doing the worst thing to the people I care about the most.

Right.

And to that end, I am somebody who would self-sacrifice myself to end that and bring them peace.

Absolutely.

But that agency has been removed from me.

Right.

Yes.

And so now the idea that it's like, so we go through this whole motion where he is not looking at these people that he's equal to as lesser than.

He's not seeing it with the eyes of a God.

He's amongst them, but he's still willing to sacrifice because of his own version of his own struggle.

It's like, no, what matters to me the most is I can't live like this, right?

It is one where when you look at the Mayel version of things, it's fucked because you're like, oh, she chooses to live in this, which is the life-preserving outcome.

Let's be real.

But she finds an outcome for him that is, okay,

what if you could age?

She asked him, if you could grow old, would you like to go?

Would that give you a reason to smile, right?

And that was a thing where it's like, that was an outcome that I get that he was not factoring in an all or nothing situation.

But he still hates it.

You can tell he hates it.

And there's that moment, and the brilliance of that like short film is, look, it's the happy ending.

Everything is great.

Never forget what the fucking truth is.

Never forget that outside the frame, someone with a fucked up, bloody, blue-eyed banging their head against the wall of reality is just living in here forever.

And Renoir is staring at that.

Never forgetting.

I've gone in a circle about this.

I've gone in a circle.

So, when I got the Mael ending, so Mael and Versa's endings are beautiful because they are clear obscure.

Mael starts beautiful, sunny, hopeful, ends in darkness to make you feel bad about the idyllic situation you created.

And then, on the flip side, Verso's ending forces Ciel to just kill herself at the altar of the fucking painting.

And Lune sits down and stares him down and goes, you're going to look at me when you do

that.

That is my favorite.

That is my favorite thing of the whole ending sequence.

The best part of that entire thing.

Because, okay, hold on a second.

Who did you form a relationship with, if anything?

Lune.

Okay, same.

Same.

Yeah.

Right?

I waited.

I waited and it paid off, right?

Yeah.

Because

I was hoping that it was like, this was like, I'm like, oh, we got options?

Please tell me we got options.

And fucking, hey, we have options, right?

So I went, Lune.

And when that moment happens, and you see CL walk in, and you're like, oh, that's brutal.

He hugs the friends.

Okay, what's up now, dude?

What are you going to say to her?

Right.

And she's like, you don't even get the fucking chance.

You don't get the chance.

I'm going to sit right here on the other side and you're going to fucking look at me as you do this.

She's not going to walk in and disintegrate.

Oh, she's not going to leave and give him the chance to forget about her.

No, it's

so powerful.

You're going to look me in the eye.

But then we get the dissendre

yeah yeah grief and moving on also she never you also see the moments too where like cell having that like that conflict with her facing her uh earlier backstory which is the saddest fucking thing in the world

is crazy it's the saddest thing in the world

to me cell's backstory is the moment that i ceased caring about the level of reality of anyone in lumiere done and done because

because aline created these people and put them in this situation to endure these hardships.

I don't care how real they are.

They're real to me, damn it.

More importantly, Ciel's story, she is realer than the entire Dessandre family with a backstory like that.

She had the same thing happen to her that fucking the Dessandre adults had, but she moved on

in a progressive, that's it.

Like, constructive way.

And, and, and has, so when you're talking about like this game about grief and handling grief, she's been the fuck through it more than anyone else has and understands it, right?

And so, that's why when she comes through at the end, that she's fighting for the world and she's fighting for their reality, but is also like,

I've, I'm seeing an old friend, right?

I'm returning to this abyss that I almost once entered myself

and

tried to, right?

If not for fucking SKA, right?

And, and she can accept that with a um dignity that's different, but Lune, the entire game has been fighting, crawling, scraping for survival.

There is no, there is no give up in her whatsoever.

And all the way to the end, like the shock on her face the first time, right, in the harbor is clear.

She's just like, what the fuck did we do with this?

And he gives that look.

And now, when she knows that it's all been for what, dude, I, oh, that's sick.

I think I think it's, it's genius.

My chest caved in on that sit down.

Ciel, Lune and Ciel mirror the Dessandre.

And like, Lune is somebody defined by the legacy of her parents and feels like she never had her own path to go forward.

So she had to be super gung-ho about technology and the expedition, but that wasn't really what she wanted to do.

She wanted to do music.

Which is what happened with all of the Dessandre kids.

You have the perfect eldest daughter who's a total prodigy.

And then you have a musician who's implied that he should be painting.

And then we have a writer who should be painting and it backfires on her, which is why Alicia has a her method of talking to the audience is via a very, very well-written prose letter instead of dialogue or music.

Oh,

okay.

That's why she writes a letter because she is a writer.

Oh, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get that.

Okay, that was.

Also, let's just go, let's just speed past the fact that they mentioned the writers.

The writers guild time.

Yeah, the sequel.

A bunch of Alan Wakes over here doing goofy shit.

The interpretation of her potentially being, like, yeah, that it's not expressly spelled out, but that is

a moment of a character.

Yeah,

I can buy that.

That makes sense.

Okay, so

I've spun in a circle about these endings, right?

Because, like, yes, Verso, Verso's ending has the cleanest break, and he is like massacring an entire generation of people, but the people who caused this can actually heal.

And maybe it is better for Mayell to live in the real world.

However, she is horribly disfigured and can't speak.

So it makes it's very easy to understand why she would go and live in Lilliniere and keep all those people.

I mean, I go round and the most understandable.

Yeah.

Because everybody had a good reason.

I think Eline is the only person.

She's like objectively evil.

Like we, I think we cycle around to the paintress being the worst person in the story for causing this nightmare of misery.

But I still fight back on that and I still push back because even though you can circle around and then land on that, the moment of extreme grief from a mother in that, you're not thinking clearly.

You're just vibing.

You're just going on, my suffering is all I can see.

There's nothing in front of me but despair.

I can't take that part away from the equation of her character, right?

So then I go, well, Verso.

She's fucking grieving, man i hate verso so much

um and at the end of the day my my

like my thoughts are currently resting with how much i hate verso and there's a really interesting simple set of reasons for that both endings are terrible both endings are amazing Both endings have crazy downsides.

Yeah.

Like, which is the point.

Outrageous.

The absolute point.

Yes.

A million times.

Like

my gut.

And if I had to go with my gut at the end of the day i'd be like i didn't go and do this shit so that fucking gustave did that shit for nothing no no and so yeah

gustave and sophie and ciel and lune and pierre and their kid they get to live fuck you and that's it and that's it right right but fundamentally fundamentally and that is to do what the characters kind of do as well to say i care about what i care about the most regardless, right?

It is the same thing.

And this is a difference between our personalities directly, because i say and look at it and go every single one of these people is claire obscure yeah they're all there's a there's a there's a little bit of that darkness inside every good solution and

i i got i can put my i got my boy i can put myself in renoval's shoes or aline's shoes dude i want my family i don't care man this is insane considering it is a nightmare and then my priority would be rock solid and i don't give a shit who has to go like i don't give a fuck right

and and round and round and the reason why I focus on Verso, painted Verso specifically, is because

there's Arnvie à Témie, there's the Life to Love, and there's Avie à Pandre, which is A Life to Paint, which is our two really bad endings.

And on Spotify, they both have 11-minute tracks associated with them.

However, there is a third 11-minute piece of music called Arnvie Arévie, which is a life to dream,

which is written on Alicia's letter to Verso.

Yes, that is what's written.

Alicia's letter to Verso says, basically,

all of you are totally intractable.

Like, no one is willing to budge a single inch

in the entire discussion.

And that is what is causing the problem because no one can compromise.

The compromise, even Verso's fucking painting, even the painting itself says, you know if this wasn't annihilating my fucking family and aline and renoir and alicia and clay could come visit that's what i was waiting for and leave yes yes would actually we could maintain fucking lumiere and everyone's lives that's not we could move past grief and you know what verso does with that letter he fucking throws it tosses it he tosses it he tosses it right and that's verso's legacy on the game he allows gustave to die on purpose because it would allow him to manipulate Mael.

But Gustav would have argued for Verso's point.

Gustav would have pushed Mael out.

He would not have allowed her to stay.

He would have been able to convince Mael to leave.

He would have never let her stay, 100%, right?

That's clear.

I think that wrinkle is what's so fucking fascinating is because what we were gearing up for right before he walks through is a situation where I go, okay, if everyone can compromise, then we can have a world where, look, you'll have, you'll come to visit and you'll leave sometimes and that'll be okay, right?

And that's all there is to it.

We can continue having things exist and nobody has to go to the extremes and we don't have to have this destruction and horrible suffering, but we can also say,

visit, you can, you can visit the people you care about over here and continue to have your family over there, right?

But you walk through and you have that thing with the letter, which is again, a horrendous thing.

But what else is going hand in hand with that letter is the idea of forcing this immortal suffering on a person who's the one who must deal with it everyone else must must uh can do what they want but one must suffer eternally and like you can weigh the cost benefits all you want over the numbers but tell the person who's suffering forever too bad fucking deal with it you'd be the one sympathy i would have a lot more sympathy for painted verso even in his immortal suffering if he wasn't a traitorous monster every opportunity

And the thing about the child is that we are not given enough, like we're given enough ambiguity on the willingness of the child to continue, but just because a child is willing to continue, it's not clear that that's actually an existence that would not be torturous to them, right?

You can't say for certain that the ghost-faced fucking child painting forever is a happy outcome for that child.

Like, I can't say it's not entirely a negative one either.

There's not enough.

I am calling they walk out of what a compromise might look like, and the next door over is fucking Omelas, dude.

And you're looking at, you're looking at that or minority report or whatever.

And now you have to go, all right, you can have your happy ending as long as one person must suffer for it.

And back to Aline, in which, hey, Aline, maybe you shouldn't have turned that child into a battery for the entire universe.

But when you come up with the mechanics of how to make her, when you, but doesn't that tell you how much of an amazing painter she is?

Oh, yeah.

Because like, you're you're like, how is she so much more skilled than everybody else?

Because she doesn't just make it, she creates the code behind the world to make the world, right?

It's a much more, it's a Minecraft server where you just build up a fucking building versus the one where you make it actually have a working calculator, you know?

I'm so impressed by that logic of it as well.

So here's the thing: I never interpreted it as painted, sorry, painting Verso's soul is an agony and torture.

I interpret it as painted

Verso

is living agony and torture because he was built out of grief.

All of the painted family, except for Renoir, are desperate to kill themselves because they are painted in Elene's image of themselves post-tragedy.

I think that the inner voice you hear as he's on the ground revealing his true self is the same of him as the person of the soul he's based on.

And deep in that inner child as well, we're looking at a possibility that that child is suffering.

I don't think there's enough to convince me otherwise, right?

And so you don't get a clean, you don't get a clean break on anybody here, right?

And like that is, that is so like important because like, hey, if that was my kid, yeah, I would like, I'd be renewed.

I don't want him on life support forever, you know.

Your family, your family.

Family's comfortable.

But then if

the fucking solutionnaire is like, okay, well, in order to pull my my loved one off life support, I'm going to hit this, that fucking fictional button that kills a million people.

And I mean, and that's the thing is the whole time I'm wondering, I'm like, I would slam it.

Well, because

if you were standing, if our positions were switched, right, that day, right?

Yeah, I mean, the way where Nar talks when you first enter the Act III and he sets up the pieces where you're like, oh, he doesn't think of these people as real is like, no, no,

he doesn't really believe that.

He gets it.

And then later on, you find out he goes, I was lost in there myself, and Aline pulled me out.

It is so, it is so wild.

So he knows

who is past the arguments that you're having with the party.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's, he, I was lost in it myself, and then I got saved because it's too tempting.

It's too insanely tempting to live in a world of your own making like that, you know?

Um, and God, here's how fucking great my greatest is.

How great Lune.

Lune is so good.

She's so good.

That sit is so good.

It's everything.

And And the fact just, again, the part where my brain is going,

I said it last time, but how does one respond to the idea that you're like, hey, you're not real.

Your life doesn't matter.

You're a fiction.

You should be, just, how do you accept that reality?

You know, and the fact that she comes back from the fucking beyond and goes, fuck you, dude.

I don't give a shit.

I still am fighting for the same things I believe in.

This was exactly what I wanted to do.

Because I think that, oh, are they not real?

Are Are they not?

It doesn't matter.

Lune and CL both come back one outrage.

How dare you?

Bullshit.

How dare you.

I don't give a shit.

Like, yeah, yeah, you got your own real family.

I don't give a shit.

Fuck you.

You betrayed me here for real.

But also,

they then even go on to be like, okay, so this is a canvas.

Mael and them are gods.

Okay, we're going to go beat him up.

You're going to bring my fucking parents back to life.

You're going to bring my husband back to life.

Everything, you're gonna give me back my baby.

Everything that's only fair.

Fuck you.

We're gonna go.

And like they just immediately move on.

And, like, how could you not like if God came down right now and said, Wooly, by the way, you're not real.

And you'd be like, fuck you.

I'm a shit.

What are you supposed to say?

Kill you.

Right.

How beautiful, side, just little notes, random.

How beautiful is it that the fucking curator, when he powers up, steps into his family and comes back out in the next phase.

Isn't that the most beautiful?

Like, the most

brain drops and I go in and walk back out ready to take you on is so hype.

I think I'll give it a one-up you.

I'll one-up you for maybe my most pop-off moment of the whole game where, oh, no, it's the end.

He's going to go for phase two.

He's doing it one more one.

My else, like, no.

And it's like, yeah, he has a great experience with breaking the rules.

The whole game, cryptos are about breaking the logos of the world.

Like,

you are damaging the internal logic of the way the painting works.

And Mayel

leaves the battle system

to attack him,

showing that Afshi is now like ascended.

And it calls out the move, too.

It says that he's doing it.

And you're just like, no, you don't.

You know, so satisfying.

I mean,

wondrous.

Wondrous.

Gustav, an extra shout-out as Gustav is the realest person in the story.

Gustav, within the confines of the game's own logic, within the storyline, Gustav should not have been able to invent the Lumina converter.

Like,

Gustav was able to create a technology that

fundamentally changes the reality of their experience.

I love the idea that what's special about you, besides just being a pretty good dude who can't who's not built for this pressure right he's someone who's like if he finds out the truth of his nature he might have buckled right he we oh but like he until he learned that miel was trapped and then he would have become re re re refound his strength yeah i can buy that right but the lumina converter is not the idea of like this in-game device that lets you like learn skills or whatever it's the idea that everyone on the party can learn them together and break what a traditional Final Fantasy game would teach you, right?

It's the ability to stack up way more skills than you should be able to across the party.

He broke the video game rule, you know, with his invention.

I love how fucking, again, I talk about how...

The painted power is supposed to only be given to Mayelle because it's hers.

But the Lumina converter...

Converter,

they can give the power of the painters to Lune and Ciel and Monaco.

The team can fight gods because of his invention.

That's That's not supposed to happen.

That's not what Aline imagined, right?

The fact that they're able to remove Lenoir at all is not supposed to be how it works.

Right.

By just beating him down, mind you.

And then you get like the whole unapologetic French bit, right?

I'm so happy with that ending and how the, one, you're almost like, you know how Japan's obsessed with Tokyo Tower and all their shit, right?

What the fuck else are we going to fight under?

You know, the goddamn Eiffel.

And then with those endings, one, the French film that is the realistic, hyper-realistic faces in black and white as you're reacting to everybody.

And then the horror shot on the eyes is the most French film ever, right?

Absolutely.

And then on the flip side, you know, with the Verso side of things, you get the Eiffel in the fucking.

I mean, what amazing real estate, mind you.

But did you catch?

Absolutely.

Did you catch the dates on the tombstone?

Yeah, December 33rd.

December 33rd, right?

This is not our world.

Well, I mean, their magic also.

Of course, of course,

in the past, mind you.

But yeah.

How about fucking Expedition 60?

Yeah, dude.

Oh!

So we greased these muscles.

We got all the way there.

We got there and we did it.

We beat the fucking shield down and we glistened our way to the bottom and realized the truth.

And then we just weren't able to do anything about it because we didn't have a Lumina Converter or a Painters on our side.

But you bet your ass we fucking scuffed the damage numbers to get through.

I think this game and its endings are like a complete triumph because like my takeaway was that I was 100% certain that I was going to be Team Mile and you were going to be Team Verso.

And I was like theory crafting

a bunch of shit to say.

Really?

You had an invisible, you had a conversation in your head about me.

I had a steel man conversation in my mind.

And I had one.

And the thing that I would say to everyone who is like obsessively Team Verso is that, like, well, did you go back and keep playing the game to do the post-game challenges?

Because if you did, you're a massive fucking hypocrite, right?

Oh, okay.

So, you think, you think I'm going to, you think I'm going to excuse evil on the basis of they were just following orders, do you?

Are you, you fucking like, listen, listen, I'm simply saying the core of it, the more that I talk about it, is like the intractability of position is the issue.

No, I, and, and, and, and I still say, no matter what, I will argue this forever, but I'm still choosing Mayel's ending, right?

I am still choosing that ending because I am saying you are giving a compromise to a solution

that Verso never would have pictured, which is aging.

This is a bad compromise.

It's a bad compromise.

It's an objectively bad compromise.

It gives him aging, but it creates a,

but her reality outside in the real world is suffering forever, right?

There's just, there's no, there's no win.

There's no win.

Yeah.

She's choosing that.

You can't live in a situation in which the entirety of Lumaire is annihilated.

Like, that's just intolerable.

That's it, right?

And here's what you can compromise.

Once you've made that decision and you have to start justifying your points, okay, you can't justify a child suffering indefinitely.

I don't give a fuck.

Fuck you.

What you can say is that

no matter how much you love your family, right?

If your family decides that they're choosing a life without you, you cannot stop them.

Ooh, I like that.

Informed.

Informed.

By the way, I think Aline is like the worst character in this story by far.

Like, she's so awful.

Like, she is the root of all the problems, genuinely.

Grief.

And hold on.

Hold on.

My core of that, my absolute, like, I feel so strongly.

It's like, Aline,

why did you paint your daughter?

Oh,

God.

Oh, God.

That's so true.

Telling.

It's so telling.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

I created an ideal world to live with your son and family.

Oh, man.

And you're like, but you know what, Alicia?

You get to keep your burns.

You can't

because it's your fault.

I'm like, I will, I will, I will give her the grief card.

I will not allow that a pass.

That's insane.

That's so fucked up.

That's so fun.

That's so fucked up.

Furthermore,

Clea is such a weird, interesting X factor because

is a character I am 100% certain we will follow in the future.

I imagine so, right?

Because she is like, I don't have time for this shit.

I'm the girl at college.

Kill motherfuckers.

I'm the girl.

I'm the girl at college, and my fucking family bullshit is pissing me off.

And why can't you get your shit together, right?

Well,

she is like,

they discuss it.

Like, everyone has

dove into an unhealthy pursuit to deal with this.

And Clea is fighting a different game's worth of a war against a group you only know as the writers.

But make no mistake, if you're going to sit there and go, Clea is correct in her assessment that, yeah, fuck this world.

Let's destroy it.

And let

my childhood home is trapping my mom.

Let's get her, let's get them out of there.

And you go help that.

You need to acknowledge that Clea herself went in, fell in love, and became a part of this world, right?

Also, she says to Mael that you don't owe anyone anything, and you should choose the life that makes you happy.

That should give her the endless tower.

Okay, you don't owe my dad anything.

Interesting.

Okay, so that I that I waited because I'm like, I don't want to get spoiled on ending stuff for tower, but um, that's it's fine.

But the Simon bit, no, that's that's all she says.

Yeah, you don't owe anyone anything.

Um, the Simon bit

is uh uh uh

so that was painted Kleia?

Painted Cleia fell in love, yeah.

And then real Kleia painted over painted Clea to make a Clea more to her liking.

Oh, I okay, I misunderstood.

I thought that

real Kleia saw painted Clea from her mom's side and went, fuck that, I hate that, that's not me.

And then I thought she also

painted Simon to go kill the other representation of.

No, Simon was one of Aline's.

Simon is a freak.

No, no, no.

I don't know what is up with him, but he's crazy.

But

he's one of Aline's paintings.

He's a person, right?

But what I mean to say is, I thought that Clea took him as an example and went, I'm going to use you to go take out my

Axem representation from my dad.

She hates her parents' representations of her in both forms.

She hates her mom's version

and her dad's version.

And she used both of those to intervene and shut those down.

So

Simon's eyes in his second phase have the charm effect like Elene's charm.

Like he is being like actively manipulated and he is also painted over to be like a super fucking freak.

Okay.

I like how the hauler Axon is like so hidden away.

Like you see it and it's never brought up.

And the only time the word the hauler is in the game is when when it attacks you during the final boss.

You don't even see it.

I didn't even see it.

No, I just saw it on the map with the fucking get stabbed.

There's a move that Renoil does where he throws a building at you.

Okay.

But you never even see it on screen.

It just throws it from far away.

Did so did

so the idea that the painted

Clea is the one that fell in love.

Yeah.

So when he's hearing the voice that he's listening to, he's listening to the sound of that Kleia before she got painted over?

No, I believe he is listening to real Kleia's manipulation.

That's what I thought it was.

That's what I'm saying.

I thought real Cleia manipulated Simon and painted over Kleia to get both ends to destroy her representations, right?

So that's the part, but like you guys said, it was painted one that fell in love.

So I guess that she could still manipulate after the fact.

It doesn't matter.

There are a lot of pieces of the game that are a little heebie-jeebie and not clear, but the core of it is that everyone was wrong, but Verso was the most dumbest and wrong.

And

Verso actively sabotages all of his own goals.

Like, that's the thing that gets me.

It's like, I understand

in each of the moments that he makes these decisions, like he only protects Elise, he only protects Mayal, but he doesn't protect Gustave.

He's like, well, this will let me do this.

And he's right for a while.

But like.

If he had done the other thing in all of the, if he had given her the letter and if Gustave was alive, there would have been a compromise the happiest compromise ending for the most parties involved leads to eternal suffering for me

well you can blame your mom for that one

She just

you can say this

you can say this however mine however many ways you want to say it It doesn't matter you're never going to erase that fact I was like that's the beauty of the game You will never erase that fact no matter how convinced you are.

It's such such a good game.

It's a good thing.

Well, it's good then that I don't really like Verso so much.

Game of the generation, man.

It's pretty unbelievable.

It also makes me think, like, did real Verso also kind of suck ass?

Because this is...

Oh, you're eyeballing that child being like, you fuck kid?

No, but like,

she painted, painted Verso based on her own view of her child.

And the painted Verso kind of sucks and is a massive liar.

That's not my read on it.

That's so my read on it is Verso was the spoiled, could do no wrong.

Oh, yeah, he was the eldest boy, absolutely.

And he, the like, the grief they feel might not have been.

I don't know if it would have been the shame if the other kids

know it's not.

She paints a fucked up, burned Maya Alicia,

you know.

The idea that he is the star, the phantom star.

You know, I also think

you just can't, you can't, you can't do that to your kids, man.

I also think Verso in the Real World might have sucked because of his axon.

So, Eileen is Siren,

who is the family member who just bombards you with visions of your dead loved ones, which is a little on the nose.

Oh,

that's what made me fall.

Like, that's okay.

The music of that moment.

I didn't, yeah, I didn't, I didn't go on my rant about Siren being beautiful.

Sorry, go, go ahead.

I just got to get through this.

Yeah.

The hauler is Clea, who is the backbone of the whole family.

Holding it on her back.

She carries it on her back.

She literally does.

Mael is the princess who wants, who's destined to

great things.

Reaching.

And Verso is a two-faced liar.

Like, his dad painted him as the masked visage.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know, I was wondering if, like, are you going to elaborate on exactly how the tragedy happened?

And you don't need to.

Like, you can't.

That's not really important.

But it's not what's important because it's all about the fallout afterwards and the blame game.

You know, and then this, this exact idea of like, oh, no, the one that should not have died died.

You know,

I think there's one detail that would really fuck up the whole...

whole arguing about the game, and they do a really good job not going into it, which is, what is the time ratio of time?

Oh, yeah,

67 years.

What does that mean?

Because it's like, I don't know.

Like, did Renoir fucking like walk out of the painting and then Alicia drop dead 10 minutes later?

I mean, I think what, how?

No,

I think painted power makes you kind of a god, you know, in reality, too.

Like, you just gotta, you just gotta check out on that.

I mean, Verso standing there in the flames being like, nah, it's cool.

I like it, actually.

Oh, you're good.

You know, um, um, God, yeah.

Fuck, I had another thing, but anyway, it, it's, it's great.

It's um

peak game.

Very good game.

Excellent game.

Very smart game.

Too many times.

I think people arguing about which is the right ending are maybe missing the point.

And I think that's kind of amazing because both endings are terrible.

Both endings are amazing.

Both endings are terrible.

And I love that they start, one starts positive and ends in a nightmare.

And one starts with a nightmare and ends positive.

Yes.

Thank thank you.

Like you don't get a resolution for free on either.

Chat just reminded me.

So I was going to say that like I popped off over the Siren fight and I didn't go into it over here or whatever you could, but just like the journey through that long, that long, massive dungeon that took so long.

like my exploration to like find the fake corners was like

getting punished for that and then the musical denu mot into the fight into the finale and the the the lyrics are beautiful

It hit on every level.

And

all of that

was amazing.

And then when the fight ends and you have that, I'm going to show you your loved ones bit.

Fuck me.

I just like, I just shit.

You're such a manipulative fan.

Oh, my God.

You know?

And then, like, and then who?

Who steps up and pulls it down?

But steps, pulls it down.

Fucking Lune.

Lune gets up and goes, nah, fuck this.

And she's the one that pulls it down, you know?

I love everything about that fucking represents.

You also never get the hard underline about Monoko being the dog, but.

Yeah, it's never, it's like, oh, oh.

I was waiting for that.

I was waiting for that.

He's a loyal companion and he's a rough and tumble guy and he loves feet.

Oh, right.

He's a dog.

He's a.

I'm like, they didn't have a moment during the funeral where they're like, hey, dumb idiot dog.

Look at him.

You know, little Shiemonoko, you know?

But yeah, yeah.

And you know what you do get in that in that second ending, though?

You do get to watch the family get closure.

You do get to watch.

Yeah, I don't care about them.

No, no, no.

You're seeing the best.

You're seeing the best resolution they could have

while acknowledging that you just wiped out billions of lives.

So it's

something that you're and they ghost away, too.

They fucking force ghost and you're just like, yeah.

Then Then also something in his final monologue in which he's like, we're painters and we found ourselves

enthralled and intoxicated by hundreds of worlds and all that.

And he's like, they're talking about video games.

They're talking about...

Like, they're talking about television and movie and games and inhabited spaces and escapism.

Right.

And it's like, it's so easy.

Right.

And then under that conversation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For me, it's like the discussion about are they real or not?

I'm like, well, the fucking DeSandros aren't fucking real either.

I am the painter of their fucking reality, and I don't give a shit about them compared to the people one level belower.

When I say billions of lives, do you not think that a place existing with a population over enough period of time will have had a billion people come and go over time?

It's a real living world, guys.

It doesn't have to be a planet to be a billion people.

You can just wait long enough and you'll get there.

It's lives snuffed out.

All right.

All right.

All right.

All right.

I got things to do.

That's right.

Have a good week.

We did it.

Take care, everybody.

Amazing.