CSB310: Glazed in Powerful Wyvern Milk

Hello.

Hey, Wolves.

How you doing, man?

You have a quizzical look on your face.

Congestion.

Just

congestion.

No!

Just really annoyingly congested.

No, don't do that.

I hate that.

Eat spicy food.

I always have a

20% congestion going on.

Wait, really?

In the back.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm always slightly congested for years now.

But every once in a while, it comes around and goes a lot stronger.

Yeah,

it's odd because it's not like an allergy thing.

I don't know if it's one of those go in for surgery to remove it or deviated septum type things.

I don't know.

I mean,

let's be honest, Wooly.

According to people who have heard asleep, like, I've heard you sleep.

Your shit back in that nose area, it's all fucked up somehow.

Well, that was many years and many pounds ago.

Losing weight has led to a significant decrease in my snoring and apnea.

Well, I heard you snore in your 20s.

Well, you snored like shit.

Yeah.

And that was over two decades ago.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, but yeah, we probably am currently approaching double that age.

No, that's.

Yeah.

No.

Okay, fine.

We have a couple more of those things

before.

Anyway,

yeah, my sleep is different these days.

But all that to say, it's just I get these weird congestion things.

Yeah, yeah, what's going on?

Okay, let's see.

What's going on?

With the human child that I have, I'm rapidly approaching sentences.

Not there yet,

but

like you can see the wheels turn a little bit further every day.

And like new words get picked up slightly faster.

Like, you know, purple.

Kid loves purple.

That's the favorite color.

Nice.

And we know this because he'll say purple.

Hell yeah.

He even said purple on Paige's stream.

It was adorable.

Good taste.

But nothing crazy going on with that other than adorable, good baby.

I played a lot of Monster Hunter over the past week because Monster Hunter Wilds came out.

Big release.

Yes.

I have heard

quite a bit about that game, including

one of the stories that it has sold over 8 million units in three days, which is

doing okay.

It's Capcom's fastest-selling game.

I don't know if you saw, but it was also like the number two game on Steam yesterday.

Hmm.

Like, I think it was just below Counter-Strike.

And alongside that.

It's just pretty bananas.

And alongside that, I mean,

that sounds like what the Monster Hunter franchise is supposed to do to the industry, right?

Yeah.

By the old standards.

But I also heard the story that

Japanese Indian cuisine places are struggling to keep up with the cheese nan requests that are now

going nuts.

You know how in a Monster Hunter game you have that part where, oh, you're going to go eat some food, and it's going to be like lavishly detailed because Japanese devs have gone absolutely bananas over food pornography.

Food porn for reels, yes.

And not the Dragon's Dogma, we just cut to video shit.

Yeah, which is cool in its own right.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, there are two scenes that are like part of the mandatory story in which you all have a big dinner with people.

And it is just a really long version of one of those food scenes.

Yes.

So I have seen the cutscene where there's the two types.

I've seen the one where someone rips open the NaN and it bleeds mozzarella style, like super oozy cheesy out.

I just pulled a drink all over my fucking table.

And if there's any part of you that is a cheese-loving person or even just a slice of pizza, goddamn, does that put it in you?

Oh, absolutely.

And it also like rivals the

like a dragon bread tech.

No,

that bread.

So, okay, the bread is a one-off moment.

But the ripping of the nan is a very convincing bread rip with cheese inside.

It's very, very well done.

It's very impressive.

So, before we even start to talk about Wilds, I need to

put the baseline here, which is,

you haven't seen it, but I showed it off on my stream.

Capcom sent me a gigantic wooden monster hunter crate

filled with shit.

Okay.

With a wall scroll with my name on it and a really nice jacket and a bunch of cool little doodads.

Yeah, the Wilds influencer kit.

And they were like, you are such a good influencer, Pat.

Oh, we love you.

So, like, that's very appreciated.

But I should put that out there before I talk about Wilds.

Did it take longer to go through the box or to beat the base game?

I was halfway through the game by the time the

box showed up.

Damn.

So.

My thoughts on Wilds are very complicated, and they were complicated enough that after I beat the campaign and rolled credits, I then went and played 10 hours of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on the Switch.

The oldest readily available Monster Hunter.

Just to update your opinions.

Because I needed comparative information.

That

homework, okay.

So, you know, when you go through a new sequel and you're like, oh, doesn't feel as good as the old shit.

And then you think about, like, is that even true?

Like,

am I even right about that?

No, respect for questioning it and going to verify.

That's interesting.

I know that.

So let's.

Oh, yeah, after you.

Well, I was going to say that I know that with Worlds,

it was a much clearer discussion because it was like, yeah, we're moving over to a new engine.

So it's going to be a whole weird thing until we get back used to it.

But now we're like three new games deep, right?

There's now an incredibly strong dividing line between

does

mining a rock make that good sound effect or not?

Like that to me is the dividing line between the old games and the new games.

Is does it have that nice little drum effect when you gather an item or not?

It's the most distinctive thing about the old games for whatever that lives in my head.

So

you know what?

I'll start with Wilds

in order of things that it presented to me, right?

Because my thoughts on this game were like a big ol' up and down, right?

They're mixed.

So, Monster Hunter Wilds put out an online beta.

You remember this?

I do.

The online beta ran like shit, bro.

Like.

And had no hit stop.

Disastrous performance, and it was missing hit stop, and that was like a big one.

So when I went back to GU, I was like, oh, I understand why people are so mad about hitstop now.

In GU and all the portable games, when you swing a weapon, it has these gigantic, exaggerated, cartoon wind effects all over it, and blood is like a huge burst in the middle of the screen.

Like, it's very, very, very cartooned.

Maximilian did a nice like explanation.

Oh, he did?

Oh,

he showed exactly what he meant.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I get it.

So now they put the hip stop back in.

I have no complaints about the hip stop.

The hits feel good.

We can just put that whole thing to rest.

Performance.

So they put out a benchmark, and the benchmark obviously ran way better than the beta did.

It was the final release version of the game's

build, and people could use it and go, oh, you know what?

That actually works pretty well.

Yeah, that works really well.

Okay, I figured out the settings that I can use to play the game on.

All right.

So I start up Wilds, and the very first thing that I have to tell you is that the benchmark is not an accurate benchmark of the game's performance.

Why not?

Because the benchmark does not include both of the always-on DRM processes that are eating up part of your performance.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

So Capcom has standard Denuvo anti-tamper.

Yep.

And it also has a Capcom-specific anti-tamper running on top of it.

Damn.

Okay.

So your resources are even more taxed than the benchmark would have you believe.

And you know, you know what?

That's not that big of a deal.

I'll kick the resolution down.

It'll be fine.

So I'll tell you this right now.

I have an i9 13900K processor.

It's a very expensive CPU.

I have 32 gigs of RAM.

I have a 4090 and I have a PC that all it does is stream video games.

This game runs like shit.

It runs really bad.

And you will then go and say that, and people go, well, I got it running to 60 FPS or 100 FPS or whatever.

And it's like, absolutely.

But then you go to the Digital Foundry thing and it spells out in much clearer words than I could, which is the game runs really bad for what it is showing you.

It is showing you a marked increase in fidelity over Monster Hunter World,

which also ran incredibly poorly at release.

Did you go back and test Rise on your brand?

Rise runs at 1 billion frames a picosecond at any resolution you want.

Is that because it was a Switch game?

A Switch game.

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

So

from Rise, it is like crazy whiplash.

It's very much like Dragon's Dogma 2.

It's very much like the game that I'm looking at is not justifying how how much power it wants.

My PC broke a fan

streaming it.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

So Rise was built for Switch, then ported to Steam.

Up.

Yeah.

And that's thus it's fine.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

Wilds, like, and it's this really strange thing that I had trouble.

I had trouble typing and I had trouble bouncing it off of somebody.

Because I was streaming and there wasn't a human that I could talk to, right?

It's like Rise is a Switch game, but it runs at a million frames a second and it runs at native 4K and it runs with all the anti-elioscan effects perfectly 100% of the time, right?

In my opinion, even though the fidelity of the assets

in Wilds is much higher,

because I can't get it to do that even close, and there's a persistent stutter when you turn the camera because there's a texture loading problem.

Rise actually looks way better overall.

Yep.

The aiming higher is not worth it if you can't pull it off.

Right?

Yeah.

So, like, the textures, I, man, I, I'm a graphics guy.

I love, I love nice graphics and I love frame rates.

I don't usually talk about textures because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like nitpicking shit.

I burst out laughing at like how bad the textures on a lot of the items that the game wants you to zoom in on are

like I am talking actual like and I went and double-checked and I triple checked with digital foundry actual PS3 like textures and they want those right up in your face So hey, that's fine.

We'll download the high-res texture pack, which is a 70-gig download, which is, you know, to that's why they separated out.

This is quite a large download.

Texture optimization is what blows file size, yeah.

Right?

It's like, okay, so I download the high-res texture pack, and it does look good, like they're good, and no complaints, except it introduces a persistent stutter all the time.

Oh.

On no matter what setting.

Oh, my God.

And it causes the game's already bad asset loading problems to get worse.

So do you remember in the Halcyon days of old, Unreal Engine 3 would load in a scene on a camera cut and then, oh, the texture's got to catch up.

And you would see characters become

wildly more detailed after a couple seconds.

In Wilds, this happens when you turn the camera.

Oh,

things unload and pop back in.

Like, the level of detail thing on

trees and rocks pops in when you turn the camera.

Jeez.

So, like,

in a screenshot or if I'm not streaming it and I'm running it all max settings, very nice, very pretty.

But like, the performance is terrible.

Digital Foundry put out a video in which they basically explained that everybody who doesn't have like a 30, 80 or

higher should not even bother to play this game on PC.

Okay.

Which is a huge fucking ass.

Well, that's what explains.

Yeah, like Rip Reggie.

That's like 5%, 10% of Steam owners have shit that high.

That explains the failure there.

What I've been hearing as well, word on the street is that there are typos in INI files so that the word resolution is misspelled and you have to manually correct it to see certain settings improve.

So, get this.

That doesn't matter.

It's a Japanese game made by Japanese people.

The game's code

wants

the typo.

Oh.

Okay, so that's nothing.

All right.

False alarm.

Like, the the internal game files want the typo version.

When you change the typo to it being correct, the game then just looks at whatever the default value for that would be.

Okay.

It's just funny that there's typos in there.

Okay.

What's not funny is that the game defaults to using a really low amount of CPU cores and that you can go change that to fit your computer in the any file and it results in a massive performance boost.

In addition, the game doesn't let you turn off volumetric fog because volumetric fog is an effect Capcom loves, and it also hides textures going completely nuts in the background.

If you turn that off, you get like a 30% performance boost.

So, but you've got to go in and do it yourself.

It's not a part of the in-game options.

Yeah.

The in-game options, you can go for volumetric fog being high and low.

And the other thing is that that was exactly the same thing that happened in World.

If you turned off volumetric fog and world, your game ran like 20% better.

It was crazy.

So, aim for Switch from now on, then.

Yeah.

So, like, basically,

just like World, it's actually, I've been doing some dicking around.

The performance of Monster Hunter Wilds is approximately equivalent to the performance of Monster Hunter World relegated, like, compared to the PCs of its era, right?

In that, if you have a really fancy, expensive PC, yeah, you can run it at a really good frame rate.

It looks nice.

If you have anything other than that, it runs like shit, like bad.

So grab it on a console.

Now, if you want to play on a console and you want to use the performance mode, get ready for that adaptive resolution to dip down to like 720

when it needs to.

I was going to ask you, so you investigated on PS5 as well?

I did not.

Okay.

I'm I'm going off DF and

talking to people.

So yeah, basically, the game runs like shit.

Just like all modern Monster Hunter games, it runs really bad.

But let's move past that.

By the way, all Monster Hunter games that were the first release all run really bad.

Every single version of the series, the first release on the thing that it came out on, ran like shit.

Even the old ones?

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

I think the best running game they ever put out was like For You, and that ran at a loose 40-something

kind of FPS.

And that was a fucking 3DS game.

So, all right.

You know what?

I've fixed up my files and I've got Wilds ready to go.

All right.

So, first of all, a lot of things show up that are really interesting that I like.

Your hunter talks.

You select your hunter's voice, but they speak and not like grunts and shit when you're in a fight.

No, they talk.

They have conversations with characters.

They are a character.

Nice.

Good.

They do things in the cutscenes.

They fight monsters in the cutscenes, rarely with their weapon, but they will do environmental stuff and shoot them with the slinger.

And the tone is very different.

In World, every cutscene where you encountered a monster, your character went, oh, fuck the monster.

And then ran away.

And then, yeah, and she had to do all the talking for you.

In Wilds, when your hunter discovers a monster, they usually get one over on the monster before the actual fight starts.

Like they drop a rock on its head, or they shoot it to save someone, or they narrowly avoid a big attack, and the monster gets frustrated.

Okay.

So, tonally, it's very different.

On top of that, we have our new bird companion, which is not a palamute.

It's a sacred.

It's not a chocobo.

Trust me, it's not a chocobo.

Even though you get the ability to customize it and make it look identical to a chocobo and all yellow,

it's not a chocobo.

Wink.

That wink is for the audio people.

I like the idea of just fast-forwarding to a full-on six Pokemon in your back pocket while you're going

hunting in the future.

Because

you got three now, right?

Yeah.

So

you hop on the Sacred and you start running into

one of the game's primary issues.

They want to streamline Monster Hunter because even World and Rise were very hard to get into, unless you had a friend like kind of pushing you on the back because there's so many dozens of subsystems interacting all over each other, right?

So we got to streamline the new player experience.

And they have streamlined it in a way that I think is the wrong way.

They have automated huge proportions of the new player experience.

So, for example,

hop on the sacred.

Do you know what the sacred does when you hop on it?

It starts running towards the nearest monster automatically.

Oh, it's a rail you're locked onto.

And to make sure you're not bored, you can now slinger grab items as you pass them.

So don't control it.

Jeez.

If you want to control the bird like a fucking video game and still keep the automatic thing, you can go into the settings and you can change manual control on and then the way that you control it.

Because the way that you control it when it's in manual is like a race car where you steer it left and right and you hit R1 and R2 for the fastness and the brakes.

Okay.

So you can turn it off and this leads to problem two, which is there are an enormous amount of incredibly cool features in this game.

You can turn off the damage coefficients, you can get raw numbers, which is the one that Monster Hunter fans tend to like.

You can change the way the target camera works to either a regular lock-on like Dark Souls or an old-fashioned Monster Hunter camera where you just hit a button to recenter on a monster.

Millions of options that are all buried deep in the gameplay section of the options menu that has multiple pages of things in a gigantic wall of text that is difficult to navigate.

And some things that you would want to do, like turn the sacred back to manual, require like three different toggles that are not on the same page.

So Worlds had the fireflies to track where the things were.

Yeah,

you'd see the fireflies and they'd snap your neck.

Yeah, and that seemed fine.

So scout flies are back.

And then jumping on the dog, you would then run through controlling it, I guess, towards, and so I guess, was there

anything wrong with that?

Nope.

So this is both now.

And when you finally go into the options and turn sacred to fully manual control,

you get a really good compromise, which is if you want to, the monster to run, sorry, if you want your Sacred to track and run after the monster or item you've pinned on the map, hit up on the D-pad.

He'll run over, you'll hop on, and then you will sprint away automatically.

Or if you want to do it manually, hit down on the d-pad and you will have full manual control.

For some reason, that's not the default.

For some reason, the default is every single time you hop on the bird, it just sprints away towards your objective, and all you can do is like kind of steer it left and right to get closer to items.

Okay.

There's a lot of things,

a lot of things that are super strange about the way the game wants to automate and control.

It's weird.

Does it,

so I feel like the flow of Monster Hunter from, you know, going through worlds and stuff, it's like, okay, there's the obviously the meat and potatoes is the hunt and the kill, the fight.

Yeah.

And then a lot of downtime in between hunts, doing busy work, leveling things up, making things, you know, and then there's the preparation phase for going into the next thing.

Like, does this philosophy extend into like streamlining those sections as well?

Yes.

So, this is where you run into issue two.

So, for the longest time, Monster Hunter players have said that

low rank is the tutorial, high rank is where the real game starts.

And the devs have taken that

to heart.

And now low rank is the tutorial, and high rank is where the real game starts.

And as a result, I would say that low rank in wilds and high rank in wilds are functionally completely different games from their structure to their goals to their mechanics.

So you start your low rank campaign and it's very dramatic and you have a big fight and you have a tutorial monster, Chatta Cabra, and you beat the fucking piss out of that thing.

You beat the bricks off it.

Like, it's fucking embarrassing.

That poor bitch.

And then you discover what your formula for the next 10 to 15 hours is going to be.

Cutscene.

Walk and talk.

Like a classic, like, might as well have a finger to your ear walk and talk.

Right?

Cutscene.

Monster introduction.

Monster fight.

You may have noticed I did not say

smithing

or prep.

Yeah, the hub.

So

they give you a little hub and you can go smithing and you can go get items.

However,

the items you start with in

your box and the items you will be picking up at random when you're traveling to places and the items that they give you by default from monster hunts and quest rewards

are plenty to go through the entire low-rank campaign

straight through.

Ignoring it.

Like straight through.

If you wanted to, you could clear the entirety of low-rank with just making up random pieces of armor that you could after every hunt.

I made two sets.

in the 15-hour campaign.

One about five hours in, and one at about 12 hours in.

And I didn't need to make them.

I wanted to make them because I wanted my character to look cool in cutscenes.

Now, how much of that is based on skill taking on the monsters with

low-level items?

Some, obviously.

Some of that is definitely part of it.

But the low-rank campaign is generally easier.

So now I'm going to skip back to me playing GU over the past week, and I've been figuring out

why the game feels so much easier.

Did you start from Super Hungary?

And I realized that it has the same difficulty curve as an old Monster Hunter game, but people usually count that as

number of monsters equal this amount of difficulty.

No, now it is amount of hours equals this amount of difficulty.

So in nine hours playing Monster Hunter GU, I fought three large monsters in total.

The rest were trying to figure out key quests, tutorials, egg quests, gathering, mushroom, fucking bullshit.

Did you start a save from scratch or did you load your old save?

I did.

I started a stave save from scratch.

Okay.

In Wilds, the first time I carted was about halfway through the game's campaign, which was about eight or nine hours in, which is the first time I carted in Monster Hunter GU.

The difference is, is that in Monster Hunter GU, I was fighting a fucking

Genprey,

which is like a tiny little fucking lizard.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, I carted fighting a, what was it?

I don't remember what it was.

I think it was like

a tough-ass Rathalos, something like that.

I carted twice in the entire campaign.

No, three times.

I carted three times in the entire campaign.

And the campaign is extraordinarily linear.

It is,

hey, go on the cutscene, go on the walk and talk, explore the area.

And by explore the area, I mean they put you and your party in a

guided zone where if you try and walk out of it, they go, no, no, no, we're not going there yet, and force your character to turn around.

Okay, okay, yeah.

Like a fake exploration.

And it's very linear.

Now, you could, at any point, break off from that and do optional quests and play multiplayer and grind out materials,

but why would you do that when nothing is giving you much of a challenge anyway?

I was going to ask, does the campaign steer you towards the multiplayer platform and go

hang out over there for a bit?

No,

so

multiplayer in the game's campaign is inconsequential.

It's still there if you want to set it up.

And you can SOS Hunter, like in Worlds,

so that you can be like, I am having trouble.

I have somebody that needs help.

Yeah.

But

it is actually genuinely designed for you to just beeline it single player the whole way through.

And the reason I know this is because I played half of that campaign in multiplayer and discovered that if you have multiplayer in that campaign, you are going to ruin that campaign for yourself.

There is

so Monster Hunter has always like multiplied monster health and damage, sorry, monster health usually, by how many people are there.

It's basically 1.7 or I think 2.4, depending on how many people are there.

If you roll into any low-rank quest with four people, you are going to dominate that thing

in under five minutes in a way that is specifically annoying to wilds.

So in old games, yeah, you'd beat the fucking piss out of any monster in low rank if you had a full group, right?

Even in the gathering hub, which is the multiplayer thing.

The difference is, is the Monster Hunter Wilds has a new mechanic called wounds.

So wounds is, if you bash on like the tail or like the front leg or whatever enough, you'll get it ready and it'll glow and

it'll have a wound.

And everybody has a wound attack now.

So what happens is, you know, I would use my great sword and I would hit the wound attack on the glowing red spot, and I would do a unique attack that would like drag the whole sword along the monster, and then it would flinch and it would pop, and then I'd get parts out of it, right?

It basically takes part breaking to like a new, yeah, new level.

Implementation of that, yeah, okay.

So, wounds is really cool, and when you're playing solo, wounds is this nice little like way to force a flinch or defend yourself or get more parts or whatever.

When you have four people in low rank,

when they're

flinching the monster from

its wound,

other people can also flinch the monster from their wounds or create new wounds.

So if

you do the campaign in multiplayer, you run into this situation over and over and over in which the monster can't fight you for like 90 seconds because the time it takes for everyone to do the wounds, new wounds spawn.

You stack each one on top of each other.

And you are are just stun locking these things it's determined by weapon

and it's determined by damage to any given part okay so if i'm like cracking a wound open on the face and somebody is taking that monster's mostly still time to beat on the tail yeah by the time i'm done yeah they

will have a wound on the tail and they'll do it and now i can beat on the head somewhere stunlock it yeah okay okay um and

It feels like it feels like I don't know the numbers, but it feels like monster health increased because of multiplayer.

But wound threshold did not

because they seemed to appear at the same rate.

So when I was playing through the first half of that campaign in multiplayer, I was bored to tears because I would do half an hour of chatting with the gang at the base and a five-minute walk and talk and a little bit of exploration and then a monster cutscene.

And then people would load into my game and we would kill the fucking thing in under five minutes.

Yeah.

And I would have, and it, and I would have no reason to upgrade for any of that shit.

And then I would go back to the walk and talk and the cutscene and this shit.

And it has a really poor pacing if you play it in multiplayer.

I would advise anyone who plays Monster Hunter Wilds to not touch multiplayer at all until you beat the game.

Like, I bet that was an argument somewhere as to whether or not to even allow non-SOS multiplayer, but people would have gone nuts if you couldn't play through the whole game

multiplayer.

And it's still doing the thing where, assuming you're not curb stomping it, that like it'll have a phase and then it'll change locations and you got to chase it up to that spot.

Absolutely.

Now, chasing them to new locations is now really simple because you just hit up on the D-pad and then the sacred chases after them.

And as they're chasing after him, you're like, I'm going to sharpen my weapon and I'm going to heal.

Right, right, right, right, right.

Okay.

So,

but once I switched to single-player at about the the halfway mark,

which also coincided with the increase in difficulty in general, I started having a much, much, much better time.

So

if they're going to want you to really focus really, incredibly strongly on this story,

how's the story?

It's

really,

really great.

Really?

For a Monster Hunter game.

I mean, is Monster Hunter not just kind of like, yeah,

there's a story.

It's there or whatever.

So we'll

tell you.

Okay, more important.

It feels like

the vibes have been, fuck the dumb story.

The cool characters you get to meet are awesome.

And just leave it at that.

That has usually been the case.

There is one Monster Hunter game that has a decent story, and it's for you.

And the only reason people like that game story, including me, is because Gourmagala,

the monster, which is the titular, like final boss of that game,

hates you specifically.

Okay, like it is almost a rivalry.

However, I've made a joke about this, and I'm going to make that joke again.

Monster Hunter: one, two, three, four, generations, stories, stories one, world, and rise

all have the exact

same story.

Every single one is,

wow, monsters around here are getting really crazy.

I wonder if there's a new monster in the region disrupting their ecosystem.

We should go find out what new monster is doing something weird, disrupting the ecosystem.

Oh, it's introduced a new mechanic to the game, like the frenzy virus, or the elder dragon eater, or the wings of ruin, etc.

We have to stop the monster that's causing that to save the ecosystem.

It is literally every single game has the exact same plot, and so does this one

until it doesn't.

It is the first game they have ever made in this series that actually

does have a twist going on.

Okay.

And it is not just a a twist.

It's the one that everyone wanted.

Okay.

And it is the deepest, deep pull

from a non-canon Monster Hunter 1

art book

that people have been asking for for decades.

Interesting.

Okay.

And they totally do it.

And it's exactly what I wanted.

Is the formula also that

the new threat is a giant god that is a set piece of a boss, so it's not the real threat fight and then there's an actual threat.

No, no, it's a fucking fight.

Okay.

No, it's a it's a fight.

Okay.

Um they also start to include little narrative elements that were known to freaks like me

but not to anyone else because they're not actually in the game.

So

the long and short of it is people would ask, hey, how come in Monster Hunter, you just go and fuck up any given goddamn piece of wildlife for like no reason?

Like, what the fuck is up with that?

Conservation.

Why are you guys such assholes?

Conservation is what I was.

You are conservationists and researchers, and there is actually a subdivision of poachers that you never, ever, ever, ever see, which is people who hunt monsters for profit or without authorization.

So in this game, in every narrative moment, literally every single time you fight a storyline monster, your handler, you have to ask them for permission and

she will tell you that the guild authorizes the hunt of blank for this reason.

So

it's this nice little thing where, you know, a monster

shows up and causes a roadblock, but is not otherwise violent or harmful.

So you have to ignore it.

But then when it becomes a legitimate problem or a threat to people's lives, you get the rubber stamp, you get your deer permit, essentially.

Yeah.

To go take it out.

And they do an interesting thing with this, where if you just fuck off from the story and go start hunting monsters that you see in the wild, your handler will tell you to fucking stop that.

She'll be like, no, you do not have authorization to hunt this.

Oh, what are you doing?

Interesting.

Huh, okay.

Because I feel like

you get less rewards from that as a result.

World encouraged you to stay in the field and just get out there, take on the next thing and the next thing, just punch things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's really, really nice.

Every single hunt has a little, like, not quite release the limiters, but like, come on, let me at him.

Let me at him, chief.

Okay.

Um,

the finale and the final boss are really great, really, really, really great.

Uh, the flagship is a really interesting monster and a really fun fight.

Um,

of a huge ups to the game's story and low-rank campaign.

You fight, I want to say like 15, 16, 17 monsters in that campaign.

There are only

three

old monsters in the entirety of the game's campaign.

Wow.

It is nearly exclusively new guys.

And the ones that do come back from older games, one hasn't been seen since the fucking 3DS.

One is the one that has to be there because it says Monster Hunter.

And the other is a pick that I never thought was going to come back, especially not so soon.

And the two of the older ones are weird, deviant versions that don't function like their normal selves.

Interesting.

So, like,

it is a brand new roster for 99% of the campaign, which is awesome.

It's really great.

What was the returning count on Rise?

Like,

because in Worlds, I remember.

For 50-50?

Okay.

Because I remember that the lack of, like,

well, essentially, like, the amount of monsters that couldn't be there was the thing that people were bummed about with Worlds, right?

So, World,

so the monster, it's one of those interesting things.

You talk about it like a fighting game, but in reverse.

Monster count is like the number one thing anybody ever wants to know.

Like how many in there?

We've had situations like Try on the Wii, where 18 fucking monsters were in Try on the Wii.

That is fucking ridiculous.

That is terrible.

That is ruinous.

And then you get stuff like GU, which has

100?

Like,

I feel like every time you've talked about like GU, it's basically been like, this is the end of the same engine buildup.

So there's like more than, yeah, there's like you said,

um, GU is Street Fighter Alpha Collection, everything is turbo, everything, yeah.

So, uh, so going GU is Capcom versus SNK2.

That's what, that's what Monster Hunter GU is, or Marvel 2 for that matter.

Like, right, all the time.

Oh, yeah, Marvel 2 is a better example, actually.

So, World had 40,

I think, or maybe 38.

Um,

Wilds has 29,

which is

the low end of what has come out in the past.

Okay.

However,

it depends.

They're doing the title update thing, right?

They're going to be putting out

new monsters every couple of months.

So it depends how fast they put out those new monsters every couple of months, right?

Oh, world had less, world head 30.

Okay, so it's about the same as world.

So there are two monsters coming in April.

It'll be

unclear to see how many more will come after that.

Well, I'm happy that, like, that's cool that folks are Dowed for the new because like that's yeah, that sounds pretty like a the new monsters are also great.

There's so there's some there are some real winners in that new cast.

There is a cephalopod skeleton now,

and they have retrofit the spider skeleton in.

So bugs and squids

are on the roster.

They are a spider type.

I see.

Yeah.

Okay.

The cephalopod squid, the cephalopod or squid skeleton is great.

It is super fun and super weird.

So it has a really good roster.

It has a big monkey.

It has a bunch of Wyverns, you know, Rathlos and Rathian are there.

It's got a bunch of brute Wyverns.

It's a really strong roster.

And

I was feeling really mixed.

So I beat the campaign, which ends extremely strong,

with a fight that you can't play again.

Like a big story moment.

A big story boss that you get to fight once.

Just like Zenojiva in World, where

you had to wait for them to get added to the game in a patch

as a real fight.

A monster, the final boss, does not have its own armor set.

It does not have its own weapon.

And apologies if you guys don't like me talking about data mining, but.

It does have its own armor set and it does have its own weapon.

It's just not in the game right now.

It's not the kind of thing where you could pick it on one of the like secondary mission sort of menus where it's like go into a

no no no you could SOS for it right but no it doesn't have a it doesn't have anything right now you can do

so I was feeling super conflicted because I did like the direction the story went but I was frustrated by the game's terrible performance and I felt really really really railroaded.

I talked to Gene about it at length and he and he described it.

It's like Monster Hunter became red dead because when you're in these walk-in talks or the story wants you to do something and you try and like move, like the fucking game hates it.

It will like auto-turn your character back to the path and shit like that.

It's fucking infuriating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like it's not, it's not like it's not that bad on a objective level because it's actually less intense than it is in other games.

But this is Monster Hunter where I just, it's been completely free form for almost every game that's ever existed.

So it's really, really, really frustrating when the game was, no, no, no, no, go back, go, go, turn, go look at this, go look over here, come on, come on.

No, I was just thinking, it's in World, it was

Zora Magneros, right?

It sure was.

Yeah, that, like, after doing that in plot,

you could like reinstance it.

Yeah, you could, you'd find him again.

Or whatever, yeah.

Okay.

So I was feeling really torn.

I was feeling very confusing.

Confused.

There's another issue that I skipped over in the

game's presentation, which is the game has a seasons system.

So I forget the name of all of them.

There's the fallow, which is like the, oh no, everything's dead and dying.

There's the plenty, which is like summertime and it's beautiful.

And then there's an in-between that I can't remember the name of it, right?

You spend

99%

of the game's campaign in Fallow,

which means that the environment is extremely, oh, inclemency is the second one.

Thank you.

The environment is extremely desaturated.

We're talking like the area, like every the area called the desert area, literally the entire screen is brown.

Even the sky is kind of brown.

It looks like you are running like a fucking broken filter to pop your HDR on it.

Like it is, it is brown or gray.

It looks bad.

And then you beat the game and you unlock the plenty, and it is more saturated, it is better looking, the sky is clearer, it runs better because there's less fog everywhere.

It almost feels like a sequel to itself in how much better the game looks after you beat the game.

It's a season or an area?

It is a season.

Okay, okay.

But the campaign takes place exclusively in

a sad, ugly season.

The game also teleports you around constantly at the end of your quests, so you have a really hard time getting a feel on where the areas are.

So

you beat the game and you roll credits and you start high rank.

And this is where I've never felt this way about a game before.

Because right away, the game starts to dramatically improve in literally every single way.

Okay.

Yeah.

It feels like its own sequel.

So I was about to say that it sounds like from what you're describing, basically the onboarding is poor, the optimization is poor, and you go through that.

And eventually you can fix and change and edit some settings, and then you can get further into the campaign where it gets better towards the end.

So there's an upwards trajectory here.

There's a very strong upwards trajectory, and then you get to

high rank.

And

I hope this makes sense.

High rank is such a dramatic improvement to every aspect of the base, of the game's progression, systems, mechanics, visuals, performance, that it made me pissed off

because this is the game that I thought I was going to be playing 14 hours ago.

Yeah,

okay, okay.

And it's lost behind completing the onboarding initial run, new game.

So, for people who are more familiar with Monster Hunter, some of what I'm going to say is going to make a lot more sense.

There is not a single capture quest in the entirety of the campaign.

You kill everything?

What's that?

Capture is in, like, don't kill.

Trap and trap.

Trap, trap.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The very first high-ranked quest is a capture quest, and that's where your tutorial for capturing starts.

So that really tells you

what the priority was for new players.

And it is a capture quest against three

Yankutkus.

So you not only have to learn how to capture it, and Yankutku is a very annoying, tough monster.

You also have to dung pot it, which is a mechanic you probably didn't learn.

And you're in the forest, and the forest is now bright and beautiful and gorgeous.

It is the first HR quest against a low-tier monster is more exciting

than

the game's finale.

Like, in terms of gameplay.

It sounds like they've basically taken the Kirby philosophy and applied it to Monster Hunter here, where the Kirby games begin once you beat the first main thing.

Yeah.

Oh,

folks in the chat are right.

There is one instance in the early game where they teach you how to use a dung pod.

Okay.

So you beat Yan Kutku, and then now the story has, even the presentation of the narrative has changed now.

Now,

Alma will talk to you as you're traveling somewhere.

And then they'll say, hey, go talk to somebody.

And you talk to somebody for like two minutes.

And then they go, hey, man, get out there and do whatever.

And from that moment onwards, the game's structure completely changes.

The map starts rotating through night and day and seasons.

You have a little chart like Majora's Mask that shows you who's going to show up at what time of day and during what weather.

And they say, go out there and just fight shit.

So you go out there and ride around and fight something.

And when you beat it up,

when you knock it over the first time or when you mount it, you get the quest started and it auto does the quest for you and auto posts the quest.

And then you beat it and you carve it.

And then it says quest complete.

And then you just get your shit back together on your sacred, and then you cook on the ground before going to the next one.

Yeah, and you just run,

you're just free and just go

and you just go and go and go and go.

And

that

is what

the fucking game should have been from the very beginning.

And then you would do urgent quests against tougher guys.

On top of that,

the interface is not good.

And I don't think there's a single place that the interface is worse than the game's most primary feature, which is multiplayer.

This is the most confusing multiplayer menu system I have ever seen in my entire life.

I actually mean that.

I thought about it for a while.

I've been playing GU.

It is

so bad, I had to have chat explain to me on the second or third day how to party up with Gene

because Gene wanted to play.

It was very, very confusing.

So there are five different types of multiplayer lobbies.

When you start the game, there are four options to start the game.

You can start the game in a recommended lobby.

You can start the game in online single player.

And I can't remember what the other two fucking things are.

Can't remember.

So, in order, you can be hunter friends.

That's the in-game friends list, which you can go look at.

And if somebody's playing in a lobby or doing a quest, you can join them from there.

There's squads, which is like a little guild where you can have people join that.

And if they go into the squad menu, they can look at where you are and join.

There is

the lobby itself, where people are wandering around inside the communal hub and can walk up to the handler and join the party if you've already started a quest.

And here's where it gets really fun.

There are

link parties and environment link parties.

A link party is a lobby agnostic group that you can invite people to that will auto-post quests that you join to them

where they are, and then they can join up.

So, when I had Gene and Diana and someone else in my link party, and I started a main story quest,

it would auto-post the quest to them, and they could go, I want to join that.

So, what would happen is, is you know, you fight the story cutscene, and then you start fighting the monster for two seconds.

Then they would load in about 30 seconds afterwards.

But link parties don't coexist in the same environment.

You can't roll around the world with a link party.

That's only for quests.

If you want to roam around the environment together as a group, you need to join an environment link,

which

actually

does drag all four people to the same

instance.

And then you'll be auto-joining quests together.

This is so complicated.

It is so complicated.

Some of these things you could post quests in, some of them you can't.

I just found out from chat just now that environment parties can't post quests to each other.

They just have to get the auto quests you get from hitting monsters in the watt.

Like, it is so complicated.

I remember worlds being kind of complicated for me, just not fully understanding how to do that, and in and of itself, and that kind of resembled what it used to be.

Why?

You know how you post a fucking

quest in Monster Hunter 1234, Generations, Ultimate, and Rise?

You go to the multiplayer hub, you give people your room ID, and they join.

Then you walk up to the quest counter and start a quest, and then people walk up to the notice board and go, I would like to do the quest that Pat just picked up.

And then you eat your food and you go.

That is how it has been in almost every single Monster Hunter game.

The world also does that with a couple of wrinkles.

So what is this?

Trying some new free form join wherever play.

And it's so confusing.

What I remember is, I remember the SOS thing where people can join you mid-hunt.

I remember posting on a, going to the board and just jumping into something on the board or posting.

And then I remember there being, maybe this is a subsection or I'm misplacing it, but I remember there being like a location that was like on like a pirate ship deck almost that was like a multiplayer.

Yeah, that was the gathering hub.

Yeah.

That's what those are, they're always called.

They're called the gathering hub.

Yes, right.

And I kind of was like, I wasn't too sure about that.

And it took a second to get it.

So

what's going to happen, and I want people to remember this for when it happens.

What's going to happen is that people are going to use these five different types of multiplayer lobbies.

And at the end of the day, in about two months, people are going to go, you know what, this actually is a really effective way to do multiplayer.

Because if I want to do this, I can use this one.

And if I want to do this, I'm going to use this one.

And if I want to do this, I'm going to use this one.

And they're adding a gathering hub in the next title update in April.

And you know what?

You know, this is actually a really good

version of the multiplayer.

And then they will forget

the experience that many people had, which is not being able to figure out this impossible to fucking understand pile of shit and then give up on multiplayer entirely because they're freaks and they push through because they love Monster Hunter.

Like,

there's going to be like survivors bias on this.

Dude, I played every Monster Hunter.

I am so confused by these fucking multiplayer menus.

That's stupid.

This is supposed to be the easiest part of the whole game is getting a group of people together to go fight monsters or play with your friends.

This is also extra confusing because

why wouldn't the design be streamlined based on the last three games experience from like, you know, there was a re a new engine restart from scratch, and then wouldn't you just build off of that?

Like, why?

No, dumb shit.

Because you assume Monster Hunter goes one, two, three, four.

We actually have two different games called Monster Hunter: portable Monster Hunters and home monster hunters.

Now, the team that worked on World and Iceborne worked on Wilds.

The team that worked on Generations Ultimate worked on Rise.

How do you know this?

Well, one, I mean, that's the development practice they've talked about, and it's actually really clear.

But even a new player would know that because when you load up the game, you get a save data import bonus for World and Iceborne, but not for Rise because they didn't work on that one.

Okay, because basically.

So, Sacreds are not sequels to Palamutes.

Sacreds are a different team's own invention along the same lines.

That would explain it.

Yeah.

They're not carrying over their work between the two.

They're actually working in parallel.

That sucks.

Because,

yeah,

because I kind of assumed I was like, okay, well, I guess forward, like, the GU stuff is all basically the momentum from the first game up until then, lessons and quality of life and all that stuff implemented, and then it drops off because of the switchover.

But then here it's now scattering.

Yeah, so Iceborne had mounts.

And these are sequels to Iceborne's mounts.

Palamutes were their own thing entirely because Palomutes can fight.

Yeah,

they were part of the battle.

That's true.

There was a whole mechanic about that.

Yeah.

We have a Street Fighter Marvel situation.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

No,

this is probably...

This is really frustrating if you're a fan of the franchise because there's no consistency or promises that anything good or bad will return in the future necessarily.

Absolutely.

It reminds me, and this is kind of a weird poll for this podcast, but if you guys back in the day played Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Call of Duty Black Ops,

those games always came out of your part.

And stuff like what does Crouching do in those games would change depending on the developer.

Treyarch versus Ward.

Treyarch wanted you to do a dolphin dive.

And Infinity Ward wanted you to go prone.

And that changes a multiplayer first-person shooter pretty fucking dramatically.

Just that little detail.

There were more, but that was the most obvious one.

And also, we're not going to meet in the middle or give up or copy.

Never, never, never.

Yeah.

So, like,

this Wild is a super weird game.

because if you just wanted to play it,

so can I just

talking about

the change?

I know, and then into the multiplayer, but before I forget, because if we go into the third section, I'm super going to forget.

Just design-wise, is

the idea here, I guess, that like

we can change up the onboarding for new people every time because we want to figure out how to make that less complicated.

But if you're a veteran, you're going to stick it out and you'll get to the end no matter what.

And at that point, you'll get the game you want.

So it's fine to kind of like push the real Monster Hunter experience to the back.

Veterans have always been like, I don't give a fuck about this low-rank shit.

I'm going to just power the fuck through as fast as I can to get that good stuff.

And that's, and like, all, and like, um, um, yeah, as you mentioned, Iceborne, it's like, right, that was a DLC, but it was, it's still its own full campaign, right?

Yeah.

And treated, treated as an entry.

So, like, so in a year and a half or two years, we're going to get Monster Hunter

Cities or whatever.

Right, right, right.

And that's going to have Master Rank and 20, 30 new monsters and all the title updates.

And that will have its own campaign as well.

So it will also have a 5 to 15-hour campaign that you will blow through as fast as you possibly can before they let you out.

So never judge it on the basic run-through the story to credits.

That's not the game.

And they don't care because that's not for you.

People like you.

No, before you came out on the 3DS,

people like you are clearly just like, oh, the game you're looking for is

way back there.

Yeah.

So if I was the type of monster under player who was like, I don't give a fuck about this, I just want to get to low rank.

Wilds does let you skip cutscenes, which the other games didn't let you do.

Oh, so walking talks as well?

No.

Okay.

But

I'm going to delete my file and I'm going to replay the whole campaign skipping cutscenes.

And I want to and in single player.

And I want to see how different that feels.

I bet it's going to be real different.

I bet it's going to be one, real fucking fast

and real different.

Well, you said the first run through to credits was already insanely fast, right?

Yeah.

Someone in the chat says you can just make a new file.

So here's the thing about making a new file in this type of game.

When you make a new file, it has to go into the second slot, and that looks ugly.

Your real file has to be in the first slot, or else

so it has to be in the first slot.

What you're saying is rational and makes sense.

It is not like it is rational.

Thank you.

I appreciate you telling me this.

Don't let anyone dissuade you all.

I feel very seen right now.

Good.

But

basically, there are a lot of different ways I could have played this game.

And I feel like the way that I played it was by far the worst.

And I'm going to put that on me because I wanted to stream it with my chat, which led to all the fights being jokes and being frustrated at being railroaded.

Where if I had played it by myself, I would have just done the same thing I did with every other Monster Hunter game of all time, which is do every single optional quest as it arises

every single time.

So it would have taken me twice as long to do the low rank, and I would have seen more, and I wouldn't have felt as railroaded.

Would you prefer if

they either.

Would you prefer A,

it's the same thing, same setup and made for new players and

completely railroaded, but it's half as long?

Or B.

Oh, it's already half as long as World's campaign.

Well, half that.

So nine hours to four and a half.

Or B,

you literally press the I know what I'm doing button.

And

it just begins a different thing

right away.

I think it's a little dangerous for us to armchair this a little too strongly, but I think that there's actually like a really easy solution they've built into the game.

I think that the main game in low rank should be get out there and do whatever, just like it is in high rank.

And then when you hit a certain hunter rank threshold, it pings you for an urgent quest,

and then you go fight a new, tougher monster, and then they dump a lot of story onto that.

Isn't that basically how a game like FF-14 works?

Yes, right.

In fact, the game's, oh, you know what?

When I was playing through the campaign, I was like, this feels just like Final Fantasy 16.

Right.

That exact, right?

Like, that exact

talk,

walk, side quest kinda.

Huge, bombastic, fucking cool thing.

Walk, talk, side quest, kinda.

Huge, bombastic, cool thing.

Like, over and over and over and over and over.

Big map, but it is not a map.

It is a point, two, point, two, point, two, point two.

Yeah, the map, the map is, like, really poorly used until you beat the campaign.

So it's, like, it very much is, like, training wheels.

Until the real shit.

And it'll be interesting to see how fast they get those title updates out.

I I would like an average of one monster a month.

So in April, they're putting out two new monsters.

And if you go to the Monster Hunter Leaks Reddit, you can see who those monsters are going to be and they're good picks.

And then you can see what the title update monster after that is going to be.

And that's also a really good pick.

It's a really good pick.

The problems that you're describing about being able to just gang stomp the monster in multiplayer, when you get to the higher difficulties, does it get to the traditional difficulty?

It's traditional high rank.

You gotta fight and fucking survive.

Yeah, so like if you're if you're a total vet and you know exactly what you're doing, you're gonna get to high rank and fight like a Kongala or something, and you'll be like, Ah, this ain't that big of a deal.

But I mean, I rolled up to a Rathian and went, I know how to fucking fight a Rathian, and she tail swiped me and I died from full health.

And I was like, Oh, okay, yeah, all right, yeah, okay.

So, so it is just like a fake mode stuck up top is what's going on, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, gotcha.

Um,

I really, really think

that if the game didn't go the place it did with its story,

that I would have been way harder on this game.

But

it went,

the story goes to the exact place I have always wanted them to go in Monster Hunter.

Like a really...

There is a singular picture of art that has been floating around since the aughts that I have been going every time Monster Hunter comes up, I want them, I want to fight that thing.

And we finally get to do it.

And it's awesome.

I kind of want to throw out a spoiler guess, but.

Go for it.

Is it a monster that is human-sized?

No.

Okay.

No, that'd be fucking terrible.

Okay.

Well, I don't know.

No.

All right.

That's that'd be awful.

Also, you actually did fight a human-sized monster?

Is there there a Gurin Lagan thing that turns into a Gurin-Lagan

boss that combines and has a bunch of people?

Oh, they've done that.

That's called Autol Ka.

Okay.

Yeah.

There is a mecha pilot final boss in Monster Hunter, and it's called Ottolka.

That's the final boss of GU.

Okay.

Yeah, I thought I heard something on that.

No, no,

you want, I'll type out

what it is in your Discord.

That's That's fine.

You don't have to.

All right.

I don't know.

I don't know what Monster Hunter fans want.

I'm just throwing random shit out there.

But yes, that's obviously me because I'm my brain speaking.

So, anyway.

The whole system would completely fall apart with a human-sized monster.

Yeah, probably.

It would just.

The whole thing.

For sure.

It's not made for that.

I just, I'm like, I'm like, what, when you talk about like, what is this world of humans and monsters?

Like, okay, I don't know.

Is it a person piloting a monster?

Is it a fucking.

or is it, you know, I don't know.

I'm like, there's only so many variables of what this series can be.

Of per you need to go read some monster hunting, T-Rex and books, dude, sword swinging at it.

Like, what do you want to do with that?

I don't know.

Some souls' bosses are giant monsters, and some souls' bosses are small, and sometimes you, you know, I don't know.

Um, even the small souls bosses are still like 10 feet tall,

like you know, so the camera works.

But,

yeah, no, good game.

Going to become a much better game.

I'm going to let it sit for a bit.

I'm going to delete my file

and continue playing GU

late at night when everybody else is asleep.

And then when we get the title update, then I will restart that game and go back.

So you have not yet let

the dust has not settled on your opinion.

No.

What do you think of it relative to

not GU, but Rise?

I think

if someone asked me, hey, man, I want to get into Monster Hunter, what should I get?

I would tell them Rise in a second.

I would tell them immediately, like,

absolutely no question.

Rise,

particularly because it has Sunbreak on top of the end, is like.

Including the DLC, okay.

Is not even close.

And what about what do you compare it to with World and Iceborne?

I would also say grab World instead,

because you probably can play those games a lot more easily and run them better.

Like going backwards is hard unless you're a freak, like me.

Like going back to GU, rough.

There's some old shit in that that's real annoying.

If somebody said, hey man, I want to get into Monster Hunter, I I would tell them to play World of Rise

and then wait until I would tell them to wait until the expansion for Wilds comes out.

Okay.

Is what I would tell them.

And for not a new player, but for someone who's looking for events.

Well, they don't listen to anyone.

Well, someone who's a fan of GU and knows the games inside out.

Anyone who plays Monster Hunter and continues to enjoy Monster Hunter is already playing Monster Hunter.

That's why it sold 8 million copies.

Of course, it's not a question about whether they should get it.

It's more like how do you stack them?

How do do you stack high rank in Wilds compared to.

Oh, high rank in Wilds is easily the best the series has ever been, no question.

Okay, cool.

Cool.

But the low rank in Wilds is the worst it's ever been in a long time.

Understanding, yeah.

That is a very strange dichotomy.

Like, I would say that that's like a seven and a ten stapled together by their credit scene.

What if you had to beat World Tour to get to the fighting ground?

That's kind of what it feels like.

Like it feels a lot like Street Fighter's campaign where World Tour.

I enjoyed World Tour.

It was fine.

It was fun.

The story was fucking terrible.

It was terrible.

But like the idea of like, you must.

It's like, it's annoying.

And the thing you want is right here.

Yeah.

I didn't even talk about all the little features that they added.

There's now

clashes.

like power struggles between you and the monster with anything that blocks.

So like you'll jam your shield up into its mouth mouth, and you'll both be like, fucking,

and you'll try and knock it over.

There's also every weapon has a dedicated counter-move.

So, you know, every strike that a monster does where they hold up their hand real big and long, and they go, oh, I'm going to hit you.

If you clash with that, you'll just power through it and knock the fucking thing right over.

Oh, wasn't that already a thing when you, like, with the perfect blocks and that, that on a charge?

So that was a thing, but it always depended on whether or not you flinched them, which was like a stun threshold.

Right, okay.

Now they're dedicated mechanics that it's like, no, if you perfect block enough times, you'll get into like a like,

I guess the closest I could call it mechanically is like a beam struggle

with the monster.

Okay.

Or you do like a very large attack that directly counters them and just knocks them on their ass.

It feels very dynamic.

Interesting.

Because, yeah,

I'm thinking of like releasing

your full alt or whatever right in the middle of a charge when it like.

Yeah, so that was was always dependent on their flinch status.

Okay.

So if you had done enough damage to them recently, you cross an invisible threshold that's like a miniature stun, which is the flinch threshold.

So what you would think of is people's videos where you would see like a charge blade element discharge into a diabetic.

When I say the word alt, I'm thinking of like amplified elemental discharge.

But what you're not thinking of is that when the value isn't high enough and the monster just ignores it and just powers through you otherwise.

Right.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Yes.

Now it's a dedicated mechanic.

So there's like mounting, grappling, grabbing, and countering.

So there's a lot of really dynamic interactions with the monsters.

What else do you got?

The game has its form.

It's just a different form.

You can customize your bird to look like a chocobo or...

It's a chocobo.

It's a fucking chocobo.

I have thoughts on like the way the endgame weapon thing works, but I haven't touched it myself, so I'm going to leave those thoughts alone.

Yeah, good game.

Launch is rough.

It's not stopping anyone.

And I feel a little bit like an old man because I'm playing GU and I'm like,

why don't they use the old Monster Hunter thing where you just post quests?

And then I look at 1.3 million people playing on Steam right now.

And I'm like, oh, that's why.

Because

having a dedicated single-player campaign that feels like a regular normal video game, not like Monster Hunter, is the point.

A lot of people.

That's

okay for that experience.

Yeah, I can see that.

When you do an SOS, NPCs show up first or can't show up.

Yeah.

If you're offline,

NPCs will show up.

And the NPCs are also really strong.

They're good.

Well, I was like, how does that, like, I'm sure you're not doing the flinch into flinch into flinch bits, but you sure are, buddy.

Oh, wow.

You sure are.

How about that?

Interesting.

Yeah, the NPCs will kick the fucking shit.

And there are a couple of the, you know, the repel quests where a really big motherfucker shows up and you're like, you're not killing this thing.

You just need to survive and get it out of here.

Those oftentimes have your hunter with you, Olivia, who is an older, very Jane Lynch looking lady, like very older lesbian gym teacher kind of thing.

Okay.

Who has a hammer

and she's cool?

Uh, the cast is cool.

Uh, I like the cast.

Your handler's great.

Um, although are you familiar with iPhone face?

No.

So I've been using the term iPhone face, and I have to explain it every time I say it.

iPhone face is what happens when you put Ryan Reynolds in a Crusades film.

And you go, oh, that motherfucker knows how to use an iPhone.

I don't care if he's pretending to be the king of England or whatever the fuck.

The Gears Kids.

Yeah.

Gears of War, whatever, Future Kids, where you're like, look at these influencers in Gears of War armor.

Yeah, so like Alma, your handler, works at your local coffee shop.

Like she just does.

Gemma, your Forgemaster, is really cool for me and Old Heads because she is an existing monster hunter character that has been in an old game.

Okay, so for me,

Worlds being the first one I've played,

I feel like a lot of the characters that have been introduced there don't look like anime characters.

Some of them are, but a lot of them are just kind of like Western faces and features.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So

I kind of get that impression of most of the cast already, you know?

Yeah, so your Forge Master in this game, your Smithy, is a character from For You called Little Miss Forge when she was a kid.

Cool.

That you picked her up on the trail,

and she talks about the events of For You a little bit, which is really cool.

That looks like an RPG-ass character.

Damn.

And the guy who said the old guy who sends you on your mission,

I believe, is the Ace Lancer from For You as well.

Just, he got old.

He's not hunting anymore.

And yeah, your cast is really strong, except for

the child character that is like the main character of the story who is

fucking intolerable.

I love it.

Just the worst.

He is so awful.

He is so goddamn awful.

And so here's the thing.

Usually with child characters, you're like, oh, they're annoying constantly, right?

No.

Nata is fine.

He's actually totally fine

80, 90% of the story.

And then he starts to become like the worst character Monster Hunter has ever had in a huge way.

And every time he speaks, I'm like, oh my god, shut up, dude.

Oh, shut your fucking mouth.

You're so stupid.

It's not like something like, oh, the kid from Stories is now in the mainline or something.

No, no, no, no.

This is a brand new character.

Okay.

But

basically, basically, this child character in the story has a hot take that is so hot in the Monster Hunter universe that I'm like, just throw this kid to the wolves.

I don't even give a shit anymore.

Okay.

And

I never thought that a character in that setting could have a hot take.

Because it's like, what could you even say?

It's like the hottest take ever, and it's so dog shit.

It's crazy.

He is the dumbest character that has ever existed in Monster Hunter.

We should let the Rathalos into the camp.

Congrats, Woolly.

You actually pretty much nailed it.

Okay, all right.

Why can't we just...

This is a minor spoiler, but at one point in the campaign, you are watching a monster like cannibalistically devour animals at random and just be insane and he goes it's just like me for real we should we should be friends got it

and you're like

yep it's like a rabid super dog at this point man yep yep yep yep

okay

um

uh that has been the monster hunter cast uh it's it's a it's a good game with weird issues just like every monster hunter game ever.

It's just now the issues are different, and that makes me scared.

And old.

I'm old.

Alright.

But how does it compare to Dauntless?

We'll be right back.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

Let's do it.

This week the podcast is sponsored by Turtle Beach

and

that has been a brand that

I've gotten headphones for Turtle Beach for my setup for years now.

Always been pretty fantastic quality and the latest they've got the Gen 3

Stealth 700 headset

which I have

I have talked about because yeah, it's got 80 hours battery life that are pretty fantastic.

No crackly mics, just pure interrupted quality with the rich surround sound and all of that stuff.

But in particular, something that has become really, really indispensable is the fact that you can have it connect to multiple devices.

I love that.

Smart switch between the devices as you need to.

So if I have it connected to my phone and then connected to, you know, via Bluetooth and then it has a receiver as well, both of those are able to work together.

However, not only does it have the ability to switch between, it has the ability to simultaneously play both at the same time, which means if you're playing a game and taking a call, you can do both and hear them.

If you're listening to music...

Don't know how that works.

That's crazy.

And it dips and ducks the volume quality, the volume so that you can hear both at the same time.

It's incredible.

It's a super duper useful

feature and it's my favorite.

That is the best thing.

There's a lot of times where, you know, like I appreciate the convenience of being able to switch between the two, but one step better is literally both at the same time without needing to switch.

Really, really awesome.

And then, you know what, on top of that, you got that comfy

ear cushioning as well going on with it.

So, yeah.

The cross-plate dual wireless transmitter system on the Stealth 700 is fantastic.

Get the wireless, get the wires out of your life,

get the quality, and get yourself

the Stealth 700.

It's got quick charge on that 80-hour battery life as well.

Oh, man.

It is.

I love quick charge.

It's fantastic.

I'm getting annoyed by devices that don't have quick charge.

Right?

Right?

Why wait?

Head to turtlebeach.com and use the code CASTEL for 10% off your entire order.

That's 10% off your order at turtlebeach.com with the promo code CASTEL.

After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them.

Support our show.

Tell them that we sent you,

and get yourself the ultimate immersive gaming experience with Turtle Beach today.

Thank you, Turtle Beach.

Thanks, Turtle Beach.

This week, the podcast is sponsored to Ching by Shopify.

Hey, Shopify.

Hey, man.

Shopify is the number one checkout on the planet.

If you have

any sort of online business that you are starting or in the middle of growing or you're already at you know your your high-level

commerce platform usage uh at all levels Shopify is pretty handy and useful for you it's got a fantastic series of tracking metrics for everything you need as you are growing your business helps someone like us figure out how to do the basics like getting a t-shirt out to people.

But if you've got more complex carts and online offerings and services as well, they can help you with all of that.

Yeah, it's the not-so-secret secret.

They're behind a ton of known brands.

Aloe Allbirds and Skims, for example, all successful businesses using Shopify.

We've used them, and it is

a great way to grow your business no matter what size you're at.

Whatever platform you're using, you can integrate that successfully as well on all your socials, on all your places that you want people to be shopping with you.

And I always shout it out, but the shop app in particular just used it today for multiple things from multiple stores that I'm regularly tracking coming my way.

Very handy.

And being able to integrate whatever you're selling into that is very useful as well.

So, yeah,

you can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use.

Go to

shopify.com/slash superbeast to upgrade your selling today.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/slash superbeast, all lowercase.

So, once again, that's shopify.com/slash superbeast.

Thank you, Shopify.

Thanks, Shopify.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

Don't rawdog the internet.

Don't do it.

It might give you a thrill, but that thrill will bite you when you get sick on your computer.

It might not even be the next morning.

It might be that same night.

Because

it works fast, you know?

Yeah, man.

You get sick real fast on that computer, man.

If you ever heard of a dater broker, a data broker is a middleman that collects and sells.

That's different.

A dater broker is different.

A dater broker.

A data broker is a middleman that collects and sells all your financial footprints, all your data, all your digital footprints, everything you leave online.

They can stitch it together for a detailed profile that includes your searches, browsing history, location data, everything about you.

And yeah, they sell that profile off to companies that want to deliver a targeted ad to you.

So

you'd be surprised, but

they are also not just selling that to advertisers, but they are selling that information to apparently the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS.

Wow.

That's damn, that's crazy.

Thank you for the heads up there.

The

yeah,

let's see here.

I don't want the tax man showing up at my door because of some search I did on my phone.

Man, I don't want to watch that.

Okay.

All right, copy.

I see what you're doing here.

All right.

Yeah.

Don't tread on me or my data.

No, no, that's not what that says.

I protect myself with Express VPN.

That's what that says there.

okay

we uh

uh I'll say hey data

data uh profile uh uh selling and processing is theft

right yeah there you go don't don't do that it is

um

anyway one of the ways that they do it of course is through your IP address which is unique to you and it reveals information about your location so express VPN can hide your IP address and makes it so that it's much more difficult for data brokers to monitor, track, and monetize your privacy online.

It encrypts 100% of your network traffic.

ExpressVPN keeps your data safe from hackers, even when you're on public Wi-Fi.

And it works on all your devices, your phone, your laptop, your tablet, everything.

Just you can name it.

Tap it, one button, you're protected, and go.

It's that easy.

I used it multiple times this week as their work.

Dude, I love ExpressVPN.

I love it.

Yeah, it is, it is.

I am constantly

tapping that button, watching a video, tapping it off.

There's a lot of American videos that

Canada is not supposed to see, and I'm like, nah, though.

Nah, I'ma do it.

You can't stop me.

Thanks, ExpressVPN.

Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash superbeast.

That's expressvpn.com slash superbeast.

And you can get an extra four months for free expressvpn.com slash superbeast

thanks expressvpn thank you

and lastly this week the podcast is sponsored by hello fresh

oh man the hello fresh ad reads are rough because like i always i always have like a piece of toast right before coming to the podcast it's like i should probably have had a real meal i mean look

probably

you know it it doesn't help that we started this out talking about how like games we play have food porn in them.

And then we transition right over into

telling you about delicious meals you can get.

I mean, when you got a HelloFresh box, you're opening up a box of food porn.

It's delicious stuff.

But what's cool about that is that it's also healthy for you.

You can get yourself,

you know,

whatever your schedule is like, HelloFresh can help you save time on that.

It's easy to find time to eat well.

They got 50 wholesome hassle-free meals you can choose from each week, deliver to your door.

You don't have to figure out what's going on or what to make for dinner or what to prepare.

All of that is ready-made from the go.

They have pre-proportioned ingredients.

They've got meals you can eat and you can you're ready that are ready to eat in just three minutes as well.

High quality ingredients, restaurant worthy foods you'd expect from HelloFresh, but with none of the work.

So even then, you've got options.

Prep and bake meals

are minimal mess.

Takes five minutes of prep.

Your oven does most of the work, not you.

They've got the 50-minute meals, three simple steps, so you can eat better all year without the hassle.

You have a ton of options.

And yeah, all of these are available.

Delivered straight to your door.

You don't have to waste time with the grocery trip.

You don't have to waste money on the grocery trip.

They've even got add-on items as well, like

if you're looking for a quick breakfast, packable snacks, beverages, and more, you can customize all of that.

So be sure to get in there.

I recommend the chicken pesto.

It's a classic.

And yeah, you get up to 10 free meals and free high-protein item and a free protein,

a free high-protein item for life at hellofresh.com/slash hellofresh podcast.

One item per box with active subscription free meals applied as discount on first box new subscribers only varies by plan that's up to ten free hello fresh meals go to fell hello fresh dot com slash hello fresh podcast that's america's number one meal kit thank you hello fresh thanks hello fresh

uh ooh mouth words hard tired

oh yeah yeah

here's a mouth word for you.

You ready for this?

Yeah.

Something I left out of the Monster Hunter discussion.

At some point in that game story, an element of that story becomes a concept known as Wyvern milk.

Nice.

And they keep saying it a lot.

Nice, good, good, good, good, good.

I like that.

And every time they say it, you're like, oh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course.

No.

If these are the animals, then why wouldn't we milk them?

So, no, that's not what it is at all.

It's a totally different thing.

Just happens to be called Wyvern milk.

Oh, it's forbating Wyverns?

It's the other way around.

No.

No, I'm not going to go into it.

They talk about it a lot.

And every time they talk about it, it hits your ear like, uh.

Huh.

Because I, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm all on board with the idea of like fictional milk from the world of the thing.

Okay, I'm just going to tell you, man, it's come.

It looks like cum.

It, it, it's, it's, it's, it, it gets on the monsters, and it looks like cum.

Awesome.

And they power up by eating it.

Oh, they get they get powerful.

It's a whole fucking thing.

It's cum.

It's, it's so fucking weird.

Good, good, good, good, good.

They're like, oh, that, that guy got into the cum.

He's stronger now.

And you're like, Jesus Christ.

I like it.

Good.

It's fucking weird.

It's super fucking weird.

I like how Luke Skywalker is drinking that fucking green alien milk or whatever.

It sits in little pools on the floor and the monsters go and lap it up.

And it's, it's fucking, it's piles of cum.

It's fucking weird.

There's, I'm sure there's Pokemon milk.

There's got to be Pokemon milk out there.

Someone's milk is, I mean, if you type in Pokemon milk right now, I'm sure you'll get search results, but I don't think it's going to be what you're looking for.

Well, for sure, there's, there's that cow.

No, it'll be what you're looking for.

No, no, no.

There's

a Miltank, right?

Miltank has,

for sure.

You can just Miltank it.

I'm not dodging that.

I'm getting out of here.

Miltank is a cow Pokemon.

Yep.

Ready to go.

Yep.

All right.

Well, okay.

Did you

want to hit up your schedule?

First, I want to talk about Expedition 33.

So

they sent out preview codes for that.

And it's a proper preview code.

Like,

you motherfuckers don't get to play this.

Ha ha.

Claire upscale.

I mean, you can, Willie.

You could just ask for one.

This thing looked so fucking cool from that trailer.

It looked so French and so cool.

Okay, so.

And those are not I have truly exclusive date details.

I have good news for you from my exclusive details.

One, it's so cool.

Yeah, yeah, it's

for sure.

It's so cool.

You can tell.

It is using a Mario RPG-like battle system where it's like enemies attack you and you parry them or you dodge them with timed button presses.

Hell yes.

You have Legend of Dragoon-style QTEs on all your skills.

Wait, turn-based RPG-ing.

Yep.

Interesting.

I beat a boss in that preview content that was like a dozen levels higher than me, that would one-shot me every single time it hit me because I learned it's parry timing.

And I just parried every single attack for 10 minutes and killed it.

Love it.

And then

got like five levels off of it and fucked up the rest of the preview content.

Turn-based RPG with little mini-games.

Fuck yes.

It's great.

It's great.

I mean,

also,

but like some of the just some of the

diversity of mini-games in like Thousand Year Door and

even just hitting that circle in Lost Odyssey, you know, like hell yes.

So there's a bunch of different types of QTEs.

You have to jump over attacks.

You have to parry.

It's great.

It's awesome.

It is also the Frenchest game.

Yeah, it is.

Baguettes and striped shirts.

So you jokes.

So, that's a DLC, right?

Yeah.

But if you play the preview, there's a hidden super boss that is literally a demon mime

and it uses mime attacks on you.

Let's go.

And when you beat it, you unlock the ability to dress up the main character in the striped shirt with the baguette shit.

Let's fucking go.

So, if you watch anybody's Expedition 33 footage, make a note of who's using the striped shirt and baguette because those people beat a boss that other people did not.

Does the music sound like MLI?

There's fucking accordions when you fucking.

Let's go.

It's Charlie Cox as your main character doing his regular-ass Britishy accent, but it's aggressively French.

Like his favorite swear word is pâtain.

Yes.

There's a lot of merdes.

In English.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Beautiful.

In British-accented British-accented English.

A lot of the little monsters talk with little French accents.

I don't know how to describe it other than the dialogue is French.

You can tell.

You can tell it's very French.

The characters are suffering from ennui.

Of course they are.

It's crazy.

In the world of Victor Chevalier.

Yeah.

Expedition 33 is to France the way Stalker is to Ukraine.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Right?

Just like, oh, like you touch it, and you're like, oh, wow.

Oh, I can taste the culture through the screen.

Zutal.

Yeah.

I said zuttalal, Goku, a couple times, and people didn't understand what the fuck I was talking about, but I knew someone laughed.

Yes, no, because

the Dragon Ball manga we got here in Quebec was the France-French

Dragon Ball translation.

So there'd be like Frieza going, Zutalal, you know, and the sound effects were the onomatopoeia were also French.

Tack, paff,

you know.

Ma sacrée, et craisé lay.

Yeah, it was great.

But, yeah, no, that Expedition 33 game is going to be really good.

Nice.

I did not know it was

really good.

I didn't know it was a turn-based RPG.

That's fucking sick.

Yeah, that's the best part.

That's super sick.

Because you watch the footage, it doesn't look like a fucking turn-based RPG.

In fact, I kind of was like, oh, it's going to be a little automata action-y 3D thing.

Nah, man,

this is a JRPG.

Old.

Sorry, it's an FRPG.

Because AAA game 2025 is that, right?

It's 3D action.

Lost Soul Aside and that other game that was announced at the Game Awards.

The roundtable one.

Where you're like, look at these beautiful boss fights with dodges and monsters and great designs.

Yeah, it's cool, but it's just, this is video game current year.

Yeah.

So there's like, it's, it's the its base is FF10, but with like action commands.

Like that's what that game is.

Like it has the turn order at the top left of the screen, and it looks like the FF10 turn order.

Yes, we're talking about tides of annihilation.

How long was this demo?

Three hours.

Okay.

It was quite long.

It was pretty juicy.

So I got a real good look at it.

You can check that out.

I put it up on the YouTube, on the Pat Stairs at YouTube.

You can go look at that shit.

What's the release date?

April 24th.

Oh, shit.

That's way sooner than I thought.

So it's a shame because the demo, sorry, the previews went out on March 3rd, which is like, you get it?

Because

it's like 33.

Expedition.

I bet they wish they could have gotten that release date.

But it was not to be.

Okay.

And that was it for me this week.

If you want to see more of my stupid shit, go down to twitch.tv slash patstaresat.

We're going to be back to Pirate Yakuza.

And on Thursday, I would advise you, fellow hunters, to get your switches out because I'm going to be playing Monster Hunter GU on Thursday with chat.

Very go back to the old, old shit for comparison.

I wonder if someone...

I wonder if an English producer went, you can't just call this game Claire Obscure.

That's not going to...

People's brains will auto-delete

these words in English.

You have to put something in there.

I feel like it's the complete opposite yeah I feel like it was called Expedition 33 and they're like no no it's a n

it uh

it could be

but the thing is if it was expeditions

but if it was Expedition trendroie

different c'est c' palm chause

you know I I definitely believe they wanted to to fucking French it up further from their normal title.

Put a little X on the title.

But Expedition 33 being the game's subtitle is really funny.

Because that's what everyone's going to call the game.

Also, there's a 33 on screen at almost all times.

Well, because that's the thing is you say, you know, like that's, like, I didn't, I saw Expedition 33 pop up way more than I saw people write out Claire Obscure, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, no one's going to use that.

It's going to be great.

It's going to be great.

I'm going to LP that.

I'm going to play that.

I'm going to stream that.

That's going to be great.

Nice.

Yeah.

What's up with you, man?

How's your week been?

Pretty cool.

Had a couple things I was able to get up to.

The first of which was a board game that I'd been eyeballing for a little bit.

So

there's a game called Alice is Missing.

And

it sounded pretty interesting as it was a.

I kind of first heard about this.

Sir Meow told me about it.

It's a card game that you you play entirely with

your phone with other people in the room via Twitter.

Wow, this is the perfect Gen Z game.

Oh, it sure is.

It sure is, right?

So yeah, Foxcate.

Is it my turn in Monopoly yet?

So not exactly that.

It's interesting, though.

So

Foxcaid is in town as well.

So basically,

went to go hang with them.

And

we did a little round of this game, five players.

And the main detail about this, because I got a copy as well, because it sounded really interesting.

And it was like, you can, it's a cool thing, but you can only really play this once.

Oh.

And you can show it to other people, but like it's not something that you can really redo multiple times because of how particular its kind of narrative is.

And what it is, is essentially a game where

it is part card and role play

it is it is part

like you you are you are playing these you are each the role of a character Alice is a teenager who lives in this town of

Silent Falls

right

and

she goes all right and Alice is a teenager and she goes missing And the five people playing the game, you each are someone in her life.

You're either,

you know, her older brother or

her best friend or her secret girlfriend or one of multiple people in her life.

And you take on that role

and

you each,

once you have that, you, the people in the room, you are basically going to be playing and communicating via texting each other only.

So

shooting, you can, I mean, you can play it via like that or just jump in a Discord, but you only chat.

You don't talk out loud.

And the game lasts exactly 90 minutes.

Okay.

The way you play it is there's a video that you load up on a TV, and it is a 90-minute countdown.

And you click play and begin the game, and there's a timer that is going down.

So the whole time you're in the room, it's playing, there's music, and it's got the timer.

And

you've each drawn cards that are meant to be played at a certain number of minutes, counting down the okay.

So you get to, you know, like five minutes in, one of the cards, or ten minutes in, one of the cards I've drawn is to be played at the, you know, at the 80-minute mark.

And

it is an event that occurs.

Something is, you know, something that we discover about the missing, about Alice, like some detail.

And Excuse me, I just muted.

I was coughing.

And then what you're kind of doing is at that point, the card will tell you to draw one of the suspicious NPCs in the town, draw a suspicious location, perhaps go to it and do a search, or perhaps just tell everybody about what's going on.

But you are putting these pieces together and getting a clue as to like someone that might be, you know, the culprit, or someone that might be suspicious, or whatever's going on.

Um,

you also, each character has their own elements that are, they have a different relationship with Alex, they with uh Alice.

They have like um uh different relationships with each other that you have to kind of play off of, and you have to kind of create one or two secrets that only you and uh Alice have with each other.

So, your so the Alice that's kind of created for your game is unique to the people that are playing that round, you know.

Uh, it's a very interesting, like,

because it's not exactly a board game in that way.

You know, it's like, it's not just playing cards and pieces.

It's

the kind of communication element is a big part of it.

And to that end, I would say that the role-playing is also a big part of it.

You know, you essentially are like looking at it and going, okay,

my role as the older brother, for example, was to

very protective of the best friend, but I am extremely suspicious of the secret girlfriend.

I would be suspicious of the secret girlfriend also.

Right.

I'm just going to tell you that right now.

Sure.

And then, you know, it kind of asks you, okay, like you had a big fight right before Alice went missing.

What was it about?

And that's a detail that only you have, you know, and so there's these things that are like, you know, suspicious details that can be on other people or on yourself.

And

you can kind of like, you know, work those things together with any other relationship issues that they might have.

And in the end, it's one of those bits where I'm like, and so there's that part of it.

And then there's also like, even though it's my, it's my sister that's missing, I'm kind of the goofball that's not going to take it seriously.

And so like, people are like, what the fuck, dude?

Relax.

Like, it's your sister.

And you're kind of like, you know,

you're afraid of the reality of things.

So you're the one, the first one to crack a joke, to toss an emoji in there, to do whatever, you know?

And so you kind of have this, this sort of, I guess, back and forth.

And then you get to a certain time point, and then another escalation point happens and happens and happens until you get all the way down to the final one, you know.

Based on the cards you pull and or what pops up, you yourself, your character can die.

Things can happen to you.

And

again, the only way to communicate is via text.

So sometimes, you know, like messages are incomplete or there's missing information and stuff and the rest of the players have to kind of figure it out without you.

It's a really interesting, you know, unique experience of a board game.

It's also like, you know, obviously, it's the type of thing where as everyone's playing and as multiple things can go wrong, this can get super real as well.

You know, some of the

locations in town can involve like, you know, the old mall, that empty barn up the, you know, up the hill.

And there can be like the creepy history teacher, that, that, that weird person that lives in town that nobody really knows, the popular kids, the bully, you know, all these people are kind of like floating around as well.

And like,

you know, at some points, you can get calls from them or rather like get information from them and then have to like break that out to the group.

But like, who do you share it with back and forth and stuff is part of it as well.

It has definitely got little elements where, you know, now that I've seen it, I can say I'm like, okay, so one, the location of Silent Falls.

Two, at one point, there is like a card that's like, the best friend has a buried locket

that went missing.

Who was like, who saw the locket go missing?

And you're like, oh, we're just doing Twin Peaks here, right?

Yeah.

There's big, big

exactly.

So big Twin Peaks vibes to the game as well.

And big,

I'd say Twin Peaks.

What I said before,

and

Life is Strange, too, you know, is part of it as well.

But

it is kind of like

the fact that the game is on an active timer means you have an active time battle board game feeling to things.

You know,

you can only communicate so much in so much time.

And while you're in the middle of trying to convey some information or something, someone else might pick up a card and play it and be like, Never mind that shit.

We got a call from the lighthouse.

Some things are going on over there.

It's muffled screams.

What's going on?

Someone can go investigate.

And then if you go investigate,

no one can be in the same place at the same time.

So there can never be any

reason for you to be able to exchange information directly.

It has to be either in this group text or via DMs and stuff like that.

So

yeah.

So let me ask you a question.

This has been a relatively complex explanation.

Do you feel that this game was very complicated to explain how to play for something you can only play for 90 minutes one time?

I think

the complexity is more just me describing the variations of what's going on.

It's not that complex once it's actually rolling out and happening.

I think the fact that

narratively, I think you can play it with other people that are having their first time.

I think if you and the same group of friends play it,

it might be like yeah, something that won't be as effective necessarily on repeats, you know?

You can, I suppose, but the RPing is part of it, right?

To me, I

like the kind of randomized gaming element of it.

So there is a bit of,

you know, that, that, I guess your rogue type quality of like, you know, it's going to be different each time.

But

what it's doing is unique enough that I feel like it's like, that's pretty cool, though.

You know, it's worth experiencing, I think, with some friends if this sounds interesting to you.

You know, if you're not, if you're into different kinds of board games or not into board games at all, then the appeal might be different.

But if you do like the aspect of role-playing and kind of creating character and having a customized experience,

if you thought that dialect, that game I talked about, which is like about creating a language, if you thought that sounded cool, you might also think this kind of sounds, You might also like this, is what I would say.

It's not for everybody.

It's not for anyone who's looking for necessarily a game of risk, you know, which is like, here are the rules, here's what we're going to play, we're going to go hard, and that's it.

This is a bit of a,

you know, like a back and forth with the group of people you're playing with.

And, you know, like you might get the role of, again, you're, you're helpful or you're an asshole or whatever the case is.

And if your job is to be standoffish, but you're not good at playing the role of that person, it might be less effective, you know, as far as that game goes.

So, you know, I kind of feel like I've played good and bad games with Secret Hitler, for example.

It all depends on the crew you're with.

Yeah.

But as far as a like

gen

alpha ass,

everyone in the room is going to sit in front of a YouTube video and heads down in your phone for 90 minutes and just go, like, that is the most like, like, yes, that is premium gen alpha gaming experience right there.

Um,

but I think, I think it's interesting.

Um, um, so yeah, that was, that was fun.

Um,

I

would say, yes, to go back on the only play it once bit, I guess to let me elaborate on that because I can see like that would be like a major sticking point.

You can play it another time, but I would definitely think that it mainly like you want to have more, you want to have new people each time experiencing it.

It wouldn't be like, you know, you and the same group of friends playing Catan for the 80th time, you know, doing the same old thing.

So,

um,

you are working together to solve what happened.

Uh,

the, the, the, there's a chance based on what you draw or based on, you know, sort of the random way the cards come together that you may or may not be able to solve it.

You know, there's good, there's bad endings, there's all kinds of variations to it, and how you particularly play and what you draw from the decks as well kind of create the narrative.

But in the end, you are ultimately trying to cooperate to solve what's happening.

So that's.

So what happens if you don't solve it?

Well, and you can't play it again.

Well,

you can play it again, but for example, what happened in our game was

Sir Meow

ended up finding her,

but he found her body, and

then he got ambushed by one of the people that was suspicious from before that we couldn't find, and then got cut off mid-text

before

he couldn't talk anymore.

There was like a whole particular way that our way played out.

Some of the details and cards and stuff as well can get pretty gory and pretty nut-so and graphic as as well.

So it's kind of like there's a lot of bad that can happen, you know, and uh uh to you and/or to your Alice.

So anyway, um, yeah, played that, had a you had a had a unique and pretty fun time with that.

Check it out if that sounds something like it's up your alley.

Alice is missing, is what it's called.

Uh, interesting.

The other thing I did

was

I got to,

yeah so me

Fox and my buddy Josh went and checked out the G Cux the new Gundam movie I can't believe it's fucking called G Cux yep like I don't know what they're the what how they think it's supposed to be fucking pronounced the most reads like G Cux the most ungoogleable name in Gundam history

And believe it or not, of course, there is a reason why it's called G Cux.

I mean,

I could fathom a guess, but it's based off of its pronunciation, not its name.

Well, it's more about the spelling, isn't it?

Because

it's spelled G-Q-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-X.

So,

you know.

Oh, God.

I mean, tell you what, like...

You see it and your brain goes,

you remember that as a, like,

what the fuck am I looking at?

What is the title of this thing?

What is Gundam doing?

Yeah.

But then good luck remembering how many you're in there, you know?

Gee quacks, even.

Sure.

All right.

Whatever you say, man.

Okay, so this was basically a movie that is the summary of the first four episodes of

the anime that's going to be starting that has not started yet.

That's a strange way to fucking do that.

Yeah.

I mean, it's happened before.

There's been, you know, there's like times where you'll just do like the intro to a series as a movie and then you can go and then the rest will bleed out.

The

pedigree behind it is when they announced this was wildly interesting because it's written by Hideakiano

of Evangelian Fame.

It's got mech designs from

the Ava designer as well, Ikuto Yamashida.

It's got character designs from the Pokemon character designer.

Okay.

And it's also got FLC, FLCL, Furikuri, and Diebuster

director Kazuya Tsurumaki as well, who also did Ava stuff too.

So it's like an all-star team.

Yes.

So how is it?

It is...

It is a wild ride.

It is not what I expected.

And I have to explain where my expectations were with this going in and then how insanely different the result turned out.

I did enjoy it, but

it's kind of like caveated in the same way you were talking about Monster Hunter, where

there's two things happening.

Holy shit.

So for starters, all I saw of it was sort of that, those names associated working on a new Gundam series.

And then I saw the designs.

And the designs are pretty extreme as well because there's basically just like Ava unit proportioned Gundam

designs happening.

They just went, yeah,

take a humanoid Ava body in that style of proportion and those lines, and then stick the fucking head on it, put the V-fin there.

And not all of them are like that, but some of them are pretty exaggerated.

And then other things are kind of remixes of older suits and Zakus and everything.

um

i feel like uh

there's

so okay the setting i'm to i'm just gonna go full spoilers on this movie if you're interested in talking to it if you're interested in in in uh g quacks g cucks the beginning um

there's it's cool but it's weird and crazy check that out but i'm just going to tell what tell you what happens in the first four episodes and shit um all right

so let's let's hear it so

If you watch, I suppose, promotional material and trailers, and if you go into this kind of knowing what to expect, you'd probably see a lot of these characters that are kind of Pokemon-proportioned, bunch of kids doing,

you know, having, having adventures, and all that.

And I saw none of this.

So, I didn't know what I was going into, except for just the names involved.

And

you sit down, and

what you get is

the beginning of 0079

the original Gundam series is just playing out and

it is like you know almost it is almost shot for shot at points oh that's fucking weird the quality is obviously you know much better because it's it's it's a it's a current movie and stuff but like it's really it's just doing one-year war from the jump.

But

what happens immediately in episode one is instead of Amuro running and jumping in the Gundam, it rising and him having his first victory, Shar

jumps in the Gundam first.

And it gets up.

And you just immediately get to watch as what would happen if Shar got in the Gundam.

It's the most.

So all

Amuro is the G-Cuck that.

There is no Amuro.

Char shows up, jumps in the RX-78 effectively, but it's

the version from this setting, and just

steamrolls the war.

Like, it's so busted, it's not even funny.

It's insane.

You know, he gets it.

He goes, wow, this thing's pretty cool.

All right, we're taking it.

And the white base.

That's coming back with us.

Because, yeah, let's go.

They steal the base.

They steal the fucking Gundam.

And he's like, ah, good shit.

Paint it red.

Let's go.

And just takes it, sticks a couple funnels on, and annihilates the one-year war.

All right.

It begins with the setting of the stalemate or whatever.

Not

the war is over.

Zeon wins.

It's done.

Oh, no.

Right?

Cooks them.

And you get to just watch this alternate timeline of like, there was no chance

Char got the Gundam.

The thing that should never have happened happened.

That's really interesting, actually.

Yeah, he speedruns the whole campaign.

And like, you know, they're dropping names of like various zombies and, you know, the relationships are there and everything.

But you're following this alternate timeline, just going like,

well,

there's nothing that can stop him.

There's literally, you know, and like you, and there's

a point where

the giant Zeon base is basically going to,

well, no, at one point, you get to, you basically introduce, you know, Cassilia, the evil lady.

Like, she's there right away, and you know that Shar has it out for her because she's the one who gets fucking bazooked in the original.

And it's

the rawest shot in the world.

And so you know he has it out for her, but like, he can't make, he can't make his play too quickly.

Um, so the Earth,

the Federation is basically like,

yeah, we're fucking cooked.

This is done.

This sucks.

We're going to go out basically doing the same shit that Zeon does, and we're going to do our colony drop on the lunar base.

You know?

Oh, man.

Really?

So they're just like, yeah, we're doing.

Is that their one move?

Fuck it.

Fuck it.

You didn't win.

It's like, yeah, no, we did.

Like, you, the way he just, the way he smokes the entire

Alliance is insane.

And they're basically just like, yeah, fuck it.

We're dropping it.

And so it's, you're watching this, and you're on, you're watching it again with like an, it's like, you know, kind of

update, like, oh, faithful to the old shots, faithful to the old music, old sound effects, and stuff, but just an alternate reality

series.

And

he goes to make make his play where it's like, okay,

who can stop this

colony drop?

Essentially, Shar and the boys can, right?

We got a plan.

Let's figure it out.

And then he's like, okay, but can I use this as an opportunity to fucking get her ass and blow up Casilia in one shot?

Because that'd be pretty hype.

And starts running that ploy and

goes into

the mission, has everything succeed, and then essentially

an unknown event occurs where he slips into new type space, you know, with the colors and the noises and the

right.

But

essentially, like an event horizon of

new type energy explosion goes off,

and

he and the Gundam disappear, and nobody knows what the fuck happened.

And

this super crazy, like,

believable alt timeline then just cuts to your title.

This is like maybe an hour

in.

And then we cut to

a future in this world where Zeon won the war.

And we're going into a, uh, uh, you're, we're fast forwarding to 0085

in post-Zeon victory world.

Oh, okay.

How is it?

The art style changes to the Pokemon characters, and we get to hang out with this new girl, and she's cute, and she's running into this other girl, and Harrow's around, and a bunch of kids are going to have these tournament battles with their

junker Zakus.

And it's cool.

It's fine.

It's alright.

It's just not the same thing as that in intro.

That's super fucking weird.

It's crazy.

It's One of the weirdest fucking things I've ever heard in my life.

Yeah, and you know, there's even like a little, like, a little, like, almost a Yuri moment where I'm like, oh, are they doing like G-Witch kind of like energy with that?

Because that was a big success.

I don't know.

But these characters are hanging out.

And their whole thing is Xeon wins.

They end up selling a bunch of their suits to like civilians because whatever.

It becomes this thing where Xeon is now the

Empire, but they're still

free.

There's still neutral colonies and stuff.

And you basically get within that,

yeah,

there's these tournaments that are like build fighters where people like, kind of like

people are jumping in their little garage

mobile suits and

taking them into these pirate environments to have junker battles, you know, for cash and for frame and for tournament purposes.

And it's a bunch of kids that are like doing that, essentially.

Wooly,

you are describing

like

wow, cool robot made manifest.

Yes,

it's nuts.

It's so weird.

And for me, I think people going in that might have seen the promotional material and stuff might have known that that's the main series.

I didn't know that was coming.

So I'm like, we're watching alt one-year war,

like Shar

in the Gundam just killing it.

This is crazy.

And it's like, no, that's just the intro setup to this alternate reality.

Weird.

Right.

And so you have, you know,

and so there's one of these things, too, where one of the leaks that had come out beforehand was like, okay, besides the whole Anno involvement and Ava stuff going on, there's a

detail here, which is, yeah, the setting is not anything we've recognized.

It's literally alt-reality.

Yeah, no shit.

What if Zion won the war?

What if the Nazis won, right?

Man in the High Castle type shit.

shit.

And

it was like, is that supposed to be a spin that you find out, you know, like 20 episodes in or something?

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

No, you get to watch it happen.

You watch it happen from the jump, you know?

But

it is something where I'm like, okay, in this new now, like, yeah, real steel ass, like, much lower stakes kids in tournaments environment,

I don't know where it's going to go.

But, like, you you know, the characters are fine.

Um, the the the the new the main G-Cucks design, I'm not a fan of.

I kind of just don't like some of the shapes on it, uh, but

I forgot, and you just hit me with it, and it just fucking just sniped my ass, dude.

Yeah, but um, but I do like their take on the RX-78, especially when you add the funnels and

you know, go all char-colored.

It's pretty sick.

Um,

but uh,

it is one of these things where like, okay, that's all happening, but you're kind of seeing like, oh,

what does a Xeon run or specifically, you know,

or a Zabi run, I should say, universe kind of look like?

And you're like, oh, there's these, there's like,

of course, it doesn't mean any freedom for space noids.

It doesn't necessarily mean, you know, of course not.

It's all a lie.

Yeah, fuck that shit, right?

It was corrupt from the jump.

Well, not from the jump, but from the Zabi takeover.

So you're like, all right, you get to see the,

like, you know, this immediately the second-class citizens in these like neutral states are in the side, the sides that are colonies that are out there.

And

then suddenly, like,

after

trying to track it down for a while, like, some of the old characters that are now jumping into this new setting, fast forward, are like, whatever happened to Shar?

Where is he?

What happened to the Gundam?

We don't know.

And then suddenly, the Gundam shows up again and is wrecking shit and going nuts and

causing problems causing problems and we're trying to track down oh is he there what's going on but he's not there it's a new pilot it's some weird kid who's kind of spacey and and uh aloof and uh we're kind of like okay

what happened to all that or origin shit right and so it feels like there's a bait and switch and the switch is into a completely different energy that is still fine.

But if you're a fan of the original and you're like, or you just want to know, like, what happened to Shar?

What happened to the one-year war in this alt-reality and whatever?

I mean, they can hold that.

Where's Quattro Vagina at?

They can hold the Where Is Quattro Vagina

carrot on that stick to the end of that series if they wanted to.

And I have my guesses.

I suspect he's no longer around, but um you think this new kid is him and umro's like gay love baby no i think that shar that's what i'm going with i think shar probably wound up being in inside the the gundam or like fused with it in some way because it it gives off energy and and voice it's it's i don't know i i'm expecting i think his brain is in the i think i think shar's brain is in the is in the gundam is that's is what's happening i hope not that sounds stupid well it might might be an Ava.

It might be an Ava thing.

It would be very, very Anno to put the character's soul inside of the robot.

So far, besides that, though, yeah,

no other...

I mean, okay.

So there's kind of those initial characters we talk about.

And

one of the old characters from the original series, who was just like a quick standby dude, ends up being in the new

time jump, but no no Amaro, no Camille, no anyone else in alternate timeline, you know, at least yet so far.

So who the fuck knows?

And also when they show up, they're gonna look Pokemonized, which is gonna be kind of wild

if they ever do.

That's so strange.

That's such a specific, the art style changing two episodes in is so fucking fucked.

It's so weird.

It's so weird, but it's it's just and again, it's like,

you know,

if you want that, because it's G Gundam style, like, like 1v1, or 2v2, it's 2v2s, but it's G-Gundam style, like, tournament shit happening, and Build Fighters was also cool with that.

Like, it's like, what's happening is fine.

It's just the most completely different energy ever from the premise.

And I guess, you know, the characters are,

the kids are all right.

The characters are fine, and they're going to sell their toys.

But I can tell that anytime if your eyes start to wander,

they can just kind of be like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, 0079.

Ah, ah, hey.

You know,

say a sentence or two, drop a name, say Dozel, say Abaoku,

you know, and then have you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on?

What's going on?

You know, because,

yeah, when you, one of those things that, like, you know, people who follow Gundam

pretty religiously know is that like the one-year war is like

every time there is always another one-year war story.

There are 365 days.

It was a one-year war, but it was a billion stories.

There are 365 days in that year, and there are 365 different stories you can tell.

Did you know that the engineering team that put

the big Zam together actually had a really deep narrative in the background?

Did you know?

And so

by starting that way, but then like ripping it into a, this is not UC,

this is fucking CU.

This is backwards.

This is upside down shit,

Means that you can play with it in an interesting way that doesn't have to follow any

prescriptive beginnings or endings.

So

my hope is that

they

properly

give this new setting its time to shine, but spend the right amount of time getting into

what Xeon run

timeline looks like.

And I gotta say, man, I'm at this point where hopping on a new show like this, unless I know it's going to be a slam dunk for sure, I'm probably going to have to wait for this to finish a full season out.

Because, like, I don't want a darling in the Frank situation.

Well,

I will say, I mean,

Anno has some shit up his sleeve, I'm sure.

You know, we'll see where it goes.

But

having him jump over onto

Godzilla and do some crazy shit, and then he jumped onto Kaimen Ryder and he did some crazy shit.

Like, I feel like he's doing it here.

He's doing all of his childhood.

He's doing the tour.

Yeah.

And he's just, he's, he's, you know, doing fucking insane bat shit

directing and writing with all of the

his favorites.

So, um, yeah, I'm curious to see where this goes.

I'm also curious.

I'm more curious to see how it is received.

Like, by you, essentially.

In 25 weeks, tell me if I should watch it.

I think, like, also by pedigree, like, Hideakiano and this staff get a lot of leeway

on,

you know, like,

you can start a Gundam series and kind of, like, a few episodes in, kind of be like, yeah, I'm out, right?

Yeah, you can do totally.

It's very easy.

Not this one.

This one's two different ones, I guess, but still.

But so, exactly.

And so here, you're like, you're going to give these names a little bit more leeway.

You get a lot more benefit of the doubt knowing that fucking Furikuri diebuster shit is happening in the background.

And, you know, even though I don't really pay much attention to the newer Pokemon stuff, I do like that art style.

I think it's really cool.

Yeah, it looks much better.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's very cool.

And there's even parts of it where I would say...

The way the colors look on the characters and designs and stuff is there's some really nice, bright.

I watched clips while you were talking.

It pops.

I like it.

It's colors like Promer has colors.

So that's also a really nice thing that it's doing.

But just a wild-ass,

like,

that is not what I thought you were going to tell me.

That's the last thing I expected you to tell me.

Yeah.

And here's what I'll say for sure.

Just out of curiosity, even if you say didn't like where it went or whatever, that first bit of like Shar stealing the Gundam and just

wrecking the war

is awesome.

Well, because

it's crazy.

It excites the brain with what if, like, hey, what if,

what if

Camille never heard some cop say that Camille is a girl's name?

Like, how, and he had some fucking complete meltdown.

Or like, what, what, what would have happened?

Or just, like, literally, or just take any setting and go, like, what if the hero wasn't there and the villain just fucking got it?

You know, what if

there was no Jonathan and Dio just ran with it all the way?

Yeah, what if the Joe Stars just didn't exist?

He just had, he just, or, you know, Jonathan died, and Jonathan was like, oh, yeah, I got the mask.

Oh, sick ass.

Cool, vampire now.

Vampire man.

Like, that's it.

Forever.

You know?

Vampire forever.

Um, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

But, like, it is, in this case, the fact that it's, again, like, you, you know, what Shar's true intentions are and stuff.

Like, it's just, he, and it's, he starts when Char gets in the Gundam.

Gundam.

Oh, hey, man, I hate to bring it here, but I have to take a break.

That dog has definitely got to go out.

BRB.

I was

about to say

that, yes.

So in this series,

when Shar gets in the Gundam,

like, he's in a world that's taking place in 0079, and everyone is in 0079 space and

speed, and he's moving like a G Gundam character.

Like it's like he's in turn A.

Like he's just...

Like he has shown up from a different dimension.

So it's that thing where later Gundam series had that thing where like

looking around, where did it go?

It's become like, it's like they're teleporting around space type of shit.

He's doing that insane like, what the, oh my god.

You know, and you're, and you're, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's just busted.

It's just busted.

It's, it's great.

The character is stuck in 1978, you know, while a character from 2025 is styling on him.

So

it's, yeah,

I'm curious to see, at the very least, not just what Anno has up his sleeve, but I'm curious to see what

becomes of this obvious, like, obviously the Zabi family is going to tear each other apart.

And

we're given free reign to rule over everything.

What comes of, you know, fucking Dozel and Giren and everybody just once they're trying to cannibalize everyone in this actual space noid rule, you know?

So, yeah.

G-Cux

has

an interesting premise so far.

Can't believe.

I just can't believe that's the name.

So the reason why it's called GQUUUUU.

Oh, Oh, is there a reason that's not?

There is a reason that's stated.

Yeah.

What's the reason?

Because the person who jumps in and sees

the project name is looking at a placeholder name.

And the letters are just filler for a placeholder that has not been filled out to completion yet.

Well, that's stupid as fuck.

Yeah, it's just like a placeholder project name.

That's it.

You know,

it's X, Y, local singles.

Uh someone in the chat says G quack.

It's fucking G quacks.

I don't know if you are have better eyes than me, but it definitely doesn't have a A in there.

Sounds like it's written G cucks to me.

So what you're it's the it's the difference between what your eyes are reading and what the Japanese voice actors are trying to say.

G quack s.

You know, so.

Yes.

Sounds like they're reading letters that ain't there.

Yeah.

But it's the U's would be like underscores or like stars in

a project.

Even more of a reason to think it's G-Cucks.

It's G-Cucks.

It's G-Cucks.

It's been asterised for censorship reasons.

You know, Gatsu and Shimon would like to have a word.

Anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fun stuff there.

Okay.

Only other little bits

are

I have been moving through Metaphor

and I just got to 925

which is

the day after

shit goes down and without spoiling

I will say that I'm very pleased with how the story is progressing.

I'm very pleased with the escalation of events.

And I am very pleased with the party.

I love

everyone.

So last time we spoke about the party, I described you as meeting the party member from Virga Islands.

And you threw me for an absolute loop

real hard.

Because you perhaps, when I said I just got to the island yeah you might be misremembering how long it takes before the island party member joins you but you have to go through the whole beginning part and then the dungeon and then afterwards they join you you're probably right i'm probably what i'm thinking of is like they're visible on the box

yeah i mean like right there was i saw the so the steam artwork uh when you load the game up has a bunch of that's the box art yeah so i i i i i saw some characters but i i didn't stare too hard at it you know Yeah,

I really,

really didn't stare too hard

at the Steam art because there's a party member I was actually legit surprised by coming into the gang,

despite them being front and center right there.

It is funny that, yeah, so, well, for one, yeah, 9-11 is actually a significant date.

I wanted to talk about that really bad when I was playing the game, but I knew you were far away and everybody was playing the game.

And I was like fairly advanced compared to the.

I think it took huge balls to have Metaphors 9-11 take place on 9-21.

On 9-11.

I mean,

there's no way that

there's no way that's just coincidental, right?

Well, considering the events that occur on it, I think it's wildly,

it's definitely just a big coincidence.

Definitely just a big coincidence.

Uh, Indeed, indeed.

But more to the point, 923.

Big shit popping.

I love, though, how this game is doing the same thing that the Persona games have geared me up for and trained me for, which is like prepare to overcome your final challenges.

And I'm like, bitch,

there are S-links.

I have not met yet.

There are question mark S-links on this friend list I have not met yet.

There are people who I have not maxed out because you've blocked me from being able to do so.

Don't even fuck with me.

Why are you lying?

Why you stay lying?

I'm double-checking right now.

Always lying.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, there it is.

That's what you're talking about, 925.

Okay, that's okay.

So,

yeah, I just think in general, I really like this party.

Everyone

is

great.

I feel,

yeah, like no stinkers, you know?

Can I pat myself on the back for just a second?

You know how I love to throw Hail Marys out all the time when I'm playing a video game because I think it's fun.

I am so glad I streamed this and did the preview event because

I called 925 within like an hour of starting the game.

Yeah.

And I was like,

down to hyper-specific details.

It's pretty telegraphed in some ways, but not.

And I was like, yeah.

It's telegraphed in quite a few ways.

I would say that

that's a decent call-up, but it's pointing it out.

I think

something interesting I like about it so far, too, as well, is that

Luis

as a villain,

as your Griffith.

He's the best.

He's great.

Everything's awesome.

I really enjoy his depiction as

like

a sociopath.

Oh, yeah.

In the, like,

in the DSM sense.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In the sense where he's like, oh, that's good.

Now I don't have to go annihilate an entire town and burn it to the ground.

You saved me the trouble.

Thank you.

And then everyone goes, right, that would have been

annoying.

Yeah.

And then everyone's like,

what the fuck?

What are you talking about?

And he's like, there's right.

You go, they go, what the fuck?

Are you insane?

And he's like, every single time, he's like, why is that surprising?

Of course.

Like, naturally, this is what would have to happen.

He seems

genuinely confused that you don't follow along with his logic.

I'm in love with when you see the talks that he has with his gay boy squad.

And

like he's like, well, this goal has to happen.

So we're going to do X, Y, and Z.

And the Gay Boy squad's like, isn't that terrible?

He's like, but the...

The plan has to go happen.

So go do it.

He's so genuinely confused that you're not following along.

You know, I love that.

He operates on a completely different rationale from the planet.

It's great.

He's great.

I said I'm going to do it, so I'm going to do it.

And I appreciate that the member of the Gay Boy squad that I liked the most is the one that I get to hang out with.

That's correct.

So,

yeah, just really happy with where this is going.

One last little bit about the archetype system.

I feel as if the most recent and later archetypes you're getting, like the

summoner, devil summoner, and the

fucking whatever, persona mask changer, like just persona, you know?

It feels as if, well, one, you have the versatility of,

you know, being able to use them in all these different ways, which is, it's so strange because it's a versatile system to begin with, but then you're adding versatility to a single role, which now makes it like, well, then I don't need to expand your.

Okay.

I fucked around with that system like crazy, and it's, it's so fascinating because you have the XP feed system.

Yeah.

You can feed archetype experience, but then they also balanced party members that you get later by just giving them stronger base classes.

Yes.

So the final party members base class is so strong.

I never swapped him off of it and he was my strongest party well i so far for two of those characters that have like you know the ability to mix up their ability yeah i'm like keeping them on their thing and it also feels as if like um the first group you know the first four i have them earning tons of different archetypes and mixing and matching for optimized you know you need that for devil summoner And then the rest, I'm like...

Devil Summoner's just good.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, no, stay locked into where you are.

Thank you.

And, oh, can we get a little bit of a bonus if we get you into something here?

Okay, sure.

Fine.

A little bit of faker's roguery for you.

But stick to what you showed up with.

So I'm going to give you an archetype tip here.

Heisme,

his final archetype requires dramatically more experience than the others.

The requirements on actually unlocking it are enormous compared to everybody else's.

That is because if you unlock Heisme's final archetype, you have essentially beaten the game.

It is

so much stronger than everything else you get in the game.

It is unbelievable.

Wow.

Okay.

It is, it is.

It is the primary reason why I broke the game's final boss fight.

Interesting.

I will say.

And I mean, like, I literally broke it in that mechanics didn't occur properly.

So I did noticed that, like,

I had been neglecting him because

I looked at, like, my crew, which I was rolling with, like, Stroll, Hulkenberg, and, like, rotating the fourth one out a lot.

You know, one of the support classes usually.

I did see every time I'd pull up the menu of like, what are other people's parties looking like?

Everyone had Heisme in there.

Yeah, I noticed a lot of Heisme in there.

And I was like, okay, well, I had him on Gunner for a bit.

And then I switched him back over.

And it's like, okay, cool.

Well, now I just got Ninja, you know?

So I'm like, okay, cool.

Great.

Ninja has some really good-looking abilities.

Let me start working on those.

But I haven't had him as a staple because I've just been like working really, really well with the main three and a healer, you know?

So I'm going to tell you something

in the Discord right now.

It's a mechanical thing that Heisme gets if you level him up all the way.

And it will make a lot more sense as to whether or not you want to spend that time.

That's pretty good.

So that breaks the game system entirely.

That's pretty good.

Okay.

Gotcha.

I mean, right now, I feel like I'm breaking the game in a subtle way, you know, by messing around with

not breaking, but just like.

No, no, no.

The game is about breaking its own system.

I think it's a metaphor.

Perhaps.

Like,

I actually legitimately think that the gameplay of feeling like you are breaking the RPG system your character has been put into is actually a metaphor for the game.

Faker's roguery feels like you can't do this.

It's not...

It is a move

that gives you a random number, a dice roll worth of turns, and the chances of it going bad seem to be

minimal compared to the chances of it being good.

Well, I mean, you roll it, and you could get between like two and six turns, or one and six turns, and like, even if you only get the one, that's still like

a minor loss.

Oh, they're blinking now.

Oh, I lost the one turn.

Okay.

The next time around, it's going to make up for it.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

And then you give it to two of your party members.

And you're just like, yeah, we're going to be doing dual techs all day, you know?

Oh, yeah.

So, anyways, yeah, it feels.

And by the end of the game, I had the final party member running a dual tech setup with an accessory that would create its own weakness to its own attack.

Yeah.

And give And then give him his turns back.

I mean, right?

Yeah, and I'm also and I'm also doing like, you know, auto-buffs that also you have MP

recovery while you're buffed.

So you just keep going.

Like, it's crazy, you know?

Anyway, so that that's that's a lot of fun to play with.

It's a great system.

But though I am annoyed that like some of the stuff I think is the coolest is like locked behind hard progress, you know?

Like

I've wanted to spend all my time with Katarina, and

they make you fucking wait.

Yeah.

Well, it's because her final set of upgrades are crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

When they make you wait, what you get at the end is like, ooh.

Also, hey, just for your own information, you're coming up on the final couple of months.

The finale of that game is just like, you want like 40 days to just fucking do whatever?

Here you go.

I finished everything and still had like weeks to go.

Good.

It's really, really open.

Good, good, good.

Because, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's lagging that I'm like, I wanted to get to work on for.

Oh, you'll have so much time, you'll have plenty of time.

Um,

yeah, and not to mention as well, but like, I really do also like that, um, a lot of those, those, uh, you know, relationships are like, there's one big problem you solve, and then

the, the denouement is like the last one or the last two in some cases, where it's just like reflecting on it, you know, which is like great

characterization.

I just found out how we solve that.

And then there's fucking Alonso,

which is a whole other thing, you know.

Yeah, he's all right.

But like, really like the social links in this game.

Really enjoy that, you know, they just kind of sit down and go, damn, that shit was nuts.

Let's talk about it, you know?

Good.

Very, very, very good.

So

I will update as I close out on that.

Cool.

So, yeah,

we did a slop stream.

That will be coming your way

soon.

I saw some numerical victories on that slop stream.

There was a numeric victory.

There was

a

taste test

of

hot ramen noodle

marshmallow chocolate s'more flavor.

No, I'm good, man.

Apparently, Reggie was holding that, waiting for the next lop stream.

And

I'm good.

You want to talk about slop?

You got some.

Yeah.

And when he opened the lid, it went in his eye.

Oh, that's so good.

And it truly became a one-day blinding stew.

That's so good.

That's amazing.

I love it.

So good times ahead.

This week, we're going to keep going with Cyberpunk and A Thousand Times Resist.

Yeah.

Good stuff over there.

And we're also going to be this Saturday coming back to Mecha Break sponsored.

There's an open beta going on, and

that game's very fun.

I'm looking forward to jumping back in.

How's your credit score?

What?

Oh, you don't know?

Oh,

the mecha break progression system is called your credit score.

Oh, shit.

Like the system to determine whether or not

you can buy robots.

It's your character's credit score.

Okay, okay.

I don't remember that detail.

No, it wasn't there last time around.

It's only in the new one.

Oh, sick.

Okay.

Yeah.

Team shooter that feels like Zoe/slash, you know, Armored Corps movement and stuff.

Lots of fun.

Very, very down to get back into that.

That'll be this Saturday over on Wooly vs.

on Twitch and on YouTube.

Okay, let's quickly get through some of these stories.

All right, did anything happen this week?

So, yeah, Monster Hunter Wilds did real good and made everybody want some cheese nan.

We did,

it was teased and now it's confirmed.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, 3 plus 4.

Fucking great.

I can't wait to buy that and just have it sit there.

Did you see the new secret character?

Fuck yeah.

Doomguy's a great pick.

Doomguy is amazing.

Love it.

Great pick.

Doomguy would definitely fucking shred with Isabel.

I still hold that in my heart.

I mean, the question is, is like, does he come with BFG as the playable background track for his, you know?

He will come with music.

So that's cool.

I really hope so.

Skating over Doom music would be amazing.

And you get to be one of the grunts, too, right?

That's the other one.

Yeah, the Revenant.

Yeah.

So, not much to say there, but nice.

Hell yeah.

Very good.

Very cool.

I love Doomman.

I love

Doomman.

I love Doomguy

more

than

in the past.

Doomguy now is a cooler thing than historical gaming Doomguy, you know?

Yeah, you know what?

Doomguy was always like, I always loved him.

I had a soft

spot in my heart.

But like Doomguy just like absolutely refusing to speak at all ever in a world in which he totally can and if he wanted to endears me greatly.

It's the Dig Dug effect.

Like nobody hates Dig Doug.

Dig Doug was always cool.

He did his thing, you know, blowing up those fucking enemies.

Whatever the fuck that shit is.

And drilling, you know.

But then when you saw him as a grown-ass man, as Mr.

Driller's fucking father in

Nabco X Capcom, you're like, let's fucking go, Dick Doug.

Right?

It's all about that effect.

It's like, yeah.

That energy from the past and seeing what he becomes now is incredible.

So

fun stuff.

Did you see they announced a samurai pizza cats game?

I did, and I also saw that they're like hand animating it.

That's nuts.

It looks great.

It looks great.

I never would expect this to be a thing because like we love samurai pizza cats, but it feels it feels like a show that was made.

You know the berserk dubs and how those were just goofing around and like only amongst the English voice actors.

And then we just fuck it, we put it out there.

It feels like that, where it's like, this is a completely different show in Japan.

And then a bunch of voice actors said, who cares what the script is?

You know, and then we got samurai pizza cats out of it.

And then we're just going back to that now?

Great.

It's great.

It's great.

I love it.

I really hope they get

the intro.

narrator back as well and do the whole rap and the whole everything.

Do the music, do everything.

There's one job, and that job is to do the theme song.

Unfortunately, the genre is like it's a kind-animated side-scrolling thing that looks beautiful.

I wish they decided to go with like a team beat-em-up instead of a

single-character platformer, but it's fine.

It's fine.

Stop spitting in this gift horse's mouth.

No, I know, I know, I know.

It's just you think of being able to like

you kind of think of like being able to like fight together, you know, as a

team of three.

But anyway, samurai fucking pizza cats.

Blast from the past.

They announced

a

new

they announced a new Sui Coden.

Give me a second.

It's for a phone, isn't it?

But here's the problem.

Yeah.

You watch the trailer and they're doing

octopath traveler stuff.

Okay.

And it's like, you son of a bitch, you're actually trying.

And they basically went, yes, this is our first title to be tailored for mobile, and it will have gacha.

Of course it will because of the 108 stars of destiny.

Go fuck yourself.

It's never...

Come on.

It's built for that.

So, you know, I guess the thought process here is though, just based on the sprites and stuff, is like

this might get ported and like de-gatchified, but not before a couple of years go by and they're fucking done with it, right?

So that's fine

because that shot was chased with Sui Coden 1 and 2 re-releases/slash remaster are out on Friday.

There's that.

And an anime.

Okay.

All right.

So a whole bunch of Sui Coden news.

And look, it's one of those things where, again, it's Konami, right?

So trying to salvage

one of their brands from what was otherwise just not the Pachinko.

Well, whatever.

Konami, Pachinko Mine, like hell.

From the trash.

From the trash.

Dude, just from the trash.

Yeah.

So if it's one of those bits where it's like, okay,

they have all these projects, they're revitalizing.

And somewhere in all these silent hills, hey, look, look, there's a good one in there.

Somewhere in these Metal Gear things, hey, look, there's a good one in there.

And then I guess in this case, same thing.

Then, sure.

Sure, Konami.

You know, Castlevania's coming around the bend.

I.

Okay, so I love Castlevania a lot.

It doesn't come up that much because Castlevania hasn't been doing a whole lot over the past decade.

Vampire Survivors.

It makes me

so insanely pissed off that during, we're on what, fucking seven seasons of the Castlevania TV show,

nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Not even re-releases.

Vampire Survivors.

Vampire Survivors

by someone who fucking loves it.

Actually, no, there was a re-release.

There was the DS games.

But still.

I mean, so I think too as well, like the era of like timing

a theatrical release to a game and like, oh, no, the movie sucked.

Now what are we going to do?

We had a whole plan for a Dragon Ball Evolution game

that we're committed to.

What do you mean?

Can I just get Symphony End of the Night on Steam, please?

It's the only game.

When you decide to not pair up

the main release or the show release with a game thing on the show or movie sucks, then great, great, erase it, no one has to think about it.

But when it's a huge success and it keeps going and there's, and then you don't have something for it, and going, and going, and going, and going, and going, and going.

Worm, warm.

Can we get the Mercury Steam that made Metroid Dread to make a new Castlevania game instead of the Mercury Steam that made those shitty Castlevania games?

I feel like Metroid Dread took away a good Castlevania game from me.

Like they gave

really smart people the Metroid job.

If time bent in a different way,

then you would have, then Dread would have happened first.

Sure.

Metroid Dread's pretty great.

It's pretty great.

It's pretty great.

I can't wait to play it on the Switch, too.

But would you truly, well, you would sacrifice Metroid for Lords of Shadow being good, right?

In a second.

And I hate that.

That upsets me deeply.

Yeah.

I'm so mad at that.

Yeah, why?

Because Samus

more than Simon Belmont.

Enjoy Other M.

I'll enjoy the combat.

No.

No, you won't.

Dude, the combat in that game also sucks.

That's what really bugs me.

So I just found out, I disagree, but I just found out that

I wasn't paying attention, but someone pointed out, a friend of mine pointed out to me that

A2MR

is actually one of the best Metroid-related things that's ever come out.

Yeah, I've heard that, yeah.

And is super worth going and checking out.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

I was sleeping on that.

I'd been following it for a long time about like, you know, over the years.

Yeah, that was the, what people would say, like, oh, don't worry about Metroid Dread because A2AMR was great.

And so that, like, I'm just like, I had a blind spot.

I, I, you know, I, when it finally released, I was kind of like, okay, cool.

It's a remake of Metroid 2.

And that one needed

some upgrading.

So that's, that's dope.

And I didn't know that it was like, oh, no, this is like phenomenal and like better than that.

Oh, wait, I'm thinking of a different game.

I'm thinking of the, no, this is the remake.

No, another Metroid 2 remake.

Like, it was, it was a fan thing that was being made for a decade, practically, or so, and it kept getting updated over time.

And then the thing that eventually came out is really, really good.

And apparently, it has a hard mode that kind of turns it into a survival horror thing where ammo is limited, and you're playing a Metroid game on limited ammo, and you know, it's really different.

So, cool.

Sounds dope.

Anyways,

speaking of the past,

Hideki Kamiya says,

we can still resurrect.

What does he fucking say?

We can still resurrect Scalebound.

Hey, Phil.

Shut up.

Hey, Phil, let's do it.

Let's do it, Phil.

I'm surprised by this.

Judging on...

I'm just surprised by this because I really thought that

the Bayo 3

monster stuff was

recycling the ideas.

I believe that also.

I thought they got shuffled forward into Bayo 3 3 with the Gamora control.

I'm really surprised that it's like, no, this is still a thing.

Here comes a hot take.

Are you ready?

Fucking guard your shit.

Judging on Platinum's fucking recent output, Microsoft was probably right to cancel that game.

Was it old Platinum by then, or was it new?

Where?

Who the fuck knows?

What era were we in?

Who knows?

It was pre-Astral Chain Platinum.

I don't know.

Oh, man.

Somebody has summed it up so good.

I want to credit the person.

Sure Yukinabch says Scalebound died so Bayo 3 could flop.

Oh, man.

Yeah,

I really do.

I really do think

you can see the bones of everything they wanted that monster control stuff to be.

That's absolutely with Bayo Fair.

Absolutely.

And

it wasn't that compelling.

No, it wasn't.

And to add insult to injury there, controlling V

is actually pretty fun for being a monster summoning dude off to the side.

V is pretty fun.

V is a lot fun.

It's not as fun as the other two, but it was their first shot at V,

right?

They got to do multiple Nero's and multiple Dantes.

You could do a better V.

Absolutely.

Maybe they should make a game starring V called Astral Chain 2.

And the character's not called V at all.

It's just Astral Chain 2.

They should just do that.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well.

Astral Chain is.

I'm looking back more and more fondly on Astral Chain as time goes on.

And who would be making it, Pat?

Who would be making it?

Capcom.

They just, they're just like, you know what?

We give up.

You guys can just here.

Just take it.

Yeah.

No.

Anyway.

Tough times.

Yeah, you know, not much else.

I mean, hey,

WWE Elimination Chamber happened, and

it was in Toronto.

And

Drake was in the audience, but you couldn't tell by watching the event

because he was never acknowledged on screen or in commentary or at all.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

That's good.

So, you know,

everything in its right place.

God is in his heaven.

Wait a second.

Every time they have a celebrity in the audience, they always pan to them and go, hey, look, who's the celebrity in the audience?

100% of the time.

And then even afterwards, they would be like, oh, look at Tyson Fury's getting in the ring.

Like, there's always a.

You know what?

There's always a little something.

You know what?

They probably don't want

people there with their kids to be be scared.

It is a family business.

You see, he canceled his Australian tour.

Oh, the one where he went under the earth?

The one where he went under the earth to get away.

Yeah, okay, cool.

Well, you know.

Anyways, all right.

Yeah, you know, that's fine.

That's fine.

That's pretty much it.

Six Six letters.

Hey, if you want to send it a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

Did settle that lawsuit, though.

Still got the one going on against UMG.

Let's see how that works out.

Shoutouts to Conan O'Brien.

That Conan riff was fucking A.

That just because it's so blunt blunt and flat.

Vicious.

Vicious.

It's the halfway point through the show, so this is the part where Kendrick Lamar should come out and call Drake a pedophile.

It's just, it's so direct and without any ornamentation whatsoever.

Isn't it funny how that keeps happening?

Yes, it is.

Said everyone in the whole world.

Oh, yeah.

Acclaim is back.

Yeah, whatever.

And

who's behind it?

Some.

It's Jeff Jarrett.

Jeff Jarrett's behind the claim coming back?

What?

I should paraphrase a quote from JR about Jeff Jarrett.

He broke tens of thousands of guitars every night.

Tens of thousands of dollars of guitars.

And never filled a seat.

Is what JR had to say about Jeff Jarrett.

Oh.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Oh, sorry.

The quote is: Never drew a dime.

Oh, God.

Oh.

JR is fucking.

Yo, he puts that hot sauce on when he really wants to, man.

Yo, Jeff Jarrett fucking sucks, dude.

He had nothing.

I'm going to smash my guitar over the guy's head.

And my name's Jeff Jarrett.

That was it.

That was it.

That's the whole fucking thing.

I

hate rap.

Rap

is crap.

Oh, yeah, he did that too.

He had a rivalry with

Master P.

Just the new era of honky-tonk man.

Effectively.

All right.

If you've got a letter, you can send it in to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

What do you got?

Hopefully a good email this week.

Even just one.

Even just one good email.

Let's see.

Let's go with.

Pardon me.

Hello, Pat and Woolley.

I'm a long time listener.

Started watching guys when it was to SBF.

It's question simple.

Some games come with games inside of them, like Tekken and Beach Ball.

Urge

had the RPG inside it.

League of Legends has them beat.

It has

TFT in it as an auto-chess game.

It has a Vampire Survivors game.

It has an Arena game and more while being free.

Anything to distract you from the fact that you're playing League of Legends.

Absolutely anything.

So, yeah, basically,

strongest examples of that.

FF-14 has its card game or something like that.

It's Yakuza.

It's Like a Dragon.

Oh,

having Virtu Fighter wins?

No, having.

Have you ever gone down the full list?

Oh, all the games.

All the games.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have a veritable fucking Mario.

There is an entirety of a Sega arcade catalog in every Like a Dragon game.

And I I don't just mean arcade games.

I mean Pool, Dark Games, Mahjong, Shouji.

Like, it's, it's, it's, there is, there's absolutely no question that Like a Dragon is the absolute king of internal games

to the point where their master system emulation in Like a Dragon has been winning awards for emulation because it's literally the best master system emulation that has ever existed.

It's weird.

You can't play play those Master System games anywhere but inside Like a Dragon games.

And just in case you didn't want to play

any of the

arcade classics or so, you can go play literal board games or literal Shogi chess Mahjong, et cetera.

Yeah, no, you're right.

That is it.

There's no question.

That's the one.

Have you played golf in Like a Dragon?

No.

It's great.

No.

I don't know if it's been in any way.

I did bowling and baseball.

But it's great.

And the bowling game is great.

It's fucking ridiculous.

Also,

I feel like anything that's like League of Legends or Fortnite or so is kind of like that, it almost doesn't count because that's more of a platform than a...

a game at this point.

At a certain level of free-to-play, quadruple-A size and scale, your game becomes a platform for minigames and features every season.

You know, it's not like a release that has, like, oh, triple triad is in this thing, you know?

Yeah.

How's the Yakuza?

No, Gwent.

Gwent is

all right.

Gwent's all right.

Gwent's all right.

I got into it for a bit.

I did fall off, admittedly, you know, but I did get into Gwent for a bit.

I do like Gwent.

How's Pirate Majima minigames?

It's the most it's ever been.

Yeah.

There was a review I saw recently that said Pirate Yakuza is a mini-game collection pretending it's a real video game, but like complimentary.

Nice.

Okay.

Okay.

Like everything in that game is an excuse to play 200 different arcade games.

Are there like pirate-themed, like drinking fucking swills?

There's pirate-themed baseball, and it's way better than the regular baseball minigame.

Sweet.

Deadman's game.

It's way better, actually.

Hell yeah.

Okay.

And you can play Mahjong in Pirate theme.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You play Mahjong?

You play Shogi.

Is it Shogi?

Or Shoji?

I believe it's Shogi.

Shogi?

Yes.

Shogi is

the name.

Yeah.

All right.

Okay.

That'll do.

Have a good week, everybody.

Ah, fuck shit.

Got it.

Wait, that'll do it for the email or that'll do it for the podcast?

Because I'm about to look really stupid.

No, no, no, no, no.

We're done.

We're done.

We're done.

We're done.

All right.