CSB 290: Game Freak Off

Hello, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Wooly, how you doing?

I'm all right.

How about this?

I'm going to start out by pointing at the stands.

Yeah, what's that?

Like baby Ruth.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm going to nominate

Game Freak Offs

as

an early

place to start.

And then

we'll see where we go from there.

We're just putting soil down, and then we'll see where we go from there.

We have to put the seeds.

I don't want to plant those seeds.

We got to water them.

I don't want to water them either.

We have to see where it goes, but we're doing that.

Just a little frame one.

How are you doing?

I'm doing great.

I'm literally sleepy because of metaphor.

Yeah.

The hot new game out now.

Yeah.

Huh.

You're looking fashionable and trendy.

Thank you, man.

I really like my new jacket that Metaphor sent me.

It goes well with my new pop filter that Metaphor sent me and my new bag that Metaphor sent me.

Oh, hey, look, there it is.

I didn't even notice.

I was too busy looking at the keychain over there.

And my substantially inferior to my existing microphone, microphone that Metaphor sent me.

There's that.

Yeah.

So

I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Oh, man.

So I'm enjoying it a lot.

This is actually very nice.

You know, you know how you know something's good?

It's when the zipper is high quality.

What does this mean?

I can't.

Was that?

I can't read this.

Oh, that's a that's that's a that's a huge book, man.

What is that?

That's a huge book.

It says utopia.

Is that what it says?

Yeah, it says utopia.

Thomas More wrote that.

Do you know Thomas More is a character in metaphor?

Oh,

Gotcha.

Understood.

Okay.

That's the one that's available now for Microsoft PC and Xbox, right?

That's right.

Yes.

That's where it's available.

It might be available in other places, but I don't know anything about that.

I don't know anything about that.

I don't know anything about that.

Who would?

I don't even know what it looks like with other games' controller prompts on it.

I don't even know.

All I know is

that game's pretty cool for the little sliver that I took a look at.

So, how about that?

Yeah,

I took a considerably small,

larger, slightly larger sliver

over the past couple of days.

If that's where you want to start, we could start there.

We could start anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

I mean, you know,

eyes on the time.

What

was

your,

I guess, when you switched over to the full save?

Where are you at by this point?

Okay, so

there's a really fun thing that happens with Atlas games that are Persona and now Metaphor, which is funny because Metaphor is made by the creators of Persona 3, 4, and 5.

I don't know if you knew that.

The same mind, but using the date system,

using the date system makes it really easy to lock in on, okay,

what can we talk about?

Oh, yeah,

you can just say, like, yeah, September or whatever, you know.

Right.

So right now I'm in the middle of July.

Okay.

So 7.14, 7.15.

That is pretty handy.

So

the demo runs up until like the first three days of free time.

And you can get about halfway through the first main story dungeon.

And you can get through an optional, much tougher dungeon.

Since then,

I have put

like

20.

I have seven parts up.

I have seven metaphor parts up right now.

I don't know what the time is.

I think it's like 25 hours in total.

Okay.

I could just look at Steam.

There you go.

Steam says 19.5 hours plus the demo, which was eight and a half.

Okay.

I've got one, which is.

You've got one?

I've put the one video up, and that's so.

I checked out your thing, and you were like at the,

you were like, you were hanging out with Grius

in the forest.

A little tutorial.

Like

end

or start?

Nah, the

tutorial goes until you're given free time.

Okay, so yeah.

So like there's so what's what's strange about that game tutorial, and it's kind of a really good example of what's going on with the rest of the game, is the typical

main dungeon that'll change and side dungeon that won't change,

right?

Like Persona 5 kind of thing, is gone.

There's big, important story dungeons, and there are minor, non-story dungeons.

Okay.

Interesting.

And they're all unique.

Yeah.

And like some of that uniqueness is

in air quotes because a forest or a tomb or the other tomb or a cave have some serious overlap.

Okay.

So

I mean, I guess in terms of like what

my little scraping has been, I unfortunately did not progress far enough to see the cool menus.

As

you would have had to have gone about a half hour past where you're at.

Okay.

So,

yeah.

I kind of just got introduced to like a, you know, I saw a couple of portraits basically and

had the had your evoker moment.

But

yeah, I mean, it.

Did you see Ultima called that like three years ago?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He said with the, with the, with the,

on some tweet about Persona 5 like in like 21 or 22, he said, you know, with the way that you're tearing your face off with the Persona 5 mask, I don't know what the hell they can do next other than literally tearing your heart out of your body.

Yeah.

Just like lasered in on it.

Perfect.

And if that continues for other characters as well, that's going to be fucking nuts.

So it's a metaphor.

Yeah.

It is an allegory.

um it's a it's a metaphor um but um no but anyway like so the the nature of this because i know some people were just kind of confused so like well but just as you're touching on it i'll touch on it at the same time um yeah let's touch on it at the same time yeah let's do that that's that's yeah yeah

get away from me typhlosion

we'll get there man or we won't i don't know i'm so like i have more questions than answers in regards to i'm not getting nowhere all right that's good That's cool.

We can roll with that.

You know, um, this is a this is a an exercise in uh a decade of yes-and-ing.

And, uh, and if, if, if you don't do the freeze, every now and then, one of us just goes, nah, no, if you don't do the freeze tag, then

we're moving on to the next bit.

There's no hot tags here.

All right, anyway, look, touch on it.

No, no, no.

So, no, all this, no, no.

So, just to say that, um,

basically, like,

we weren't able to stream the like a session session of getting some time in so we basically had to sit and do what we could

after finishing a previous day's stream yeah in

offline time so we did what we could without ridiculous hours and that you know it was it was difficult but time constraints plus doubling up and stuff made it so that we

ran into a a totally different problem where I like I had to so I started the demo and I did the demo stream, which Atlas wanted and they paid for, and that's great.

And I was like, yeah, I'll do two hours of this demo and then we'll just

redo that demo part when the full game comes out.

Yeah, it'll be great.

And then like, I was messing around with it to get footage for the video that I was going to make.

And the demo just like kept going.

And like, I ended up getting so much footage that I didn't even beat the fucking demo.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'm like,

I can't have the.

I can't.

I can.

Oh, fuck.

I got to restart this whole shit on, on, oh, fuck.

So that's the, that's the problem: is that, like, the thing you have is more than you could possibly use, and the, the ask is for the tiniest sliver, right?

Yeah, which is also why that, that, that video I put out, which is way, way, way above what the, the actual,

I was asking, hey, did Wooly's video go up?

And people in chat were saying, hey, Wooly's video went up.

It's over an hour.

And I'm like, they asked for five minutes.

It was way over what they asked for.

and I and that was and some people are like why is there weird cutting and jumping around in this and it's like because we sliced based on the fact that this is actually multiple hours of session condensed into one you know like everything that's like confusing about that I'm doing I'm doing what I was asked to do so just that's all I can say on that you know like you're you're what that I'm I'm delivering more than was asked for and your plate is over over full it's packed with with so hey listen listen to everybody out there.

This is one of those things.

This is probably as bad as it's ever been.

We're going to talk probably a good goddamn amount about metaphor.

And I think metaphor is really good.

However,

I literally have metaphor touching my body right now.

You do.

So with that.

And it's also touching my bank account.

With that, I hold up the hand gesture for the hashtag sponsored ass opinions.

This is the most sponsored ass opinion I think I've done in my whole career.

Do I need to put this in the shot somewhere?

Just to remind you.

The bag is sitting on top of

my book box.

I'm just spoiled back up.

All right, so these are some sponsored ass opinions

coming in on this here

Atlas RPG.

We've talked about a couple of those over the years.

Oh, this bag's really nice, by the way.

You know, did you know that the inside of the bag has the same pattern as the main character's coat?

Oh my God.

The drip continues to the inside.

Incredible.

You could never know that unless I told it to you by getting that bag, literally, the literal bag.

Incredible.

I love when you meet a character that has like a portrait and I'm like that little lady outside the shop and I was like, ooh, your jacket, your cape, your design, all of that you know like i like that feel of like okay i'm i'm gonna be spending some time with you in a minute i think there's something um i think something that really ripped me out of it and just like okay this is atlas's version of fantasy was like you go into town Like right, like you come out of the desert and you go into town.

And one of the first establishing shots of the town while Galica is talking is two dudes leaning on a wall hitting their fantasy vapes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're actually vaping.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, wait, what the fuck is this?

And I did see some interesting feedback, too, where some folks were like,

like, the fantasy setting was actually like bouncing them off of it because it's like, like, personas modern day, obviously.

And it's like going to something that's a bit more resembling of like, you know, other fantasy genres is like less of an interesting setting choice.

And, you know, like, I get that.

I'm someone that all that like champions originality wherever it you know I just I love that shit whenever I see it and it's when it's a fresh take on something and we've gone on and about the the fucking room in Mass Effect right we've talked about the downcore room

but like I don't have time to get like

I don't have time to get to to glaze over the generic fantasy feeling when the first thing that happens to the cat boy that shows up is he gets strung up Like I'm like, okay, look at this fantasy universe.

There's some cat boys.

Whole dog people are garbage.

Like, immediately.

Like, you don't know what to do.

I think, you know, I think genuinely, like, the game sets its tone right away.

Not just with that, but when you finally have control of your character in the city, you can overhear characters in the background going, uh, an elder.

Disgusting.

Everyone is disgusted at you, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, I remember.

Who let that out of its hovel?

Now, I feel

the bearers, right, in 16 kind of like, you felt it heavy in that intro and in the beginning, especially establishing the world and stuff.

But eventually you, you know, you go hide with your own people and stuff and you start to

create a little group of tolerance and then you go out into these

like areas closer to the capital of just absolute like horrendous war crime and i think

and so i think yeah

sorry, I think 16 kind of like, I mean, they're obviously going for different things.

One is like societal stratification and like a caste system, and the other is like

that is slavery.

That is just straight up 100% slavery, indentured servitude.

No rights.

So the thing is that like 16's version of this with the bearers, yeah, it creates some wrinkles in it as well, where it's like a non-slave can give birth to a slave and vice versa.

And so there's like less control over it.

And it's just this randomized factor that gets thrown into society.

And whereas here, you're like, no, no, no, what's coming out of your head?

You know?

So

one of the things that, like, so Metaphor has your nine tribes, and they don't get along by and large.

And one of the things that the setting like kind of sucker punched me with, it's, it's,

it's like, it's, it's like a minor detail.

No, it's in the tutorial.

Um, Is that you, sorry, it's in the demo.

So I'm going to talk about everything that's in the demo, like completely free and clear, because

that was weeks ago.

You run into somebody who's

a halfy from two tribes.

Okay.

No immutable characteristics.

No,

they have like a little bit of one and a little bit of the other.

Yeah, okay.

Right.

So they have like little tiny wings and like a darker skin tone.

And like that character like weirded me out because the rest of the setting is so overwhelmingly like uniracial between each other that i didn't even think that these races could actually intermingle okay okay

so like it's so rare

I think I've only seen two characters in the whole game that are like that.

So this is where I have to point out.

Do you know Saga at all, the comic?

I must have brought it up to you at some point yeah

but um it's really good it's one of my faves it's it's excellent but um it's literally a story where a winged magical people are at race with a or at war with with with alphiers are at war with a horned people yeah and little do we know that like oh my god they can actually have a baby together and people on both sides are like ew you mated it with a what?

You know, and like the whole story is actually about exactly this in this type of way, but it focuses on the

hybrid character as like the child.

Would you say that that's a metaphor?

I would say that it is

yeah, it's actually allegorical.

Yeah, and you focus on the couple and then the child, and that's your main characters.

But like, it's so like the literal knife ears and horns and winged bit is like those exact traits have been found.

One of the first lines of dialogue in the game is calling the red-headed elf a knife ear.

And I'm like, oh, this is what we're doing.

We're doing this here.

And, like, even if you're like, I don't know the history of what's going on, but you're like, also, you guys are like backing Griffith.

And

like, that was really, really quick.

Like, that dude walked and turned his back to the light and gave his staircase monologue like right away

i think it's wild

how

um

so you're talking about lewis or luis as he's pronounced in game uh took no time

uh it's really funny to see like how he is just literally griffith

like he is a one-to-one copy over um but he is also a one-to-one copy over of your friend and mine lewis cipher uh-huh from the Shinmegami Tensei series.

Are we even going to like, yes, we're not, we're going to change the last name.

Just it's the same dude again, man.

It's a metaphor.

Literally, his name is Lewis, yes.

And

there's a little bit of Legend of the Galactic Heroes in there with Reinhardt as well,

the man who wants to seize the universe.

But yeah, a big dreamer.

You know, a big dreamer that's...

Wow, the inside of this coat's even nicer.

Oh my god.

Coats all the archetypes.

um

he's he's reaching high you know he's he's he's aiming for big things

um

yeah

it's it's quite funny because you know a lot of the time when um i'm especially like aware of this because over the years when i

when i actually analogize things and and compare things to things i know and stuff and there'll be times where it's like don't trivialize this new thing by just making it feel like it's the copy of the old thing or whatever the case is.

And right.

You know, you want to like give it its own space and respect and stuff.

And here they're like, nah, man.

Don't even remotely fucking give this its own space.

Okay, so

this is this is a this is a

is a gut feeling.

I have nothing to back this up other than my own gut.

I have a strong suspicion that Atlas was worried that this game would not do the numbers that it's doing now.

It's doing extremely well.

It's doing very well because it did not say the words persona or Shinmegami Tensei on the box anywhere.

It didn't.

Because they went really

very hard with their sponsorships and social media outreach.

And they're like, I want you to fucking say the words persona over and over and over again.

You know, you got, like, literally, like, P3 Reload just dropped.

You got your blue-haired main pro tag with the thing going.

Oh, what about your, what about your gray-haired guy with the yellow coat?

Yeah, he hasn't talked about protein, but it's fine.

He's cool and tough.

You know, and like you are hanging out with

Makoto.

You're hanging out with you.

We have another tall, foreign-sounding redhead.

Literally,

your starter

transformation has like the shoulder joints and hips, you know, of you.

We're gonna hang out with a weird dude in a blue room, and he's gonna tell us all sorts of mysterious shit and help us fuse our archetypes.

Yeah, like

nah, dude, you know what this is, you love it already.

Shut up, yeah, I do.

Um, so what I could say, uh, now that I'm I'm I got my whole leg in it, um,

those characters'

superficial similarities to existing ones

fade away.

And the cast of Metaphor so far

is

in the running for like one of the best casts that Atlas has done.

I have not run into a party member that I did anything less than love

so far.

That's awesome.

All of the bonds,

they're called bonds.

They're not S-Links.

They're not confidants.

They're just Bonds.

Are great.

They're fucking awesome.

And they're shorter.

They're significantly shorter.

There's eight instead of 10 now.

Nice.

Okay.

Like on a tone basis, like it is, it very quickly grows into its own very weird, very different thing.

Yeah.

I mean, all jokes aside, though, like personality-wise with these characters, I'm especially aware and have developed a somewhat hypersensitivity to seeing a character hairstyle and

not necessarily just going, oh, this thing, because again, between the somewhere between the three houses video and making a crack at Sasque hair showing up on Noctis.

I don't want to have that happen anymore.

But I'm sure within a number of interactions, these characters come into their own.

I'm curious what the

crew size is going to end up being, though.

I could tell you right now what the crew size is going to be.

It's going to be one person of every tribe.

Ah.

Okay.

Okay.

Like as you go along, it becomes incredibly obvious that that's how it's going to play out.

Okay.

We got to unite together to defeat the racists.

To stop discrimination.

I can't wait for the part where you have to stop the discrimination in the hearts of the people by kind of giving into it a little bit.

Just a little bit.

So you did not get to the part where you got to see your five royal virtues.

No, I didn't.

So if we're going to talk about metaphor, metaphor is a fantasy version of persona.

Let's just skip like 30 minutes of conversation and just say it's persona six, but it's in a fantasy setting.

Yep.

Okay.

That's good.

So you have your five royal attributes, which are, you know, academics and courage and shit like that.

Courage and wisdom are pretty self-explanatory.

Eloquence is pretty self-explanatory.

Imagination, okay, that's something a ruler would need.

But then the third one is tolerance.

Yeah.

You start off the game

intolerant.

You are listed as inflexible.

So these stats, and the basis of this, like, is all set up because

besides just being Fantasy Persona 6, there's a race for the throne element to

the core.

The core of the game's call to adventure is that with the king dead, the king decided to make a fancy little magic spell that would force a snap election for the new king under threat of magic.

Can't mess with the election.

And as a result, everybody from the guy who wants to abolish taxes to the lady who's just trying to join the election to shill her family workshop to the guy who thinks ugly people should be executed are all in the running for, I'm going to be the fucking new king.

Yeah.

Your stats start based and you have to invest to become cringe.

Is that what?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

You have to level up your wokeness.

I swear to God.

And the way you do that, the way you become tolerant is exclusively through hanging out with some of the lesser, shittier tribes.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Like you hang out with the Mastari or the Perippus, the dog people or the people with the

cages on their head, and you hang out with them and your character's like, I don't feel like barfing so much anymore when I'm around them.

That is quite that's that's my that's my

personal from they'll take a mortal blow for you to like they will not throw up in their mouth at your sight.

And you you hit the way that the those stats primarily work is the number one thing that those stats do is that you hit walls on your bonds.

And basically, it's like, well, you don't know what the right thing to say is because you don't have a good imagination.

Or you wouldn't know how to navigate this conversation because you're not eloquent.

You don't have enough charisma to talk to her.

And so

then you get to bonds, which are the equivalent of social links in

three and four.

Confidante.

It just didn't catch on, did it?

It never caught on.

Everybody still thinks.

Bonds is good because bonds is shorter.

Yeah, yeah.

It's way shorter.

Yeah.

Bonds.

S-link confidante.

There's three, there's three syllables to two.

Yeah.

100%.

Bonds are a massive step up from all of those systems.

So here's what happens.

You know, you go hang out with, let's say you go hang out with Leon.

You hang out with Stroll, right?

And you're like, Stroll, it's really sad about your hometown.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

What do you want to do?

You're noble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you have your little dialogue choices that you choose to make stroll like you more or less, right?

So when you pick the right one, it traditionally you would get little points up, and that would increase the likelihood of getting his rank up the next time you talk to him, right?

And you would have to bring in the right persona, the persona that would be like chariot,

right for for stroll, right?

To make sure that you get the most amount of points, right?

So you don't have to bring in anything of note.

And if you are hanging out with someone, the bond is guaranteed.

There are literally no filler hangouts ever.

Oh, okay.

Ever.

Okay.

So

if you're like, Galica is ready to hang out, I'm going to go hang out with Galica.

You are going to level that up every single time.

So I think that Persona games, because the calendar has to follow a school year and you have to have things that people know, like festivals and summer matches.

You kind of got to spread it a little bit.

Yeah, you're going to switch to your winter uniform.

The calendar has to dictate the pace pace to some degree.

Whereas, yeah, here you're just doing whatever the fuck you want for whatever you need to.

So that's good.

That's a smart thing.

So you hit the D-pad and you go, does anyone want to hang out?

Is anybody willing to hang out?

And you go, yeah, these people.

You need to go talk to them.

Bond up.

Also, the bond upgrades are all really good.

Like, eventually you can unlock the ability to see what everyone's bond upgrade is going to be in advance.

Okay.

And I went down all the ones that I had, and every single one, I'm like, ooh, these are really good.

These are all excellent.

So far, I have not encountered anyone that would be like the reporter from P5,

where I can't even remember her fucking name,

where you talk to her, and all of her upgrades are dog shit because they're all about like minimizing the fucking alert level in a dungeon.

Oh, yeah.

Her name was Oya.

Okay.

So instead, what they do is they give you shorter time limits to deal with.

Okay.

Because travel time

to reach locations is now a factor.

Okay.

So the basic deal is that it works.

So I'm at the second town right now, and I was given a 17, was it 17?

I was given two weeks to get ready for the dungeon of note, right?

And so things that I did was I went and hung out with non-party members.

And then I went, okay, rank up, rank up, rank up, rank up, rank up.

And then I'm like, oh, instead of having like mementos off to the side as like the

persistent dungeon that you would go through for every time you had downtime, now I got four different quests to four different locations that are like, you got to clean out these goblins.

There's a fucking ring you need to get out of this skeleton-infested shithole tomb.

You need to take out this gigantic worm in these caves that's been attacking people.

and going to each of these locations takes a day of travel.

Okay.

Does it continue the like element design element where it's like we expect you're going to work on clearing out these dungeons and in like like multiple steps at a time as opposed to just like going for it in a way?

I have one day at every single thing.

Okay, because that's how I played persona games as well.

But like it's there's a lot of like, oh, you can go rest now.

You're out of MP.

That's okay.

And you're like, well, no, that's a waste of time because we're wasting days that precious, precious days that we need to.

So the, the, um, uh, so, like, for example, I've uh I've been getting ready for the second major dungeon, and I've done all the combat quests and I've done everything that I could do that is like a side quest to do beforehand.

I now have three days to do

the proper dungeon, but you have to solve it before calendar date.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Um, and uh, so a lot of the

smaller, like, side quest areas, they're like a one-floor forest.

Right?

They're not like a fucking palace or like 10 floors of Memento.

They're like a one-floor forest or like a two, three-floor cave or something like that.

They're small and they are meant to be taken out in one go on normal.

Okay.

There is a lot going on to help you.

beat these things in one go.

So you didn't get there, but you remember when you were playing as a

first archetype is the seeker,

and you would attack people

and you would do your three-hit combo, and then you would do the squad attack, and Leon would also attack with you.

So Leon attacking with you is the Seeker's special ability.

Is that the other party members will all gang up on the monster you're fighting in the action combat as well?

Okay.

All the other weapon types that you could equip all have different mechanics and they have different attacks.

So, if you were to pick like a fucking white mage, essentially, or what's it called?

It's called just called healer, you're hitting people with a mace, right?

And you're doing blunt damage, and you're healing the party when you stun them, right?

Yeah, and last time you mentioned there was a way to get back MP as well, yeah.

The mage line, when you stun enemies on the overworld or kill enemies, you get an MP back for the whole party.

Um, and someone in the chat says, it's one MP per, so it's really not that effective.

That's why there are two other factors that go in.

If you are too high, if you are three levels above an enemy, you don't even fight them.

You auto-kill them on the fucking field.

And I have had some of the smaller dungeons turn into Dynasty Warriors.

style action levels as a result because I came in three levels higher than literally every single enemy in the dungeon.

So I am just fighting them

like an action game.

Replenish your MP.

Yeah.

And if you go through some of the larger dungeons, what you can find is there are enemy generators.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

And there are like crystals that will just spawn the lowest level enemy on the floor.

Okay.

Infinitely.

Last story.

And the game's like, you should really destroy that to stop enemies from spawning.

And what I hear is I should stand in the cycle

for like five minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

just spam the AOE on Wizard and get my entire party's MP back to full.

I think Last Story was the most blatant version of that I recall, where it was just a fountain of grunts popping up before the boss door.

And you're just stabbing things that are sticking their head out

and leveling up and going like, okay, now open that door.

Like, you later unlock a

you later unlock the merchant class.

And the merchant archetypes deal is that when you stun or kill enemies on the overworld, you get double what you were going to win out of the fight for cash.

Okay.

Wow.

So right now, I'm running around in a dungeon and auto-killing people by hitting them with my abacus because I'm too high a level.

And I'm getting 700 gold.

Oh, sorry, 700 Reeve every single time I do it.

And so I ran two circuits of that, and now I have like 200 fucking 50,000 reeve.

I can buy anything I want.

So I heard as well, so that like you going down does not mean the game is over.

Nope, the main character can totally go down.

Now, are the other party members comparable to you at all, or are you still just an absolute beast god?

By comparison.

This is something that's really fun.

So when you get a new party member, so I got the fourth party member yesterday.

So you've been leveling up your archetypes and you've been leveling up your character, right?

And when a new party member starts, they start with a couple levels in their

personal archetype, right?

But so like I rolled in with

Will, Will, Will Metaphor, that's his name in English.

And he was maxed out on Merchant and he had like 15 levels of Seeker and 15 levels of healer and all this shit, right?

And then I got the fourth party member and they started with four levels in their archetype and that's it.

So they were way behind.

Like they were, they were like a dozen hours behind.

And

the solution that Metaphor has is that I've maxed out Merchant on Will and I maxed out Warrior on

Leon Stroll, right?

When you hit cap on an archetype, you still gain XP.

But every time you get a thousand XP and would gain a level, you instead get a item that is worth 1,000 archetype XP put in your inventory.

And you can use that on teams.

You can use it on anyone.

Oh,

interesting.

Okay, because

so like the fourth party member starts way behind.

But I go, well, I have my three party members that are maxed out on Merchant, Warrior, and Knight.

I'm just going to not move them off those.

And now I'm dumping 400%

experience into the fourth party member.

And now I fucked up.

Now they are way ahead of the rest of the camera.

Okay.

Because I just dumped all those items into them.

Interesting.

That's an interesting.

That's a smart way to do it.

In SMT5, you get like xp items that are only usable on the pro tag and those that are only usable on demons right so there's a distinguishing between you and your party members but here like the stuff from you is compatible with them is big yeah it also creates like these situations where like let's take knight the upgrade to knight is magic knight and that unlike most of the other archetypes requires 20 in knight and 10 in mage like it needs them from a totally different discipline right

well my knight didn't have any point of any levels in mage, but I had fucking

heroes leafs, so I just switched them over,

gave them five of them, and now you're level 10 mage, and we can switch you right over to Magic Knight like that.

Nice, nice.

Yeah, because like,

I remember the discussion about like XP share and like Pokemon and stuff from back in the day, and you know, that could be an imbalancer, but like the need for it is something that they were trying to address.

But how do you make that more...

How do you work that kind of thing out?

And I think something like this is quite nice, where it's like, hey, you get refunds, you get change, you know, and you can just use it at will elsewhere after you've hit the requirements for something.

Like giving you the freedom for how you want to spend that as opposed to like just automatically doing it, for example, is a lot more...

a lot more customization to that.

I think that's pretty sick.

The other thing about enemies that you auto-kill on the field give you basically no experience at all.

They give you a tiny amount of experience compared to what they normally would have.

So what ends up happening is like I got way out ahead in terms of levels on this section.

And so most of the little micro dungeons I fought, I would

auto-kill the generic mobs.

But the tougher mobs floating around didn't auto-kill those, and those were still threats.

Those were still like very real threats.

And I was way over-leveled for the first major dungeon.

And what ended up happening is that I slept through the first half and then I got to the second half of that dungeon and all of a sudden the enemies had been kicked up two levels.

So I could not

auto-kill them anymore.

And because I had essentially earned nothing off that first half of the dungeon because everything was getting auto-killed, the dungeon like slid into the difficulty quotient that it was supposed to be.

And levels take escalating amounts of experience so that your party will eventually, like, I started, you know, what this guy started at a higher level.

This guy started at a lower level, but over time, because of the way their math works, they all just kind of even out

to more or less the same.

So, a lot of time you spend in Persona as well is obviously like demon fusion and, you know, going back to the room.

There's no demon fusion.

There's no demon fusion here, right?

So, this is where it's like, okay, so playing with archetypes, playing with jobs and levels and stuff has to kind of replace that.

In SMT,

you also spend a lot of time shopping for yourself, right?

You're upgrading your own personal abilities.

And

it's not as in-depth as Demon Fusion can get, of course, but there is an amount of time you can spend, you know, like locking in on that.

Does this system compare at all to

absolutely?

Yeah.

So there are the two main things that happen

is you can change archetypes at any time on your main menu.

Right.

So if you're like,

I want to be a gunner for this next section, fucking switch it over.

The other thing that affects, like, why would you mix and match all of these things?

Like, where's the depth there?

The depth there is that you can inherit skills from anything.

So

you can level up merchant to maximum, and then you can put consumables are 20% stronger as your passive effect on warrior.

And all of a sudden, your warrior, who has no healing spells, is actually a

passable healer with just like medicines.

Yeah, like, so I, I, so I remember when, yeah, again, we were following up from last week's discussion on this and kind of uh uh looking at it here.

It's like it sounds almost like you know, a job system sphere grid kind of thing, right?

Yeah, it's a job system, it's a it's it's closest analogy that I can think of is like Final Fantasy Tactics.

Okay, yeah, it's like, did you, do you want to, do you want to level thief so you can put steel

on your mage?

And so, I guess this is, and so with like,

are all your like, um, because when you're fusing demons, that's where you're getting your, like, your Zeos and your Bufus and your Aggies, etc.

Are all of these classes like sharing enough, like, you know, sort of middle abilities, or are you kind of getting?

No, they're, they're all very unique.

Okay.

So, like, for example, uh, uh, this is a pro tip: Blizz, the spell blizz,

is

like

like fucking half of all enemies are weak to blizz for like the first 20 hours of the game like it is it puts it's so much better than the fire or lightning equivalent

but blizz requires um mage level two

and that's the only place you can get it

so what does that mean it means i took every single fucking character in my roster and made sure they got to mage level two at least

so that i could put blizz on them just in case especially the melee fighters that are like all physical attacks.

Because you run into a lot of enemies that are just completely immune to physical attacks.

Okay.

And if you get an attack blocked or repelled, all your turns just evaporate.

And as you're changing archetypes, too, like, is this like, is equipment mattering in the sense that like, you know, in other, again, in a persona game, you just, you kind of just inter

you just go from one gun to another, one weapon to another.

Equipment matters a lot.

But here you have a team of people that you're like, oh, if I have like multiple mages and I don't have enough stabs that so, so the way that I have managed that is by never having two classes of the same type at the same time.

Okay, so everyone can pick up because when you switch to them, it goes, I would like to equip all the strongest equipment available right now.

Yeah.

Though

there is a third wrinkle to this system, and it's called a synthesis attack.

Different combinations

of archetypes archetypes can do dual techs.

And they are unique between all the different ones.

And they do allow for weird, weird combinations.

There is a triple tech that requires three mages.

Hell yeah.

Nice.

And you can do it as soon as you have three mages, and it's like

a severe fire attack.

Okay.

So they incentivize you going for specific builds as well.

That might seem weird.

So like I really love merchant, right?

But my merchant doesn't have any of, I have merchant unlocked.

I don't have any of the archetypes, not even one, that interact with merchant.

So merchant never has any dual attacks.

Okay.

And the other thing,

the way that synthesis attacks work is really, really, really smart.

The way it works is I go, hey, I am a seeker and I would like to do a move with the knight, right?

So I'm going to hit synthesis attack, and it's going to say, hey, the knight over here is going to give me their turn to perform this attack.

But if it hits a weakness, it will count as if we both hit that weakness.

So it's a double press turn.

So you will get a double press turn off it.

Ooh, that's the good feeling.

And it will actually neuron activation.

It will use MP from both.

Okay.

Okay.

So

you can have like a knight and Warrior that don't use a lot of MP,

but you can use them as fuel for synthesis attacks for the others.

But if one of the two has already acted, then you can't do it.

You need enough spare turns.

And neither of them can be affected by status effects that would slow it down.

So even if one of the two has already acted, but you have enough spare turns, you can still...

Okay, wow.

Well, that's very generous.

It works really well.

It works really, really well.

There's a lot going on.

Like, one of the, like, you look at, you, you go, you unlock a new archetype and you go down its list.

And the first thing you see is, like, oh, I could put media, I could put media on anybody I wanted.

I could have a whole team of people with media if I leveled up healer on everybody a little bit.

Or you see things like passive abilities.

So, skill inheritance, the way it works.

Hey, do you want Blizzard on your guy?

500 meg.

Okay, that's pretty normal.

Do you want the ability that increases your crit rate by 10%?

8,000 meg.

And once you've unlocked it, you can slot it in on that character in any way you want.

But the passive abilities, they're way stronger.

10% is over.

They're way, way stronger.

It's a strong number for crit rate.

That's crazy.

Yeah, but there's other things you can do to increase your crit rate.

So you can get up to like 30, 40%.

Jesus Christ.

And

in a system that you get extra turns for doing crits, it's really strong.

Like, Wizard has a fucking ability.

It's the last ability that they unlock, which is regenerate MP every turn.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

And something strong.

I see that, and I'm like, what is that going to be?

Like, fucking 20,000 mag

to unlock?

Because I'm going to do it.

It'll be worth it.

Yeah.

And so you have to hem and haw because like higher tier classes, like say you have Warrior, right?

And then there's the upgrade to Warrior.

The Warrior costs 500 mag to unlock.

The upgrade to Warrior costs 7,200 mag to unlock.

And then the third upgrade to Warrior probably costs like 15,000 mag to unlock.

Okay.

And so you're like, do I want to increase the value of my guys?

Do I want to have the good skill inherent?

Dragon's Dogma, right?

It's super cheap.

Yeah, a little bit.

It's super cheap to unlock the first step in all things.

And the last trick of the archetype system is that if you cap an archetype,

it gives you two of its primary stat to that character forever.

So, if you cap mage, you get two magic on that character forever.

Okay, if you cap warrior, you get two strength forever.

So, it very much strongly incentivizes you to max these things out.

Cool.

Yeah, that sounds that sounds pretty in-depth for a couple of years.

You know, people on chat are saying it's like FF5.

It is totally like FF5, actually.

I have no reference there, but

okay.

Yeah.

The system, the system's super exciting to use.

It's like, it's just really good.

It's really fun.

Because,

you know, like Demon Fusion has gone from being a chore to being a pleasure when there's enough quality of life in what it's made fun to do, you know?

And that is literally just how early or how late in the franchise are you playing it?

I would say

Demon Fusion in particular, more than, I guess, Persona Fusion, like...

The amount of shit you can do in 5 was like, oh, you can really, really fine-tune and get in there.

I never want to go back to Demon Fusion.

Okay.

The system is so much easier to control.

Yeah,

it's going for a different thing, you know, with your monsters.

But ultimately,

by the time we got to five, I was like on the complete opposite side.

Whereas I remember in three, in pre-3, it was like, this is the worst ever.

I'm just going in and out and in and out and in and out until I can get the exact move list I want.

And by five, it's like, it's a pleasure to kind of go do it, you know?

But

yeah, building up your characters characters and just having a free form time spent like individually customizing is that, yeah, like that sounds interesting.

Okay, cool.

The system, I thought the system was really good when I you run with three characters for a long time.

And then I got a fourth character and I'm like, oh man, this is like one of my favorite.

like battle systems in our RPG I've I've fucking ever done.

Also, if you beat enemies without getting hit, you get a 50% experience bonus.

Oh, what's the word?

Unscathed.

Unscathed victory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And if you fight enemies during, if you fight enemies during really bad weather, you get another 50% experience bonus,

but

press turn no longer works in your favor.

Okay.

It only works against you.

Interesting.

So it is much more difficult.

Okay.

Yeah.

Fucking interesting, man.

It's very cool.

And like, with this thing being, you know, selling quite well and stuff, and like, okay, so now we've started out this franchise.

Like, is this a, are we looking at like an Injustice MK situation?

Do you alternate your metaphor and persona or SMT releases?

Well, metaphor doesn't seem like it would be a franchise.

It seems like metaphor is more like, we're going to do weird stuff sometimes.

I would not write off the idea of anything successful not being a franchise and staying fair enough.

That seems insane.

I like it a lot.

I think it's really cool.

I think changing the way the stats and the confidants work to, yeah, it always succeeds.

Like, yeah, you have way less time.

The calendar is like four months.

Like, you have way less time.

But it's a dance

matters.

But every single thing you do always succeeds.

So there's no hemming and hawing.

It's like, I would like to go hang out with Maria to level up the healer archetype.

Yeah, I'm going to go.

Okay, I leveled up the healer archetype.

Done.

No failed steps.

Yeah.

Cool.

Hey, I got to take a quick break and help with something.

I'll be right back.

And I mean, right back, like two minutes.

Here, baby.

Okay.

Also, the music is like the best.

Esperanto.

Got you speaking it.

It's the best.

Off that

re-fantasio pack.

These Elda ruts.

These disgusting Elda.

I also really like this twist of Gallica as your Mona equivalent, and instead of telling you to go to bed, she's like, hey, wake up.

Yeah, wake up.

I want to have a conversation with you in the middle of the night.

Hey, wake up.

Yeah, she's all right.

You got a little, because I'm like, okay, if you're going to walk around with a Pixie,

my previous comparison point was

the SMT 5.1,

I can't even, super long Japanese name.

Yeah, that girl.

Yeah.

And

this isn't her.

This is Pixie.

And I'm like,

you didn't actually have to do the Navi bit, you know?

But yeah, Pixie is cool.

There you go.

I'm out Ozako.

Oh, you want some?

Oh, fuck off.

Do you?

Anyway, anything else?

Yeah, I beat the Silent Hill 2 remake.

So that's in the bag.

So

of note, because I have a strong computer, I was able to push a lot of buttons.

You know, I'm just going to explain it.

So, Silent Hill 2 remake on the personal computer and otherwise has an extremely strong traversal stuttering problem in which the game will kind of stutter so hard it looks like it freezes for a second.

It's very annoying.

It's very bad.

Well, if you go to the Steam Configuration community page and put in a bunch of engine hacks into the engine.ini in its file folder and then

fucking

force the game to render out in DirectX 11 Vulcan instead of DirectX 12,

you can significantly improve that stuttering.

You know, there's some stuff that's gone away.

I haven't had to make a batch file in a long time.

Yeah.

Opening up an INI

and futzing around in there is still

okay.

So I got the game running smooth.

So

I can now say that the performance problems are still really bad, but I was able to fix them for me.

Going through it,

they do a lot of cool shit in that remake.

They do...

So the game is massively expanded.

In some places, that's not as great.

I think the hospital is too long.

The hospital is like four and a half hours long.

It's the longest part of the whole game.

What percent increase would you say it is?

It's like twice as long.

It's like twice as big.

Okay.

And in other cases, they have expanded areas that had very little,

and it is a big improvement.

There is a lot more going on in the labyrinth in Silent Hill 2 Remake than there is in the original.

And when I was looking up

certain things for the labyrinth and to like room numbers and stuff like this, I found people theory crafting about that shit in the original game on Game Facts in 2008 and realized that Bluber took those like little pieces that were implied and expanded them out.

And they're still implied, but now there's just more to bite into now.

Okay.

I don't remember how long I spent going through the labyrinth.

It's pretty short.

Okay.

It's mainly like a straight line, and then you go into the basement and do a loop-de-loop with Pyramid Head.

Got it.

And then you exit out.

It's been turned into like a proper zone

in the remake.

So every area is larger.

And I think mostly it works well.

I think the hospital might be too long.

I did not understand this until I was watching it, but there are genuinely completely new scenes

between the characters.

Cutscenes.

Yeah.

And

they hit.

They hit really well.

In particular, there is a new cutscene with Angela in between the hospital and the prison

that is really effective and does a better job of setting up her arc.

The

Labyrinth boss fight

against the bed monster

has been expanded into

the best sequence in the entire game from a mechanical and narrative perspective.

I was talking to Gene about it and I read his review and I totally agree in which there's one chase scene in the game that is totally ruined by the new camera.

The elevator chase in the hospital.

Okay.

Is like the new camera just it doesn't it can't it can't do the same things that the other one was doing.

But the when you when you um when he the hallway that he's he's coming down yeah because it was fixed and it was really awkward.

Yeah.

And now it's just like they try to emulate it and it doesn't work at at all.

It's like, it's like a much

worse version.

But all the Angela stuff in the Labyrinth, on the other hand, is

way better and has a lot more going on

and is like a much better version of that scene.

Overall,

I would give the letter reading

a B plus.

Okay.

There's like

literally

one line read in the letter that I'm like, this is worse than the original.

Overall, it actually really does like a good job.

But the one line read that they don't nail is the last line read of the letter.

Ah,

you made me happy.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

And

you're like, oh.

Overall, I would say that aside from the performance, the game is like pretty excellent.

I think the best thing that I can say about it is that it has every right to exist.

I still wish the original was much more widely available.

But this game's got stuff, and a lot of that stuff is really good.

I think it might be too long.

But then I say it might be too long, but then I think about like, well, some of the stuff they added was actually really good.

I did not encounter anything that I went, oh, man, oh, come on.

Right, right.

Which is like what I was kind of expecting, like, the whole time.

And if someone were to have this as their only experience, they're getting like.

They would come away strong.

It would come away real, real strong.

It's conveying enough of what it originally did, and

not losing enough that it

hampers it.

Okay,

I think it's pretty great.

It's a million times better than I expected.

I expected it to be

interesting.

That's what I expected.

I expected to see

like a clumsy attempt with flashes of good ideas uh and instead what i got was a bunch of good ideas with flashes of clumsiness

um did the endings

show anything new or like expanding no because there are two new endings because say again there are two new endings there are two new endings okay

so we're up to eight endings on a game that's like 25 hours long so i would probably advise people to just youtube them if you've had your fill of the game.

And the circumstances around getting them are interesting.

All the new ones are in New Game Plus.

Okay.

Okay.

Just go around again.

Wow.

Cool.

Okay.

Good outcome.

Yes, good outcome.

I really, really liked it.

That's kind of it, honestly.

I was kind of looking at Silent Hill 2 remake upcoming as like, man, I'm going to get to complain about this for like five fucking years.

I can, oh man, I'm so ready.

And it's like, no, I finish it, and I'm like, you know, it's pretty great.

So just actually, give Bluber team a HelloFresh instruction card and just look at it.

Yeah, so here, here, so they, we've gone, I've been following

from like active derision in a lot of people's minds, like just like, oh, Bluber,

to

well, they can color inside the lines real good.

If you give them crayons and

a sheet, they can make a real pretty picture.

So

I would say that they should start working on Silent Hill 4 right now instead of doing a new thing.

Jump to the room?

Yes.

Because the room, Silent Hill 2 and the room can exist outside of the context.

Whereas

3 needs one to exist in a modern form.

Also, 4 is like the most interesting.

And I really like the gameplay stuff they did in Silent Hill 2 Remake.

And I would like them to just transplant the skeleton of Silent Hill 2 Remake just directly on top of Silent Hill 4.

Okay, okay.

Well,

what like three,

what Resident Evil did, right?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So, Yeah, where Resident Evil skipped three.

I mean,

they didn't skip three.

That's not what I heard.

Okay, so yeah, they can basically, if they're making money, they can become a Bluepoint style company.

Yeah.

Interesting.

What else?

Did I do this?

I mean, man, I played Metaphor.

That's what's going on.

I fucking played Metaphor.

Okay.

I'm looking at my video producer tab and it says metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, silent hill, silent hill, metaphor, metaphor, metaphor.

It's good.

It's really good.

Imagine a world where there are no

elder or horned or elf eared people, but it's the future and everyone is born without magic and everything is fair and everything is equal.

Where the fuck is that, metaphor?

Because that ain't.

I got to be super real with you because uh every time you're describing so you're showing me a sketch you read are you out of your mind

you reading the you reading another page of the utopia book they show you like a you know that that that parchment like sketch yeah uh and you you always when you get a new party member you read a page with them you're like oh can i see your book right

and like every time it comes up like it starts to kind of sound like maybe like our

neck of the woods and like like every page you read is like oh oh you wish you fucking wish man

yeah like oh you're fucking kidding me with this shit right well it's just it's the hilarity because it's like in the background the fake world we created is the metaphor of the fucking horrendous shit in real life it's a metaphor it's a metaphor it's the metaphor there were you're watching the fantasy metaphor and then in the fantasy metaphor for real life fucking racism they're reading a book about what what might be our world, but it's everything is great and fair and you talk about it.

That's so good.

You know, it's against the law to discriminate by place of birth or creed.

Oh, man.

There's like a really strange takeaway.

Like in a very early discussion, I think you saw it when you hang out with Stroll and you're about to go up to the fort.

One of the options is like, he's like, oh, you're reading this book.

It's like a fantasy.

And he's like, yeah.

And you go, yeah, it's a world without tribes.

And he goes, oh, that must be great.

And I'm like, what are you guys actually saying?

Because it sounds like you're saying if there was only one tribe, everything would be solved.

No, no, no.

The book is not about the planet Earth.

The book is actually just about Japan.

That's the utopia.

Well, I mean, if you look real carefully at the game's intro, it's actually really, really, really clear it's about Japan.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you see the vending machines.

And like, I'm pretty sure I saw a Lawson in the painterly shadows of that one screenshot.

Oh Fuck.

Yeah, don't worry about the other shit.

What we're talking about here.

Oh man.

All right.

Hey,

I got to help with dinner for a second.

I got to help transfer something to an oven.

So I will be right back.

Yeah.

Excuse me.

You just

mumbling.

It's a metaphor to yourself.

Yeah,

I've been saying it a lot.

It's really funny to me.

I've been, no, I think it's really humorous to just

tell things that they're metaphors.

See, the problem for me is I keep trying to get, like, I only get to three.

I get to simile, allegory, metaphor, and then I run out of words.

Yeah.

That's pretty much it.

Those are the ones.

So it's more like meta three, really.

Uh,

okay, over here, what are we doing?

Yeah, I had a pretty short week as well, like

fairly busy and lots going on.

But in terms of

games and other things,

went to

them hinterlands in

Shadow of the Earth Tree.

So just that.

Hinterlands.

Yeah, it's just that little area top right where you basically go to the second

finger, like graveyard area kind of thing.

And that other area that I'm being informed you did not find.

Okay.

There was a

Falling Star Beast, which was like, hey, what's up, buddy?

Haven't seen you in a minute.

And I guess part of that was also the wrapping up of the little church which leads to Fingimami.

Sorry about that last week, man.

I apologize.

Yeah.

It was cool.

Yo, that thing's gross.

Yeah.

What a nice, like, it didn't need to exist, but I do like when a character or boss shows up that is like, well, this brings a lot of the lore together, right?

And it's like, oh, all of these are from this, and this is awful.

Yep.

And this is connected here.

And this is just a, yeah,

it's a nice little like

point to tie all your

string to on your Pepe Silvia board, right?

Yeah, if you're unclear that all the fingers and all that shit was from fucking space, here's the crater that this one landed, and here's the crater that the other one landed.

More importantly, I would say, is the like, here is the radio system that explains the direct how and why the greater, not why, but how the greater will

passes its will on.

And yeah, this is the antenna.

Here is the antenna, and here's how the antenna breaks down into these fingers, and here's how these fingers spread out to these places, and then these people interpret what these fingers say and do, you know, and so on.

Like, it's like, okay, it all directly comes straight from that connection point.

There's a real, um, there's a real feeling of like you go, you find Trina, and you find all that shit at the bottom, and you find

Finger Mom, and you find Midra,

the lord of the frenzied flame and you're like man ronnie knew what the fuck she was talking about that all this shit needs to go

the whole thing it's all the whole yeah daddy concept needs to fuck off and the idea that again like any concept that you're born with you can literally carve that shit off and throw it on the ground you know why not man like yeah like fight for your freedom however you can you know um

Of course, to do so, you have to, like, impose your will over the world and replace the order with some kind of new order, you know?

Because letting chaos take the world, it was the one thing that everyone's afraid of.

But, like, really, chaos is just kind of like, nah, burn it all.

But it's like, nah, I like it.

It's fun, man.

But, like, real chaos would just be like, anything goes.

But this chaos is...

Yeah!

You know?

Yeah, I like to set things on fire and have like a creepy sun head.

chaos doesn't have to always be crazy fire pyro.

You know, chaos can keep chaos in in Shinmegami Tensei and chaos in to a degree, like if you're using Lewis as the fucking Lucifer stand-in.

Lucifer's platform, sorry, Lewis's platform fucking rules in metaphor.

His platform is a radical, anti-racial meritocracy.

Ah,

here we go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And if not for the fact that he was a violent, treacherous murderer, he would have the best platform of any of the candidates.

You know, I can think of a certain white hawk who's also anti-racial and who also wants to unite all kinds of people and beings and creatures under the same banner.

You know?

Yeah.

With talent and ability and skill.

Only determiner.

Absolutely.

You fight alongside these fucking freak demon beasts and your merit is all that I care about.

You know, the most important part is that no matter what race you are, no matter where you're born or what you believe in, you belong to me.

You are my thing.

Yeah.

That's that's interesting.

Yeah, we'll, you know, more on that.

But

the,

what was I going to say?

Oh, yeah, no, just the, the, the element that you're like, oh, this is all fucked up.

It has to go is quite interesting.

And then there's a a little piece of um when you get the soul of the uh meta the mother of fingers you look at the weapons you can create from it and one of them um is her like staff you know and then the other is like the big bonking finger that's what i took i took the big bonker yeah and you see the um the weapon art on that right Cow Tower's resentment.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

I'm just going to bullshit some head cannon here and go like, what if the description on that is implying something of the of what the mother of fingers felt you know and it's the idea of like you are subservient to this greater will and you have no say in the matter and the finger can only bend and like it it gives a couple sentences kind of describing like the only like the the subservient thing it hates the fact that all it can do is serve another being you know and so i thought that was a pretty interesting thing but at the same time it's not a hundred because there is the idea as well on the other spell or on the other item you get that kind of says

it waited long, it waited for more orders, but they never came essentially.

So there's a lot of like, I'm like, every time we pick up something, some lore, and I kind of, we fucking spit the bullshit around with it.

Yeah, I like, I like things like this that are new, that, you know, you can drop into the old and kind of like improve some of that, some of those connections and stuff.

Also running around that little, that little

void, and I'm like, where's Rom?

He's like way over there in the distance.

You know, there's a vacuum spider chilling out.

There's, there's like, there's, there's a feeling of like, you know, in Elden Ring, you eventually discover, oh, wait, these are, these are fucking space aliens.

Holy shit.

And, but, like, for a lot of it, they don't really come off like fucking space aliens, right?

Like, they come off as fantasy creatures.

Um, and the DLC does not have that fucking problem.

The DLC is like

maldered beyond this shit, telling you about the finger alien.

I mean, I mean, you know, the Albanorics like clue you in pretty heavy.

And I would say as well that, like, we're also primed because of the moon presence, you know,

to that whole idea of like, all right, swords and dragons and shields and kings, and then unknowable horrors and creatures and cities and darkness and wolves, and then fucking space.

You know,

um

it was normal and then space happened and now it is fucked yeah uh so that was a that was a particularly cool um um boss i i like that one uh i've also i hate the arena the arena is horrible the endless void the endless void with the fucking tubes man i like died and then like came back in and was like where are my souls oh my god they're like a football field away i didn't realize you know, it was like, well, I mean, pretty much almost where you're fighting, the Elden Beast, right?

But yeah,

that was fun.

I

we have

we have

begun what is, I guess, called 1-4, and we've crossed in Phoenix, right,

the...

The Kansai-Mason-Dixon line.

Yes.

And we've met Lotta of heart.

And, you know, not much to say so far, just she's cool.

She's from America, right?

Well, no, she can't be from America.

You're in America.

Yeah, that southern Osaka Ben drawl.

You know,

the hospitality.

It's clear.

No, she's fun.

And not much to say about the court, about that, because we're literally in the middle of that story.

That's a good case.

Lots of, lots of.

In the original Phoenix Wright, that was the last case.

There's one more after this, I've been informed.

And

someone was like, hey, maybe save that for the end of the trilogy after you do the rest.

And it's just like, that's in.

That's ridiculous.

You're implying a lot with that?

Also, nah, that's crazy.

That's ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah, no.

I'm sure there's some chronological something to that, but no.

No, it isn't.

It's just the quest, the case is

pretty tough.

Also very long.

It's very long.

Yeah, I heard very long.

they all get they all get like you know way longer uh so far so

um anyway so far so good with that um

and then yeah i guess this week uh for me personally i have returned to the church basement and i started doing some combos so i went back to the boxing gym

under the church and uh yeah just you know gonna gonna

be getting back in there um

Did two 10-round sessions, and it was fun to kind of see some old faces, see the old coach, get in there, hit the bags, do the thing, you know.

And I'm like, yeah, this is cool.

I kind of miss this vibe.

I'm feeling it.

Everything.

You're like, all right,

let's go.

Let's put the gloves on.

Let's put the hand wrap up.

You know, all right.

I feel it.

Step one: pick up your fucking skipping rope.

Oh, God.

Oh, god, how do you do it?

I can't do it.

I can't do it.

It's gone.

And then I'm like wheezing.

And it's like, okay, next round, go start your box jumps.

And I'm like, fuck.

And just like, it's, it's rough, man.

Cause I've been, I've been trying to do my own, you know, like, again, hitting the gym, my own walking and doing stuff and keeping that cardio up.

But like, the amount required to do boxing-related things and to throw punches and to keep it going and moving is just so next level by comparison to any regular cardio workouts you do.

It's insane.

So I feel

like that feeling is me anytime I return to any task I stopped for longer than five or six days

in my whole life.

Like if like on the times I've taken trips or haven't streamed for a week, like because I've been ill or whatever, I come back and I sit down to this chair and I'm like, oh my, oh, what the?

How do I even turn this shit on?

What the fuck am I doing?

Every single game that I play, when I sit back down the next week, I have to go, wait, how do I play again?

You know, and if God forbid a week has passed extra on it, I'm cooked.

I'm done.

Like, I just, I cannot do it.

You know, I can, I can retain what is in front of me for a couple hours at best until it's completely evaporated.

Um,

so, you know, even, even as I like, as much as I can say, like, oh yeah, some of the movements and stuff started to come back a little bit by the end.

And I did, I two of them, you know, and those are the that's what I could fit in with the week schedule and stuff.

Um,

holy shit, man, is my body paying for it?

My legs are currently still on fire, like days later.

And you know, well, conditioning just leaves like right away.

Conditioning leaves, and age fills the space.

No,

yeah,

yeah.

So, and I've decided to work out by by lifting

a 25-pound

object that's increasingly onto my shoulders and over my head about a thousand times a day.

There you go.

And it, you know, it gets heavier every day.

It does.

It does.

It's an ever-growing kettlebell.

It's pretty impressive.

Then, once you start getting those swings,

oh man.

Yeah.

So, anyway, no, that's that's that's uh

just uh just a

a fun, painful reminder.

Um

anyways, uh

what's your schedule looking like this week?

My schedule looks like this week over at twitch.tv slash patstares at tomorrow evening.

I'm going to be checking out uh UFO 50.

Yeah.

And then uh Wednesday is Metaphor.

And then Thursday is Wizard of Legend 2, which is is a sponsored stream, and more UFO 50.

And then Friday is

Metaphor, and it's probably going to continue between

UFO 50 and Metaphor

for a bit.

Okay.

Because those are both real juicy.

They are.

They are.

If you haven't yet cracked it open with

UFO 50,

I would say

it depends on you don't like if you like

if you feel it lock in.

But

if I don't feel it, move on.

Move on.

Yeah.

Keep it light, and then if something grabs you,

stick with it.

And

also,

some of them are real, but still a lot.

Like, there is at least two silent, turn-based, like, strategy

games in there that, like, you can just be sitting and making decisions on your turn, and there will be no noise on the stream.

Oh, that's awesome.

You will just a silent stream will be occurring.

Oh, that's great.

Because you're staring at it, that's great.

I love that.

That's awesome.

So, just be warned about that, too.

That's good stuff.

Is something wrong?

Is it broken?

Nah.

Anyway.

Yes, I will be having, yeah,

so on

Tuesday, going to be doing some Elden Ring, and then, yeah, we're going to come back in with some more

Phoenix Wright

on,

I think Friday, actually.

So

I'll post a schedule on Wooly versus on Twitch and on Twitter.

And yeah, over on YouTube as well.

If you haven't checked it out, you can check out the

Metaphor video that went up.

It's only on YouTube.

It's not on my Twitch VODs at all.

So CASP!

Catch that there if you can.

And yeah, some highlights of Run Wooly versus the algorithm as well.

Alright, let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

I love sponsor.

Boopadoop boop boop.

This week,

the podcast is sponsored by Loading Time.

Hmm.

Oh, cool.

Oh, yeah.

I did a slop stream.

We watched...

How was the slop?

We watched some good slop.

We watched some bad slop.

We watched

some great shit like Kurt Russell and John Carpenter just laughing at a commentary track watching the thing.

That was great.

Yeah, had a good time going over it.

And then we got to the core of ADHD editing.

And,

you know.

Oh, what's his name?

You know,

when you start watching a replay video of some games, highlights, and then like the first.

What's his name?

The first thing that happens.

I forget his name.

There's a guy.

There's a guy?

There's a guy who does the ADHD editing.

There's a lot.

It has a million graphics a second.

There's a lot of them.

Maxor.

Okay.

There's a.

I don't know that I could put a specific name, but I've seen more than enough that have popped up and have that.

It's usually that water,

those two screaming clips that are deep-fried and they make your ears hurt.

And yeah.

Yeah.

It's...

We ask the real card quit-hitting questions, you know, and we get to the core of it.

And Reggie kind of has to

look deep into his soul a bit on that because

it is it truly is like

at the at the end of the day

does

louder truly equal funnier

I fucking hope so

one brave man says oh I I fucking hope so brother because I oh loud equals funny

and that's the only that's all you need to know

All right.

This week the podcast is sponsored by Shopify.

Hey, Shopify, what's hanging?

A great cart for your business or your website is hanging.

That's awesome, man.

The kids love it.

If you are

yeah, if you've got a

business and you're trying to figure out uh how to take that to the next step, if you want to figure out how to sell things online and uh make it so that you can keep track of everything as you grow

um

you're gonna need a good cart, you're gonna need a good platform for selling and for all your commerce.

And uh as

people who uh could barely point a camera and microphone at a screen and then record it and stick those videos online, we could barely figure out how to get a t-shirt or other sold

and it helps that we were able to with Shopify.

So that's the number one checkout on the planet.

They are

known behind brands like Aloe, Allbirds, Skims.

They've got a

award-winning customer service that can help you and

keep track of of all of your data as you are selling from your first to your millionth sale.

Conversions of up to 50%.

Oh,

shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%.

There you go.

And yeah, I mean, that shop app, I can say that like literally using it right now as we speak, as I'm waiting for stuff to come in, it's pretty handy keeping track of what's coming and going.

And when I have a lot of things coming from different places and being dropped off, I just default to putting a lot of my shipping things through it.

So I know for a fact that that on its own has been incredibly useful.

So if you want your

sales to be compatible with that as well, with the shop app,

you want to hit up Shopify.

It helps you

figure out how to sell a t-shirt, folks, and how to get it working.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Help me.

Upgrade your business.

Get the same checkout that we use.

Sign up for your $1 per month period at shopify.com slash Superbeast.

All lowercase.

Go to Shopify.com/slash Superbeast to upgrade your selling today.

Shopify.com slash Superbeast.

Thank you, Shopify.

Thanks, Shopify.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by Henson Shaving.

And

we've brought them up before because when you're looking for the

ability to get yourself a decent shave,

it's nice to not be treated like a criminal.

It's nice to not have to go down

and put in a password and get

a perp walk to get your access to a razor at your local store.

Not to mention the quality of what you're getting is also pretty garbage.

And then they're like, cool, we'll see you same time again next week.

It sucks.

Don't do it.

So

you want quality, and that's where Henson shaving comes into

play.

Huh, if you were born after 1970, there's a good chance your first razor was a multi-blade razor.

These razors have been the status quo for over half a century, but where has that gotten us?

According to a recent study, two-thirds of men expect some irritation when they shave.

There's no information, virtually no information on how to prevent it.

And over 2 billion plastic razors enter the landfill in the U.S.

each year alone.

That's a lot of garbage.

In addition to making you wear

the ball and chain before you go buy them.

So yeah, Hands and Shaven

is

all about

getting beyond that.

You've got groundbreaking research that has impacted the quality of shaving on your skin.

How thin are those razors?

What was the number?

0.0013

is

a system of measurement.

It's beyond my human-sensical comprehension.

It is less than the thickness of a human hair when we're talking about the blade extension there.

So it is incredibly accurate, and it is gentle on your skin.

And Henson makes their razors in their aerospace machine shop that also makes parts for a Mars rover and International Space Station.

So they're exceptional at manufacturing, and that level of precision is,

yeah, going into the quality of the razor that you're getting from them.

And with that, of course, you're also

getting

not just the quality, but it's at a pretty good price by comparison to getting ripped off down the corner.

Only about $3 to $5 per year to replace the blades.

The razor itself is made of aluminum and there's no plastic.

Also no plastic in the packaging as well.

So

yeah, you want to

get in on the

laser-like

accuracy.

I've used it to line up, edge up a bit, get some sharp lines going on the jaw, and I can appreciate the lack of bumps that I used to get when I was a teenager and when I was learning how to do it.

These days,

I've

you know, I've been much more paranoid about the quality of what I'm going to put on my face because when those bumps that come around, they don't go away anytime soon.

They last a while.

Yeah.

And it sucks.

It's not great.

So.

Say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime.

Visit hensonshaving.com slash superbeast to pick the razor you want and use code superbeast and you'll get two years worth of blades free with your razor.

Just make sure to add them to your cart.

That's 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash super beast and use the code super beast.

Thank you Henson Shaving.

Thanks Henson Shaving.

And this week

we are sponsored by Uncommon Goods.

Hey, Uncommon Goods.

Haven't seen you guys in a while.

You doing well?

I have bigged up Uncommon Goods quite a bit, and it's legitimately a super dope spot.

If you are, if you're good at gift giving, you can usually, you know, kind of figure out, get a feel for what someone's into, what they and then there's people like me

where if you're bad at it, you're like, oh no.

But either way, Uncommon Goods is like basically, it's exactly what the name advertises.

It is a

wide variety of stuff that's great for whoever you're shopping for.

And especially with the holiday season coming up, there's lots of just like clever, out-of-the-box,

unusual but interesting ideas and stuff for gifts.

And I know I've talked before about how I've been able to find...

some great like planting stuff for

for the wife.

I've got you know the the the self lighting and growing

planting machine and just a fun kind of 3D tic-tac-toe device and a couple other things for some cooking as well.

A grilled

garlic kind of like heating plate and things like that.

They've got like just tons of stuff and whatever category the people in your life are into is you can browse by that as well, by for who, by for what.

Super legitimately

great site for finding stuff that's interesting.

And you can just kind of click, keep scrolling and just see, like, oh, a lot of the time you're like, I didn't even know that existed.

I didn't, like, they've invented something for that.

Oh, wow, huh.

So, yeah, with holiday shopping coming up and stuff like that, you want to make it as stress-free as possible.

Get something for everyone on your list that sparks joy.

And yeah, and you know, again, the feeling of like, whoa, I didn't know this existed.

It's exactly what I want or needed or is super useful for, you you know, my everyday is awesome.

So

that's where, that's where

I would highly recommend you check them out.

And when you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists that are small, independent businesses.

Many are handcrafted products, made in small batches.

So

yeah, support that.

High quality, handmade in the U.S.

and out-of-the-ordinary gifts.

And for every purchase you make, they give a dollar back to a non-profit partner of your choice.

They've donated more than $3 million to date.

So

yeah, they're really, really awesome for gift buying.

Check them out.

Go to uncommongoods.com to get 15% off your next gift.

And use...

Sorry, let me try that again.

To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com slash superbeast.

That's uncommons.com slash superbeast for 15% off.

Don't miss out on this limited time offer.

Uncommon goods were all out out of the ordinary.

See, I see what they did there.

Yeah, I seize it.

It's almost like a metaphor.

Almost.

Thank you, Uncommon Goods.

Thanks, Uncommon Goods.

Okay.

It's a metaphor.

Alright.

Would someone like to explain

what's happening with Pokémon?

All right.

Because

I've got some details.

I've got some bullet points.

But the more I try to get my head around the whole thing,

the less I actually feel like I know.

All right.

All right.

All right.

So

here's what's going on.

You ready?

So

at some point,

somehow, someone

got

access to Game Freak shit and like a terabyte of fucking nonsense.

Data got leaked.

It's just out there now.

Including employee

personal information, which always makes me think: okay, someone was doing the ransomware gig, right?

Yeah.

Someone was working

to steal the data, force them to pay up.

If they didn't, then they would release all the information.

And this has happened to Capcom.

This has happened to a bunch of companies recently.

So

the following pieces of information are out there.

A bunch of shit where they're like

basically like descriptive, like transcripts of discussions between staff where they're like, I want this character to look like Jennifer Lopez and have big boobs.

Data.

And people are going, oh my god, it's scandalous.

And it's like, how do you fucking think they designed characters?

Now, this is like data going back from before even the first game came out, right?

It's like literally everything across the entire franchise's history.

Right.

And then you've got stuff like the Switch 2 code name is in there.

And the Switch 2 code name or development name or prototype name or whatever the fuck is ounces.

Interesting.

Which to me

says that the Switch 2 is going to be really light.

Because it's not measured in pounds.

It's measured in ounces.

I mean, the current one is already quite small compared to the Steam Deck, but

if they made it lighter.

And then

we have

development details about them talking about where they want to put the camera and how they're going to handle it, you know, all that stuff.

But the thing that people are latching on to

is what people are characterizing as

gooner-ass perverts,

Pokemon, pregnant, fucking kidnap, fanfiction.

And so it turns out amongst the leaks from Game Freak,

there's stories, origin stories, and unused stories for Typhlosion, uh, Octolary, Slack Off,

and uh,

a bunch of these involve like

just

like weird human Pokemon hybrids, underage kids, and

murder, and, and, and, and, uh, fucking.

It's a bunch of dank shit.

Yeah.

Um, we might need uh to put the the not like us dots

on a couple Pokemon caves.

But the core of this is that these are all pretty much just like,

what if we took like the Greek myth of this or this Yokai myth where a Kappa stole the and just applied it to Pokemon?

So that's so that's yeah.

So what I've seen is there's there's the the stories and then the people freaking out about what's in the stories and then the summaries therein of, you know, Typhlosion

killed a dude and

banged an underage girl and gave her a half-human, half-Pokemon baby, and all that.

And then what I've seen is the third round of people

explaining that what these are are folktales and mythology that are reflecting the creation myths like in the real world.

And it's not unlike the Brothers Grimm or other really dark.

Yeah, so folk.

What you're seeing is a bunch of creatives like spitball a bunch of bullshit

and then go, nah, we're not going to put that in there.

That's weird.

And people taking like, I can't fucking believe the fuck.

Oh, shut up.

The child-friendly franchise eventually

that was landed on, I guess, was, there was a time when they were spitballing, making it much darker.

And I guess that's why over the years I've heard about these like

things where they're like, oh, there actually was a Pokémon god that gave birth to all life and like every one of those little things that like I heard about later on that were all creation myths and weird deific things.

And you know, the also there's already been characters that have like married Pokémon.

Yeah, they're weird.

Well, the links between humanity and Pokémon and humans being a type or whatever.

I'm like, oh, that makes a lot of sense given that like from the jump there was already this kind of yeah bit like Yokai creation myth.

Exactly.

So

is it Arceus is God, right?

That's the bit?

Yeah, Arceus is God.

We're all descended from Arceus.

Okay.

Alright.

So yeah, like, I guess there's

Pokemon impregnations and kidnapping lore and bits that are.

Lots of Aria.

We knew this was going on.

If you followed the money, you'd know this was already happening.

Followed the money.

Yeah.

So again, I just like, I'm like,

there definitely are, I remember like these kind of storylines you'd hear about, like, again, the Grim Fairy Tales versions of,

you know,

every

childhood thing.

Or...

the ghastly crumb tinies where like, yeah, the things were to be like, oh, the children did good and they lived happily ever after, or they did bad and they died.

You know, and I remember being young and being like, ooh, what the fuck?

Ooh, that's dark.

People didn't die in the other pop-up books I was reading.

And I do feel that a lot of the time, too, as well, when you hear about,

yeah, like Japanese creation myths, too, they definitely get into.

They get fucking weird.

Yeah.

With like

long names that get referenced as the final form of your persona.

Careful, there's a demon that'll pull your soul out through your asshole.

It's now in Elden Ring.

It's called the

crazed Kaka Consumer.

The butt eyeball thing.

Yeah.

And they make for some great, like,

Yu-Ki-O-A-style, you know, views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai, painting-style things.

That look great on woodblock.

And I imagine that if ever there were bits of this that were referenced in any way, shape, or form, it would be like in cave drawings on the wall inside of some mysterious ancient place or something you know um

but yeah yeah that's that's that seems to be part of it and now there's also like terabytes and terabytes of other like

things too so it's like

the more i was looking like like that's one element but there's like literally just like also leaks about like future plans and and and

I want to say that like um at least two games source code as well.

Like

Yeah, apparently modders are like super excited because Pokemon ROM hacks are about to get like super good.

Yeah.

Nah, man.

It's the same thing every time with these, which is just like

fucking people's passports and addresses are always part of it.

And that's fucked up.

I feel like there's like a real, we're living in a like a dead society that's only crumbling further as

instead of people going, I can't believe these people got their personal shit hacked, people are going, I can't believe someone drew what if Typhlosion had sex with a girl on a napkin.

Like,

and now, certain, and yeah, and like, like,

the three in particular, of all the Pokemon, Typhlosion, Octilary, and Slack Off

are the ones that are taking the most heat.

People

saying, Yeah, they're in the crosshairs.

Kendrick has to come for Typhlosion.

Yeah, Typhlosion,

all joking aside, and all seriousness aside,

no one will ever look at Typhlosion the same way again.

I literally just scrolled past a fucking screenshot of like 10 Typhlosion standing around a Pokemon trainer, like not 10 minutes ago.

Yeah, so I mean, I thought Reshiram was the beginning of this, and then somewhere in the middle was the Smasher Pass.

Rashiram was not the beginning.

Resharam was the beginning for you.

Well, well, well, smash or pass, you don't get a say with Typhlotion.

Typhlosion will decide

whether the smashing or passing is going to occur.

Anyway.

Yeah, and whatever that, whatever that, that, what's that, what's the crocodile lizard one that like looks all like seductive?

The one with the eyes?

I don't.

Yeah.

So I'm really afraid that you're just describing a regular crocodile-looking one, and you're like, look at how seductive they are.

That's just like a crocodile googly.

There's one that everyone in the Smasher passes.

That's a lasso.

Everyone in the Smasher Pass gets to that one and goes, yo, what's with that?

What's with those eyes, though?

Oh, yeah, what is with those eyes?

What's up with that?

Exactly.

What's going on there?

Oh, man.

All right.

Well, anyway.

Hey,

before we go to a different news, I forgot something from my week that was really important.

Oh, okay.

It was so important.

Me and Paige went and played bingo.

We went to a character.

In a bingo hall?

In a bingo hall.

Yeah.

With the old

people there.

Oh, oh.

And there were people our age there, and there were young people there.

Wow.

and let me tell you let me tell you something let me tell you something wow first of all i want a bingo hey i'm i'm super good at bingo um skill and two

you know what you know what they don't tell you about bingo and why bingo kicks ass

like dabbing your little dots and keeping up with the bingo collar

fucking rules when you've already had two drinks ah

Okay.

Like, that's what they don't tell you.

That it fucking rules.

Well, as a.

Because you have your little drinky drinks, and then you're like, a man calls the number, and you're like, that's my number.

Yeah.

As a recent crocanole and petonk enjoyer, I have, I have nothing to say about embracing these old man games and activities.

We had to Uber home.

Yeah, you did.

We were.

I won the bingo, and then me and my wife stumbled out.

Did you shove it in Agnes' face?

Did you go suck at Ethel?

No.

But

there was a nice old lady who was sitting next to us who's like, am I going to see you next time?

We're like, maybe.

This was fun.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, like, she didn't win a bingo, though.

She's not as good as I am.

No, no, it's all, dude, the skill.

it's undeniable.

Hey, like, there you got that.

I know.

So, Reggie goes hard on trivia night stuff.

He's big on trivia bits, loves that.

Used to, like, train for it, you know?

So, these, yeah,

I get it.

What'd you win, though?

I won $11.

No, wait, $10?

I won a very small amount.

I don't know.

Actually.

Did you claim your prize?

A man came to me and said, sign this.

And I signed it.

And then he gave me an amount of money that I then handed to the beer man.

Nice.

That's a racket.

That's a good racket, they got.

Though,

I'm sure you, as you noted, there's other young people around.

Like,

there is a, there's definitely a,

like,

it's not hipster, but there is a, there is a discovery of old things that no one else of your age is attending that is around.

There were a couple kids there playing bingo.

Yeah.

But

they were bingo maxing.

Bingo maxing, okay.

Yeah, because the kids, they had their tablets up and I could see them like scrolling on TikTok between

any moment that was free.

So they had the dabber and then they had the tablet and they're like one hand on the TikTok just going as fast as they can and just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam with the bingo thing.

Turns out it's a lot more fun when the numbers don't involve David Cage'sms.

That's true.

Yeah.

That's the last time we played bingo.

Anyway, so are we going to...

Is Typhlosion...

Getting locked up or what?

What are we doing here?

Typhlosion's not real.

I don't mean to break it to anyone.

Okay.

But

we need to move back into the situation in which

your disgust or outrage needs to be appropriately pointed at the fact that this isn't real.

Okay.

Nonetheless, Nurse Jenny is going to lock up some of these types based on sight.

Just look at any of them.

Yes, well, that's always been the case.

Yeah.

I mean,

you can just look at certain ones and, you know.

all right

was I not giving you what you needed of on the on the on the I don't know Jenny racial profiling angle no no no we're good we're good

and it was and and less about racial profiling and more about locking up the the the predators and you know

throwing away the key

yeah

anyway Pokemon so fucking stupid.

So, speaking of

villains and bad things,

Addie Shankar has been online, and he's working on the new Devil May Cry series, the anime that's going to be coming to Netflix.

And some people noted in some of the conversation about,

you know, the trailer and some of the stuff we're seeing.

Oh, interesting note, there's some, like, looking at the screenshots in the trailer, Dante's wearing three different shirts under his jacket.

So it seems like there's different eras of Dante that are going to be covered there.

Because you got the black shirt, you got the white shirts, you got the no shirt.

So we'll see what they're going.

But yeah, Addie Shekhar, he replied to a couple people's tweets about Virgil as a villain, saying, actually,

someone said Virgil is the coolest villain in the history of gaming.

And he said, correction, anti-hero.

He's not.

He's an absolute villain.

And then he's like 100%.

And then

the person said, he's a villain when he's motivated with gaining more power.

And Addie Shankara said, disagree.

His pursuit of power is rooted in logic.

He understands the core nature of the universe.

He's not a villain.

He's just smart.

And then.

No, he's what the fuck is this nonsense?

And then a second tweet, because people are going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Had him tweeting out, every villain is the hero of their own story.

And

yeah, that the idea being that everything that he's done is because of, you know, it was to protect the people around him and such.

And I'm total nonsense.

And I'm just.

There's no one he wants to protect around him.

He has no one in his life.

He attacks his own son.

Do you remember?

Do you remember after we beat it?

I remember this conversation so vividly, and I'm ready to go right back into it.

And I sat down and I had a like, Okay, we need to talk about Virgil moment.

We need to talk about this character that I think is awesome and is very cool and a huge fucking one of my favorites.

That is, he is a piece of shit.

He is a piece of shit.

Just so all right, this was a couple years ago, so you might have missed it.

But in case you missed it, at the end of Devil May Cry 5, after all the actions were said and done, and we got that, like, kind of the bromance going between the bros, and everything is jackpot.

There's a bit in there where I'm like, yeah,

it's easy for with the fan base especially to kind of like

whitewash and kind of forget the crimes and horrendous shit that he's responsible for.

Listen, Ada Wong is very morally gray.

But like legitimately

by going like, no, no, it was Uri Zen to blame.

It's like, no, no, no.

Before all of that, when he raised the Temen Negreu in

3, knowing that he would be unleashing the demon world

on Earth, he was totally okay with that as a means of getting to Sparta's power.

Hey, so you say that, and it's like, I don't remember that being in the game, but you know what it is in?

It's in the DMC3 manga that this anime is taking characters directly from, in which he's like, Yeah, I'm gonna raise this tower.

What about all the people who live there?

Aren't they gonna get attacked by demons?

And he's like, That's their fault for being pussies.

Yeah, if no, if things like Tony Redgrave and Morrison and all that stuff is all part of the canon as well, it's like he straight up raised the tower, knowing the threats and kind of being like, Yeah, my goal is not to cause this suffering, but I don't care.

Because what I'm after is in there, and that's more important to me.

Maybe if they didn't want to get eaten by demons, they should be stronger because that's what I'm doing.

I don't want to get eaten by demons, so I'm going to get stronger.

And Dante is like,

Those are the demons that killed our bomb, idiot.

He's like, Yeah, I'm getting stronger, so they don't kill me.

What is hard to understand here?

So, to till then later, right, when it's like, uh, after all these losses, after you know, eventually, after fucking eating shit, he's like, I've got to cut out the human from the demon, you know, and you get your Urizen.

It's like, even if the Urizen that gets created is the one to blame, that's still him pushing that domino over to create that effect.

Okay, is is Virgil responsible for the actions of Urizen?

Okay, let's break this down.

Is V is V responsible for the actions?

No.

V is not responsible.

However, is Virgil?

Yes, Virgil is as guilty of what Urizen does as a drunk driver is for causing a car accident.

He said,

I'm going to do this and I don't really care what's going to happen because I really want to do it.

And then a bunch of shit happened, Virgil.

You knew it could.

You knew you were playing the fire.

The ClyFOD annihilating a city is not number one on the list, nor is it even the main goal, but it sure is just a thing that happens to bystanders while I'm on my way to this fruit, right?

And then, you know, V coming back together at the right moment was ultimately like,

it was a part of a plan of desperation because he knew he didn't have long left either.

You know.

And, you know, you can, this is where you can kind of get into, like, was the plan to always

stay back as a full demon?

Well, what about?

I think that Virgil had no plan at all.

Because when he's defeated as a demon only, and that wasn't good enough, even after having the fruit, clearly, right, there must have been some regret to that.

And V gets over there at the right time, and maybe he changed his mind.

But whatever the case is, like, the motivation to do all that was fucking evil, dude.

It was horrible.

Also, before he did that, he like tore his own son's arm off.

Yeah.

Because he's like, but I want it, though.

Well, it's mine.

You know?

And it's like, we don't know.

the full, full bit, but like the fact that it popped out in that way to begin with, like, anyway, it's like you know, you know that there's like a scene somewhere on a napkin of in between the ending of DMC5 and before the post-credits where he's sitting around and going, man, that apple made out of a million humans was delicious.

You know, like,

oh, I'm so

glad Yuri isn't ate that apple.

Oh my God, I can remember.

It tasted delicious.

Man.

God, that sure was a long time ago.

I guess you too were young once.

You know?

Yeah.

I mean, there's all kinds of head cannon about, like, who is Fortuna lady?

Is she someone that was just like, that dude is literally a walking incarnation of my god?

Get in my bed.

Is it just that simple?

You know, we don't know.

But

whatever the case is, man, like, Virgil, absolutely.

Cool,

you know, monster drinking, sitting on the plastic chair, etc.

That's all fine.

Meme it to death.

The motherfucker's evil, dude.

He's a villain.

That's crazy.

And wanting the main thing to be, nah, but it's about beating my brother, though, as opposed to like world domination or anything, doesn't like, it doesn't mean that, like, you can't just go unless you're an anti-hero.

You don't get to write all those fucking bodies off, man.

Anti-hero does not mean

villain that has a relatable goal.

Anti-hero means

someone with a heroic goal or internal heroic motive that acts antithetical to the common tropes of heroics.

They are rude, they are crass, they are cold, they are uncaring, whatever.

They are not actively villainous.

Stone Cold Steve Austin did not burn down an orphanage to get at Mr.

McMahon.

Motherfucker lost twice, three times even, and refused to accept it.

Which, okay, there's some grit, right?

You don't want to die, fine.

But the fact that, like, you're willing to, like, you go fuck the consequences, I didn't lose, you didn't win, and then you, like, you're, I'm gonna take on Mundus.

You can't, idiot.

Nah, though, right?

You, and like, throw your, become a Mundus pawn.

Get out of that, and still continue down this fucking you have no plan B, you know, know, like in most of the games, Dante is an anti-hero,

he's rude, he's crass, he does not explain what is happening, he lets bad things happen because he's not paying attention.

Like, you know, like he shoots the Pope in four.

At the beginning of four, but beginning of four, he looks super duper evil because you don't have the content, but he has an internally heroic goal, which is stop demons.

Yeah,

um,

just

absolutely wild at that.

Like, the best villains have motivations and like guiding principles and things that are consistent and make sense from their own perspective when you can see it from their side and go, like, oh, I get why

you're moving the way you are.

You know,

without seeing it, I just, I always go back to that really, really great thing I've learned about the

Wackfu villain that was kind of just like, well, I don't know, whatever, spoilers for that, if you are,

but the, there, there, I, I remember uh hearing about there's that, there's a villain who's like doing horrendous things, but the idea is like if you, he, by going back in time, I can fix it and make it all good.

He just wants to get his family back, and that if you just stop trying to resist him and let him win, he'll fix it all.

But the worse and worse it gets is because you keep trying to stop him.

It's like, okay, that's great.

That's a really, really good example of like, oh yeah, in his head, as long as he wins in the end, it's all going to be okay, you know?

Incredible.

But it doesn't mean you can write off the things that are happening on the way to that journey, you know?

So

it's wild to kind of look at it this way.

And I guess we'll have to take it when we see the anime.

Like, is Virgil going to get kind of like hand waved for being a chill guy?

You know, is it like, yeah, but in the end, he just wants to fight with his bro.

So it's cool.

You know, like he has that, that war, that ending of like, and then they fought forever and stopped all the demons in hell hanging out.

You're right.

And you're like, yeah, but he opened it.

So, you know, like he created the problem.

And now he's like, well, I guess we got to get down there and solve it.

You know, I was workshopping, I was workshopping like a metaphor in my head for like Virgil's anti-heroness and why it doesn't work.

And I'm thinking of like, there's a child crying in front of of a destroyed house that Virgil walks by.

And he's like, I don't care about that shit.

Anti-hero.

There's a

child crying in front of a destroyed house that Virgil destroyed.

And he goes, I don't care about that shit.

Villain.

And as I was saying this, this is the same conversation that people argued.

About for like a decade about Kratos,

in which Kratos has a goal, and his goal is not heroic.

His goal is just straight-up revenge.

And as Kratos goes through those games, he is just causing larger and larger problems and going, It's the gods' fault.

And people were arguing as to whether or not he was an anti-hero or a villain all the way up until the release of God of War 2018, where he just has a whole speech where, like, I was a bad person.

Yeah.

I, you know, much to some chagrin, to like, it to upsetting degrees to me in the original games.

It was, uh, you got to be clear about that.

And I think in this case, just some of the, some of the, the chuckling old boomer Virgil memes might kind of make people forget.

I think it's got bodies, man.

There's an ancient tweet that is like...

Kratos looking out over the destroyed Greece going, I can't believe Zeus did this.

And it makes me think of Virgil on top of the Clyphot looking down at like annihilated Red Grave City.

He's like, I can't believe Yurizen did this.

I mean, so that's the wild part is like when you make, when you make fun of, so that there's that Naruto video where Mr.

Meeseks is just pain going, well, it's not my fault.

He made me do it.

And he points to fucking Madara.

And he's like, well, it's not my fault.

He made me do it.

He points to Obito.

It's not my fault.

He made me do it.

And it's fucking the little, whatever, the the the true darkness it's like it's not my fault she made me do it and then the moon fucking

you know and it's all these just like yeah yeah okay all right sure everyone's no one's to blame everyone's on the swing set we got eight swing sets in a row and the real evil came from the moon all right sure but virgil it's all just it's just him pointing at himself you did this you split yourself in two created fucking massacres came back together and went what the fuck happened oh that's crazy man who shot Hannibal?

That's wild.

Hey, Dante, you see all this shit?

What happened?

Well, the portal's open and we better get down there.

Someone's got to fix this.

There's a real good feeling where we have all this arguing and all this shit.

And it's never explicitly stated or gone into at all.

But there's a genuine feeling for me that that ending in DMC5 only works under the explicit condition that Virgil is just going to stay in hell.

Yeah.

So Dante is staying

to make sure he watches over hell.

Yeah.

I'm not.

You're actually fine as long as we quarantine you over here where you will never interact with another person ever again.

I'm not letting you die,

even though you really fucking deserve it.

You piece of shit.

You deserve it more than anyone in this series.

You totally, totally do, but I'm going to try to be the bigger man.

But holy fuck, do you deserve it?

But fine, I'm not letting you die.

god damn it dude oh

what an asshole

he's a fucking asshole

yeah it's crazy it's crazy i just i'm like i'm reading that and i'm like

as the guy with the big fucking virgil number one finger over here nah dude fuck that guy not an anti-hero fuck that guy

He sucks.

I mean, he rules, but he sucks.

Don't, don't get it twisted.

Like, he's like, like, he's the fucking fight with Nero.

And then he's like, oh, my son.

Oh.

Cool.

That boy is my son.

Yes.

That's crazy.

Wild.

Really?

Wild.

Damn.

No shit.

Wow, really?

Oh, cat.

You capping.

You capping, bro.

Cat?

Really?

Cat ain't my son.

Dante, I thought that was no, not me?

Really?

Oh,

crazy.

And it's and it's because he can fucking beat him up.

Because he can fight.

You know?

I acknowledge you.

What?

My existence or my strength, you know, my strength.

Like, literally, anyway.

I don't have a son until he kicks me in the balls and fucking DTs on my ass.

Until I get bustered into the ground.

I just saw,

it's weird seeing on Twitter people listening to the podcast in real time, but I saw Haddock just like, what has Virgil ever done that's heroic ever?

Has he done one heroic act in the history of his character?

He jackpotted.

He jackpotted with his father.

That's not heroic.

That was pragmatic.

Like, has Virgil given a hand to anyone in his entire life?

He took out the bigger threat at the time so that they could make the real fight about them too.

That's it.

That's personal.

That's personal.

That's it.

He tried to take on Mundus

because,

you know,

daddy went down like that, but also he could prove how powerful he is by becoming strong.

You know, I really got to hand it because, like, there's a real problem

with a lot of villains that you fight constantly.

So, like, Dauntrail has this problem, Final Fantasy 14 Dauntrail, where, like, the big villain of that expansion, you never feel like you can't take him.

There's never a moment in that whole expansion where you're like, oh man, this guy looks pretty tough.

No, the whole time you're like, well, I could just take him right now.

I could just take him out right now.

Like

that.

Like no problem.

But Virgil, who loses like every fight he's ever been in on camera.

Is still like, yo, that dude's so cool and so strong.

Oh, shit, it's Virgil.

Like, it's non-stop fucking losses for Virgil.

The most heroic thing Virgil's ever done was bust a fat nut.

That was a heroic nut.

That needed to happen.

The rest is fucking, you know.

Does he get credit for V's actions?

I don't know.

Like, yeah.

Like, and all...

Not to mention the part where if you really want to go back and examine it, it's like, you were outside.

She was inside.

There were demons.

No one abandoned you.

They just couldn't get to you because of the demons.

You fucking jerk.

You stupid idiot.

Oh,

yeah.

All right.

All right.

Virgil's so dumb.

I love him.

I love him so much.

Hey, I'm going to need a second.

I'll be right back.

Yeah, man.

I'm just thinking about how no attack in that game did more damage than catching the line, I'm not your mommy, V.

Just, oh!

Like when he fused back together, that chunk of damage stayed.

That never went away.

That's in there.

Trish won the scene.

Man.

Dante's not the only one getting impaled in every game, dude.

V got fucking lit up.

Yeah.

Anyways.

Um,

okay.

So

Disco Elysium's five-year anniversary passed.

Yes.

And on that day,

everybody

got up and had something to say.

So.

Who do we got?

On the same fucking day,

three separate studios all announced their own Disco Elysium

spiritual successors.

We are the successor to Disco.

Of four of

former Zaoom employees.

So I saw some people say four.

I saw some people say five.

I can confirm the three.

That's when looking at it after the fact, because people were saying four and five.

And I was like,

okay, I can only see I can only see the three new studios that are popping up that have made their announcements.

I see five here.

Okay, so I'll talk about the ones that I've gotten.

First

was

Long Dew,

which was

it's a studio.

None of the studios have Kervitz or Rostov.

But

there's a number of ex-Adisco Elysium Zaoum devs working at Longdew, and they've announced

they're making a new narrative-led RPG.

They didn't show anything of it, they didn't show any, give any names or so, but and they and they haven't gotten into the full

list as well.

But they've basically said that they're looking to not replicate, but to innovate in Trailblaze.

And the studio has former Bungie and Rockstar people on the team as well.

Well, that's eclectic.

So, this is Long Do Studio.

Not too long after, immediately, as if hitting the button in response to the fucking race,

Dark Math Games came out and announced Triple X Night Shift.

And they are a studio of 20 people, half from Zaum.

Again, no Kurvetz or

Rostov.

And

they showed a trailer

which basically showed off

kind of like the intro wake-the waking scene in Disco where you're waking up.

It was like a different character with a different set of internal stat voices.

Yeah, there's footage and

screenshots for this.

Seems like there's a whole like, well,

yeah, similar to like the limbic system scene, you know,

but you kind of have these different.

I think it showed off the full branch of like maybe

20 of them or so.

I don't remember, but play a true three-dimensional human being, combine 20 traces across four categories.

And that sounds pretty familiar.

And the story

is: yes, you will be playing a detective on holiday at an Antarctic ski resort in the year 2086.

Triple X night shift from Dark Math Games.

And then,

third,

came Summer Eternal,

a studio

that they didn't show off any projects.

They just came out, they showed the list of people who were there, including two of the original writers, Argo Tuluk and Olga

Moskvina,

and some other writers as well from Disco Elysium.

And

they did not put out footage, but they put out a manifesto.

This fucking thing, Summer Eternal, if I may.

On this day, the 11th of October 2024, we announce Summer Eternal.

We recognize we are writing the opening words of our story at at a time of apocalyptic material conditions for game creators across the world.

Our art has been dressed down into an industry, and this industry has been pilfered by corrupt executives, by the vulgar profiteering of corporate bodies moving like leviathans in the dark, burning human fuel in their insatiable lust for money.

It is not pencil pushers and moneylenders who make games.

It is the relentless passion of the workers that create an art form capable of saying something true.

As creators and game makers, we have too long been led away from the truth, away from the right to define ourselves as artists, in service of the definitive art form of the future, one that has made us dream since we were children.

Instead, the disposability culture operating at ruthless core of this industry wants us to think ourselves as cogs in the machine, rudimentary craftsmen, disposable career workers, inert producers of made-to-order, marketing-driven content, empty calories, leaving the soul hungry.

The profiteer knows that by keeping your dignity low, he will keep you crawling on the treadmill of passion until he lays you off for the sake of the red number in his book.

We make games because we have to.

It is our calling, because we have no choice but to see the transformative potential of this youngest medium of human interaction.

You can't turn away once you've seen the light, or it will always feel like everyone else in the world is doing something without you.

They're in the light you try to abandon, but can't because oh the horror, it comes from inside you.

All art is communication, dialogue across time, space and thought.

In its rawest, it is one mind's ability to provoke emotion in another.

Large language models, simulacra, cold comfort, real doll, pocket pussy, cyberspace freezer of abandonment I am chat, which are today passed off for artificial intelligence, will never ever be able to offer a dialogue with the vision of another human being.

Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art in its core is a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across words, worlds, and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality.

There is no one to connect to in a large language model.

The phone line is open, but there is no one on the other side.

The peddlers who aim to get rich quick from this scheme will always play the fool to any ethical or artistic argument.

This is why we must push back against big tech's encroachment on the territory of our art, against increasing corporatization and alienation of game creators from their work, against the robbery of rights from workers, performers, artists, and all contributors of this complicated and multifaceted medium.

Our mission is to unite world-class artists and creatives in a truly independent game studio, which will always prioritize artistic integrity over personal comfort, profit margin, short-term interests, or big tech profit bubbles.

There we will be able to embark on that treacherous road of building a cultural mega-project, a role-playing game, with complexity and ambition worthy to rival our wretched and wonderful world.

In this we are committed to pursue the highest caliber of literary quality.

Here we stand, bound by our love for games and devotion to our craft, ready to bleed and weep and ride the cavalry into machine gun fire once more.

For this we will need all the support and help from you, our readers, colleagues, and future visionaries.

Come walk the desert with us.

We will not take any of your support for granted.

We have seen the suffering wrought by the hunger for power, the terror and greed and envy, the complicity of the averted eye.

We've also seen the triumph of the human spirit, of solidarity and of striving, of making something never before seen in its miracle unfolding to the world.

We have seen poverty and we have seen plenty.

We will make mistakes, we will win and we will fail, but we will never forget what we are doing this for.

Yours in every summer in every season, Summer Eternal.

Yeah, that game's not coming now.

It's not going to fucking come out.

Well, I'll say this.

Of all the announced projects, one certainly sounds like the voice of Disco more than the others.

There's one that did not get announced on the 11th.

There's one that got announced last two years ago.

And it was Red Info LTD, the company that Kurvitz and Rostov did go and make

and have since been radio silent.

They're working under Netis.

Nettie's.

Okay.

So.

And then the fifth is Zaoum's continued shambling course.

Okay, we're counting Zaum.

Yes.

Okay, there you go.

That makes sense.

Fair enough.

So

these three were announced simultaneously.

And then there's a lot of things.

And then there's a fourth that was a little bit better.

And then there's the obvious arrangement.

Yes.

So here there are words and there are people writing them.

Yeah.

I don't know that that means there are visuals or anything else that it takes to make a game, but at the very least, there is a burning spirit and desire to make that happen.

Hey, let's be blunt.

Dark Math has put a trailer out for a game that has had people work on it.

They have put out a trailer that is on

all of these that you can watch right now.

But I will say this.

I will say this.

That

there is definitely a.

There's a moment in reading this where you're like, okay,

you can...

There's a part of your brain that goes pompous,

self-serving, verbose, a little bit fart-smelly.

Perhaps, but I believe that

they believe what they're writing.

Oh, and I believe

that

the thing that I love about disco is how much disco means it.

And that is something

absolutely worth looking at and holding on to.

Because it's, I don't know that any of these games,

I don't know that they, like, they're going to have the text on the side.

They're going to have cool voices.

They're going to have narration and awesome things going on.

And there'll probably be some pretty fun RPGs.

But I don't know that they're all going to have something to say.

Do you know what I mean?

I think the most important thing that any of them could say is that one of the largest takeaways of disco

Elysium as its core theme would be that communism is for losers.

And to move from that

to five different groups going, We're the real people who really know what disco really means.

Man, the most.

We're the successor.

We're going to do it the right way this time

without any of those fat cats wearing us down.

We're going to do the real true version.

We get it.

We know the difference this time.

We're going to make it.

It's Tom Road itself.

The most disco ending and the most disco disillusion into

spiritual successors.

Yes.

And like three of these will fail.

Maybe.

And two of them will release in a way that the developers are going to go,

you know, we tried, we tried, we tried, but, you know,

the economics of capitalism made sure we couldn't really bring out our true vision.

Triple X night shift is probably coming out.

It's probably going to be the best one just because they've made some of it.

It's happening and it's there and they proved that it's happening.

Like if these were Kickstarters, that one showed you that there's a game happening.

Yeah.

This is a wild fucking just, I mean, I was, so here's what's up.

Like, personally,

I definitely cemented in my, I'm like, I, uh, a disco Elysium being a one-off moment in history that was just like, it couldn't possibly continue.

You know, too much bled, too much blood was on that, on that, that keyboard.

Um,

and they had to, they had to fail completely, like, and bankrupt themselves, making a completely different type of game to get the chutzpah to fucking make disco.

And I was ready to accept a timeline where that's all that ever was.

It was a fucking blip that shouldn't have existed that came out of nowhere and was unbelievable.

Like, legit.

Oh, yeah.

When I finished it, I had this feeling of like, oh, there's never going to be anything like this ever again.

No.

And I mean, also, like, I put extra emphasis as well because being an adult, being somewhat more jaded and cynical to some degree now, because I've played games for my whole life and stuff,

like the impact, something being impactful now means so much more.

And, like, you know, there were, there's a lot of games that we can look at in our childhoods and go, yeah, that was life-changing.

But, like, to make something that you can consider life-changing like now is

almost impossible.

You know?

Um,

so I'm like,

that was a weird thing that shouldn't have happened.

And now, to have any of this occur, like

I'm very curious to see who carries some of this flame forward and what it looks like.

Because yeah, disco was not made by just one person or two people.

There was a whole team, you know?

It'll be very interesting to see what pieces of disco branch out into each particular project being stronger or weaker or more focused on or less focused focused on.

Because I'm like, I'm like, okay, so

here is a fucking manifesto that like

I that I can hear the narrator going and having

to sound like.

And then here's another where like the portraits are the lines instead of like the you know like an actual like painterly face of some kind.

And it's giving an ethereal kind of tone as you're the woman waking up in a big bed and it's kind of hazy and ASMR and druggy.

So it's got that kind of psychedelic quality to it.

But, you know, that's one piece of disco, the psychedelic quality, right?

The marching fire and the, and the, and the riding of horses into machine guns is another one, you know.

And will they all just become like

these transformations, these Voltron, you know, parts together where

like

one of these is going to be just the, the, the comedy, the goofiness, the, the, the, the fucking, the, the cop adventure.

I don't know, whatever, whatever the absurdities are, you know?

Um,

it's, it's interesting because just like, yeah, of all these companies, like

they're,

they're,

none of these three have those two names at them, but they're clearly announcing at the exact same time because there's an arms race to take the mantle of Disco Elysium's success.

And in the background, Rostov and Kurvitz and their boys are working on

something.

Something.

Something.

Now,

are they like drinking and smoking the day away and there's literally nothing to show for it?

Fucking maybe.

Fucking maybe.

Who knows?

Did Eternal Summer write that the night, the same night they saw the two get announced and just fucking took a shot,

put the keyboard down and went, oh,

you know, like, I think so.

I think they just, they posted that on a red background and slapped that shit online and said, we exist, you know.

But

it's about to get really interesting for

Disco Elysium fans, I guess.

We'll see what happens.

And then we'll see what Zatlum themselves actually put out and what that looks like.

Which might be fucking nothing.

The way this letter is written, excuse me, this manifesto is penned makes it sound like what you can expect from Zao might be heavily AI

dependent.

Oh, that'd be bad.

But like who else but light-bending money

would embrace.

Why do you guys keep talking to me about writers?

Just have the chat GPT write it.

I would not imagine those words were included here for no reason.

You know?

That would also be the most disco thing ever.

It really would.

Like,

Joyce forever.

Disco baby.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This story just keeps...

It keeps like

the vibe,

it's just that it's a, it's a vibe nuke is what it is.

Disco Elysium was a vibe nuke on video games, and then the fallout continues.

And And then it was killed and then its fucking head split like the Hydra.

It's too late.

You can't kill it.

It's already out there.

We've already seen it.

We've heard it.

We've played it.

And most importantly,

it was voice acted.

If the best one...

Smaller scale projects, which makes me wonder.

If the best one of these games is not voice acted.

Yeah, that's what's going to happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what's going to happen, bro.

You know that's going to happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Can they all

just hire the same narrator?

Lenval Brown was shown on part of the,

I think he's part of the Summer Eternal team.

I think the screenshot showed him on that team.

So he is.

He is.

He's been pulled together.

So Eternal Summer got him in the divorce then?

I think so.

Ooh, that's a get.

Let me double-check it.

Get.

But I think they got him.

You know?

Yeah.

You know.

I mean, hey, man.

Baldur's Gate narrator is

getting her flowers.

Oh, she's great.

She's great.

She's got a tone to her, too, that is appreciable.

Anyway.

Amelia Tyler, I want to say.

Yeah,

so

I think they're the only ones that showed off

the staff, but

the voice acting is going to be the question.

Oh, well, and then, of course,

Night Shift also showed off the voice acting, too.

The voice acting is going to be a deal-breaker, not for you or I, but for you and I's channels.

Correct.

But I also put the original disco on a shelf because of that reason.

For this exact purpose.

Yeah.

But here I am playing Phoenix Wright.

And you know what?

It's going pretty good.

Phoenix Wright has like

in its totality like one-eighth of disco's voice of dialogue.

I looked up the numbers, by the way.

You did?

Yes.

So,

if you want your comparison points.

All right, let's do it.

Sacred and Terrible Air, the book that I read, has 87,000 words.

Phoenix Wright has two, one.

Ace Attorney has 220,000 words.

Yeah, that's about right.

So

order of magnitude indifference.

But I know what I'm messing with.

And if you want to go disco Elysium word count,

you get one million words.

Not all viewable on every path, but

a lot of

you cut out 20%, maybe 30, because you can still exhaust and then pick one, right?

Cut down a third, maybe.

Sure.

Still.

Yes, orders of magnitude.

Fucking crazy.

That's a lot of words.

That's a lot of words.

That's a lot of words.

Yeah, so there we go.

Alright.

That's pretty much what I thought was.

Yeah, it was kind of slow this week, huh?

There's the only other bit was just

it's it's it's what we know, but Steam put up a warning message now to let customers know you're buying a license, not actually buying the game.

And we all knew this, you know.

Yeah, that was known.

But now, this is just a like legally, we're covering our asses to say that no, when you buy a digital copy of a game, you're not buying the game.

And then

GOG swoops in and is like, hey man, you totally own it.

It

this is these trends are

always going to go against the consumer.

It's just the way, you know, like this is going to get worse and worse over time.

And the fact that.

Oh, listen, if I buy it with my money, but I don't own it, that means if I pirate it with my no money, that means I'm not stealing it.

Hmm.

You can't steal things that are impossible to own.

Hmm.

If you're...

God, what was the fucking...

When you make purchases on Stadia and shit, you can get your metadata transferred to you.

Oh, wonderful.

Thank you.

Cool.

That's actually what I'm glad you exported and saved that.

Nice.

Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right, we got one coming in.

Owning things is like a metaphor.

It's like an allegory.

In that it's not real and you don't.

Not even the means of production.

I still think back to a long time ago where I wanted to make a communism joke and I wanted to yell out, seize the means of production.

But instead, I fucked up and yelled out, destroy the means of production.

And then I thought about it and I'm like, yeah, fuck it.

Actually, yes.

Yes.

No,

that is how that goes.

Destroy them in the process of seizing them.

You're correct, actually.

You were more right than you knew.

Oh, fuck.

Yep.

You're not going to 5G me, motherfucker.

Yeah, you are.

Give me my 5Gs, please.

We'll build our own nuclear energy.

Yeah, how hard could it be?

Get a couple boys around,

you know, and enrich some uranium.

This rock's hot, right?

So I just need to get it to boil water.

Okay, fine, whatever.

Oh, man.

Yeah, Reggie's like, I thought it was a party.

I just, it was a good time.

Put the lampshade on the head, you know?

Woo.

Hey.

Wee.

Oh, my God, dude.

And I just, Krasmazov gets so much more in Sacred and Terrible Air.

Oh, yeah.

Like,

the depths of failure, dude.

It's wild.

The moments they build on for, it's incredible.

It's, it's so fucking good.

Get owned, Kraz.

Like,

the echo of the gunshot.

of the bullet that you put in your own mouth being used in a moment of like time-crossing, beat-dropping rhythm so that you can use that sound and its echoes to drop the ultimate fucking EDM beat.

Like,

I'm like, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

I went back in time to use the sound effect of him blowing his brains out.

Hit the dance floor.

No, I don't want to.

Alright.

Make sure to read a really good email.

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Oh, no.

Hold on.

Oh, man.

All right.

Dear Willie and Pat, learn here, no witty nicknames for now.

I was watching Sakurai's recent video about the importance of developing games that respect people's time.

And

while it was very insightful, one thing I appreciate is that he's talking, while he's talking, he immediately immediately apologizes to fans for wasting so much of their time on Smash.

It was silly, but I find it kind of sweet how

considerate he was being with people's time.

What little things do you think you appreciate like that from devs, and what are games that you've played that have respected and disrespected your time, respectively?

One of the things that really stands out to me is Miyazaki doesn't play his own games.

That's hilarious.

That's crazy.

Like, like Mr.

From Soft Elden Ring, Dark Souls just like, doesn't

play them.

No, that shit's too hard, I believe.

And that was the quote.

And, like, that's why so much shit in there is so fucking weird and non-intuitive.

It's because it's being made by somebody who's never going to encounter it.

Um,

I feel like I just moments stand out where I'm like, I don't mind if you disrespect my time respectfully.

Um,

like,

I'm one, I'm one of those that liked sailing, so I enjoy riding my boat, and

I feel like in

Black Flag, that was the full embodiment of what I started to feel playing Wind Waker.

What I started to feel playing Wind Waker, Black Flag fully brought that out, you know?

But,

like, Triforce pieces obviously can go fuck themselves forever, because it doesn't matter what method you're using to get to that thing.

That's that's garbage.

Um, I, I, you know, I've talked about Metroid Prime 2's disrespecting of your time by going back to get those final little puzzle bits towards the end.

But even things where I'm like, I'm not a fan of crafting, for example, right?

I don't generally enjoy it that much.

And in a lot of cases, tweaking things and stuff, like, depends, but in many games, I don't really enjoy it.

It's really silly, but like...

Something that I still remember is in Last of Us 1, like, when you're modifying your weapons and doing shit and tweaking tweaking it and just having the fact that it was all laid out on the table.

Yeah.

It was nice.

Just that little detail made me enjoy something that I otherwise would not enjoy doing because of the feeling of like survival whittling, you know, and that you're doing and such.

Like I actually can find myself enjoying mundane things if you make it feel like it's part of the experience.

You know,

I play a lot of open world games and I've like, I've had my spiels where I complain about Rockstar

about how like, oh, the fucking takes 10 years to skin a fucking deer because you've got to have this lavish deer skinning animation and load it up on your horse and all that.

But like, we've entered into this world in which like...

Is there an animation for picking something up off the fucking ground or not?

Because

if there is, if you're dead still and you hit the button and your character will kind of lean down and pick something up, but otherwise it'll just show and shoot in your inventory,

fine.

But if every time you fucking like, hey, I'm going to pick up an item and your character's like, oh,

let me go pick up that item.

I'm going to freak out.

I fucking hate it.

It means nothing to anyone.

Stop it.

Stop it.

Stop it.

Stop it.

If the thing you're picking up is also ore that dropped on the ground from a picking animation that was already slow because part of the process is making you watch that picking.

Then, yes, let it just drop into your fucking pockets.

Like, Monster Hunter, as people are pointing out, is like the absolute ultimate.

Like, I complain about Red Dead and shit like that, but Monster Hunter, there's the.

Oh, my fucking God, dude.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Every single goddamn animation was this long, laborious thing that could fail.

Fuck off, my pickaxe broke.

Go to hell.

Shout outs to

people handing you an invisible object off camera and then your character receiving it.

I'm a huge fan of that.

Putting it in the back.

I love that.

Oh, here's that dog you wanted.

Oh, oh, thank you.

I'm also, this is obviously developers wasting my time.

Somebody in the chat mentioned Pokemon, but there's a ton of games doing this.

Your text needs to be faster.

Oh,

I need to be able to kick up the speed of the text to my reading speed because holy shit.

Do you remember Final Fantasy tactics and like the phrase little money in the opening text crawl that it goes L I

T T

L

E

space and then it types it's weird.

I hate it

Show the text instantly or current it to the voice acting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the same speed.

Or tap, tap, tap.

Um,

okay.

Uh we got one in here from

uh

Jerbear says, Hello, 3D horse boys.

Longtime listener, Jojo fan also pondered how they were gonna get horses to work in part seven.

I believe a proof of concept has shown itself.

Elusive Samurai has a lot of horse combat scenes, and though there's some wizardry, and through some kind of wizardry, they're looking good and not jarring at all.

Check it out to see, because this tech could be used for steel ball run.

Also, an aside.

Okay, you're my.

I'm trying to look for it right now.

My retired non-video gameplay mother's favorite podcast.

Oh, thank you.

She affectionately refers to you two as well.

That horse looked fine.

That's very nice of her.

Thank you.

That's sweet.

Okay, Elusive Samurai.

Okay, they're 3D models.

That's what's happening.

But they're being shaded really appropriately.

Let me see.

And the horse.

Yeah, they're 3D models, and they have a really good run cycle that is well put together.

And like,

I'm seeing different shots of the horse in Elusive Samurai, and the horse has the same run cycle in all the shots.

Okay.

But the run cycle is really good, and they're just shading it really, really flat.

It's flat.

Yeah, okay.

I see a really flat shaded horse right now in screenshots.

Is there moving?

Here, I'll just, I'll just, I'll get you a a fucking shot here.

I found the video.

Here you go.

Share, start at 144.

Boop.

Okay.

Here you go.

So you'll see what I'm talking about?

Wait, did I?

Yeah, yeah.

You'll see what I'm talking about?

I have to open it in an out-loud way for

stream.

But like, the horse has, like, one.

Run animation

and the run animation is solid.

And the the horse is just shaded so flat that it's not clear it's a 3D model.

Oh, god damn, but it's 3D model.

This is only gonna.

Hold on a second, this is only gonna open in a way that's loud.

Oh no!

Uh,

all right,

let me figure this out.

Give me a second.

Sorry, yeah, they're basically painting over the 3Dness.

We always knew it was gonna be 3D horsies.

Um,

the question is,

Woolly, do the horses in Steelball run, do they do anything other than run?

Yeah, they do.

They do stuff.

They run in really cool, crazy, non-standard ways sometimes.

They do things.

They do.

They run,

but boy, they're...

You know?

They fucking go.

And like, there's moments of musculature detail and emphasis that are like...

Yeah.

You know what they can do?

They can just, whenever that happens, they can just cut to like a landscape shot

and then cut back to the characters.

And

gyro's like, holy shit, your horse did that.

It was so crazy.

Read the manga.

True believers.

Yeah.

I mean, they literally replace the characters' like feet, like, are just, you know, during fights at times.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

All right.

Elusive samurai.

No, you know what they they need?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I did it.

Just not animate the horses at all.

Just have them be stone still,

standing straight up, like doing the horse equivalent of an A-pose.

And just have them slide around.

Flat panels with the 3D characters on top of them.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Alright.

we got one here from Cole who says, Hey, Patrick and Woolsworth, what's a feature or mechanic that uh was unique to a game that you're disappointed you haven't seen it ripped off or reiterated on more?

Uh for example, Mount and Blade has the best medieval uh melee combat system of the time, of all time, but to my knowledge it has only been copied uh by Fat Shark's fantastic but short-lived War of the Roses.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Um,

I think a lot of quality of life stuff that we've seen popping up

is mainly my concern.

Quality of life over everything.

We were just talking about text in games.

I think of how 999 lets you skip past all the text that you've already read to get to the new stuff on subsequent playthroughs.

Oh, that's insanely common.

That's like one of the most common visual novel features that ever existed.

At the time that I played it, that was the first time I had ever seen it.

Oh, no,

that's like standard.

Okay.

Well, awesome.

Great.

Good to know.

Back then, that was the first time for me.

And I love the idea of like, for example, P3 with the ability to go back earlier in the day on your saves, stuff like that as well.

It's just really cool.

Oh, yeah, that's nice.

Like, save rotation being baked into the moment that you actually pick.

You know, I'm seeing a lot of people in chat save the nemesis system.

It's fucking criminal we never got the nemesis system in anything other than those goddamn

Lord of the Rings games.

Because it's patented and now it can't go anywhere.

But like, they didn't even use it for Batman.

Like, they could have made a Batman game with a Nemesis system.

That would have worked.

I'm going to dominate the zapping system.

The zapping scenario system where the game changes depending on who you beat the game with first.

I think that's cool.

Yep.

Yeah, other cool stuff that's probably used in other things I have, I don't know.

So, that

we got one coming in that says, hey, on your phone charger not working properly, there's lint or dust in the charging port, get a safety pin and scrape it out, and your charger will work perfectly again.

Thank you.

I've literally never had a problem with my phone charger in my entire life.

I had those, but that's when I was talking about the wiggling of the.

Yeah, the only time I've ever had a problem with the phone charger, I held up the phone charger, and the charger itself had been completely destroyed by an animal or like dramatic accident.

And it's like, well, these pins are like bordering on being broken off.

There's no way I can use this.

I would suggest maybe not using a metal thing, maybe like a toothpick or something that wouldn't necessarily electrocute you potentially by sticking it in an outlet or a socket or port.

What

do you do?

Do you rotate?

Do you like replace your phones often enough?

I replace my phone every like three or four years.

Okay.

I'm sometimes less frequent than that, even.

All right.

And let's take one last one here.

Rotten butter writes, dear something clever.

I'm clever.

Yay.

Thank you for saying we're clever.

Wanted to share with you something I learned about the U.S.

government today that I can only describe as some anime bullshit.

Uh-huh.

So the governor of states have the power to veto bills.

And in

Wisconsin, they also have the power to veto parts of a bill, meaning that they can let most of a bill pass, but delete parts they don't agree with.

Oh, that's crazy, actually.

Clearly, when they made this power, they didn't think about how far this could be pushed until in 1990 when they made a Vanna White law that prevents governors from taking out words and sentences to make Frankenstein bills that are completely different from their original intent.

All you have to do is black out the word not.

Exactly.

But this hasn't stopped the current governor from saying that numbers and punctuation are still fair game.

Oh my God, dude.

Come on.

So, taking a bill that would increase school budgets every year from 2024 to 2025 and making it into one that would increase budgets every year until 2450.

No question, just thought you get a kick out of the Wisconsin governor using a veto power like

that's a bunch of bullshit.

That is funny.

It's mainly

mainly funny because we don't live

in Wisconsin.

That's insane to just like, okay, let's use these letters and fucking just construct another bill by deleting.

And like the logic of the words has to remain true.

The rules say I can do it.

So every bill just puts every letter at the beginning and at the end, and then whoever gets in can just fucking.

Yeah, that's incredible.

That's wild.

Talk about fucking with the founding fathers' interpretations of things, man.

Wisconsin, you crazy.

All right.

Why is it called a Vanna White Law?

Because of the,

I'm assuming, Wheel of Fortune letters appearing.

Oh, Oh, oh, okay, yeah, alright, yeah.

You know?

People who annoy you.

South Park.

I'm going to.

I'm going to decline to solve.

Oh, you.

For all the money?

I'm going to decline.

For all the money.

Are you sure you don't want to solve?

You know what?

I'm pretty.

I'm certain.

Pat Sajak says there's a lot of money on the line.

I mean, you can't.

It's yours to to solve if you want it.

I don't know.

I don't.

I don't.

That might be like the.

Oh, that might be the funniest.

No, the second funniest South Park joke.

I think

the best has got to be Tolkien.

Oh, the base.

Yeah.

And changing Tolkien's name to Tolkien and then rewriting the subs on 20 years of episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To gaslight people.

That is the that is the most powerful bit.

All right.

Let me know when you're good to sync.

Go ahead.

And

five, four,

three,

two,

one,

six.