We Play, You Play: Mother 3

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All right, Nintendo of America.

We have some great games lined up for 2006.

Chief among them, this one, there's a lot of hype for in Japan.

I think the American audience is really going to respond to it.

Mother 3.

Yeah, I think it's time.

The American audience is ready for a game with adult themes and not just a, you know, silly characters like jumping around doing crazy stuff kind of game.

They're ready for grounded characters in a human story.

And I just want to say, like, I'm really happy that you guys put put me in charge of translation.

For those of you who don't know me or recognize me from the Department of Translation, my name is Duget.

Yeah, hi, Doug.

Hi, Duggett.

Hi, Dougette.

You introduce yourself every meeting.

So you don't need to say hi to yourself.

Any what?

You don't need to say hi to yourself.

Oh, okay.

Goodbye, Dougette.

No, you don't need to do that either.

Oh, okay.

Sorry, please continue.

What?

I just want to say thank you so much for putting me in charge of the translation.

There has been an issue.

So I deleted everything.

The North American release of Mother 3 has been completely erased.

I was drinking an Orange Julius, and perhaps I was slightly too close to my computer, and there was an accident, and I deleted it.

But I'm sure that we could put it back together because I can't have had the only copy of English translation of Mother 3.

Yeah, I mean, there have to be, you know,

recovery.

Like, where do we keep those?

Where do we keep those files?

In the archives downstairs?

Okay, well, on accident, I was down in the archives downstairs the other day, and I spilled an orange Julius on some of the archives.

But I'm sure we have like another place where we might have backup files.

We do,

in very extreme circumstances, like this, for such a high-profile release,

we would have them not just in the archives, but we'd have one.

In the Colorado server?

In the Colorado server, yeah.

So last week I went to Colorado to see my folks, and I did on accident.

I was inside of the mountain facility

called Deep Prime.

Uh, and I had the

security code because uh, you know, I last time I was there, I left one of my shoes, so I was just gonna pick up my shoe, but I tripped because it was right on the other side of the door.

I thought I was farther into the facility.

I did spill orange Julius inside of the mountain facility in Colorado.

There's so much to be mad at.

I do

want to express express deep concern for the amount of orange Julius you're consuming on what seems to be a regular basis.

I'm just punching in the zip code for Redmond, Washington here, which is obviously where Nintendo of America is located.

We all know that.

You're not seeing an Orange Julius.

In the Pacific Northwest.

So where are you getting these?

So wherever you're getting one from, it's far away.

And I'm going to guess hot.

What?

You mean it's hot where I get them?

No, it's the temperature by the time you're drinking.

I get Orange Julius from Louisiana, where there's a nice Orange Julius, and I do bring it back on ice.

Thank you very much.

If you're thinking you might want to call Nintendo of Japan to see if you could get a new version of the source code, I wouldn't do that either.

Why is that?

Because they just built an Orange Julius in Tokyo, and I was there last week for the grand opening.

And then after I got my Orange Julius, I went to say hi to

Mimoto, and I tripped on his shoes, and I fell down the stairs.

I did dump Orange Julius inside of Ninton of Japan.

We have to hope at least the Japanese version is untouched.

The good news is, yes, for the Game Boy Advanced version.

The bad news is, I did destroy the N64 DD version.

So, this was some time ago?

Yep.

That's why it wasn't released.

Can I just say,

I think it's amazing that you have a PhD in Japanese literature that justifies your employment here as the chief translator for Nintendo of America overseas.

Tale of Genshi is the first novel ever written, and it was a Japanese novel.

I think that that was a fundamentally challenging moment for Japanese

and Western literature.

What do you do with that?

Or Julius?

My first copy of Dale of Kenji!

We rhythmically battle wildlife chimeras and visit Club Tiddy Boo as we play UPLA Nintendo's never localized JRPG classic Mother 3 this week on Get Play.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where this week, we are talking about our We Play, you play game of the month

game of the year

game of the decade game of the century wow mother three

we're back

we're back

so we had a yeah we were i mean we had a couple new we had new episodes the previous two weeks they were previously recorded we're now back caught up basically to the present.

We're recording this on May 29th.

And we've all been playing Mother 3.

And it's a game that Heather loves.

It's a game that Matt and I and Ranch have now played for the first time.

And we're going to dig in on that.

And this is partly to pay off of our Switch 2 release date bet, which we're right before.

We're coming right at the fuck up on the Switch 2 release.

Hot on the heels.

Oh, man.

As of release of this episode, the Switch 2 is coming out this week.

That's wild.

Isn't that weird?

It's so weird.

It's weird.

It's very weird.

It doesn't feel like...

It is.

It doesn't feel like it is for some reason.

Also, when you look at the games like on the splash page,

it's like four games.

Yeah, it's basically not coming out yet.

Like the games that are coming out are

Mario Kart World.

Mario Kart at launch is like the big one.

And then patches for like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild and some other ones.

So like games that are already on the thing.

Yeah.

But I'm...

I can't wait to play that Mario Kart.

The other games that are coming out that I'm a little bit more excited about are coming out later.

Here's the thing.

I just want to have a new thing.

Well, that's a big like a new console comes out.

I was like, I got a new thing.

No, don't get me fucking started.

I love having a new thing.

I'm going to have a bunch of new things.

I ordered a bunch.

I went crazy on accessories.

I got.

So when the,

this is what, this is way back in the day before even Mother 3 comes out when the Nintendo GameCube was coming out, you know, it was still, there was still a little bit of a, of lead time with the Japanese release versus the U.S.

release.

And I was like, ah, fuck.

Do I spend extra money to import a Japanese GameCube?

But, you know, they weren't region-free free at the time would have been a whole pain in the ass so i was like would have been too popular yeah so so i was like i'll just order a controller just to be holding a gamecube controller so i just there was whatever the month however it was like three month period however long it was i just had a gamecube controller and i was like okay well i'll have an extra controller that i can plug in when i actually get this thing the north american release but i think it was pretty nice to hold that controller it's pretty here's no matter what it is functional or not it's nice to have a new thing new thing how about that it's good yeah kind of the opposite of the message of the game that we were playing.

But.

Yeah.

The message I got was that you're supposed to buy more stuff.

Buy more stuff.

Sit in front of this damn

happy box.

Happy box.

Man, by the way, I love the happy box.

I was like, I got to get one of those fucking things.

Yeah, oh, wait, this is going to solve my fucking problem.

That's why they can't release this game here.

So they're like, Americans are going to have the opposite reaction to the happy box.

They're going to think it's good and want one.

Like every, every dip shit, like Silicon Valley guy who reads like a, like a sci-fi story about some foreboding possible invention is like, I got to make that.

I got to make this happy box.

No, don't do it.

But honestly, though, if there was something called the happy box available at Best Buy and it showed anything, I would get it.

Yeah, sure.

Why wouldn't you?

Yeah, I guess why wouldn't you get it?

That is what a Switch 2 is.

It's a happy box.

It's going to, for a while.

Well, yes.

And the box itself is going to be a happy box.

I think the packaging is confusing.

Why?

Because it says Nintendo Switch on it.

No, because it looks exactly like the regular Switch, except it has a big two on it.

And I think that's not differentiated enough for the average mother or father.

who's going into a store to buy it for their kids.

No, this is going to be an unmitigated disaster for Christmases for the next couple of years at least.

While they're still making and releasing regular Switches.

Yeah,

I think it should say switch small and two giant.

And that should be the front of the box.

Yes, because nobody's going to understand that.

I mean, you can play Switch 1 games on it, but nobody's going to understand too, that you can't play Switch 2 games on the regular Switch one, but in some cases you can.

Yeah.

Which is also confusing.

I think they should have called it the Super Switch.

Yeah, I would have solved a lot of problems.

I was hoping for the Super Switch, but I'm kind of amazed that they actually just kept the Switch branding instead of

coming up with some new thing, which Nintendo always does.

I'm looking at this box now, and yes, I could see this creating confusion

at retail.

But also, I wonder what percentage of purchases are someone like walking into Target and being like, oh,

the new Switch, I'm going to get one of those versus like ordering it online, especially in the early going.

I don't know.

But yeah, this does seem a little bit

too similar to what's already out there.

Too similar.

Yeah.

They could have made it blue.

Oh, blue's an interesting choice.

It doesn't have to be red.

It's the warmest color.

Oh, no.

Is blue.

I've seen parts of that movie.

Is blue more new than red?

Huh.

What?

Like, because you got red, and then you got blue.

Like, the switch one is red.

That's the colorway.

The switch two is blue.

Does blue feel better than red?

Better.

Yeah.

So you're...

Or newer.

This is some Weiger shit, and I just don't think we can really abide by it.

We can't get into it.

So you think that if you made it a blue box, that people would be like, well, this is older than the red one.

That's the way your brain matters.

I'm just wondering.

Do you have color ranking in your head?

And does that ranking also apply to new versus old?

Well, okay, so some of this comes from just like how.

We already kind of ascribe value to colors, right?

Like blue is first place, the blue ribbon.

Right.

Green is eco.

Yeah, sure.

Yellow is piss.

Yellow is shit.

Yeah, brown is shit.

Yeah.

Sure.

I was going to say yellow is old.

Yeah, yellow is old.

Yellow is old.

You're talking about, yeah, like something yellowed.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I could see,

I think they were right to stick with red, but you're right, it is very similar.

What if it was shiny red?

I mean, now you're talking.

Like, it could have been like a glossy finish on the box.

Shiny feels newer than

Matt.

Yeah.

Well, hey, hey, watch yourself.

That's just a little fun for everybody.

I like this.

Everybody better like that.

But red is like the Nintendo color, right?

Like, I mean, like, I mean, is it though?

No, but I mean, like.

It's one of the Nintendo colors.

I think of Nintendo as red.

Oh, boy.

I don't think I've.

Wow.

I mean, I guess the, I guess the, the, the, the, if we're going back to the Famicom slash NES, we're going back to that era.

We're taught, like, yeah, the dominant colors were red, white, and black.

Yeah.

Um, but

I don't know.

I feel like, like, the the

super Famicom Super NES were completely different colorways

completely different colorways purple the DS is silver the 3ds is white and 64 was like black and gray like the the multicolored buttons you know go with me with this yeah okay PlayStation is blue

sure

PlayStation is blue yeah PlayStation is blue yeah PlayStation is blue Xbox is green that's pretty straightforward that one I get that one I don't need anything

and Nintendo is red

You heard it here first on the Premiere Video Game Podcast.

PlayStation is blue.

Yeah.

Xbox is green.

Nintendo is red.

Sega is dead.

Yeah.

And by the way.

Oh, we're back, baby.

We're back, but

we have some.

Did the Steam Deck have a colorway?

I think it's kind of black.

Yeah, I think it.

Yeah, I think it's black.

That's not so great.

Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, PC, you could generally say is kind of like RGB.

That's kind of aesthetic.

It used to be beige was the PC aesthetic.

The Steam logo is a sort of gradient blue where it starts light blue at the bottom to a darker blue, almost black at the top.

I think of Steam, because I'm also thinking of just the digital storefront.

I think of it as so black and white.

I feel like it's just sort of like that, that's that's the, that's all it is.

Play date is yellow.

Yes.

Which everybody, and it's in the, it's in the conversation.

Everyone's talking about it as a

like, like, what other systems exist?

Yeah.

Season two of Play Date came out today.

Yeah.

I got to get it.

Hang out.

Should we do a color tier list on the podcast?

No.

I mean.

Video game colors?

No.

No.

I think it's good.

Here's the case for Nintendo being red, Mario.

Red.

And so, like, if you're like, what, like, like, red is a video game color.

That's pretty high up in the tier list.

Because you got, like, you got Mario, you got M-Bison slash Balrog.

You got Blood, which is in in a lot of video games.

You got Hearts, which are like an essential health bars.

Qbert's orange.

Yeah, orange is down there.

I might have to go back to the back.

Maybe we got down.

Maybe the

orange box might push it up a little bit.

Should we pivot today's topic?

No.

What if we don't do it?

We all played through Mother 3.

We just don't talk about it.

We're talking about colors.

Ranch, you got a favorite color?

Think of pink.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

We talk like what intensity?

Like

how pink we talking?

Like a peachy pink.

Oh, like a peachy pink.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm with you.

Like a salmon.

Yeah.

I love that.

Peachy's got it.

Yeah.

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All right, we got some business to get to, which is something we talk about at the top of every episode, which is video games we've been playing lately.

The question for the room is, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

I had to be the Resident Evil Merchant, and I've had a rough couple of weeks.

Oh boy, I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm aimless without you guys.

I was wandering around.

You were on the other ones.

You were on the banked ones.

Yeah, yeah, but we haven't recorded in two weeks.

I know, but you sort of knew that.

I think you, yeah, we knew the sketch.

You knew the sketch.

I didn't have any goals.

I feel like

you just need something.

You can't do that to me again.

I was aimless.

I was a wanderer.

Well, not all who wander are lost, they say.

Do you know that there is still some food in the burnt refrigerators in Malibu?

Oh, boy, what are you doing?

Patton around up there.

Last person I'd want to see over there, if I'm being honest.

Good God.

Stay away.

They've been through enough.

No, no, nobody's there.

I wasn't in a place where people are rebuilding.

Yeah.

That's sort of the concern, I think.

Anyway, I'm really happy to be back.

And I love asking this question.

Nick,

what are you playing?

Resident Evil Merchant, thank you so much.

for asking.

First up,

real quick on Elden Ring Night Rain, we were recording this on May 29th, as I mentioned.

I have it installed.

I opened up Steam this morning.

I was like, oh, I'll play some Night Rain just to just to try it out for a little bit.

It wouldn't let me play it.

So I don't know if the actual release date is tomorrow or...

Yeah, I think it's the 30th.

It's the 30th.

Okay, because Steam said the 29th.

Yeah.

And then, but anyway.

Did it pre-install 29th?

Because I pre-ordered it on PlayStation also.

So I think it's installing.

It must be installing now.

Anyway, no Night Rain impressions from any of us, but I did play another game that released in May of this year, Drop Duchy.

This is developed by Sleepy Mill Studio.

This is a roguelite tile-based game that combines Tetris block placement, like literally, like you're basically moving Tetris blocks, and then strategic elements, and then also deck building.

So, I'm going to this some bitch, and I was actually pretty hyped for this game because I'd read some pre-release impressions, and I really like the aesthetics, and the aesthetics absolutely hold up as you're playing it.

So, I'm going in hot with this bad boy.

So, basically what it is, is you have a grid.

Pieces are, you know, it comes to you one at a time.

It's basically just like Tetris.

You can, you know, stash a piece away and swap it out later if you want to, you know,

for whatever reason you want to delay putting it on your grid.

And so they're shaped like Tetris blocks, but they also have attributes like they could be, you know, towns, they could be,

you know,

different biomes, like they could be forest or plains,

they could be

military installations,

they could be buildings that provide upgrades.

And you're basically just like one by one placing all of these to make some sort of functional play space, which will get you additional resources for your runs.

And, or some of these are combat encounters, so you're trying to defeat an enemy armada, or in you know, at the end of each stage of each run, a boss.

And

it's one of those things where I'm playing this and I really admire everything they're trying to do.

And maybe it'll all come together in a follow-up, like, you know, maybe like just like

a DLC or a full-fledged sequel or something like this.

But it's kind of like I'm more in admiration of its ambition than I am actually like really clicking with it with playing it.

Part of that is

i i it almost feels like it has one too many elements like i talked about the tetris thing and

it's just kind of strange to be to have such an explicit tetris mechanic that's kind of grafted on to these other existing mechanics like like systems um it just feels a little bit awkward the way that pieces like automatically descend very slowly but in in like a way like there is like a ticking clock in the same way that there is with Tetris.

And maybe if you get deeper into the late game, that accelerates or

whatever.

But like it is a sort of thing, like, this just has a different sort of vibe than what I want from this sort of game where I want to be able to like really think through every single turn and figure out exactly how

I want to

build my...

build my grid here and how I want to set myself up

for combat.

The other thing is like the way combat plays out is a little bit awkward because you are assigning

what the enemy units do as well as your own.

So, like, you'll get like a you know, you might get a few different like building and um uh and like grassland tiles or whatever the fuck, and you're placing those down.

You get one for one of your own military installations, but you also get a tile for like an enemy military installation, which you can try to stash.

But there will enough where you have to play some of them.

And then, when it actually gets, when uh, the grid is filled up, uh, you basically run out of room on the Tetris board.

You go into combat, but the way it's set up is that you prioritize the order of attacks down to

where the enemies attack as well.

And so it's got like a rock, paper, scissors element in terms of which units defeat, which other ones, you know, archers defeat swordsmen, swordsmen defeat

axe men.

I don't remember exactly what it is.

It's not super important, but you get the idea.

But you're kind of saying like, okay, I'm going to have the enemy axe men attack

My

my swordsmen because they're disadvantaged and then I'll use my swordsmen to attack the enemy archers

and It's it's one of those like kind of like abstract kind of just like feel things where it's like

I Don't know.

It just isn't my sense of video game combat.

The idea of like tasking the enemy units with attacking me, if that makes any sense.

I don't know.

It just feels kind of awkward.

It's just sort of thing that makes it

all just feel like,

you know, again, again, really ambitious and really cool in some ways, but in other ways it like isn't quite clicking for me and didn't quite get its hooks in me as much as I'd hoped it would pre-release.

I don't want to pick the moves that my enemy is going to do.

I don't want to lose.

Yeah.

I want to do a good job picking the moves that are going to beat the enemy.

Yeah, it is kind of like...

I feel like I'm doing a poor job of articulating it, but it's kind of like the difference between saying

the difference between like, hey, I'm playing basketball.

I'm going to put my hand up to block my opponent's shot to make it harder.

Like, I'm playing defense versus, like, I'm playing basketball and I'm going to decide where my opponent is going to attempt a shot from because I think they'll have a lower percentage of hitting it from, you know, this part of the court.

It's like, it just feels a little bit different and a little bit less,

you know, satisfying from a gameplay standpoint.

It's kind of like going into a subway and they ask you what your sandwich is, and you ask them, well, what do you think my sandwich is?

Right, yeah, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what?

It's exactly like that.

Anyway, all that said, it did get me

into run-based roguelites again.

And

also, I've been traveling, so I've been fucking playing Bellacho again.

I'm playing some on Apple Arcade Plus on mobile, which I try not to play games on my phone, but it is just so fucking good

for playing on a train, for playing on a plane, or playing in a place where you're just waiting on something.

And then it's also on Game Pass.

So I think it's been on Game Pass for a while.

So I got it reinstalled on my PC on Game Pass.

And I'd previously played it on Steam, but now I get the

dumb lizard brain thing of like, oh, I'm on a different platform.

I get to get all the achievements on this new platform.

So I'm just going through on Game Pass and

beating runs with the different decks and what have you.

It's really such an impeccable design.

I mean, it just might, it might be the best one of these, these sorts of

deck building

run-based games.

And

I don't know.

I mean, looking back on

my best of list for last year, I probably kind of undersold Bellatro a little bit.

It might just have been the best game that came out

last year.

I mean, like, but

it's so fucking fun to play.

I can't get enough of it.

I learned this week that Bellatro's Platinum Trophy on the PlayStation has only been earned by 0.1%

of all players.

What do you have to do to get that plat?

Unknown.

Unknown?

I don't know.

No, I'm saying I don't know.

We can look this up.

I'm sure we can.

Anyway,

that's what I've been playing.

Heather, what have you been playing?

Well, this last week wrapped up the Pokemon card game Pocket season.

I finished this season in ranked mode with Ultra Ball 4, a full two ranks above last season's win.

I think if I had known when the season was ending, I would have finished at Master Ball because I had finally constructed a deck that I enjoyed playing and also was giving me a pretty consistent above 50% win ratio, which is really all you need to achieve Master Ball.

But the thing that I want to talk about today is

about a game that we don't talk about much here on the show anymore because

it is a struck company by SAG AFTRA.

But there was

an extremely

monumental thing that happened in that game this week.

It has,

or over the last two weeks really,

it has ended in an unfair labor practice charge from SAG AFTRA to Llama Games and I'll say Fortnite.

And it involves

what I think is a watershed moment in video gaming and a point of no return that has been crossed by Fortnite.

And that is

two weeks ago, Fortnite allowed you to battle and then recruit Darth Vader in the game.

Darth Vader is powered entirely by a large language model AI and voiced by James Earl Jones, whose estate licensed his voice to the AI, to Disney, which is co-owners of Fortnite.

And so when you are playing the game, you now have a fully AI NPC that you can have full conversations with, and they respond in character and give you tactics updates and do bits with you, et cetera.

And it, I think, is a moment that people will look back on and be like, this was the moment that games shifted.

Because if you can do that with one character in one game, and it is definitely a testing ground for upcoming Disney implementation of this AI feature, then very, very, very soon, within the next year and a half, probably,

you are going to have RPGs that are entirely populated by voiced, interactive NPCs that you can form relationships with.

Yeah.

It is fucking insane.

I cannot stress to you guys enough how crazy it is to talk to an NPC in Fortnite who refers to you by your character name and has a memory.

So, like, for example,

you know, every time we recruit him, somebody says some insane thing to him to start the conversation.

Typically, something like, hey, Darth Vader, what do you think of macaroni and cheese?

And he'll say something like, macaroni and cheese is a diversion.

We need to be focused on the enemy and we need to push forward in order to strengthen the Empire and our squad.

But if you keep hounding him on stuff like this, he will eventually start getting agitated.

And he has an emotional intelligence as a squad member, where if you hound him enough, he will leave the party.

So, like, it's not like you can just do whatever you want to Darth Vader.

If you keep being like, yeah, but like, if you had to have,

what kind of cheese would you have on your macaroni and cheese?

He'd be like, stop it.

This is unimportant to me.

And if you, like, if you like fuck up in the game and you're downed, he'll say something like, maybe you had too much macaroni and cheese.

Like, he's a fucking asshole about it.

And he remembers and contextualizes based on your actions in the game.

It is

alarming.

Yeah, it's very scary.

But it's also, I think, I don't understand how the SAG.

So let me read the language here from the unfair labor practice charge, which is Llama Productions chose to replace the work of human performers with AI technology.

They did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over the appropriate terms.

We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies to allow new generations to share in the enjoyment of those legacies and renowned roles.

However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voices that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader's iconic rhythm and tone in video games.

I think the problem here is you cannot have an actor do this because it is on infinite instances of the game simultaneously and voiced by an AI.

Like you can't have a person

on every instance of, you'd have to have 400,000

actors

constantly interacting with the team members in that particular drop of Fortnite.

And as such, I find it dystopian, alarming, but also insurmountable.

Yeah.

It's a,

I believe what's going on here is

obviously, yes, you are correct that technically there is no way to achieve this with

even an army of live performers on this level.

However, I think what's SAG AFTRA's complaint is more has to do with the fact that

these companies are currently struck because there is not explicit AI provisions in the current

collective bargaining agreement.

And so the idea is we have this extremely highly visible

instance of this happening on

one of the biggest games in existence.

This is the kind of thing like we kind of have to

explore as a test case and make sure that, hey, this is maybe happening here in this particular

on this particular game in this particular way, but we want to make sure this does not

become extremely widespread and is completely out of our control before we actually get it litigated through collective bargaining.

I don't know that there's a way to because like I think they're I think they're just going I think there is a way to do it which has to do with we're just going to make explicit the provisions of how this and what instances this is allowed and what compensation is due any particular party whose voice likeness or you know physical likeness is used in

any sort of interactive entertainment.

Like

I think it's more like we just want some specific guidelines for how this will be used in the future before it gets completely out of control.

Yeah.

So, my feeling is playing the game that it's already out of control.

Like, I think that I think the Rubicon was crossed, the point of no return, the threshold, all of it's in the rearview mirror because interacting with Darth Vader in Fortnite is

like haunting and ghastly.

Like, it is crazy to

know that one, it's an official license.

Like it's not like

the voice of a dead man.

It's the voice of a dead man who you can con into talking about skibbity toilet because it is an official licensed interactive part of Fortnite.

And it's like, how

it's so terrifying and so rapid this

shift.

And three years ago, that what what you're doing in fortnight was literally unimaginable and now it is present and advertised and it's great i can't it's it's i you guys aren't playing the game it's fucking crazy yeah i've seen some clips and i i've heard you know secondhand what these experiences are like it is i i i think we're maybe we're maybe uh you know talking uh kind of or you know across each other like like cause i i i get exactly what you're saying that i i think that that yes a rubicott has been crossed this is a this is something that there's no going back from this this is the promise of seaman

like like at last realized

I don't think we're going back to an era where this isn't happening.

I think more the union's concern is because this is involving the voice likenesses of real human beings, we want to make sure that like something shady doesn't happen and someone gets, you know, maybe the estate of James Earl Jones is being massively ripped off here.

Like, we just, we don't have a way to know what the financial terms are.

And, and also, like, or maybe he's being extremely fairly compensated.

And everyone there is really happy with how this is all working out.

But what could happen is that, you know, Joe character actor is maybe being paid an extraordinarily low day rate.

Yeah.

And then their voice is used in perpetuity.

And it's happened with,

I personally know voice actors who are in League of Legends, and like their voices are used over and over and over again without additional compensation, without residuals, which are something that we'll get if you're in a film or you're in a television project and that airs or a commercial, at least that's how it used to be, and it airs repeatedly, you're going to get additional compensation for it.

There's no provision for that in video games.

Now, I would argue that needs to be not just for performers in it, but for everyone who works on a video game, should be compensated in perpetuity every time their game is sold or played on some, you know, some cloud service or whatever the fuck.

But

because we don't have any sort of contract language for that, there's maybe danger in something like this becoming so prominent and

so widespread

again before this can be litigated.

When you said this this sort of is the triumph of C-Man years later, I realized that I have never told Darth Vader I'm gay and I want to know what he's going to say.

The C-Man was inclusive and supportive.

Yeah.

Let's see if you can handle this better than C-Man.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but but I was

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That's a true story.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

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Matt, what have you been playing?

So I've been, I had been nose down in Mother 3 for a while.

Yeah.

For a while.

I hopped off.

I hopped off Claire Obscure, but I hopped back on.

I finished Act 1.

Okay.

Act 1 is good.

I was shocked.

Wow.

I'll just say at the end of Act 1, I was shocked.

Wow.

Good shit.

Can't wait to see what else is going on in there.

I also played Claire Obscure over the last couple of weeks.

Did you get to finish Act 1?

I don't think I finished Act 1, but I was shocked that I sat back down and played some more.

It's a good game.

It's a good game.

It's nice and crunchy.

Yeah.

It's good.

It's good stuff.

It's good as hell.

I have paused it because of Mother 3.

That's all I was saying.

I only have bandwidth

both time-wise and

in terms of mental real estate to dedicate to one intense RPG experience at a time.

But I'm going to go back to it.

Is having a three in a game an indicator of quality?

Mother 3, Claire Obscure, Expedition 33.

I think he might be on a 3.

Alders Gate 3.

Walter's Gate 3?

Super Mario Bros.

3?

Oh, shit.

He's got more.

Street Fighter 3.

Hey, wait a minute.

Holy fuck.

What are we doing?

Have we just cracked the code?

Red and 3?

What else else will we get to the bottom of today?

But I want to circle back to Bellatro real quick.

Yeah, please.

Because Bellatro led to

a fan sighting while I was on my vacation.

A fan of the podcast.

Wow.

Shout out to Gamblor in the Discord and the Patreon.

Clocked me because I was talking about Bellatro loudly at a pool with my brother-in-law.

We were talking about how good Bellatro is.

He goes, Are you mad about a doctor?

And I was like, Yeah.

He recognized your voice here.

You talking about a video game?

I was talking about Bellatra.

That's so funny.

But my brother-in-law also put me onto something called Guess the Game.

Have you guys encountered Guess the Game at all?

You set the link and I did not dig into it.

This is a travesty.

I don't click any links.

No, I guess nobody does.

Suspiciously.

Nobody gives a fuck about my links.

No, I give a fuck about your links, but I won't click.

Guess the Game is like framed.

It's a daily guessing game Yeah.

Where it's like it's like framed or like Wordle or something, but it's more closely to framed because

it's exactly framed.

The movie one, where it's screenshots of video games, and the more you get wrong, the more

specific they become.

Okay.

And it.

More specific.

What do you mean?

Like in terms of the hints become?

Well, it'll start to give you hints.

It'll be like, this is the Metacritic score.

This is the genre.

This is the platforms it's on.

So I pulled up the link and I see this image of a background.

I'm going to guess this is Final Fantasy VIII.

So I'll type it in.

Yeah.

So we've got a cloudscape, we've got a skybox, and then we've got a pretty pixelated

texture.

It's definitely a 3D environment, but it's like some sort of hillside, but it has a sort of like the lack of texture filtering.

It was not Final Fantasy VIII.

No.

That makes it look like a PlayStation 1 or Saturn-era 32-bit game.

And so the thing about it, and so it gives you a little bit more clues, but then

the scope of the

screenshots will broaden a little bit as well, where it'll show you just a little bit more up into like a like a main character of the game or like the HUD or something like that.

And what's cool about this one is that

shout out to my brother-in-law, Arim, by the way, for putting me onto this.

It's it rocks because it's just like you can go back and and play the ones that you missed.

So they're all just like available there.

And I don't know, there's so I was I was doing a lot of them and and I was I was doing a pretty good job.

Like you can for even for games that I haven't really played like like Outer Wilds or something, I was able to figure out in like three before I got to you get six tries.

And so if you don't get six, if you don't get it in six, it tells you what it is.

Right.

But getting them getting them sooner, getting them on one, let me tell you something.

Okay, Heather got it.

It's the Legend of Dragoon.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, you were right.

That was that is a PlayStation 1 GRP trip.

I got it on the third one.

That's very good.

I recognize that eyeball from the HUD.

And so this is the thing.

I think recognizing stuff is fun.

Yeah, it is fun to recognize stuff.

So, like, you're playing this, and you're like, there's kind of nothing to this.

Yeah, sure.

But then, when, let me tell you something.

When you get it in one, you're like, I'm really good at recognizing stuff.

Yeah.

This is good.

It feels good to recognize.

It feels good to recognize.

And it's sort of like, I don't know, your brain, like, for me, I'm sort of like, oh, my brain is not as bad as I thought.

Or it has worse, it has bad information in it.

I wish I had good information instead of me being able to clock like Prince of Persia, Warrior Within

from the first one.

Wait, see, the archives are open.

You can look at.

Yeah, you can go all the way back to the very first one

and go from there.

It's extremely satisfying.

But yeah, that's sort of what I had been doing.

And then I got back into Claire Obscure Expedition 33.

And I'm very interested in getting into Elden Ring Night Rain, but I'm hearing that it's a little bit more fun if you have a squad.

Oh!

If only there was some way we could assemble a squad of three, I'm not quite sure how we solve that.

Oh, boy.

I don't know.

That sounds like a good time, boys.

Instead of trying to kill me, why don't you join forces?

And we squad up, perhaps.

Oh, man.

Can't wait to sink every run.

Be Securo.

You're going to be great.

I'm interested in just seeing what it is.

They said it's like, it's just, it's challenging, that it doesn't feel completely balanced

as a solo game, which I sort of do understand.

Right.

But I kind of want to take a crack at it by myself, too.

I am 100% going to mess around with it.

Ranch, are you going to mess with any Elden Ring Night Rain?

No, it's not really in your wheelhouse for gaming.

Do I play Elden Ring first?

I don't think.

I mean, it probably would be helpful.

Do you make me feel a little daunting to just jump in?

Yeah, yeah, because

if your first souls experience is Night Rain,

God bless you.

That sounds like a disaster to me.

You know,

this guess the game thing, it is cool.

I ran into this with there's these fucking grids that like there was an NBA grid I was doing and there was also like a like a movie grid and I was like, I can't do these daily games.

Yeah.

They just like, all of a sudden, like, that's an hour of my day is spent doing some, like, multiple, like doing those, and then doing my fucking whirl.

I was like, I can't do anything that demands me to maintain a streak.

I just, I just, I just have to stay away from it, like cigarettes.

Well, this is the good thing about this is that like, you're not punished for not doing your streak at all.

Yeah.

You just go back to the other ones.

So for me, I'll just do like five or like 10 or however many I want.

And just be like, I'm done right now.

I'm done guessing.

I'm done recognizing stuff.

And then just kind of go back, just get, go back to my life.

I just don't have like the patience to do anything, like

anything at all.

Yeah, no, I don't.

I could do things like once or twice, and I'll be like, yay, this is pretty great.

And then I'm there.

I don't want to do it anymore.

Yeah.

You think you'll go back to it after doing it that one time?

I don't think so.

It was pleasurable while I did it.

Yeah.

But I don't think I want to do it.

I think the information that they give you also is like helpful, but not so, um,

not so much that it gives it completely away.

I think.

I think the clues are parsed out very well.

Like the Metacritic score, the game Council of Origin, et cetera, et cetera.

I wonder if they pull these

screen grabs.

I think there's a,

when you complete one, it tells you the source of the

screenshots, which is very cool, actually.

That is pretty interesting.

Well, God bless them.

Yeah, hats off to whoever is maintaining this.

It's a very, very cool project, and I really enjoy it.

I looked up the

Balatro, by the way, the Platinum Trophy.

And, you know, obviously, Platinum Trophy is just getting all the other trophies.

So I was trying to figure out what the

possible

bottleneck could be.

And it looks, I think it's the gold stakes.

Matt, as you know, like as you go through, you will have like the base difficulty is white steak, but then you've got a bunch of other stakes that make it progressively more annoying to try to complete a run.

Gold stake is the highest.

So you basically have to complete a gold stake with every single deck.

And that's just the kind of thing of just like, you know, you have to dedicate a lot of time and be a pretty high-level player to be able to pull that off.

I certainly haven't.

It's just not something I'm going to do.

Yeah.

Because like I, that's my go-to.

I'm in between games.

What do I want to do

to pass the time?

I'm just going to play Bellatro for a little while.

You know what?

Part of this is, I think I brought up on a previous episode.

of just wanting a game that kind of chills me out.

And I am realizing that that's part of the appeal for Bellatro to me, or that's the thing I've been realizing in the past couple of weeks of just like, I can play that game before bed and not get riled up.

And the way that even something like Slay the Spire, which is a very similar sort of experience, but I think because it's like a little bit more intense and because the vibes are a little bit less chill wave, like I'm just, I'm more like, then I'm, I'm lying in bed thinking about it as opposed to just sort of like, all right, hey, you know what?

This, the

sink or swim, whether I finish this run or whether I, I have to pause it in between, or whether I lose it, I'm, I can just, you know, put my hit the hay.

And I think it's because I'm not pressured.

I don't feel the pressure to gold stake anything or do any of it.

I'm just like,

if I win this run, great.

And if I don't, that's all right.

I'll just play another run.

Yeah.

I also just love the sounds.

Great sound design.

The sound of the chips.

Oh, baby.

And I have, like, I know it's one music track that's like 18 minutes long and looping.

I have never muted it.

I've just listened to it.

Like, it's, it's, I, I, I love it.

I can listen to it forever.

I will.

I was on a plane.

I did mute it because I had, I was, I was being iPad kid behavior.

Yeah.

Had a, had a, a show on in the corner and on the on the iPad.

I'm playing, I'm playing Bellatro, but then I have in a sort of minimized window on my iPad, I'm watching something.

I was doing two, I was two screening on one screen.

Wow.

I love it.

I was living in the future.

I don't raw dog flights.

No way.

You'll never catch me raw dogging nothing.

I don't want that.

No.

I don't want to catch you.

Nothing.

I don't want to.

And I mean nothing.

Okay.

I did do that for a bit of a flight.

It was kind of nice.

Yuck.

Yuck.

Just sat still.

I don't want to be bored.

And if I saw you in particular on a flight,

sitting still and doing nothing.

I put my ear to your

chest to see it wasn't ticking.

Wasn't sure if he's going to go first reformed on our face.

Guys, should we get into it?

Let's get into our WePlay You Play of Mother 3.

All right.

Well, I've got a little thing prepared here, and I want you to imagine a video game that opens with a family tragedy, critiques capitalism, wraps it in absurdist humor, and never officially left Japan.

Welcome to the WePlay You Play of Mother 3, the half-lost masterpiece of emotional storytelling.

Today, we'll tell you the story of Mother 3, its cursed development, its bittersweet tale, its strange sense of humor, and why it continues to move people around the world, even those who have never held a Game Boy Advance.

The Mother series, known as Earthbound Outside of Japan, was always a bit odd.

It wasn't about saving princesses or grinding for loot.

It's about growing up and about the strangeness of suburban life.

It's about grief.

Creator Shigesato Itoi is a novelist, an essayist, an adman by trade.

He thinks that games aren't about numbers or rules.

They're about feelings.

And in 1994, Mother 3 began development for the Super Famicom.

It then moved to the Nintendo 64 and eventually the 64 DD or disk drive.

Its scope grew wildly.

Full 3D graphics, real-time environments, an ensemble cast.

Nintendo showed off the 60 DD build of the game at events, magazines hyped it, and there was a fully playable version of Mother 3 on the Nintendo 64 at Space World.

But it was too ambitious, and in 2000, after six years, the project was canceled.

A whole generation of fans mourned the game that never came.

But Itoy did not walk away.

Years later, Mother 3 was reborn, this time as a 2D title on the Game Boy Advance.

It launched in Japan in 2006, and it was very quiet over here when it was.

No Western release, no translation, except one,

fans made their own English patch.

They treated the game like scripture, preserving its tone, jokes, and sorrow because this was no ordinary RPG.

This was Mother 3.

They expected maybe thousands of downloads in the first week and instead more than 100,000 downloads in the first week of the Mother 3 fan translation.

Now, at its heart, Mother 3 is about loss, personal and collective.

You begin in a utopian village, Tasmille, playing as a young boy named Lucas.

His mother dies.

His brother goes missing.

His father becomes lost in grief.

And slowly, chapter by chapter, the town changes.

Technology arrives.

Currency is introduced.

People begin comparing their homes to one another.

Happiness boxes arrive.

TVs that sort of hypnotize the populace.

The town that once shared everything becomes normal and and unkind.

Behind this transformation is the Porky Corporation, run by an immortal time-traveling child tyrant.

But Mother 3 doesn't end with a grand boss fight.

It ends with a question.

Can innocence survive progress?

Your main character, Lucas, well, one of your main characters, Lucas, doesn't save the world by force.

He saves it by feeling.

What makes Mother 3 so unforgettable is how it balances grief with absurdity.

You'll fight enemies like Reconstructed Lion or Carpet Monster.

A talking barrel might help you sneak through a factory.

There's a club run by an octopus.

It's funny until it isn't because beneath every joke is a real feeling, something real.

Lucas' dog Bony still recognizes his brother even after he's been mechanized into a soulless weapon.

You meet a robot who falls in love with kindness and he explodes to protect you.

As Itoi once said in an interview paraphrased, the thing that matters most to me is that the player feels something they can't put into words.

There is no better way to describe Mother 3.

Let's talk about some things that aren't obvious on this first playthrough, or if you haven't played the game.

The combat system is rhythm-based.

Each enemy has a hidden heartbeat.

And if you time your attacks to that heartbeat, you can combo.

It's not just a mechanic, it's a metaphor.

You're listening to the rhythm of what you're fighting so that you can understand it and empathize with it.

And when you've reached that final battle, you don't defeat the villain with strength.

You simply withstand pain.

You endure.

You press forward despite heartbreak.

And when it's over, the screen goes black and your characters vanish.

Mother 3 is a story that asks what happens when a community forgets itself, when joy is replaced with comfort, when grief is ignored.

It's not nostalgic.

It's aware.

It's a game where the final boss isn't a monster.

It's loss itself.

And the only way to win is to keep feeling.

Mother 3 isn't about fighting.

It's about kindness and being gentle to the person sitting next to you.

Maybe that's why it never got a Western release.

It wasn't designed to sell here.

It was designed to last, and it has because Nintendo hasn't brought it overseas.

And even if they never bring it overseas, we've already brought it home.

Thanks to the fans.

Wow.

That's this week's Get Play.

Heather, I love that.

I thought that was great.

And

you had a lot of context there.

Some of which I was aware of and some of which I learned in researching this game, which I know that you are such a fan of and that I'd never played before.

I want to get back to Shigesato Itoi because he's such an interesting guy.

And I do feel like this is such a vision that is so clearly like his, like when you dig into it a little bit.

But before we do that, I'm just curious about, like, I just want to ask you as a person and as a gamer, like, when did you first discover Mother 3 and when did that get the game, when did it really connect with you?

I have no idea when I first discovered this game.

I

don't.

Oh my God, he's spilled.

It's fine.

You can't just say that.

It was not bad.

Ranch, back me up.

It's fine, Spill.

It's fine.

Thank you.

Don't let him feel you this way.

This feels good, actually.

How much liquid by volume do you think you've spilled in this room?

All right, we'll just pick up the edit from here.

So, Heather, when did you first

hang it?

Get into Mother 3.

So, I'm not certain when I first discovered Mother 3.

I know that

the first time I played it, it was just the straight up

fan translated ROM.

But being a bit of a purist, I got the fan-translated cartridge and played it on a Game Boy Advance.

And then being

a very specific kind of purist,

I decided that I wasn't going to beat it until I was playing it on a CRT using the Game Boy Advance lock-in for the GameCube.

And so that's the way I played Mother 3 was on a CRT, which isn't the way that it's designed to be.

Sure.

But god damn, did it look amazing.

It was so warm and so nice.

I had a couple false starts when I first started playing it.

Again, for the aforementioned attention issues.

But once I got rolling with the game,

I can't remember if I beat beat it while this podcast was happening or right before the podcast was happening.

But I mean, when I finished it, I was like, oh, oh, oh,

oh, my God.

This is not a feeling I've ever had in a video game and definitely not one that has been conjured by like a 2D sprite-based RPG.

Like I've felt emotion, I've cried during The Last of Us.

You know, I felt a lot of feelings during Death Stranding, during Disco Elysium, but the ending of this game was like,

I don't, I need to know people who've played this so that I can talk about the ending of this game.

It's kind of an undeniable.

I feel like it's the kind of thing of like, I've heard, I've had this game hyped endlessly, not just by you, but by, you know, like it's fandom in general over the decade plus since the fan translation has become widespread.

And it really does live up to the expectations that you, the, the, the very high expectation someone has for it.

I, I, just, just to talk generally, real quick, I, I don't know at what point we're gonna dip into spoiler country, and I don't know how deep we're gonna go because I do feel like some of our audience is going to end up playing this game as a result for the first time as a result of this episode.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I mean, I feel like your, your overview was pretty general.

Like you kind of talked about some.

I'm going to try to keep it as general as possible.

Yeah, but but

I guess what I'll say is we should we should have planned this out a little bit more, but I'll just say this now for our listenership.

If we are going to go into spoiler country beyond, I think we can talk about the first, the first chapter, the first couple chapters.

I think we kind of have to do that.

But if we're going to go deeper than that, I think we'll give a pretty clear warning.

Yeah, I do think we got to get into very, very

deep spoiler stuff.

Because I have some things to say.

Yeah.

Matt, Matt, how did you play through this game?

I played it on.

Well, Heather Heather obviously gifted us the cartridges for the Game Boy Advance, which then I had in, I had some false starts with it since you gave it to us, which I'm now realizing by this point has been anywhere between five or six years ago at this point, which is insane to think about.

Because not as

of this release,

it'll be a couple of weeks away.

We will have been doing this show for six years, which is insane.

Jesus Christ Christ.

But

I know.

I know.

I recorded the pilot six months before that, too, right?

So like in 2018,

we had our first recording ever.

But

I had played it.

I had played like through maybe half of the first chapter,

I think, four times.

Yeah.

And was sort of like, this seems cool.

Maybe someday.

It's not like I'm in a rush.

I'll have this forever.

And so

I had planned to play it on my analog pocket because I got and I because I have the dock for it and a

like a Super Nintendo Bluetooth controller for that.

I was like, I'll play this on my TV.

And I did start to do that a little bit.

And I didn't love how it looked in that presentation because it's not

CRT.

It's not built for that.

And so

I loaded the ROM up on

my Ambernick Game Boy Advance and played through it

entirely on there.

And that, what was what was great about that is

I would just basically put it into sleep mode and then pick it back up.

And then also, like, I did

in some instances utilize save states, which was incredibly helpful for some of the parts that was going to, that were pain points, I think, for me.

It has some,

it, it, it has some, some fairly difficult combat sequences, which I was not necessarily expecting.

No.

And so knowing that, like, in I would say.

Or sections, maybe, maybe a better way to put it, sections where, you know, you have to grind a little bit more or, you know, you have to maybe get a little bit more lucky with RNG in an encounter.

Save states are helpful.

And then sometimes, too, like the...

You would get sent sometimes, not always, you get sent back just far enough where I'm like, I'm going to have to go through like these guys again.

I kind of don't want to really engage with them anymore.

So like, if I got through it unscathed and got to a point where I could then just kind of continue with even what minimal health I had left, I would just try to do that as best as I could.

But

that Game Boy, the Game Boy Advance

form factor.

Yeah.

I talk about the SP as being the Game Boy Advance, I think.

Yeah.

I think it's the flat one.

I think it's the long boy.

It has to be.

The wide guy.

The wide guy.

It's easier to hold.

It's easier to hold.

It's easier to hold.

My issue with it is.

Do we all agree that it's easier to hold?

It's easier to hold.

We all agree it's easier to hold.

I think it's easier to hold.

It's easier to hold.

The SP, you're a little bit cramped, and your hands are a little bit, you know, your wrists are not in line with your forearms, which is a huge ergonomic thing.

That was a problem with the fucking Dreamcast controller.

But the

it's just like having the

front lit or backlit screen is so huge.

Yeah.

And so with this, the ambernick obviously it has it has a backlit screen or uh

it might be front lit i don't know which one is the one that is supposed to be better backlit backlit um and it's it's nice and it's it's got it has a couple extra buttons but it's it's basically the exact one-to-one form factor and the screen presentation is like one-to-one with the game boy advance um or it's i guess not one-to-one it's bigger than the game boy advanced screen but it scales properly so it just it was a gorgeous experience i put in wired headphones i was playing

with earbuds on an airplane.

Having uninterrupted time to play this game on an airplane was one of the great

blessings with maybe of my entire life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was really, really great.

But yeah, I played through it all on

in a ROM, which is,

I feel like in the past, it's the one, it's the only way to play it.

Maybe a few years ago, harder to find than, say, now in the year of our Lord 2025.

You know, know, there's been some discussion about why it isn't being released by Nintendo in the West.

And certainly there's like questions of

theming.

Reggie, who was the old, what was he, the director of Nintendo of America?

He said it was that the controversy, quote, is not the issue at all why Mother 3 never made it to the West.

It was all based on the business needs and the business situation at the time.

Obviously, that quote applies, I think, to a physical release.

It is surprising to me that a release that can be done via the Virtual Console, especially when Mother 3 has been released in Japan on Virtual Console,

has been met with this sort of like invisible barricade.

There is theorizing that it is because of the music, which is so

integrated into the experience of playing it.

And that's what you talking about.

Your earbuds reminded me of it.

But also the music is full of

sound sampling and also

thematic.

What did you call it?

Intonation.

Interpolation.

Interpolations.

This was pre-recorded.

I kind of dropped some knowledge.

Yeah.

Everyone was really impressed.

Matt was super smart before the show began.

I don't know why he doesn't do it during the show.

I saved that stuff.

I saved that stuff for before the show.

But like, so there's like

one of the bass lines and like musical phrasing, and one of the combat encounters is from Michael Jackson's Beat It.

There's

there's just like a ton of like larger named, unlicensed musical riffs in the game.

And so that has been the theory on why it hasn't come out here.

It's entirely possible.

The composer, by the way, is Shogo Sakai and

it's a fantastic score.

I mean, it's just, it's...

It matches what the story demands emotionally.

And also those combat encounters, like that, like just to talk about it,

it's not one battle theme.

Like, like, like, there's different battle themes for each individual enemy.

They all kind of have their own leit motif, which,

you know, like comes up and then is part of like the combat.

Like you're talking about

those music words, too.

When you're fighting the little bat, the beginning of the Batman TV show starts playing.

Yeah.

Like the old Batman theme.

Like that, that's, it's all, like, you can't separate that from the combat encounter.

No.

If you even could literally separate, like, even if they have the source code or whatever you need in order to, like, strip the music from a game and then rebuild it.

It's a, it's, I'm sure it's a solvable problem technically if that really was the issue.

And maybe it is.

I also kind of feel like Nintendo is just so fucking weird.

And so like,

they're like the best and the worst in so many ways.

Like, this is the kind of thing of like

letting

giving Shigesato Itoi this enormous budget and this

extremely long development cycle

and on multiple platforms to make such a singular vision is like, that's a thing that only Nintendo would do.

That's the thing that only they would do with their resources.

But also, them deciding, ah, we're only going to keep it in Japan and we're not going to like localize it anywhere else and we're never going to explain ourselves.

That's also Nintendo, like something only they would do.

It's them being so fucking like

they're so great and also so frustrating at the same time.

Yeah.

And what's wild about this game in particular is it's not,

as you described it, it's undeniable, right?

Like it's not a game where it's like.

I'm going to flash some of my gamer cred and be like, oh, Rule of Rose for the fucking PlayStation is a great game.

Like it's, it's, it is a straightforward, extraordinary experience.

It has tone and it has you know authorship and specificity, but it's not like a game that like Earthbound already exists and Earthbound was already released everywhere.

Yeah.

So it's it did bomb commercially in the U.S.

But I mean like also they did a horrible job marketing it.

Damned, it came out at a weird fucking time.

It came out 30 plus years ago.

Yeah.

So like this game, for the people who've played it, it's like

you're getting to see an alternate version of the year 2006 or 2008 or whenever it would have come out here

and you're seeing it being like you playing it you're like this would be a cultural touchstone like this would be one of the big games and uh you know uh lucas's ex uh like uh exposure in smash brothers is testament to that like he's he's already an international figure but like the source material is not It's so weird.

It's really strange.

I will say that I am someone who was introduced to the Earthbound franchise in general via Smash Brothers.

Like Ness, you know, I think was the very first Super Smash Brothers, has been a mainstay of

the series.

And then Lucas, of course, when he was added.

That was my knowledge.

And then Mr.

Saturn, who's also has a presence in Smash Brothers and some items as well.

Like, like, that was my introduction to the kind of like the mother/slash earthbound

sort of IP.

But like this game was outside of Lucas and knowing its fandom and certainly having played some of the games that it was influenced by

or that it influenced rather, such as, you know, I mean, Toby Fox's Undertale is the most the most obvious example.

And that one you can see so much Mother 3 and Undertale.

But also things like, and I honestly don't know if Concerned Ape, Eric Barone, actually has cited Mother 3

an influence.

I didn't,

I should have looked into that.

But like, certainly there's elements with this sort of tranquil,

you know, rural village being blighted by capital that I definitely feel is

an element in Stardew Valley.

And that there's like, you could basically choose the bad playthrough, the dark playthrough by

in Stardew Valley, there's a community center which you can choose to repair.

Heather, your mom knows all this, obviously, with all the time she put in Stardew Valley.

But there's like a community center that you can repair, and that's like kind of like the good or canon sort of playthrough.

But there's also this onerous corporation, Joja, that has Joja Mart there, and you can instead choose to side with Joja, and then Joja kind of takes over the town and kind of strips it of its identity.

It's not as overt as what happens to Tazabilly Village and Mother 3, but it's like the same sort of thing, the same sort of like, oh, this is a heavier theme than maybe games, you know, of this era, of the Game Boy Advance games.

And certainly when it began development in Super Famicom and on to Nintendo 64, we're not really like, not as many games were digging into things like this.

And now it's a lot more prominent.

I think about like.

My Game Boy Advance was extremely important to me.

And obviously one of my white whales of gaming is on the Game Boy Advance, the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance cartridge that is just going to sit on my fucking coffee table for the rest of my life.

When I think about the state of mind I was in, the age I was, like the sort of feeling of that pre-smartphone era of 2006, the idea of this game being in my life, I think would have been like a trajectory change.

Like it would have been like,

I know I would have made it part of my personality.

I would have been, I would have been like,

because there wasn't,

to my knowledge, in 2006, there's nothing like this at all

coming out on Game Boy Advance, certainly.

There might have been like PlayStation 2 games that had more emotionally charged adult themes.

Certainly, like Final Fantasy X deals with death and grief.

And you could argue that Shadow of the Colossus also is an adult experience, and adult in terms of like...

I want to say like the literary feeling of the game, because like Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City are also on PlayStation 2 around the same time.

And those are adult games because you can kill people.

But like a game where you experience sadness as an intended effect of the game was very few and far between.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush for that whole era of gaming, but yes, it is certainly for the Game Boy Advance.

I mean, because

I was trying to think of other Game Boy Advance JRPGs or RPGs in general, and there were a lot of good ones on that system.

But, you know, it's it's things like Golden Sun, which is, I like, I really like the Golden Sun games.

Those are pretty straight ahead.

They certainly weren't dealing with these heavy, heady sort of themes.

Or, or, you know, you talked about the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the Final Fantasy IV, like five and six advance remakes.

You know,

it is more stuff that's a little bit more, again, all great games, but a little bit more straight ahead.

That said, you know, even with Final Fantasy,

we did a whole episode on Crowdo Trigger earlier, but like also, you know, even on Final Fantasy 4 and

6,

you're dealing with some pretty intense emotional moments.

But it's not the sort of thing that's kind of like

as overarching and as thematically dominant as it is in Mother 3.

Yes.

Can we talk about Shigesato Itoy a little bit more open?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he's the writer-director of this game.

Scenario Buy is the credit.

The mother franchise in general uh along with uh uh the the uh late satoro iwata uh you know was was a

uh basically his his brainchild his baby um he's the chief creative voice of it uh and he's this this i mean i just did a little like you know kind of peripheral research about him um but you know he's it seems like this polymath was this eclectic career you mentioned that he was an ad man he was a renowned copywriter like like a celebrity copywriter which is such a weird thing he also co-wrote a book with Murakami.

Yes,

he's got all these,

I mean, he was a, he was the Japanese voice of the father in My Neighbor Totoro.

He's like, he's got all these like insane sort of credits that have nothing to do with video games.

Here's an anti-war print ad he made in the 80s that's entitled After You, Mr.

Prime Minister, which is just such a, like, I just would want a poster of that.

It's really cool.

That's incredible.

It's really cool.

It's these two soldiers.

who are gesturing at a, like, you know, they're in

full combat gear and that they're gesturing for someone else to take their place.

And the text says in Japanese, after you, Mr.

Prime Minister.

So, like, he's, he seems like,

I don't know, just,

and also the other thing is, when this game releases, he's a guy, he's, he was born in kind of like what we call the baby boom era in the States in

1948.

So when this game releases, he's almost 70 years old, you know, like it's kind of like,

there's, we don't see it as much in video gaming, and maybe it's because it's such a young art form, but a thing that you'll see in like, for instance, film, like like, well, like we had a recent year, maybe it was last year,

I remember, it may have been two years ago, but Killer's the Flower Moon,

you know, Martin Scorsese's movie comes out, and then also Boy in the Heron, Miyazaki's movie, you know, both of these artists, like who are like,

you know, very, very much elder statesmen of their crafts, but it's just like because they are at that level, they're like these old masters, they have such a

such an intense

awareness of their own voices, and

they're able to make stuff that it's so meticulously crafted.

And that's kind of what it feels like with this game, too.

It's just like, oh, this is a guy who is so confident

in his own voice and just like is like, fuck it.

I'm going to do exactly what I want to do.

It's also like the

that tone, that voice that he's brought forward in this, in this game is both funny and horrifying at the same time.

Like, one of my favorite moments early game is

obviously

if you've played just a few chapters, you know, that the sort of inciting incident of the game is the death of one of the main characters' mother or one of the main characters' wife.

They're sitting around a fire after she's gone missing, and a guy says to Flint, the husband of this woman,

hey, I found a tooth.

It's going to make a great weapon.

And

it's awesome.

Yeah.

I did find it in your wife's heart.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is structured as a joke, but is, it is like the motivating moment for the entire, like it causes Flint to go into a rampage until he's knocked out and thrown in jail.

And it is the first moment of grief that Tasmani can remember.

And it's delivered funny.

Yeah, it's a, you know, it's the, it's the grotesque, right?

It's the bearage of the horrifying and the

hilarious.

I mean, that's kind of what you're dealing with.

But it's also just like really bad bedside matter for that fucking

thing.

Well, he believed with your wife died.

The town's never experienced it in the world.

It's true.

He has no idea.

He needs to know how to do it right.

But also what that gets.

That's a funny read.

It's like he was doing his best.

I don't know.

I did find it in your widescreen.

He's just dumb.

Like the writing there is really great.

And also the localization, which we should talk about as well, the fan translation.

But like also, that is a sequence where just like, holy shit, the animation in this.

Yes.

Like, it's like all the sprites look great, but the way they're animated is just like, I mean,

it feels like the sort of thing of like, oh, yeah,

this is partly the benefit of having such a lengthy development cycle is that

you're allowed to get this like granular with character animation.

Well, you don't, you, like, you'll see like really

lush, one-off sprite animation in modern games.

But at the time, like in Final Fantasy VI, for example, if somebody's angry, they make the same face and hopping motion as if they're shocked or if they are confused.

Like, they'll just hop up and down with the same exact animation loop.

Nick, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, hands out, hair up.

Don't get me started.

But in this, the things that Flint does at that fire are never repeated anywhere else in the game.

It is just for that sequence.

It's the, and all the, I believe all the NPCs in Tasmille Village are all unique sprites, which is its own thing.

It's another thing that just like you,

you always see assets being reused.

But then, but then thematically, all of those characters have like individual names, but once the town of Tasmille becomes gentrified, then you get generic NPCs like guy, girl,

You know dad.

I did see one late game.

This guy, he kind of looked like Allie G like the character Allie G and I saw somebody on like Reddit, I guess, being like, who is this?

Why does he look like Allie G?

So Atoy is like, you know, the, the, the, the strong creative voice behind this this game.

So much of our ability to play it is owed to Clyde Mandolin, aka tomato, and their team, who are just absolute heroes overseeing this fan translation.

Mandolin, go on.

Well, I was going to say,

it's also not the case where this is a translation made by somebody who's not a part of the industry.

He is a working translator.

Like, this is his job.

Professional Japanese to English translator worked on Dragon Ball One Piece, Lupin the Third, Kingdom Hearts 2, Matt.

Hell yeah.

And I think they're like, first off, it's the internet is awful, except when it's great.

And this is one of those instances where, God bless them.

But also, this is the kind of thing where it's just like, it's kind of awesome on a game that seems so stridently anti-capitalist that it's a fan community who volunteered their time to make this freely available to people just to experience as not for any sort of profit-seeking or anything like that.

It's just like, hey, this is just purely a labor of love, just so we can share this with other people.

God bless them.

I think it's so awesome awesome when shit like this happens.

I'm sort of like, I mean,

that sounded like I was going to denigrate this project in some way.

That's not what I meant to say.

What I mean to say is

it's baffling to me because you hear about things like this and then like

you hear, I feel like you hear about other stuff like this or like even stuff that's like tangentially Nintendo related at all, like a Super Smash Brothers tournament being shut down by Nintendo or something like that.

But this persists.

yeah.

And they have to know about it.

They 100% know about it.

They were completely aware of it.

Like

in multiple interviews, they're like aware of the fan translation.

And I believe at one point there was even discussion of using the fan translation as the official translation were that the game were to be released here.

Like it was like they are, it is above.

Like it is above water.

It is not.

It's on Mario's desk.

He knows.

Yeah.

But

they're not ceasing and desisting everyone on the internet.

And it's like, how much of that is, like, of the mysteries of Mother 3, part of the mystery is, why isn't it localized?

And part of the mystery is, why aren't they stopping it?

Yes.

Both of which are like, is it about, you know, Itoi's like, is he in some way involved in being like, just let him have it?

Like, who knows?

There's no way to know.

It's a very fascinating circumstance because like any other,

there's a, there's a reality where this we didn't get to do this like yeah like because it got stopped in 2006.

You know what I mean?

All of the Wonder Swan games that I play are absolutely untranslated.

They may be masterpieces, but my command of the language and ability to read it is so low that I will never know.

And so that means there's not an official translation by Nintendo that they're just holding on to.

Right.

Because otherwise they would put that out so then people could they're not afraid of well they are who fucking knows they don't know, they don't like money

the same way it's it's baffling, they're an infuriating company,

and also it's it's also like part of the i think part of at this point the allure of the game is the sort of un unwoven mystery of why it isn't released, why it isn't being stopped, have you played it, sharing it with people who like the fact that you can't go on the switch and just click a button and play it, yes, Yes.

To me,

makes it special enough that when you do seek it out, that there is an added layer of like, this is special because it was a little bit tricky to get.

Well, and also that Nintendo did go to the trouble of localizing Mother One.

Like,

they eventually released that one as what did they call it?

Like Earthbound?

Earthbound beginnings.

Earthbound beginnings.

And it's, I don't know, it's just so fucking, they're so fucking weird.

Yeah.

They're such an annoying company.

I will, of course, buy and rebuy everything they ever put out.

But I also think

this game would be just as beloved if it wasn't such a

hidden object.

This isn't like the fact that this is like a, oh, oh,

this is a hidden gem.

This is a buried treasure.

This is worth seeking out.

And part of the, like, like what makes it great is that you have to jump through the hoops to try to get it.

I think if this was just released at retail, it would have been still as rapturously received.

It would just be more popular because it's it's like it's that good of a game.

I think Nintendo should do not just a digital release of this, but a physical release on a Game Boy Advance cartridge in the United States of America.

Can you imagine?

It'd be great.

It would sell out instantly.

If it was a limited run,

if it was a limited run, it would sell out instantaneously and it would be on eBay for like $10,000 the next day.

Oh, yeah, and it would be a limited run because that's the kind of dumb shit they do.

What was this super?

There's a Super Mario compilation.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars.

Yeah, and then they were just like, they released that one, and it was like, but that was like a limited run for some reason.

Yeah, and on digital storefronts as well, as well.

You can't buy it digitally now for some reason.

Why the fuck do they do this shit?

They're fucking stupid and dumb.

It's fucking ridiculous.

But it's also.

It's a company that's sitting on like 20 billion in cash.

They're certainly smarter than me because they figured out some way to

permanently frustrate its biggest fans and also get them to continue to be their biggest fans.

Well, maybe part of it is a psychological game where you're like, well, what if I can't play it later?

Like,

like how Wind Waker HD

is not available.

Yeah.

Like, that's crazy.

It's so crazy because I'm also, I'm also.

Because there are, like you were saying, Reggie has said, like, Reggie has commented on it.

Yeah.

He's been like, it's not because of the music.

It's not because of the content.

I'm sort of like, one of those is bullshit.

One of those is not true.

Because

if it wasn't one of those things, it would be out.

Like, because those are the concerns, I think.

Those are the things that would typically be flagged, you know, like, because there's

some insane stuff in this game.

There's some really crazy stuff.

There are

robotic mermen that you have to kiss to get air underwater.

Yep.

That's wild.

There's ghosts that are just drinking.

Yeah.

It's nuts.

When did Reggie Fizzume

leave Nintendo?

He left in 2019.

So it's been, you know,

he still looms large because he was such a prominent figure for Nintendo of America.

You know, Doug Bowser's never going to do it.

Yeah, that was what I was going to say.

Like, like, it's because the Reggie thing, the Reggie on Mother 3 thing has been so memed and was like, you know, like reference on Robot Chicken or whatever the fuck it's like.

Yeah.

It's like, has anyone gotten Doug Bowser on the record on Mother 3?

I think Bowser's going to pull a Bowser and not do it.

The game is so packed full of like loving details that it's kind of hard to talk about.

Like there's so much.

Like even just the,

I've read a lot of complaints about the way you run in the game.

I love the way you run.

I wish I could run like that in other games.

Like I think it's great.

Yeah.

Like that you hold and release to run instead of like holding to run.

It's great.

It's very similar in a way to the way that you hold and release to stab in shadow of the colossus

like that you that to to run is something like that's also the way you feel when you're a kid is you're like ah i'm gonna go fast and then you go

and then you feel a little out of control as you're moving around yeah i mean i i'll i'll be honest just from a a game a like a a control feel standpoint i did find it a little bit awkward i like i'm not the hugest fan of the way running works in the game but certainly not a deal breaker for me I love it.

It certainly feels like a decision.

I would say this.

I will defend the decision because, again, it feels like

everything, every single detail in this game was extraordinarily thought through.

I'll also just say that like,

I don't know.

It's, it's,

it's been so long since the game actually came out that I guess it's kind of hard to talk about the length of its development cycle.

But like, I, as a man now in my 40s, remember reading about Mother 3 as a kid.

kid like like i remember egm magazine and and game pro magazine seeing like previews for this game that was coming out for the nintendo 64 that i was excited to play and like like that it was like there and then by the time it came out you know i was like a a grown man and it had gone through three different platforms that it was going to go for it's like it's it's like it's like crazy that it even exists at all because it feels like the sort of thing that again any other company would have killed at some point in the development process.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can I say another thing I like I wrote down just some stuff I liked once in a while.

Yeah.

I also wrote down some stuff I like.

I like that you get a fever when you're learning an ability.

I like that too.

And I like that it slows you down.

You can't run.

You can't run because you're like, I don't feel so good.

No, it's fun.

I mean, like, it's, I, I like, I, I love when a game is like, hey, we're going to, we're going to tax you on your time, your real world time as a person, but like it's for some, it's to make some sort of point.

It's for some sort of purpose.

Yeah.

Like like it's not just like waiting for a cool down.

It's like, actually, there's, there's something you're going to like feel from this.

And, and for me, like, that's just like the spa experience.

Like, when you, when you go into one of the baths and it's like, I just got to sit in this bath for a second.

And it's also, it's like, it's kind of making me be like, it's making you feel like, hey, I just gotta.

I just gotta chill for a bit.

The same way my character is chilling.

I just gotta chill for a bit.

And I can't really touch my controller.

And there's no way to speed this process up.

I just gotta wait it out.

That did soothe me every time.

I felt so good.

It's very soothing.

Yeah.

It's, it's great.

Yep.

Really, really.

It made me want to get in one.

Yeah, I was thinking about getting into body water.

What?

Just getting in some water.

Yeah, getting some water.

Why not?

I haven't done that in a while.

Yeah, take the rocks out of your pockets for doing this.

Matt, you discovered the origin of a meme.

This completely shocked me.

I'm playing the game.

Well, there's a couple things too, because I recognize Mr.

Saturn, yeah,

from

I guess people posting him online, you know, like people posting him.

Yeah, I feel like that made me sound a hundred years old.

I feel like I've seen him, I've seen Mr.

Saturn before.

Yeah, he's in Mother 2 or Earthbound as well, right?

So he's like a fixture of the series.

I get to one of these rooms in one of these caves, and I stumble upon Negative Man.

Right.

And I'm sort of like,

this fucking guy, Negative Man, is a yellow square man or rectangular man who

is on his hands and knees in such agony.

And I've seen him just like online as like a meme.

They'll post it as like a reaction or something.

And when I see him in the game, I was like, no fucking way.

This is from.

This is from this.

Yeah.

It, it, it shocked me.

It absolutely shocked me just to see see him because i i just didn't know what he was from it makes 100 sense he's from this because he looks like everything else in this weird game

it's also the kind of thing of like he's kind of just like too beaten down by the world to even muster up a fight right like it's kind of like it's it and it's like it's not really even

It doesn't really necessarily even have like a ton of, like, like, there's a lot of stuff in this game that doesn't necessarily have a ton of gameplay consequence.

It's more just like, hey, here's just a moment to experience.

You know, it's one of those sorts of things.

But then as such, it like lingers in the collective memory because it's so like distinct and so weird.

Yes, because he's

in one place only.

He's the only one.

I think you can one hit him.

He has like basically no health and you get nothing from beating him.

Yeah.

He's just there.

And his face.

I just need to talk about the emotions on his face a little bit because he looks like, god damn it, not again.

Like he looks like he's so like, just end it.

Just fucking kill me.

I'm done.

I'm done.

And it was just so, it was just so surprising to see him.

There's a lot of just like,

I mean, gosh, it is, it is hard to talk about because there's like stuff that I want to say that's like about the later stuff.

But like, I'll say...

We'll cordon off a part where we can talk about endgame.

I'll say in the beginning of the game too, like when I was starting it, my first, my, the first initial pain point that I was experiencing was the very first boss that you have, which is the mecha draga.

And I was just like getting housed in every playthrough that I was playing with it.

And I was like, I think I'm just not being calm.

I think I'm just not thinking about this in a way that is helpful to me like beating this thing.

And then like, once you like...

Like I think my final playtime for this game was somewhere around like 35 hours, which is above the average, I think, completion time if you go on like something like how long to beat or something.

It's a big boy.

It's a commitment.

And also the thing I was surprised by is how deep into the game you finally take control of Lucas in Ernest.

Like that's like, that's like

10 hours in.

Yeah, like a third of the way in.

Yeah, you first, you start as Flint, right?

Yep.

And then you go on to Duster.

And then you have like a little cold open where I think you are Lucas for a little bit.

Yeah.

And then

chapter three, one of my favorite chapters.

You get to be salsa the monkey.

Here's the thing.

If I knew there was a monkey named Salsa in this game, I would have played it 10 years ago.

Yeah.

I didn't know.

I had no idea.

I didn't know he was going to be a good one.

He was a fucking monkey in the game, right?

That you get to play him.

Got a girlfriend Samba?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Not just that.

He fucking dances.

Yeah.

And his dances are hilarious.

They're adorable.

Yeah.

They're so cute.

And yet, you also are like,

to extend the themes of like grief and sadness, like this monkey is

rumble.

His girlfriend's being held hostage and he's being tortured.

He's being

abused by

facade.

Yeah.

Which, of course, is his name.

He's a fucking phony.

Facade, by the way, that's just like a nice little bit of localization.

So I looked this up because his name is Yokuba in Japanese.

Yokuba means

it's a play on the word yokubari, which is greedy or avaricious.

And so it was like, okay, we need a name that sounds like a name, like, sounds like it could be a name in the way that Yokuba sounds like a name, but it has that same sort of meaning to an English-speaking audience.

So facade, like

the homophone versus facade.

I don't know, it's very clever.

I will admit something.

And it just thought, again, thoughtful localization from a team that's working for free.

I have to admit something about some character names, real quick.

I didn't change any of the character names, which you can do.

Yep.

It took me entirely too long

that

Lucas and Klaus have the same letters.

Yeah.

I was like, oh, they're brothers.

They have the same letters in their names.

Yeah.

I forgot what that's called.

Anagram.

An anagram.

Yeah.

One thing I like is

in the character creation, just a lovely character creation scene, by the way.

There's these animations that are all playing in the corner as you're going through and meeting each character.

But the option to use the canon names, which exist, you can change the character names, but the canon names is don't care.

Yeah, that's really funny.

I really like that's that's a home run to it.

That's really funny.

And I like the stuff that's like, then you can pick like what your favorite food is or whatever.

And what your name is.

And yeah, you got to put it, which comes in

huge.

Look, another thing that

you see the long tail influence of this game, Metaphor Refantasio does the same trick.

Yes.

And what it hits in Metaphor,

which I finished in the first part of this year, started playing it at the end of last year.

It's a sort of, it's, it's not quite

on the same level as in Mother 3 in terms of how it's deployed, but it it is still like extremely effective.

It's a really good technique.

Did it make you cry in Metaphor Refantasio?

Because it made me cry in this.

Oh.

No.

No, because he doesn't.

Yeah, nothing.

He can't.

It's not possible.

I knew that.

I was just taking a second to reveal that it made me cry.

For years.

Yeah.

He's just been using super glue as eye drops.

Here's the thing.

Wigger don't leak.

Well,

that's complete bullshit.

You spill constantly, dude.

We gotta leak.

You're right.

That's a character trait.

Yeah.

That is leakage.

Well, that's external leakage.

That's a different thing.

I'm pissed.

It also made me cry when I finished it.

I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Because also, you don't know

that it's going to be that effective.

No, let's just say, look, I mean, I also, I did finish this on an airplane on my flight back home.

Yeah, well, it's a higher than typical oxygen saturation.

My wife rubbed my back.

Nathan Fielder flying the plane.

Yeah.

Nathan was up there.

Yeah.

Michelle, while we're talking character names, because I know you're playing this game too, and you also shared some screenshots.

So you did rename some characters.

I did rename all the characters.

Every single one of them that it prompted me to.

Were you at one point standing?

What was like, because

the screenshots that you sent to the group chat, but I feel like at some point it was

like maybe Matt at Matt standing at Weiger's grave.

What was it?

It was Matt standing at Heather's grave.

Yeah.

And then Weiger trying to console Matt.

Trying would be the correct word.

You would not be able to succeed.

They're there.

It's fine, buddy.

It's okay, buddy.

I'm still here.

What did you, like, I don't know how deep you got into the game.

I know you put some hours into it, but like, you're also coming into this without any point of reference, right?

Really?

Like,

what were your impressions playing Mother 3?

I was, yeah, I was shocked how deep and thoughtful it got really quickly.

Yeah.

There was definitely an added flair to it because I named all of our characters after us.

But yeah, just like, okay, wow, like this game is all about capitalism like immediately.

and it was it was cool to see that in like a

I don't know a game that I thought was gonna be kind of just like a chill yeah a chill thing right for sure yeah I that's probably the thing that threw me the most is and obviously it hits so much you know like

yes you have a little bit of a tell because the first chapter is called night of the funeral but it's like but like when when it really does

That moment we've already talked about hits, it's like, oh,

I see what I'm in for.

And you still only kind of know what you're in for at that point.

But

just like the idea that like, again, again, this is, this, this type of game is so often built on accruing treasure, right?

And like accruing currency.

And, and that's how you make yourself more powerful is by getting more stuff.

And they have a game that completely like, like, you know, it works as it counteracts that.

And where the introduction of money is like the original sin in this game is like you know this evil man is bringing money to this village

i don't know it's i think one of the items

that you can purchase from the official like like storefront for mother 3 yeah uh which is part of uh itoi's like personal website which i think is called some like the translated name is something like almost always daily newspaper.

It's like a blog that has been kept up for years and years and years.

Yeah, he like started started in the 90s.

Yeah.

But one of them is a bag of money.

Yeah.

Like a bag of coins.

Which is a funny thing to purchase.

Yes.

After playing Mother 3.

It's very,

yeah, sort of against the whole thing.

Yeah.

I got to talk about something I loved.

Yeah.

Save points are kind of just like whatever, typically.

Yeah, you had like what, whatever, like a little apparition, a crystal, a green squirrel, a spefe room.

The save, the save point in this game is a little guy, he's a little frog.

Yeah, yeah, they're safe frogs.

And let me tell you something:

I didn't think there would be another frog in an RPG I'd like more than frog.

This fucking guy, he tells you, he's polite.

Yeah, he's very friendly.

He tells you to say hello to the next frog, frog you see.

Yep.

I think maybe just encouraging you to save as often as you can.

Yep.

He and then he

bids you farewell at like the last one.

Yep.

It's great.

It's what it, he's cute as hell.

Yeah.

A save, a save point that talks to you is pretty great.

Really good.

Sometimes he's in different things.

Yeah.

Right, right.

He's in a little car.

A lot of fun.

He's in a little, like in the trash can or something.

He might be behind a door.

Yeah, it's it's detail that doesn't need to be there.

It's detail for for the sake of it.

And I don't know.

That's part of why this feels like such a magical experience.

We talked about.

I was going to say

there is a late game frog that is a bit spoilery that was very funny to me that I'll try to remember later.

We talked about as far as since we're in animal territory,

we talked about the safe frogs.

We talked about salsa the monkey.

We got to talk about Boney.

Boney?

Perhaps number one good boy.

Bony really good.

Great dog.

Great dog.

I like that his, like, I like his sniff ability, like, just reveals enemy weaknesses.

Like,

I don't know.

It's also also just nice to have like a dog in the party.

Yeah.

I like that he's faster than everybody.

Right, right.

In terms of like the turn lineup.

And always has initiative.

Because

he's a dog.

Of course he's faster.

Is it chapter

five when you go to the club?

I think it's chapter four.

Chapter four.

Club titty boo.

He has to put on a little disguise and he has to dress up like a guy.

And then the guards are like, you smell like a dog.

But then you're like, you're just

like a weird guy that smells like a dog.

You're like a dog and a kid.

It's funny how often people comment on smells in this game.

Yeah, they talk about smells a lot.

Like, they're like, Dusty, you stink.

Oh, man.

But that, there is also a moment where smell is referenced.

It's like late game.

That's

its own thing, too.

It's a, yeah, I don't know.

It's, it's such a...

What?

It's an, oh, no.

Yeah.

It's such a wild experience because it's just like it's

i feel like there's there's always something new and even the parts where i feel like the game was kind of like like chugging a little bit or was

you know

like i i was less engaged by it there's still always something that's just like oh wait this is something unique to this to this area

that is unique to this experience that makes it all feel like it's like none of this game feels like homogenous or samey it all feels like you're you're you're you're just like having these endless surprises.

Even just the existence of a super tall guy.

Man, I love that tall guy.

Like just like the fact that there, it's, it's like, there doesn't have to be a super tall guy, but it's, it's a game that embraces so many different creative instincts that when you're in an area where it does feel a little grindy, where it does feel a little samey, you'll still meet like

an enemy that's like, like a, and I don't have the words to describe, but it'll be like a fly that's trying hard is like the name of like your enemy or like

an ultra, like that a table that's concerned.

A stinky guy.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're still being, you're still being fed like new stuff constantly.

No, totally.

And then like you, the stuff that you then learn about the world of

of these games,

of this game in particular,

you then see somebody like the tall guy.

Is his name Letter Leader?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm looking at this guy.

I'm like, what's his lore?

Like, what's his, like, what's, why is he so tall?

And then I, I think I maybe do have a reason for why he's this way.

But that's not like what the game is about, even.

I almost am like.

I just, just to clear it, because I know there's people listening to this who haven't played this game.

This guy's tall as fuck.

You don't like, like, it's just like, he's not like, just like a little bit taller than a regular guy.

He's like four times taller than a regular guy.

He's, I mean, I think those far maybe five times.

He's like a giant.

He's like a Titan from Attack on Titan.

But he's like

long.

He's like a long boy, yeah.

He's a long guy.

He's a long, tall man.

It's like if Victor Wembanyama was 20 feet tall.

And I'm my size.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And there's nobody else like him.

Yeah, he's the only one.

So it's not like you're like, oh, there must be

a group of tall people and we'll meet their town later.

He's just one tall guy.

He's also old.

He's old and he's tall.

So I think I'll explain my theory to you off pod, I think.

Oh, okay.

I don't know if, because I don't know if it's worth bringing up, but I have a theory about what his lore is.

I know we're kind of all over the place here, but I do want to comment on the gameplay a little bit.

I did really like the JRPG combat.

I think it's like, yeah, things like the, yeah, I messed around a little bit with Earth Bomb, never really got deep into it, but I know that like the odometer spinning for your resource pools is like part of the the mechanic there like I think that is really fun in this.

It is really engaging, does add a little bit of tension to something that can feel kind of you know monotonous and turn-based.

I do really like the especially that the timed rhythmic presses for additional damage that you that you referenced, Heather, that are like tied to the tied to the different music themes for the enemies, but also that there's an element where if an enemy is asleep, it's easier to time.

Yeah, like that's really satisfying.

And also, just in general, I like it when a game like this has a combat system where status effects are actually useful.

And

like, you know, like, like, like, like

paralyzing an enemy with

staples or, or, you know, or just things like that, like the facing of the enemy matters when you start an encounter.

Like, they're just like these little bit of added layers to depth that like.

It's not the

most

revolutionary combat system that I played in an RPG, but it's, it's really satisfying and it has a good amount of depth.

I love so to sleep as a status that makes it easier for you to hear the beat of the music, which makes it easier for you to attack, is such a wild.

So, in all fucking RPGs, if the enemy is asleep, you get a good hit on him, right?

Yeah, this is a way where you are personally

making that hit and it is easier because he's asleep.

Right, right, right.

Yes, it does, yeah.

Like, like it's not that.

It's not your character doing doing extra, doing a critical hit because they're asleep and that wakes up.

Because the beat is easier.

It's so great.

It is cool.

I also liked, I liked the combat.

I liked, but like, I liked the combat, but the boss fights, I almost were like, I don't need to be doing this kind of.

Like, I'm enjoying walking around.

Yeah.

I'm enjoying fighting little guys.

It's good that there's a boss fight, I think, to break it up and stuff like that.

But oftentimes,

I would just kind of be like,

okay.

Like, because because we would just like, I mean, some of them are very memorable, of course, but some of them I'm sort of like, oh, well, let it maybe overstay their welcome a little bit.

Like, like giving the enemy too high of a health pool is part of where the challenge comes from, and it starts to be a little tedious.

Yeah.

And I also think this, this partly comes from coming from a

development lead who does not seem necessarily super interested by video game, like the video game part of video games.

So I think, I think that's maybe part of it.

But it's also part of the time that it came out.

Like 2006 is an era where RPGs were more challenging.

Yeah.

And

less like, oh, you know,

the whole reason Elden Ring and Dark Souls and Demon Souls all had that like PS3 era resurgence was because games had gotten soft.

Like Uncharted is not a hard game to play.

Yeah, I know.

I don't have to play it on easy or nothing like that.

And so and so like when you go back to playing a game like this from 2006, you're reminded that like, oh yeah, stuff used to be a little bit tougher.

Yeah, it's it's weird because though, because like

there's an element of challenge, sure, but I think it's also kind of like more just kind of grindy and time-consuming and

I think more unforgiving rather.

Because it's like

it's, I don't know, I don't know if it's necessarily like the, like, like the most testing of player skill as much as like kind of like testing your patience at times.

But again, these are relatively minor things.

And I think this is like.

It reminds me of Dragon Quest.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Where there's a lot of like, oh, part of the joy of this game is that you maybe you play 30 minutes or 40 minutes before you go to bed and and and and you only attack like five or six of the same dudes and then you go to sleep.

Like it's a it's like a bedtime game.

And I think Mother 3 also is a really great nighttime experience.

You get a little bit farther in the story, and I think that's a place where save states are so great in modern gaming for Mother 3 is that you can break down those chunks into a little bit more personal time.

I think that was like a

maybe the number one reason I was able to finish it when I did because I was just like, I was plowing through it and I was spending a lot of time with it.

But it was sort of like, if I was only able to just save when I could get to a save point and not even put it to sleep or something like that, I would have, it would have taken me a lot longer to do, I think.

Right.

But I do think, to go back to the save frogs, there's a lot of save frogs.

There are it does seem fairly forgiving from that standpoint.

They're everywhere.

Well, and that's okay.

There's one,

there was one frog in a place where I will say it was shocking to see one.

And then I talked to him just to see if I could talk to him.

And I could.

And he let me save my game there.

And then in the next room, there was also one.

should we i don't know if anyone else has any any general thoughts or if now's a good time for us to go deep into spoiler country and talk about the the end game um i will say just um from a character design standpoint i love all of the characters the way they look all the main characters of this story they're so unique and they're so like Flint's a cowboy.

That's really funny.

Like, it's cool that he wears a cowboy hat.

Lucas, obviously, a little boy.

Kumitora, extremely cool red hair.

Yes.

Bony, a dog.

Duster.

Duster has a lot of funny stuff happen to him.

He's in a band at one point.

It's very, very funny.

He's in a band and like, sort of like,

and he has a wig.

Kind of loses his memory.

Yeah, he has amnesia.

Yeah.

Which is very, very funny.

Also, he's just like an idiot.

He steals the wrong thing.

Yeah, he steals the wrong thing.

Salsa, extremely cute.

I just love all the character designs so, so much.

Yeah, the art direction is pristine and it takes full advantage of the hardware, the platform that it was released on.

And I also just really like the sort of a vivid palette which this game has.

Thank God it came out.

Well, I guess it didn't, but thank God it was developed for the Game Boy Advance.

Because it was because it's on I feel like Game Boy Advance games have aged so beautifully.

Yes.

And have aged in a way where like games from other generations before have not aged as well.

Well, yeah, Nintendo 64 games are very kind of milky.

There's like an in-betweenness to them, whereas Game Boy Advance feels like the pinnacle of that style.

Yeah, they'd already basically already perfected,

you know,

2D game design with the 16-bit era.

It's like we kind of reached the end point of what that could be.

And then when we have the Game Boy Advance, which is kind of like an extension of it, then things got to be even more refined, both from a gameplay standpoint and from

ar an art standpoint.

Yeah, you were the legend going back to the the guess the game we were playing earlier, that that Legend of Dragoon screenshot from the

first true 3D console generation.

You look at a game like that and it's just like, yeah, I do have some nostalgia for that sort of look, but it it it certainly is not aged as well as like a

game from the Game Boy Advance or even from the Super Nintendo.

Yeah, no way.

All right,

it's time.

We're going to get into spoiler country for Mother 3.

So we've talked peripherally about some of this stuff earlier.

If you don't want the end game spoiled, go ahead and jump ahead to the timestamp where we will get to our segment, where we'll get to our Ryu crew.

That timestamp will be inserted right here.

If you're on the free feed, the time code is 2 hours, 24 minutes, and 52 seconds.

If you're listening with ads, you can skip exactly 33 minutes from this point to get out of spoiler country.

As for everyone sticking with us, you've been warned.

Hold on to your hats and glasses.

We're getting into spoiler country.

Yeah.

Spoiler country.

All right.

Here we are.

I guess, I mean, where to start?

Should we just get into the end game?

Should we talk about, is there anything late game that we haven't gotten into yet as we're here in spoiler country?

I mean, there's like a couple like very specific late game things, like end of, near end of game things that I would like to get into.

Maybe the place, I could be wrong.

Maybe the place to start is the chapter six Sunflower Field.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good place.

That's great.

That's great.

So

non-spoiler country is snake rope.

Spoiler country is sunflower field.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everything before is snake rope.

Which, by the way.

Just to circle back to the rope snake real quick,

when he becomes like a bigger part of the story, he's like, hey, now I'm like part of it.

I'm like, that's really funny.

He was a functional item to traverse gaps.

And now he's like, by the way, I talk and now I'm like a big part of the story.

Very, very funny.

But yes, the sunflower field.

So it's just kind of Lucas is, you know, this is,

it's,

I mean, hey, Death Stranding 2 is coming up.

I think we got Death Stranding on the Brain, but Death Stranding is also divided into chapters that are of wildly varying duration.

Yes.

And it's an interesting pacing thing.

It's definitely the case here because this is like,

yeah, I think

easily the shortest chapter.

Oh, yeah.

It's pretty abrupt and it's kind of gameplay-like.

It is just kind of tonally,

you know,

Lucas, the being kind of in this liminal space of the sunflower field where he's seeing visions of his dead mom.

And I don't know.

It's just a...

it's just a it's just like an interesting sort of

just transitional sort of device, basically.

It's very different too because

you are sort of in the rest of the game,

it's a 2D game, but you sort of exist in, you know, like in a 2D, 3D sort of world, right?

Where you can traverse in many different directions.

More of an isometric perspective.

Correct.

And so in this, you're just going

side-scroller style through

this field, and you don't know what it is.

You're just kind of walking through it.

I realize I just use the word isometric and realize that people who are talking about the difference between Earthbound and Mother 3 might get a little pedantic because I think Earthbound is closer to isometric.

This is more like a top-down game if we're being technical, but

you get what I'm saying.

Because you're playing,

you're up here, your eyes are at the top, and you're looking down to the screen.

There are so few side-scrolling games that have a moment as beautiful as the Sunflower Field.

Absolutely.

And it's very simple.

Like, it's just artistically

honest and pure and well-executed.

And so you're just like, wow,

this is gorgeous.

Yeah, I think it made me the saddest I've ever been.

Like it was, it was brutal.

It was just like, oh, Jesus.

Yeah.

Cause like it, it's after a point

where,

like, because there's like a big boss fight before that,

and then you wake up in this field and you're just like, what the hell?

And then you see, yeah, your dead mom.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's, it's, it's a travesty.

It's, and then, like, sort of like from that, it's, it's sad throughout the game, but then, like, from that point on, it's just sort of like it doesn't get any better.

What I kind of like, I'm realizing part of what I like about this game, and part of my response to it, it just comes from being older and having endured more.

Yes.

It's just like,

it does sort of

explore how life is just kind of like a like punishing.

And it's just, it's just,

there's a series of

things that you encounter that aren't like obstacles to summit, but are just like things that forever alter the course of your life.

And then you just live in their aftermath.

And that's, that's just kind of what this game is

about so much of, is just dealing with grief.

And as a gameplay,

like as a tangible

manifestation of that theme, the end boss being

something that you just endure.

Right, right.

It's like a story, a story on a story about

here is grief, here is trauma, here are the things we've been through.

It is kind of relentless.

And then like the

apex moment, the climax of that idea is not throwing a punch and just having to take it is so fucking like clean and good and effective.

Yeah.

Like,

I had not read any spoilers about that final fight when I played the game.

And I went through a first a wave of confusion.

Yeah.

And then understanding.

And it was like,

it, it was like getting, it was, it was like getting somebody put a key in my hand and I didn't even know I was in a locked room you so you it's a it's a one-on-one fight with the

uh

like like your Lucas and the other party members are debilitated it's a one-on-one fight with the masked man who is the the kind of like you know the uh enforcer the Darth Vader if you will of of of porky

and who's the main who's the the the the emperor in this analogy and he's at at this point i he's at this point revealed to be klaus yes like in this fight yeah so so you're you're fighting your twin brother who disappeared earlier and has been you know recruited and the this the abilities that are inherent to lucas are being used for ill and you're fighting him one-on-one and you just get the message when you're trying to fight that like something is stopping you something is preventing lucas from attacking his brother and it's it's like it's a medium where obviously, the, the, the, the, with, with, with video games, you're in control

as the player.

And this game so effectively has moments where it wrenches control from you and where what you're dealing with is there circumstances that are completely out of your control.

Uh, it's really effective here.

Um, before we get into the final fight before, but like in depth, I also want to say I think this is pretty late game.

When you're hallucinating that you're in a

hot spring and then you stop hallucinating and it's just a puddle of fucking mud.

Yeah, but Bony won't get in.

He's like, that fucking stinks.

Yeah, it's very funny.

So fucking funny.

But in the hallucination, like he's like,

you're just like, it's like confusing why your dog is an intra into it.

Your dog doesn't get in.

Yeah.

Because yeah, you're hallucinating because you ate mushrooms that you found.

One of the things that I'm sure

has delayed the localization of this game.

Right.

But it's just so funny too, because like when you get in, typically when you get in the hot spring,

it heals you as we said.

But Boney doesn't get in.

So Boney doesn't get healed from when you guys go in the hot spring.

It's very, very funny.

That whole area, that area is scary.

Yeah.

Because you're having like a bad trip, kind of.

Because then you're seeing other characters that you've interacted with, and they're running at you, or like they're like following you and stuff.

And they say really scary things.

One thing I read about this, or maybe watched in someone's analysis of

this game, is that

this specific thing,

this sequence where you're hallucinating and you're encountering all your loved ones and they're saying horrible things to you is a specific like nightmare of Shigesato Itoi or a specific thing of just like,

like the worst thing that can possibly happen to you is someone you love telling you that they hate you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Can you believe that this game in all his interviews talks about how much darker the N64 version was?

Jesus.

And that that because of the length of time it took to develop the game he became a quote good person in that time and so he softened it up quite a bit but he's like the original ending which he i don't think is revealed was much darker that's crazy

god so so this uh this is all that's all happening i yeah the the ellucidation is happening in in chapter seven i believe and that's that where you're going you're kind of doing this this traverse this world traversal going to all these different things to find these seven needles yeah that's when you've gone, that's after the point where you've gone underwater and have

just been walking around underwater, having to kiss robotic mermaids to get air.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

I do think that is like part of the game, the part of the game where it does kind of feel a little bit meandery, but I also feel like that is just such a

JRPG convention.

I mean, you know,

a game of a similar era,

the GameCube

Paper Mario, which recently got remade, has like a late game, like world-traversing quest where you have to go.

That's just like it's really bogs down an otherwise really engaging game.

I don't think that's it's even that much of an issue in this one because I think that there's interesting stuff that's happening as you're progressing.

And then, yeah, and then we go to the

final chapter where you got the

face-off.

There's something I want to circle back to that I forgot to mention earlier.

There's different like vehicles that you can kind of ride sometimes in the game.

Like there's like a ship that you can

sort of like fast, you know, it's not fast travel because you are doing it, but it speeds you around the map faster than normal.

But at one point, you can just get on a table and the table sort of gallops like a horse and it clips, it clip-clops around.

That's really good.

That's funny.

That's really, really good.

Really good.

That's really good.

That's all.

So the ending of this game, after you

withstand these attacks by your brother,

you hear the voice of your mother who's compelling, he's begging you not to fight anymore, the two of you.

And I would say that the ending of this game is a cross between

the end of Evangelion and the Neverending Story.

Because your main character

is

faced with a, like,

are you going to rebuild the world or are you going to destroy it?

Power.

Very, very akin to Shinji getting the choice to rebuild the world or liquefy everything.

Yeah.

But shockingly, in this game,

you choose...

to destroy it.

Like, because you are, in theory, not a great person anymore.

Possibly?

because I don't know?

I mean, like, my reading of it is it's like intentionally sort of ambiguous.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and I don't know if that's necessarily what happens.

I almost wonder if it's like supposed to feel like a misdirect or that's supposed to feel like a possibility, but then also because you have this coda where you know you can

in the blackness sort of interact with all these

characters that you've experienced with previously and that also that

you get interacted with you as a player from the game's voice as well.

It's like, that to me makes me feel like, oh, that's not actually what happened.

We've just like sort of entered a new sort of realm of existence.

I don't know.

It's hard.

I think that even though the coda is positive, the ending before that is bleak.

Like,

it's not like, hey, we did it.

Like, you.

Everyone theoretically survived.

Yeah, but we're starting over kind of.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, and

also, like, I think there's maybe something to this is just a fallen world.

Like, that's sort of like, you know, you get to New Pork City.

You sort of see what, how everything has been

basically everything

has been completely scoured and

ruined and

the world has been amiserated.

And so maybe it does need to be destroyed to be rebuilt.

But like,

it's,

yeah, in that sense, I get what you're saying.

But there's also that.

There's the

big thing that Lucas is doing and the big world

altering choice.

And then that coexisting with the fate of Porky, who's the main bad guy who you don't actually kill because he's effectively cocoons himself in this

mechanical tomb that allows him to exist as he is, but he can never exit.

And so it's kind of of like

you've got this guy who's like, you know,

basically wants to build this capitalist dystopia that he can be atop of, but he wants to remain like completely static forever and would rather numb himself to all experiences

than ever confront like at like changing the way that he is.

And you've got that versus like another character, the player character who is basically perpetually having to be altered by the moment and ultimately having to alter the nature of the world itself.

I don't know.

It's just like, I really like that you have this, what's happening to Porky also, like, I feel like that also just doubly emphasizes what's happening with a player character in the end game.

This.

Did they make any sense there?

You made absolute sense.

I think we're all just kind of sitting in the space of the ending of the game and thinking about it.

What were you going to say, Matt?

I was going to say this game

fucked me up.

I

know you have a brother.

I only have brothers.

I have a twin brother.

This game fucked me up.

I was crying on the fucking airplane.

Like it was like this is like this.

Anything like brother stuff really just gets me.

Like Iron Claw, I was miserable.

It's a horrible, horrible story.

Obviously a true story.

Well, there was one extra brother that's not in the movie.

They didn't get it all right.

So I guess I couldn't have been as sad as I would have been if they had done it.

There's one more brother who dies in the real story that did not include in the movie.

Artistically, it's rude kind of too, because they're like, well, he died in the same way as the other one.

So we just combine them.

I'm like, that doesn't seem right.

But a great movie.

And Zach Efron's great in it.

You get to this climax.

You get to like, I'll be honest.

I was able to telegraph that Lucas was the masked man.

Yeah, yeah, it's not that, it's not that obvious.

It's pretty obvious,

it's obvious, it's obvious, but it's feeling kind of obvious by design, yeah.

And also, this is the other thing:

so, a lot of people who played this game, certainly in Japan, where you don't have to go through a bunch of steps to

have a localized version, but I mean, I don't know, in the U.S.

as well, I mean, I'm sure a lot of, or, or in English-speaking territories as well.

I'm sure a lot of people played this when they were very young.

It's it's like

because it's like kind of like an all-ages design that also deals with adult themes i i think like a thing like that is supposed to be there for kids yes because if you're if i'm a kid and i'm playing this i feel like a genius that i figured out who like the identity of the masked man before it's eventually revealed yes i think that's a really satisfying but yeah narrative thing figuring like just sort of not even figuring it out yeah knowing immediately that that was lucas sure uh

or klaus yeah i was like it doesn't that doesn't take away from the impact it has on the story.

Right.

You know what I mean?

So like,

just like the mom, like inner, interrupting the fight, you not being really able to fight.

You can, but you get,

it's not, you shouldn't.

Like, it's not, it's not helpful.

And then the mom also stops you from trying, too.

Um,

I thought it was just so beautiful and so just deeply sad.

Um, and just like, I like,

if I had played this game

even

five or six years ago when you gave it to me, I probably wouldn't have even been like as affected of it.

Like, I don't know, just that I'm a little older now.

Yeah, like,

I don't know, just like a different guy than when you gave it to me, which is like weird to think about too.

It just, like, it really, really got to me.

And not even like in a bad way.

I was like happy to be experiencing that because it was like such like a beautiful moment in a, like, a very in a game full of experiences um

and uh because of that i'd like to issue you a very sincere apology for taking this long to play oh

what a beautiful what a beautiful gift you've given us oh man well thank you it's all i didn't

i made the game i didn't make the game i just liked it

well as somebody with as pristine taste that you have, it shouldn't have taken us this long to get to it.

Yeah, I only had to win an impossible bag.

Yeah, I only had to guess that it would, that the Switch 2 would have came out on the 4th of July.

Don't be wrong.

I like that

it could pull its punch with what happens with Klaus.

And there could be a version of this where it's like, oh, hey, we're bros again.

You know what I mean?

Like, ah, whatever.

The spell's broken.

Hey, we're back together.

But instead, no, it's just like, no, I'm going to be with mom now.

And it's just like, it's just like, oh, no, this is another bit of heartache that you have to endure, both as a player and the character has to endure.

And he's just, again, I'm repeating myself, but he's going to have to live in the aftermath.

One of the most emotionally affective moments in the final fight for me is when it goes from being these massive damage attacks that you're constantly having to mitigate.

to

because think about what you're seeing on the screen.

You're seeing a stagnant image with

numbers at the bottom and a little icon and

like a sort of wavy background, but it's a static image of a dude.

And the numbers are moving slower.

Like he's attacking weaker, but all you're experiencing as a person looking at the game is the numbers are going down less.

Yeah.

And you know

what is happening.

And it is so powerful to be like, oh, I know that he's barely able to hit anymore, even though he's never visually struck anything.

Yes, it's a it's it communicates that very well also

not to go back too much like the

the juxtaposition between the fight with porky and the resolution of that

then straight into this yeah it's very it's

there's just a whiplash yeah because Porky's in like a big ball that he can't get out of and you can talk to like the guy there and he'll like push the ball around a little bit and it's like funny.

And then

this part is

there's i mean it's just it's brutal it's just it's it's all

just it's it's very emotional very sad yeah yeah and it's again i admit that's maybe what i was kind of trying to to to get at earlier is just like it's it's either like you can deal with with the with life's experiences or you can insulate yourself from them

and i cut the ball

yeah ball seems pretty good

No, but I mean, like, you look at these two characters, these characters' fates, it's like, that's a much worse fate.

Oh, yeah.

Being trapped

just by yourself for all of time, but yet, like, like, but you never have to worry about anything hurting you versus like, hey, I have to deal with this fucking horrible shit that, you know, because that's what life is.

Life is just a series of miseries that, you know, like whatever you just have to, you have to endure.

I don't know.

It's interesting.

It kind of makes you grapple with that.

Yeah, the freedom you would,

I would rather experience the freedom of

feeling misery than never feeling anything at all.

In the fucking ball.

I had enough.

I just, yeah,

I loved it.

And then when it, so like that hits you from an emotional standpoint.

And then when the screen goes black and then

the game starts talking to you, starts saying, hey, thanks for helping us.

Yeah.

And like, thanks for doing all that stuff, Matt Apodaka.

I put my full name

because I thought it would be funnier.

I was like, I don't know what this, when I put it in, I was like, I don't know what this is going to do.

Yeah.

But I think it'll be funnier because it has enough space.

I'm just going to put my full name.

So when it starts calling you by your full name, it felt very personal and very

It just like, I don't know.

Just not now.

We talked about Uncharted earlier.

It's like a game that's like not hard.

Uncharted would never do something like this.

Like the Last of Us would never do something.

Well, they would name you a character in the game and then kill you.

Yeah.

In front of your game's family.

I mean,

when Sam gave me a cake in Death Stranded,

I was a little bit like, huh.

I mean,

but just to just

any, any time...

Why it works so well in Mother 3 is that you've forgotten that this is an element.

Yes.

Like you, it's not like you, you keep being reminded of it throughout.

It's like suddenly a gut punch of like, oh, right.

It knows who I am.

Yeah.

Whereas like when you when you play these other games and they like ask you to put in your birthday in Animal Crossing or whatever, like it's it's like, oh, I know on my birthday something is going to happen inside of this game.

Right.

Yeah.

Whereas in Mother 3, you don't know.

Like

it could never happen.

I'm just going to, I'm about to sound like a big crybaby.

When it happened in Animal Crossing, I cried too but it was like my pandemic birthday like so all my friends were in my house different different vibe but um

so when it says your name and then it also says your name in the credits like you get which is crazy like that that's even a part of it um i just was like so

this is what i wanted to say i was gonna say i am old enough to remember uh nes games where the end credits would say and thanks to you the player of course yeah yeah i guess i i i'm also like i'm skipping the credits a lot of the time.

But

I sat on the on the airplane with the Game Boy Advance in my hands and just watched all of the credits and then saw all my guys against all my friends and just like with tears in my eyes, not like sobbing, but like just like experiencing the full heart of the game.

And I do think there is something to

like.

The intimacy of holding a game.

Yes.

Right.

We're like, it's one thing where like you're experiencing it on the TV and like that's like, there's something there too, because it's an active experience.

But the intimacy of

holding a Game Boy Advance in your hands, you're the only person that can see what you're experiencing.

Yeah.

But everybody can see you doing something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's just like a, I don't know.

It's just like right here, like kind of like, not that.

It's not.

It's not right there, but like it's just so close

to your brain and heart kind of that you're just sort sort of like, I don't know, it's more intimate than any other gaming experience you can have.

Well, you're holding the whole thing.

You're holding all of it.

That's like

when you're holding a PlayStation controller, there's an element over there and then the system's over there.

Yeah.

But like with a Game Boy Advance game, you're cradling a little thing.

Yes.

And so it does feel a little, I think that's a really astute observation.

Nick looks like he's going to laugh at the two of us.

No, I mean, I played Mother 3 on PC on Emulator, so fuck me, I guess.

No, like you get to experience it, but like, there's just like, I don't know, I, like, you also didn't cry, right?

So, like, I had this like very emotional experience.

With not to say that you did not, yours was just different than mine, but I was like, I was holding it like a little, little baby.

No,

I totally get that.

I like, I, hey, I loved my love the Game Boy Advance back in the day.

I loved my, my GBSP, it's like my favorite handheld I ever owned.

Did it scale to the 16 by nine?

Um,

what's the

big the wide monitor you got?

The ultra-wide

Lucas is over here, and Bony is all the way over here.

It's 32 by 9 is a rich shot.

That's absurd.

5120p.

I did.

So this is a deep, deep, deep, deep aside, real quick.

I recently saw the final reckoning on IMAX, and I got there a little early.

So they were showing normal commercials.

And they showed a

screen or they showed a commercial for Mario Kart World on the IMAX screen.

It took up the full IMAX screen.

I was already hyped for the Switch 2.

I was like, yeah,

I was so excited.

I think, so to talk about something that I touched on in what are you playing, and the emotional impact of reading your own name on a Game Boy Advance game.

Yeah.

I think we are in,

again, you guys haven't.

engaged with Darth Vader in Fortnite.

I think it's extremely dangerous territory for the amount of emotional manipulation you're going to be able to feel in a story that is mostly constructed,

but has you interacting with something that learns about you is going to be really, really, really weird.

Yeah, I that's you know,

it's toothpaste that's like out

of the tube, right?

I know, I know.

It's like it's it's it's gonna come for all things, but I do.

I was having a

polite argument with this old guy on vacation that I was talking to.

And he was like telling me about how he likes AI and stuff.

And I was just like, it got to a point where I did have to raise my voice a little bit.

Oh.

And I was like.

How did this happen?

How did this come up?

I was at like a

family friend sort of like gathering thing.

This one guy kind of cornered me and started talking.

So this is a relative or just...

This is not a relative.

It was like a friend of friends of a relative.

Okay, who was also at this event?

Yes.

And I was like, I hope this guy doesn't want to talk to me because I can overhear him talking about how much he prefers Grok.

And I was like, that's insane.

It's an insane take.

All of them are bad, but come on.

And so he was telling, he was talking to me.

He's like, what they can do now with like creating images and stuff like that and like in voices, it's like, we're going to maybe see like movies, like full movies like this.

And I was like, I can just guarantee you you'll never ever see a movie as good as, or anything.

You'll never see AI make something better than people making something.

That was the thing that I loved about this game.

You could tell people made this.

Yeah.

And like that it is like, it's a work of

people and

like coming together and like putting ideas together.

And like it's just this, this is a man-made

man as in human-made,

I don't know,

yeah, an individual with perspective and taste,

which is essential to any work of art.

I feel like, to use Mother 3 as a metaphor for what is happening, I feel like AI is the happy box.

Yes, absolutely.

Because it is designed to, I mean, often literally designed to be kind to you.

Yes.

But additionally to that, to make you feel like you have some agency over something that you did not actually craft

and ownership of that thing.

So

it's hitting so many different dopamine areas

that

of course, like,

and also, I will be the first fucking person to purchase a Sony robot that can talk to me.

Oh, I will be there on launch day.

I will hold its hand as we walk out of the store and I will kiss it on the forehead when it's time to go to bed.

Just to go back to Mother 3 and the end game, I think it is the thing of,

and I'll just say say it because we talked about other naughty dog games.

There's a lot of times the AAA approach towards game design is like you have these extraordinarily

well-rendered cutscenes

that are in between

levels of gameplay.

And

you reach the objective, you defeat the boss so that you can watch the next movie.

It's like that's your reward for gameplay.

I'm always more interested in games where the interactivity is more core

to the artistry of it.

And that's what it feels like with this game is like the

what's happening that final battle, what's happening when you're interacting with all the characters post-game

and just throughout, just like

your agency as a player, even though this is a fairly limited

or

fairly linear experience,

it is making the the interactivity a strength of the medium and it is making

its themes resonate more because of that element.

Well, it's interesting, too, because there's nothing else in the game like that fight.

Yeah.

So, like,

you kind of have to figure out kind of quickly that that's how the game wants you to behave.

Yeah.

Right.

Because, like, every other fight, you're going to go in swinging.

You're just like, all right, I'm going to go with my strongest, you know, home run or whatever I have.

I like to give give Bony bombs to throw because he's like

fast out.

Get a couple of bombs out there first.

Yeah, it makes sense to give him a bunch of items.

To give a dog a bomb, sure.

Yeah, why not?

But like with this and then just knowing that it's starting to, it's going slower than normal.

Your health is diminishing slower and you have more time to, or there's more advantageous times to fully heal yourself, like when your HP is lower so that then you kind of start the cycle over again and stuff like that.

I was just like, this is just the game doesn't necessarily tell you that you're going to have to play like this at all.

Right.

But like, because you've been playing the game and you've been seeing how the various systems of combat work, you can kind of work it out that, oh, this is going to be the best way to.

I was going to say attack this, but I guess not attack this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Should we rate this bad boy?

I give this eight joysticks out of 10.

That'd be so funny to be like, it's all right.

That's so funny.

Also, Joyce.

Sounding like

an AI prompt, make a video game podcast.

No, that's probably where.

I'll echo Matt's comments to you.

Either this was, you know,

we all had this bet.

We all had a game we were going to pick

and that we were going to have everyone play.

You picked this game.

It's the moments like this.

I'm grateful for the podcast and grateful for the both of you that I had this incentive to finally experience this and that I had

some friends to talk about it with.

So a really, really, really cool experience.

Guys, I kind of think the four of us in this room are all pretty one-to-one comps for the party.

Wait.

Am I the dog?

Explain.

No.

Heather's going to be Kumitora.

I'll be Lucas.

I'm the little boy.

Nick, you're Duster.

Sorry about it.

I sound the guy who smells bad.

And Ranch is the dog.

Because Ranch likes dogs.

And Ranch is the one I would trust with my Bahams.

I agree with you there.

All right, it's time for the U-play of our We Play U Play.

It's your review crew, the Ryu crew.

Ha Rokern.

Welcome back to all of you who skipped Spoiler Country.

We're going to be spoiler-free, unless there's any,

if there's maybe there might be some light spoilers in some of these comments.

One of the comments is just like, I can't believe Ronald Reagan was in this after we just spent an hour talking about it.

He didn't look like the other characters.

He looked like a human man.

Camp, I'm stuck in the game.

My wife was the blue job queen of Hollywood.

Isn't it funny that that's like a thing we know?

Nancy.

I know where I'm going with my time machine.

Put on a Bob Hope disguise.

They would make a disguise of a contemporary guy.

Well, I think of a historical period.

I guess that's true.

Yeah.

I would have the resources to take it with me.

Yeah.

And I have a time machine.

I could look like whoever I want.

I probably have the admission impossible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

I could quantum leap probably asked Bob Hope.

I'm going to do this.

Anyway, this first one is from Murder Donut.

I'm Murder Donut.

Also, Murder Donut.

Did we say?

These are all from discord.gg/slash get played.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Got to throw it out there against a good group of folks.

Yeah, our larger party.

Huh.

Wow.

They're in the reserve.

They're in the

swap out.

Yeah.

They're the Suicoden version of the party.

Yeah.

108 different.

This first one's from Murder Donut.

And Murder Donut writes, loved it, but I'm sure I'll be confused character-wise when you guys start talking about the story since I renamed my characters Jiznut, Dildo, Ask Kitty, and Banana, to name a few.

Jesus Christ.

I'm a grown man in my 40s, and I did this last month.

Do better, Murder Donut.

I actually, maybe talked about this before, but Final Fantasy 4, when I played that in Super Nintendo,

localized as 2 in the US.

There was one other kid at school who had, it was playing,

this was not an era where RPGs were at all of a mainstream genre.

So there was one other kid at school who was also playing this game, and we talked to about it, but he'd renamed all the characters.

So it was just like we were always trying to figure out what the fuck we were talking about.

That's so funny.

Imagine then it's just like normal names.

We're like, well, wait, who's Charlie?

Like, what are you talking about?

Yeah,

it was literally that.

Like, I'd be talking about Kane the dragoon.

He'd be like, oh, you mean Craig?

Craig.

This next one's from Zach.

Hi, Zach.

What's up, Zach?

Zach, right?

And that's indicating here that Zach's new to the Discord.

Oh, hi, Zach.

Welcome to the, welcome to the show.

The show.

It has one of the best save points in all of gaming.

Beep, beep, frog emoji.

The frog in the car is like his top tier.

Yeah.

Of all the ones, of all the different.

Okay, so I'll say, oh, we out of spoiler country.

Oh,

do you need to re-enter spoiler country?

Nah, it's okay.

Okay.

It was the thing that you wanted to remember to say.

Say it won't bleep it.

Okay, Ranch bleeped it.

When they're in the

when all the

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of the

you can

yeah.

okay.

That's enough.

I cursed a lot.

I swore, I said a lot.

It's a lot of the worst words.

I was going crazy in here.

This next one's from.

Oh my God.

I spoiled again.

A second spill has hit the show.

So fast.

Man, that was so fast.

I just knew one day I'd have to.

My God.

How did I do that?

How did you do that?

You're you.

We have it on tape.

In one of the ones, in one of the, in the clip one that we did where you spilled, you were just kind of like fucking with the cup a little too long.

You're like, you're like, I'm going to get to you someday, give it a little pet.

And then you knock it over.

Just pick it up.

That was not this.

This I just like, I kind of like, I feel like I blunt forced it.

I just sort of knocked it over.

I'm going to get you one of those baby tables.

I'd love one.

Yeah, kind of me too.

That sounds great.

Put all your stuff there.

Bibbet a bonnet, too.

You make a mess, who cares?

Can I just wipe it off?

I think we just need to make the cup so wide that he can't.

So here's my pitch.

No, that's too much liquid.

Here's no, no, no, no, no.

Here's my pitch.

This guy, bowl.

You, you, you take the can and you put it into a cozy that has a plate this big.

So the cup is in the dead center of the plate because then it can't.

Yeah, but then he's going to chop one end on accident.

It's going to send the drinks flying.

You have to see that happening.

Yeah.

Sorry, where were we when I spilled?

Do we read the comment yet?

No.

Maybe it's got legs and it's a full table.

You need the walking table

from the game.

You just need a camel back.

You're done with cups.

Man.

I get the water bottle.

This has a cap on it.

You spilled that.

Well, yeah.

You need a camel back.

You should just try it for two weeks.

I don't think I could be a camelback guy.

Yeah.

It's a different sort of guy.

You You get two.

You can put fun drink in one, like, I don't know, what, bottle of wine or something?

And then water in the other.

You can't be a camelback alcoholic.

Or maybe that's what you need.

Maybe you just need one of those hats with the foam bones, and then you just get a little straw.

Because he's at some point going to turn his head all the way down, upside down, to look at the bottom of his shoe or something.

That's his shoe.

Yeah, that's what he's going to do, bending halfway over.

Okay.

Let's read the comment, please.

I'm just piling on.

You know how it is.

You get going.

Like, what else can I say?

The singing chemist writes, earthbound slash mother two.

So mother one

is earthbound beginnings, but it's called mother.

Yeah.

It's mother.

Mother two is earthbound.

Okay.

And mother three is mother three.

Maybe they just didn't know what to call the second, the third one.

Well, can you have a different name for it?

They could go earthbound two.

Imagine like

humans in America buying a game called Mother.

Yeah.

Nobody would have done it.

No.

Not when Call of Duty exists.

Yeah.

But it was just called Mother 2 in Japan, right?

Yeah, it's Mother, Mother 2, and Mother 3.

The Singing Chemist writes, Earthbound slash Mother 2 is my uncontested favorite game of all time.

Wow.

Mother 3 is a better game by pretty much every metric.

Wow.

That's huge.

Yeah.

So if Mother 2 is your favorite.

Wow.

Wow.

But why is Mother 3 not your favorite then?

I think, isn't that what they're saying?

I think they're maybe saying that I have a personal fondness for this one.

We all kind of have that level of

fandom sometimes.

It's just like, I know objectively that this is better, but I just happen to like this one right now.

Yes, good content.

I think that's what's happening.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm going to have to check out Mother.

I'll check out

Earthbound in 10 years probably.

See what's going on there.

You can borrow my $10,000 cartridge or whatever the fuck it costs now.

This did make me want to really dig in on Earthbound.

I was like, ah, because there is some Earthbound lore that ends up being a part.

Not in Spoiler Country, but in Mother 3 ends up being revealed.

I was like, ah, fuck.

I kind of wish I was more up-to-date on this.

Oh, no.

We didn't fucking talk about Mr.

Saturn.

Nope.

Wait till we touch it.

Did we talk about it?

I guess I'd mentioned that I'd seen him before.

Yeah.

But let me just talk about him for a second.

Okay.

He's like a head.

He's just like a head guy.

Yeah, he's a head guy.

We got like a big round nose, and he talks funny.

Yeah, he's head.

He's good.

He's in Super Smash Brothers as like an item,

and he's like basically useless.

He just sort of like doesn't do anything.

And so I'm like, okay, so

let's find out what Mr.

Saturn's all about.

And then he's like, oh, yeah, he's just kind of like

hanging out.

But like, the best they'll do is like, one, he polishes that thing for you.

Two

kind of just stacks up.

Yeah.

Gets five more of them.

Yeah.

And they're all Mr.

Saturn.

Yeah.

I love it.

Oh, Tay Ball, Tayball Calm.

Tayball Com writes.

Tay Balcom?

Tay Ball Com

writes.

I played through Mother 3 last year in the midst of a year-long JRPG kick I was on.

Simply one of the most memorable video games I have ever played.

Bald at the end.

Never in a million years would I have been able to beat it without a guide.

Now that's interesting to bring up.

I bought this after finishing the game.

Yep.

I bought it in the middle of playing it.

And then it arrived after.

And then it arrived after I had finished it.

Matt is holding up a hardcover book.

I'm calling him.

What the fuck?

I'm going to call him after this.

I think you got to put him down.

We'll cut that.

We got to put him down.

It's over.

You got to say, you got to say.

I'm not saying all this again.

What?

Oh, so we're not cutting it.

I don't know.

Matt is holding up a hardcover book.

I'm holding up a hardcover book.

Who?

It's normal to make a mistake with people you talk about and speak to constantly.

It's a hardcover Mother 3 handbook made by Fangamer, and I believe the localizer, Starnet,

I believe,

assisted on this as well.

And it's just like a lovingly done

guide of the entire game.

Talks about the enemies and stuff.

We didn't even talk about the Clayman.

Nope.

I love the Clayman.

Yep.

And just like all the items and different characters and just like the maps of the game, the item guy,

everything.

I love the item guy.

And there's like really nicely done

like clay renderings of the characters.

Like the old Nintendo Power

sculptures before you could do CG renderings.

It's like you would sculpt the little guy out of clay.

And it's in this guidebook.

Yeah.

So I have this now

for if and when I ever want to play through it again.

I also bought the Lucas Amiibo because I was like, I have to have a little representation of my guy on my shelf.

Yeah.

I love him.

Yeah.

I put it on my shelf, and my wife goes, who is that little boy?

It's funny that you can go to like Best Buy and buy a Lucas amiibo, but you can't play the fucking game.

It's crazy.

It's absolutely insane.

Wow.

He's so cute.

I love him.

He is very cute.

This next one

is from Tycho Kepler.

And Tycho Kepler writes: I played Mother 3 reading a translation guide just line for line, which was just an absolutely insane way to do it, but it was still an intensely emotional experience.

That's wild.

Holy shit.

Crazy.

That's intense.

Tycho.

That's incredible.

I wonder if that predated the fan translation or if that was just a, you know.

A personal goal?

Yeah, exactly.

I wonder.

Very, very clear.

That's amazing.

Domenius writes, honestly, just want to say thank you because this inspired me to finally play it after being on the backlog for 10 plus years.

Great music from a GBA and

a really interesting approach to breaking down the story.

I wasn't expecting to control the folks you do early on in the chapters.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Really, really great.

Green Tea Duck writes, I assume Matt will get a tattoo of Frog Car.

Now, look,

it's a pretty good idea, and I wasn't thinking about it until you mentioned it.

We'll see.

Geosan312 writes, I'm about halfway through this epic of a game.

It's an emotional roller coaster.

The Neon Genesis Evangelion of Game Boy Advanced games.

I absolutely love it.

Crazy to think that Nintendo hasn't released this outside of Japan.

Can't wait to finish it.

I hope you do get to finish it because it's just an all-it's an absolute all-timer.

Yeah.

And finally, Fierce Deity, Fierce Deity Bort writes, all caps.

Thank you, Heather, for winning the prediction pool.

Putting off, I was, I put off playing this game for way too long.

Nintendo had this on Nintendo 64 as planned.

I wonder if PlayStation would have been the undisputed RPG machine of that generation as we see it now, particularly when you could compare this to Final Fantasy VII.

Because it would have come out probably around the same time if it was on Nintendo 64.

If they'd managed to put this entire game on Nintendo 64,

I don't, like, I can't even imagine what that would be like because it's so, so much of the the charm of it is also the sprite work.

Right, it certainly wouldn't have aged as well visually.

I mean, you could see a lot of footage of the Nintendo 64 version of it, it seemed to be pretty deep in development.

But, um, yeah, I don't know.

I don't, I, I, I wonder if it would have tilted the balance of

power at all in that generation.

I probably would have been too niche to have much of an effect outside of a Japanese.

The hierarchy of power in the RPG universe was about to to change.

And that's it for the Ryu crew, the Ryu crew.

Gosh, we've been talking for so long that the words are starting to not fall out of my mouth appropriately.

I'm sorry to hear it.

But you know what?

Your friends are all here.

That's right.

Everybody's here.

They're all here.

And thank you, Matt, for all you've done.

Don't make me cry, bro.

That's this week's Get Play.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen, Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.

Our music is by Ben Prunty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

And hey, our merch is available at kinshipgoods.com.

You can find the link in the show description.

Also, check out Get Animate, our sister show, over on Patreon.

Matt, what are we watching this week?

We're back on Gurn Lagan, baby.

Animehem is over.

It's done and dusted.

We watched some pretty crazy shows: Lazarus, Birdie Wing, Horimia, and Accuba Made War, which was insane.

Absolutely insane.

If you have not seen any anime ever, put it on immediately.

It's nuts.

But we're back, we're back in Gern Lagan and

we're gonna

tarry forward and just and

finish it.

Yeah, we're gonna pierce the heavens of the show.

That's right.

Check that out over on patreon.com/slash get played.

And hey, you out there,

you got played.

That's right, Stephen.

Stephen drives his car off the interstate.

That was a head gun podcast.