The Game Was Better: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

All right, Final Fantasy movie.

This is such an exciting opportunity.

You know, we're huge fans of the game and just to bring that to the big screen.

Yeah, coming off of Final Fantasy VII, eight, and nine, this is gonna be, this is gonna be genuine.

Yeah, and I think, you know, we'll touch on these like major, major hallmarks of the genre, hallmarks of the games.

Like, we'll pack this movie full of the things that the fans love about Final Fantasy.

And it'll it'll also work as a gateway to introduce new people, like cinema audiences, to the worlds and concepts and tropes of Final Fantasy games.

And, you know, I'm just, I'm not a gamer, right?

I don't really know the world of video games.

I'm just an executive, right?

So why don't you guys tell me what things you want in the movie from the game?

Cool.

And, you know, I'll see what we can make happen.

Cool.

I think a Final Fantasy, I think a one-word, airship.

We got to have an airship in this bad boy.

Okay,

fair.

You know, like you got to change, you got to bend some rules.

You got to break some rules in order to...

Okay, how about

one of the hallmarks of Final Fantasy is these

birds that people ride called chocobos.

And I think that if we have our characters riding chocobos in this movie,

then we're guaranteed box office success.

No.

Okay, well, hey, here's a smaller thing:

a healing item that's always in these games is a potion.

So, you know, we could have a character just swigging a potion, kind of a little,

okay.

All right, how about, how about if you take magic systems, right?

No, they have this.

Well,

okay, but like it could be a magic system that has some technological basis like materia, you know?

No.

Okay.

What about what, okay, what if you,

what if there's like degrees of magic system like Blizzara, Blizzaga, like you, like you increasing magic systems, like that, that show off like power levels of the characters?

No, okay.

Um, I changed my mind about Chocobo's.

You could put it on a t-shirt.

Oh, okay.

Oh, hey, and hey, if we're open to chocobos, maybe we're open to the other iconic character that is present in all these games, the Moogle.

What about, what about, I mean, most of the games have swords.

No.

How about at least, you know, one thing I think we have to have in this movie is the music, the iconic score of Nobuo Uematsu.

I mean, that just adds so much texture to the film.

And then that's just like such a key part of the property.

It's like John Williams' score in Star Wars.

Like,

it's locked in with Final Fantasy.

We got to get...

We're going to have Oematsu for sure.

No.

All right.

Can we at least...

Can we at least take a picture of our main character in like a sexy bikini and put it in

like a near pornomeg.

Well, yeah, no, you could do you could absolutely do that.

Absolutely, absolutely that's a no-brainer.

We should be doing that for every film, as far as I'm concerned.

All right, then, how about a character named Sid?

All right, I'll give you one.

I'll give you one.

All right, so Sid, C I D

Sid.

No,

We shoot invisible phantoms and maintain the same facial expressions as we discuss 2001 box office bomb Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, this week on Get Played.

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.

Oh, you know that's me, Nick Weiger.

And I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Oh, you know that's me.

And hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Get Played, the premier video game podcast, where we're talking about all sorts of video game and video game-adjacent

stuff right here on the show that you chose to listen to with your own human ears.

Humans only.

I don't want any other beings listening to this dang thing, all right?

No aliens, no cryptids of any kind, and particularly no phantoms.

Calm down, Ashley, from Mass Effect.

Famously xenophobic.

I disagree.

If you're an alien, If you're an alien, go ahead and listen.

Because I would be terrified if this, if you heard that and you were like, well,

time to invade.

You might listen to this and be like, you know what?

We got to end this human race.

Well, hopefully they don't end it before this month's We Play You Play, where we talk about one game at length.

That game is going to be Final Fantasy 16, and that episode is coming out on Monday, July 31st.

So if you want to play along with us, we are going to talk about it extensively.

And maybe you already are playing along.

We'll hear your thoughts then as well.

That's right.

Oh, boy.

They're going to hear some thoughts.

They sure are.

We got them.

We got some chunky thoughts.

I got a couple little marbles rattling around in this old noggin of mine.

I got to put some serious time into that game in the next couple of weeks.

I think

I've been pretty thin.

I've been playing.

I've been playing, but I've been a little thin on how much time I'm truly dedicating to it.

And I think I just got to hunker down on a rainy day here in Amsterdam and play the fuck out of Final Fantasy 16.

I think, I think you can.

I think you can do it.

I just need it to be a rainy day.

Weather uncharacteristically sunny here in Amsterdam.

And it has been

a little

weird.

I came here thinking it would be rainy.

I understand that it's always sunny in Philadelphia.

I didn't know the same applied to Amsterdam.

Well, you know, especially because Shirley Manson was going to vacation there.

Oh, boy.

And so she's probably beside herself.

Thank you very much.

This has been Get Played.

You can follow us online at Get Played Pod

or.

I see an alien outside my window pointing a gun at me.

Not even an alien gun, a human gun.

That's a really funny, like, if this was like 1998 and you wanted to do like a parody movie, like one of those little grays coming into your room and then pulling a regular gun on you is pretty funny.

Like, yeah, if we could find a way to go back and put that in Scary Movie 2.

Yeah, yeah.

You could do like an X-Files parody in, in like 1998.

Yeah.

And that could be the thing that happens to like,

you know, what would they call Fox Mulder?

They'd probably call him like

Dog Holder.

Yeah, dog holder is really good.

So man, that's really good.

That's really good.

And he's, he's like, he's played by like,

well, Charlie Sheen's in those movies, so that's like not that funny.

It'll still be Charlie Sheen.

It could still be Charlie Sheen.

Yeah, he'll be dog holder.

And

his partner will be Scully, but she'll just be bones.

She'll just be a skeleton um

man it's good what what is the topic

the topic this week if you're if you're like tuning in for the show and you're like what are they going to talk about we've got i've got we've got a chunky talk today a real a real crunchy talk about one of history's most interesting cinematic bombs uh we'll be talking about Final Fantasy, the spirits within.

But before we talk about that, we always talk talk about other shit.

And sometimes we do it like this, where we're just like chit-chatting and we're doing like a little beep-bopping and we talk about little here's and there's we're just riffing.

We're just riffing.

Telling stories about the road,

talking about great sets we've done.

Yeah.

There's been interesting video game news.

There was.

Are we going to talk about the Sega thing?

I think we should a little bit.

Yeah, this may be, you know, this will be probably about a week old when this episode comes out, but this, I'll read the headline from xputer.com.

A huge classified 272-page Sega document leaks online revealing a gold mine of details.

And basically, it just quietly showed up on the site Sega Retro as just a PDF called Sega FYI 1997 brand reviewus.pdf.

And within it, it's just like,

you know, it's just got so many like diagrams and breakdowns of budgets

and, you know, just like just technical details

about just

the mega drive and then the upcoming Saturn launch.

There's like

there's like storyboards for a Saturn commercial that I don't know if that ever aired, you know, things like that.

It's just, it's, it's really interesting.

What, what's part of what's interesting about it is learning that

Sega was losing, losing money on all of their hardware

and that the margin for retail was

so thin.

6%

thin.

The retailers made $15 per unit of Saturn hardware sold.

So basically, it is

a financial burden on the parent company.

And then there's very little financial incentive for the retailer to push Sega systems,

right?

Which is kind of maintained, I feel like.

It's why when you go to GameStop or when you pre-order a console, they want to bundle it with a bunch of software and accessories because the actual margins on the hardware are pretty thin.

Yes.

I remember when I worked at Electronics Boutique back in

my childhood.

It's really funny to think that I was working at a, like I was a child laborer.

Sure.

Right.

Working at a retail shop selling video games at Electronics Boutique.

And yeah, it was,

they, when they would have these like onboardings, they'd be like, systems are great, but selling systems hurts us.

So you have to try and sell games with those systems.

Even better, try and sell that two-year insurance policy.

Nobody ever cashes it in.

And it's just helps increase the margins on selling these systems,

which are, which are damaging.

And you would get people who'd come in, and it was almost like they knew, because they'd come in and they'd be like, Yeah, I want a system.

And you'd be like, Okay,

would you be interested in a game for that?

Because it doesn't come with a packed in game.

And they'd be like, No.

And you'd be like, Okay, well, you know, sometimes systems break.

And what if you, you, you don't want to buy a whole new one?

So why don't you get an insurance policy for that?

It's only 15.

No.

What about a magazine?

Yeah.

You like magazines?

No.

You'd be like, you're just buying a raw system.

It's like somebody going into a Wiener Schnitzel and being like, I want a hot dog on a plate.

Hey, again, talking about chain restaurants.

That's why they want you to buy the combo.

The sandwich or the whatever the main is is the least profitable item.

They make a lot more money on the sides and especially the drinks.

This is a quote that was from this article that XPuter pulled.

I like this one one because of the hubris.

This is from the CEO of Seg of America, Tom Kalinske.

Quote, we are killing Sony.

In every store, Saturn hardware is sold out and there are stacks of PlayStation.

The retailers commented that they can't compare the true sales rate because Saturn sells out before they can measure accurately.

Wish I could get all our staff, salespeople, retailers, analysts, media, et cetera, to see and understand what's happening in Japan.

They would then understand why we will win here in the U.S.

eventually.

eventually.

Well, what's crazy about that quote, right, is that it's true.

In Japan, the Saturn fucking ruled.

It took a long time for the PlayStation brand to become established.

And like, also, 2D games, which were a forte of the Saturn, were still very largely popular in Japan at the time.

Also, it had that six-button controller for fighting games.

It was, it was, it was the system to beat.

Sega was an established brand.

So if you went to Japan and were like, holy shit, the Saturn is fucking ruling here.

Yeah.

Of course you'd come back to the States and be like, why aren't people buying more copies of Bug?

It has the best version of Castlevania Sympathy of the Night.

I don't get it.

I think that, yes, but also if you're the CEO of Sega of America, you should have some understanding that these are different markets

with different needs.

And so, yeah, I don't know.

From that standpoint, it's a very Trumpian sort of quote.

But it's a,

I mean, hey, look, I didn't have a Saturn.

It was a one-one system that generation I didn't have, but the, but I did, it is, it was a cool piece of hardware in retrospect.

It's, it's, I, I wish, and I wish 2D Gaming hadn't like kind of had its era where it just kind of disappeared.

Did you guys get to the part in the document where it said that Dr.

Eggman was responsible for Yuji Naka's crimes and he's just a fall guy?

Yeah, they were really looking ahead there.

Yeah.

I think one of the most confounding, because I, you know, I flipped through this giant document, it's huge, and I didn't get through to the end, but there is.

You didn't see that part.

No, I did not.

There is a screenshot of a file that is labeled brand strategy

or a photo of this file labeled brand strategy, and there's a post-it note on this

file from somebody who worked at Sega.

And the post-it note reads,

screw technology, what is a bootleg?

And like,

to me, incredible, to me, that's like, okay, so

somebody in this meeting or something was like, we have a bootleg problem.

And

somebody took a note that was, what is bootleg?

I did scroll to, by the way, just you talked about you didn't get to the end of it.

I did scroll all the way to the bottom of the document just to see.

And actually, what ends with the document ends with a whole string of emails,

including some of the

from Tom Kalinske himself.

This one is, this is the final thing on the final page.

And this is just interesting as a timestamp.

This is from Bradford Carey to uh kalinsky tom cce yamamoto yutaka uh subject internet online service dated sunday march 17th 1996.

i received your memo asking when we would be able to access offer access to online services from the saturn internet browser According to both CompuServe and AOL, we could not access their conventional proprietary content services without significant changes to their technology.

As such, they don't see a solution to offering their existing content through the Saturn.

The articles you attached that discuss the AOL and CompuServe agreements with Microsoft and Netscape refer to AOL and CIS willingness to give their subscribers the option to view through the MS or Netscape browsers instead of the proprietary browsers AOL and CIS have created.

My understanding is that these deals do not provide a new interface to the AOL or CIS content.

Let me know if you have additional questions.

So wasn't Sega was the first, like they were like very much the

sort of pathfinding,

you know, trailblazing

internet company from a, from a console standpoint.

Like the Dreamcast was like really out far ahead of its time in terms of internet hardware.

Yep.

And they had, what was their, their on, what was their service you could stream games on?

Their Genesis service or Mega Drive Era service.

Remember that?

What was it called?

What was it called?

Oh, no, I should know this.

Oh, no, I don't know it.

It was something like Sega Remote Arcade, but it wasn't that.

But it was like they had, they had a service like that, too.

But it just like they were so far ahead that no one was ready for it.

It was like fucking Steve Jobs with the original Macintosh.

It was just like, you know, that the, it wasn't quite scalable and the market wasn't quite ready for it.

But it is interesting to see in the mid-90s, they were already talking about getting browsers onto consoles.

Yep.

I, I also like, there's a, there's a document that lists

strategy for like pushing Saturn and like pushing the brand.

And it's like, drive Saturn in this software strategies 96, 97.

There's a document that says drive Saturn hardware with exclusive arcade and Sega character titles, parentheses, Knights, Sonic, Fighting Vipers, Virtual On, and Virtual Cop 2.

Now, when I look at that list, I'm like, holy fuck, like Saturn hanging its

hanging its necktie on Knights, which was like an unproven,

very weird title.

Right.

And then Fighting Vipers, which I played the fuck out of, but I don't think,

I can't imagine, Nick, that you even know what Fighting Vipers is.

No, I remember Fighting Vipers.

Oh, wow, look at that.

But it wasn't like, it wasn't like a top tier, like, you know, it wasn't like Virtua Fighter.

Virtua On was not top tier.

Virtua On.

Those are cool.

Those are cool cabinets, though.

Yeah.

And then it also lists Sonic, which historically, famously, did not come out on the Saturn.

Right.

They must have had plans for it at some point.

Yeah.

And then we just like, yeah, it's a, it's, they, they had like a, you know, they never, they were, they were, they were thinking ahead of,

uh, they were ahead of the game in some ways, but then like hopelessly behind the times in other ways.

Like, well, first off, like you're saying, how they're committing more to 2D and kind of throwing, I was like, oh, yeah, we should have some 3D hardware in here as well.

Uh, and then also like so leaning so heavily on arcade ports at a time and fighting games at a time when both were kind of falling out of fashion.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's fascinating company.

Super interesting,

super

bizarre.

Can I also

share the

Saturn 1997 marketing calendar and their brand partnerships?

Please.

Foot Locker.

Coke and NASCAR slash Daytona, you know, for Daytona, Cherry Coke, Lollapalooza, Arena Interactive,

the

All-Star game,

Knights, Weedies,

which

was there a fucking Weedies box with Knights on it?

Did that come out?

It's a collector's item.

Foot Locker, Fox TV, Taco Bell, the Macy's Day Balloon, and then

KFC/slash bug

because bug

bug was going to be a big game.

It's not a good game.

Also, that's like, I don't think you want the word bug on your fast food brand.

No.

Man, so many of them list Sonic 3D or 3D Sonic or big Sonic games coming up, and none of that shit ever materialized.

Yeah.

I mean, what, what must that, like, because none of that conversation is in this document.

And there must have been like a fucking panic when they were like, oh, no,

Sonic Extreme isn't happening.

It's not working.

What's going to happen?

We're not going to have Sonic.

Yeah, I wonder.

Cause also at what point in the

life cycle did they really know they were cooked?

Yeah.

What at what point did they know they were coming in third and they were like, oh, well, Sonic's not going to save us.

It's wild.

I wonder wonder if they came in third, all territories included.

I guess we should have looked that up.

I guess we could look that up.

Should we look that up?

We could.

International

system

video.

I mean, this is a weird podcast.

Why would anybody listen to me Google?

No, no, no.

Look it up.

No, people love that shit.

Oof.

This looks bad.

This is bad.

Woof.

All right.

PlayStation, 102 million.

N64,

32.9 million.

Sega Saturn,

9.26 million.

Jesus.

Not ideal.

Really, really not ideal.

Oof.

I'm trying to remember who developed their sports games of the era because obviously in the Dreamcast,

once they got team,

they had 2K, you know, the 2K sports line was one of the few things that

at all

gave a life vest to

the Dreamcast.

But this predated that.

So I can't remember who made what their NFL and NBA series were back then.

Okay, their NFL series was just called NFL.

And then the year.

So NFL 97, and it was a Sega game.

It was a Sega first-party game, and it followed up

the Joe Montana football series, which was the license for the Sega Genesis slash Mega Drive.

I guess just the Genesis.

It probably didn't release in other territories.

Why would it?

Oh, man.

Tom Hamm elaborated in GameSpot about NFL 97.

For example, it's hard to distinguish who the receiver is, and the quarterback takes too long to hand the ball off.

Even executing a kickoff was painful.

With so many serious flaws, the game's just no fun to play.

It hurts to play NFL 97.

It hurts.

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All right.

We could live in the past all day.

We could talk about 1997

until we're blue in the face.

But we should talk about the present.

We should live in the now.

That was, what, 26 years ago?

Get over it.

Get over it.

Get over it.

And let's talk about

what are you playing?

What are you playing, surprise?

Wow.

Holy shit.

Holy fucking shit.

Blindsided by the Resident Evil merchant.

What are you playing?

A jump scare.

I like to think of my life as a series of jump scares.

Oh my God.

How are you, man?

It's been a minute.

Yeah, it's been a minute.

I've got a job.

Nice.

And

I've got a small apartment in Pasadena.

Oh, lovely part of town.

I love Pasadena.

Great, great neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I live above a movie theater.

Oh, cool.

You know, that sounds convenient if you like to go to the cinema.

I imagine sometimes with that bass is rumbling, it could be a little bit tricky with the riding.

Yeah.

Loud.

Yeah, very loud.

John Wick movie in theaters.

You're probably having a tough night's sleep.

Yeah, man, that guy could shoot.

He can't,

what, what?

Oh, just as yeah,

he can he can shoot really well.

One of his many skills.

What do you think of LeBron James?

I don't play basketball despite my height.

Yeah, you are sticky tall.

I am.

I'm so tall.

Do you know the doctor frown?

One of my legs has two knees.

Bizarre.

Like the Brachiosaurus has a heart in its neck.

Yeah.

And a heart in its chest.

In the same way, one of my legs has two knees.

That's a, I mean, look, that's that sort of thing that would put you on an old-time freak show back in the day, but thankfully we're past those times.

Yeah, you're like a marionette puppet.

Yeah, yeah.

How have you guys been?

I'm doing okay.

Yeah.

You know, I feel like I've been getting over an illness for a while now, but beyond that, i'm doing all right me too la plaga

well hopefully it's not la plaga in my case yeah yeah yeah i think it's just a viral infection but if if i got you sick

when we were in the booth together

my lawyers have said i'm fine you can't do anything about it

you're okay i mean i guess you can't probably prosecute someone for getting somebody for getting you sick unless it's done intentionally.

And it seems like you're saying it would have been inadvertent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean, if you have,

if we're ever back in the studio, I know we're doing remote these days, but if we're ever back in the studio

and you have Laplaga, please just don't come in.

We can zoom you in.

Yeah, you don't have to surprise us with Laplaga.

Yeah.

I found a way to get over Laplaga is to hotbox yourself with your own virus.

I mean, this sounds like an Ivermectin sort of thing.

Like, this probably isn't supported by medical science.

It's just your own.

You're just scatting up your own theory.

How could, how could, how could, you know,

a small dose of the disease be the cure?

You know what I mean?

There you go.

Yeah, I don't know.

Anyway, how about you, Matt?

Ah, you know,

general state of ennui, but otherwise, all right.

Of course.

Well, Matt,

Matt, how about I ask you a question?

What are you playing?

Oh, fuck.

That's it feels good.

That's why we pay him.

That's why we keep him on staff.

Yeah.

For those of you that don't know,

the Resident Evil 4 merchant is on retainer, baby.

He's on salary.

Whether he shows up or not, we're paying him.

So

that was a contract problem that we had like eight months ago.

Yeah, yeah, it's sort of locked up.

It's low-key Y-Stitcher Premium Shutdown.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were like, guys, this is going to be the end of us.

And we're like, do it.

Do it.

You don't understand what you're getting with this guy.

He could pop up in any show.

Right.

It's sort of in the, yeah, he can pop up in any show.

You want it for office ladies.

He'll show up.

He'll be on office ladies.

He might be on Comedy Bang Bang.

He might do, you know, hey, there's no guests on Threedom.

He might do a Threedom.

We don't know what they're going to do.

I'll always do a threesome.

Oh,

okay.

Well, I'm a little uncomfortable just noting how many people are you're speaking to.

But I'll say what I'm playing.

Catch something about that double knee thing.

Yeah, I have two

turned on, is why I'm scared.

I've got two knees in my penis, also.

Okay, God.

One would be concerning.

Didn't have to be two.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A dick knee.

Come on.

Yikes.

I thought we were off track when we were talking about the Saturn for 20 minutes.

We googled.

We did Googling.

We Googled.

Anyway, I'll say what I'm claiming.

I have a couple of updates.

One, I've crossed.

In many ways, I feel like

I've reached a zenith.

I've reached a

new...

Not a zenith, because that's like a height that you can't

surpass anymore.

I've reached a certain point with, within my play of Final Fantasy 16,

where I know last week I said, I don't know what's happened to me.

Now I'm sort of on the outside looking in, and I don't know who I've become anymore.

Holy shit.

I have gone so far the other way into Final Fantasy 16.

That I've admitted out loud, I think I'm addicted to this video game.

I've played it for 40 hours.

40 hours.

Holy shit.

I've doubled

my playtime since last we spoke five days ago.

Um, I've just had nothing but time to play this game.

Uh, and I'm not even just I'm like 58%

done with the story, right?

Like, because on PlayStation, it tells you what percentage you've completed the game, uh, but it only tells you for the main story.

It doesn't tell you like all of it.

Um,

So I know that.

I'm on, you know,

I'm not like near the end necessarily, but I'm at the halfway point where, you know, I'm getting closer to completing the game.

I'm also doing

every single side quest that pops up because

they're not long.

Every side quest is relatively pretty short.

You can kind of

blast through them.

What I'm experiencing is I could finish this game.

I probably will finish this game for the we play you play.

Yes.

Unless I keep doing

all the other, everything that the game tells me to do.

I've never felt like this with a Final Fantasy game.

Like, I've finished very few of them.

Yes.

So, this is being a full-on completionist is usually pretty daunting with one of these.

Yes.

And

I don't think I'm going for the platinum or the 100%.

Like, that's not something I generally do.

But I, I, because I know that there's things I'm probably missing too, like items or whatever, or like,

you know, finding certain things.

But it's going to be, it's going to get to a point where push is going to come to shove and I'm going to just have to knock out the main story because I don't think I can,

how I'm playing is sustainable.

But I'm playing that.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy 3.

I think I'm almost done with that.

I'm really loving that.

It's so fun.

I just like.

You're playing the Pixel Remaster?

Pixel Remaster, yeah.

And

it's just such a nice contrast to

16.

It's because they're just very different.

It's like, it's just a very nice, like, easier sort of, they're both, you know, they're not incredibly difficult games.

But I will say, yeah,

I was talking to our friend at the show, Jordan Morris, about Final Fantasy 16, and I had the same sort of thing of, it feels like they consciously...

nerfed the difficulty.

Like, it's not like a devil may cry hard.

Yeah.

You know, it's, it's, it's, I, I think it's made on the default difficulty, it's made pretty easy even without any of the charms or anything Because they know that a lot of the Final Fantasy audience isn't isn't necessarily used to an action-based game.

Yeah, that is I think the reason the game I mean like I'm loving it loving it, but it's not

When I play it I'll play it for a couple hours and then I stop playing it to play Fortnite so that I have a challenge

because I'm looking for that like dopamine hit that like adrenaline rush and I'm not getting getting it from Final Fantasy,

which is a little bit like

it's like a really good soup.

It's a really, really good stew, even, but it's not like, it's not like a hot wings challenge.

So, you want your like your meals to be like difficult?

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I mean, is that not a thing?

I do like something.

Yeah, there there is something to it

inside of i yeah i like i like spicy food

look at him look at him look at him go bit of a heat seeker yes yes let's go crossover crossover

the the uh

the the you know there is something there i i i get exactly what you're saying when you go when there's struggle it's it's more satisfying i understand that aspect of what you're saying is there a more difficult setting you can or is there just a default difficulty on Space?

Well, there's action-oriented, and then you, once you beat the game, you can do like a new game plus, which has a difficulty, a harder difficulty.

Final Fantasy.

But on your initial playthrough, you can't go on hard mode.

No, no, there is not, unfortunately.

You can pick bad icons, probably.

That's probably like

map the controls in a really confusing way.

Yeah.

But that's basically it for me.

I did have a friend of mine, my pal Connor McCabe,

great guy, had a

party at his house that was like a fighting game party, and there was different stations.

There was one that was just Super Met Smash Brothers Melee off to the side.

There was one, he had a Dreamcast room where there was like a fighting game going on, and the Dreamcast room is probably Marvel vs.

Capcom 2, if I had to guess, maybe some other games as well.

But the main event on the big TV was Street Fighter VI with fight sticks, and I hadn't played it with the fight stick yet.

And I won like five or six matches and I immediately was like I gotta get a fight stick it was it was it

it was incredible I felt I felt amazing it was it was it was so much fun anyone wants to hit us up with some fight stick and hitbox recazzi have been thinking about that as well you know there's a they're hit us up on the on our discord I was playing with someone's uh hoary uh fight stick mini and it's it's about it's about this big right like it's like you know I'm holding up my hands

the way I'm going to be.

About the size of a Jersey Mike sub.

Yeah,

it was actually, this thing was actually kind of, this was Mike's way, too.

It was fucking soaked.

Covered with olive oil and red wine.

Yeah, it was very hard to play.

But

it was a good size.

And I felt like the buttons had good, you know,

what is it called?

They felt good.

Tactility.

Yeah, tactility, good buttons.

And the stick was very, like, it didn't feel too insane.

So I liked that quite a bit.

And I saw that I won't only 50 bucks.

So, I might be investing in that little guy.

But that's it for me.

The mini, right?

The mini, that's right.

Yeah, okay.

That's it for me.

Who wants to go next?

Wow, very cool.

I mean, Heather, you were talking about Final Fantasy 16, some.

Yeah, I've been playing, my gaming has been light this week, just because I've got a lot of stuff that I've been taking care of here in the city.

But I've been playing a little Final Fantasy 16.

One of my favorite things to do in a game of 16's caliber and environmental like design is to just, and I mean visual design, not like, not like a video game level design, which is different.

Yeah, I get what you mean.

Is I will

try in any particular arena to run into every corner of that area so that I make sure I can see everything.

And that has made my progress kind of slow.

Like I'll be like, you can't enter this house, but I want to see it from all sides.

I want to like make sure that I look at the roof.

I want to make sure I haven't missed any details because somebody really, really struggled to create the thing.

So when you're just like running past it with Clive,

you might miss.

Some of the artistry of it.

It's the same thing I try and do in like an art museum is that there's like a statistic that like,

you know, these people paint these fucking paintings for years and years and years of their life, and then the average person looks at it for 15 seconds.

And

I, like, I want to try and ingest more of it than that.

So, I've been really making my way through it slowly.

Um, and then also, I've been playing, of course, Fortnite, but not as much, uh, in part because my hours are weird for our

robust and incredible community on Discord, the get played Battle Bus.

But there have been a couple of people who have been kind enough to show up at strange hours for them in order to squad up.

So the last couple of times I've played, it's been with a full squad and that has been

just so fucking heartwarming.

It feels.

I know it's strange because like Fortnite's the same no matter where I am, but it feels like playing a little bit of home.

Like it feels somehow like a home feeling to hear familiar voices from the battle bus

coming in through my

PlayStation Pulse 3D headphones.

So yeah,

I don't have any particular players to shout out because I don't want to forget anybody.

And I feel like if I shouted out somebody, somebody else might be like,

Hey, I was also in that squad.

So I just want to say thank you to all the different squads I've played with over the last few weeks.

Really means a lot to me that you guys keep showing up at strange times.

Also,

we set our

servers on the east coast of America so everybody is at a disadvantage.

But yeah, it's super fun.

And

that's,

I mean, that's what I've been playing.

How about you, Nick?

Speaking of Fortnite, sorry, I just put a meme someone put in the Discord in the chat.

Yes, I've seen this fantastic meme.

It's

a Jeffrey Epstein

jump into Jeffrey's limited time island event with a new Epstein skin.

Yeah.

This is

diabolical.

It's It's well done.

Yeah.

It's well executed, man.

I wonder if,

maybe this has already happened.

I wonder if there was a skin released in Fortnite that then became representative of something extremely problematic if they would pull the skin.

I think they probably would.

Like if it was a celebrity who got, you know, who got canceled or something like that, I think they probably would.

Just take it out of rotation.

Interesting.

But I guess, guess what you're saying?

Like, if somebody already purchased it with their V-Bucks, would they refund their V-Bucks and make it so they couldn't use that anymore?

I mean, they already probably discontinue things because of licensing agreements, right?

Yep.

Or are they all there in perpetuity?

They're there in perpetuity.

So if you get like Aaron from Attack on Titan, like you'll still be able to play that 10 years from now.

Yeah.

Theoretically.

Yes.

Okay.

I've also been playing Final Fantasy 16.

The bulk of my gaming time has been dedicated to this game.

I won't talk about it in any depth, really.

I do really, but Heather, you mentioned about just taking in the environment.

And I do think the, from an artistic standpoint, the environmental

design

is

really great.

Like, it's just like these are,

I think these are just gorgeous exteriors and interiors.

But

I'll save my thoughts in any depth for our We Play, you play.

And instead, I'm going to talk about a game that is my current frontrunner for game of the year that I discovered on Steam.

It was on sale during the Steam Summer sale and it had a lot of positive feedback and

it's a game from a Korean developer called Mitt Rocket called Dave the Diver.

I took a flyer on Dave the Diver.

I cannot emphasize enough how fucking much this game rules.

It's so fucking good.

It released 1.0 on June 28th.

It was an early access for a little bit, I believe.

It has this incredible gameplay loop where you are this amateur diver who has a scuba suit, and you jump into the ocean, which they call, and this is like typical of the game's sense of humor, which is another part of its strong points.

The ocean is called the blue hole.

So you jump into the blue hole and you dive around with just absolutely phenomenal, like echo the dolphin tier underwater physics in terms of moon maneuvering your player character around.

And then you use an arsenal of weaponry to catch fish, which then you do that in the morning and the afternoon.

And then in the evening, the island where you live has a sushi restaurant where you work as a server and you serve and you manage the restaurant and you serve the fish that you have caught prepared as sushi.

And it is just such a satisfying way.

And then you use that extra money to upgrade your arsenal for when you go back into the blue hole.

It is so fucking fun.

Like, they have just absolutely figured out how

this gameplay loop ties in with your character's progression, where every run feels consequential, where the stuff that you take from your run goes to

the more sim aspect of the game and enhances that.

And then that gives you more for your subsequent roguelite runs.

And

the combat, the underwater is really fun.

Like, a lot lot of times, the underwater aspect of any sort of game is kind of like, oh, this is like a weaker part.

You know, there's rare exceptions.

This game, I think, being entirely focused on underwater, they really drilled down how to make that super fun and

easy to navigate.

But a big part of it, I've talked about a sense of humor, is also like the main character for this game.

I should just

share my screen so you can see this.

The main character for this game, Dave,

is

so delightful.

He is a big,

it's a big dude.

He is kind of like a loser.

He's like a loser that like other characters, you can see him right here in the corner of this icon.

It's this big dude who's kind of slovenly with a goatee.

And then like other characters, NPCs in the game like make fun of him.

And it's just such a, it's such a, it's like they're not like in an aggressive way.

Like they're not like insulting him, but they're just kind of like, like, that guy who served me at the restaurant was weird, like, just kind of things like that.

And then, meanwhile, all the other NPCs are like cool and interesting.

So, it's just like such an

like, I don't feel like I've experienced this specifically in a game where it's like, hey, the character that we're going to give you to play is super low status.

This is like, I guess, kind of a Luigi is the same sort of thing.

Here's this sort of low-status guy who, you know, is

trying his best, but is just

having trouble fitting into this reality.

But

I don't know.

He's awesome and he animates so well.

That's the other thing.

I could rave about every aspect of this game because I think the

characters are rendered in sort of this more pixeley style.

But it's a 3D engine and a lot of the

objects and the ocean life is more polygonal.

And then it's also got like this just really serene soundtrack for this really chill vibe for the actual ocean exploring.

I'm all over the place because I love every aspect of this game.

It's also got great cinematics that don't get tiresome when they replay.

It's got like a really great phone system.

Like, you know, a lot of games have phones these days, and this, but the way this one integrates with the gameplay, it's like really effective.

They just, they just seem to have iterated on this over and over again in development to get it to get everything in sync and everything informing and enhancing

the core gameplay.

And as such, it's just like a fucking home run.

So yeah, Dave the Diver, it's on Steam.

I don't know if it's on other platforms right now.

It would be a great one to come to Game Pass eventually.

But right now, support the developer.

You can hopefully get it on sale.

If not, it's $19.99 full price and absolutely worth every penny.

Fucking love this game.

Matt, you would love this game so much.

This would be extremely your shit.

I already have it

wish listed here now after talking about it.

I guess I just

get it.

Yeah.

Heather, I think you would like this game.

I think the sim aspect of the restaurant might rub against you a little bit.

You might not be as into that.

But the actual combat aspect of it, I mean, it feels like a classic sort of 2D, you know, platform, action platformer with some combat elements.

So I think you might, you'd at least respond to that or at least be able to appreciate it.

But anyone who's into this sort of game, absolutely check it out.

It's pure fun.

Well, Dave the Diver.

That's the game.

All right.

I did a bad job there, but I was just, I was just excited.

No way.

Yeah.

Everybody's

just ranting.

And then there's also like, and then you get the sushi, and then you can upgrade the sushi.

Feel like an excited kid talking about a toy.

Can we go back to the Sega Saturn for a second?

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No, we can't.

We can't, Matt, because we have to instead jump ahead a few years from 1997 to 2001 when Final Fantasy The Spirits Within hit theaters.

This is The Game Was Better, our regular video game movie slash TV show segment.

And we're going to talk about, because Final Fantasy 16 is the Zeitgeist, we're going to talk about 2001's Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, directed and produced by Hironobu Sagakuchi, who created the whole Final Fantasy franchise.

I want to set some tone.

I want to set some tone for this,

some place in time, right?

It's the year 2001, summer.

when this movie comes out.

So

the world has just seen the Matrix.

They've just seen the Phantom Menace.

The launch of Final Fantasy X is due any day.

And

Square has

just come off of

a

massively successful multi-hit game run.

Like from seven to eight to nine, and the trailers for 10 are out.

And it's just like, holy shit, this company can do no fucking wrong.

They're cooking with gas, yeah.

And Sakaguchi is like, I want to direct a movie.

And Square Enix is like, fuck yeah, let's do it.

And they

build a

studio for him in Honolulu that the studio to build it costs $45 million.

Yes, in this case.

So their initial investment into this movie is to create a Warner Brothers, like a full-blown fucking studio

with 200 jobs 200 animators working on this fucking this thing I had somewhere the amount of time it took to render each individual frame it was yeah okay so it's 141,964 frames of movie and each frame of this movie took 90 minutes to render

each

fucking

frame.

This is also at a time when Shrek and Toy Story were like the pinnacle of CG movies.

So

Square being like,

we're not just gonna fuck it, we're not just gonna

swing for the fences, we're gonna swing for the stars.

We're gonna create photorealistic humans to be in our movie and we're going to announce that those actors will be in other movies.

Like,

Aki, the main character, was an actress,

theoretically, who would then go on to be in other movies if this movie succeeded.

Simone, if you will, I was so fucking hype for this fucking movie.

Yeah, me too.

I

have rarely been more hyped for a movie.

I've just put into the chat

this

watch that came out from Seiko as a title.

Oh, yeah, I remember this.

And it was

sort of a modern day, 2001, modern day version of the watch that

Aki wears in the film.

And I was like, someday I'm going to make enough fucking money that I'm going to be able to buy this watch no matter what.

I'm going to fucking buy this watch.

I never bought the watch.

My friend,

uh,

who I will not name, was uh so excited for my excitement that this um

this mischievous character stole a bus stop poster of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within for me, which I have to this day, one of those heavy vinyl backlit bus stop posters.

And then

I was invited to the LA premiere of Final Fantasy Spirits Within.

Wow.

So I was in the first fucking audience to see this movie.

And about

10 minutes into it, I started feeling sick.

I was like,

oh no.

Oh no.

It was already enough of a strange blow that the guy who wrote all the music for all the Final Fantasy games did not write the the movie movie music.

And

yes, 100%.

Nobu Uematsu not included.

And that's like one of the main things you think about when you think about the Final Fantasy franchise: Uematsu scores.

So you were like, okay.

And then,

and then, you know, just coming off of seven, eight, and nine, you were like, I kind of understand what a modern Final Fantasy movie is going to be like.

And this movie was nothing like those things.

I have rarely been more disappointed than I was walking out of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

And you saw the Phantom Menace.

Yeah, but I wasn't a Star Wars fan.

So I saw the, I saw the Phantom Menace and I was like, yeah, this is fucking weird, guys.

I don't, like,

I don't understand why everybody likes Star Wars.

This is what

my experience of Phantom Menace was going into the theater and then leaving and being like, this is what you guys like.

But yeah, Spirits Within Within was my Phantom Menace experience, and it was it was heartbreaking.

So going into this viewing, I really expected to have like just those bittersweet memories come at like, oh fuck, okay.

Well, what a bummer.

But the truth is,

I was shocked at how much I enjoyed this movie this time.

Interesting.

Just to step back in time a little bit, I don't have as elaborate of a journey as yours.

I didn't go to the LA premiere, but I did see this movie opening weekend, I think actually opening night with my friend who also was, we both got Final Fantasy VIII on launch day.

Like we were both like that level of like Final Fantasy, you know,

super, and nine was already out by that point, too, you know, but like, you know, we were both, I remember when eight was out, we were in

separate rooms playing the game at the same time, like that, like just trying to get, and trying to see who could finish it first because we didn't want to, or, or trying to to get ahead of spoilers because we were worried the other person was going to spoil something.

So like we were both like that level of hype.

And

yeah, it was, I would say, crushing to watch this movie.

I thought it absolutely fucking sucked.

And my reaction watching it the first time was that looked great,

but it was god-awful.

And my reaction to watching it this time is

kind of the opposite.

Like it looks good for its time, but obviously you compare it to something like the Avatar the Way of Water, like, you know, 20 years of progress.

And I know that's the highest height of this style of, you know,

effectively a fully animated film, but it's like

there's been so much progress technologically and artistically in terms of computer animation

in the 20 years

since its release.

But I didn't find I wasn't because I didn't have the expectations of like here's the Final Fantasy movie yeah in the same like it's it's like similar like like the super mario brothers movies like here's the super mario brothers movie and then you watch the bob hoskins john leguizamo thing uh where they're going to you know like

it it's where they're in some like surreal like

uh you know hr giger reality it's like what the fuck am i watching it's the same sort of thing it's like here's the final fantasy movie and you expect the the oematsu score uh i we i probably didn't even know going in that it wasn't going to be the final fancy.

We weren't going to hear the prologue at any point.

I probably expected, oh, well, we'll start with the prologue and we'll hear some of the main themes and there'll be an Uematsu score or whatever.

Instead, it's scored by a well-regarded composer who's, you know,

the composer is,

if I just had his name.

Eli Goldenthal, a well-regarded composer who's worked on a lot of,

you know, well-known properties, well-known films, but is just like not necessarily a great fit for this.

And then also, it's completely just pretty much just sci-fi.

Like, there's none of the, yeah, there's, there's some more, that's some more spiritual, you know, metaphysical elements, but it's, it has none of the sort of fantasy trappings, which even something that was more sci-fi, like Final Fantasy VIII, as hard as sci-fi as that went, it's still hard, not hard sci-fi, obviously, as sci-fi as that one went, it still had shit like the gun blade and like magic.

You know what I mean?

Like it, it still was fucking weird, uh, and none of that existed.

So I remember being super disappointed with this movie and thinking it sucked and resenting it for years and revisiting it.

It's bad, but fine.

It's, but it's more, it's what, what, what else is compelling and interesting about it is

at the time I was like, this isn't Final Fantasy.

And now

20 years later, I'm like, I'm surprised how Final Fantasy this movie is.

Like,

what has expanded?

Because also, there's only been in the last 20 years, there were Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9 all come out within like, and 10 all come out within like four or five years of each other, right?

It's an insane rant.

I just, I just brought up the chronology, and then I may have just closed the window.

Um, okay, so yes, seven comes out in 1997, eight in 99, nine in 2000, 10 in 2001, and then 11 in 2002.

So yeah, within six years,

within five years, they released five mainline entries in the franchise.

Right.

And this movie.

And then in the 20 years since Final Fantasy Spirits Within, the 22 years since, we've gotten four mainline Final Fantasy games.

But.

How did they fucking do that?

How did they make it?

I mean, they must have come just different different teams, but how they, how they made eight and nine a year apart is just staggering because they're both also, they're not like, neither of them feels rushed.

Well, you know,

there was an interview done with, I think, Tetsu Nomura, the guy who designed

Cloud and Squall, and then ended up being the director on Kingdom Hearts.

And he talks about how once, because this movie comes, this movie is an enormous budget.

And I've read, though I cannot find the sources on the

actual budget for the movie is obfuscated because it was much higher.

Like

it wasn't just that it was the $45 million to build the studio and the budget for the film, that it was actually a huge amount of money pulled out of Square's coffers in order to create this film because they were like, Sakaguchi can't do fucking anything wrong.

This dude is gold, right?

But the movie is such a bomb, and they have to close.

They do do one Animatrix movie, like one Animatrix short, and then shut down the Honolulu studio.

Yeah, Sakaguchi steps off of the board and then resigns from Square Enix in 2003.

And then

the people at Square are told, don't communicate with that dude.

And there's like a 15, 20-year hiatus on anybody even talking to him from his old team, like all the mentorships that he started when he worked at Square.

And Tetsu Nomura in an interview was like, after he left, there wasn't any driving singular focus, singular vision at the company anymore.

And I think that that's part of why

you went from back back-to-back to back bangers to this

20 years of only four games.

Because that's

that makes sense.

And then you also combine that with just like it's so much more labor-intensive to produce a AAA game now in the, you know, the PS2

and more advanced eras.

I know that that's true,

but also how much more labor-intensive is it than this movie was?

Right.

I'm saying just combining those factors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sakaguchi's absence and then, and then, yeah,

those two things probably work together.

Yeah, because that's, that was a permanent severance, right?

He's never gone back to square.

He's just been at Mistwalker the whole time.

Yeah.

I think so.

Yeah.

Um, he uh created Fantasian for Apple Arcade.

It's a two-part uh RPG that um he has said might be his last.

Uh,

and um, he made it because he went back and played six and was like, man, I really miss these games.

I'm going to make one more good classic RPG.

I would like to read Roger Ebert's review

of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

I love that.

Final Fantasy The Spirits Within,

three and a half stars.

Also, I want to say, for a guy who famously thought video games weren't

Yeah, I think he would have come around if he'd lived longer because he was a guy who was, you know,

kind of just generally ahead of the curve with advent with technologies and things.

I mean, but yeah, go on.

All right.

Should I read the whole thing?

I mean, sure, it's a podcast.

Who cares?

Other movies have been made entirely on computers, but Final Fantasy The Spirits Within is the first to attempt realistic human characters.

Not Shrek with his trumpet ears, but the space soldier Gray Edwards, who looks so much like Ben Affleck that I wonder if royalties were involved.

The movie, named after a famous series of video games, creates planet Earth circa 2065, where humans huddle beneath energy shields and wraith-like aliens

prowl the globe.

The film tells a story that would have seemed traditional in the golden age of Asimov, Van Vucht, and Heinlein.

I don't know how to say those fucking names.

But science fiction fans of that era would have wept with joy at the visuals, and they grabbed me too.

I have a love of astonishing sights, of films that show me landscapes and cityscapes that exist only in the imagination, and Final Fantasy creates a world that is neither live action nor animation, but some parallel cyber universe.

The characters live in that cyberspace too.

Not for an instant do we believe that Dr.

Aki Ross, the heroine, is a real human, but we can see that she is lifelike, which is the whole point.

She is an eerie presence that is once subtly unreal and yet convincing.

Her movements, which mirror the actions of real actors, feel about right, and her hair blows convincingly in the wind.

The first close-up of her face and eyes is startling because the filmmakers are not afraid to give us a good long look.

They dare us not to admire their craft.

If Aki is not as real as a human actress, she is about as real as a playmate who has been retouched to a glossy perfection.

I'm going to pause there because it's really interesting to me that Aki did appear in Maxim.

Yes.

This is the weirdest fucking thing about this in hindsight because, you know, a character that was named after Sakaguchi's recently deceased mother.

And they were marketing as they're like, check out this sci-fi bikini babe.

Yeah.

Like, like in men's magazines.

It was so fucking weird.

Because also her character is not really sexualized at all in the film.

No.

But they were like, I don't know, how do we sell this thing?

I don't know.

Fucking make her a pin up.

And it's interesting considering the

conversations happening right now in the entertainment industry about like AI and like things like that and like the idea that this character was, or not this character, but like this

this, you know, this 3D model of a person

was going to appear in other movies

is wild.

And like

I would imagine that actors at the time

were

maybe afraid of that.

I saw a quote here in the IMDb trivia from Tom Hanks.

When talking about Final Fantasy and its digital characters, Tom Hanks said, I'm very troubled by it, but it's coming down, man.

It's going to happen.

And I'm not sure what actors can do about it.

Tell you what he can do.

Fucking

conduct the Polar Express.

Yeah, he ended up doing it, kind of.

Doing it like a media.

Yeah, he's like, whatever.

I'll just do it.

Oh, I didn't know I could do it.

I'll do it.

I can be Santa?

Oh, fuck yeah.

Let's go.

I want to read

the final two paragraphs from this review because I think that they are

extremely prescient.

Is there a future for this kind of expensive filmmaking?

Parentheses, 140 million, I've heard.

I hope so, because I want to see more movies like this, and I want to see how much further they can push the technology.

Maybe someday I'll actually be fooled by a computer-generated actor, but I doubt it.

The point, anyway, is not to replace actors and the real world, but to transcend them, to penetrate new into a new creative space based primarily on images and ideas.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Star Wars series mutated in this direction.

George Lucas's actors, who complain that they spend all their time standing in front of blue screens,

which will be later filled with locations and effects, would be replaced by computerized avatars scarcely less realistic.

In reviewing a movie like this, I'm torn between its craft elements and its story.

The story is nuts and bolts, space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's AI.

But the look of the film is revolutionary.

Final Fantasy is a technical milestone,

like the first talkies or 3D movies.

You want to see it whether you care about aliens or space cannons.

It exists in its category of its own, the first citizen of a new world of cyber film.

Yeah, it's, you know, he points at the, and I know he also liked the Phantom Menace.

I remember he, uh, Ebert was, I can't remember his review of Attack of the Clones, but I know he did, he was very bullish on Phantom Menace for the same sort of reason of, like, he just, like appreciated the beauty of the filmmaking.

Like he's just like, oh, this is all sorts of cool shit to look at.

I think more so than this film,

as far as being a progenitor of where we are today, it was more the Star Wars prequels that ended up informing how movies are made in this day and age of just like, hey,

we're still photographing movie stars.

We're still photographing human actors, but just on stages and then we're painting everything around them.

We did not actually go to the point where, hey,

these are not real people.

These are rendered,

you know, CG creations.

And

these are character models that don't actually exist because I think there's just so much cachet in

people

like fandom.

There's so much in just like people wanting to have an actual person that they can see on screen.

Well, Counterpoint,

most

of

Spider-Man No Way Home or Iron Man, you're staring at a CG character.

Like, for effectively animated movies,

you know, like,

and it's only because those dudes are in masks that you aren't like, well, what the fuck is this?

Because sometimes when you do see CG characters like in Rogue One, you're like, oh, what the fuck is this?

Yeah.

Because even Disney and Lucasfilm with their infinite treasure chest cannot make it really human.

But also,

I think it's key what they're doing

in those Star Wars movies and also more recently in the...

Did you ever see the new Indiana Jones?

Not yet.

Not yet.

I'd rather re-watch Final Fantasy the Spiritual.

But

they do the same thing in Indiana Jones.

There's a lot of de-aged Indian there.

There's a lot of de-aged Harrison Forbes.

They're using the technology

to depict real people, like real individuals.

And they weren't doing that here.

They were like, we're creating new character models from Whole Cloth that are like fictional, you know, like actors, and we're going to be able to use them.

There just isn't like a, it's like the Vtuber thing.

It's like there isn't quite enough of an audience for that yet.

And so I, I, yeah, you're, it's a great point that something like Deadpool or Spider-Man No Way Home is effectively so largely an an animated movie, but

we still have, you know, Ryan Reynolds or, you know, Toby Maguire.

We still have an actual actor that you can look at and be like, that's the guy.

That's Tom Holland.

I know that real person that I'm a fan of, and that's a key part of the film's marketing.

So I don't know if we're ever going to progress to the point where...

It's, you know, there's no real world,

you know, person that we're latching onto.

I don't know, man.

Like,

there's like four more avatar movies that are going to come out.

And I can't see the ones in the future having too many people in them.

Hey, you know what?

Avatar is maybe a good example, but these aren't like,

these aren't people here.

These are like, you know what I mean?

Like, those are, those are navy.

Yeah.

It's its own thing.

So if we get to the point where, hey, you know what, Spider from Avatar and said, that's not a, we're not, there isn't an actor we're watching anymore.

That's a, there isn't even a character that's modeled off of an actor.

Yeah.

There's just like a

like if there's equivalent to that, there's humans that we're seeing that are meant to be photorealistic that are not played by actors or not based off of real existing actors.

Like, I think that's what Final Fantasy of the Spirits Within was predicting.

And we aren't there yet.

And I don't know when we'll get there.

I think we're getting close.

I think Planet of the Apes, I think Avatar, I think Snoke

in The Last Jedi.

I think we're close.

We're real close, man.

I still don't.

I'm skeptical.

I just, I feel like so much of fandom involves latching onto real people.

I think.

I think, like, why do people listen to a podcast?

Because they have, like, they want to listen to, you know, they engage with the hosts on a personal level.

I think the same thing happens with the creation of music, the creation of art, the creation of cinema.

Not to get spicy, but I don't think that the actors matter to

new fandom.

I think that the least important part

is

to

modern fans is the actor.

and the most important part is

like what's gonna happen next

like what's gonna happen is spider-man you know maybe maybe marvel movies are have crested and and that's like not the greatest example but like i feel like fandom is more about the the the stories than it is about the actors and i think that those actors could even be swapped out and people would still be like fuck i gotta know what happens to spider-man

I don't know.

Hey, that's what happens in comic books.

Yep.

So who knows?

Can we talk about it?

While we're doing tangents, can I talk about something else that Final Fantasy of the Spirits Within makes me think of?

And it was a really interesting era in video game adaptations.

First off, that

they didn't know how the fuck to market one of these things.

They were kind of running away from it being a video game.

They wanted to change everything that made it interesting

and appealing to its core fan base.

Whereas now we're in such a fan service era where they're like, ah, throw in absolutely everything you can, pack it in, jam, pack it in.

We'd have to make sure that the original fans are like on board.

I feel like so much of that was like the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where they're like, this succeeded because it hewed closely the source material.

Like, we have to do that with everything now.

And that's obviously a big part of the MCU and so on.

There was another movie that came out of this era

that where they also gave full creative control and

the director, like made the director,

the creator of the video game franchise.

Final Fantasy of the Spirits Within, directed and produced by Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Wing Commander, directed by Chris Roberts, who made the, who also co-wrote the screenplay, made the Wing Commander series, which was a very successful PC game, Space Flight Sim series, obviously heavily inspired by Star Wars.

And they released that movie in 1999, which I also saw on theaters, and is complete dog shit.

Totally sucks.

Have either of you ever seen it?

No, but

it is unwatchably bad.

Yeah, 10%.

Unwatchably bad, starring Freddie Prince Jr., who I'm a fan of, and Matthew Lillard.

And it just, but it's just completely an Eply-made film.

And it's kind of amazing that

these game creators had this much cachet where they're like, you know what?

You know who should direct this movie?

The person who made the video game.

Any directing experience?

No?

Yeah, fuck it.

Take a shot at it.

That aspect of it, I'm just, I'm just really surprised by it because I don't think it happens today.

Yeah, that's such a tough, like,

I don't know, like,

they don't, I don't think a studio now would be like, let's give somebody who's never done this before a shot.

Like, it's like, it's interesting because, like, you want people to have shots, probably, right?

Like,

if a studio was like,

wanting like Hideo Kojima, maybe this is a bad example.

To direct the movie.

Yeah, I'm like,

This is a bad example.

Yeah, because we want that.

Very bad example.

Like, we want it.

Well, okay, so here, so I guess the modern counter to that is like Neil Druckman and directing some of the Last of Us TV show.

But there it was, it's also like the context of prestige TV.

And then there's also a showrunner who's, you know, involved who has a lot of TV experience.

So it's kind of a different thing.

Yeah.

Versus like just giving the reins of a theatrical film to a novice director.

Man, we've been talking about this for a second.

Wing Commander fucking sucks.

Sorry.

Final Man's Experience would have been so much better.

We've been talking about this for so long and we haven't even really talked about the movie itself.

Yeah.

I have a bunch of notes here that I want to just read out real quick.

So if you're listening to this podcast, it's a movie about

the world is fucking ended.

right?

Like a meteor came and decimated the earth and there's like aliens that have infected every corner of the planet.

You can't see them unless you like shoot a fireworks gun at them that will

turn their translucent bodies visible.

There is a lady, Dr.

Aki Ross, who is hunting for these

like

biological totems called spirits.

And if she can collect all of them, then she can create a waveform that hopefully will undo the destructive effects of these phantom-like aliens called phantoms.

And she is in direct conflict with General Hein, who has made a big gun called the Zeus, and he wants to instead fire it at the Earth and destroy the aliens from space, which...

Dr.

Aggie Ross and her team says you could damage the Earth because the Earth has a spirit called Gaia.

And if you damage gaia then you're gonna end up fucking up the earth even more than these aliens and that's the main conflict is the race against time well she's trying to find all these these uh these spirits of uh of living creatures and also sort of the discovery of what the true nature of the phantoms are which

It's a 20-something year old movie.

I don't know if we need to enter spoiler country, but here we are entering spoiler country.

Yeehaw.

Yeehaw.

It is that these aliens come from a planet where they were in a war and they destroyed themselves and blew up their planet and then a hunk of it fell to earth and on that hunk of their planet were ghosts of those aliens and those ghost those ghosts are basically haunting the earth which When I fucking deconstruct this concept, that's hype as shit.

That is an awesome fucking concept.

It's a cool idea.

I don't think any of it is well conveyed.

And I think as a result, it just ends up being kind of a

confusing mush

for the audience.

Okay, sure.

I think it's an incredibly well-crafted anime.

Like, I'm like, I can follow this from moment to moment.

Papadaka.

I had never, so I had never seen this, right?

And I've not played a lot of Final Fantasy games.

So I sort of have the least amount of

context.

But I understand

the vibe of Final Fantasy, right?

Like I sort of know what to expect from game to game.

Even though like tonally, they might be different from each other, but like there's certain things that cross over, right?

Like crystals and magic and things like that.

So I'm watching this.

And I'm like,

where the fuck's my crystals?

Where's my magic?

We can't throw one fucking chocobo in this movie.

There is something.

There is no Google.

There's a fucking chocobo.

Where's the chocobo?

Yeah.

Where the fuck is the chocobo?

It's on Aki's shirt.

One of the spirits is a chocobo.

No, no, it's on Aki's shirt.

That's not enough.

Not on the.

And she wears a t-shirt at one point.

She's got a chocobo on it.

Hold on.

Let me find this.

It's just not enough.

Because

I'm sort of thinking about this while I'm watching it too.

If this was a Final Fantasy game, this would be the worst one.

Like, I don't think it would be like,

you know, they're wearing t-shirts.

That was something kind of jarring too.

I was like, oh, like, there's, I know that in Final Fantasy 15, that's sort of a little, there's like a car in that one or something, right?

Like, there's like, it's, it's, it's modern, it's, or more modern than the other games tend to be.

No, it being said in space and all that shit, like, none of that rubs me the wrong way.

All that is like, this is completely consistent with what a Final Fantasy could be.

It's, it's totally fine for this to be more science fiction than fantasy, but I guess that the fantasy elements are like the spirit.

That's supposed to be the element, but it's just not enough

to feel like an actual Final Fantasy property.

But also, again, it's like how titles were used at the time.

It was like, this is like based on the game series Final Fantasy, which I think is how it's said.

It's just like, it's not necessarily meant to have any connection.

It's just for the fans, it feels like a letter.

And so you mentioned earlier the live-action Super Mario Bros.

movie.

Yeah.

And I'm not throwing shots.

Oh, here comes a shot.

I think that movie is more of a Mario movie than this movie is a Final Fantasy movie.

Because it at least has, like, yeah, they fuck up all of it, right?

Like, they fuck up how Bowser looks.

Yoshi's a fucking dinosaur.

Toad's a guy with weird hair.

They're like,

you know, they're wearing the overalls like at the end none of it looks good but but at least it's in the movie like at least the stuff's in there no no no you've got a sid you've got a hein you got a sid yes uh because hein was i think the bad guy in three

right uh

you've got gaia which is in final fantasy 7

you have chocobo shows up on her shirt I'm going to give it

to her.

And I would say that one of the most

uh that one of the largest hallmarks of the final fantasy series is pushing the boundaries of the physical technology of the time it's created sure

so final fantasy 7

is like oh my god oh my god it's like moving characters on the cg holy shit like

this this is no different

i think you're doing a lot of work on behalf of the movie oh yeah i am a film that a film that doesn't doesn't need a champion.

Wow.

Because it kind of is what it is.

Fucking.

I think that

it's...

Hold on.

Hold on.

I would love to have re-watched this and been like, you know what?

It's time for a reclamation project because this film's actually great.

Completely disagree though.

Give me one second.

Okay, go ahead.

I watched this movie with Mary Laws.

Uh-huh.

Mary's so cool.

She turns to me.

Love Mary.

She turns to me 45 minutes into it and goes, this is good.

I've never disagreed with Mary before.

I don't even think it's bad.

It's a thing.

She still made fun of it.

Like, there were still tons of things to make fun of, but

she enjoyed the whole thing.

This is a glorified Easter egg.

Akis, the Choco Bo that looks like a stain.

It looks like a dark stain on her pajama.

I put it in one shot.

Yeah, Heather, is this your king?

Yeah.

It is so rare that I'm on this side of this.

Like, I'm always the one who's like, no, this sucks.

You can't fucking, the combat sucks.

I hate this.

I'm so grumpy.

Yeah.

To be the champion of something, it feels great, guys.

It feels great.

I think part of why I'm this upset about it.

I'm not even upset.

This is for humor.

I think while I was watching this yesterday, all I could think of was, I wish I was playing Final Fantasy 16 instead of watching this.

100%.

I would have rather spent two hours.

But I will say that.

It's also funny how I think Final Fantasy 16 looks better.

Like it looks

better, right?

100%.

Yo, I was actually thinking my point of reference for this was because it's kind of similar tonally is Returnal.

I was like, Returnal looks better than Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

This game that you can control in real time.

And that's just that like the Way of Water is just like, it's staggering

how much technology has advanced in 20 years.

But there are i think you can see different teams working on different shots in this movie because there are some shots that absolutely fucking hold up there are shots like she's walking down a hallway and everything in the hallway is lit immaculately and you're like that could be great lighting that could be a full that could be a fully modern cg shot in a fucking movie there's like uh there's a couple shots where like she's like there's one where she's like laying on the ground and like the fabric of her uh outfit is perfect, and the rubble is perfect, and the fire is perfect.

And I'm like, whoever this A-team is who's on some of these shots,

they're fucking killing it.

And then there are other shots where it doesn't even look like they animated Steve Buscemi's character's face for his jokes.

Like, it looks like someone telling jokes through a mask.

And then there are that's a big issue.

Then there are shots where, like,

the, there, there's a shot of like Heinz assistant, and that guy looks real.

Like he fully bypasses the uncanny valley in like one shot.

And I was like, What the what is there's part of what's weird about it is it swings really wildly from working and not working visually.

Like there are shots that I'm like, Did you finish this?

Because you're the faces are so static and like mannequin-esque.

And then there are shots where it's like, fuck, this looks incredible.

The woodenness of

the expressions on the characters is a huge issue with this movie.

Most of them are just really vacant.

And that's more than anything, that makes it feel really dated.

I don't think motion capture was used for this movie.

I could be wrong.

I think Ebert's review says it is.

It is, okay.

But it wasn't, it certainly wasn't what we have now where it's like Benedict Cumberbatch is playing, you know, Smaug and

where his performance is mapped onto, like, like, so we're not getting a lot of the granular detail of like an actor's motions.

Not that you necessarily need, need to do that.

There are also like animated movies that are that are super expressive that don't use motion capture, but like, this is that it's played,

it's too wooden or too subtle, whatever it is, like it just doesn't come across in terms of the expressiveness of the of the character.

I have a paper from MIT

that describes the,

okay,

in this culturally liminal space, the diverse production staff painstakingly constructed the movie using the following process.

So this is a breakdown of how they actually made it.

First, frame-by-frame storyboards were scanned into a slideshow Avid system while the voice actors recorded the script.

Using a program called Alias or Wavefront Maya, the scenes were blocked and shot with virtual cameras, which moved like real cameras to provide the necessary cinematic look.

Storyboards and layouts were then sent to the animation and motion capture departments.

The former held the subtext and character emotions for the story, while the latter contained camera moves and character blocking synchronized with the voices of the actors.

According to animation director Andy Jones, animators debated on what made a character more human, the way it moved or the way it looked, and finally decided to focus on its look, particularly the face and fingers.

Also due perhaps to Sakaguchi's penchant for elaborate storyboarding, the crew paid more attention to conveying the emotional state of the characters through appearance rather than through dialogue.

Motion capture accounted for 90% of the body movements that were used in the film.

Got it.

But it looks like the...

In addition to large movements, motion capture was used to get the bodily nuances of the performers when they were still.

still, nuances that were difficult to animate but easy to record through a 16-camera optical motion capture system and the tracking software from motion analysis.

So it looks like it was

a real merger between hand animating some of these facial changes and then like major structural motion capture for bodies.

I will say that the facial expressions are are often very wooden, and they're not aided by the voice performances from most of the cast, most of which are just like, you know, Ming-na has talked about like, like, like, was in total isolation.

And I think her performance is good and is one of the, you know, things that anchors this film.

But, like, you know, all the actors were working on themselves in the booth.

I don't know if they were directed by Sakaguchi or by the voice director.

I mean, Sakaguchi does speak English, so I imagine he was at least involved.

But, but, like, you know, so that performance is pretty good.

And I think Dr.

Sid, Donald Sutherland, is, is pretty good.

Beyond that, most of the cast is just so lifeless.

I mean, you mentioned Buscemi, and it's weird that Buscemi seems so flat throughout this.

Again, it could be how he was directed.

It could be the takes that were pulled, but it's just like he's supposed to be like the wise cracking guy, and so much, so many of his lines have so little energy.

And then, you know, Perry Gilpin, I think, is pretty good.

You can kind of see an alternate career path for her.

Roz from Fraser, where she maybe was like kind of a Michelle Rodriguez sort of, you know,

type in action movies.

I think she's actually good at kind of playing the badass Marine here.

But like James Woods and Alec Baldwin,

not good guys,

but generally good character actors, but they're so fucking flat in this movie.

Baldwin's performance is...

So it's awful.

It's the worst he's ever been.

It's remarkably bad.

What did he think he was doing?

Like, I wonder if he just had no context for what the movie was, or maybe he just read none of the script and he just did all his lines in isolation.

James Woods has a line

where he's like, just accidentally released aliens into the like sanctuary city of New York in order to like do a false flag attack and create the

need for him to use his big gun.

And he's he fucks it up and the aliens get loose and he just goes

what have i done

hey james you want to you want to do another one can we get another

you got it i gotta i gotta get out of here i got a capri son to finish if i do one more i'll have to tell you uh something i think about

politically

uh this yeah they were particularly bad uh and not just because they're bad guys truly awful they they it had the vibe of,

and I'm not denigrating all of these types of performances, but it felt like early voice voice acting in video games.

Like it felt like Final Fantasy, like you're in or something.

It felt like 90s video game tier voice acting.

And especially for James Woods' character, because character design is like very, very animated.

You know, he's like this, you know, gloved coat-wearing mustache.

Not doesn't have a mustache, but he might as well mustache

villain.

100% hair.

He looks like a fucking Nazi.

It feels like a performance where you can't go too big.

And he just

does like the most anime thing I've ever seen in a major motion picture, which is when he's contemplating what he's done to New York City, he takes out a gun and puts it to his own head.

Yeah.

That was insane.

That actually rules.

That's actually rules.

I forgot about that until you just said it.

But also, like, James Woods was in Hercules and he was.

Oh, he's fantastic.

He was 80s, and he was great in that.

Like, he's voice acted before.

He's fucking great in Kingdom Hearts.

Yeah,

he reprises Hercules and Kingdom Hearts, and he's really good.

But it's interesting.

Maybe he didn't care about what he was doing in this one.

Yeah, it makes me wonder maybe they were just like limited in time or just like the actors didn't have a lot of context or just maybe it was how it was, how they were directed.

I have no idea, but it's

pretty universal.

The direction was more realistic.

It's going to be really realistic.

It could be that.

More realistic.

Play it smaller.

Maybe that was it.

Yeah.

I want to point out a couple of the things from this movie that I loved.

One is very early in the movie, Dr.

Sid takes out a journal and he says,

He opens it and shows it Aki.

And Aki's like, What is this?

And she reads it, and it's like, Perhaps there are spirits within every living thing, and

those spirits could

help heal the planet.

And he takes this diary and he's like, Yeah, I wrote that 40 years ago.

And then he throws it in an an incinerator and

she's like, why are you doing this?

And he's like, because Galileo was punished for his views.

But the truth is, this dude has had that journal for 40 years until that, like, he's never burned it previously.

But

I do still like that moment because it kind of sets the stakes of like what the side, like, like,

there's things like that that work.

I really like the tech design in this movie.

I think a lot of it looks looks very, very fucking uh Midgar-esque.

And I also really like the jelly drops, uh,

which like when these dudes, when these soldiers leap out of planes, they do it without parachutes and they fire jelly at the ground and then hit the jelly and slow

into like a regular landing.

And I was like, that's fucking awesome.

That's a cool idea.

The movie could have used more of that because a lot of it does feel kind of generic.

I also say, like, just on the mechanical design sense, the actual Zeus cannon

is really well rendered.

And that moment when that thing comes to full power, then later on, when it's fucking destroyed, all that shit looks really cool.

I like how the Phantoms look.

I like the Phantoms.

Fucking great.

There's some good artists.

Firing the fireworks gun in order to see them.

Fucking great.

Like wherever those particles fall, which is also a great way of saying, hey, we need

a weapon that has a lot of particle effects because that's going to really show off how good our CG is.

I really liked,

so New York is surrounded by this like

bubble, this like energy bubble that keeps out the phantoms.

And you're like, that's a great concept.

Okay.

Cool.

And then they say, if that's true, then what else is true later by creating a mini submersible, submersible that has the bubble technology, like that bubble shield constantly being refreshed around the outside of it.

And I was like, fuck yeah, guys, because if you had that tech and you needed to go somewhere else where there might be phantoms, you would totally use that tech.

Then I was like, but why don't they, why don't they just surround the soldiers with that shit?

Like, why aren't, why aren't the soldiers in essentially a like?

If this is true, what else is true only goes so far, you know?

Like, you can only think about so many things.

They should be in like hamster bubbles.

Like hamster wheels and like running around in the, in big bubbles.

And the gun, the bullets should be that.

Mary really laughed at, there's a moment where, see, over the course of the movie, this party builds up, and you got like essentially Vasquez from Aliens.

Steve Boucher, like you've got this

little squad

of

dudes, and one of them gets impaled.

And Bing Rames is character.

Yeah, Bing Rames gets impaled, and then he's like, leave me here.

And they're like, no, we won't.

And he's like, no, leave me here.

Just give me a gun.

And they're like, okay, do what he says and they give him a gun and he's like now go and they turn around and just walk away

like without any sense of urgency they just yes

well he's got it i'm just gonna walk

walk

slowly away which is really funny um it's that struck me as like maybe that was just a you know the the production workflow of like and they they did the if they you know maybe they motion captured it earlier with them walking and then when they were animating, they're like, well, fuck, this doesn't work.

But we already did the motion capture section.

So we're locked in.

If we speed it up, it's going to look weird.

So then the final thing I want to shout out about this:

did the movie reignite my interest in having this Final Fantasy Seiko watch?

Yes.

Have I looked at my own wrist and thought, can I wear an Apple Watch and the Seiko Final Fantasy watch at the same time?

Yes, I've had that thought.

Then I was like, is there a, why isn't there a cyberpunky

like Apple Watch face?

Like, why, why, why are they all so?

I mean, it's Apple, so you know, just they want it to look friendly, not like mean and terrifying.

But the final thing I want to shout out about this movie is that there's a

beautiful

Spirits Within credits song that plays, which that song is great.

Yeah, it's a great song.

But the second,

the second song that plays during the credits is by

then superstars Lark and Seale.

These were the guys who did the opening theme for animes like Full Metal Alchemist and Great Teacher Onizuka, right?

Big, big, like there's big, they played Madison Square Garden.

Like these are big fucking J-Rock stars.

And it felt surprising to hear their voices start screaming out the Spirits Within second theme, which I assume was the first theme in other territories, but I'm not sure.

So let's play a little bit of Larkin Seals

Spirits Within song.

I wake from a nightmare now.

In the day it's home to me.

It slowly tells me about

what dreams I'm going to be.

It's so jarring when this hits mid-credits.

It's so disorienting.

This fucking sucks.

It really is just late 90s butt rock

that hits after a very like,

you know, plaintive and

beautiful song that precedes it.

I really think a big part of it is just context because it so rubs against everything that happens in the movie.

And again, the previous song.

But maybe if I heard that song in a different situation, I might not bother.

It might not bother me as much.

The ending set piece

was sort of like

the first part in the movie to me that I was sort of like, I guess this is kind of like Final Fantasy stuff.

Like

this really big, the big phantom, the was it the Gaia Phantom, I think it's called?

Like...

having like all those like tentacles and stuff like that.

I was like, that's like, you would see something like that in a game like this.

Uh, and then at the end,

when

you know

what's when Aki is like looking out into what has happened after, you know, the resolution of the film, the world beyond that

looks what I would think a Final Fantasy world looks like, yeah, at the very least.

Yep.

Uh, because the rest of it, the rest of the movie is all like

brown or gray, yeah,

and it's not really like fun to look at.

At least there's like a big splash of color.

You know, not a lot of color.

It's like blue and white and like maybe some trees.

But I thought that was at the most Final Fantasy at the very end.

And then you see an eagle or a bird of some kind flying, and then the music starts.

And then it's over.

You know what's a lot like?

Oh, go, go.

I just, I had an answer to an earlier question that I found and I wanted to answer that earlier question.

Animator Matthew Hackett, this is from Wikipedia, but you know, the source is the making of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within Blu-ray featurette from 2007.

Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes, in others, animators still had to use or make all their movements manually.

Hand and facial movements were all done manually.

So,

holy shit.

Yeah.

yeah, that's really labor-intensive.

It explains why a lot of the dialogue is done with characters wearing helmets that cover their faces because they don't have to worry about lip flap.

But it also does make it all feel kind of lifeless.

That made me think that, like, you know, it kind of resembles in terms of the absence of emotion from the characters.

It's like the quote-unquote live-action Lion King remake.

Yeah.

How just like all these animals that are meant to be based off of photorealistic ones, they just can't convey any sort of expressiveness.

And as such, it maybe even makes the voice performances themselves feel a little flatter.

What I was going to say is that

what you were talking about, Matt, is I think this was that era where they were with adaptations of nerdy shit, they were just still running away from the source.

I mean, the X-Men franchise was obviously a lot more successful, but that was another thing where it's like, everything has to be cool and sleek and gunmetal and black.

Like, we can't, if we're going to reference the X-Men, we can say, you know, they certainly can't be.

we'll have like a joke about them wearing yellow spandex, but we certainly aren't going to like lean into what people like about the comic book.

And that's the same sort of thing here.

It felt like they ran away from everything, including removing, you know, getting rid of Oematsu and getting a more conventional film composer.

It's just like, it's funny how much work Marvel has done for the Marvel cinematic universe has done to change that.

Destroy cinema.

Lift those eyebrows.

It's Marty.

Like, by the time,

you know, you're, you're watching like Thor and Spider-Man and Captain America, like, all of them in their bright colors.

For sure.

Like, you're like, they had to do so much lifting to, because I honestly, I think that the reason the X-Men are wearing all black leather in the early 2000s is because they were afraid that people would say, this is gay.

Like, literally that.

Yeah.

Like, it would have been like, oh, I don't like this.

It's not hard enough.

And all of the work that Marvel has done to like arc us out of that so that when you see Captain America, you're not like, that guy looks gay.

And instead are like,

these movies

have less and less return value here.

I think the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, too.

Yeah.

Was we're a big part of that.

But even just embracing what was cool about the idea.

I think Spider-Man is

like his costume costume is toned down.

Oh, yeah, it was like a middle round.

Yeah, for sure.

I would like to read, as we near the end of this

podcast,

or at least this segment of the podcast, I would like to read

a quote from the official U.S.

PlayStation Magazine issue 47 from August 2001, which, of course, comes out a couple of months earlier.

So it predates the release of Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within.

After seeing the technical achievements of The Spirits Within, the future seems very bright for Sakaguchi.

But the future also seems bright for one other star, Sakaguchi's virtual heroine, Aki.

It would seem that she has a strong career ahead of her in future games and certainly in movies.

I definitely want to make Aki our main digital actress, says Sakaguchi.

As any real actress, we'd like to see her in other features such as commercials or even comedy movies.

And in an industry based around image, Aki may have a one-up on the rest of Hollywood.

Because Aki is a CG character, he says, we have the advantage of showing her at any age.

We can even have her come back as a 16-year-old girl.

That alone is sure to spark plenty of jealous looks from all the rest of the girls in Tinseltown.

If you made a movie today and you just like, were like, yeah,

we've got it's Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone

and Aki Ross is one of the principal characters.

It's our third lead.

She's back.

I don't know.

It would be kind of interesting to figure out how to get Aki Ross into something now.

I think we're the ones to do it.

I have one thing I do want to touch on, which is just because this was a thing that was talked about so much.

I think it's been talked about so much in subsequent years.

I remember talking about with my friend at the time.

The final line of this movie is Donald Sutherland's character, Dr.

Sid, saying, all of, you know, Gaia is like, Gaia is real.

The Gaia spirit is coming out, and it's coming out of the earth, and it seems to be the salvation of this ruined apocalyptic planet.

You know,

and Dr.

Sid is observing this, he's observing his wife's work come to fruition, and he says,

it's warm.

That's that's the, there's no more dialogue in the movie after that.

It's Donald Sutherland saying, it's warm, and that's it.

It's a bizarre choice.

Like to bookend this fucking movie, we're going to close the book on all of the ideas that are presented here by having this guy say, it's warm.

It's warm.

It's warm.

It's warm.

It's warm.

What a film.

I don't hate it.

It's interesting to rewatch.

I think

if you're like me and you saw it many many years ago and thought this sucks and are thinking about revisiting it, you know, put it on.

It doesn't, it does, not boring.

No.

It moves.

It's well paced.

And you know, it's an it's like an hour 40.

So it, it's, it's, it's, it's inch, it's an interesting watch.

I don't think it's good.

I won't go as far as Heather did, but I do, I, I am,

I was happy to revisit it.

All right.

Well, maybe you were wrong.

Maybe you were wrong.

You guys ready for a little segment it's time for the question box

all right this is a oops all voicemails edition of the question box we got a couple voicemails here uh

why don't i just fucking let them rip what do you say yeah let's hear it hey get played crew this is alex aka pbr hipster 420 from the patreon uh a while back mentioned that the sopranos road to redemption would have worked better as a narrative-driven game in the style of tailtales the walking dead series.

This got me thinking, what are some games that you would like to see deviate from their original genre?

Thanks again for all the hours of free entertainment.

Edge.

Wow.

Hell yeah.

Love that.

Nice.

Edge.

Right back at you, buddy.

Yeah, that was the original.

I have an additional design credit on Sopranos or Dispel, and that was the original design concept for it.

It was more of akin to a Telltale game.

I think I've talked about

before in the podcast a number of times.

So, yeah, we're talking about genre shifting something into that format, or is it more general than that?

Is this genre shifting something else?

Oh, yeah, yeah, any genre shift.

Like,

you know, if

a Final Fantasy, well, it's kind of the same thing.

Final Fantasy Telltale game.

It doesn't have to be a Telltale game.

It could be

in how Final Fantasy 16 is more of an action game than it is an RPG, right?

You know what makes me think of is

Metroid, the Metroid series made such a great transition from 2D to 3D.

like probably the most successful version of that, going from, you know, the, the, and, and, the, the 2D Metroidvania genre to being an FPS.

Uh, and

I want, it would be interesting if they would try the reverse with Halo.

If they were like, you know what, we're going to make like a 2D, uh, a 2D, uh two and a half D Metroidvania in the Halo universe.

We're going to use that world, we're going to use Master Chief or another character.

And you're going to control them through that environment.

Like that to me would be an interesting

subversion of that IP.

I wouldn't mind trying something like that.

Seeing something like that.

I think that, so when you see combat in first-person games, like physical combat, the camera is

all over the fucking place to try and make you feel movement.

But the truth is, when you are fighting somebody in like real life or even in VR, you're not swinging your head around wildly.

You're kind of locked on them.

Yeah.

And

they stay visually in the dead center of your conceptual space while your fists and shit like fly at their heads.

I would love to see a first-person Street Fighter game.

Where, like, I don't even know how you would do it.

I know that there was like some

genre shifty stuff in, I think, the 3DS Street Fighter game, but I don't remember what that was.

I don't think it was a first-person Street Fighter.

I think that there is an opportunity for a

first-person action game where you are punching and kicking and doing special moves on the people instead of using guns.

Abadaka,

what's your take?

Probably a Tony Hawk text adventure.

Honestly, if there was a Kingdom Hearts text adventure game, I would play it.

That's sort of different enough,

I think.

That'd be probably top of my list.

Even a Metal Gear...

There is a Metal Gear Tactics game, I think, right?

I don't know if there's like an XCOM with Metal Gear.

I don't think so either.

I think Metal Gear Acid is like a card battler.

That's

something.

A Metal Gear XCOM would be good.

That's an interesting guy that, yeah,

unless we're forgetting a game.

Yeah, if they did, because they did that with the Gears of War.

They did a Gears of War tactics there.

It was actually pretty good.

I think there's, you know, that's like, I don't know, me coming up with this right now, it's probably the best idea I've ever heard in my life.

Let's listen to another voicemail.

Hey, what's up, guys?

My name's Brandon.

I'm from Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas.

Huge fan.

So I got a question.

The last month, I decided to finally check out the Resident Evil series.

Within the last month, I've beaten RE2 Remake,

RE7, RE8, and I'm about 10 hours into RE4 remake.

And

it's been fantastic.

Really awesome to be able to kind of run through them all in a row.

RE8, definitely my favorite by far, but all of them are great.

So my question to y'all is,

has there ever been a game series that you never really interacted with that you came to later in life and kind of blew your mind?

Anyway, love the show.

Love you guys.

Thanks for doing it.

Bye.

Thanks, Brandon.

That's a great question.

I mean, I'll stop.

I'll start things off and just because this is something I've mentioned before on the podcast.

And

so I'll say this, and then maybe we can all think of one and maybe I'll have something better to say.

But I will lead off with the Mass Effect franchise.

I discovered

I was always on my radar, never got around to playing it.

And then when they released the Legendary Edition,

I just had an absolute blast playing it and thought it was such a great piece of science fiction in any medium.

And so that's definitely one that I came to, you know, years after its release and was excited to play and excited to talk about it.

It goes without saying right now, Final Fantasy is that for me.

But

when I got my Xbox,

my Series S, the first game I played all the way through was

Gears 5.

And I loved it.

I never went back to finish or play the other Gears games, but I loved Gears 5 so much.

I thought that was such an incredible game.

And I also played through

some Halo games, and I loved Halo Reach quite a bit.

I thought that game was absolutely incredible.

I had never played any of the Halo games before.

And I went straight through that one and played some of 1 and 2.

I guess my answer is Fortnite.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Because, you know, I had avoided it for years and then became

insanely addicted to it.

So Fortnite.

Yeah.

Unsurprising answer from Heather Ann Campbell here on.

Here's another voicemail.

Hi, y'all.

This is Corinne from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And I was calling with a question

about your favorite, like, sick day

or, like, burnt out, crispy games to play.

Like, for some strange reason, whenever I am stressed out, I have to go to Slay the Spire.

And because I've been stressed out for like two months now, all I have played is Slay the Spire for two months.

So I was just curious if there were other games that you all had that are sort of like the equivalent of like an after-dinner drink or a chicken, chicken noodle soup to soothe your soul.

I guess that's what it is.

All right.

Thank you for considering this question that I stumbled through.

Thanks, Corinne.

Thanks.

Thanks, Corinne.

And hey, I hope you're feeling better.

You know, my answer for the longest time was

the Diablo franchise, and then Hades comes along, and it was Hades for for a bit.

But I will say, I was super sick recently.

And

I talked about it on the podcast when Gabris was on, that's when I was binging a lot of Diablo 4, and that was honestly great, because just the hours melt away.

So a Diablo game or a

civilization game is the other one that just makes me kind of time travel.

You can kind of get lost in it, and that's a big part of making being sick so endurable.

But you know what?

From this point on, maybe it's going to be Dave the Diver.

Because I gave

wow, Dave the Diver.

Wow, he loves to play Dave the Diver back to the side.

Dave, look at him go on Dave.

Dave the Diver, you've been down too long in the midnight sea.

So,

my immediate answer in my head was

for that noodle soup feeling, Sega CD games, which

have

enough

um

like sound and and like like snatcher right it's got enough going on that it's not boring

but it is also not demanding anything of you like you can move real

really slow at your own pace through those games without um

without like

yeah without putting too much effort in and so

yeah i think i think sega cd games are are my my chicken noodle soup soup.

How about you, Abadaka?

Well, I have two answers, right?

So, like, because sick and stressed are different modes for me, right?

Like, I mean, honestly, if I'm sick, I'm probably not going to be playing a video game.

But, like, if I'm a little bit of sick, like I have like a little cold or something, I'm just like, oh, I want to play a game, but

it's going to be low input.

Like a low input type of game, like where I only have to press a couple of buttons.

I don't have to be like the master of the controller, right?

So that to me is going to be something like something I've replayed a lot in my life, which is like Pokemon, like a Pokemon game.

Like there's not a lot of interactivity.

You're just pressing A and walking around.

That's kind of, that's kind of it.

If I'm stressed out, which I think I am right now.

Because of the spot.

Well,

no, no.

No.

You know, just everything.

Yeah, just

doing this.

I could do this all day with you guys.

I need something

where I can just fucking win, right?

Like, I need to fucking, I need to be Kratos.

I need to be Clive Rosenfeld.

Is that his name?

Rosenfeld?

Clive.

It's Clive Rossfeld.

I need to be someone that can just fuck shit up

and just get in there and

take out hordes and hordes of enemies.

I need to be Leon Kennedy, right?

Like, that's where I'm going if I'm stressed.

I want to fight.

I want to win.

I want to destroy.

This next one,

I don't actually know who sent this one.

Hello.

I'm just a mouse.

I'm a tiny little mouse.

My name's

Andy.

Andrew.

Andrew, the mouse.

I guess I wanted to call in and just say how much I love the podcast, but

I had a suggestion, which is you guys should review the popular 90s video game Biker Mice from Mars.

Here is

Heather's wife

Barry's favorite game from her childhood.

uh

and uh yeah you know bring back mary and uh

um let's review biker mine her favorite game

uh we love heather you'll see this okay bye this is and now bye for now

oh man

yeah so that was a real mouse you called

Let's get that mouse on.

Yeah, I think we should have the mouse on.

Lots of questions.

I feel like this breaks the fourth wall of the podcast, but I want to say something to my wife who's in the room,

which is that we just listened to your voicemail.

Oh, the mouse who wants.

She reiterates that she would like.

to oh i think she's going to come a surprise guest on the podcast right here

hello I'm just a little mouse.

Maybe you should play a video game about my people,

but they're mice from Mars.

And Happy Birdie Laws on the podcast.

Bye.

Incredible.

Incredible.

That was adorable.

I think we should do it.

Here's the thing.

I think we should too.

We're just like,

it's like it's Final Fantasy time, baby.

Yeah.

We will.

final yeah we'll make it happen we'll we'll finish out final fantasy month and then i think i think we have a gamer quest and i know just the way to do it but we'll talk about that later we'll figure it out all right and we'll definitely talk about biker mice from mars uh for longer than we talked about final fantasy this i don't know

this episode

well over two hours i have to eat dinner i have to go eat dinner yeah

Mary's in the same room as you because she's tapping her watch and her foot.

Well, hey, that was the question block, and that's this week's Get Played.

Our engineering is by Alex Gonzalez, Dead Air Alex G on Twitter and Instagram.

And also, we got Get Animate.

You get played here, but you want to get animated?

Check out our paywall show, which you can find only now at patreon.com slash get played.

Heather, what are we watching this week?

This podcast was longer than the movie itself.

That's making content, baby.

We are watching the melancholy of Harhi Suzumiya, mid-2000s mega hit.

The melancholy of Harahe Suzumiya, where we are in the final stretch with the final two episodes of The Melancholy of Harahe Suzumiya, which is in broadcast order.

So those are episodes five and six, five and six this week on GetAnimaid, which you can find at patreon.com slash get played.

I know it's confusing, but we're get played.

So

we're get played.

Patreon.com slash get played to get animated.

Yeah.

And Matt Past past guest John Gabris texted me.

Nick, you got to play Dave the Diver.

He texted you right now.

No, this was while I was playing yesterday.

I was like, dude, I was playing, dude, I was just playing.

It's fantastic.

You got to play Dave the Diver.

I got to eat dinner.

Okay, sorry.

We'll wrap up the episode.

So, yeah,

this has been a great record of here listening to us talk about one of the best movies ever made, Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

And if you disagree, then you got played.

It's warm.