Ghost of Yotei with Erika Ishii

This is a head gum podcast.

I'm right about a lot of things that people have.

Oh, oh, okay.

HBO Max presents a new comedy series, The Chair Company.

You've been distracted, Ron.

I feel like you're hiding something.

There's so much badness in this world.

From the creators of I Think You Should Leave.

People are nuts out there.

Starring Tim Robinson.

Oh my god!

You're disgusting!

These are my work work clothes!

The HBO original series, The Chair Company, premieres this Sunday at 10 p.m.

on HBO Max.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.

Hey, guys.

Hey!

Hey, man, how's it going?

I'm so excited about the episode today.

We got a great guest.

Yeah, notice anything different about me?

Is a new Dodgers hat?

Maybe it dusted it off a little bit.

It's not the newest thing about me, though, I'd say.

You've got all the same tattoos.

Yeah, yeah, same.

Didn't change them.

didn't uh didn't swap them out anything about can you like narrow down like uh the field for us a little bit wait a minute I think I know what it is yeah

do you have wolf companions are the wolves new very observant Nick I gotta say Heather not doing so good in the observation department I got some wolves

is it your shorts no Heather I've already said we've already established

the new thing is the wolves the new I got wolves now that's a wolf guy I'm a wolf guy guy.

Okay, guys, I'll get it.

Thanks for the clues.

Gold chain.

Is it gold chain?

That is new, but that's not the thing.

Okay, okay.

You had that last week, though, I think.

I had it last week.

I am sort of a different guy now, though.

Is that wolf-related?

No, not really.

It's not part of the wolf thing.

The wolf thing is separate.

No, you know what?

I think it is wolf-related because I think you wearing the gold chain made you a different guy and that gave you the confidence to pursue

some wolves.

I had it interrogated it in that way.

The chain sort of did give me the confidence to be a wolf guy actually so now i have wolves and it's actually you know it's it's not that big a deal have you have you always had eyebrows is that what it is yeah no i've always had them okay okay these these wolves i gotta say they seem chill as hell they're really chill yeah because you're probably thinking you hear wolf yeah you're thinking a couple things of wall street yeah where yeah Alpha.

Alpha.

These wolves are sort of just, they're kind of like, I think it's maybe because they're rolling with me a little bit.

Yeah.

They're not that, they're not that crazy.

They're just kind of like normal, cool guys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you used to have black shoelaces?

No, no, no, no.

So you've always had the white shoelaces on your converse?

I know that we're sort of here to talk about me and sort of my new thing.

I'm a little concerned about you, actually.

What are you talking about?

Are you doing it right?

We've told you what it is, and you somehow can't get it.

Dodger's hat.

Dodger's hat.

No,

I even guessed that early.

That was my first guess.

It's kind of alarming that we're saying it, and you're sort of like just missing it every every time

Is it cuz you're afraid of the wolves or blank black socks?

No, no, I'm always wearing black socks.

I've actually been thinking about switching my socks up a little bit, but that's separate.

I'm actually remembering now like earlier because we had lunch before the record.

Yeah, and then we finished having lunch and Heather said when are we gonna eat lunch?

I know what it is.

So earlier today, I was attacked by wolves and I've been bleeding out the whole time.

So it's really hard for me to keep things focused.

We upgrade our wolf skill trees and capture our motion as we discuss ghost of Yotte and acting in video games 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, Tiger Weiger.

That's me, Tiger Weiger, here with our third host, Mr.

Games himself, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where this week, somebody has made the mistake of joining us on the show.

This happens on occasion.

And, you know, it is nice to have another person in the head gum studios because the ranks have sadly been thinned a little bit.

I'm not sure if this news has gone wide.

So maybe among our listenership, this is how you're finding out.

Unfortunately, there have been layoffs at Headgum, which is our podcasting network.

And it's, you know, I can't comment on the financial situation of the network.

I can't comment on whether this, I mean, I certainly can't be someone in support of people losing their jobs, especially a lot of great people that we've worked with here over the years in various capacities.

But I just can just say that it sucks and it's a fucking huge bummer.

These fucking tariffs, I mean,

they're killing jobs left and right.

Yeah.

I could just say sitting here as somebody who has worked at podcast companies that have done exactly this, it's normally always fine and good.

It's always good.

It's always a sign of good things to come, you know?

So we're like, hey.

We're hopefully on an upswing coming coming ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Never a harbinger of anything.

No, it's just the life cycle of new media.

Exactly, exactly.

Sunrise, sunset yeah yeah

layoff see we what they wax on and they wax off dawn of a new day yeah yeah get ready for more celebrities

it's a good sign everything's going great it's like majority welcome it's don johnson and this is wheels

i'd love to hear don johnson's wheels podcast

i'm gonna be honest that's i'm the audience for that here's the thing i don't want it edited i want to hear every thought that man has i'm curious i'm curious.

Yeah, I know.

It feels like sometimes

at a company, you're looking up in the sky and you're seeing the moon and Majora's mask just approaching.

But, you know, Ray, we're going to soldier ahead and continue making the podcast.

I'd better see that.

Then the whole sky turning red.

The blood moon coming once again.

Lose me.

Miss me with that.

Oh, my God.

I'm scared.

Everything that's dead comes back?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But the cooking.

Oh, but you're the cooking.

I had that happen once.

What's that one section of what's that one section where you're just like nude?

You're just dropped off nude with no equipment?

You know what I mean?

The island?

Yeah, there's the island.

Yeah.

I was there and then the blood moon happened.

I was like, I can't fucking believe this is happening here.

I'm like halfway through this thing.

No, that's the last place you want that to happen.

Yeah, what a nightmare.

Anyway, we are thrilled to have today's guest on the podcast, an actor and host from Apex Legends, Dream Daddy in Dimension 20.

They currently star in Ghost of Yotay.

Erica Ishi.

Erica, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so thrilled to be here.

I am a huge fan of all of you and all of your work.

You're so me.

Oh, God bless.

What a thing to say.

We're right back, Addie.

And congratulations on Ghost of Yoté, which we'll talk about more in depth in a bit.

But while we're declaring each other's fandom,

you play Amanda in a game I love, Dream Daddy.

And I did, you know, I've been a Dream Daddy fan since it came out.

I got to meet Leighton Gray, one of the writers' designers at a certain point, which was very exciting.

But I'm just curious, like,

that for me was my first encounter with, as someone who knew you as a performer from the Upright Citizen Brigade days, where like encountering you in a game.

Where you were Skeletor.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah.

Skeletor that did roasts.

That was my old bit, yeah.

Yeah, it was a good bit.

Oh, God bless you.

Yeah, for that time and place.

Yeah.

I was there when you did it at a wedding.

Yeah.

Still funny then.

I think, Nick, the way things are going, bring it back.

It might be back.

It might be time for Skeletor to return.

There's there's a comedy festival in the middle east you might want to have it

he's back baby but but i remember you from that show turned of nerds and then then just to to encounter your your performance and dream daddy was so excited about it do you have any specific memories from working in that game working on that game it's so funny because that happened.

That was in my very, very early days.

And Dream Daddy happened because I was a fan of games and sort of friends with a lot of indie developers and youtube-y people.

I think we all run in that sort of YouTubey comedy, nerdy LA space.

And I was actually at the Hyperlight Drifter rap party.

Oh, wow.

And my friend Vernon, who was with the Game Drums at the time, started telling me about this game and showing me some of Layton's work.

And I was like, I, a, A dating simulator where you date hot gay dads is exactly like I am the Venn diagram that this applies to like I and I was with Giggy and Sundry at the time which you know we were scrapping along I was making sort of filler content for everything that wasn't critical role and so I had taken over video games and I was like I if you when you are finished with this game I know it's just the beginning of development but I would love to stream the game I would love to have you on if you and if you need anything in the game, please, you know, I would love to be a part of it.

And, you know, it's

wildly enough, several months later, Vern called and asked if I wanted to do a voice in it.

And so I went to the Game Grump storage closet and we recorded it.

And I have since been paid, but at the time it was just like.

Sure, yeah, I'm happy to do it because I think everybody also did it for free originally.

Because it was just, this was before they had started their own game studio.

And like, I think my roommate at the time was working in their new game dev studio.

And so it was all just sort of scrapping it, you know, on all levels, both on the YouTube-y side and on the game development side.

And it's been so

wild to see those two intersecting in such a big way.

That's why I had no idea that your presence at that game was like such an organic way in which it would have, which would happen.

Yeah, because I mean, it was a lot of my early roles were that of me sort of the intersection of me being a video game host and, you know, bringing people on the channel or handing my card out at GDC or just kind of making it on my own.

And then slowly I would get booked in bigger and bigger things and then landed an agent.

And then it just sort of escalated from there.

And so it's wild to suddenly be on the other side.

Yeah.

What I remember about Dream Daddy and what I've said in it in terms of my fandom of the of the game is

it's

it's such like a like they walk the line so well in terms of like it's a funny game that's that's also like a wholesome game and it's like a great dating sim.

It remains my favorite dating sim because it's kind of what got me into the genre.

But it's also like there's there's a version of this that's kind of like that's like making fun of it of itself, you know what I mean?

Or a little too self-aware or whatever.

And it's not that at all.

Like I it's kind of it's kind of amazing how they were able to thread that needle so effectively.

Yeah, I think there's always the

risk of the sort of winking,

self-deprecating of the genre and medium that

you can fall into

because we're all a little bit self-deprecating nerds.

But with Dream Daddy, I know it was a concerted effort on everybody's part to not make this a joke, you know, and it's it was really nice.

And I think that that's what people really responded to.

I think wholesale across the board whenever i've seen projects that people like really put their heart into and are very um

uh earnest about it just people really are craving that right now 100 and speaking of dating sims to talk about something that uh we all have discussed on on the podcast and we did an episode with ray chase about it but um yes yes date everything

but you are it's you know one of the things playing that game is just you stumble upon so many great voiceover artists as you're playing it and you are in Date Everything.

I mean, what was that experience like?

Date Everything was also wild because it was started back in the day of like just post-Dream Daddy.

And a lot of the team that was on Date Everything was from Dream Daddy.

My again, my

housemate, Greg Batha, the sweetest, most supportive man ever,

had told me about this like game he was sort of helping to prototype Date Everything.

This was six years ago or so, and it was he was like all the lava boys, you know, like Robbie and Ray and Max Middleman.

And, you know, they really want to make it union because they want to have all of their famous acting friends.

And I was like, wow, that sounds great.

Imagine to one day be in that kind of company.

And then just somehow the timing was that six years later, yeah, I got to audition for this X-Toy role

and

I booked it.

And I got to be there with all of these friends from those YouTube-y days and Dropout and Tabletop and also from the video game world.

It's just really a murderer's row of voice actors.

That was the thing when we were talking about the game is that we couldn't even...

If we tried, read

the cast list of everybody that is huge in that game.

It's like the whole cast is like, it's the most stacked cast of any game I've ever played, I think it's really crazy.

I want to ask you about Death Loop real quick.

Because I love death I love Death Loop.

That's exactly my kind of shit.

I mean, I would assume that that was like a lot of fun because it's like a really just like very sort of abstract sci-fi, like fun world.

Yeah, that was great because you know, I got to talk to myself

and

you know, be a villain.

And it's just so much fun to be a villain.

Yeah.

But I had seen the, I had booked it not knowing what it was and then got into the studio and they said what it was.

And I had seen the E3 or the trailer that had come out already.

And so I was so excited about it.

I think probably a lot of people they cast didn't necessarily know.

But it was really exciting for me because I really love that studio.

I'm terrible at their games.

I am not a good stealth person.

I am a run and gunner.

Yes.

So

So, yeah.

And so getting to do that and also, again, having so many other iconic voice actors in different, like very distinct, different characters was very, very fun.

Is it like, because obviously I know it's not functionally different than going in and doing uh like voice work for like a cartoon or something, but like are is there any like sort of like some is do you have to be in a different mindset a little bit to be like this is for like a video game versus like a straight ahead like TV show or something?

I think for animation, you get a lot more, you know, sometimes you'll have animatics.

Um, usually you'll know what the project is for video games.

A lot of times, even when you're auditioning, sometimes even throughout the session, they won't tell you what it is.

Yeah, or you know, you won't know what your character looks like,

which has been a problem in past.

There are lots of stories.

Oh, not sure.

Yeah, but it's it's kind of a

you really just gotta make some strong choices and swing for the fences.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

Like with efforts and stuff too.

Just like, yeah, it's it's because you know if you don't know the genre of the game or whether or you know what kind of design there is, sometimes it's harder to make something that fits with it.

Yeah.

So you just got to hope that you're with, you got a good director.

Yes.

And they're cheering as much as they can.

I remember we had Stephen Fu on the podcast, a very talented actor who voiced Jamie in Street Fighter VI, but talking about that process and how little info was disseminated in terms of what the role it was and what the game was.

Because everything's played so tightly to the vest.

I remember the same thing about like

acting on like a Star Wars game or something like that.

That whole audition process, everything's very obtuse and you're just guessing what sort of vague sci-fi or fantasy property this could possibly be.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm lucky that I think a lot of my like deep, deep knowledge of games has allowed me to sort of be able to make educated guesses or to at least sort of place it within the category that it roughly is like, oh, this is like a military shooter, like first-person shooter sort of a thing.

So it's like more grounded or, but yeah, with animation too,

most of the time, a lot of times you get the benefit of reading with other actors or table reads or being in the same room with another human,

which, you know, in video games, most of the time, it's you reading down an Excel sheet of lines.

Yeah.

And it's, it's lonely.

It's lonely.

But, you know, I, there are some projects then with video games like Yotai was where you get to work with other people and it just really informs everything.

That's awesome.

It's really awesome.

This interview is kind of turning into the video game equivalent of the Chris Farley show.

We're just asking you about games we liked and saying you remember them.

Do you remember that?

That was so

fucking awesome.

crazy.

It's crazy.

It was so crazy.

I will say, like,

just like only having met you tangentially at certain functions and things like that, having now played, well, and we'll get into this, having played some hours of the game, sitting across from you, I'm having a strange experience because

I was sort of like, oh, like...

That's Erica in the game.

And now I'm sort of like, oh,

Erica kills people.

Yeah.

It's your entire face.

It's like so crazy.

I've seen you do horrible things to men.

It's crazy.

The animation, the fidelity and the animations are so good.

And it is a jump scare every time.

It's wild.

This is really unlike anything that I've ever done before.

And because it's my face and, you know, doing full performance capture too, like seeing like, oh,

she walks like me.

And

she has like little mannerisms that I added in.

And And it's,

I mean, it really, and there's some times where I'll see it and be like, I can't believe that they added that.

Yeah.

And,

you know.

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Did you have to try on all of those hats?

There's so many hats in the game.

If you, I, I, oh, that's the thing is that I didn't know what a lot of things would look like.

And I was fortunate that I was with production the whole time.

So I did end up getting to see a lot of stuff in progress or some finished cinematics.

And that's, again, like a rare thing for video games.

But there's one, there's one part in the game where there's a hat and it's the biggest, like, dumbest hat that you've ever seen.

And you're like, damn, I want that hat.

And then, you know, you get that hat.

Spoilers, I guess.

And I

was so happy.

Like, I was when I remember recording the line about the hat, it's like, I want your hat.

And I was like, this is cute.

But then watching it, I'm like, this is the greatest video game interaction I have ever had in my life.

So, like, truly, props to all of the designers and to the, the, like, the, the costumes are so beautiful and incredible.

And yeah, I got some masks and hats.

You, if I'm not mistaken, you cosplayed as yourself recently, which has to be

a very surreal experience.

What was it like to, what, what was that?

I mean, what was that like?

How weird was that?

It was, I just,

it felt, I felt like Cinderella.

Oh, you know, at the ball, I felt like the prettiest girl at the ball.

I have, because, you know, I came from cosplaying when we used to, you know, as someone who donned the skeletor suits.

Do one of the jokes real quick.

Is this the roast of He-Man?

Yeah, his great voice.

The setup was, I guess I'll, I'll generally, the setup was,

it was a show called Tournament of Nerds.

And then I would always come out towards the end thinking that it was the roast of a He-Man character.

And then I would get really defeated that I showed up to the wrong show.

And then the host would allow me, Howard Reddick and Justin Donaldson would allow me to do my set anyway.

And so I'd just be roasting a He-Man character who wasn't there.

But, you know, starting from this sort of sheepish, low-status

perspective, then I would just say the filthiest roast jokes imaginable.

And

killed every time.

The dumbest thing with so many layers.

And yeah, for some reason, the audience liked it.

it.

But then also, everybody else in the show, I like would really go all out for costumes.

Well,

it ranged from like Alex Berg wearing the red shirt and the khakis, you know, that he always wears all the way to like,

I can't remember who it was.

I think it was Roger, Roger Barr.

And

he had, he came out with like Big Trouble in Little China with like, a portable truck.

That's just what I was thinking of.

He bought like a cord, a cardboard like pork chop express.

He was just like, it's like it was like all painted, you know, his wife was an artist and stuff.

And so some people would just really go all out on their costumes.

And I remember I did everything from like, I did a Sailor Moon for my first one and, you know, like a, like a drunk sort of surly buttercup from the, you know, from the Powerpuff Girls.

And it was always like I getting involved with, you know, Tournament of Nerds kind of came from like I was a cosplayer and then I was in Hal's 101 class, and I was like, um, actually,

you know, you that that's not really a real reference, you know,

like a juggernaut would never.

And I was like, Well, do you want to be in the show?

Because there really was only Lindsay Kaytai and Leslie Cena in the show.

And so, I, yeah, I so I joined it through there.

And I feel like so many people that I ended up like, I ended up working with Joan Ford on a Disney show, and Ify and I are just still close buddies.

And it's so wild to see everybody.

And you guys are doing this.

It's, it's wild to see how everybody sort of came up together in different realms.

And we don't need to get into what I saw Iffy do at the Turnbridge show.

Yeah.

But God bless him.

Oh, that was a Christmas to remember.

Yeah.

But yeah, but I came into all of this because I loved it.

And I was put all, put all my effort into these little closet cosplays and then having Sony Sony sent me out there and had like a professional seamstress

make this gorgeous like all the details.

It's weathered and you know, they had originally made swords that were like the right draw size for me, but they got stopped at customs that we had to make do with other ones that were still beautiful.

But it was, it was a dream come true because I've I've cosplayed as Sony characters characters before

and now to do it and it's like the most accurate there ever will be.

I think that rolls.

Because yeah, even if somebody else was wearing the costume, it's only 99%

accurate because it's literally you.

And that was the biggest trip.

Yeah.

You know, and just...

Yeah,

also, I was jet lagged, so it really did feel like some fever dream.

I still can't believe it happened.

Yeah.

Wasn't there like a Comic-Con or something where

the guy who plays Walter White, what's his name?

Pranston?

Pranston.

Where Pranston wore a mask of Heisenberg.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

And I've heard

Hugh Jackman did, like, just fully did Wolverine for one Comic-Con and people were like, nah, you're too fat.

If I looked like Hugh Jackman and somebody said that to me, it would destroy me mentally.

I'd be done for that.

I would kill that man.

I would kill them.

I'm like, my veins don't look like this for you to say that to me.

I don't get up in the middle of the night and eat a whole chicken for you to criticize my body.

And now I'll sing you the most beautiful song you've ever heard.

He's a great singer.

Dang, yeah.

He can do everything.

He is a triple threat.

He can do it all.

Look, we love Hugh Jackman here on the podcast.

This show, I just got to say real quick, it's finally good that we got to this.

I know that we sort of started the show with some, like, we, some breaking news we had to get in front of.

This is a huge Jackman Ford podcast, and we just have to stop hiding it.

We have to stop hiding.

Whenever I hear his name, I think he's like a Hideo Kojima character who masturbates a lot.

My mom for a while called him Wolfman Jackman.

Pretty good.

And I don't know if it was sort of like she got things mixed up or it was because he was her suit, you know, but like I think, you know, that was that was his name in our household.

That's right.

Pretty good.

Because, you know, obviously there's Wolverine and then Wolfman Jack, a real guy.

So, like, yeah, I can completely understand.

Jackman.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Eric, I have one more question to ask you and everyone on the podcast that we ask each week.

That question is, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

Hi, it's me, the Resident Evil Merchant.

And I'm here to ask my friends and their guests what I've been playing on video game consoles.

Matt Abadaka, would you like to go first?

Resident Evil 4 Merchant, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, Resident Evil 4 Merchant.

Always a treat to you.

Always a pleasure.

Hey, what did I say?

How many of me are there in the room?

There's one of us in each area.

Oh, wait, so wait.

It's a different guy in each shot.

It's a different guy.

Because you can shoot one of the guys and it, like, he dies there in that location.

Are you a multiplicity?

Hold on.

I've been killed by this lady.

She just.

Oh, Jill Valentine?

Yeah, Jill Valentine.

Okay, okay, hold on.

Hold on.

It'll be a little bit more.

It'll be a lot of fun.

Things are a little bit clearer for the first time.

There are a lot of me.

You're a Mickey 17.

We've really instigated an existential crisis on the old Resident Evil 4 merchant here and really also informed some of their canon.

I'm sorry for you to find out this way.

What am I?

What you are is an important individual with

your own agency, your own self-determination.

Your own internality.

Starring in Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein.

Why was I made?

It's okay.

Hey, hey, it's okay.

It's okay.

It's okay, buddy.

It's okay.

Is this why I was replaced in the new one?

Maybe you weren't replaced.

Maybe it's just a different you.

Yeah.

It's like one of Santa's helpers.

I have to kill all of them.

You're like a Nathaniel Richards child.

That's the one rules.

You don't need a child.

You're not new to it.

Jetley's the one.

No, it doesn't.

You don't have to go.

You don't have to disappear like Nathaniel Richards and go back in time and through all of time and kill every version of Nathaniel Richards.

So it's just you and the beast and then defeat the beast.

You don't have to do that.

I'm reading a Fantastic Four

arc right now.

Does that drive up demand for the supply and lower supply for guns in Resident Evil

for Wars?

So

if you kill like other versions of me,

I'm more treasured.

Because

the guns in a different place then should be more expensive because you can't go back to the other guy because that guy's not selling them anymore.

Or do they come back?

I don't know.

Do you think they're transferred to kisses?

We can't get into that.

Do you think I could charge more for kisses?

I didn't know you could buy kisses from the Resident Evil merchant.

Well, that's why he has the little mask here so that

when you pay for it, you get to see his lips.

Those luscious lips.

Those kissable lips.

I keep them moist like mice and men.

I never, ever want to hear that again.

I never want to hear that again.

That was horrid to me.

And you know what?

I need you to apologize to me right now.

The underside of that scarf is Vaseline.

Oh my God.

It's like a wet article of clothing.

Slugging, slugging.

Slugging.

Like slugging.

What?

You're being a slug?

Yeah.

I don't know what it is, but yes.

Oh, slugging is when you put, you know, that you put your moisturizer and serums on, and then you do a layer of like petroleum-based

something to lock in the moisture.

Oh, it's for when you go to sleep.

Yeah.

Okay, I've heard of this.

There's so much about skin stuff I don't know.

You gotta keep it wet.

Yeah.

You've got good skin.

I have no idea.

I'm so good skin.

Hey, thank you so much.

I'm trying to maintain my boyish looks.

You're doing a good job.

Nick, something for you to say to me?

Hey, doing a good job below the waist.

What the fuck?

Are you implying I got a Bart Simpson down there?

No, never.

You're doing great.

Yeah, I can only wish to have a Bart Simpson.

I don't follow that.

You asked me a question.

You see Bart Simpson's dick in the Simpsons movie.

Yes.

Illegal.

Illegal Texas.

Yeah, actually, they can't show show the Texas.

They do not show the Simpsons movie in Texas anymore.

And if they're hoping for a big box office in 2027, they won't repeat this mistake again.

Oh, my God.

You're right.

They'll give them a huge hog.

Maybe you'll get to see Merch's vagina.

Whoa, wait, didn't we already see that in Playboy?

She was the first animated character in Playboy.

I've seen it in a couple of other movies.

Yes, yes, I did.

I mean, that's just what I've heard, at least.

That's just what I've heard.

I don't think she went nude in Playboy.

From my understanding, and this is my only hearsay,

I don't think they do that in Playboy.

I think that's a different magazine.

I don't know what they necessarily show.

I mean, they showed it.

They don't show Bush?

Oh, they show it.

Yeah, they made her shave.

I think Bush and vagina is different.

Can we agree?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll agree.

I'll agree with you, Matt.

I think it's different.

They're different.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're different.

Thank God.

But Marges would be blue.

Marges would be blue for sure.

Yeah.

And it would be long and tall, like all the way up to the belly button.

Yeah.

Well, my question is, is, is, would it be?

Because we see Marge in flashbacks has the long, uh, straight hair.

Oh, it's true.

You think it's long and go down to her knees?

I think she'd do that to her hair.

Who?

Marge.

Which part?

The beehive?

You think she saw it was Grand Frankenstein and was like, I'm going to do it.

Yeah, it was her prom, and somebody was like, oh, that looks great.

And then she just never stopped.

It's iconic.

It is iconic.

I'm not trying to get her to change it anyway.

She'd probably just tease it to be long and tall.

Yeah, tease

the bush, yeah.

This feels like my fault somehow.

It is your fault.

It's your fault.

I brought up Bart Simpson's dick, and now here we are talking about Marges Bush.

Talking about Resident Evil Merchant's kissable lips.

So, I've been playing Silk Song still.

Oh, and I have to report, I was having a hard time with the last judge,

and who's a boss that's sort of gating you from progress into act two.

And you know what?

They don't call him the last judge for nothing because he's fucking dead.

The last judge is as dead as a fucking doornail, okay?

And this is what I wanted.

I wanted applause.

I did it.

And now, I'm stuck in Act Two.

I'm stuck.

It's not that I've been stuck.

It's that I've been playing.

I've been playing Ghost of Yote, of course, but I've also been playing Hades 2 from our conversation last week.

Yes.

God.

I just got to say, it's so fucking good.

Yeah, what a fucking video game.

So great.

And I've just been really loving

getting your different boons and stuff.

I have four weapons currently.

So I haven't had...

I haven't done too much, but I've unlocked four different weapons.

And I'm just like buying every sort of, like, anytime there's like something to buy, I've been buying stuff.

I feel like resources have been more plentiful in this game versus the first one um

and we also there's more resource collection is like a mechanic yes uh so i've been loving i've been loving that my favorite weapons so far are the second weapon you get that's like two sort of like handheld things they're fast i like fast in the game fast is really good

and my new i'm i i i i'm going in between

uh like ice boons and and water boons because water does push it pushes you pushes enemies away and i uh that's good for me because I don't want them anywhere near me uh but then freezing them also then freezes them in their tracks and I so that combined with like a speedy attack has been very very good for me so far your attack that you're doing a build for like get

away from me

get away from me

yeah keep your distance I don't want anything to do with you I'm still trying to work out the the cast in the first game I felt I like I liked a little bit more somehow um because now it's more instead of like something that shoots out at an enemy, it's more of an area of attack.

And the useful thing about it, though, is that it holds enemies into a singular location.

So you could sort of, in theory, do more damage, and then the cast can have damage sort of stacked on it, too.

But

I liked throwing it for certain reasons.

Well, it was more straightforward.

There's a higher, I feel like there's a little bit of a higher degree of difficulty on using the cast in AD Studi that I also haven't quite wrapped my head around or figured out the optimized boons to pick, you know?

So

I agree with you.

There's There's a little bit more of a skill ceiling on using the cast.

But I don't know.

It's super fun and kinetic the same way the first game is.

I can successfully get past the first area boss pretty consistently.

But now I'm getting stalked at the,

I can't remember what they're.

Oh, is it the

band?

Yeah.

It's like a band of, I can't remember what they're called, but it's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a three sort of person situation where it's a band and they stomp me every time.

Every time.

And I'm just like, I got it.

I feel so good leading up to it.

And I'm like kicking a lot of ass.

And I get there and like everything I've done has been for absolutely nothing.

And I feel that's the wrong perspective.

Everything I do is.

Failure is gross.

Matt, no.

Oh, my God.

Don't say that.

Oh, my God.

I'm kind of bad at the game and they're actually making me return it.

Hey, God, who beat the last judge, Matt?

Actually, it was me.

Yeah.

Sure was.

Rochelle, our producer, Rochelle Chen Ranch,

are you still chipping away at Silk Song?

I am.

I am in the depths of Act Two right now.

Wow.

It has gotten considerably harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of fun bosses, though, and I feel like it's going to take me like four or five months to finish this game.

It feels big.

It feels like it's something that, like, I'm not necessarily in a rush to finish it, though I am the finisher.

I finished the games on the show.

But it is something that, like...

I'm having such a great time taking it so slow.

Yeah.

Just like enjoying the, enjoying getting my ass ass kicked routinely

every time I play.

I looked at the map, the full map, as a spoiler.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, I only have seen the third of it.

Oh, my gosh.

That's actually horrifying to hear.

Ranch, you said to the group chat you encountered some silk song cosplay in the wild at a Halloween party.

Yeah, yeah.

My friend Sarah dressed up as Hornet, and then her little dog was the bell beast.

That's really, really good.

Oh my god!

Man, I wanted to do a hornet this year, but I don't know that I have time.

Almost every year, I think I took a break for one year, but every year I do an unnecessarily slutty, indie, usually indie game character.

Um, and it's, I have this series.

So like, it started with Untitled Goose.

I did sort of like

horrible goose.

And that was really fun because, you know, you wear like a little, I was wearing like a little tutu and a little corset and had a little duck bill, you know?

And so you just like steal people's shit all evening at a party.

Very charming.

Never grows old.

And then I think it was, oh gosh, oh, Among Us.

That was the year of Among Us.

Oh, wow.

And so I did like this sort of like vinyl red jumpsuit, like little leotard and like the red helmet and, you know, like long gloves.

But then I had like a little machete and stuff and like a dumb, the, the post-it on my forehead.

That's so fun.

So it's like, it doesn't need, these don't need to be flutty, but it's so funny that it is.

And then my, one of my favorites was, it was Financial Dom Nook.

Oh,

yeah.

That's really cool.

So like a really skanky version of his little like khaki shorts and the tied up shirt and stuff.

And then, you know, like a writing crop and stuff.

And then people started Venmoing me money,

bells, with just like the little bell symbol.

And I ended up making $1,100.

Oh, my God.

It was a funny bit.

But I ended up...

That's a bitch to be rewarded in this society, actually.

It's really good.

But then I ended up donating it to an LA Unhoused project because that is what Tom Nook would do.

I don't care what people say.

Let me tell you something about Tom Nook is that he gives out interest-free loans.

He helps build his community.

He takes care of his nephews.

Like, he is a good tanuki, okay?

Like, I don't know.

None of this.

Like, he's not a capitalist.

That's not what.

Commerce is not capitalism.

So, you know.

I like the spirited defense.

Yeah.

I like hearing that I can buy stuff and it's okay.

I had trapped myself in a corner of philosophical imprisonment.

Yeah.

But apparently commerce is not capitalism.

I can buy stuff.

Yeah.

And when you don't want that stuff anymore, you can put it in your pocket and resell it.

Yeah, that's nice.

That's nice.

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Heather, what are you playing?

Well,

guys,

I've been playing Ghost of Yote, which we will talk about in the larger conversation.

So, what I've been playing is: did you guys know that there was a nearly flawless conversion of Street Fighter 2 for the Virtual Boy?

I sent it to the thread.

The music is not flawless, but the actual gameplay and sprites, somebody painstakingly translated to Virtual Boy.

And now you can play, it's called Hyper Fighting.

And with a little bit of search, you can actually get a physical cartridge, a physical box.

Like,

people are dedicated to bringing homebrew to the Virtual Boy.

And this is one of the games that has been brought.

I feel like with Nintendo's announcement and also my personal re-evaluation of the system via the 3DS mod this season, this is last year was the was the Summer of Swan.

This year...

Oh, that's right.

I forgot about the Summer of Swan.

It was the Summer of Swan.

The Wonder Swan, yeah.

Swan.

Summer of Wonder Swan.

Oh, okay.

This year is the year of the virtual, the, the re-virtual boy.

Uh, so, um,

so I'm excited about that.

Uh, I've also been playing as of October 2nd, uh, Fortnite, I think, is the last conversation we had about my favorite game on Earth here on the show.

I was concerned about how fucking buggy it was.

Remember, I was like, I don't know what's going on.

They've scrapped medallions.

It seems like they're halfway in between a season that is ongoing.

As of October 2nd, they threw away everything.

It is the most unceremonious and unepic Fortnite decision that I have seen in the time that I've been playing.

They've fucking vaulted everything.

Whoa.

Wow.

And they made it into a K-pop demon hunters collaboration.

Yeah.

That's good.

And it is so fucking good.

It is so good that I finished playing.

You know, they dropped the skins of

our three lead ladies.

As of this record, that's the only drop they've had.

There is rumor of a second incoming drop of the boys.

With the boys?

Of the boys.

But what about Susie and Derpy?

The cat?

The cat, the tiger.

Well, let me...

Good news.

You can don the cat's face as a mask and then teleport to wherever you need to be on the map.

That's true.

The three K-pop weapons that are in the game right now are the cat mask,

Rumi's sword, and

also

a shield bubble that when you're in it, it's golden.

And it plays the hit song golden

inside of the shield bubble.

Nothing is more hype in this fucking game than throwing a shield down on the ground that heals you and your friends while that song's pumping and people are charging you at top speed.

Wow.

And you're like getting ready as that song plays because none of the songs are available as actual emotes or as tracks in the game.

So the only way you can hear the song is to drop the bubble and save your friends, which thematically works with the actual show.

It has been, they also patched all the glitches.

All the movement is fixed.

All the shitty bugs and everything are like the, it's also funny because the theme of that season was bugs and it was extremely bugged.

So maybe they were going for meta-commentary?

Do you think that they did it on purpose?

I don't think they did it on purpose.

Anyway, right now,

Fortnite Mares is about to begin.

That's the October Halloween horror-themed Fortnite, and K-pop Demon Hunters is their lead collaboration.

It is a blast.

Waiga, what have you been playing?

Heather,

before I answer your query, I want to throw a question back at you, which is, you mentioned it was Hyper Fighting, the Virtual Boy, a homebrew port.

So is it Street Fighter 2 Turbo?

Which version of it is it?

It's Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

Yeah.

And it plays just as fast.

And because the Virtual Boy is more powerful than it should be,

it actually plays really fast and really well with full-size sprites.

Yeah.

And it kind of is like, what's interesting about it is it's like

it implies a world where the Virtual Boy was a success and it got an official Street Fighter port.

And then you realize that games ported to the Virtual Boy would have been robust.

Right.

Like they wouldn't have been shitty Game Boy ports.

They would have been Super Nintendo-style style ports.

And in 3D, in the mid-90s, if only the fucking thing wasn't sitting on a table in bright red and to give you a headache.

Yeah.

It's really, there's, we are one multiverse away.

The paper thin world between us and a world where there were two separate choices made with the virtual boy and it ended up being a huge success, paper thin.

That veil is paper thin.

And sometimes you can see through it with ports like hyperfighting.

oh it's like the beta VHS or oh my god or it's like the wrong one one yeah yeah yeah

although in this case the right one won yeah yeah

but but also like

there's an alternate reality well what's gonna be interesting is that a whole generation of people who

And truly, this is more than a generation because the generation of people who were exposed to the Virtual Boy also didn't play Virtual Boy.

Like, it's not like, oh, one generation saw it, like reel-to-reel cassettes, and then it was everywhere and then it went away.

This is a thing that was available for a generation of players and nobody played it.

Only 700,000 people all over the planet bought one.

So when it returns to Switch 2 next winter,

it's going to expose people to, I wonder if...

I wonder if they are going to sell more Virtual Boy stands that you can slide your Switch 2 into than they did the original Virtual Boy.

Oh, certainly.

Isn't that fascinating?

I wonder if it is that popular, if they'll try and reissue.

I mean, it would be, you know, we have the Christmas 2,

but like,

I can also imagine people, because Nintendo collection people, the Nintendo console collector people will buy it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, so

that's interesting.

Nintendo also makes just the wildest, most indefensible decisions at times.

So it's the kind of thing they would just do for no reason.

With the rumor that

Xbox is shutting down hardware

that was sort of floating around this week, we're looking into a future where it's a Sony-Nintendo duopoly and that Xbox games are available on both.

And then additionally on whatever your, say, Steam handheld of choice is.

And I wonder if that will encourage Nintendo to get even weirder because they'll have a little bit more flexibility to make strange decisions.

Yeah.

I just I remember when the Wii was announced

and I and I feel like that was weird.

Yeah.

Yes.

So what could possibly what could they possibly do next?

I can't, I hope it's something.

I hope they expand on the Switch 2 modularity and put fuck, like give me something else to snap to the side of the system.

I mean, we're one generation removed from Nintendo releasing like a cardboard-like keyboard that you could build.

You know,

they're still doing like insane shit.

So, we'll say it was great.

Yeah.

God bless them.

God bless them.

God bless them.

Um, Heather, I, I'll answer real quick.

I don't want to hear from Erica, but I, I, I, I've been playing Clover Pit.

Uh, this game got huge and sold like 100,000 units in one day on Steam.

It is self-described as the demonic love child of Bellachro and Buckshot Roulette.

So, it is a slot, yes, it is a slot machine, roguelike with a grim, dark feel.

I was hoping it would be like lighter and chiller.

That's what I was like, I was like, oh, this might be like kind of chill vibes.

But then

once I bought it and loaded it up, I was like, oh, it's absolutely not that.

It's got this grimy like 90s PC or PS1 lo-fi 3D aesthetic with these kind of like, you know, chunky textures.

And the way this game works is that you accumulate increasingly threat.

This is very not Tom Nook.

This is very not,

you know, like some sort of benevolent commerce.

This is straight up capitalism

with

a punishment for failure of death by being dumped down a pit.

So you are accumulating increasingly higher thresholds of debt that you have to meet by playing a slot machine.

And then there's power-ups that you can buy to boost your odds.

So you're just like gambling for your own life, essentially.

And then as you keep going, eventually you're going to fail your run and be dropped to your demise.

It's funny to think of slot machines as a literal gamble for your life because, in theory, if you play them long enough, you will die.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There are like some of the aesthetic stuff I like is that, you know, you get cryptic hints via landline phone and things are a tutorialization from an email terminal.

It's all stuff that, again, just kind of feels like very

lo-fi, very 90s.

My main thing with this game, which I do like, is it's just a little too depressing for me, a depressed man right now.

But I do appreciate its design.

And I'm just generally so impressed by like, you know, the vampire survivors, deep rock galactic survivors of the world, the clicker games, and the, you know,

games that are just like basically.

Semi-automated or just are full-on gambling, like this one, that just like kind of lay bare what video games do to your brain, that just like remind you what a dumb animal you are, that you're just like responding to stimulus and response and hoping for numbers to increase.

And this game is very much that.

It's a really good design that just like gets at the right the core of what gaming is.

So yeah, I'm very impressed by it, but I'm not going to play it for too much more right now because it's just a little too bleak for me.

Erica, what are you playing?

Okay.

Well, I'm playing Ghost of Yotte.

Yes,

which is still, yeah, and people are like, how is it?

And it's weird to be playing it with me.

But I mean, I was a huge fan of Tsushima.

And so, and I really do feel like they heard some of the criticisms of Tsushima and then just really improved

on every level, like mechanically and design-wise, and you know, storyline-wise.

And I, it's just such a good game.

And I, I know I'm obviously biased, but it's it's so addictive.

Like, I've been staying up so late playing it, um, and which is actually the reason that I didn't get Hades 2 yet.

Okay.

Because, on top of that, that would kill me.

Right.

I beat Hades 2.

I mean, you're looking at a man at the brink of death.

I played Hades 1 so much.

And I'm terrible at roguelikes.

Well, I heard that this one's like it's a roguelite technically.

So it's like, it is okay.

You're supposed to fail.

You know, that's how you progress the story.

And that's what I, one of the things I loved about Hades, because I hate roguelikes because I'm just bad.

And

so I'm really looking forward to when I finally pick it up, but I know it has to to be at a time where I do not have pressing responsibilities because I will get lost in it.

It's so,

I love the Hades world.

I love the mechanics.

I just, it's so slick.

Like

I will buy anything that they make.

And I'm just so glad that Hades 2 is

out.

But

also, I bought Silk Song on its first day.

And I don't know what made me think I would be better at it than Hollow Knight.

I

truly feel like I was just went in, like, I think it was because of there were so many years in between.

And he's like, remembering Hollow Knight so fondly, all the lore and the little bugs and, you know, how good it felt.

And because I'm a huge Metroid fan and a huge Metroidvania fan.

And so I'm like, yay, another, another Hollow Knight is out.

And then I just was constantly getting my ass kicked.

And it wasn't even just the boss fights.

It was the run backs that would just get me because I'm not great like at the platforming.

I'll know like what I need to do, where I need to go, how I need to time attacks.

And it's just the execution is not there.

Like I am a scrub, like fully will admit that.

And so it's been hard because like I still want to play it and it's so cute and like the lore is still just as good and it's it's just as good as Hollow Knight.

It's just, I'm so bad at it.

I think it's hard.

It's harder than Hollow Knight, right?

Yeah.

That seems to be the consensus.

100%.

It's sort of like it picks up,

it starts with the end difficulty of Hollow Knight.

It primes you to have been prepared for that.

I feel like it assumes that, oh, you finished Hollow Knight, which I don't think I even did.

I don't think I really got to the end of it because

it's, I'm...

bad, but like, and then assumed that we wanted to start at that difficulty.

But yeah, it's, it's so good,

but maybe I'm not the target audience.

The target audience being people who can get better at video games.

Well, let me just tell you something real quick.

I'm also very bad at games.

I play a lot of games on Easy.

I think this nun doesn't have a difficulty.

If it did, I'd be done with this thing already.

It's no problem for me.

Real quick, generally, what types of games are your favorite types of games to play?

Narrative.

Narrative games.

I have always been such a sucker for, like, even

I'll get through something like The Last of Us because it's such a compelling story that I'm willing to die over and over.

And eventually, we'll get past it, or they'll like take pity on me and load it with less enemies or something.

But yeah, I just, I just hunger for narrative-heavy games.

Uh, also, something like A Return of the Obradin,

which is just like satisfying little brain puzzles.

Um, and and just I love games where it is the closer it is to something that could not be transferred effectively to another kind of media, the more I love it.

Where it's like, oh, you know,

the sort of ludonarrative design of like, wow, you couldn't make this any other way.

I think I think most

media that I love is like just really takes advantage of the medium.

Like comics, like Alan Moore's comics, I just love love how it's like, wow, you really do need text and pictures in order to appreciate this narrative.

Just in that way, I think like video games where it's like, wow, this narrative is so compelling, but it's so driven by the design of the game.

And so just anything that's like that.

And, you know.

You recommended House of Leaves to me.

Hearing you say that makes a lot of sense.

Man,

I recommended House of Leaves because everybody I know that loves immersive stuff and all of that has read it.

I still haven't read it.

Let me tell you something right now.

Neither have I.

It's by my bedside table and it hasn't for a while because I'm just like, well, what am I going to do with my life after that?

When I saw that it had a bunch of, I'll call it components, I was like,

I don't read normal books.

I don't

know.

I'm not going to get to this one.

Right.

Dice and shit.

What's going on?

You know, like, like, like pop-up is the same thing with pop-up books.

We're like, well, I I love a little interactive activity that makes me feel something.

Yeah, for sure.

So, you know, you mentioned, because you mentioned Return to the Oberdin, and then also, you know, making me Lucas Pope's previous game, Papers Plays.

But those are both two, like, yeah, those are, those are great examples of exactly what you were saying.

Like, this is specific to this being an interactive medium.

And that's what, like,

you can't really think of a translation of that, an adaptation of that to a different genre or a different medium, rather, that doesn't completely change

the essential feel of it.

So, yeah, I do it 100%, especially as someone who also loves narrative games.

That's the kind of thing I like as well.

And hey, that goes back to Dream Daddy, even.

It's just like,

yeah, you could have

an animated version of Dream Daddy, but it would not have the same feeling of you as the player, like, you know, driving the narrative.

Well, I think that's the huge problem with The Last of Us Part 2: is that

translating it to a television show

removes your physical pain and empathy in inhabiting.

you cannot play

those scenes and have it have the same physical, tangible effect.

What are you laughing at?

Force me to kill a dog.

Yeah.

Shoot at least one dog in the face.

Well, I mean, that's like that.

They literally took it out of the show.

Did they really?

Yeah, they took the dog killing out of the show and also like

bullshit.

Right.

So, so they're already making compromises.

They're making compromises on like the sort of ruthlessness of the story.

Yeah.

But they're also making compromises on the sort of physical effectiveness of telling that story through the game medium.

You can't, like, you just can't.

You can't.

Yeah.

You can't do it.

Unless, unless it was pitched as two totally separate television shows.

Yeah.

And then after you had watched those television shows, suddenly they were like, technically, this is the same show.

Oh, my God.

That's so big brain of you.

Holy cow.

But

I feel like that's the only way to achieve it.

You'd have to be watching effectively Breaking Bad and some unrelated television show where you got into that protagonist.

And then the third season would be like, actually, these are the same world and these guys are going to come in conflict.

In the world where they don't call 10 Cloverfield Lane, 10 Cloverfield Lane,

but you then learn.

they called it something else, and then you would have learned it was a Cloverfield movie.

That is more interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I don't know.

It's

games are fucking awesome.

Yeah.

These are awesome.

They're good.

Yeah.

There's an alternate reality where the virtual boy triumphed, and then also Heather is in charge of Hollywood.

And just things are more interesting.

But unfortunately, we don't live in that.

France is violent.

Yeah.

Ross killed Joey.

I mean, but just imagine like a whole separate sitcom about this woman and stuff and like the terrible men she dates.

And then suddenly, oh no, she's a Joey girlfriend.

Dang.

That would fuck me up.

He's here too?

Can they do that?

Yeah.

Well, hey, we're talking about narrative and games and a game that,

hey, achieves that quite well is Ghost of Yotte, developed by Sucker Punch, published by Sony, and released October 2nd of 2025, this current year.

The sequel of of 2020 is Ghost of Tsushima, which was one of my favorite games of that year, one of my favorite games of that generation.

I 100%ed that game, and I'm not someone who goes around platinuming games, platinuming games, woolly-nilly.

We already, Erica, we already talked about the, the, you know, got into this

to some degree about the performance, but like, I'm, I mean, can we step back even further?

Like, how did you get cast in this game?

Like, how did that this all come to be?

I, you know, so by the time that I auditioned for that, I already had sort of a lot of titles like triple-A's under my belt.

And so, you know, it was sort of a request, which means that there's like a more limited group of actors, I think, that gets called in.

I think, I mean, or at least

my agents must have like pitched me or something.

They were like, Erica would be very good for this role, I think.

And then...

Yeah, it was, I figured out, again, it was code named and it had fake sides,

but I figured out what a feudal

Japan

Sony game was gonna be.

Yeah, so I it was and it was was both very daunting because again, I was a huge fan of tsushima and also

really exciting because it's like you know, sometimes when you do an audition, you're like, this will change everything.

And

it kind of did.

Yeah.

It's so weird because while I, because, you know, I went to the callbacks and they asked if i had any questions and i asked is this ghost of tsushima too

and they had a very urgent conversation amongst themselves and before turning back to me and saying yeah yeah it's something like that yes

uh

and and i was like did anybody else figure it out yeah like no wow yeah so they're like so don't tell me

um and so yeah i i ended up getting cast uh you know i remember even at that audition we were talking about Kurosawa and just like games in general.

And it's just, it was, it was, it, it was such a dream to get cast.

It didn't feel real.

And I thought that they would kick me out, you know, like even months into the, to actually recording.

Cause you never know.

And I,

you know, it was, it was about two and a half years of my life of doing it.

And I just getting to work like in the booth and in the Mocap studio with so many unbelievable actors and some of the best directors and storytellers that have ever done it

was the hugest honor of my life.

And I feel like I got to grow so much as a performer.

And yeah, now that it's come out, it's...

It just doesn't feel real.

It really doesn't.

Because this was, I got into this, you know, I always loved games, but i got into this with the last of us and i was like that's it i gotta do games i want to do that yeah um and getting to record on the sony sound stages like was it felt like being in these hollowed halls and seeing some of the props that they use and the horse that i was on was you you know the the the sort of uh wooden horse shape thing was uh first of all they had a tag on it that said Nobu, which was the name, as you might remember, that you could pick for your first horse from Tsushima.

And I was like, guys, this is upsetting.

It's upsetting.

And I do have some conditions, and I'm going to be continuing on this project.

Remember,

and now that it's out, yeah, it's so wild.

And

I,

yeah, it's this has been such a dream,

like a dream come true.

And

also, it's weird that at the same time, you know,

when I was announced, that people were like, Erika Ishii from Dropout,

which is like, people kind of knew me as this sort of like chaotic gremlin, or I played D and D.

And it's so odd that those two sort of paths were bifurcated, but also really informed each other.

Yeah.

I mean, there must be some, some of the audience that's playing this game now and is like, you know,

I certainly know how talented you are as a performer, but certainly there are people who have maybe got exposed to you via dropout or other avenues that were like, did not know you had this range in you, you know, that you not had this kind of dramatic gravitas, you know.

But yeah, I think some people are still surprised.

And I think

when, like, I still get it about maybe once a week, I'll get some like

sort of like tag where somebody's like,

No, was nobody gonna tell me that Erika Ishii was in Apex Legends or something?

I don't think because I'm just so different.

Like, when I first started voiceover, I thought I was gonna do like sort of Zaney, you know, characters, young Anjinu characters.

I'm really bubbly, but then they're like, No, Space Marine.

Um, and so, yeah, I just like am, I've gotten, and I feel like all of that sort of led up to this character, you know, sort of my love of Kurosawa and Westerns, and uh, just the sort of dry humor, which is not my normal style of comedy, like on dropout.

But then also

just like the hours and hours and hours of shouting and dying.

Yeah.

Can I ask you, like, what's it like?

Because obviously that...

this was like a secret, like

a big secret that you had to keep until it was announced.

What What is it like?

What toll does that take on a human being to keep such a huge secret like that?

It's wild.

Well, Matt, I've kept some secrets.

I can feel this.

Okay, so it makes you this.

Yeah, I mean, you all know what it's like to have to keep these secrets.

Usually for online content, certainly, but even for TV or film, it's a much shorter sort of length of time that you have to keep something on under wraps.

Whereas for this, it was about

like even from audition to

the launch, it was like three years or more.

And for the developers, it was even longer.

Yeah, sure.

So yeah,

I was so...

grateful that I had, I constantly had like with dropout things to continue to do and announce and other games that you know would had a quicker turnover because it was driving me insane.

Because also, too, it's like in Hollywood or in, you know, in

any industry, you get more roles based on your resume and things that you've seen.

And you couldn't, like, my agents or my manager couldn't tell people like Erica is the literal face of a Sony AAA game.

Like,

until it happened, you know, and even then, it's like, well, what if the reviews aren't good?

Or what if it's like, what if it ends up being a bomb, you know?

And I've been on games before where it's like, you spend so much time and so much effort and it just doesn't really do well.

And you got to kind of move on and do the next thing.

I feel like people have been so stoked for this game for like so long

because of the love of the first one.

And as somebody who's now played just a few hours of it, but has played,

it's like what you were saying earlier.

It's sort of like it takes exactly what you liked about the first one, but it's just it feels everything feels somehow even better than it did before and it already felt great.

It feels so so good.

I did make a modification to the layout.

Did you go souls?

I'm going souls mode on this.

I'm attacked on the right one in R1 and R2.

I can't read your reaction here.

I can't tell if you're horrified or easy.

Like that's hard.

You're hardcore, man.

I'm playing on easy.

I will say, really?

Oh, yeah.

I on easy.

But it is good counter-programming to something like Silk Song that is very difficult.

And then I just get in this game and I'm just like killing everybody with no problem at all.

It's very satisfying.

And it is.

That's the samurai fantasy.

Yeah.

Just like slicing through a bunch of guys, you know.

I can't remember what the name of the

power that you have that like scares everybody.

The wolf.

Yeah.

The only knows how

when I get that and people are like, oh, fuck no.

You're like so scared.

And you're just standing there with like a, with your blade out, and they're just like, I'm dead.

I'm cooked.

And it's so, so, so much fun.

I also have played about five hours of it since it came out.

And

I think I'm going to bump up the difficulty to the final.

difficulty layer insane which has no off-screen warnings for uh for like when people are attacking you

You really have to work your position.

I've watched videos of it and I'm like,

I think I can do that.

Cause the first thing I did do in these games is, where can I go that I'm not supposed to be?

So I got my horse and rode to the stables and got my actual horse.

And then I saw that there was like a way to get two swords.

And I'm like, well, I got to get two swords.

And then from that point forward, I just ignored everything and started riding north as fast as I could.

And I am now in in an area where everything kills me in one hit.

And I'm like, I could make the whole game like this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it's awfully satisfying to kill somebody that every time you make a mistake, it's like you died instantly.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I could make the whole game like this and also turn off all the warnings.

So I think that's what I'm going to do this weekend.

Wow.

I need more warnings.

Because even on easy, I'm like, I'm getting fucking worked out.

The parrying is so good.

The parry is great.

It's so good.

The switching between your weapons is so good.

It is fast, which boy, oh boy, my number one complaint in games is always movement speed.

She runs a little slower than I'd like because I always want everybody to run at Sonic speed.

I want Sonic Frontiers speed in all games.

Yes.

But she's really, really, really fast on combat and it is so fucking satisfying to play.

On horseback, too, running through the flowers gives you that.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

And and you can see that.

With the horses, if you're in like the herd of horses, it's like, you're like, I'm free.

I'm spirit of the stallion of the Simuron.

I'll say this.

It might be too fast.

It's like,

it's so fast to me.

You can also, one of my favorite things to do in a game like this, if you're riding a horse, you can get off while the horse is moving and run fast.

Yes.

Fuck yes.

Let's go.

Ride my horse directly up to a guy who's torturing somebody.

Don't do any of the story.

Yeah.

Cut that guy.

And I will say, too,

from just like time to game standpoint.

We were talking about this last week when we were talking about Hades 2.

You start Hades 2, you're in Hades 2 immediately.

This game starts so fast.

You're just in it.

You're at the critical moment in Atsu's journey

to set her off into

her revenge quest to take down the Yote Six.

And also,

I know it's kind of bad.

I kind of like revenge.

Revenge is kind of cool.

It feels good.

It feels great.

It feels good.

It feels morally uncompromised.

Yeah, you feel better afterwards.

You just fucking, you just get to go.

Revenge stories are just like often very compelling and like there's just like a lot of nuance there and stuff.

And so I feel like we're going to learn a lot about Atsu.

And

I'm excited to see where the story goes from where we're at.

I would like.

So part of the problem I had with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is that often I would be faced with a decision and I'd have to make a fucking decision.

Yeah.

And I'd be like, oh, God damn it.

Do I kill this guy who actually didn't mean to kill this other guy?

Do I ram my sword through the back of this guy's head in front of his family or do I not?

And like, you have to like kind of weigh your reputation.

I'm hoping

as I go through this game that I'm not faced with any moral quandaries and I could just murder my way across the entire place.

Yeah.

Erica, I'm curious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, the thing is, is that like, I think we, I've talked about this with Brennan, and it's like, I love moral grayness in a story, but not moral ambiguity.

Yeah.

Because there is a right and a wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think Brennan says, he has said that, like, you know, removing black and white is two less shades of gray.

Right.

You know, because everybody's like, well, everything's not black and white.

It's like, well, but there is a black and a white.

He's always saying good stuff like that.

It's crazy.

Bangers every time.

Like even just like a talk back episode or something.

Eric, I'm curious at what part in, you know, you're involved with this process for two and a half, three years as you were saying, at what point are you playing builds and getting a sense of like what the game actually feels like?

It's so funny because normally you don't get that.

Yeah.

You know, at all.

I was lucky enough to get it.

I think like earlier this year.

Wow.

I know.

Yeah.

So I had already played through, but the lovely thing is, is that another incredibly rare thing for video games is I would get my scripts ahead of time, like a week ahead of time, and get

access to the writers.

They always had a writer like on the call.

They always, you know, if they were like, if you have any questions, like we can have, they would give me writer meetings, you know, beforehand.

Wow.

Which is, and they, they told me like the.

you know, sort of rough trajectory of the story and the character's arc, which is just something like most, for most games, you get the scripts as they come in and you don't really know how it ends.

And sometimes it's out of order, you know.

And so we filmed and recorded things out of order, but I was always given a very clear picture of this could happen,

this might happen in the beginning of the game, this might happen at the end of the game, or this could happen like a side quest at any time.

And so it's a challenge and but like an interesting puzzle for somebody who knows games and is an actor, because usually as an actor, like you have a concrete of like, you know, where in the narrative this goes and how different your character is between these points.

But in a game, it could be like in this part of the game or after this pivotal moment has happened and you don't know.

So you have to kind of split the difference, but still make strong choices.

Yeah, if you've got like this, that, you know, because of the open world nature of it, some side quests people can do in any order.

You know, if you're Heather, you're jumping to a late game area and just doing whatever, whatever the fuck.

Like, like, like, do you, do you, like,

I mean, I, that, that to me seems like the biggest performance challenge.

And I know as well for the, the, the, the actors portraying the NPCs and those, it's the same sort of thing.

Like, how do you present some sort of neutrality, you know, some sort of catch-all sort of, you know, behavior?

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting.

I think that, again, we talked about how game.

is such a different kind of narrative, like due to the immersion.

But I think game is such a different kind of performance as well because

of of the immersion.

And you're like, well, how much of yourself, how much personality do you give this character?

I've said, like, well, where do you want it in terms of like silent protagonist to a Nathan Drake, right?

Where it's like, you are a player avatar, but you have, but you have a distinct point of view and, you know, like a real strong personality.

And I feel like they really gave me so much guidance in terms of player agency, where in the narrative things were, what people might want, might be feeling at any given point.

And in also being a fan of the first one, and just of open world games, too, I had a pretty good, like, I was able to sort of map things out and be like, okay, well, like, on the golden path, these could happen simultaneously, or like one before the other.

And like, then this block of things happened.

And so I need to be like different for this.

But like, if this one side quest happens, you know, and it's, it's really interesting.

And I think like a challenge for actors who might, who might not, or, or write, gosh, uh, writers who, who might not be experienced in games.

Yeah.

Um,

I love it.

It's so like, you know, because, cause going back to Ghost of Tsushima's release and the, the, the run-up to that release is like some of the discussion was even, and I think this has maybe been, been memory-holded and maybe was, was, was, you know, overthought at the time, but there was some discussion, like, should a Western dev even be doing this sort of like, you know, Kurosawa pastiche?

And then some diamonds passing that game was so successful and I feel so influential.

Like, we don't, I don't think you get games like Assassin's Creed Shadows, which came out earlier earlier this year, which I enjoyed, but I'm also playing it in anticipation of Ghost of Yote, just speaking for myself, you know.

But that game I don't think exists without Ghost of Tsushima, you know?

So

now it's kind of this space where it's like a kind of a different place,

I guess, culturally in games, but also just like samurai

and again, this, this sort of like the sort of feudal Japan world is a little bit more in the zeitgeist, you know, gaming-wise.

I think, well, and then I think

I personally think, and like, I do not represent the the views of Sucker Punch, but I feel like Tsushima doesn't exist without Assassin's Creed and Witcher 3

and others that are like clearly an influence on it.

But yeah, I feel like Tsushima, people were like, oh my god, we can do samurai now.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I really do feel like that, because then suddenly we had so many, and like it was just an embarrassment of riches now.

And I, I've heard, well, first of all, yeah, I remember, I remember the controversy.

Um, and I, I think, like that the answer to that was the game and of Tsushima making Tucker Punch ambassadors, cultural ambassadors.

And, you know, which is, and Famitsu giving it a perfect score, which is, I think, happened when Tsushima happened.

Three different Western games had gotten perfect scores, like 40 out of 40.

And so

it was like so clear how much care and attention to detail went into it.

And I think there's always always that fear, you know, that fear that they really took their time and were very conscientious about, you know, their cultural sources for this one.

And, you know, again, Famitsu and the Japanese audience are

so happy with this.

And I think it's also that it's not, they're not trying to hit the hallmark of historical accuracy.

They're trying to hit the hallmark of, you know, with Tsushima Fotla Kurosawa.

Yeah.

Because like, you know historically samurai didn't have uh swords like didn't have katana in that actual era um but it's like the fantasy of it exists and like the idea of the japanese uh like roanin uh like wandering the countryside and like mixed with that western cowboy feel is like very much the informative vibe for for yote because like and you can oh my god the soundtrack is so good, but yeah,

like the shamisen and the guitar.

And I found out there is a traditional Ainu instrument, you know, the indigenous sort of northern Japanese

people

that is essentially it's a jaw harp,

which I think of as very Western, you know, that boing, boing, boing, but there, there is a traditional Ainu like instrument that's like that.

And so it's just this incredible confluence of, you know, the 70s filmmaking, you know, and so yeah, I just,

you know, I think today are the IN one of the INU

consultants posted about it and how much fun it was to work with the team.

So like major props to them.

That's so funny that it's, that it has, it like has its, you know, historical origins there because like to me, a mouth harp, I'm just thinking of a hoe down.

It was a completely different vibe.

Yeah.

Thinking it was some guy with like a, like a barrel instead of clothes, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like in a jug of moonshine.

Yeah, knees like ham boning and such.

Yeah, it's crazy how many sort of like confluences of culture were there.

And then the vibe of like the appearing in the saloon door as the wind whistles behind you and like the bounty posters is so like that, that like Leone

Sanjudo sort of vibe is so prominent.

And it just, as somebody who's a fan of both of those things, oh, it feels so good.

It's been a minute, I guess, since I'd played an open world game.

Like, I know that Death Stranding 2 is technically open world,

but it's got a different flavor.

Like, you don't come across stuff in Death Stranding 2.

Like, you're not like, oh, what is this?

And, and, and your curiosity is sort of rewarded constantly if you, like, see something in the distance and you're like, I want to, I want to know more about this.

And then there's a whole story that unfolds at like a shrine or a bounty or whatever.

And, and the sort of emergent way that that stuff.

It's so

man,

that we've really perfected the constant dopamine drip in an open world game.

Like, I'm thinking about it, and the more we're talking about it, the more I want to go home and play it.

100%.

Which, half the time, on the games that we cover on the show, I'm like, I'm probably not going to touch this again.

But, like, it's so fucking good.

And I'm just like, oh, I really want to know where the smoke is coming from on that mountain.

Yeah.

And like, I know that there will be something that is making that smoke.

It also makes me want to eat better food.

Cooking in this game is so fucking good.

You want to go foraging so badly.

Damn.

Yeah.

You fucking like, you, like, Wager, you haven't played it.

So

you can cook fish over a fire, right?

Yeah.

And you use your controller to like bring the fish back and forth.

Perfect.

And then you flip the fish and you crisp it on the other side.

Like you're cooking the fish.

Yeah.

It or you're burning the shit out of it.

You're burning the shit.

You're burning the shit out of it.

You're burning the fish.

And you can, and then the fun thing is that like you can skip those if you want.

If you're like, I just need to eat.

Yeah.

And eating is also

optional.

But like.

the real tactile sensations around them are like you can turn it on so you can like blow into the controller to like stoke the fire.

It just feels really good.

And the and the dual sense is such a

like a futuristic controller.

Like you can feel the fire in your controller if you're burning your fish.

Like it's not getting hot, but you can feel the crackling in your controller and you're like, ah, I'm fucking up.

I'm fucking up.

Sounds hot.

Yeah.

For me, it was hearing the mother's voice like calling to you from the past in your dual sense control.

And I was like, oh, no.

Is there stuff?

Because like you're, you've, you, you've played the game and

so you, so while you're playing it, was there stuff that you experienced as a video game player that you were like, oh yeah, I forgot that I even did this.

Yeah.

I mean,

also stuff that it's like, it was added in after my performance.

You know, stuff like the,

I mean, I guess no spoke.

Oh, I guess since you did the katana one where there's a part where you have to like train your left hand oh it's so good it's so good like i

and obviously i had nothing to do with that like and and

it felt like one of my favorite parts of video games just in general is in the last of us left behind when riley is narrating a fighting game to ellie and it's like the only thing you see is her face like and she's like got her eyes closed And then you have to do the buttons as they're described to you.

And the action is getting described.

And I was like, this is why we make games.

And it was, it was that same feeling of the idea of like the frustration and the like,

you know, like pushing through like a, like a physical challenge of that.

And it just like the design was, is, is phenomenal.

There is, I think this is early enough in the game that it's okay to spoil this.

Yeah.

You do these

side quests where you have to cut through bamboo and each bamboo piece is a different button on the controller.

And when you are learning to use dual katanas,

you have to only use your left hand because you're training your left hand in the game.

And left-handed combos involving also the face analog button that you have to push in as part of the combo is extremely tricky for if it's your non-dominant hand.

I kept thinking, well,

I mean, if you're a left-handed player, this is probably, you just breeze through this part.

Yeah.

Then you got to wonder, like, how are they doing it normally?

Yeah, sure.

But the, but the, the way that it

induces the feeling of familiarity in you, the player, is the longer you do it, the simpler the combos become, which makes it easier for you, which is synthesizing the experience of training your left hand.

Interesting.

Which is great.

It's fucking great.

I was cheering at the screen when I was like, this is impossible, this combo.

Yeah, yeah.

This fucking sucks.

I did.

I have

stalled story progress because as soon as I got a bounty board, I was like, I'm getting all these fucking bounties.

I'm going after all these guys and collecting my money because I want to buy all the little outfits and all the little, all the little things I can do.

You haven't even gotten to gambling yet.

No, I know.

I've learned the little game where you're flicking the coin.

Oh, my gosh.

That

it's an unbelievable experience.

But one of my favorite bounties was there's a bounty,

this guy who

plays the flute and sort of he lures people with his beautiful song and he kills them.

And to get to him, you have to play

your instrument,

and you then have to, then you play a song with him.

You fight him till he's basically almost dead.

And then you play a song.

And I was like, this is games.

This is good shit.

I fucking love it.

It's so, it's what a how cool that you get to be in something like this.

I unbelievable.

I can't, I can't express enough how exciting it is to sit here and talk to you and also get to go home and watch you die a million times.

In some ways, our conversation is not ending.

Yes, that's true.

To be continued, to that, but to that, is it, is it existential at all to watch yourself die in a video game?

Oh, interesting.

It's so funny because, like, in a lot of ways, I had to sort of do that while recording it in the booth, you know?

Because all of those horrifying screams that would be like, now you really need to imagine yourself.

on fire, you know?

So it's like,

you know, you're like, well, how would I replicate, you know, sort of like my vocal cords getting crisped up?

And, you know, like, and so it's really an interesting exercise, but then seeing it with your face is so wild, you know.

And I, as I said, am not very good at video games, so I die a lot.

But it's the fun, the fun and weird thing is when I will say something like I, you know, playing the gambling game, and I'll like miss a shot and I'll be like, oh, and then I'll hear her go,

like, in exactly the same tone of voice.

And that's the weird existential moment where it's like a stereo sound.

Oh,

yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah, it's so wild.

And I can't, I still, this all feels like a dream.

And yeah, after spending so much time in it and like really falling in love with the game and so many of these story like, because every, like, even as you said, just like finding the discovery, the rewarding of discovery and just every NPC and even every vendor has this personality and something.

And I just really fell in love with it.

I would have been so heartbroken if the game had been bad.

Right.

But seeing, like, I was in Japan when the reviews dropped, and it was 9 p.m.

at night, and I was like in a Lawsons, and I saw the reviews start to come out, and I, I just like collapsed and started crying.

And they, being Japanese, they completely ignored me and what I was doing.

You know, it's just the polite thing to do if somebody's having a little Menti B in Japan.

And like, you know, I just, I was so, I didn't realize that I had been keeping all of that tension in my body because, like, yeah, I, I love this, I love the people that I work with.

Like, I, I truly got a chance to know them and to work closely with them.

And they really took care of me, like, support in, in terms of support for an actor.

And, you know, I put so much, literally so much of myself in there.

And, you know, with the, with the face rights buyout, it's like, once you do it, it's kind of like, they're not going to put me on the face of another game.

Sure.

This one's bad.

I've blown it.

But yeah, and just seeing this story and these characters that I've really fallen in love with also having the world fall in love with them too is just so overwhelming beyond belief.

Because yeah, I am a gamer and if it had been bad, I would know.

No.

And I'd be so sad.

But it's so good.

Like even aside from the things, like I, as you said, just the dopamine pop of like, oh, maybe just one more like bamboo strike or oh, maybe I'll just do one more bounty

is so satisfying.

I've finished all the bounties in the beginning of the game so far.

Oh, no.

I went nuts with the bounties.

But it's such a, it's so great that the game is incredible.

And it.

Your performance in it is so, so fucking good.

And I just am like, just, I, I

was like nervous coming today because I was like, which I never am, because I was just like, oh, like you're so good.

You're so, so great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It's like, I can't wait to go home and play this game.

It's so fun.

I like truly, I can't.

Again,

all of you have done work that I'm just like, God damn it.

Like, it's, you know, when you get mad at a thing and you're like, how do they do that?

So it's such a relief to hear that

you are enjoying this thing that I did.

Now, Weiger's going to do one of the skeleton jokes real quick.

I'm not saying many faces likes to drink human urine, but

it was an actual piece of the sand.

Yes.

That's pretty good.

Congratulations again.

It's such a cool achievement.

You know, Heather put me on Blast for not having played it yet.

I am 100% going to play Ghost of Yote.

Just the

our record schedule currently is about a week behind the news cycle.

So this game kind of just came out.

But

I'm so fucking excited to get into it.

And it's so, so cool that you're a part of it.

And the thing we always say,

a huge part of it, the thing we always say on this show is like, if when we have a guest on, if we weren't into something, we just wouldn't do the episode because it would be like, we're not going to bring a guest on and then lie to them.

You know what I mean?

It's like, it's for us.

It's exactly them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it, but it's so, so cool.

I didn't mean to put you on blast, buddy.

I'm sorry.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

Silk song.

Yeah.

Hades 2.

Like, did the Digimon game, which I hear is great.

I can't do it.

I can't.

I don't have time to be very into Digimon right now.

I mean, and Pokemon is coming out next week.

Or this week?

Oh, my God.

Next.

Oh, God.

Right?

My life's over.

This year has been such a banger year for games.

Like, truly some of the best that I've ever gotten to play.

And it was this year.

I played so much blueprints.

There you go.

So much blueprints this year.

And I was like, I have to

get what I need done,

done, because there's so many other things that I need to play.

It's crazy to think that there is, speaking of these alternate universes,

there was a world where Grand Theft Auto 6 was going to come out.

Yeah, I know.

Everything would be insane.

I played scary.

I played so much blueprints, I went all the way around to disliking blueprints, which is the thing we talked about in the earlier episode.

I have a notebook.

It's a full notebook that's full of it.

It looks like a crazy serial killer's notebook.

It's got tabs.

It's got scrawl with like fountain pen.

It's got diagrams.

It's your handwritten House of Leaves.

Yeah, it's my House of Leaves.

I saw a thing on TikTok that was just examining details in Red Dead Redemption 2, and it made me realize that I know that part of what's holding up Grand Theft Auto is the online.

They want the online to drop at like full

experience.

But there was somebody who was like, Why did they animate the tongues of the sheep who are on this one farm who are drinking water?

And why did they animate ripples in the water?

There's no reason for that.

And then showed that if you look through the like the compass with the or the binocular or whatever, what do you call call what do you call this periscope periscope if you like

telescope if you look

at the sheep on this farm that you can see the sheep with their little tongues lapping at the water and it's like why who was assigned this yeah the last thing it's doing before you walk up and shoot

right

do they ever interview whoever did the shrinking balls on the horse in the cold

i would like to talk to this person they're on another level over there and we simply simply have to give it up.

We do.

Yeah.

That being said, we are so glad.

I'm personally so glad.

Yeah, because it was supposed to come out.

It was supposed to come out right around the same time and nobody knew.

Nobody knew when it was going to drop

until it suddenly did not.

I saw or I heard a clip of

It must have been somebody high up or maybe the head of Sucker Punch.

Oh, Nate Fox.

They asked him, yeah, and he was like, we popped some champagne.

He's like, we're still hungover.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was also in Japan and I got, like, I, you know, it's like one of those very traditional onsen.

Yeah.

And I got a text from my manager, like, hey, check out Rockstar's Twitter account.

And I pulled it up and it was like, we are so sorry that we have to delay.

And you could hear me apparently across to the other side of the real con.

I mean, being like, yeah.

Like, I don't get royalties.

Like, video game actors don't get royalties.

But I loved this game so much and I loved this team so much and I really wanted it to do well.

And so, I mean, I, yeah, talk about that, that alternate universe where, like, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's people who don't play video games are going to buy GTA.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and they'll always have it.

And everybody, it was this big old black hole that everything around it within a two-month radius was, was doomed.

Yeah.

So

there was the, the opposite of that, though, this year, which was Silk Song releasing with like 10 days' notice.

So, it's also like they could, you know, shuffle the calendars up there.

Yeah, that's true.

We're gonna say other, I was gonna say, I feel like at some point they're just going to announce that we are in Grand Theft Auto VI

and that they had, like, that was the level of detail that they achieved.

That we've all been playing it already, yeah, and we didn't know.

That explains a lot of things that have happened in the news.

Yeah, the head gun who just pre-lit Laszlo's podcast,

yeah, Florida Man,

Should we do a segment?

Let's do a segment.

You know, I figured since we have Erica here, somebody with actual talent, we should bring, dust off an old segment.

It's time for VO Theater.

Wow, okay.

What is happening right now?

Rochelle Arancha is distributing some paper scripts.

Thank you.

These are just some scripts.

It's a very short scene.

Got it.

This is going to be...

A presentation of Link the Faces of Evil from the Philips CDI.

Yes, this is one of of the Philips CDI Zelda games.

Okay, got it.

I just have, I don't want to give,

I'm not really a director or anything like that, right?

But I have, I sort of have a take on this.

Okay.

I think we should just give it everything we got and do it as seriously as we can.

Got it.

Okay.

Oh, interesting.

You don't want the tone.

This is the thing, like tone setting.

You want it more grounded than the actual CDI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Forget the reference, forget the source, and let's just just, let's get, let's, let's do this like a cold read, guys.

Yeah, do it like, like, this is like Prestige TV Game of Thrones, okay?

Like something, something huge, just as a comp.

So I've cast Erica as Link.

I've cast Tiger Wager as the king.

I've cast Heather as the wizard, and I will be the sole Zelda line here.

And so I think we can begin.

Link, if you please.

Gosh, it sure is boring around here.

My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for.

I just wonder what Ganon Ganon is up to.

Your Majesty, Ganon and his minions have seized the island of Koridai.

How can we help?

It is written, only Link can defeat Ganon.

Great.

I'll grab my stuff.

There is no time.

Your sword is enough.

Hmm.

How about a kiss for good luck?

You've got to be kidding.

Squadila!

We are off.

Wow.

What are all those heads?

These are the faces of evil.

You must conquer each.

I guess I better get going.

And scene.

Wow.

And so we'll like sound designing and stuff, but I feel like for reference, we should hear the clip so we could all have a nice little laugh.

Great, great.

I

it was so hard not to think about the original.

It was so hard.

Gee, it sure is boring around here.

My boy, this piece is what all true warriors strive for.

I just wonder what Ganon's up to.

Your Majesty, Ganon, and his minions have seized the island of Koridai.

Hmm, how can we help?

It is written: only Link can defeat Ganon.

Great!

I'll grab my staff.

No time.

Your sword is enough.

How about a kiss for luck?

You've got to be kidding.

Squadral, we are all

Wow.

I think stirring stuff.

Yeah.

We did a good job.

We did a good job.

My friends and I were obsessed with, like, in the early days of YouTube, you know, like they, somebody uploaded the CDI

like scenes, and my friends and I were obsessed with them.

And so like I remember like the ooh.

Yeah, it's there was so many to pick from from that.

I was actually surprised.

I went through some of the ones that we've done in the past.

We somehow hadn't done that yet.

Wow.

I have never seen animation that repulses me.

The way that the animation in that game like physically disgusts me.

It looked like it was about to throw up somehow.

The way the eyes googly around is like activates my lizard brain to tell me something's wrong.

It's the Uncanny Valley.

Yeah, it's disgusting.

They're like kind of Ralph Backsheeish,

but not.

Yeah, yeah.

Ralph Crapshy.

It's basically the only source where I would say I'd rather watch AI animation.

AI animation would look like that, though.

There's just something a little wrong with it.

I do think that king guy acted my ass off.

He's making me somebody real fucking amateur.

I didn't want to say he ate my lunch.

That was VO3.

That's this week's Get Played.

Our producers are Shale Chen.

Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.

Ranch, you streaming over on Twitch?

I tried Alien Isolation again.

Yay!

I love that one.

I hate it.

So what is it?

Is it too scary or what's the situation?

I think.

Did you get stuck in a table?

That happened to me.

I was stuck under a table?

Yeah.

I'm usually under a table only, actually.

I think I just don't under the map is very confusing to me, and I famously do not like being chased.

Oh, that's not the game for you, then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Why, why are you doing this?

A lot of people wanted me to play it.

What do you see for me?

What do you think you might switch to?

I think Silent Hill F.

I am very interested.

All right.

Phenomenal.

Yeah.

Again, you don't like being chased.

I don't like being chased without a way to defend myself.

I will say,

I'll just make a pitch here real quick.

You can get him to go to Yote, and then actually, you're the one doing the chasing.

You're the biggest threat in the game.

Twitch.tv/slash yard underscore underscore sard.

Our music is by Ben Prenti, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

We got merchantkinshipgoods.com and get animated our sister show on Patreon.

Matt, what are we watching this week?

We're watching Elfin lead.

We're almost done with it, I think.

Yeah,

I'm sorry to have said that just now.

It's tough.

It's a tough watch.

Not for the faint of heart, I'd say.

So if you'd rather skip out on it, that's fine.

But we are, we're all, we're almost done.

We're almost done.

And when that show is done, we'll be watching Link the Faces of Evil.

Ah, fuck.

Patreon.com/slash get played.

Erica Ishii, congratulations again.

Ghost of Yotay is the game.

Anything else you would like to plug?

Yes, I have a podcast with Lou Wilson, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Abria Iyengar.

It's called Worlds Beyond Number, and it's an improvised storytelling podcast where we are informed, our narrative is informed by games.

So

yeah,

we just finished our first arc of Brennan's story, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One.

So that's all available wherever fine podcasts are purveyed.

And I am currently putting out, I made my friends roleplay Clue.

Wow.

Hell yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Hey, well, there you go.

And thank you so much for doing the show.

Unfortunately, we have to tell you that you got played.

But you know what else got played?

Ghost of Yote.

So there you go.

That's all I wanted.

I killed a guy and I didn't even know there were bounties.

So I like walked up to this thing, and there's like a whole story, and I just slayed him.

And then a pop-up happened.

It was like, go to an inn.

The way you play games fascinates me.

That was a hit gun podcast.