06: The i Stands for 'I'm the Gamer?'

What's good, internet?

It is June 10th, 2025, and this is not a magical island where time works in strange ways.

A thing that could maybe apply to two of the games we're talking about today.

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Hi.

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What's the free level?

A follower on Patreon, uh, on friends with the table.cash of the newsletters that Janine Hawkins, who's also here, uh, puts together for us every week.

Yeah, I'm realizing I didn't tell you that I moved to an island where it's currently 1980,

70.

1980, 70, 1980, 70.

That's the year that the game mixtape takes place in, based on the soundtrack, is my understanding.

It's all of your favorite music from 1980-70, 1980, 1970, 80.

Oh, right.

That's from 1980 90.

i'm sorry yes of course um uh welcome back janina and keith you've both been here before we don't have to do a whole big intro but hi it's true um

i have to start with a thing before we get into our two big games of the week which i think are probably going to be fantasy life i the girl who steals time

which i still don't know what the fourth eye stands forth

and elden ring night rain i do want to you know someone actually messaged me on blue sky the other day was like are did you were you on any streams for the summer games fest stuff did you talk about it and i was like no i wasn't i don't even know for sure we're gonna cover any of it on the show on side story um but you know i

i i was so annoyed by a thing that i just want to shit talk it really quick

which is did did y'all see the green games showcase

i've seen zero seconds of any of this i love this for you keith yeah yeah living pure i heard about it i heard people were watching it not having a good time and i I was like, I don't need to bring that into my life.

I think a good thing about it, this is the good thing that I'll say about it, is that it happened at the same time as the Future Games thing.

And I think the Future Games thing probably had more people watching it because it's an established thing.

So the good thing is it was scheduled alongside something that was better, that other people were probably watching instead.

Unless they were weirdos like us,

like Austin and I, who were like, oh, what's this new thing?

Let's watch it.

Yeah.

Which one had the split gate thing on it?

Oh, that was just the Summer Game Fest thing.

That was even before.

That was on Keely's stage.

Which, I mean, we had a much longer conversation about the way those shows go, both Summer Games Fest and the Game of the Year awards stuff, the game awards.

Sorry.

In fact, we once.

He's on both ends of the year.

He's capping the year.

That's right.

It takes the summer.

He takes the winner.

It's it's unfair for everybody else we're all just sitting here trying to sneak out whatever we can do in between the the rising and and lowering of keely's sun yeah it's just keely's world we're all just living in it

that's right

yes

um i know my friend went abandon all hope yeehu keely here which is nothing

uh

you know i The Split Gate thing is actually a pretty good...

The guy from the company that makes Split Gate 2, which is a Keith.

You played the first Splitgate?

It feels like a Keith.

I did.

I played the second one too.

Okay, okay.

Well, yeah, the guy who runs that company, I believe it was a CEO, but maybe it was just a designer,

came on stage and was like, Aren't you sick of I'm so sick of all of playing every Call of Duty and they're all the same.

And also, I love Titanfall 3.

Titanfall 3 should have come out.

We all want to play Titanfall 3.

And his hat was like, make FPS great again, which is...

Yes, it sure was.

Yeah, and by the way, just a just a quick recap on the Split Gate thing: Splitgate was a game that came out before or around the time that the most recent Halo game came out.

I think there hadn't been a Halo game in a really long time, and this game that was sort of like Halo and sort of like Call of Duty and also sort of like Portal came out, and it was so popular that they had to delist the game because they couldn't make it work.

And then

five years later, or something, they put out Split Gate 2, a game that seems very similar, but worse in every way.

Yeah, that does seem to be the case.

Anyway,

my big beef with that, besides the fucking MAGA hat or the whatever, you know, besides that.

The Mufuga hat.

Right, yeah, the Mufuga hat.

That's a classic Mufuga.

Gaming the Mufuga

is there are so many.

games that are not Call of Duty to play, even inside of just the first-person shooter genre.

We are just talking about Echo Point Nova, these showcases year after year have been filled, or not, not the Summer Games Fest main stage, or all the side ones, the future one, PC Gamer Show, all of them have had like wild, interesting FPS games for the last five years.

There's been like a huge resurgence.

This year, in particular, a huge boom of specifically first-person shooters, where you also got to mop up a thing sometimes.

That's right.

Yeah, those

lots of, you know, boomer shooter style Doom things, but you're a cartoon mouse or some other sort of you know cartoon creature.

There's all sorts of stuff in this race that isn't Call of Duty, and I think it's like disingenuous to be like, we're here.

I mean, it's not disingenuous, it's an appeal to a certain sort of aggrieved,

imagined player.

And I shouldn't say imagined, because this is the same people who are like, they took tits out of video games, and so now every fit game in the SGF is a gooner game where it's like, we're not actually a porn game.

we're not gonna like show people like fucking we're not gonna have people have sex on the in the game but you're going to be in a sort of lurid daze the whole time because the ass is going to be in your face the whole time you're doing action combos that's what we want that's the thing and like that's what i'm doing i guess apparently everyone wants to announce that because it's all over the summer's game summer games fest truly i would be i would be happier if jeff was like we're gonna let porn games in here now uh that's crazy is that true what That, like, that sounds that sounds like it couldn't possibly be true, but why would you lie?

Why would you make that up?

Non-stop.

You know, it's like I said, it's every fifth thing, you know, which is not everything.

One, but one in five is kind of a lot.

You know what I mean?

If you're like, okay, well, is this going to be one where if I was 16, I'd be embarrassed if one of my parents walked in the room.

And it's like, it's one in five, I would say.

And that's on top of there being a sort of similar,

there isn't like a real

embrace of like hyper violence that is

again, I am not like to get get the gore and get the tits out of my games in any way, but I do think that it's indulgent and it's like uh and and the attitudes around some of it are so defensive and entitled in a way that's like really off-putting when it when it then kind of like funnels down into a guy being like they're taking our good FPS games away.

It's the same mindset as they tried to censor Scarlet Blade or whatever, it's just about FPS games.

And in both cases,

Scarlet Blade is different.

Okay, you're right.

Scarlet Blade is different.

They did not try to censor Scarlet Blade and MMO from 2013 or whatever, which was one of these games.

They've never, they were never not here.

Do you know what I mean?

So I don't get.

I get the aggrieved position, is what I'm saying.

In order to have the aggrieved position, you have to

stake out

a social thing of we are doing this against the games industry that's right and then that means that you have to like make the aesthetic of that part of your genre which means like

going beyond the thing that they say is gone but never was gone which is like

tits and blood right tits and blood been in games and then also you're showing it at

not

e3 you're showing it the biggest stage that they're kind of yeah the game industry doesn't want us to make these games so they gave us this huge stage stage to show our game.

Yeah, and a lot of, and we're making it with a lot of money, right?

Right.

I forget what game it was, but like, I do want to illustrate this point for Keith.

There was a game, I forget what game it was, I'm not going to tell you that it was maybe a fun game, I don't know.

There was like a

armored-up person figure shooting out guts and stuff, and they turned around and like they looked extremely just like armored up, whatever.

And they turned around, they just had like an amazing, lovingly detailed, shaded, rendered ass.

Yeah.

Then, in a way that just like really,

you know, you thought you were hit in the face a little bit when someone ripped someone else's throat out and then like tied it around like a macrame knot.

Well,

here's this.

Here's the most beautiful ass you've ever seen.

Do you both remember my really old friends of the table story about the cat woman statue at Six Flags?

I don't.

Please remind us.

What?

At Six Flags, New England, there's a, in like the kids' ride area, there's a small, like kid-friendly roller coaster called the Catwoman's Whip.

And in the line to that is

a giant Catwoman statue.

Which era is Catwoman?

The really hot era, whatever.

I don't know.

This is like the hottest Catwoman statue of all.

Which I know.

I don't know enough about Catwoman besides that I could tell this is Catwoman.

The rhyme is called Catwoman.

Cartoon, live action, start there.

Is it this?

Is it this?

This is sort of semi between, it's between cartoon and reality.

Oh, okay, that's comic.

That's okay.

There we go.

Yeah, that's this is the Catwoman.

That's like classic.

The class on this statue is unbelievable how detailed it is.

Oh my God.

I found it.

I got you.

Wait, show me.

Show me.

I'm going to show you the Catwoman ass.

Wow.

So I've been like,

I haven't been to Six Flags New England in 15 years, but I remember from like the ages of 10 to 15 being like,

okay, I'm pro this statue, but it doesn't belong here.

Like, I like this technically, like on paper.

Like, I like this, but it shouldn't be here

in line for this kid's roller coaster.

This checks all the boxes, but there's a child here.

Can I take this off your hands?

I guess you're the child at this point.

Yes.

But But yeah, again, like, that's the thing is for me that the, my beef with this stuff is not that it exists, or there's obviously people who really want it.

And it's not even that it's in the show in any way.

It's that there doesn't, it rarely actually feels genuine in these games.

I think Atomic Heart 2 is the, is the, is maybe the biggest offender where it's like, oh yeah, even the first game, that, that game had these like, you know, sexy, faceless android nurses or whatever.

And the trailer for the second one, of course, leans even further into that.

And it doesn't...

Do you remember that game?

What was the actual name of the game?

The one with the faceless woman and a huge ass first-person shooter that came up

Haiti.

Yeah, Haiti, H-A-Y-D-E.

There's like three of those now.

Yeah.

There are.

And I went on the forums for those games recently and found out that people miss the faceless model because the person who makes those games or one of the people who makes those games gave the character in, for people who don't know, Hadi, H-A-Y-D-E-E was a, like a third-person shooter that came out in 2016, right when Steam started to let asses on their platform.

And,

you know, it was this thing of like the camera is at like hip height and she's constantly crawling through sore, you know, over soar grates or whatever or vents.

And so it's just like ass, ass, ass.

And her head was a big Android robot head.

No facial features at all.

Just kind of a flat white port almost like a portal turret head.

And more of those games have come out and they have like apparently, I've just read these.

This is not, I've not played these games, so I can't speak from experience in this case, but I have read the forms.

And in games two and three, they're like backstory to how things got to this point.

And there are characters who are, who have the same big ass, but a human face.

And there's a subset of the players, at least some, some very loud subset, that is like, give us back faceless Haiti.

This lady's ugly.

Give us back the faceless one, which is like, you know, real classic,

dehumanization shit.

Like, it's like, remove the head is like all, if you do like any sort of photography studies or women's studies or studies about race, like the way in which the desired body is framed without the head is like a classic maneuver.

And,

you know, regardless, underneath all that, there's someone who's like, no, the lore about the ass is important to me.

And I don't get that energy from Stellar Blade or from any of these other other things that are like, we know there's an aggrieved, an aggrieved demographic that we want to appeal to.

Again, I can't actually read anyone's mind, but when I see the work, the work doesn't scream interest in the ass outside of the artist's interest in designing it.

It doesn't feel like that's part of anything in any

important way.

You know, I just want lore-consistent ass.

That's all I'm asking for.

You know, I see

a genuine feeling of appreciation for it.

That's right.

I wonder also if part of it is like we're hitting the

video game nostalgia wave of PS.

Like, there's a lot of games in this that have that have evoked PS2 in a really strong way.

So, like, we're kind of, we've moved past the

sness and Genesis, and we are, I think, still, we've got a toe in the PlayStation era of nostalgia, but things are moving into into

sort of like slightly higher fidelity, slightly like, you know, and part of that.

both ways.

We were in Nintendo 64 for so long and then we went back to PS1 and forward into PS2.

Yeah, but I think with that, there also is like, when you look back at those games, you're getting a lot of,

God, was X-Blades was PS3, right?

No, I think that you have the sorry, I think it was an Xbox One game.

Oh, no.

You're actually right.

It's PS3, Xbox 360.

You had it right.

I was confusing with some other thing.

So

I remember at the time that X-Blades felt a little bit dated in what it was doing.

I remember like seeing it and being kind of like, really?

It's it's you know, 2012 or whatever.

Like, what are we doing?

Um, never even heard of this.

This looks terrible.

I don't, I can't speak to the quote.

I mean, it's got mixed steam reviews, but that could be the port.

I don't know.

Um,

but yeah, this is 2009.

Um, sure was.

Yeah, I

so there's part of it that I look at, I'm like, how much of this is just like there is a nostalgia for when a game

looked like this and it wasn't like a thing but also it is a thing and it's a marketing thing and it's really hard to separate the like are you doing this for like nostalgia reasons are you doing this because stellar blade sold a fuck ton and it was apparently pretty mid um

like

you know I don't think anyone's, I agree that, like, I'm not sure how many people are doing it because they really love that ass.

Are they, did they, is it, are they in it for the love of the game?

You know, I don't know.

And again, my my

my actual read on this is that there is a loud that it's the same thing that we went through in the 2010s, which is this the sudden arrival of games that, for instance, treat women as full people and not just objects to be oggled are like

uh feel make a certain subset of players feel like uh under attack right like well wait no why should i have to care it's just a game let it just be a thing uh and that is a line of thought that I think we all see all over the entire culture we live in.

And so when I see that ported even away from these kind of cultural war issues like boobs in games or even ultraviolence in games to simply, I'm going to make the real FPS game.

It's like...

You're trying to ride the way.

You're trying to ride a gross corrupt wave in actually a way that's somehow even more cynical, you know?

Because like you're just trying to move product.

You're just just trying to sell your stupid game, and to do it, you have to ignore that there are other things like the thing you want all over the place.

You could go click on the FPS, you go listen to us talking about Academy Nova three episodes ago, that game fucking rips.

Uh, there are tons of games that people who want things like Titanfall can go play, or people who want things that are just not Call of Duty can go play that still are about getting sick headshots.

And some of them are like, are like

wildly aggressive and ultra-violent.

Some of them really are wildly throwback to an era of Halo-style shooting.

Like, it drives me crazy when that maneuver happens because it's so naked.

And it's so,

you know, and that's again on top of the fake MAGA hat.

I also can't help but wonder how much of that is a pitch targeted towards investors who are not interested in something like Echo Point Nova, but

because of their demographic, where they're at, they can, you know, someone can say to them, hey, remember those games games that you thought were really cool?

There's a big hole in that market now for a really high-budget visible one of those.

We can do that if you give us, you know, $30 million.

Janine,

the years of working on games is really showing.

I mean, you know, so it's hard.

It is really hard not to just imagine meetings sometimes.

Yes.

To look at a video game and be like,

who is in that room?

What was going on there?

Who was making that pitch?

And like, often that pitch and what the creatives actually believe in in the project do not align.

But, you know, like.

Totally.

But then when you get on stage and you deliver that as part of the pitch to like the public,

the weird thing is like it makes the...

It makes the way you understand games seem extremely myopic.

Like taking you at your word, you must not know anything about video games.

Luckily, neither do the people who play video games.

Well, also,

they're counting on someone watching the main stage events and not the side things, which a lot of people will do.

A lot of people will watch the big one, if they're watching anything at all.

They'll watch the big one.

And the little, the side stuff that's showing cool, interesting whatever stuff, like they're, you know,

not really going to key into that until something, you know, strikes gold on Steam in, you know, 12 months and just becomes the hot new thing that everyone pretends they were always excited about.

I'm sorry for detracting against the actual thing, Austin, that you want to talk about.

I do just want to quickly say, yeah, there were some other things that were worth talking about

that were, I do think those other showcases, I do think things like the Day of the Devs was like pretty solid.

I think on June 7th, there was the Wholesome Direct, which we could, I think I've already talked at length about the words wholesome and all that, but there were some things in there that I think were interesting.

Woman-led games, Latin American games showcasing.

The problem with the wholesome thing is that it is where a lot of games I'm really interested in gets.

I'm in the same position.

And also,

to their credit, they are, I think, starting to move away a little bit from just like the like, oh, you have a big armchair and you got your cozy socks and kitty.

That is way more patronizing than I meant it to, but because like most of the games I'm interested in also show up there.

But you know, there's games, they're showing like horror games now, you know, they're showing games that involve like shooting and fighting and stuff, but because they're acknowledging that, like,

in my head, the phrase that plays over and over again a lot is comfy, not cozy.

Um, where it's like games that are comfortable to you in some way, but it's not purely about just like feeling

like safe and like babied, I guess.

Like, it's it's not it's not about games that are like unchallenging or you know won't won't like rile something up a little bit in you.

It's about games that, for you, are a comfortable place.

And for a lot of people, that is horror.

So why not put horror games in there?

You know, it's there.

So they're trying.

I do think the phrase wholesome is

kind of a

albatross.

Yeah, I think it definitely holds them back at some point.

Yeah.

It's something that got tainted from a long time of people's, the way people were pushing games and talking about games in that area, which could also happen with the word comfortable.

Yeah.

Right.

But it has it.

Which makes it useful.

Cozy.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, I think

there's there was something wrong with wholesome until the people started talking about it and like making it.

Until the genre got deeper, right?

Like

until

enough was going on that you could afford to have more nuance.

Well, I think like, yeah, instantly you have this sort of like what counts as wholesome, wholesome for who conversation that you you can have.

And again, we've had

there that conversation has been going on for five years now because that show is five years old.

And I don't want to just rehash it.

But for people who are curious, you can find a lot of great, you know, conversations and criticism about it.

And speaking of criticism, I do just want to also shout out

the excellent Liz Ryerson, who put out another showcase that is not part of the Summer Games Fest, like list, but I think was really good.

It was a 45-minute showcase called The Unearthed Treasure Room, an alternative showcase of overlooked games.

It was put on by Liz and

Melis Hantani,

who is an independent game developer that has put out games

like Anodyne or who's co-developed games like Anodyne, which I think is an all-timer.

That is a showcase put together with

a bunch of independent developers and like

some critics and stuff just like talked about a game that they thought was really interesting for a few minutes.

And then, like, there showed there was some gameplay.

And it was kind of like, let's put a flashlight on some stuff that's come out over the last few years that would never show up, even on a Wholesome Games Direct or on, you know, any of these other, these other showcases.

And so, people like Bennett Foddy and Laura Miche and Blake Andrews came on and like talked about something that they really loved.

Really cool collection of games.

Very cool event.

I hope that it continues.

I hope that people go go watch it because i think if you're looking for stuff that's like you know the range of stuff here is you know weird arcadey retro things through visual novels uh through kind of um

you know bright uh psychedelic platformers and stuff like that really a cool event so i wanted to shout that out and we haven't even talked about the main thing that made me want to talk about this to begin with yeah Judy, we started watching the Green Game Showcase thinking, I came into it skeptically.

I am

ah, nature, I guess.

Yeah, I was curious, right?

I will say I'm skeptical in general of anytime there's a sort of like games for change-ish movement.

I'm skeptical of that entire project.

I have been of the official games for change thing.

And I say that as someone who wants to

talk about Twine on stage or a panel about Twine on stage

at the Games for Change Festival, an experience that helped me kind of hone in on being like, I don't know about all this.

It opens with people talking.

I'm not going to like, I'm I'm not here to like say the hosts were, I don't, I don't know enough of the behind the scenes as to like who got in, what they expected.

I suspect there's some people at this show, like showcased on this show who had no idea who else is being showcased on this show.

I think maybe a good example for trying to always get to that sort of information if you can.

But sometimes a show will say, hey, we're going to be as part of the Summer Games Fest.

We'd love to have you be part of it.

We can't tell you who else we have because of NDAs.

So either you're in or you're out.

And I know, I understand a developer saying, yes, we want to be in.

And also you can be in if you donate some money to this charity thing that we're doing.

Yeah, well, yeah.

In fact, that's maybe the most interesting thing, right?

They were like, there's three categories of games that we're going to cover today, which is not normally how one of these showcases works.

I would argue it's not really how this one worked either, but I guess you're right.

They were like, the first one is about games.

This is how they said it.

Subject is.

That's right.

They said it a little weirder than that.

They made it sound like it was going to be games that actually did something for the environment, but that's later.

So yeah, subject is environment.

And they showed like

an anno-style.

The first one was like an Anno-style city builder where you have to be aware of nature.

And I went, okay, I get what this is.

It's worth saying, like,

what I was expecting from this is the fact that there's like a half dozen games about solar punk stuff coming out.

And I was like, yeah, I guess you could put those all in a showcase together.

There's also like a bunch of games that are coming out that are,

you know, top-down, high-level resource management things that are specifically about unfucking up a place.

So, again, there's like a lot of stuff going on, obviously, because it's a conversation a lot of people are having.

That like, yeah, sure, you could put together something for this.

And like, I know some of this has come out in the last few years.

Yeah, some of this has come out in the last few years.

Tara Nil did really.

Like, oh, maybe it's getting DLC.

Maybe it's right.

Exactly.

Exactly that.

So the first one, I was like, okay, yeah, this is kind of what I expected, a game where you have to, like, figure out where you're going to get the energy on the new space colony without fucking up the planet.

Okay, cool.

And then the second game, they were like, it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a

deck builder.

I was like, okay, cool.

I like those actually.

I like deck builders quite a bit.

And it has lots of themes about.

That's right.

Is that what they said?

It was like about

surviving a world,

you know, in crisis or something like that.

And I was like, okay.

And then instantly, I think you and I were both like, wait a second.

This looks like AI art to me.

Yeah.

And then it started moving.

And

that was definitely AI.

Keith, I'll drop you a time stamp on this so that you can see what we're talking about.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

Elohin.

There is something really special about when you look at something and immediately know that it's AI.

And this is like, yeah, oh my God.

It is the AIest looking thing I've ever seen.

Yeah.

The music, too.

Oh my God.

The vote.

It's vocal.

Yeah, the music.

The music is fucking Anna Indiana too, basically.

It's funny because I don't know if it's on the internet too much.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah,

it was described as a game about like thriving with the planet or something.

And then instantly, it is AI art of,

you know,

the most empty,

meaningless, archetypical characters.

You know, noir guy holding money.

You know, paused on noir guy holding money.

There's no character to any of this.

No, you know, a woman walking with lion in front of the pyramids.

All of the UI is this kind of chintzy sci-fi fantasy stuff.

All of the characters are...

It's like, it's not just, Janine, you pointed this out.

It's not just like empty.

It's sloppy.

Yeah.

Like, no, there are, there are mistakes all throughout the art and everything else.

It's like, and it's the classic AI art mistakes where it's like,

it's stuff that, like, if you wanted to, you could take a few minutes with a clone tool and clean it up.

Like, it's, it's lapels that just sort of like mysteriously fade out of existence.

Um, it's like buttons that kind of don't make sense.

They're just kind of like smeary and have lines in a way that doesn't make any sense either.

Like, lots of like little things where it's like, as soon as you

don't need to be an expert to spot this stuff.

All you need to do is follow lines.

Yep.

Um, and like, and look at shapes and be like, does this shape make sense as a 3D object?

If you can take the time to sit down and do that, you can figure out that this stuff is not

with the AI art stuff.

Like,

okay, this lapel doesn't go anywhere.

That's sloppy.

You know, I can tell that, like, oh, this piece of clothing, it comes out of nowhere and goes into nothing.

The real problem, like,

I could play a great game where that's true about the art.

And I think that one of the defenses of people who don't care about AI art is that they can look over those things.

It's not important to them.

And really, it's not important to me either.

But the problem is that the people who are drawn to AI art as like a tool for making their game don't have the artistic qualifications to be like thumbs-upping a piece of artwork.

This art sucks ass.

It's so bad.

It has no personality.

It's like, why do I want a card of like a CG looking owl sitting there?

Like, it does nothing.

Yeah.

Austin, I found the, I say, I found the how they frame it.

Um,

Ello in Quest of Time by Earthwise Games is a web-based card game about thriving with nature.

Thriving with nature.

Great.

Now, I've actually read some of the lore of this game.

Uh-huh.

Is it about thriving with nature?

Well, there's like two sides, right?

There's the side that

is using Moloch, the evil AI, in order to get ahead.

And then there's the side that is rejecting Moloch

and something, something they have like a good AI.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Or from Metropolis, the movie Metropolis, famously re-re-configured Moloch

as a big mouth, the big factory mouth.

You know, they're just kind of lifting that whole claw.

Here's the other thing.

What this trailer...

Sorry, I'm looking at this picture and also this lady's holding a lantern that also makes no fucking sense.

It's just like a handle and then like it thinks it's a candle for a second, but then it's like, no, wait, it's a lantern, it's a lantern.

It's embarrassing.

The

thing they're not saying about this is that this game is based on a series of books.

There's a series of fantasy books that were bestsellers in the self-help category.

Okay.

And they were a collaboration between someone who's like

a business person and a lawyer, I think was their background.

And then like a famous self-help

self-actualization person.

My guess is that

the former is using the latter's work as sort of an underpinning for the fantasy thing.

Sure.

And if you go to the website for this, you can read a little exchange between

like a, it was like a witch or something and a gamer.

A gamer is, I think, you, the reader.

I'm the gamer.

Yeah, and the witch is telling you about how you can improve your life and like the dangers of Moloch, but if you, but like you have to use Moloch to get ahead, but like, how do you use Moloch in a way that's responsible and that doesn't have other knock-on effects?

Oh, I see.

Interesting.

I see.

Well, one way might be that you just take your money and you give it to someone else and you say that that means that what you've made is green now.

You know, well, yeah, also

coin to prove that you're good.

Okay, Sam Bakman freed.

Let me just really quick find the list of things that they said are their goals,

things that they're trying to do before release.

They are exploring renewable-powered cloud services to host our game and AI models more simple.

I still love exploring.

It's a web-based game that's designed to reduce reliance on energy-intensive gaming consoles and high-power PCs.

That's right.

Yes.

Okay.

They are also evaluating blockchain networks with strong sustainability commitments for our Web3 features.

So, you know, we don't have any of these things.

We're not sure we can get these things, but we're going to

be investigating.

Yeah.

What is a Web3 feature?

Because we don't.

Because NFCs are good.

So it is crypto.

There's crypto.

Everything you do gives you a coin, gives you a special token.

And the token is associated with a DAO, and there's a whole bunch of shit there.

Anyway, the last one, hardware optimization.

We're committed to optimizing Eluin to run efficiently on lower energy devices to reduce unnecessary power consumption.

I like these four things because they are, at best, two things.

Sure.

All of this stuff.

And like, I think that there is someone could show up and be like, yeah, but they're going to be on Ethereum.

Ethereum is proof of stake now.

Oh, AI's costs are dropping, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Which I think all of that is.

fundamentally bullshit.

We know that people who, for instance, get back processing power from not needing to be proof of work for Ethereum mining anymore just use that processing power for other crypto coins that are still proof of work.

Like that's like a thing people have looked into.

Like there is not a way out of the entire process of what this stuff is.

We know that when AI gets more energy efficient, people just make more calls.

They make more dramatic calls that boost all of that work.

But even let's bracket that.

This is not a game.

It's not even a product.

It's like a

thing looking for investment money.

It's a lore.

It's a piece of bait

for VC.

You're the product.

You're right.

The player is the product.

Yeah, 100%.

And you're being sold to VC because they're being promised that this is going to be the next big thing.

And it's not.

This game is not going to go anywhere.

This game is going to like scam some people.

Maybe not scam.

I don't want to make it a legal, particularly a legal allegation.

Some people are going to get excited about this and they're going to put their money into it as individuals and investors.

And I suspect they will not see a return.

This is not legal advice, but

as a parasocial friend of yours, don't put money into something like this.

The thing that then happened is this event continued.

And I don't think there was anything as egregious as this, but the fact that this was the second thing they showed was ominous, and it turned out to be pretty indicative.

It's worth saying, of the of the sections that, you know, there's the games, the games where the theme is,

it's about helping the planet.

This was in that section.

It was not in the section that was basically all mobile games that have a little microtransaction pack that in some way benefits some sort of green charity.

And it it was not in the portion of the game.

Normally, this green charity, by the way, the one that's

associated with this particular case.

Well, there were some that were like, oh, they're donating to like this thing with trees and stuff.

With trees, yeah, there were a lot of those, yes.

And then the third section was just games that the team had donated an amount of money to the charity that was running the stream, and

they got a placement for their thing.

And you know, I think if this game had been in that back portion, I wouldn't be half as mad at it.

I would be, yeah, I'd roll my eyes at it and I'd say, look, this is the limit of this style of greenwashing.

Like, that's what this is, right?

That, like, in the same way that buying, you know,

carbon offsets tends to be mostly a publicity move and does not actually offset the harm done.

Like, here we are, here they're doing it.

But okay, I get it.

They quarantined it in the back half.

But instead, it was the second thing.

Yeah, and then like,

it takes two minutes to go onto the website and find their graphs about their tokenomics.

Like,

it's right there.

They're not hiding it.

Like, it's right there.

So I can only assume at that point that either you're just closing your eyes completely or you know and you think like

they gave enough of a pitch of like, well, here's how we're doing it responsibly that someone was like, yeah, it sounds okay.

Yeah, come on in.

Exactly.

But then you have to look at the game.

and go like, and this meets our quality standards, which is then like a second, like, it's your second thing.

It looks like shit, and it's sketchy.

Well, yeah, well, one of them

wasn't ready.

We were just seeing card art stills, just being like, oh, it's like Hearthstone.

But for people who kind of,

what's that thing that Keith Ranieri and Nexium and stuff started out doing?

Neuro-linguistic programming.

It kind of, I don't know that it's the same, that it's the same underpinning, but all the self-help stuff kind of gives me the neuro-linguistic linguistic programming vibe.

Yeah.

Over and over again, at the back end of this, when they were just getting to like the they gave us money portion of this,

one of the hosts kept with this chorus of any game can be green.

Any game can be green.

Yeah.

It just goes to show you that any type of game can be green.

Any game can be green.

Because you could just make a donation and then you've made a green game.

And like that is maybe like if I had to come up with a

bad faith version of

like eco games or any of this shit, it would be that statement.

You know, if I needed a straw man, it would be the argument that any game can be green, no matter what it's actually doing environmentally, no matter what its actual messaging is, no matter who made it, no matter where it was made, no matter under what conditions it was made.

Any game can be green if you give these people, if you give a charity, any charity that is vaguely, you know, ecologically minded some money, that just makes the game green.

And we just like, you know, one of the first things they showed was an Amazon, you know,

Game Studios game.

Yeah.

What are we doing?

What are we doing?

And again, I don't, for me, this is

one instance of a larger ongoing sort of like failure to engage industrially with the truth of an industry.

It's not just they did a bad event.

I mean, I think the event was bad, but I, but also this event was like platformed on the Summer Games Fest page.

It was like, you know, part of the main, you know, Keely didn't show up for this thing, obviously, but it was right in, it was in the same block with women-led games, Latin American games, et cetera.

It would just go into it.

Any game can be a woman-led game.

I mean, right.

Like, we wouldn't accept.

Just make a donation.

We wouldn't and shouldn't accept the idea that like if I, if I was the only executive on a game and the only lead on a game, that it would be a woman, a woman-led game, you know?

It would be if you donated to the game.

But if you donated, it would be, right?

And so it's just like, and it also just brings down the entire seriousness of the rest of it.

And again, imagine being someone who had a game in the middle of this showcase that you were really excited to show.

And what you thought was we're going to be in front of people who care about this issue.

We couldn't, this couldn't show up on the main stage.

People wouldn't get what we were going for, or they would poo-poo it, or they would say it was too political, or blah, blah, blah.

But now you're in the middle of a bunch of people saying, and I don't know, maybe the people who are still part of it were excited to get the exposure.

I can't speak for anybody.

This is not me, you know, kind of

reporting an actual feeling from somebody and just kind of like covering who it is or anything like that.

I'm just saying if it was me, I would be fucking pissed.

Imagine if your game that you made in the desert using like,

you know, on your water farm with only wind power, and you went on after the AI art game with the cryptocurrency, you're like, what the fuck?

I thought this was green game.

Yeah, what the fuck?

I was like, I took this seriously.

I thought we were taking this sort of seriously.

And it's, and it is a serious issue.

It's maybe the most important issue in the world with like the biggest disparity between how serious it is and how much work is being done.

Like on the front, arguably.

Again, there are a lot of games that are doing this that weren't there.

And like, you can, you know, you can only show whoever wants to be shown.

But like, there were other games literally in this string of press conferences that

I want to say in The Wholesome or something, in one of those there was a trailer for Spilled, which is already out.

But it's a game about cleaning up oil spills.

Right.

And like cleaning up water in a little,

you got a little tugboat and you're sucking oil up.

That came out in March.

I think they're doing like a...

update or something.

But like there's that.

There's a bunch of like those solar punk things in early access.

Some of those were were out.

They're, you know, part of Steam NextFest, if you want to check them out.

Like

people are doing actual stuff.

I don't like, I don't, I'm looking at this.

I'm looking at this fucking card game and it's just like,

you're just telling me it's about Earth and showing me a druid and a tiger.

Like, it's true.

I guess.

They did pick a winner to show at the very end of the stream.

Keith, can you guess without looking at what the final game was?

Now, remember, this is the section of you just have to make a donation.

Okay.

You want me to guess, like, fabricate a game that's.

No, it's a real game.

It's a real game.

I'll tell you this.

It already came out.

It already won Game of the Year awards.

Oh.

Oh, what game would have won a Game of the Year award?

I don't even know.

I believe that the trailer said it won 80 Game of the Year Awards.

Oh, my God.

Um,

did it win Keely's Game of the Year Award?

I don't know if the current edition of the Keely's

was out, was happening yet.

It may have just started.

Um,

I don't know.

I don't know.

It'd be really funny if it was a first-person shooter.

It would be very funny.

It would be very funny.

Because of how first-person shooters aren't coming out.

Yeah, right.

No,

no, it's it's it's I think before the terrible dry spell of first person shooters.

Yeah,

I don't know.

I would say so you're telling me this is an older game.

I'm telling you, it's an older game.

All right.

Is it Stardew Valley?

It's from before Stardew Valley.

It's from wait.

They had a green game showcase in 2025 from a game that's older than a game from 2013 or something.

I believe that that's right.

I'm double-checking my dates.

Keith, can I give you a hint?

Can I give you a hint?

Yes.

Yeah.

Always save the last one for yourself.

Oh, no.

I don't know.

This hint doesn't mean anything to me.

But is it your hair short or whatever?

Oh, yeah.

Keep your hair short.

That was another one.

Yeah, for sure.

Hair shirt or hair short?

I don't want to keep my hair shirt.

You were the game of the year, but the hair shirt.

The hair shirt game.

The hair short.

Fursuit hairy or whatever it was.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Oh.

um

well if it's if it's older if it's on a green games thing and it's older than Stardew Valley I'm gonna stick in the same thing and I'm gonna say like a harvest moon game that's a great thought no it was the walking dead the adventure series from telltale from telltale which doesn't exist really that's right yeah so for a video that doesn't really exist a game from 2011 2012 yeah uh-huh

i believe skybound is putting them back out again uh i think that's the thing is that they're available for sale now i guess oh well this makes actually it makes perfect sense because this game's recycled.

This is a reused game.

They're putting it out again.

It didn't cost any development resources at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

You're right.

Well, it was just.

You actually, you also didn't talk about the last segment, which was like a 15-minute long interview with Sir Ian Livingston.

I forgot about that.

And I couldn't tell you what it was about, honestly.

I watched the whole thing and I could not tell you what they talked about.

I think it was mostly about how the sensors don't understand how games can be powerful for education

yeah i played math blasters i know about how games can be powerful for education yeah uh-huh i played that one with the snow and you threw snowballs and you skied and also it was math yeah this is also the event remember the name of where the one of the developers of sensible soccer the all-time uh soccer game uh announced that he is a new band

He has a new band.

He has an album.

What's it called?

Like sensible

songs?

Sensible rocks.

sensible sensible something like that that sounds like a they might be giants album maybe sensible band he's formed sensible band a band that's ready to produce electrifying rock uh anthems not too electrifying but that's right renewably electrifying rock a very sensibly amount of electrifying oh right yeah because it's sensible right yeah yeah yeah uh it's like taking iconic video game melodies and giving them lyrics and rock guitars.

And I was like, why is this in here?

This guy just gave you 20 bucks.

Like, or he's your friend.

Like, I don't, I don't know.

It's fine.

I, it is, it is, it is not, it is not that serious, but also is,

keep the thing you just said of like, this is maybe the most important thing any of us could focus on with our limited time on earth.

And when it's done like this, it just, it just itches.

It gets increasingly more limited.

Every day.

Every day we're more limited.

Anyway, any other things from Summer Games Fest, Janine, that you saw since you watched the stuff that you want to shout out or that you thought was actually interesting?

What was the...

I would love to shout out the

Frosty Games Fest?

Yes, Frosty Games.

I think if you are overwhelmed by the amount of things that you could watch

and learn about,

I think if I had to recommend just one for someone with deeply limited time or attention, it would probably be the Frosty Games.

Just Frosty Games.

I forget if it was...

Was it Fest?

Was it Stream?

Was it...

I thought it was Fest, but ultimately...

If I had a Frosty Games thing, I would call it a Fest because of the alliteration.

Yeah, Frosty Games.

So it's Australian and Audio Rowan

games, developed games.

And there's just like a really wide variety of stuff there.

It's called Frosty because it's winter there right now, obviously.

Of course.

But I mentioned that because one of the things says, one one of the games says it's coming out in spring 2025 and i was like that already happened and then i had a moment i was like they probably mean their spring which has not happened yet yeah um that makes sense but there's a lot of stuff there just like a lot across a lot of genres that was neat uh and and cool and not like duplicated in a lot of the other streams like there's a lot of cross-pollination in the other ones but this one's yeah so that's if you want to be pleasantly surprised i would say that's the that's the big one yeah i'm excited for Big Walk, which wasn't from there, but was from Day of the Devs

by

House House.

Is that right?

House House is the name of the studio.

House House, yeah.

I'm excited in the more traditional space for the new Resident Evil, Resident Evil 9.

I really liked RE7 and 8.

You know, there's stuff there.

I don't, I don't,

we just spent 30, 40 minutes being like,

I'm so frustrated at this industry, and I'm not not frustrated at the industry.

That is how I feel.

And I do think there's maybe a larger

ongoing,

what's the word for it?

Like a malaise about

games in many quadrants that I think is probably worth a larger thinking about because I did feel like even inside of very mainstream

corridors, there was a general like,

all right, is that it?

From a lot of people.

But I feel like if anything, there's more malaise from mainstream and AAA

places and players than from other, because like

if you're tapped into like what is actually coming out, you could find anything that you would actually want to play.

Yeah.

There's so much.

And there's some malaise among people who are like trying to get $10 million checks from people and can't.

I do people that they're

who people are playing huge games

seem to be sick of the huge games that are out.

I think that's not going to stop them from playing Fortnite.

I mean, yes, which is, of course, a big part of this, right?

It's like more and more people are playing one or two big things full-time.

A lot of kids are just playing Roblox, you know,

and then, you know, a lot of adults are just playing Fortnite or they're playing one 150-hour RPG or another and they're like not finding the time for a bunch of little stuff or they're not interested in it.

I think that there is something.

I'm trying to work through a thought.

And so I don't think this is a real thesis.

Go ahead, Keith.

Well, I try to work through it.

I'll tie it back to the first thing that we talked about.

One of the reasons why the uh

mufuga hat shit is so frustrating and the like they don't make games for guys who love boobs anymore is so frustrating is like there is real aggrievement to be had if you're someone who wants to be playing like new interesting video games that are uh you know expensive to make and interesting to play

uh and it's that's not where the agreement is like that's not the right direction the direction should be from like everybody's making live service games.

They're all terrible.

Everything is like downstream of Destiny and WoW in a way that is like really obnoxious and boring.

Like, everything is trying to be Roblox or Minecraft or Fortnite or

something Overwatch.

It's not that they're making fewer of them.

It's that they're making the same ones for longer.

Uh-huh.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is part of why I think something like Claire Obscura hit for so many people, right?

Was like, oh, there's a novelty here for me.

I don't normally play these games.

Games like Final Fantasy have become, you know, less turn-based.

This, not that there aren't other turn-based RPGs, built Japanese and otherwise out there, but like, oh, wow, this looks big and expensive.

This hits that scratches that part of my brain.

And also, it's doing something that I'm not getting from the other big AAA-looking games that are out there right now.

I think that there is a...

It's crossed my minimum threshold for me to consider it a real game.

100%.

Visually.

I think that's a real thing.

You know, like I,

I, one of the big conversations we had when I was making the game I was making that I'm no longer making over and over again was like, what do we have to hit in terms of visual fidelity?

What sort of style can we pursue that will open us up to a

cross that limited threshold, right?

From game I don't have to take seriously to game I do take seriously.

And I think when you're in it when you're in development, a lot of that stuff that's theoretical, that like from my critical position, which is like, I don't care if it's lines on a paper, it can be a game.

You know, like we fucking, we run a tabletop game podcast, none of that stuff got graphics.

That's all up here, baby.

Like, I'm fine with that.

But as a developer who is trying to make something that is going to hit an audience, you then have to get kind of real politic about it and be like, well, there is a meaningful audience that will not spend more than seven or fifteen dollars on something unless it crosses some threshold and looks like quote-unquote a real game, which is bullshit.

And we should try to change that all the ways that we can.

But also,

it's the realist, it's the realistic part of being in this situation,

It's also totally irrational from a market perspective,

because there are so many gamers who feel that way about graphics, about how it has to look a certain way for it to be real to them.

But then also, all of the biggest games look like shit.

Fortnite looks like shit.

Minecraft is a very specific style.

Roblox looks like shit.

You can have those standards, like those sort of.

I would say standards born from like,

you know,

shallow, like limited experiences

until something like hits like your friend is playing something and drags you in and you get really into it like a thing I always think about is my mom who after she retired sort of got into games

and

she you know I would show her things like Minecraft occasionally is like you could try something like this

And she would, she would say stuff like, why would anyone play that?

It looks that, because it looks that way.

Like, why would you play something that looks like squares now?

Like, everything else.

Video games don't have to look like squares, so why would you choose to play something that looks like squares now?

And there's, it's hard to answer that question to someone who has that perspective and hasn't played the thing in question to know that, like, it feels really good.

It doesn't matter what it looks like.

If you haven't had the experience of something feeling really good and looking bad, quote unquote, like, looking older or looking whatever, I don't agree with any of those statements about Minecraft, but you know what I I mean.

It's hard to just like talk someone into having that, into changing their mind on that.

But that's the weird thing is that the same people who like won't play a game and look unless it looks like GTA 6

also are playing Fortnite every day.

True.

And I don't know how, like, to, I don't know how like you make a game with that kind of person in mind where they like, they technically will play something that doesn't look very good endlessly for hundreds and hundreds of hours, but we'll see a game that is like slightly weird graphically and go, ew, it looks like shit.

It looks like a PS2.

I mean, I think Fortnite is still fundamentally legible, though, right?

And it's very legible.

And I think when you think about when people first got into it, also,

I'm not saying it looked outstanding at the time, but it was not, it was on par with third-person shooters that were multiplayer focused.

And also, there are other ways to communicate

technical success, like scale, which it had right compared to a call of duty map there's this whole big area you can explore uh you know changeability you could build stuff in this game well okay well if you can build stuff in this game then it's of course it's gonna it looks better than minecraft minecraft you can build something but it doesn't look as good as this but right squares in minecraft and why would you play a game with squares that's right it's all squares it's all squares and then also just like it's a big it's a big um uh multiplayer game oh there's all of these players in every match that means that you make it that little bit of, you know, that is impressive.

It's not a trade-off.

I don't think people are doing calculus in their heads, but they're being impressive.

They're like, whoa, we've been fighting like all these different people over the course of a whole game.

Like, cool.

And I think that that cool factor is that the kind of technical cool factor can come in even through stuff that isn't what we think of as like technically good quote-unquote graphics.

And instead, through these other things that are still, which is actually getting to the thing that I actually think, which is, I think that there is an audience for whom what was lacking from these showcases was something like novelty, which absolutely exists if you scratch the surface of these things and you find that inside they are all doing slightly different things.

But I think for a certain type of consumer and a certain type of...

player, they see a game like mixtape, a game about being in your high school years, a coming of age story, and they go, oh, yeah, like Life is Strange, which I've been playing for a decade, right?

And I think that's a hard hill to climb over.

And I think that's also true for all of the

everything from smaller,

more independent things than that up to gotcha games, which all just look like a Hoyoverse thing, but realigned in some way.

And a ton of stuff, you know, in between those two things.

I think a lot about the move, and I've talked about this before, but from like the original Xbox to the Xbox 360, the move to HD gaming, right?

That was such a, oh my God, I feel it.

I feel the new box I bought and put on my, under under my TV can do a thing my old box can't do, right?

And not just visually, but also in terms of the types of worlds that they can produce for me, the speed at which games are running, the connectivity, all of these things.

And I think that there was a follow-up to that, which is not as clean as the box produces better graphics, but is like, oh, we're exploring new types of interactivity.

We're figuring out new genres.

Oh, we're telling adventure game.

We're using parts of the adventure game or the visual novel, but in 3D spaces that allow us to tell stories about people who aren't just john marine you know but we've had a decade of that now we've had most of the 2010s and all the all the 2025s having battle royales and uh you know the return of the immersive shooter and intimate you know stories about uh uh grief and i and i i there's a sort of lingering low-level buzz that i can sense this is not my my best critical hat isn't on uh I'm kind of like an empath

and I can kind of feel.

This ought to be good.

I can kind of feel like, you know, Keith, like the exile from Code Tour 2.

I kind of have a sense of how other people are leaning in the world.

And I can kind of feel

that part of the malaise is that people want something that they haven't had before and they don't feel like it's coming.

You go to a show like this and you want to feel buzzed about a thing.

You want to feel like, oh my God, I hadn't had that idea before.

And that thing can glow in a way that other things gain that,

you know, I think of people going to see Horizon Zero Dawn whenever that first showed up at E3.

And I remember people coming out of that being like, you could knock the pieces off of the robot dinosaurs.

And that made them excited all day.

And then they go and see other games and they're already buzzing.

They might not even like that other game, but they're already buzzing from that previous demo.

Shout out to Jeff Baccalar.

I'm talking about Jeff Baccalar, my good friend.

Shout out to Jamie Prom.

But like, he was glowing after after seeing that demo, you know?

And I think that there is, that there is, and again, that's a technical thing, but it's, I don't just mean that.

I also mean, oh my God, I hadn't thought that there could be games that talk to me in this way.

And I think we're in a little bit of a moment where right now, a lot of, because of maybe because of what's being shown, or because of the format of the way a game is being shown, because of all that stuff, it's part of why it's hard to get money to make any video game.

Of course.

You know, Janine, I think part of the reason you and I both were like, whoa,

is it Big Walk?

Big Walk feels cool is because it's like, oh, it's not quite, it's kind of doing something different than even what we get this right now through games like Repo and Phasmophobia and other sorts of multiplayer things.

But like, this feels like a different thing than those.

And I think if there were more of those things on a big stage or if things got the space to show the way that they were novel, you might end up with some of those people who have malaise being a little more...

Just having a little more interest.

Though I also think that this might be an ongoing situation that's real in space of games, partly Keith, for what you said, which is the conservative

tenor of it all.

I think that was you.

It might have been Janine.

And people not knowing,

I think that in a lot of cultural stuff right now, there's people who don't know how to talk about what they like and don't like about something.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's hard to know what you like and don't like.

There's a whole job around it.

Part of what being a critic is, is like unfolding your feelings.

Janine?

It's so part of it is also, I feel like

I should clarify because I've only said that I

work

on stuff with IO Interactive, so

I'm not going to comment on any of that stuff.

But I also recently was working with a company that unfortunately shuttered and was working on an unreleased game

that was a cool multiplayer thing that...

that, you know, RIP was neat.

So

when I'm commenting on like, I wonder what the funding situation was like here, it's coming from that background.

It's coming from my experiences there.

And my experiences there also

sort of tell me a little bit of like,

I think a big reason that people aren't getting that, wow, that's something new, is because

it's really hard to get money for video games and has been for the past like

three-ish years.

And on top of that, the way to get money is often to say, it is like X plus Y.

And that is where the niche is.

You pick successful thing X, successful thing Y.

Whether or not your game actually is that,

that's the two things you're going to try and use to pitch it to someone is like, it is this peanut butter, it is this jelly.

Right.

And you put it together.

And that's why we should, like I said before, that's why we should get $30 million.

And

sometimes you can do that and like be a sneaky peat and release something that is its own thing or that feels unique when you play it.

But if that's a strategy that got you money, that's the strategy you're probably going to market with.

And that's the strategy you're probably going to lean into in terms of what you're showing.

And so people are going to be like, oh, right.

It's like peanut butter plus jelly.

Yeah.

And like, I have peanut butter and I have jelly.

Yeah.

So exactly, you know, it doesn't exciting.

And to your, to your, I mean,

when I started making the game for Possibility Space, when I was on that team, we started that project when, as the finance guys like to say, money was cheap, which is to say, interest rates were low.

And so it was very easy to borrow and also not just low, but it was flowing.

It was easy to get a loan of a high amount of money for a relatively low interest rate, which means that people who want to start a business or who want to invest in

a game project or a studio.

Looking at pandemic numbers and saying, I want to take to that.

Exactly right.

They are going to be a little more lowercase L liberal with, it's kind of also uppercase L liberal with their investments, right?

They're going to say, oh yeah, I'm willing to take this risk because the money's cheap right now.

I'm not losing a bunch of money on interest

when I make this investment.

If it doesn't pay back, yeah, of course it'll be a loss, but that's the job.

That's the

part of

the thing that i like doing i like to to be a little risky with this and most of the time i know i know a good thing when i see it but sometimes something surprises me so let me let me put my money into something uh that that doesn't that isn't just peanut butter and jelly but when the the economy gets more more shaky uh when uh interest rates are higher when there is market instability not simply because of tariffs or because of the the bouncing back and forth because of tariffs uh the general sense that nothing is stable, a lot of that investment gets way more conservative.

And

it's not just investment because even inside of something that's like fully owned and operated, fully funded internally,

people who are holding the purse strings often lean towards more conservative decision making.

And so you start asking like, could we make this a live service game?

How do we extend the life on this thing?

How do we make sure that people don't just play it for a weekend?

How do we make sure they get the battle pass?

How do we make make a game that has a battle pass in the first place?

How do we make something that no one will see and think, oh, this is for someone else?

It's not for me.

How do we make sure that we build the biggest tent possible?

And all of that stuff, I think, sands down what could be, you know, really idiosyncratic or interesting games.

And instead, we end up with stuff that does feel samey.

You know,

part of why I'm like, when I roll my eyes when I see something like The Last Descendants or whatever that game is, isn't just the TNA in it, right?

But what is

kind of like eye-rolly about it for me is like, oh, this is just, what if we put it in Destiny?

Or what if we put it in, what was that sci-fi original TV show that was also an MMO?

Defiance.

Defiance, right?

And I think when I look at that and contrast it to something like Warframe,

which is

tons, absolutely has ass, a thousand percent does.

You end up with something where you're like, oh,

this is a project that so reflects the interests

and the creative direction of its developers, the sort of broader ideas they want to explore, both narratively and mechanically and aesthetically.

Like all of that stuff feels like something

that

is unique and in and of itself, like something that was being pursued for its own ends, and not because we know we can find an audience.

And

I think that

you can play that conservative development development game for a little while, but eventually it has diminishing returns.

There was a moment where once there are enough of those similar things out, once there are seven different Genshin-inspired third-person gotchas,

you're too late to the party, buddy.

You're not going to be Genshin number two.

How many truly successful live service games are there?

I mean, you were saying earlier, people chasing WoW and Fortnite, right?

And like,

that's, you know, I think Final Fantasy XIV probably is the one that hit the most in the post-WoW

world.

It's interesting.

No one's pitching.

No one's being like, we're going to be the next Final Fantasy XIV.

They're so excited.

It's like that that game is.

Yeah.

That game's expensive.

It was really successful.

Like, there are people who are making MMO pitches, but the MMO pitch they're making isn't Final Fantasy XIV.

There's also a sickness at the heart of the live service game, which is that.

I thought you were saying there's a sickness at the heart of Final Fantasy XIV.

No, I haven't played it and I won't.

But you should play as Final Fantasy XI.

Let's get back.

I got into Final Fantasy 11 last year.

I played Final Fantasy 11.

All right, it was good.

Anyway, yeah, I played it on the Xbox 360.

We talked about this on the stream.

You're right, we did.

Which is that, okay, so the number one thing that

big publishers with lots of money are trying to do is put out a game that makes tons of money and keeps making tons of money so they don't have to make another game, but they're also trying not to pay anyone any money,

which is a fundamentally contradictory thing with live service games.

It's the kind of game that needs the most stable employment, the most labor, people actually constantly working on a game.

And so you have this thing where like you want to make a live for service game because you want a game that keeps making money for a really long time, but you don't want to pay for it to be good.

You just want it to work.

You want people to like it and to keep playing it.

And so like these games fail because they say that they're going to be a live service game.

And really what they are is a game with a battle pass or

a game that has

some really unimpressive updates every three months.

Yes, I don't know.

A lot to consider, a lot to think about.

I thought we would talk about this for no time at all, but here we are.

I turned this into an episode of Run Button.

It's my fault.

It's not your fault.

You don't have to take the blame.

How often do I say we have 20 minutes left and then we set an hour left?

You know,

but we should take a break.

When we come back, we can talk about Elden Ring and Fantasy Life I.

fancy fantasy life i i'm the gamer that's what the eye stands for that's the fourth eye

stands for i that's groundbreaking that's groundbreaking actually that's one of the other that's one of the other eyes is i

i have a thought but we'll we'll come to it after the break

e-y e

I like the big I's all around giant or mosia oh

could that be?

Where does it say that there's four eyes?

I mean, this is not the first time I've heard this.

Janine, do you remember where this is?

Is it from like an interview?

Is it from some marketing thing?

It's like it's like from like a year ago.

Uh, there was an interview where someone was like, ah, but there's a fourth eye.

Give me a second.

I'll try to find it.

Fantasy Life Eye came out.

You have to know there's three eyes to know that there's a fourth eye.

Well, that was the thing, is they said what the other eyes were.

It wasn't just like

they weren't just.

Again, this is this is from like extra game material.

This is trailers and this was it's not even trailers.

It was literally just an interview.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, I found it.

Uh, the it is it is I for islands, I for internet, and uh I for for individual uh because of how you can play your lives out in your own way.

Um, and I did, I did also just find someone suggesting that the fourth eye was Inofune, uh, as for KG Inofune,

who was originally at level five during most of this game's production, but now was gone.

Who could say if that's true?

That seems tenuous.

It does seem like a coincidence to me.

But that's a case.

I'm sure there were a lot of people whose names started with I.

Almost certainly.

But.

Someone says that someone said the fourth one was Inafune, but now I'm not so sure.

Regardless.

Someone said that someone said it.

probably someone said it fantasy life i the girl who steals time the follow-up to the original fantasy life on the 3ds and fantasy life online a game i didn't play but janine i know you tried to play some of it right

yeah the when they released it um i like started it but the immediate beginning felt just like the beginning of the the 3ds game and i was like i don't i don't need to play this for a third time

uh and then i bounced off of it i'm sure there's some different stuff in there but right

the initial impression was a little bit like, I've already done this.

Well, we've met some of those characters now because they show up in this.

It is a

kind of top-down, unless you download the mod for the PC build.

RPG life sim make work game by level five.

I love how you say make work.

It is a term that I think you first deployed in my in my reading uh about these games.

I love it as a as a descriptor.

Do you want to talk about what that what that means or like what you're trying to why you use that term in relation to these games?

I feel like it's kind of lost some of the meaning in the like post like pressure wash simulator world.

Oh, sure.

But a make work game is essentially originally intended as like a the the point of what you're doing in the game is

work.

Is like you are you have to clean a thing up, you have to build this, you have to, you know, it was about like

restoration, construction, self-guided tasks, but also things that in a less pleasant framing are very chore-like.

Right.

And let me tell you, there are some chores.

I would say that, I would say, Fantasy Life Eye is a game about numbers going up and checking boxes off of a list.

You are playing an adventurer who is the kind of aide of an archaeologist.

You're drawn to a mysterious island, and on that island, you find a strange hole in the ground that leads to a weird dungeon.

And also, you're intercepted on your way there by a weird magic dragon.

In fact, multiple dragons.

The long story short is, you get knocked back in time, and you find a version of this island from a thousand years ago,

and you end up meeting people there,

developing skills across a number of kind of job or class types, what this game calls lives,

and trying to unravel the mystery, not just of the past and the present, but also of a strange other world called Ginormosia.

And

along the way, you cut down a lot of trees and mine a lot of ore and make some clothes or armor, you farm some, you fish, you fight with swords and bows and staves, magic spells.

It is like a bright, colorful, isometric RPG with a lot of

player-driven goals.

You can say to yourself, I want to try to rank up my blacksmith skill today.

So I'm just going to focus on getting the ore I need.

And nailing these recipes.

The

combat is like top-down action RPG stuff,

not like Diablo style with hundreds of enemies or anything, but you know, you go into a room and there are six weird wolves and you fight the six weird wolves, and maybe there's a seventh one who's like a mini boss who has more HP and some special attacks.

The mining and stuff is about finding kind of weak points on the ore or the trees.

If you're cutting down trees,

circling around and then like, kind of managing your stamina and trying to break the stuff that you can break given your current skill level.

And then the blacksmithing,

alchemy, tailoring, etc., artists, the new artist life is all kind of like this one particular style of mini game where you're bouncing between kind of workstations with the left and right buttons and then tapping or

rapid tapping or holding or spinning a thumbstick, kind of almost like a WarioWear-ish mini-game or mini warrior is not right the right the right comparison, but a little mini game to make stuff.

That's what this game is.

That's kind of what it was on the DS also.

But I do think the constant layer, like removal of another layer of how much more there is.

is, I think, over, is made, is incredibly different than the original game.

The original game was like, oh, I'm in a town.

Okay, I'm going to do this stuff in the town, and then I'm going to do this stuff in the outskirts of the town, and I'm going to go to a new town, new part of the world, a new island, and then do everything there.

This is like, oh, there's a, there's the current time, which has its own dungeon, and there's the past.

There's the past, but then there's also giant armosia, this big open world to explore.

And that has its own little villages with its own little, you know, challenges and quests.

Oh, and then there's the multiplayer,

you know, roguelike dungeon mode where you plant a tree and the tree grows and you go into the tree.

And there's just like, it keeps doing.

doing that.

And then there's the town building mode that's kind of animal crossing-ish

on top of everything else.

And then there's the art gallery that you can put your stuff into.

And then there's the Coliseum.

And it's like the whole game keeps giving you a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.

Not to the point that it's overwhelming, but like I do think that it feels like a much bigger scale game in some ways, in some ways, than the Original Fantasy Life.

That's what Fantasy Life is.

How are the two of you finding it?

With a couple things that I hate about this game.

I basically love it.

Where do you want to start on that?

I'll start with the hate.

I like to start with, I'll start with the hate.

Okay.

Here's my.

Did you play the original fantasy life?

I did.

I loved the original fantasy life.

And I even, before I even knew about Fantasy Life, I, I played, I found my 3DS games in a box and played some fantasy life last year,

although not enough to really remember how it was.

So

I, I, I can't really do any comparison between old fantasy life and this fantasy life, although i do think that the old combat was more fun um interesting uh this combat i find to be a little bit rough although i don't dislike the combat it's just like a little bit weird um what was different about the old one i don't remember attacks in the new one come in really fast and because of the like um because it's

The arenas are bigger.

You have to get closer to be attacking things.

It's just kind of tough to like see an enemy attack coming and like block it with a shield in time

for it to actually work.

So I find that I do a lot of dodging, but like dodging before an attack has even started because there's like a perfect dodge mechanic.

Right.

But attacks happen so fast, I find it very difficult to get those perfect dodges.

That makes sense.

That's a minor thing.

The

crab, the gathering is

so

like find the weak spot and just hit it.

And they really want you you to be hitting things with axes and pickaxes for 20 hours.

That's right.

Yeah.

And it's, and it is not, it's fundamentally, it's not interesting.

The crafting has a timing skill-based thing to it that like, or I think of something like Stardew Valley's fishing mechanic, which is like, keep the thing in the thing.

And like this is, you know, the fishing is just like, find the right spot and hit.

you know and you can either do it or you can't based on your stamina there's no it's just sort of like did you gauge wrong?

Sorry, you're out of stamina.

Try again when you have more stamina.

It's very weird because it's very binary and it's also kind of flavorless.

And there's so much of that.

Right.

It's not like you get or if you're hitting a rock and you don't have enough stamina to finish the rock's health bar.

It's basically a fight, right?

And if you don't have enough, you know,

skill-less fight, there's no skill to

disagree.

Yeah, you're.

Okay.

Tell me why you disagree.

Okay, so I disagree for a lot of of reasons.

I will say, like, I think a lot of what you're saying is more true of the original game than of this one.

I think a big difference is that they have sanded down a lot of stuff.

The original game, it didn't feel like they wanted you to take on every job.

This game, I would say, it feels like they want you to take on every job, and they have done a lot to make that as frictionless as possible.

But there is still a degree of planning.

Sometimes I find gathering resources a little too easy.

But there's a lot of it is like if you are spending your points in the tree

to sort of account for your weaknesses and things like that, you can focus on building up your stamina or you can focus on building up your just material skill or you can focus on using energy more efficiently for your super attacks or whatever or getting more super attacks or getting more drops from a hit.

And you can also, you know, bring your if you if you're having you know if your mining is a little bit lower you can bring a miner in your party and then they'll help you out, or you can just tell them to do it while you're doing something else.

My, my thing is, it's really like once you've started on a rock, you either have what it takes to beat that rock or you don't.

There's no, like, once you're in the mining instance, right?

Like, there's not a lot of wiggle room.

Like, okay, maybe you'll get an extra critical hit or two.

I found that that is not enough to make up for like being one level shy of being able to beat the rock.

Yeah, there is a, there is a real, like, part of the

meta game, so to speak, is you want to be getting the best,

you want to be mining, for instance, the hardest possible rock you could potentially mine at all times in order to get the best XP out.

And you don't want to be doing the

one more than that, because then you'll get nothing because you'll hit a brick wall, right?

There is no partial, what I was trying to say before was there's no partial rewards.

You don't get like some, I mean, I guess there's there's kind of one way to think about it.

If you finish the health bar, you get kind of normal amounts of rewards.

If you crush the health bar, if you get it down to very low and then give it an extra big hit, if you have the stamina or the super move available to do that, then you get an excellent, which gives you extra rewards.

Those are the kind of, that's the, that's the thing that makes it matter.

It gives you a lot of stamina back, which is important.

Right.

It lets you get it.

Losing stamina really sucks.

But there's not, you're not getting an orph every time you hit it.

I'm not, I don't, I don't feel as strongly, Keith, about this as you do.

Right, exactly.

I do find it pretty easy, mostly because once you get support, it's just like you're blowing through.

Once you get a part of it.

It's definitely easy.

It just takes a lot of time.

Right.

And there's no.

I wish it was harder.

I would also disagree that they want you to be.

mining the hardest possible rock that you can.

I think the fact that it's encouraging you to do multiple jobs,

it feels a lot like because the way that this game or the previous game worked is that if you have one job that's a higher level than other jobs, you get an experience gaining boost to your lower level jobs.

So it's really fast to level things up experience-wise.

Not maybe necessarily doing your quests to actually get the next rank, but in terms of just like getting points in that tree,

you can go really fast.

But

there's like

Because of that, I think there is a real advantage to doing stuff that is a bit lower.

Like your main class shouldn't be a gathering class, it should be a combat class or a crafting class.

But

if you are going for stuff that is lower than your level, you might not get a lot of experience from it.

The people that are your party members, if they're lower level, will still get a ton of experience.

They'll level up so fast.

They'll level up so fucking fast.

But you'll be able to very easily get excellence.

You'll be able to very easily maximize what you're pulling out of that resource.

And then when you are crafting,

there is also the thing of like

the ideal, I think, there is the material you're converting,

you should be relatively like a fairly higher level than that.

Never quit crafting materials.

Always do it, you know, do a batch, but always do them like yourself because you will get a huge bonus.

You'll get a huge bonus.

You can go from, you can craft four things and end up getting 10

for your materials.

And then you use that.

And then the thing you're doing is crafting the highest possible thing you can craft.

Like, that's the stage where you really want to push it because you will get hundreds of thousands of

XP from that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I say that it's what they want you to do, what I really mean is that's the sort of, for me, that's the thing that feet you can really feel the game mechanic

like functioning because it's like, ooh, do I have enough?

The only point of friction while I'm in gathering mode is do i have the stamina to pull this off uh and and for for me like whereas um there are definitely times i'm fighting it's actually it feels the same in combat right which is like

you know oh i'm level 40 can i beat the level 60 boss if i try really hard the answer is yes but that combat is where you can stretch it for sure stretch it that sounds fun like right that's the thing right is there's the flexibility in the combat where i'm like i'm level 40 if i really get my dodges down i can beat this level 60 dragon and then i'll I'll get a huge XP boost, and it'll feel cool, and I might even get a new companion or some loot that's like ahead of the curve in a way.

Whereas in mining or in blacksmithing or in any of this other stuff, sometimes you just don't have it.

You don't have the stamina you need.

You don't have the turns you need.

You cannot skillfully push past it.

And so the only way I could get that feeling of I've actually achieved something here is by chasing the edge of what my skill cap is, if that makes sense.

Which is not, you know, that's not the end of the world in any way, one way or the other.

And again, here's what I'll say is if all of this sounds like, what the fuck are they talking about?

I really think it's important to understand this game is driven on the joy of

every time you get an excellent, every time you

get the kind of like overkill effect on a tree you're knocking down because you've you've done enough damage that you've not just emptied the bar, but you've like gone past the empty point by a bunch.

Or you crush crafting a new cape because you had 10 turns to do it, but you actually got it done in only five turns.

All of your companions clap and applause for you.

And that's what this game feels like.

This game is 100% big.

Numbers go up.

I did the thing.

I needed to make four.

You know, I needed to make four iron bars to level up my

blacksmithing, but I only had enough iron to make three iron bars, but I did so good that I, even though I only had enough materials to make three, I made seven, and that was enough to get me through that challenge.

Oh, it feels great.

And that is like,

if we talk in ways that feel like that, it's because that is the logic of the game, I think, you know?

Can we talk about stuff that we do?

Like, I've, I have, actually, I'm going to come back around, Janine.

You said something, which is like, one of the big differences between this game and the previous one is how much this feels built for you to constantly be swapping between lives and having every life.

When I played that first one,

I think I did Mining Blacksmith Paladin.

And that was kind of it.

And I did Mage because I was really curious about the Mage story and the Mage characters and magic is cool.

But I went back basically late in the game to level that up separately.

And in that game, you had to go to the guild.

Tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe you had to go to the guild counter in order to change lives.

And so if you were in mining life, you were in mining life.

And that meant fighting.

If you got into a fight, you had to deal with it with your pickaxe.

And that was fine.

It wasn't like, you know, you weren't going to go try to fight the dragon with the pickaxe.

And there was no reason to do that.

You weren't going to get special rewards.

There were no special, special quests or challenges to go do that necessarily.

But that was the kind of, you know, you were going to go out.

Oh, okay.

My mining trainer, the person who's training me in this location for mining says, go get three rubies and 10 pieces of gold and some other objective.

Awesome.

I'm going to go out and do that.

Here, you can hit a button to quickly change to

any of your the jobs that you have at the, from the lowest level, you know, onward.

Once you have the job, you can switch to it at any time.

And so before, you would be walking around going, oh shit, that's a special tree.

I have to remember the special trees here.

I'm not, you know, I'm in, I'm in fishing mode right now.

I think there was a little bit of wiggle room with that.

I think the thing that was the most annoying though was the combat lives where it was like you have to kill X enemy in this mode.

So if you kill that enemy when you're in the other mode, it doesn't work.

I think you could still be like woodcutting, but also be maging.

I don't fully, I don't remember.

Keith, do you remember?

You just played the original a little bit.

No, I don't remember.

I do know that one of the big things about this game is that there is no swapping.

The game auto auto-swaps, which means that the last game didn't, but I don't remember the extent to which there was one.

Well, you can also go in the menu and like swap to your,

you know, you can

swap to your combat life or whatever.

But for like skill, for crafting and for gathering, it will just auto-swap you.

I think

there's three different tiers.

There's like, there's crafting, gathering, and combat.

Maybe you could have like one of those at a time.

Is that does that make sense?

I mean, that's what I would do.

don't believe you.

No, I'm just opening my videos.

I did.

So, for Riching Hour season five, I played the original Fantasy Life.

I'm just going to open one of these videos.

I'm just going to look.

Oh, it's automatically made chapters.

That's very funny.

Oh, wow.

Thanks.

Story, house, hair salon, spooky time, what?

Okay, status points, bounty hunting, otherwood, butterfly restrictions.

Even named them.

That's crazy.

Ball monsters.

Oh, okay.

Great.

Okay, so that's, yeah, that's witch stuff happening.

Oh my God, I totally forgot the bounty thing where you would have, you would, you'd kill a big guy and he'd be put in a little box and you had to drag the box to the to the bounty clerk and turn him in.

Yeah.

Wow.

So, uh,

while you look this up, I do think the thing you were saying is is

one of the most

major changes.

The streamlining to a thing I will do all the time now is: I'm a hunter is my main combat class.

But if I'm in a place where I've seen that the mage or the paladin or the mercenary has enemies they need to kill to rank up, I'll just switch over to them real quick and just knock them out.

Uh, if I am in mining mode, but I see a tree that I know I need for my my

um

wood wood cutting woodcutter life, I'll just switch over and go do it.

In fact, like you said, you don't even need to you You just walk over and hit the button and it auto switches you to woodcutter.

Yeah.

There is something so different about that feeling that is more like a traditional RPG where you just happen to have a fishing skill and a woodcutting skill.

That's totally the thing.

Fantasy life has always been they've split things that you can normally do all the time in an RPG to these different avenues.

Right.

And having to swap was the thing that made it not feel like

it's all just one thing.

But now it just kind of all just feels like one thing.

Right.

And like that to me is, I think, one of the biggest, strangest changes.

It, it really does make me feel better about the number going up because I can make the number go up all the time in this kind of condensed way.

But it makes it.

It's like you see a big tree, you see a big rock, you see a big guy, you could just get all three.

I get all three, one, two, three.

But it diminishes for me sort of the feeling of the ways in which the original Fantasy Life felt like a sim, both in the sense of like a life sim, but also just like the sort of simulated world

almost the way like a game like Final Fantasy XI can feel like, okay, I'm committed.

I am being the blue mage now.

It's a big deal if I want to go switch off and do something else.

There's a sort of like, okay, that this is my role.

It's almost like the Sims, actually, right?

Where you're like, okay, I'm part of the society.

My role is...

criminal, capital C criminal.

That's the job I have.

And so I'm committed to that right now.

There was like a real like, that's, I can, I can imagine who my character is and what their specialty is and you still get that over the course of a long period of time because obviously um uh you know you're you're not you literally are only crafting one thing at a time you're not literally the same button presses or the same you know 30 second thing isn't going to give you both a blacksmithing and a tailoring thing but you're searching between those at the at the same workbench very quickly you know there's no going back to the guild um and so it's the same workbench it's the same matter as well yeah that's the other thing is you don't even have to go to like any workbench you go to, you can make any recipe from.

You don't have to go to the alchemy place.

You don't have to go to the, yeah, it'll just change it, dude.

You could even, when you switch in the menu to a crafting job, it goes, you want to be teleported to the nearest workbench?

Because we'll just do that for you.

And I'm like, yeah, sure, absolutely.

Take me there.

That's why I switched to this.

But it is that smoothness, that frictionlessness does, I think, take something.

It's not an argument against the game itself.

And yet, when I booted it up again an hour ago to be like let me just play a little bit more to remind myself i i beat it about a week ago um maybe i i just want to just i was like i just want to keep playing i just i don't want what if we push the podcast back what if we just i just want to play a little more i'm so close to getting hero on my hunter i'm you know oh i could get the the oh i just have enough to cut down this tree and get to this different part of the dungeon now like it it doesn't not hit I only think maybe, and I really like it.

Like you said at the beginning, because you're like, there are a few things you really hate about it, and then lots that you love.

Like, playing it puts me in the damn machine zone.

I am in it.

I am like.

I think the goal is different.

I think the goal of the first game was very much like,

this is a level 5 RPG.

And a big part of it is you're going to, you're making stuff.

You have a little trade that you're working on.

Yeah.

But like when you finish the story, you finish the story.

Congrats.

You can keep grinding if you want, but you finished the story.

In this, it feels like there is much more intention for you to keep building your little place, keep exploring gynaramosia, keep

leveling stuff up.

And because it's less of a grind, there is a lot more incentive to just like poke around.

And like,

I have, I have a friend who's playing it who said that even though it is nothing like Genshin Impact, it fulfilled the niche for them.

I think, Austin, you might have also said something similar to me.

I said the same thing about Rune Factory, is what I said at the beginning of

Rune Factory.

Yes, I'm excited about Rune Factory.

I only just learned about it.

They said it about Fantasy Life Eye because it was just like: sometimes the thing you want to do is you want to run around and find stuff.

Sometimes you just want to mash a button and kill a guy.

Sometimes you just want to make little things and watch the levels go up.

Like,

it is a little, it is a little smorgasbord for you to pick at.

And like, so it's, it's, you know, it's familiar, but it is also kind of, it feels like there is a slightly different goal in this one.

And, like, I think whichever, which one resonates with you is probably going to be like

what, you know, what you're looking for.

What kind of, you know, are you motivated by the numbers going up or do you want something more behind that?

Like.

Well, I think this is the other thing that I, it sounds like we're really down on this game.

I think all three of us have put a lot of time that we're very positive.

Okay.

Well,

yeah, I really like this game.

I just want to say, I'm not saying we're not.

I'm not saying we're, sorry, I'm not saying we're down on it.

No, I want to say that.

I feel like we might be.

If you're only,

but actually, I think it doesn't do that.

Right.

I think we all really like it, including, including me and Keith, who are not as verbose in saying what we like about it in this moment.

But I do think, I think my, my actual biggest thing that I wish was the same from the previous game is that,

and it's a thing that you wrote about at length in your original review for the game, Janine, for Paced, uh, for the first game, was how charming the story was and how much time was spent on the people and places there.

The first game takes you from a kind of central, traditional European fantasy, you know, kingdom to these other kind of traditional JRPG takes on world villages.

There's the sort of like, uh, world, like kind of Epcot Center style.

Ah, yes, we're in the vaguely, you know, Middle Eastern place.

Okay, we're in the Mediterranean seaside village.

And some of those villages, that village-type stuff is still happening here.

And there's still a lot of people.

Yeah, they're still evoking it.

And like, in a lot of the crafting recipes and stuff, they're still being like, hey, you remember that place?

100%.

In fact, those characters show up as strangelings, which are the companions you can recruit, who are very cute and who have, some of them have very fun lines, some have very annoying lines that they'll say repeatedly, which I even kind of...

Mind any good wood or whatever the fuck?

Exactly.

I don't even, I don't even, i i don't have i don't want her and my party saying the same thing 30 times in a row um uh but there's something fun about that being here for me still uh and me being there's a in the same way that uh dosovsky says that the uh person complaining about the toothache takes some joy in the complaint uh i think i like complaining about the verbose uh npc companion but what i miss is each of the jobs used to have a different trainer in each of the locations who had their own little micro story that was being told and each of the the locations had some sense of place in the world and some connection to a larger mystery um that was uh that you know swerved in different ways that was a game very it's not hard to see where they put their time instead of that that's right because here we have the huge sprawling ginaramosia uh a place that would be even harder to explore that would be even longer to explore if not for the mod that we that uh keith you linked us to uh that lets you move the camera that something similar is coming for the console console releases of this game, is my understanding.

There's a patch they've announced, they will be changing how the camera works.

So, hopefully, that does come soon for people because it's life-changing.

Um, yeah, uh, but like I think that shift, and then in general, the shift from what the kind of

very traditional level five, you know, charming RPG with a little more heart and a little more depth than you might think, given the very uh kind of simple, positive uh art direction.

Um, I'm really missing that from here.

It became the numbers go up game because

its charm is in the loop of leveling up.

You said there's not much grinding, but it's kind of like there's either no grinding or it's all grinding, depending on how you look at it.

Yeah, that's the game is the grind.

Right.

There is pleasurable the whole time.

It's, you know, you have two pies, and one of those pies is blueberry.

And one of those pies.

Why am I doing all this food stuff today?

And one of those pies is apple, cherry, and blueberry.

It's like, well, the pie that has the three things in it isn't three pies.

It's still one pie.

That's right, right.

And it has less blueberry.

You have, you know, you have your action RPG, but you also want to have this like...

Breath of the wild evoking open world,

super on the nose.

Yeah, down to the shrines.

Like

all this, like, really on the nose kind of funny.

Not, I, you know, I don't want to say it's like, it's not copying.

It's like, it's like, parrot, it's not parody is the wrong word.

Um,

pastiche is also the wrong word.

Yeah, I don't know.

Uh, but you know, it's evoking it in sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge way where it's like, we know what this is, it's fun, we're having fun.

Um, I mean, we, we were, we were getting so long in the tooth on the last segment, I didn't do a defense of uh, of

you know, peanut butter plus jelly games.

Um, but this is a peanut butter plus jelly game, and a lot of my favorite games are peanut butter plus jelly games.

Yeah, yes.

It's not, that's not bad, it's just you know, it's if you're looking for something that is like

if you're looking for peanut butter banana, the jelly

I like more than the jelly that it's referencing,

right?

Yeah, you are not a hate the original jelly, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's that's which is animal.

I think, yes, that's sorry.

I was just gonna say this: there are a lot of people who don't like Animal Crossing, who

because it's not because it's not directed enough, right?

Um, they kind of get,

I think it's like an intimidation where it's just like, okay, you just put me in this world.

I'm like,

I don't care about what carpet I'm using.

I don't know what to do.

Right.

And like, you know, if you give that player a little bit more direction and guidance and like, well, you don't just have to craft the things you like.

You can craft the things that will advance your level.

And then once you advance your level, you can craft this other stuff.

And then you can come here and do that, you know?

So it's,

but you don't don't get that plus also the fully fleshed out RPG stuff, plus also the fully fleshed out open world stuff.

Like, something has to give somewhere, especially level five, who's like, they've been in trouble.

They've been in like some

like

business economic troubles in recent years.

Like there was definitely a period where it felt like they were just dead.

Yeah, for a long time, I didn't know that this game was going to come out, frankly.

Yeah,

I thought they were just fucking toast, which I was very sad about.

I was very, very sad about that.

Totally.

And I'm glad it was.

And yeah,

I think that that stuff kind of reflects a little bit on what

we were already talking a lot about like player expectations and how do you reach an audience and all that stuff.

And I do think like so much of this game is

it's i wouldn't say it's a miracle, but it's like there's so much of it that feels like it's driven from, okay, okay, people like Animal Crossing, people like Breath of the Wild.

How do we make something that like captures some of that while still retaining what made the original special?

And it is shocking that it does fit together without ever feeling too

you know, too.

It doesn't feel phony, it doesn't feel like it's arrived at any of those things cynically.

It doesn't feel

doesn't usually feel like not enough of itself, right?

Yes, I think that's true.

It still feels mostly like fantasy life the whole time, yeah, absolutely.

I am curious, um, you know, what is your are both of you focusing on everything kind of give or take the same amount?

Are you, do you find that you're spending as much time building stuff in your little Animal Crossing town as you are doing adventuring?

Are you, is there a particular life that you're zeroing in on mostly?

Kind of just around.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've not done a lot of crafting yet.

I got like started on crafting late, so I'm still working on leveling up before I can make anything that I actually like.

Sure.

And that's the part of the game I'm least interested in anyway.

Like, I really want to get houses for all my guys, but it seems like I maybe hit the cap on houses for guys.

Six.

Which is weird because there's so many more guys.

There are 50 guys.

What's the on there?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know if that's a

if that's a memory consistent.

So much space.

They give you so much space.

They give you so much space.

there's a lot i could easily double my houses well and i built like um the way that i laid things out was so much more cramped because i assumed that we'd get a ton of space i kind of took that initial starting zone and turned it into a little plaza where like there's a little extra like um kind of like ground tiling stuff and then on the left and the right hand sides i put like two or three houses each so there's like a little row I did two houses on the left and then uh the gallery that you can build eventually in the middle and then I have one I have the house for my farmer, my first farmer, off in the back, like closer to nature, because I was like, he seems like a type of guy who wants to be out near the trees and the grass and everything else.

But my actual farm is up in the middle of the front plaza.

So like,

I just assumed we'd get 10 houses, you know?

I guess not.

And that stuff is also like a little light, but I never, I'm still charmed by it every time I go back to town.

Every time I go back to town and someone runs up to me to be like, ooh, here, I have a little gift for you.

Or, oh, can you give me 10, you know, pumpkins?

I'm like, yeah, absolutely, Doc.

I'm on it.

But, so I started with a combat.

Well, I started with actually Angler, and then I took a combat life after.

And I focused on those two for a while.

And then just like, as I wanted more things, I would just take the life that would get me that.

stuff.

So like I wanted to build better weapons.

So I started with the miner so that I could get the ore.

And then my first crafting life was blacksmiths so I could build swords.

And I'm like just at the point, you know, 30 hours in where I'm just focusing a little bit on every, I'm like level 30 in almost everything.

Right.

I'm like missing three lives, but everything that I have, I have at like level 30, except the crafting stuff, which is a little lower.

And I'm just now starting to like be able to build weapons that I can use that are like better than what I'm running with.

I've hit the point now where I finished the main story and like there's still post-game stuff.

There's a lot of post-game stuff to do.

But I'm like, I think I could do most of it.

I'm wishing that there was still narrative hooks for some of this stuff is really where it's at for me.

Janine, you were going to say something though.

I was just going to say that like I

mastered Carpenter basically by accident.

Yeah.

So I think if anyone's like,

if people are like having trouble leveling stuff, I really think like the best advice I could offer is if you focus on carpentry or if you pick up some other strangelings that have crafting abilities and you can level them up, working with them really makes it easy to just tear through

those levels because they're not going to be able to do that.

Because the first strangeling is carpentry, right?

Yeah.

And

the way it works is that your skill level and their skill level combine.

So if you both have decent tools,

you can really swing above

your weight class because, like,

the first game,

you were really, you couldn't use tools that were higher than your

tier in the guild, basically.

You couldn't do recipes and stuff that were higher than your tier in the guild.

You had to like be adept or be a master or whatever to do certain things.

In this, it is full, they have like separated the level, the guild tiers from

skill level and like equipment and stuff.

You can use any equipment.

So, if you luck out and find a really good tool in a treasure chest, you can just use that from the jump, which really, again, really helps.

Huge.

You, you know, recipes are dictated, like, recipe success is dictated by like your skill level.

And, you know, there's, you can, they've made it like you still have to go back to your master to turn in the quests to level up in the guild, but

that doesn't really matter as much because there is also a skill tree and like you get the points to put into the skill tree no matter what, just based on leveling that skill up.

So you can kind of just go for quite a while

just like on your own, just like, just like getting those levels.

Yeah.

To the point that like I've found

a lot of my

A lot of my lives, I've kind of like

sort of petered it at adept or expert because I'm not actively pursuing pursuing the quest, but I am still just making all the stuff I want.

I'm still like, I'm still doing fine.

I just like

I'm a little bit outside of the traditional progression structure.

I'm not, you know, not part of the job rat race, the corporate.

Oh, okay.

You're doing it for the labor game.

You're doing it.

I'm doing it a little bit different.

I'm my own boss.

That's nice.

That's good.

You make your own schedule.

Oh, I've tried that.

I'm terrible at it.

So I got to learn from you.

I got to figure it out.

Yeah, I ended up mastering Alchemist Alchemist

without even realizing I was doing it, basically.

I was at the step before master being like, wait, how did I get here?

That's not where I should be.

I should be way lower.

And similarly, I'm there with just very few recipes.

That's what it is.

And she blows through.

There's, yeah, it's also one of the classes that's less dependent on a gathering class.

Every now and then it dips in.

But, you know, like for

if you're a blacksmith, you really should be mining.

If you're a carpenter, you really should be cutting wood.

You can buy those things, but it's expensive and easy to get it.

And it feels bad.

It feels bad to be like, I need to build, I need to craft this vest, but I need to buy a bunch of fleece.

Yeah.

But I'm the one getting fleeced, it turns out.

Alchemy and Taylor mostly rely on things that drop from fights and plants you can just pick.

Yeah.

For free.

No, no, no.

The occasional other thing.

but it's

pretty easy to just kind of blast through those two.

For sure.

I am,

you know, we were joking before about not knowing what the fourth eye is.

And so I've beaten the game at this point.

And not only do I not know what the fourth eye is, but I think there's something that happens at the end of the game that's very confusing.

Neither of you have made it there yet, but I need you both to message me when you beat the game.

So I can ask you if you also interpreted something someone said in a way that made it seem like there was way more game to go and then there wasn't.

And the people listening who've beaten this game probably know what I'm talking about.

I bet

the

present day island thingy that you do makes me feel like there is meant to be some sort of DLC or something.

There is an intention for it to be.

I don't know.

I don't know if it'll ever happen, but it just feels like there is a.

It feels like Gamescom or something would be like a little thing.

I don't know.

But

is the eye

infinite?

Whoa.

Maybe, but is it infinite?

I guess there's the roguelike mode.

That's kind of infinite.

Right?

The tree sprouting.

Oh, God.

We didn't even talk about the roguelike sprouts.

Or the multiplayer in general, right?

I forgot about those until

you mentioned it today.

Like, I got my tree, I planted it.

Yeah.

It was like, okay, this is a treasure grove.

And I was like, okay, cool.

And then I never went back there.

Yeah.

It's one of the only places to get a, I think it might be the only place to get a certain resource or a certain currency, I guess.

Okay.

It's the currency that, you know, the guy in your guild hall who sells

materials and you can like upgrade his shop, Mateo.

He has a, he has part of it, part of his shop runs on these sort of

special fruit.

There you have

some sort of weird fruit thing.

Oh, goddess melons.

It can't be goddess melons.

No, that's that's Roo Factory, Janine.

The,

yeah, he has stuffed, like 10 of those.

And I think I've done, I did one of those dungeon by myself, and then Janine, you and I did one.

And I have three of those melons total at this point.

Yeah, you can go like hundreds of years back in time or something,

but it gets harder and harder as you go back.

That's yeah, I think each

run is a hundred years or something like that.

Um, well, it, it, or like each, it takes you back another hundred years.

I'm not exactly sure, uh, and am curious about it.

But this is the first time in a long time that I've been like, I wish I had waited to play a game until the DLC is there because I am not done with this game, but I really want more narrative.

I want to be strung along more narratively.

And part of that could have come from, to be clear, part of that could have come from there being more teachers, more masters to teach you each of the things.

So that would at least give me a little bit of a hook.

But I've met all those people now because I've already started all of those

lives.

And never is this more, I think,

clear to me than in the thing that happens when you master a life, which I don't mind talking about because they actually released all of these songs in the lead up to.

And also they did this in the first game.

It's the same thing.

It's

shot for shot the same.

It did.

Do you want to explain the the thing i'm talking about so when you master a life um

first of all it's worth knowing that's not the end right you can go beyond that which is a that's a touch that i think is cute i think it's cute that you can master and then you can go on to be like a like a super good you know um that's that's a that's fun that's that that makes it feel like yeah that's what it is to be a legendary hero in a job in like this sort of like fabled you know fantasy world where it's like yeah you you you can be a master swordsmith but you're not the swordsmith who made the

sword of blazing dreams or whatever until you're heroic.

Anyway,

what happens when you hit master, when you're when you're equal to your the person who's leading the guild,

you get they teleport you to a little to a little bar or cutscene and they sing you a little song and the song

is always very specific to the job

and like the stuff that you do on the job and you get a lot of like shots of like everyone celebrating with you and you get like fake credits where it's like

chief little guy

sis uh what's

not in my experience buddy

like chief little guy mr mr

boba or whatever

it'll be like all the all the characters you've met and stuff like that and they'll have have little roles.

It's all haha, cute.

The only one I've seen, the Carpenter song, is a song that I hadn't seen in the first game.

So I don't know if I believe they're all the same.

Okay, well, it was not a good song.

Well, you know what's changed about them?

They're in English now.

Updated midi-five.

Oh my god, right.

There's the lyrics in English that we're talking about.

They're just singing it in.

Right.

Because before it was, they were singing it, but it was just subtitled in English.

Exactly.

Okay, because the lyrics are so forced.

It sounds very weird.

Well, what's weird is the subtitles are different, too.

So they re-localized these songs, but it's the same songs.

And they're just not

as good, unfortunately.

And for me, the more important thing is fucking no one's there.

In the original game, all of your little masters from the whole thing were there.

Right.

And so now.

And like, even ones who like lived in different eras.

They all came to your place.

to celebrate your master.

That's right.

Exactly.

And so that to me is the thing where I'm like, oh, that was actually what I loved about it was this sense of, wow, everyone from around the whole place like came to hang out with me and celebrate.

I mean, this one, they all live in the same town.

They didn't even show up.

I mean, the other masters, great.

Well, that's the thing, right?

It's like, whoa, what?

My woodcutting master isn't going to come hang out even though I'm getting my mage doctorate or whatever?

Are you mad that I?

Yeah, the woodcutter lives right next door i know yeah i know so well i think that you know we live in a more atomized world oh i guess you're right that's that's it's a commentary actually

yeah the eye doesn't stand for individual it stands for individualism you know it's it's what's what's broken us as a society um but yeah i think that that's part of the thing where i'm like ah

isolation oh isolation you nailed it there it is the eye stands for isolation i mean the thing is of course that's not true because there is more of a sense of community that's why i always showed up it would be so sick if all of the class,

the strangelings of that class that you'd recruited had showed up.

You know, like, oh, you're finishing your

paladin one, and like, Odin is here, and Odin's the one who I rock with the most.

So, yeah, that was definitely the other one.

Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, the pirate paladin, is here.

It's so weird to me that she's a paladin, but okay.

Uh, she, well, it's like DD.

You can be a paladin of any god.

Her god is money.

She's a pirate.

Anyway, yeah, I think that that to me is like

it's actually really funny because

I'm watching the mastery scene from when I did this for Witching Hour.

And the

characters, the characters who are strangelings in the current, in the new one, are in this one.

There's Colin, there's Hazel.

That's them.

they're here jamming out um it's and it's funny to hear you say that and be like well that yeah they used to go to the they used to just go to the party they used to hang out with you why aren't they hanging out anymore i mean they hang out with you different kind of world they all they do hang out with you at work if you're like in the dungeon they'll come with you but they're not gonna come party with you you know covid it really changed everything

really changed everything

but i do think that there's like that feeling of of um the first time i hit one of those in fantasy life on the ds or the 3ds i like got a little emotional about it.

I was like, wow, I really need it to commit.

And I think that comes from the sense of I spent all this time as a miner.

I really did it.

I was a minor.

I'm reaching the pinnacle.

18 years.

18 years

as a miner.

And I get the party.

And you have a big party.

And it was like, wow, you made it, you know?

And now it's like, oh, yeah, that's just a thing I do when I'm not shooting my bow.

And I think that that shift.

And again, I love this game.

Playing it again for 40 minutes today made me go, I'm not done with it.

I thought I was done with it.

I'm actually not done with it.

I'm desperate for DLC to hit, so I have an excuse to go back through.

I still have to do the Jenny, you were doing the Coliseum the other day.

I have to go back and do the Coliseum.

You know, there's stuff for me to do still in the game.

Yeah.

I mean, look, some of my favorite games I cannot stop complaining about.

So this is not.

It comes from love, doesn't it?

Yeah, it comes from love.

Yeah.

It's because you care.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I love getting a new Strangeling.

I love,

I love the art stuff in this.

They added one of the lives, the creative lives, is just building decor for your Animal Crossing village and stuff.

And then there's the gallery.

You could put stuff in the gallery and your villagers will go in and appraise it and even make you a money off of it.

That rules.

It's so good.

It's so flavorful.

So I'm not dissing this game.

I like it a lot.

I wish I could.

It is interesting, though, that you're wishing for more narrative hooks because one of the reasons why I'm not deeper into this game is because I find the story of it so difficult to get through that I'm having way more fun just hitting rocks in the mines.

Yeah.

You're not

the story.

The story is such a thing of the there's a the problem with the story is there is this conflict that you're not really in the loop on

and the way that you progress

is

you are in the main world

and you do some talking and run in a cave and then something stops you and you have to go back in the past to find a thing to help you unblock the cave cave and then you open up a little more of the cave and then something else stops you so you have to go back in the past

and like that's not a great flow thing especially because like the first game

the first game was much more traditional it was much more like here's the stuff that's happening here's the problems we have to solve here's the conflicts in the world um

it carried a little more it carried you forward and there's a there's there's like a um the first fantasy life i'm not saying this is a fantasy or uh this is a dragon quest builders thing because the first fantasy life also is kind of where it's also very dragon quest builders.

It's very dragon quest builders in its in its art and in its writing style.

The difference, though, is the dragon quest builders is full of like funny and interesting characters.

I find that all of the dialogue in fantasy life

overstays its welcome.

Like the talking to people and getting through the story takes so much time, and none of the writing writing is worth that time, it feels like to me.

The only the we get to the when you get to the fourth island, I think, Swolean, the one with the Coliseum.

I was like, oh.

This is the first thing that's really, there was some stuff in the art island that was like kind of funny to me, but the Swolean Island is about like a

kind of pro-gladiator, pro-wrestler type guy.

And there's some really funny like gags in that.

And I was like, oh, sick.

Like, I finally, okay, we're out of the tutorial.

We've unlocked the, we've unlocked farmer.

We've unlocked artist.

Now we're going to get a few islands of just the more traditional fantasy life stuff that's going to be able to deliver the kind of charming level five, funny bit that's kind of honed down to a few cutscenes.

And that was the last island.

And I was like, oh.

Yeah.

Okay.

I see.

And so that's, you know, it is, it is a complaint of wanting more, but it's more of the good stuff, Keith.

I get what you're saying about like, it's funny that I'm saying that, but it's really what it is, is like,

it's probably Fantasy Life 1 remembered very fondly with 10 years remove.

Though I will say this game, of course, was really, there was a really rocky development process.

You know, like I said earlier, KG Infune left this game or left this company in the middle of the development

after

they released a blog post saying Fantasy Life received a lot of negative Fantasy Life Eyes in 2024 had received a lot of negative feedback, harsh feedback.

And Infune left, and I don't know how close those two things were in terms of causation, but they were very close

in

timing.

It was like back to back, exactly.

And so they needed to like make quote-unquote major revisions.

Major revisions were necessary to improve it.

It got delayed by a year.

And so.

I do think that there's a degree to like, I'm so curious what this game was supposed to be at its

initial conception.

And I'm really happy we got it at all because I'm really happy people can play this game without needing to do it.

It's doing really well.

Like, that makes me happy that people have been really high on it.

There's been a lot of buzz around it because it's, it, yeah, it's always

nice to see that happen to the sequel of a game that, you know, you love a lot.

It's really fun to go and do the stuff.

It's really fun to go and do the stuff.

It's really fun.

It's full of stuff and it's all fun to go and do.

Yeah.

Despite my complaints.

And that the camera is.

I mean, they designed a game that cannot be played properly with the camera that they put in there.

I'm glad that's getting fixed.

I think that camera is designed to kind of make the world feel bigger because the thing I noticed when I installed that mod was that I immediately saw the limits of stuff.

Yep.

Um, in a way that was like, oh, okay, I see.

And it's a way that, like, I don't care.

But I think if I was developing that game, I could very easily imagine feeling self-conscious about it.

Yes,

especially if, like,

it was bigger once and you were like, you had such ambitions and now you can see the ends of it.

And it's like, oh, people are going to think it's so small.

Gene, I had to see.

The real issue is that there's a giant island where the core is finding these Breath of the Wild towers to give you more map segments and you can't see them because the camera can't look up high enough.

Well, that's the thing.

I think Janine's point is like,

they were trying to make that harder so that that place would feel, it feels like, oh, by not being able to see them, you'll spend more time looking for them.

Because the second you see them, I just put on on a podcast or whatever and just ran around and got them.

Once you can look up, you can see basically, you can see like half of them from any given point on the map.

That's right.

And I find that to be a way better experience.

Yeah, yeah, that is what I wanted.

You know, if you are, if you are a developer who has seen every

bump in the development process of a game, it's really easy to be like, this game's too small.

This game's too small.

People are going to be disappointed.

People are going to be disappointed.

We have to make it feel bigger.

How do we make it feel bigger?

Oh my god the thing that i heard was that this was a consideration for the switch so that it could run properly yeah that also makes sense but that's i would believe it i will say the switch to trailer look up the switch to trailer has what looks like the the camera that they must be adding if you take a peek at it um okay uh i think around like 30 seconds they go to ginormosia and you can straight up see like oh yeah this is lower i don't believe this was the baseline viewpoint i think if this was it you would have been fine with it, Keith.

The other thing, yeah.

So, the other thing that's interesting about the mod is that it lets you see how close you have to be to something for it to start animating.

It's so funny.

Yeah.

Or how quickly they'll.

That is, I think, a performance thing for sure.

Totally.

Totally.

So I'm curious.

I'm curious how that will hit.

I'm curious if that mod or if that patch does hit the original Switch or if it's only Switch 2 and the other consoles or what.

So,

yeah.

Fantasy Life I.

I stands stands for I

in stores now.

Can't wait for there to be more of it.

The I stands for in stores.

Yeah, of course.

I'll talk more about Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma maybe on the next podcast because I'm really enjoying it.

I should buy that and play it so you have someone to bounce it on.

Yeah, it's been in my...

It's been in my cart for a few days now.

I'm really liking it.

I will say it's so funny to go from Fantasy Life to this because the focus is so much more on talking to a bunch of characters and going through their stories because that's just like the type of game it is, obviously.

But also, the farming is,

you know, Dre said before, Dre is at work, so Dre couldn't come to talk about Fantasy Life right now.

But Dre said that they,

my thoughts on Fantasy Life Eye, now that I'm in the post-story content, are what a cute game.

How awful the farming life is betrays how much fun everything else is.

I basically like the farming life just fine,

but I do think that it's interesting how both Fantasy life i and rune factory are doing farming slightly differently than like harvest moon or uh stardew valley are um

with with rune factory being mostly about automation um uh you have a village of npcs both the named ones

But also, I mean, they're all have names, both the main datable or rank-uppable, bondable,

written NPCs, and then also some proc gene ones.

And you keep recruiting those.

And like, it's a village simulator more than it's just a farming simulator you're like giving villagers job you're saying go work at the at the flower cart go work at the the spa um uh go mine for for materials uh and that is scratching that is still numbers go up but it is scratching a different like sub part of my brain than fantasy life is so we'll talk more about that i think uh uh next time um we would yep you should realize sukuna rice and ruin you should just like get a taste i should just get a taste you're right i should get a taste of sukuna it's a very different thing but i think it would, it would

my brain would benefit.

Actually, it would Sukuna Rice and Ruin is

super influential to this new heart, the new Ruin factory.

Um,

to the point that there is Sukuna DLC, there is.

That's free.

You could have a little Sukuna in the thing.

I need to, yeah, it's it's it's a very different thing.

You should play some.

I'm very curious what you think, especially given our conversations around

Mysteria and farm sims and dating and all that stuff.

Sorry, what did I say?

Mysteria?

Mystaria?

Yeah.

Isn't that the D?

That's

the place in

the

ore.

The ore type.

The ore type.

In fantasy life, isn't it?

Oh, I think you're right.

It is.

I was thinking it was also the DD arcade game.

Shadows over...

That's Mystara.

That's different.

Shadow over Mystara.

Is that the woman, the wife?

That's a four-player game.

Oh, no.

Is that Gail's wife in Baldur's Gate?

Yeah.

Fuck, what is her name?

What is the god of magic called?

That's Mistra.

Mistra.

Very different than Mistara.

Different entirely.

Anyway,

Keith, do you want to save our Elden Ring Night Rain talk for the next podcast since we've gone so long already?

I'm happy either way.

I think that I could do 40, 30, 40 minutes on Night Rain, or we could do it next time.

Let's save it for for next time.

We've gone for two plus hours already.

Quick thoughts, though, because I think the one thing I will say

from you that I'm interested in, just in case our scheduling works out so that you can't be on the next one, you are not an Elden Ring guy, especially.

No.

You like Sekiro a whole bunch.

A whole bunch, yeah.

But you've been enjoying Night Rain.

I've been loving Night Rain.

Yeah, I really think that it's...

I don't like it more than Sekiro, but like, I

went into Elden Ring being like

pretty excited to try it, like, wanting one of the not, one of the, the, uh, Soulsborn style fromsoft games to hit for me.

Uh, I don't dislike any of them.

Like, I appreciate what Dark Souls is doing.

I've never played Bloodborne because I don't use my PS4.

Um,

uh,

you know, and

I wanted it to work and I got in and I I was like, okay, it feels like Dark Souls, it's kind of interesting, but I really just had this feeling of like not wanting to do the stuff it wanted me to do.

Yeah, like, go, like,

oh, you know, climb this thing, go into the mine.

There's like creepy little guys who throw knives at you.

I just thought it was like,

I was just kind of annoyed by it.

Um, I played about 25 or 30 hours of it and just didn't go back.

Um,

it's a game that I

oh, I played 20 hours of it, so even less than I did.

It's a game that almost worked for me and then didn't.

And I don't feel negatively about it.

I just feel like I don't care about it.

But now, but Night Rain hits for some reason.

Running around.

Running around.

Is it the friends part or do you think it's something in Night Rain?

Friends is a huge part of it.

But I think that the main thing is like,

I want to be doing the bosses.

I don't want to be doing the little guys all the time.

Just like show, like, if I could just go from boss to boss to boss,

the parts of Night Rain that I, or the parts of Elden Rain that bugged me,

um,

with the little guys who throw knives at you, the little guys who throw knives at me, the like Sekiro, it felt so fun to fight like a group of seven guys because of like, it's hard,

right?

Like, it's kind of a boss, it's kind of its own version of a boss fight.

Yeah.

In Dark Souls, it feels annoying.

And it was also true in

Elden Rain.

Whenever I would go into a room and the thing to do in the room was like

figure out how to not die from five guys, I was like, ugh, oh, fine.

And Night Rain is like, you know, playing with Austin, watched, who watched a bunch of streams already.

And

first of all, it's so much easier.

It's like way easier.

It is like for any, for the decade plus of give Dark Souls an easy mode

discourse,

Night Rain is Dark Souls easy mode.

I think.

Like

guys barely notice you.

You can kill them in a hit or two before they even stand up.

You aren't going to get ganged up on and murdered.

You know,

it's just so much easier.

Do your friend can resurrect you by beating you up on the ground.

Right.

And the bosses feel easier, but like not even as much.

Like the minute-to-minute running around gameplay is so much easier that

it basically doesn't exist as part of the game.

You know, it exists for the first minute when you want to level up twice.

And then every other second, nobody matters but bosses.

And the bosses can still get you, but there's...

I laughed earlier when you were talking about you wish you could only fight bosses because I've been watching Christine Love play through

some Elden Ring here and there on her streams and she is 100% a I wish this was just a boss rush game person.

And this is kind of a boss rush except there's you know 30 to 40 minutes.

I mean what it is is like every 15 minutes you fight a boss and then you fight the big

boss of your run at the end, almost like a roguelike style thing.

But the time in between is running to the next boss, not fighting your way through a group of guys.

And like, you know, playing with you, you're like, you know, don't don't fight them.

Ignore them.

We're going this way.

I'm like, yeah, I get to be the bossiest person I've ever been while running this.

And I have been bossy before, I know.

So we did a stream of that.

People should go watch that stream.

It's, it's the, the Twitch archive should still be up.

Um, uh, it'll eventually be up on our YouTube also.

Um, I, I am really enjoying it.

I had a run of that game last night with some friends that was like maybe an all-time gaming moment in the, in every possible way, in terms of stuff happening in the middle of the game, weird bugs we encountered, the big final boss fight, everything.

I'll talk about that next time, though, because I want to be able to.

Did you beat the mouth guy?

No, we fought a different boss.

We fought a big ice dragon, is what we fought.

That was, I have to tell you, maybe the most majestic fight I've ever seen in a video game.

Wow.

Truly, in the middle of it, my friend and I were just going like,

This is,

look how, look how beautiful it is.

At one point, I said,

I think we might die but that's okay if i had to die in real life i could only dream that it would be in such a beautiful way

so you know like dying anime ass statement like she was gonna say like if i said like a hunter hunter character yeah that's how it feels that that is like the that is the sort of sense that um the fromsoft games give you is like there is nothing to do here but die beautifully Yeah, that's right.

Wow.

That's right.

That's how it feels.

All right.

On that note, thank you for joining us for another episode of Side Story.

Please let people know about

the show.

We're still a very young show.

This is, I think, only our seventh episode or something like that.

And so we're still trying to get

sixth, sixth.

You're right.

He says five was the blueprint spoiler cast, which was a joy.

I'll be editing this tonight.

I have another podcast to record first, Keith.

Oh, my God.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Maybe it might go up in the afternoon tomorrow

instead of first thing, but but we'll see.

So yeah, it has been a joy to get all the positive responses from folks.

Please leave us reviews over on iTunes or on whatever your podcast, wherever you are

doing

your listening to us.

It means a lot.

I think iTunes probably still is where most of our listeners are.

And thank you so much for everybody.

I'm looking at them now.

I'm looking for funny reviews to read.

Here we go.

Great discussion about games and I.

This one comes in from Sari Jesargo, who says, think that the I might stand for immortality or interversion.

I don't know.

I don't play those games, but I love this show.

So thank you.

How did they know about this?

I don't know.

How did they know about the I?

Well, they listed the show.

They like the show.

They just don't play the games.

Oh, well, oh, did the I has the I come up?

Did the I come up recently?

Oh, the I has come up in every consecutive episode now since the first.

Wow, that's the first one.

stand for

yeah i haven't that's the that's the one i haven't listened to episodes three and four yet i see well that was it those are the two yeah because i was on five song two in and then there's the two with the i i dropped the ball by not asking you what the i might stand for in the last episode so you know that's on me

um again people you can find are patreon at friends of the table.cash that is the number one best way you can support us uh the bulk of that money does come to us it's a big group you know i think we live in a world of more atomized uh relationships these days.

And I think there's

one of the nice things about this show is it's all of us.

It's the whole crew.

The way the money is cut up is it just goes into the bucket and it gets cut up the same way that our regular monthly Patreon stuff does.

We thought about doing a different side story Patreon or whatever, but we're like, no, like this should be it.

This is friends of the table.

This is friends of the table, just like Media Club Plus is friends of the table,

just like our streams are.

It's all us.

So friends of the table.cash is the best way to support us.

You can go watch all of our streams over at youtube.com/slash friendsofthable or twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

Keith, you're now in the final arc of Hunter Hunter on Media Club Plus.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's only if we're recording our,

I can't remember the name for the thing that comes before Penultimate.

The anti-penultimate anti-penultimate episode recording on Thursday.

I am currently, I have 39 minutes left in the episode 44 of Media Club Plus called Dog Cheadle.

Dog Cheadle, my favorite actor.

Your favorite actor.

It's a great, it's a great show.

Please go listen to Media Club Plus.

Please go leave us reviews.

And I think that's going to do it.

I was going to say, send us questions.

I'm still fighting with the email currently.

The way that Libsyn interacts with the hover.com email stuff is bad.

So I guess the only place to send questions right now is friendsatthetable at gmail.com.

I'm working on getting our more side story focused email up and running.

Hopefully I'll have that going by next time.

We'll see how it goes.

And you said it wasn't me at the end of the last segment about

going long.

I am proud to be on the two longest episodes of Side Story.

I have the top slot.

Five-star runtimes, as they say.

Wait until fucking Story of Seasons Grand Bazaar comes out.

Oh, we're going to go long on that.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

All right, everybody.

Thank you so much.

We'll see you soon to be continued.