03: What Does the i Stand For?

What's good, internet?

It is April 29th, 2025, and this is not an intergalactic library overrun by space pirates.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell them.

Maybe it will turn into an intergalactic library overrun by space pirates or a bunch of cats have been kidnapped.

We are, as always, presented by Friends of the Table and supported by our patrons at friendsofthetable.cash.

I cannot underscore how much your support has meant.

We currently

have three episodes of our Outward LP up for $10 patrons.

People have been deeply enjoying the goofy edits I've been doing.

You've been taking a particular relish in those edits that has been

as your long time, you you know as as a person who's known you for a long time uh it's it's nice to see you have fun with a thing in the way that you're having fun with those edits i don't have hobbies you know i'm not a i'm not a hobby person i'm not a

i don't well i have jobs

this is all hobbies that become jobs that's true

i don't have like you know i have a closet full of gunplay i haven't built you know what i mean i don't say you had a closet full of guns no absolutely not I mean tiny plastic ones, little plastic bazookas for the various gunpla over there.

But I don't have like, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't do that style of deep learn the tool,

you know, create small little things these days because I'm so focused on these things.

But, but yeah, so it's nice.

It's fun to be fiddly in that way and very funny.

So you're saying we should do a season of the show that in some way requires you to build gunpla.

Yeah, that'd be you would think by now.

If not by now, then

I want Perpetua to already be that.

I know.

I keep thinking of like a town in Perpetua that is all miniatures.

Oh, that's cute.

Keep that.

Keep talking about that.

We'll find that.

We'll keep reminding me of that and we'll find a way to work it in.

I think that's a great idea.

I realized something interesting about the place we're going tomorrow in Perpetua.

And I'm excited about that.

So So you'll have to listen to that to find out.

That's a while off still, but you'll get there.

Keep listening.

That is the voice of Janine Hawkins and first-time co-host, Ali Akampora.

Hi, Ali.

Welcome to Side Story for the first time.

Thank you for having me.

Of course.

Happy to have you.

How,

for people who don't know you from Friends of the Table, for people who've only jumped on board here because all they care about is video games, maybe.

Where might people know you from?

Where might people know, or what should people know about you?

What should people know about me?

I have been the producer and contributor to Friends of the Table through its run.

I very much recommend you listen to Friends of the Table.

Big time.

I've also been doing a lot of Twitch streams over on Friends of the Table.

twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

We'll get into it later, but I've been streaming a lot of Fields of Mysteria.

And you can also listen to a Star Wars podcast that you and I do, Austin, which is called a more civilized age.

Yeah, we just finished up Rebels, which is which was really f fun.

We had ups and downs throughout that.

If you are someone who likes video games a lot, you should go back and listen to our co-tour coverage.

Oh, my God, yes.

Enjoy.

Yeah.

And then I am also reluctantly over on Blue Sky at Alley-Online.

If you want to follow things

of me there, even though I don't really post.

It was very it's been very funny, Allie, over the last two to three months to hear you go from saying, I'm not online anymore, really, or like, nothing, I don't say a thing there, to now being like, I am

in blue sky, I guess.

I have to be somewhere.

So welcome.

I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad to talk about games with you.

Like you said, we'll talk about Fields of Mysteria shortly.

We could jump into that now if that's where y'all are at.

Like, if you guys want to talk about Fields of Mystery,

we can shuffle.

I'm not afraid of shuffling.

Maybe we did kind of spoil the surprise.

I'd hate to keep people in suspense.

About the space pirates and the library.

Yeah, the space pirates in Fields of Mysteria.

Oh,

I thought you meant the other one.

I thought you were saying you spoiled the suspense of what one of the topics would be.

No, we should keep people in suspense about that.

Let's keep people in suspense about that.

Let's talk about space pirates.

Cats and all the library.

I will tell you the truth, though.

If there was an update a year from now where a spaceship landed in Fields of Mysteria and a group of space pirates showed up and they were like

cute somehow, I would not be surprised.

Do you know what I mean?

I'm not sure they'd be pirates,

they would be

everything else I am on board with who like decided they wanted to do some, they wanted to open up a they'd come to the Saturday, uh, the Saturday bizarre thing, the Saturday market.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, um, to sell space fashion to you, you know.

We used to be pirates, but we decided we really like, you know, fashion more.

Uh, tell me about Fields of Mysteria, the farming sim slash life sim from NPC Studio.

It is their first game, which is wild

because I think it is extremely well crafted and pretty polished, especially for an early access game.

It came out in early access last August, so it's been out for just under a year at this point.

I know it's a

really,

it gives me the same feeling that Stardew Valley gave me when I first played Stardew Valley, like way back when it released, which is,

okay, the people who made this have played a lot of these games and they know what they want, and I respect that.

Yeah, I mean, Allie, you've been playing an effort weeks and weeks and weeks, uh, months and months and months, actually, I guess, right?

You've been doing Mystery Monday now since last,

yeah, basically since release.

I took

kind of an extended break in January just because holiday post, whatever.

Because the winter time on the farm.

And

I mean,

an interesting thing about the way that I've been playing is forcing myself to stream it and only play a week of in-game time per week

has like changed the structure of how I've ever played one of these games for myself.

Really?

So I've

yeah, I mean, I really appreciated like the like feeling of like sitting down on Sunday and being like, damn, what am I going to do at my farm tomorrow?

Like, am I going to focus on my chickens?

Or like, do I really have to get a bunch of seeds?

And, like, you know, this is, these sort of games are things that you can fall into.

Like, I knew with it being early access, like, if I had just played it, played it, I would have put like 60 hours over three weeks into it in the first three weeks.

And then by the time the update came, I would have been like, well,

I played it.

I'm done.

This is the early access thing for me.

It always happens to me.

I think Invisible Inc.

is the only time I've been able to stick with a game through all of early access and like keep playing it through release?

So I'm glad you did not fall into that trap.

But so, yeah, so now you've seen some of those updates.

You have been playing it in this.

That means you've been playing it not quite in real time, but when you like zoom out enough, you're like, if it's a week, if you're playing once a week and you're playing one week of a thing at a time, does that mean you're in spring again now?

Are you just behind?

I am about to, I'm a little bit behind because of Miss Weeks.

I'm about to start.

I just ended summer.

I'm about to start.

Okay.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Janine, I am very curious about your reaction to it because I do feel like

as I've been playing it, and we played a little bit of Stardew together, and I've also seen you stream other types of these games that I've like taken on like Janineism as I've been playing it.

Where I'm like, oh, I need to make sure that I have five fruit.

And I like hold on to all of these things.

And then I'm like, why am I holding on to all these pineapples or whatever?

That's a genenism is the hoarding pineapples.

I have a system that is important because

everyone has favorite gifts and recipes and stuff.

And you don't know, maybe you're going to need a pineapple in winter because

so-and-so wants pineapple slice.

That makes sense, actually.

I have not thought about that.

Yeah.

So like the thing that I do in all farming games is I will try to have a stockpile of things, depending on like where I'm at, how badly I need money, etc.

Like early on, it's usually pretty minimal.

I'm not going to focus on having a stack of five high-quality whatever's when I don't have any like basic stuff.

I'm still focused on selling and not retaining at that point.

But as I sort of move along, then it'll be a thing of like, you know, in Stardew, it's gather a stack of five,

you know, basic quality things and then gather a stack of slightly higher quality ones once you have once you're starting to get those a little more reliably um and then eventually you have you know the dream is to have a stack of the high quality things so that whenever you need to make a gift you can make a really really good one um

that's yeah that's and that's not that hasn't always worked um there have been some um

games where the food was perishable.

That's the only thing in video games that has ever made me understand people who hate weapon durability because I hate it when the food is perishable.

It sucks.

I cannot imagine perishable food coming to this game because I feel like

quality of life in the world

is never

so important to its identity.

Which I guess we should say it is a life sim and farming sim in the Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon or

what is the

Story of Seasons mode

with a really heavy dash of sort of late 90s early 2000s really I guess 80s and 90s anime vibes is really what it is

really diverse characters but all drawing on archetypes that are very familiar if that's a space that you're familiar with or like a genre space you're familiar with so you know you have the kind of and like those those things exist already in harvest moon and in rune factory and in stardew valley but there is something about how cleanly they're drawn here not literally drawn

how they're written, how they're, how they are, what their animations are, what their poses are, that really feels of a kind with a certain style of, you know, early 90s, like, or late 80s, like Record of Lotus War, Slayers, like that style of big anime character is here.

And I think that the, so that's like stylistically what separates it, but, but in terms of playing, I only played a little bit, I only played like the first week of play, so I'm well behind you, Allie.

But I was like immediately like, oh, I don't need to fill the water can ever.

The shops stay open even when people are like at the bar.

Can I tell you,

when I started playing,

I instinctively,

every so often, would go to the well

and then do the watering can action because I thought it was doing something.

And then I realized it wasn't doing anything.

And I was just watering the well.

And I was like, I was really shaken.

I was like, because

I've played a lot of these games.

I have never, even the ones that are for babies, like actual babies, I've never played one where you don't have to refill the watering can.

Even, even like, what the fuck is it called?

That, that one, that, uh, uh, that one that Dre and I were playing for like a little bit.

Um,

oh,

the like

the

one where you have like a realistic

Japanese.

Oh, that one.

The one.

Ooh, I don't remember the name of that game.

It was also with an S, though, right?

Wasn't it like something?

Hang on.

I'm looking in my.

Where's my gather and craft Steam group?

This is wow.

Very.

Allie, do you have a do you have Steam groupings?

You're not playing this on console.

You are playing this on Steam.

I'm a console head.

Wait, where are you playing this?

Is this on console?

Yeah, no, no, no.

I've been playing this on PCB because I've been streaming it.

Yeah, okay.

generally

sunny side.

So, yeah, sunny side gives you a hose, which I think is fascinating, but you still have to refill the water tank sometimes with a pump.

Sorry, I need to understand what you're explaining.

You have a does it mean you have a bucket?

You have like a

gas can filled with water and then a hose is attached to it, or do you mean you have a hose you plug into a gas can with water?

What do you yeah,

imagine the shape of a gas can?

So then what are you plugging?

You're plugging the hose into the wall to a faucet?

The hose is attached on a reel to your shed.

You have a shed.

And then on the other side of the shed.

No, let me finish.

Okay.

On the other side of the shed, there is like a water tank.

Like

a boiler, but it's not heating it up.

It's just a big water tank.

Yeah.

And it has a meter on the side.

And periodically, you have to go to your hand crank water pump to pump some water from the ground into that tank.

And then that's what the hose is.

I see.

So even that, where you have pumping water still.

Where you have technically a non-immediately finite source of water, you do still have to pump to refill the tank periodically.

I see.

That makes some sense, I guess.

That's the closest I've seen any game do to the just, your watering can just works.

It doesn't matter.

We know that if you had to refill it, you were going to.

So just fuck it.

Just whatever.

Just do it.

Yeah.

You know, like all these games are abstracted in some important way.

Like, for instance, there's only four months of the year because it's just four seasons and four weeks in each thing.

So, like, where they dial in on that is where a lot of the interesting choices about what a game feels like is.

And so, seeing that the water can is always full, seeing that it just tells you where characters are on the map.

Um, I, there is something I didn't understand at first, which is it will mark the location of your the character you're looking for with a particular icon that's like I think it's like the silhouette of a person.

It's like a like a simple, like not quite a stick figure you know what i mean i thought that was a gravestone at first

and i was like why are they using a gravestone as the what do you know you don't know the symbol i'm talking about i'm gonna put it

faces no no no no some if it's a if it's a person it's this symbol i'm putting in is in our chat right now this like blank character image and i was like oh it's like a gravestone that's a weird way to mark something maybe i'll learn this connecting to the art

silhouette.

It's like a Nintendo silhouette.

But it's little on my screen.

It's on the little map.

So I thought it was like, oh, maybe it's tied to the archaeology stuff because there's so much archaeology stuff in here.

Maybe this is like a symbol that's going to become important.

It's like, oh, a general waypoint symbol.

No.

No, it's just a character.

It's like before you meet them, like you introduce yourself.

Yeah, and then like, and then like, um, if it was like, you bring this thing to this place, it's marked like that, I think.

Oh, okay.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe it is just the first one, but I kept seeing it.

Yeah, I've not seen any gravestones in my game.

They're not gravestones.

You know,

there are some things that are kind of like gravestones, but they're anywhere else.

This is true.

You get the cursed realm of Fields of Mystery that kills you.

That's finally, yeah.

I, someone should do that, actually.

That would be not the kills you, but the like, you're the one person, one out of 10,000 people has the weird thing happen, you know?

Oh my god.

Yeah.

But my point being, wow, it just says, here is where this character is.

Here's where this quest gets turned in.

I would say that's gotten a little more common in the genre, but it's still often not as clear as it is here.

I will tell you what has not gotten that much more common is shops staying open late because they're just a secret board you talk to.

I guess that one we played last year, Janine, had that.

Those just people weren't characters.

They were just

people who sold you things.

Whereas here, you know, the

people who run the general store will go to the tavern or the inn to hang out at night, but like you can still go into the tavern and or into the general store to buy seats, you know?

And so it's like, I don't know how I feel about that stuff.

I feel it makes me feel like an old asshole, kind of like,

it puts me in the position of people that I'm not usually in the position of who are like, well, this shooter is for babies.

Where it's like, well, but the store, but it can't be open all the time.

You know, people in this town are doing

it.

Put your money in the basket.

You know?

And like, I can recognize, like, you know, it, it doesn't need to make sense because it's not about that.

It's about facilitating the things you want to do in the world and kind of operating on the good faith of, like, yeah,

sometimes you're just going to need to buy something and game time has passed in such a way that it's inconvenient and it doesn't matter.

Like, it's not the part of the story that matters, right?

Yeah.

Well, and sometimes that is.

I don't expect that, but sometimes that is what you want from a game like this, is the semi

where you're like, oh, right, everyone has a schedule.

And like, oh, look, they leave the shop, and that means that I can't buy the thing until tomorrow.

So it's nice to remember what their schedules are a little bit.

But

I will say, as the person,

yeah, as the person who always runs into friction with these games because it feels like I'm not optimized in playing,

there's still a time schedule in this game for things like the seasons.

But like, if I didn't, I'm never going to not make it to the shop in time to buy the seeds.

I can can do that at midnight, rush home, and plant them if I need to.

You don't have to worry about, like, oh, on Thursdays, the restaurant is closed for whatever fucking reason.

That stuff doesn't happen here.

No one takes it.

You know,

I guess not.

Stardew Valley having to add the phone so that you can call a store to be like, what are your hours?

Are you even open to this?

And you didn't have to run into town only to be disappointed that it was closed.

It's such a like, this is funny.

it is but also I can understand why you wouldn't want this yeah I get it

yeah

go ahead yeah I definitely feel like because like you know a lot of the

the experiences like this that reduce friction in terms of like the stores being open and stuff like that like I feel like the convenience there I like in the game because it's not like there aren't these other time constraints other

like in other places like you said and like the idea of like, oh, the store is closed, but I only have eight days left in spring, and cucumbers take seven days to right,

like you know, there's still that math that you have to do.

And the thought of like, oh, I can't buy the cucumber seeds, so I'm just not going to have any more cucumbers this season, like sucks.

So, like, things like the store, I really like, but like, explicitly, that feeling of realizing that in Stardew after the store closed, and be like, I could have fucking done it, and I fucked up.

That's the thing that kills me.

So, that not having that little bit of extra friction really helps but you said you were you realized but with the some of the updates that have come along I like

the more that they come around I'm I'm wondering like

are these

gaps that like I would expect the modding community to fill in instead of the dev team to sure

or is it because of the way that I'm coming across it like the the thing for instance is that like in the place that I'm at and with the update that came you're able to get a horse.

Once you get the horse, you can summon the horse basically anywhere except out of sight of buildings and you're able to walk places a lot faster to like change it.

It like really opens up the ability to move in that game.

And like that's great.

I get a horse.

I feel like the horse would have been,

it would have been closed.

Like I was around year two when this came around and I think you need at least one of the Hayden Farm upgrades to even unlock the horse.

So it's not like they added the horse and then

if you like just booted up the game after that update, you've gotten a horse right away or whatever.

But I also feel like because it's an early access,

like if they wanted to scale the time of moving a little bit, like, I don't know, there's just something about it how it like is such a big change in terms of like timing immediately that I'm like, is this the design decision that I would have made?

And like, I think the fact that it's an early access is making me consider those things a little bit more.

And also making me consider those things more is that the farming game that I did right before I started doing this was multiplayer stardew with...

you, Janine, and Keith, a friend of the table person, and Dre and Sylvie came in on those a little bit too.

And that was like, we played at vanilla for like one session and then started pulling in mods.

And that was was my first experience with like a modding community for these types of games so now i'm just like

the like measurements in my head of like utility of some of these things is just like all sort of skewed in terms of the way that i'm thinking about

how that stuff is managed i guess yeah well like and that's one where

watching help do those streams was like one everyone has different styles of play and different things they want to focus on and then two like oh wow this game does just just change with enough people to do everything all the time.

You know what I mean?

Like, that is almost like a quality of life improvement is having someone who says, Yeah, I'll do the watering today, or I'll go into the mind.

You know what I mean?

Who's lucky animals?

I don't want to deal with you.

I don't want to deal with them.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm curious, Allie, because the other big difference here that I kind of alluded to was setting and characters.

Like, I know people of the Stardew Valley characters.

I get it.

I think, you know, when I played that game, I put, I put 20 hours in, which is not any fucking time.

But, like, you know, I had characters who I liked the most, and I've played Mune Factor games all the way through and have had favorites and stuff.

But I think that there was just instantly so much character

through the set of characters here, so much personality.

They feel so...

not just distinct from each other, but like I've seen these archetypes before, you know, I've seen the mean boy blacksmith type.

I've seen the sort of suspicious doctor

many times before.

I love that character every time, it turns out.

But there is something about the way that the writing is delivered here.

And I'm curious if that is, if I'm getting a lot of that because I just started and then like it kind of fades.

Or like, you know, the first Friday when they're like, oh, come to come to the tavern on Fridays because we all hang out.

And it's like, oh, here's the card players and they're having a little discussion.

And here's the people at the bar who are just catching up.

And here's the fucking DD group starting their new campaign.

Like, that shit doesn't happen in specifically the feeling of bumping into a conversation already happening between two or three other characters does not feel as common for me outside of big scripted events in the farming games I played.

Now, again, I am not the farm master.

Maybe that is happening all the time in these games, and I just don't know about it.

But it happens so often here.

And I'm curious if that continues post-week one, season one, year one, et cetera.

um yeah so the there's there's definitely a little bit of friction on this for me and it's an early access so i forgive a lot of this and um

yeah so right now the friday night things are only scripted for the first year um people will still go on like people will still go to the bar on fridays but you won't get those sort of like overarching story like week one week two week three you're like seeing their events progress over time um and like that is some of the best writing in the game, but I also like cannot even understand

from a dev's perspective, like how you calculate how many years of that you should even be writing.

Yeah.

Like I, you know, they could do five years, they could do 10 years.

Like I, you know, the, the,

I am not developing this game, but the thought of having to make that decision like gives me anxiety.

Just like that's why you don't usually get it, right?

Like why you don't usually have have

normally in farming games, the sort of conversational continuity will happen in like your romance scenes or your friendship scenes, where it's like those will call back on a previous one because they can trust, like, well, you got that relationship up to one star, so you saw the one star cutscene, and you got it up to two stars, you saw a two-star cutscene.

So you can have

like a thing that feels continuous there.

You don't often get it in something like an open area that you're going to or like an event you can go to every week.

Normally you'll like, you know, in Stardew Valley, for example, I mean, in most of them, they'll be like, okay, these two always hang out together at the bar on Wednesday nights.

And they have some line about like,

the chickens are doing great, you know?

And that's like their thing that they do.

But it's basically, I don't want to say unheard of, but like wildly uncommon to go there next Wednesday and hear them be like, Right.

So, how's that chicken doing?

Oh, I don't know.

She's, she's kind of weird this week.

And then you come back next week.

And, you know, it's so

I do also like,

I wonder how much they're holding back on that stuff until release.

Oh, sure.

Because that's kind of one of the easier things to just be like, we'll show you up until this.

Right.

And then, but actually, we have four or five or plus years of this already written.

We're just not going to put that in the early access because that would be giving it all away up top, right?

Yeah.

That's possible.

I also wonder, like, do you do five years of bar events or do you do

two years of a bar event and then a beach event?

Right.

And then, like, half of a, you know?

Yeah, I mean, that's another thing with the game is that there are kind of beach events.

I feel like I've missed a lot of them because just I, when I wake up, I tend to buy vegetables and buy animals and people seem to leave the beach by like one o'clock or whatever.

But like, you can go to the beach and people have

bathing suits.

So they have different sprites, by the way.

And they're also like different like combinations of people will be at the beach that day, like

just hanging out with each other.

And that's really fun.

That was like a secret that I didn't realize until like

halfway through my first summer.

And yeah, I mean, like, I can't speak to how rare it feels in this game, but I feel like the

sense of community that you get in Fields of Mystery is something that really sets it apart.

Like, just because

the archetypes are so clear, the like relationships that the characters already have with each other are so clear.

And then like when you, as you're going through heart events with people or doing the like town upgrades with people, you'll get like specific pairs of like,

you know, the

guy who is the farm that's right next to you will,

the first heart event that you get with him is like you come over and talk to his chicken.

And then the mean blacksmith boy is also there.

And he like has a fight with the chicken.

And it's like, you know,

in places like that, I feel like the sort of like relationship events would just be between you and the person that you're giving the heart coins to and not like these opportunities to see them in context with these other characters.

And then just in terms of like,

I mean, like a lot of these games are like you arrive at this town, this town needs certain updates and you do those updates over time.

But I feel like, you know, the

something I was really charmed by is that like

You know, the story with Stardew is that you arrive at the town and nobody kind of gives a shit about all that stuff.

And then you're the only one who does and then you sort of like you know build this community by all of these these loose threads or whatever whereas mystery you know everybody kind of has this investment in the place that they're in already they just haven't had the opportunity to like have the time and the space and the you know the player characterness that you have to to sort of help that ball roll down the hill well that way comes specifically right yeah like yeah yeah and it's like well they all have to live their lives.

They all have stuff they have to take care of already.

They don't have the time to deal with this new challenge.

And you're here and you're already dealing with a new challenge.

So

go nuts.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, specifically, that is the like cavet of the game.

Basically, there's like the rich girl in town who's the like baroness's daughter who's also running the town for some time who gives you this farm as sort of like a like like a work home sort of like we need this help So, can you just,

you know, you can live here if you

as long as you put the word out?

It's like cat sitting.

It's like, yeah, you can stay at my place for a month, but you have to take care of the cat, like 100%, you know?

Because in this case, you have to help us repair from this bad earthquake.

Yeah.

I will say, like, some of these, some farm games, this is a thing that like Harvest Moon did for a spell pre-story of seasons.

So, like, Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon,

did for a bit, which I always hated, and it feels kind of like an attempt to build the sense of community, but I think it just always

just made me feel bad, which was that for a while in Harvest Moon games, every love interest had an alternate, like a rival, like a like someone who, if you didn't romance them, was going to romance them.

In some cases, there was a timeline there where you could be romancing someone, and then you would get scooped.

Not scooped,

but someone would swoop in and you'd be kind of SOL.

It sort of

they weren't always that mercenary, but it's, you know, it kind of depended on the game.

They were always kind of playing with stuff like that.

But there was, so you would often get to a point where your scenes with them would have the other, the rival involved.

Oh, interesting.

And it sort of,

I feel like it was supposed to build that feeling of like, these people have relationships, they know each other, etc.

But it always just felt kind of shitty because it was always boiling it down to romance.

So like this person is relevant to this person because, yeah, because they want to marry them.

And also,

in some games, there would be par there would be potential romances that didn't have a rival.

Like the traveling merchants and stuff sometimes wouldn't have a romantic rival.

But for the most part, like the people who are living locally all had a

potential rival assigned.

And if you married that person, they just wouldn't get married.

Like everyone else in town would get married.

Right.

All of that stuff.

And they would just be single forever because you stole the one person they were going to love.

And I thought that felt terrible.

Yeah, that feels bad.

They got rid of that, but it was...

like the worst possible solution to that problem of like how do we make these characters feel like they're in the same world?

That's wild.

It's interesting

because it's funny how that intersects back with the first part of the conversation we had, which is like the quality of life convenience stuff, where it's like, where does the sim kick in and the

loose visual novelty narrative elements, you know, which I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, but I mean that in the way of like, oh, there's a bunch of content, there's a bunch of story written for these characters, a bunch of dialogue, and you're moving from one chapter of it to the next with these characters or whatever.

And like, it's not, it's a different vector because it's not, I'm inconvenient, I'm frustrated by my inconvenience, but it is I'm being frustrated by the game's attempt to make the world not fully revolve around me and my needs.

But it almost wraps back around to reinstating the centrality of your needs.

If what the outcome was was, and this other person who you decided doesn't get what they want, just the end for them.

There's no more, like, they don't get to move on from this.

They don't have, they're not part of your ending with character a they're just character b off in the corner you know

there's no there's no consideration there for like

like there's it feels like there is no consideration for the player being sad for that character yeah yeah

and and like finding that an undesirable outcome where they've clearly like taken something

and presumably you know there's no the non-romance path with them as just an npc in the in the town still and they don't ever talk about it.

I don't know about that.

Because

I would often go for the character who didn't have

Harvest Moons and Story Season stuff, one of the few games that I have always played with

a walkthrough or some sort of strategy thing.

Normally, I don't like playing that way,

but these kinds of games, if for nothing else than the fact that I need to know what people, what gifts people like to maximize that,

it's worth doing.

But like, that also meant that, you know, even when I was like emulating them or whatever, playing them on like my Nintendo DS, like

there was always the opportunity for me to be like, okay.

This person is the one, like in these games, at least the ones that had this system.

Here is the person who doesn't have any other attachments.

I'm just going to go with them.

Sometimes that's like a god.

Sometimes that's a merchant who only shows up on weekends or whatever.

Sometimes that's the guy who's only there in the summer.

Those are usually the ones that don't have those other entanglements, but it's like, okay, I guess I, because I don't want to, I don't want to see like,

you know, whoever the fuck is Clay or whoever the fuck.

I don't want to see him just like alone forever.

Because of me.

Janine,

you can't fall in love with someone because you have pity for them.

You can't.

It's It's the opposite.

I'm refusing to fall in love with someone because I have pity for someone else.

Oh, I see.

Right.

I see.

Wow.

So true.

I, you know,

thinking of this dynamic is really coming to light how

sort of smart the character dynamics in Fields of Mystery are

because there are people in Fields of Mystery that I would have strongly pursued stronger if I didn't feel like they had better chemistry with somebody else in town.

Sure.

The doctor and the evil poisoner are

incredible couple.

I have not seen them together yet.

I would love to see them.

Yeah, I would love to hook up with the poisoner lady who poisons you, who works at a bathhouse and always has her boobs out and

like calls you her guinea pig.

like the first heart event you get with her I'm obsessed with her but she has such a good relationship with the doctor that like I don't expect the game to do the sort of thing of like oh we're gonna pair off other play like other

characters but the the the writing that they have together is strong enough that I can kind of put on my shipping lens and sort of enjoy these these the chemistry that they have together without this and like I you know I don't know that there's like a one-to-one for everybody, but like, the three sort of young woman girls are all at the click together.

And I could see somebody sort of being like, well, I'd rather Celine hook up with Adeline, and so I'm going to date Rena, or, you know, whatever else, or even March and the Reese, which is the oh, those two seems to be.

Yeah, I hung out with them the other day.

I was like, oh, okay, I see the vibes.

Yes.

So because, like, Mark hates everybody.

And then all of a sudden, he talks about Reese once.

And I'm like, wait a second, you didn't shit talk Reese Reese at all.

Like, you were like actually saying something about how cool he was.

I'm like, okay, are y'all together?

Like, okay, I'm gonna leave y'all alone.

I'm gonna hang out with Balor, who's the merchant guy.

Yeah, and I, like, I,

I love that, like, the, the characters are strong enough, and

the

like interactions that they have with each other are strong enough that you can sort of make these lines for yourself without the like

the like firmness of what it sounds like it is in a harvest moon game in terms of like oh you these they are absolutely coupled and if you engage with either of them you are breaking up this pair essentially isn't it starting to sort of like that too aren't there like people like the mean girl will hook up with the jock boy and yeah there are definitely some pairings i don't know if they'll like get married and stuff i don't know how far that goes but there are definitely like

at least for the romance characters and also non-romanceable characters, you know, because the Mayor and Marnie are like a character.

Oh, right, of course.

Yeah, the

mean girl and Alex, the football man,

I think we'll hook up.

I think

like Emily.

Is it Emily and Shane or something?

I don't know.

There's, you know, Leia and Elliot.

You know, there's there's definitely like, they are designed as two sides of a coin in a sense.

Like, they have sort of clear, like,

parallel characters that they do socialize with, but I'm not, I don't really remember.

And also, there's been so many updates that I who knows at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah, I will say this game continues the long-standing tradition of these games where you go, why are none of these parents datable?

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Everything.

That's the curse.

That's the curse of a farming game.

And like, you know, sometimes I'll be like, is this because I've gotten older?

And it's like, no, this was always true.

It was always true.

There was always hotter parents than anyone else.

Like, like, just

going back to going back to like Friends of Mineral Town and the family who does the chickens, like the mom, Lilla, who does the chicken stuff, was a smoke show uh-huh

her daughter was okay but damn

yeah I I will say at least for the the parents in fields of mystery uh the the the relationships that they have with each other are 100% like I'm such a I'm like I do not want to separate the

like shop owner lady who's always talking about like

checks and balances or whatever from the the the goofy guy who runs the shop and is always saying puns.

Uh-huh, halts.

Yeah,

yeah.

The thing that fucks with me is the old woman who does not have a chance.

Elsie.

Oh, yeah, she does.

Elsie.

Yeah.

And she's like always talking about old flings that she used to have when she was like young and hot in the Capitol.

And I'm like, you're still young and hot.

Let me take you.

She's also like an Agatha Christie side character.

She's like the

what's her name?

Athene, whatever, who hangs out with Poirot sometimes.

Like,

she's definitely

incredible.

Janine, how far have you gotten in the Friday nights?

Not very far.

I'm still in the first season.

Then I will not.

I mean, I've watched a bunch of yours.

Okay,

but

she eventually becomes the DM of those games, and I'm fucking obsessed with her.

She's the best one.

That's exciting.

Also, I'm posting, I posted Papuri's mom, Lilia, and now I'm posting Papuri, and I'm just saying,

like, yeah, the vibes are similar, but just the mom, the mom, it's like, it's like wine and grape juice, you know?

That third one where her mom is like frustrated or like exhaling or something is so good.

Really great.

And going the opposite direction with characters who are great, but you can't romance them good.

The kids are so funny.

They're so funny.

Luke Dell and Maple.

Luke's little.

I have to tell you, I looked a lot like Luke when I was Luke's age.

Luke has huge little Austin energy.

I do not like bugs the way Luke likes.

Yeah, I was going to say, how did you feel about bugs?

Not a fan, never a fan at all.

But the kids are so funny.

The way that they like walk around in their little group and hang out and sometimes have a babysitter babysitter or like a you know someone guiding them around in the day it's so good you know from friends at the table that i love really well played and well-written like child characters it's so hard to do in a way that's both convincing but like

i don't know again i don't know if it's just my perception but i feel like

kid characters have been getting better

There have been more kid characters.

I've been like, that one's fun.

Yeah.

In games.

like is that I'm wondering if it's like is it a knock-on effect of more developers being parents where you know remember the datification of games and stuff it's like that but the other side is like people have actually been around real children and know the ways in which they are funny and stuff yeah totally a hundred percent cal Luke is so excited they're like giving you a bug net so that you can go do bug captioning

The other last thing that I just want to point out is like, I think one of the things that makes this cool is

it does feel like there's, there's there's and again rune factory does this there are other fantasy driven you know fantasy life isn't a farming even though the new one does have farming uh but the old one also had farming did it did it have like a farm you could you could have i didn't realize that i don't remember if you had like if it was like a farm farm but there were like crops there were like okay yeah there was a farming class right i don't remember

was there a farm i don't remember i don't i don't remember if there was an actual farmer i'm searching for i'm searching the lives list uh

paladin mercenary

magician hunter

farmer's one of them farmers and farmers the new one farmer is in it farmer's new for the girl who steals time yeah i think there was it was like gather some sort of gathering one there was a wood cutter who let you do that type of stuff i think maybe but uh but yeah in any case um

what was i even talk oh uh the setting like has

i keep being like okay well what's going on here um uh There's, I started doing the archaeology stuff.

You go over to the ruins and start digging stuff up.

I was like, oh, yeah, the headdress of the ancient witch queen.

Huh?

The who?

The what?

You know, I'd say it's not quite too.

What was the Square Enix

farming RPG that came out a couple of years ago?

Harvestella.

Harvestella has like, Harvestella secretly is just a JRPG that has a lot of farming in it, but like is a JRPG that is like the bulk of what you do in that game.

It's not the sort of harvest or the sort of Stardew Valley Rune Factory.

I mean, Rune Factory has a lot of combat in it, but it's so tilted in that direction in Harvestella.

Just ignoring the fact that Stardew has that war going on in the background that they just occasionally talk about.

Do they talk?

I

do not remember this at all about it.

There's just like talking about like, what do we, how do we tell the children about the war?

Okay, but what if you went to that war?

That's what Harvestella is.

One of the characters, yeah, well, in Stardew, one of the characters comes home in like year two or something from the war.

Interesting.

And he has PTSD.

Okay.

Yeah.

And that's why I was going to say, like, oh, cool, but that's not.

She's like the hottest mom.

Wait, wait.

Oh, you can't date her because her kid has

a guy.

She's married to a guy

who's fighting in the war.

I see.

That's a classic situation, which you could date her, I think, historically speaking.

I'm not saying they should put that in the game, but someone's going to pull the trigger on that at some point.

Someone's going to pull the band-aid off and be like, you can date the mom where the guy is gone.

You know?

That's what modding is for.

You're right.

That mod exists, presumably.

Yeah.

Like instantly, right?

They're probably competing different mods.

Stardew Valley mod.

We're doing the research live.

This is.

Jodi, I think her name is Jodi.

Dateable Jodi.

There you go.

Dateable Jodi.

There you go.

Reddit post.

Why is Jodi like that?

That's very fucked up.

I will say

the fantasy element of Fields of Mysteria is...

I don't want to say subtle because you're casting magic, obviously.

Sure, yeah.

But you know, the way that it is sort of happening in the background is, is really, it makes the environment seem a lot more compelling as you're just getting into it.

And I do think that, like, the way that they have the sort of quote-unquote main plot split across two different paths.

One is

one is you are raising the town rank and you're

like upgrading parts of the town over time and you're getting like different scenes for that.

But also the deeper you go into the mine, the more interactions you have with like the ancient dragon statue or at least the spirit of the ancient dragon statue and like a lot of plot and upgrade stuff is locked behind how deep you've gotten um

so it is it is very fun to see the like there's the like you know mundane plot quote unquote and then the fantasy plot and those are like two different things that you can put your your time into that i think makes the the like the way that they weave those two aspects of like this plot or the story that you're you're uncovering really really good.

And

have they been updating both of those with updates, or is that like,

yeah, I think the last update both had like

you know, the updates have typically been there's a new festival because it only launched with one, um, a couple of quality of life updates, um,

go being the be the ability to go deeper into the minds, and then like a a bigger cap on what the town renown can be

um and the town renown is like the the the like level basically right right right right yeah that is where you

uh like any quest you do gives you any it's like everything you do can increase renown right even like selling crops will increase town renown Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doing, doing

quests for people is a big renown thing for you.

So, and then also, I think another thing is that it was only planning on being in early access for a year.

At least that's what they said at launch.

Right.

So, the full update should be sometime, or like the full game should be sometime this summer, which is exciting.

That is exciting.

Yeah, I hadn't checked the roadmap, actually, but

yeah, it seems like they're getting there, huh?

Also,

if any of the people who are working on this game are listening to this, and I'm going to say something kind of ridiculous if you're someone who is like, this is going to sound like

I'm giving people who buy games homework right now.

Y'all have to charge more than $14 for this game.

This is not...

$14.

Yesterday's price is not today's price.

I would bet when they release the full price, it will go up.

But it shouldn't go up.

I hope it goes up to above $20.

I know I'm

giving us homework.

I know times are tough, but that's why you have to be able to charge more than $20 for something that is so.

This is not a small little game, and it is 2025.

You know,

I think it's a $25 game, minimum.

I agree.

Yeah.

Okay.

I would say, though, that

it's gotten a little more.

I feel like this was sort of frowned on for a while, but has at least anecdotally gotten more common of just like, we're going to put it in early access at a low price

people.

because I think maybe because there have been so many early access games that came out and then got abandoned that there's a little bit of reticence uh justifiably

um disney dreamer value is forty dollars it's it's on discount right now to 30 but like you know these these games are expensive out here start you know startup is 15 I get you want to price it competitively to that but I think we all need to Nintendo was selling games for $80 $90 more if you're in Canada or whatever right 70 or 80 and then more if you're in Canada

It's like $100 here.

That's wild.

What do we do?

And I'm the guy who just said you shouldn't charge $14.

You have to charge more.

I'm just trying to get us somewhere, you know?

They deserve to be paid.

Please.

Please tell me,

this is from the Jodi marrying, Jodi dating mod.

Oh, yep.

Please tell me this includes a storyline where she and Kent get help with their issues and divorce amicably.

And the mod creator says, I thought about that, but I really didn't know how to really approach that, which is fair.

Currently, she just silently divorces him when you marry her.

Perhaps I'll add some extra events about the divorce in the future.

You know, I understand.

Call that I understand, but also it's wild to read the word she just silently divorces him when you marry her.

That's crazy work.

That's what do we

man, imagine being in the fucking bunkers of the Stardew Valley World War, and you get the fucking mail that's just divorce papers

what the fuck is going on no because he's back by the time you're is he back when I mean he comes back I want to say at the start of year two so if you move like super fast with Jodi you could theoretically you gotta race you gotta it gotta be done before he's back otherwise and I wonder like where does he live do you live in that house and then Jody moves into yours right yeah he gets to keep the house and like the heads were

where does does Goku live, or whatever the fuck her kids live?

Goku?

Is she the one who has the blonde, spiky-haired kid?

No, I forget who that is.

Jody has a little boy.

It's a little boy, the little spiky-haired little like Keith kind of character.

Yeah,

I see.

Wait, no, wait, Sam.

Sam is dateable.

Sam is the adult one.

Oh, yeah, no.

Sam is Goku.

Sam is Goku.

Anyway.

Wild.

Well,

any other mystery of thoughts before we take a break?

I'm good.

Playfield's mystery is really good.

Yeah.

I have a theory that the Doctor and the Poisoner are dating because specifically, or have that relationship because the Doctor looks like a gender swap Dr.

Tomoe from Sailor Moon, and the Poisoner lady looks kind of like Mistress Nine.

That's my theory.

It's a good theory.

That's a good theory.

It might not stop me, though, from dating the doctor.

I'm really thinking about it.

Yeah, what are our top words?

Where are we at?

I mean, Allie, we all know who you're trying to date.

We've all seen the streams.

Is that still true?

Have you cooled on March?

Not at all.

And in fact, last stream,

last stream, I did the

like the shooting star event, which is a spring event, which quote unquote binds our fate.

Yeah, I think that that maybe is like a, he's definitely a marriage candidate for me now.

And I was actually, I was, I, the mechanics of that were weird because it's like you get a pin that you give somebody.

I thought that it was going to be at least a thing of like, you need to get X amount of hearts with them before

you can do that.

I think that there is a little bit of locking there.

Like if you, I've never interacted with someone, um,

I wouldn't have been able to do it.

Um, but I was kind of curious.

I guess they didn't want to put people in the position where like if you have the same heart level with three different people, they didn't want to just randomize who you would be there with.

Um, yeah, but yeah, it was, it, it was great,

it was very, it's very emotional, it was charged.

I'm having a great time with him.

Why can't you date his older brother?

You cannot, and that is a thing that people are.

I'm so

I was gonna say, if I could date anyone in this game, I want to date Ulrich so bad.

Yeah, I like Ulrich.

And I would be fine not dating him.

I just want to know what's up.

You know what I mean?

I'm fine with, I'm fine with, if he's like, I don't want a relationship, that's awesome.

That's fine.

But I want to know what his vibe is.

I don't want to lie.

There's so much fandom contention about this because there's been so, like, Can We Date Ulrich has been a thing that people said again and again and again

since release.

And then you have the flip side of that, which is like, well, there should be ACE representation

and there should be

ACE people still date.

Ace

still dates

that.

But there should be people who don't want to date should exist in games and games like this.

But like, if that's the case, that should be in the game and that shouldn't be something we have to always film.

Yeah, and it should not just be a thing that people are arguing about on Reddit or whatever.

Like, it is not representation just because he's cut off in that way.

So, like, the sort of like conversation around it has been more annoying than the actual just reality of it, which is that you could probably only code so many people into the game, right?

So, well, romance is inherently going to be a lot more writing and also a lot more like, usually you're going to have like extra sprites and like all of this other stuff and they have to have special responses to things.

And then also when you marry them, usually you're going to want like, okay, what do they do on the farm?

Like that is just going to be like straight up like

coding some shit for them.

Like

sometimes even in these games, like it's a thing of like, well, this child or this, this person will have this child with you.

So you have to make those assets also.

And like,

you know, I get it, but also, Ulrich is nice looking and kind.

He's kind.

And I like that.

Yeah.

And because he's not dateable, you know, no one else is going to date him.

Yes.

So maybe that's not the same thing.

I would also settle for Darcy.

I would settle for Darcy.

Which one's Darcy?

Oh, Darcy.

Darcy's one of the market.

Yeah.

Oh, Darcy's cute.

Darcy's so cute.

Darcy's so cute.

Darcy's so cute.

Yeah, one of the Saturday market people.

So is

Mary, also one of the Saturday market people, one of the cutest characters.

She's really cute.

My top three right now are Valen, the Doctor,

Balor, Baylor, Balor, the merchant, and then I think Reina, who's like...

Not entirely my type, but is kind of my, like, personality-wise.

She's so bubbly.

But sometimes

you see someone who's like so committed to getting it done in the world.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, all right.

I think she's like the best designed character.

She's so well designed.

Like Celine is kind of the cover girl of Mysteria and like she's she's cute.

She's good.

Yeah.

I like that she has different hairstyles sometimes.

Like that's also fun.

But every time I look at Reyna, I'm just like, that's the kind of character that makes me want to like

do fan art or something.

Like that's.

There is something about her that is just like really

polished and like exceptionally cute.

I don't know.

I just, she's great.

If you told me Reyna was a Sailor Moon character, I missed somehow, I'd be like, oh, yeah, sure.

100%.

Yeah, Rayna's giving Molly.

She's giving

Yaru vibes.

100%.

I want if Reina talked with American dumb Molly accent.

Oh my God.

It'd be very funny.

That'd be great.

Well, those are my top.

So what else?

What are the other, those are my top picks?

And Allie March, but Janine, are you

also thinking Dr.

Valen?

I'm thinking so hard about Valen just in terms of like

I want to I want to pick a character that I do find like cool and attractive,

but I also am not happy with the idea of of interfering with her and Juniper.

Yeah.

Which is a shame.

It's complicated, you know.

I don't love the a lot of the this is my curse with farming games is I often just don't find the guy as anything special.

Um,

other than Ulrich, um, I think Baylor is just is fine, also.

I might go with Baylor.

Um,

yeah, like I don't really get enough of what his deal is, but he has a good vibe.

I like his, I like his vibes, I like his looks, I like

Eiland, Ealen's vibe, the, the Baron's, the other Barons, the same Baron's other kid, who is like, um, but he's the type type of character i play not the type of character i date do you know what i mean

um i mean yeah he's he's like he's kind of a malguin yeah he's a malguin he's a little bit of a malgin

yeah but yeah he's like he's a little more fancy boy but go ahead

he's just like a dork yeah archaeology boy and like everything that he's like i

I gave him a birthday present the other day and he's like, oh, you have, you have such a great knowledge of old traditions.

And I'm like, no, man, I just gave you a birthday birthday.

I'm not honoring the

history of Mystria because I gave you the strawberry, bro.

Like, come on.

And there's like the archetypiness of some of the characters

get

a little silly in that regard.

Or it's like, this is the one thing they care about.

Yeah, Adelaide is that way too.

She, I, another strength of this game is that, like, I think the like very easy tom nook-ism of Adelaide in terms of being like, sorry, it's Adeline.

Adelaide is our high rod.

She's like the prissy rich girl who's always working for some reason.

And then she also, like, during every town upgrade, she's asking you for like thousands of dollars.

And it's like, that's such a dollar.

Come on, damn it.

You're a rich.

It's all locked up in a truss.

She doesn't get to touch it until it's a good one.

She has like

$500 worth of flowers in her fucking manor.

Like, I'm selling that shit for $20.

Yeah, they're selling them for the capital.

I don't fucking know.

But the way that I'm like, the way that I feel that sort of way that I would, like, about Tom Nook and in terms of like, I understand that you were helping me, but stop asking me for money.

Like, it's like, is a good feel, like, it feels a success in terms of how the the writing in this game is.

Yeah, definitely.

Agreed.

It's funny that Celine, the kind of poster character for this, who is like the daughter of the general store owners,

is like not the central.

I didn't know Adeline existed.

You know, I was like, oh, yeah, Celine's going to be the one who is leading me through all the main town quest stuff.

That just doesn't seem to be the case.

So I like that Hayden is here

for people who are fans of the druid guy from Baldur's Gate 3.

House him, yeah.

Yeah, House.

It's basically the same to me.

So

shout outs.

Shout outs to them.

All right.

Let's take a quick break.

We'll come back.

We'll talk about some more video games.

We are back and going to talk finally about an intergalactic library overrun by space pirates.

I think maybe before diverging back to old

80s, 90s anime vibes, actually.

But Skin Deep is, I believe, out now.

I know that the embargo is up and I can talk about it.

This comes out, maybe it's tomorrow.

It comes out tomorrow, April 30th.

It is on Steam.

I don't know what the launch price is.

It's not on here yet.

You can't pre-order it yet.

But if it's for $14, I would also say that they should raise their price.

Skin Deep is the latest game by Blendo Games.

It was one of my favorite developers of all time.

30 Flights of Loving is probably the game that I played that first got me into Blendo games.

I think that that's probably true.

30 Flights and

Gravity Bone, which is the kind of, well, the first one was Gravity Bone.

30 Flights of Loving comes with Gravity Bone and 30 Flights of Loving.

And then, yes, Quadrilateral Cowboy came out in like 2016.

I loved that game.

I'm a big fan of the game Flotilla.

These games used to be made primarily by Brendan Chung as a solo dev, but that has not been the case now.

I think since Quad Cow.

I think Quad Lateral Cowboy had a full team.

They are very distinctive stylistically.

They tend to be very boxy.

They have their roots in old Source and Quake mod scenes, making unique levels.

They have a history of pushing

kind of the storytelling structure of games.

towards techniques that you don't traditionally see in video games, things like montage, which have a long history going back to the early 20s, going back to the early history of film in film, but aren't things that you traditionally see used in video games where you're like cutting, but you know,

in something like

Gravity Bone or 30 Fights of Loving, you'll be like walking down a hallway, and the game will just cut to like further on down in the hallway, or cut to a memory your character is having in this moment for a second or two.

And historically,

the Blender games have really walked between two different lines, I'd say,

which is really carefully handcrafted narrative games in a sort of first-person mode.

30 Flights of Loving is kind of the epitome of this, where you are moving through levels and there is interaction that you're doing, but you're not like...

You can't really fail a level.

I guess there's some like following through some platforming stuff in 30 Flights.

But generally speaking, you're like moving through a space.

There's a kind of fun spy/slash crime story happening that's told in fairly abstract,

kind of impressionistic ways

that is like stylistically, really cool.

And also historically, the characters have been big cube people with big cube heads.

The other type of game that Blendo traditionally does is really systems-heavy explorations of,

you know, it's all set in the same setting, so like different parts of that world, but weirder in some way.

Adam Zombie Smasher is a game about the zombie apocalypse and you're doing sort of um you're destroying parts of a town or to like keep the zombies from from spreading through the the the streets flotilla is a wildly cool fully 3d space combat roguelike where you're moving your little like ships around in actual 3d space from like a third not like you're not piloting them it's turn-based and you're like putting in directions uh and then they kind of play while operatic music plays, and for like seven seconds, they might like shoot at another one, and then it pauses and lets you put in your next thing.

But, like, actually in 3D, in a way that's not the way like a Star Wars fight happens, but is like, oh, the ship is slowly like a naval battle, but in 3D.

And that's like not at all like 30 Fights of Loving.

Quadrilateral Cowboy kind of walked the line there, where its

core kind of gameplay loop was about going into a level and sort of programming in a heist, figuring out where and how you would hack certain things and set up certain sorts of interactions between

different computer systems,

very grounded in like

you know, freaking and kind of 80s and 70s, 80s, and 90s early hacking,

while still being in the traditional kind of big cube-shaped characters mode.

And that kind of started to blend those two things together.

I'm here to tell you that

Skin Deep has like completely melded together those two styles of games from the studio.

It is a

first-person, I've seen people call it an immersive sim, like Deus Ex or Dishonored.

I don't know.

I just have that feeling sometimes.

Sometimes, but it is a

stealth action game, first and foremost.

You're not reading note cards to learn.

You are kind of.

You're not,

you are reading note cards to learn passwords for things.

You are sometimes reading,

you know, about the

way that people have kept showing up and putting books into the library book return with guns in them.

What should we do with all these guns that are in these books?

I don't know, just put them in the back behind the book return.

And then, you know, you've read that stuff, but it doesn't have that same sort of overarching structure that something like Deus Ex has.

Instead, it is a level-based game in which you play Nina Pasadena, who is an insurance agent for the Meow Corporation, M-A-I-O,

which is a corporation where I guess her job is to be in a cryo-freeze

like tube, a cryofreeze cabinet on a ship run by cats, on various spaceships run by cats.

And if pirates or any other problems show up, she gets defrosted and has to go rescue all the cats.

That's the pitch of this game.

Can I say, I love, I love, like, fictionally, I've, I've, I watched you play some of this game,

and I really

loved that concept of the idea of like instead of insurance being a thing that you pay into and then if something bad happens, they pay out.

It's like, well, the insurance is you acquire this frozen person and if something goes bad, you hit them.

You bought them out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then they get to work.

And what happens is you have these kind of really tight, handcrafted levels.

This is not a proc gen game.

As far as I've played anyway, I've played a bunch of it at this point.

Apparently, I played nine nine hours of it, which doesn't, it feels like I played three hours, but apparently I played nine hours of it.

And I've not hit any sort of like, and now it's a proc gen game or anything like that.

It's not like there's an opening tutorialization and then it gets proc gen.

But you, you, there are these tight, handcrafted spaceship levels where there might be four rooms or six rooms,

and those rooms have the space pirates patrolling them.

The pirates tend to just be doing their thing, which is like walking around, you know, slamming their hand on a vending machine, chattering with each other.

And your job is to navigate, distract, attack these pirates until you get the keys to release the cats from their little cat jails that are all over the spaceship.

And then to call in a cat escape pod, load them up.

And now at the point of the game that I'm in, you then have to get yourself extracted, either by killing the pirates who show up to reinforce any of the pirates who are still on the ship, you have to kill all the pirates, or getting the key card for the pirate ship that has now landed and then stealing that to escape.

That is like the high level.

In play, it's a lot like something like Heat Signature,

the Tom Francis game that came out, again, about 10 years ago, around the same time as Quadrilateral Cowboy, except it's in first person.

It is a hijinks simulator.

It is a game uh, there is a comedic layering of systems, uh, it's something like an even more comedic take on Hitman, um, where you're doing things.

I mean, importantly, there are guns in this game, but they're fairly rare and you get them in very silly ways, and they're not something that you are constantly able to use.

And it's a big deal if you find a gun or like a grenade or something like that.

Instead, you know, I will say at this point, nine hours in, the number one way I can get a easy, clean kill, and it's it's only sort of clean, is I'll throw a box of like a powdered detergent at someone, or not a detergent, a powdered uh deodorant at someone, which is flammable, and then I'll light a lighter and throw it at them.

Or I'll take a like a metal like electric conduit and smash it against the wall, which causes it to start sparking, and then I'll throw it at the big the big powder cloud, which will then explode and probably kill them.

Now, when they die, they don't actually die, they're they get knocked out, or they die and their head pops off their body in a little hover,

a little hover globe, like a snow globe, but a head is in there.

Reclamation jar.

It is something like that, yeah.

And if you don't go get it, it will float to like a respawn pad and they'll just respawn with a new body.

So you have to go get the head and then get it out of the ship and throw it into space.

I tend to do that the most by just opening an airlock and tossing them out because it's fun, but you could like flush them down the toilet or put them in a trash chute, anything that sends them out into space, and then they're gone for real.

And that sort of like interaction is the way you deal with all of the problems in this game.

You are trying to trick someone to walk near a

electric wire that then you're able to hit in a way that causes it to zap them.

Or my favorite level so far is the Galactic Library.

It's a whole library spaceship where

I'll say really quick also there are side objectives that you can also check as soon as you start a level.

If you're going to play this game, I advise you to immediately look at your map and then hit down on the D-pad to see your side objectives because that tends to be like Hitman,

which full disclosure, Janine, you work on Hitman.

I think it's probably worth saying that out loud

before we get harassed for stupid reasons.

But like that, there are like opportunities sort of in the level.

And once you know what those are, you can kind of like actually piece together how the level works.

So for the library, for instance, one of the side objectives are like, find the hidden um cassette tape because there's like music that you can find uh on the cassette tapes, and then then it's

return enough books to get a reward from the book return slot.

Uh, and then it's zap someone, zap one of the pirates with the anti-theft book security systems.

Um, and so it turns out on this library ship, which has like six rooms, there is a

there are in the hallways

security like perimeters, security zones where you can't pass a book through it without getting zapped.

There will be like an electric zap, which will stun an enemy or damage you a little bit.

And so it became very fun for me to lure people with the books or just get them to chase me through there and then set up throw a book past them as they were running through, causing them to get zapped.

And then of course, if you deliver enough of the books, because the pirates had been sneaking guns and in the books,

the book return is set up to give you a gun whenever you return three or more books.

And that's like life-changing.

There is not, this is a game about throwing deodorant at people, not a game about having a gun.

And all of a sudden, you have a gun.

You're like, oh, I'm invincible.

It's so deeply funny.

It is so hijinksy in the way of, oh my God, someone is coming.

Maybe I can like hide above them in the little alcove in the roof or hide in the vents or all of that.

And then on top of it, it's just like a things going wrong simulator where it's, I tried to throw a thing at a guy, but I missed it.

I hit the window and now the entire bridge of the ship has decompressed and now everyone's outside in space.

Or I've set up a tripwire, but then I forgot it was there.

And I'm trying to run away because a bunch of new space pirates just showed up, but I run into my tripwire and now I'm knocked out.

And now I'm knocked out but I do have the auto what is it what is the what is it called when what are the defibrillator of an auto defibrillator set up right um and when that happens it zaps everyone in the area so now that everyone's zapped and stunned for a second so i can quickly jump on the back of one of them and then like charge him headfirst into another one of them it is just a it is really really really funny in that way um and i'm really enjoying it uh and also someone show Sho is there as

a crime lord cat named Little Lion.

And so

I don't know what's better than this.

Did the cats do crime too?

This one, you and Little Lion used to be criminals together.

Used to be assassins together.

Yeah.

So, but you know, situations have brought you back into relation with each other.

Uh-huh.

And so you have to do, you have to, he gives you some missions.

You're like, you're like, first of all, you have to give him a bunch of money so that he'll give you advice.

And then he sends you on a mission to go get some special things that are all weird and goofy, like a big hot air balloon.

You're like, why do you want this?

And then, you know, play to find out what happens.

But, uh, yeah, I, Janine, I don't know if anything else popped out for you.

For me, like, comedy in games is so hard.

So, anytime anyone's even trying to do it, I'm excited.

Yeah, and I, I, you know,

this is, you know, you, as you've mentioned, I work on Hitman, um,

and

I

really respect when a game does comedy through systems.

Yeah.

And, like, acknowledges the comedy through systems versus trying to write their way into

being a joke genius kind of thing.

I feel like that's the shit that's like, it's so easy to feel

when someone is not confident in their humor or is too confident in their humor versus just being like, well, here's how we want the game to work.

And sometimes this is going to go bad in a funny way.

And let's embrace that.

That's, I think, and that's, that's to me why I can be like, this feels very immersive semi-timey is because there's that thing of like,

things can combine in ways that you just don't foresee.

Because that's how the world works sometimes.

Right.

In a way, going back to the Mystria thing of like, sometimes it's funny when the player doesn't get what they want.

And in Mystria or in Sardo Valley, maybe that doesn't always fit the desire of the player in the meta sense.

But here it's like, I want my desires to be, to be, I want to fumble.

I want to like, I want to keep forgetting that there's glass on the ground and keep stepping in it and then like die hard, like take a little damage.

And then be like, ah, fuck.

I have to find a health thing again.

Okay, great.

And the other thing is.

It is Bluff City.

It is Bluff City.

Oh, this game is all of the Blendo game stuff is huge influence on Bluff City.

Like, if I've never said that out loud, I apologize.

But if you're a Friends of the Table listener and you like Bluff City, huge influence on the way the Bluff City works.

And also, like, was doing Bluff City, you know, for people who don't know, from Friends of the Table, Bluff City was our first Patreon exclusive season.

It's now totally available.

There is a Patreon post with a link to it all.

Or I think maybe the Patreon posts are all free to the public, but it is now just all on YouTube, too, I think.

Is that all of it?

Just season one.

Just season one.

sorry.

But all of season one is now available on YouTube now, I think, which is, of course, youtube.com slash friends at the table.

And that is like a single setting, but we play a bunch of games to

tell a broader story, but a lot of them are mostly standalone in terms of like getting a new sense of it.

What's everyone's favorite season one Bluff City game?

I say season one because it's free because I know season two, we would all just say America's Playground, probably.

Maybe not, because Ali, you weren't in America's Playground, right?

Yeah.

It's still a good one, though, regardless.

I think for me, it is truly just, I think it's the first one, the Box of the Bird, the.

Our fiasco, our first fiasco game, yeah, our very first fiasco, I think, to me is it was such an immediate thing of like you could feel everyone immediately just locking in on like, this is what we're doing.

I get it.

I think the stuff has been fun.

The zoo stuff has been fun.

It's occurring.

Yeah, it's when I try to think about it, I feel like I can easier say

who my favorite Bluff City character is than my favorite game.

Who's your favorite Bluff City character?

Chris Andrews.

From Messy Business.

From Messy Business, which was Lacuna.

That's Lacuna.

I think that's my favorite one.

Yeah.

Chris Andrews rules.

But for people listening, we played all these different games, and that is what Blendo was doing well before I was doing Bluff City, right?

Because all of these games from the game about the zombies, you know, through this one in space are all in the same, you know, unified setting.

And it's a very silly setting, but it's a very, it's a very

thoughtful and like considered setting.

Not thoughtful as in like

huge, big ideas and world building, but thoughtful as in like, it, it, you will constantly be like, oh, shit, right.

I remember because this is like, this is the big city on Earth still.

Or like, oh, right.

I remember from playing Flotilla, there's all these cats in space.

Like, cats are a major part of

the space economy for some reason.

And the way that that stuff layers is, I think, really impressive, especially since this game is the game, I think, with from them with the most

writers and the biggest team at this point.

There's an FAQ on the site that lists all the different writers.

And like, there's, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different guest writers on top of

Laura Miche, who is the narrative director of the game, and Brendan, who's the creative director, who I'm sure also did some writing work on it, along with a bunch of other artists and composer and programmers.

And one person, Mimi Kwan, did all of the cat art, it says here, which is love that.

I love to have a cat art developer.

I mean, that's a huge part of the game, right?

You gotta get a cat expert.

Let me tell you, there are every ship has unique cats and then you and then when you rescue them they email you and they go nina they go nina it was so good to see you uh not the circumstances we wanted to want to do that have you seen shark bite seven the horror movie about sharks and you get to choose what you write back you have two options most of the time and normally it's something like I don't like shark movies, but I am excited for this new vampire movie.

I might have this backwards, but like that's the gist.

Or like, oh, I can't wait.

Do you want to to see Shark Fight 7 with me?

You know, like, how friendly do you want to be to these cats?

And there's that, is what I suspect the additional writers that were writing was all of the cat email content that feels like contract writer material to me.

Do you ever get like a mean one, like the one that you get in Mass Effect 3?

I've literally just digged it so high to be like, what is that thing that you're always talking about?

Because it's like from the assassin guy that literally nobody likes in terms of nobody liked that character.

Oh, Kai Lang Kai Lang's email

yeah like let me add this because he emails you from like somebody else's name and he's like good okay I have it yeah I have it too you open this message this isn't actually the Asari military command they're busy tending to what's left of the planet so you survived our fight on Bessia you're not as weak as I thought but never forget that your best wasn't good enough to stop me now the entire planet is dying because you lack the strength to win the legend of shepherd needs to be rewritten i I hope I'm there for the last chapter.

It ends with your death.

It's funny because he doesn't know you would have opened an email from anyone.

If the email said Kai Lang, I would click it in an instant.

I might have clicked it first.

Mass Effect 3, what are we, what do...

I have been a Mass Effect 3 defender in my life.

There are parts of it I really like.

I think Kai Lang, like people talk about how they don't like the end of that game.

I think you don't like Kai Lang.

I think Kai Lang is the actual problem.

Not literally, Kai Lang, but like metaphorically.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, I think if a game, there's a thing I say a lot over on Shelf by Genre, I think I've probably said it on AMCA too.

You probably heard me say this, Allie, but like there's a point in, there's a point at which I start being, when I know I haven't actually liked a thing, is when I start like complaining about little pedantic things that are like, um, uh, that I would have otherwise accepted if I didn't dislike the game already.

Do you know what I mean?

If it had me, I would give it the grace about certain things.

And the second that I'm like,

we talk about this a lot with Obi-Wan, the Star Wars show, where I'm just like, it's the, the, I hate it so much that the production quality is not something I can hand wave.

And I really think for a lot of people who didn't like the end of Mass Victory 3, they might, I'm not saying they don't, they, I'm not saying they would have liked it if they liked Kai Lang, but if they had fucking stuck the landing on all of the rest of the game and you get to the end, and it's like a little deflating, and you don't necessarily like the three choices you're given, and blah, blah, blah, I think a lot of people would have like extended, they would have remembered all the good times they had during this session in the whole series and would have like been like, okay, well, I didn't love how it ended.

The little boy was kind of stupid, but like, whatever.

Mass Effect 3, what a triumph.

But it's that there are stumbles throughout that game that like land you in a place where you go, ah, shit, like, I'm just not, I just didn't have the time with this I wanted to have.

That's how I feel anyway.

I don't know.

I also never played the Citadel DLC, so that's my.

Oh, Lord.

Well, I was done with it.

I was going to go back.

Anyway,

this podcast will be four hours long.

Especially the Citadel TLC.

But are any of the cats passive aggressive to you?

Sorry, Allie, because it was on the same.

What would you say, Allie?

And then I want to come to you, Janine.

Are any of the cats passive-aggressive to you?

When you're passive, like Kai Lang.

I don't think I've met a passive.

Well, Little Lion is.

Little Lion is very passive-aggressive because you used to be friends.

And now, and now he's like, you know, oh, Nina, you're lowering yourself to work with me again.

Interesting.

You know, he's like that.

So, but yeah, I would love for there to be a shitty cat who's like, I didn't need you to rescue me.

You know,

Janine, what were you going to say?

I was going to say a thing that I think is interesting with this because

of the increasing amount, because of the increasing amount of money

and marketing and publishing weight that is going behind Blendo games.

It's interesting to increasingly be moving towards

like this game is really, you've talked about this game in a way that I think is fair, like as a continuation of the Blendo Games verse.

But I think this is the one that's going to probably bring in the most new people who are going to have none of that context.

Yes.

Just because it's getting marketed really heavily.

It has a certain degree of polish.

It's got a large, yeah, it's got a larger team behind it.

Annapurna is publishing it.

It's boxy people.

It actually has people that are a little bit more.

Yeah, it has.

When I first saw the art for Skin Deep stuff, I didn't even clock that it was Blendo Games.

So there's a lot of stuff there where it's like a lot of people are going to be entering into all of this with this game.

And I think from what I've seen, it's actually a good game for that.

But it is also really interesting because these games, or you know, the

previous Blendo Games games are

kind of,

I would describe them as like game developers games, or like, I think that's right.

They're things that like you, they come up in conversation with people who are like either critics or in press or are developers or things like that they're a lot less likely to come up in conversation with just like you know you I if I was

having dinner with a bunch of friends who just casually play games and one of them had a glint of recognition if I said 30 flights of loving

that would

be shocking whoa that would be like wait are you secretly like, what's your deal secret?

What's your job?

Do you work in the industry?

Yeah.

Whereas this, like, it's getting a lot of banner treatment, you know?

So I'm really curious to see how people are going to respond to that world, if they're going to connect the dots and dive back, or if it's just going to kind of be a standalone thing.

I think it has the strength to be a standalone thing.

Yeah.

But yeah, I'm curious.

Me too.

I hope it does well for them.

I'm such a big fan.

Like, this is

Secret Stan, you know, like this is high.

It's not an undeserved platform.

It's overdue.

Yeah, and I have been, I have been, in the same way that when there's a new Tom Francis game, like there is something about these games that is so to my sensibility.

I will say I am, I tend to be, I think one of my,

one of the reasons we're doing this podcast is so that I get to play games I wouldn't play otherwise, right?

Like that is, I am so bad when I'm busy with other work.

When I was working at Possibility Space, I did such a bad job of staying abreast of like what, what all was coming out week to week,

what stuff that I would normally play for coverage or to talk about or to write about.

I just didn't keep up with those things anymore because I didn't have the time and because I was like, give me my delicious slop now that I don't have to like weigh in on whatever an interesting new thing is that came out.

This is a game that I would have played even in that era.

It's so to my own sensibility and like, it's so fun to see this stuff get to it's so fun to see the person who was making 30 flights of loving and the people who've also I I know worked on other smaller things for years and years and years get to make not that this is like a huge AAA game by any means, right?

Like, like I said, there's like 20 people on the credits, like it's still not a huge game, but you're, but it's nice to see them getting a push in this way.

I hope it does really well for them just because I think it's fucking great.

So, yeah, that's skin deep.

Uh, is it time to talk about a little more anime, a little more classic, classic 90s fantasy vibes with Lunar Remastered Remastered Collection, which is Lunar Remastered Collection.

Yeah, sorry, Lunar.

I said Lunar.

It's not Lunar.

It's Lunar.

Explicitly.

Is it not Lunar?

It's Lunar with an A.

Lunar.

Oh, my God.

Well, that's still how you say Lunar.

It does, but it is pronounced Lunar.

I think.

I mean, I pronounce things wrong all of the time, but I'm pretty sure it's Lunar.

I pronounce it Lunar.

Maybe it's Lunar.

I mean, it's a Japanese game, and Japanese pronunciation of that word would give it more of an ah.

Sure.

Lunar.

Yeah.

The ah, the ah.

Lunar.

Right.

Well, lunar, lunar, remastered collection, which collects both lunar Silverstar Story Complete and Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete,

which is a series of JRPGs that originally came out.

Did the first one, the first one...

You tell me, Allie, because you were the Lunar head here.

And I don't want to get this wrong when I have an expert.

Um, yeah, so the the

I guess I'm not sure about Eternal Blue, but I know that Lunar Silver Star was a Sega CD game

that was

ported by Working Designs

back when, and then had a remaster for the PlayStation, um, also ported by Working Designs.

And that was like a huge,

overhaul of like

redesigned sprites, like environments were redesigned, like

it changed the game completely, basically.

Whereas this new remaster is like a pretty

like as much of one-to-one as they could do of that PlayStation release.

It's not like another big, like,

we're putting in a new engine and it's

not in HD 3D, or it's not in, in, yeah,

yeah, no.

In fact, that there is a like classic graphics mode with

like fake CRT filters, and then there's the quote-unquote remastered mode, which is there's not a huge difference between them, and it's actually kind of interesting to see the difference because the remastered stuff is like the cutscenes are

redrawn basically because all the cutscenes in the game are um like anime style animation graphics with some computer generations for the environment.

And the

like in one of the first towns that you go in, like in the classic version, quote unquote, there's like fish in the water, but they're still, and it's still this pixel art.

And then in the remastered versions, it basically looks the same, but the fish kind of move around.

There's like very slight like upgrades there, which are,

it's fun to see that there's not a huge difference, but the differences seem like, I don't want to say respectful, but they're at least meaningful in that way, where it's like they're not trying to like reinvent the wheel.

Um, you know,

yeah,

sounds a bit like a intention sort of thing.

Like, this is the thing you get with, not to go back to farming games, um, but Harvest Moon

on the SNES versus Harvest Moon 64.

People will often say that, like, Harvest Moon 64 is what the original was intended to be, but because of like time and hardware constraints and all of those factors, couldn't be.

So, when they had the chance to kind of do it over, do more on a stronger system, on a more powerful system, you know, they got something that's closer to the vision.

Like, I wonder if the thing that happened there was instead of, you know, because we've seen a lot of really

awful remasters of games from that era where it's like, yeah, we're going to make them all look all round and squishy and it'll be great.

The Final Fantasy remasters from the iPad ones in the mid-2010s were so gross.

Very bad.

So I wonder if they, if, you know, it was like, well,

we can count on, you know, more processing power.

We can count on more memory.

Like, what are the changes we can make based on the original vision that are, you know, take advantage of that?

But, like, you know, we don't need to redraw everything.

People are going to be mad at us if we do.

Like, no one wants that, so why bother?

Yeah, well, and there's stuff that feels like you can't, well, you could change it and remaster, but it'd be more than than a remaster.

It'd be a remake in some way where, like, uh, this game is, is about as straightforward of a game in this kind of turn-based JRPG style as you can imagine in my memory of it.

It's been a while since I played all the way through, but I put I put like 10 hours into Lunar One about two years ago when I was in early Perpetual Prep.

I am in my JRPG seeking mode.

Um, and it's like it is the most like

an adventurous boy and a faded girl from a village.

A weird little animal.

And a weird.

Oh, and oh my God, the weird little mascot animal.

What is that one's, what is this mascot name?

Null.

Null.

Okay.

I almost, I have to say, I almost said the Grand Blue Fantasy one,

which is Vern, is that right?

Or something like that?

Yeah, V-R-V-Y-R-N.

Yeah, V-Y-R-N, yeah.

Yeah, maybe Viren.

But, you know,

a little pet guy who hangs out on your shoulder and, you know, roars and complains.

It's like a human nose, and it always kind of creeped me out.

It's like a human face on a creature.

A hundred times.

Yeah,

the constant joke in the game is that everybody calls Null just a flying cat.

And he's always like,

I'm not a cat.

I'm like a dragon or something.

No, because that's Vernigan.

I'm thinking of Vernigan.

God damn it.

He's just taking over that spot in my head.

I haven't even played that much Grand Blue.

Damn it.

Anyway, it is one of those.

It is like you're from the little village and fate aligns that you meet an elder being who puts you on a quest.

Does that hit still?

Because you can't.

You can't.

It really does.

Yeah.

So good.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know,

both of you have known me for a long time.

We've talked, we've written a lot of stories together and the same inspirations come up again.

So I'm sure that you've both heard me talk about Lunar very often.

And, you know, it was...

Al, you're playing a Lunar character in this video.

I'm literally playing a Lunar character.

Like, it is not even.

I like my, yeah, my Roll20 sprite right now is my like account one is null, and then my character one for Veil is a recolor of Mia.

Like, there's nothing

surprised about any of this.

But also, it was like an anime JRPG game that came out when I was seven.

Like,

with animation in it.

Like, I can't, there is a, there's,

there is a, a, a way, there's something that that gets missed.

I've talked about this all the time, so I don't want to, like, re-walk through an argument, not an argument, but, like, a thing I've said a billion times.

But I think there is truly something about the way games exist as

pieces of interactive technology that makes their archival difficult or part of what the archival experience is requires that you also archive contemporaneous like um uh casual ephemera people talking about a game like this at the time is so important like if if i could have my way this game would ship with anonymized form posts or or like would license old reviews or something because you cannot undersell

what the effect was uh sorry you cannot oversell what the was of a young person in when this game came out looking at the anime cutscenes throughout it and like how what the production value sense was, how magical it felt to be playing a game that suddenly broke out into something that looked like Against Slayers or Lotus War or another contemporaneous anime.

There's two, this is the thing I was thinking is like people talk a lot about the pursuit of photorealism in games, right?

And you tell this story sometimes about like, I forget, I forget what it was, it was like maybe Mortal Kombat or something and thinking like,

this is the future.

This is it.

This is where it's all going.

Yeah.

I think there's a much less talked about, but no less present sort of strain of gamers where like the pursuit wasn't photorealism.

It was like, I'm playing the anime.

That was also me, but you know,

I hadn't yet been consumed by my anime self.

But you know what I mean.

No, 100%.

Where like there was, you know, there's, there's a thing of like well games are gonna look more and more realistic versus games are gonna look more and more like this other media that i adore a hundred percent like they're gonna get closer and closer until i can just play you know the movie the movie during the drum and that feels like that feels like a lot of the pull for lunar from the time was like look how close we're getting to this to this beautiful future and part of it is not just the the anime parts, the literal animation parts.

It is the

super familiar character archetypes.

It is the like the sense of open-ended adventure that feels like sitting down to watch an anime you love.

Like, that was so, that is, it is played completely straight.

Not that there's no comedy, I don't mean that it's like joyless.

In fact, there's like, if my memory, Ali, please correct me if I'm wrong, is like there's constant bickering and bantering in every cutscene.

That's like the whole purpose of Novell, right?

Basically, yeah.

I, and it's interesting, the um

so the the translation has been updated for the the re-release at least

interesting and like it's so weird to see people on reddit be like oh they they cut out this this line where like this character calls everybody in this town a hick

like oh like you know it's not that serious but what they ended up doing was like re-translating the the japanese script for it because the original working design script is still like owned by the old CEO or whatever.

So, like, there's interesting.

There's some, like, a lot of that stuff has been upgraded, but there's still like

a James Bond reference, for instance.

Like, there, there is a lot of like in the original Japanese script, then that was not a early 90s localization decision.

I suppose so.

It seems like there's a lot of disagreement on like what actually happened there, but like, it seems to be retranslated.

And the

port, it seems also like when Working Designs originally took it over, they like scaled the difficulty slightly different.

They like changed some of the mechanics a little bit.

And a lot of that stuff isn't here because it is a redo of the Japanese release rather than just a refresh of the

English version back when.

But I guess more to the point of what we were talking about.

In terms of like the comedy and stuff, like, yeah, the, I, the, what I have found revisiting it is that I am so surprised at how straight some of those archetypes and the character actions are played, and like, how,

like,

unshamefully, it is truly just like a love story between these two people.

And then the like supporting cast is two other couples.

Like, there's no,

there's no, like,

we all know what's happening here.

Like, that is the point of this, basically.

Um, I think if anybody's had familiarity with the

Luna's boat song, which is the, um,

there's like this blue-haired girl singing sadly on, like, the, the, the, um,

crow's nest on a ship or whatever.

The scene right before that, before she gets on the boat, is her being like, I can't, you know, I'm too nervous to travel.

Alex, you should go on without me.

Yeah, and then on the pier, right?

She's like, no, she didn't get on the boat.

This is exactly as far as I played last time, Alex.

Yeah.

And then, like, the ship is leaving, and Alex is like

yelling to her on the pier over it.

And is like, I can't go without you.

Just come with me.

Take my hand.

You have to do it right now.

And she was like, oh my God.

Like, this is, they are as much.

It's a high melodrama love relationship.

Yeah.

It is not a game about Alex that like Luda slowly becomes the main character because of some twist stuff.

Like it is always just a game about them and how much they are in love with each other.

Shout outs.

I appreciate it.

I'm glad it still hits.

I'm glad it's still good.

I need to at least dip into it.

I am beset upon by all sides by games I want to play, unfortunately, right now.

So it's hard to prioritize.

Even think about farming games, like we're a month out from that new Rune Factory, give or take.

Also,

is there another Rune Factory?

Fantasy Life is next month.

Yeah, the new Funey.

Yeah, Fantasy Life.

And Fantasy Life is next month.

You know what fantasy life is gonna beat out rune factory i think but yeah there's a but the new rune factory after the summer august it's it's june it's june oh no the thing that's in august is is story of seasons the grand bazaar remake

we are cooked grand bazaar was my favorite of the harvest moons it was one of the early ds ones um it had a really good system um i'm curious about the remake but i'm a little bit worried because it looks like they've kind of tinkered with it a little bit.

But you know, the Friends of Mineral Town remake was

good, so

maybe it'll be fine.

Yeah, I um Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma is June 5th, and there is stuff in this features trailer that looks first of all, you know, the last Rune Factory that came out, I think, had some real technical problems and limits when it came out.

Was that five Rune Factory five?

Yeah,

they moved to fully 3D and they did it on the Switch originally and it was you could tell it was really rough.

It was a fire

kind of game that like it didn't really need to be it didn't need to be as like big

and flexible as it was aiming to be.

It just felt like they weren't quite ready to be doing that.

Well, they're putting out another one and it seems bigger and even more flexible, but it also looks really solid solid visually in a way that the previous one didn't.

And again, this is trailer, so who knows?

But it has a bunch of stuff that I really didn't expect, like a village building mode, for instance,

where you are like getting villagers and giving them jobs in town,

which is not what I associate Rune Factory with, you know?

To be clear, there are NPCs and villages and stuff in Rune Factory historically, but not in this mode of like, not in my, maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong.

I'm always open to being wrong.

You don't get to tell them what to do.

You don't get your job is to be a logger or a fisher or a miner or a herder or at the most.

You get to be like, hey, you come with me so I don't die in this dungeon.

Totally.

And that all seems to be here too.

That style of like, you have a party and it's like an action RPG and you're floating around on your umbrella like it's a breath of the wild paraglider.

Who knows if it's going to be good, but I'm optimistic.

I like to be optimistic in my life sometimes.

And this is one of those cases.

My guess is I'm going to run into the thing: the thing of, I wish all of your parents were the ones who I could romance, though, because all these characters look like they're 17, you know, unfortunately.

But, you know, we'll see.

We'll see if it's good.

When is Fantasy Life?

I believe it is May 21st or

18th if you pre-order.

May 21st.

Who or who?

The pre-order.

There's like a pre-load or not

so long for Fantasy Life.

I cannot wait for this.

I even tried out that Monday.

I'm a little worried.

Oh, yeah.

I'm a little worried there won't be enough new

because this is sort of the thing that when I, you know, they released the mobile game over here

late, belatedly.

And I started it and I was like, well, this kind of just seems like more of

the one that I've already played twice.

Yeah.

And I'm a little worried it's going to continue in that vein of being like, well, it's going to be these systems and then a very thin story that is different.

But who knows?

I haven't really dug in deep on the materials for it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like the thing that's setting this one apart is the town building, too, which funny enough.

Yeah.

Seems like a strange thing that's emerging out of this style of gameplay.

Well, you know what's happened happened since the Flash Fantasy Life is, you know, build, craft, survive games have become the biggest thing in the world and they're like a cousin to farming games in many ways.

Okay, I will say

that

Story of Seasons, A New Beginning,

which is one of the first ones to be called Story of Seasons, I believe, unless I'm misremembering something.

I don't think it was Harvest Moon, I think it was Story of Seasons.

It was their first or second one for the 3DS.

That one had a system where you had to kind of like Animal Crossing New Horizons

build the houses for people and place them and sort of decorate the city.

And there's like a tourism element where like you had to make the city kind of appealing for people to come visit to help it grow that much more.

And like you had to place all the individual merchants and things like that.

And they were still going to do their thing,

but you were literally picking up and dropping and crafting.

Like all of that stuff stuff was there.

And New Beginning is like a that's a pretty solid game.

That's one of the more solid ones of that period.

Of that era, yeah.

So like they've there's been dabbling for for a while.

Yeah, I'm excited to see how it goes.

Like I'm I am uh

Fantasy Life, the original fantasy life, which came in 2012 in Japan, 2014 in the US and North America, which is wild because it means that you could have been 10 when the first one came out and be 21 now,

Which is a little cursed, which also means like maybe you just never played these games.

If you're listening to this, you've never heard of them.

There's only the two.

There's the first Fantasy Life and then the mobile one, which Ali, you also tried to play and it sounded like you did not have a great time with.

It made my phone too hot.

Like, I just,

well, you know, the first one was such a great execution on this style of game.

I don't want to go too down, too deep down the rabbit hole because we will cover this game when it comes out.

I think this might be the first game where we have enough people at front of the table who are like, I want to be on that episode.

We're going to fight over who gets to be here.

We'll stream it.

There's four-player multiplayer, so we'll do some streams of anything.

I'm planning on streaming it for sure.

What lives are you going to pray with?

Maybe that should be the way that we do it.

People can do the stream or do the podcast.

One or the other.

I get to do both.

And then

you can still talk about it.

No, I wouldn't stream it then because I don't have to do both.

I can just do this.

That's fine.

And then I can play it at my own pace, which is also useful.

Anyway, no announcements to be made about Fantasy Life streams, except we're going to streamline.

No, we have to figure this all out right now.

Now is the time.

The Girl Who Steals Time.

What a weird subtitle for this thing.

That is like...

Is that the weird part or is the I the weird part?

Fantasy Life I, The Girl Who Steals Time, is a wild title.

The Girl Who Steals Time feels like a Professor Layton title to me.

Yeah.

And the I is really weird because it's like, are they already planning a sequel?

Like, are they going to go for two?

Is the I really a one?

Is the I really a one?

Why is it a little I?

Because it's not one.

Not since Bravely Default have we had a five.

I was going to say this.

I was going to say.

I was literally going to say, is this a Bravely Default situation?

I muted myself so I could go check if I was making that up or if I was right.

No, it was Bravely Default and then

something I forget the name of that I shouldn't forget the name of because I reviewed it.

You reviewed it.

And then Bravely Second.

And Bravely Second.

And then now there is Bravely Default 2.

Bravely.

Well,

I don't want to.

Oh, no, wait, it's Bravely 2nd and then Bravely Default 2?

That's correct.

Bravely 2nd comes after Bravely Default.

And then Bravely Default

2 comes after that.

Bravely 2 end layer.

Is that the second?

And there is the Bravely Default.

There is the Bravely Default twist that changes the title screen.

Yeah, we know.

I'm not going to spoil that, but that could happen here.

Dragon's Dragon's Dogma does this most recently.

Awesome.

Dragon's Dogma 2, the title screen for that game is Dragon's Dogma for basically the whole game.

Oh.

Huh.

Here's...

Okay, right.

I immediately have an answer.

Producer

Tomoya Asano stated that the reason for the game's title, Bravely Default 2, was due to his belief that Bravely 2nd did not live up to fans' expectations and its critical and commercial underperformance made it difficult for the team to continue on the series.

Oh.

Wait.

Sorry, That's why it's called what?

That's why it's called Bravely Default.

That's why it's called Bravely Default 2 and not like Bravely Definitely.

Bravely 3rd.

I see.

Yeah.

I see.

Interesting.

And why Bravely Second is sort of a non-sequel, I guess.

Right.

Passively.

But we don't know what the.

Oh,

here we go.

I'm on a form.

Is it for

Stanford Interactive?

No, that's a great guess, but not quite.

I'll tell you hot or cold.

No one looked this up.

But guess.

I I want guesses.

Yeah.

Oh, I hadn't.

My guess was the Roman numeral.

That's a good guess.

It would be upcase then.

I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you, yeah, but maybe they're lying.

Maybe they don't become up or you know, I get it.

I will tell you right now.

Individual.

It's like, it's like personal.

Holy shit.

That's one of three things.

Okay.

All right.

So you're one for one right now.

Do you want to do you want to roll the bones and give me another guess?

Um,

individual, uh, intimate?

No, that's

That's great.

But close.

Invitation?

No, but friends is a good direction

in terms of you might play it with your friends.

Invitation?

These are all good.

No, that's internet because it has internet multiplayer.

And one more.

Actually,

the first one.

Yeah, but I'm just saying what the developers said.

Okay, okay, okay.

The third one is island because it takes place on an island.

That's so and then it said there's a secret fourth thing that they'll talk about later.

Hmm.

So there you go.

There will be a twist with the eye.

What's the fourth thing going to be?

Maybe it's like I, the person playing this game.

You know, like the player is the I.

No, I feel like that's already like individual or whatever.

You're right.

That is already individual.

What do we want the fourth I to be?

Maybe we should.

Oh, ooh.

maybe it is intimate because there's like a deep dating sim in there, yeah, maybe

don't say it like that.

That was so dismissive

I want ice to sorry, I want I to stand for

um

oh shit, like

ice do I like ice, iceberg?

Ice level, ice cream.

Ice planet.

Like, I want you to

go out of the island, and then you've got the ice wall around you, you know, like the Antarctic ice wall that's real.

Those jokes.

Some of the people think I say things seriously.

I don't believe in the ice wall.

Me either.

If you don't know what the ice wall is, good job.

Keep living that life.

You're doing great.

You're good.

You're great.

You're so good.

What if it's like,

I'm thinking about the first Fantasy Life game, which shockingly had like a deep-felt story about like tolerance and like different ways of living, which isn't that surprising if you think about it as a game about choosing a way to live a life, you know?

What if it's like ideology or like I, you know what I mean?

Like something about like

the ways you could shape your life or ignorance because it's about nothing.

Gratitude and you have to kill God.

It could,

I guess it could be that.

It could be that.

Infidelity, you get married and you cheat on your spouse.

No, that's, we already explained that'll be in Stardew Valley 2.

That'll be.

I think those are some good guesses.

Please,

you at home should start thinking about what the I is.

We don't have a question bucket to send.

We do have an email, but I don't know that we're doing questions yet on this show.

I don't know.

Find it in your five-star Apple.

Oh, wow, Allie, this is why you're a pro.

If you put your guess for what the I in

Fantasy Life I stands for, the fourth meaning, I might read your review.

Maybe it's isolation.

And at the very end of the game, they just sever your ability to do multiplayer ever again.

That's wild.

Like a sword.

You don't have to worry about it being live service, right?

You just don't have to.

Yeah, yeah.

It's your reward.

Your reward is.

We're not going to change anything about this anymore.

It's fine the way it it is.

You have it.

It's yours.

Wow.

Wow.

I got a review to read here, which maybe spoils a little bit about the ongoing Outward Let's Play.

This is from Ob Meow.

Best Blueprints Let's Play.

Don't get me wrong.

The podcast and the Outward Let's Play are both great, but the real star of the show is Keith's Stellar Blueprints gameplay.

Go give these people money on Patreon.

Thank you so much to Aub Meow.

I do wish, Ab Meow, you had told us what you thought the I in Fantasy Life I stands for, but how could you have known?

If I had seen that, if I had logged in to check these reviews and seen someone saying, well, I think the Fantasy Life I stands for.

The I is for Infinity because you get to go into a time portal if you beat the game.

Oh, that's actually so smart.

Infinity is such a good guess.

It's unbelievable.

You can imagine that the actual name, you get a title screen that says Fantasy Life Infinity.

I keep wanting to say Fantasy Star, by the way.

I'm so fantasy star-brained for some reason, always.

Fantasy Life Infinity.

You could see it on the screen if you...

And it is the girl who goes through time.

You're right.

Yeah, I wonder if it's like you prestige.

Like, you get it.

Because I think the original one had New Game Plus, kind of, but like, what if it's Infinity at the end because you prestige your one class and then

your favorite, your your whatever, one of your top classes, and you get to like carry some bonus over and just keep playing.

That sounds like a great idea.

We may have cracked the road.

What if the I

stands for

Iceland?

Go to Iceland at the end.

Intelligent.

Oh, intelligent.

At the end, it just says it.

It's just like, it just becomes one of those 20 questions games.

Right, like an activator style.

I know the thing you're thinking of.

My fear is if it's called Intelligence in 2025, that it has a little LLM in there, you know?

And I don't want that.

I don't want them being like, actually, after you beat all the content we wrote, it keeps writing content for you.

Oh, God.

No, they just hired the brain age guy late in development.

And that's why it wasn't.

Oh, right.

I see.

Yeah.

Of course.

It's actually very funny.

Yeah.

You mean the floating head or the developer?

Yeah, Yeah, that guy.

Yep.

No, he was the head.

Dr.

whoever.

Yeah, he's celebrating his 15th anniversary with the Wii Fit yoga lady.

Hopefully,

they're married?

They got together?

Damn.

All right.

I was going to say, what about the

yoga man, but then I realized they're probably siblings.

Dr.

Kawashiba and the Wii Fit Man?

No, you're saying the Wii Fit.

No, no, no.

The Wii Fit lady.

Because that's

still him.

Yeah, I got you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Also, I don't want to assume they're together just because they work together.

They just work together.

Yeah.

You don't know what their deals are.

Are they going to make a new Wii Fit?

Who could say?

They're probably going to make a new Ring Fit.

The Fit.

Yeah, Ring Fit.

Yeah.

Exactly.

All right.

I think that's a podcast.

I think we're getting too punchy to continue.

Thank you for hanging out, everybody.

As always, you can support the show by going to friendofethetable.cash.

I already shouted out, in fact, just recently, the the Outward Let's Play that does, in fact, have some Keith Carberry blueprints in there.

Not a lot.

It's not a whole blueprints, let's play, but you should still go watch it.

We have ongoing streams on twitch.tv slash friends at the table.

And the archives go up on youtube.com slash friends at the table.

If you are moved by hearing us talk about fields of mysteria, you should show up to the next Mystria Mondays, twitch.tv/slash

friends at the table.

I was in slash Mystria.

That's not what it is.

Yeah, I typically do those over at 1230 Eastern Time

on Mondays over on the Twitch channel.

For this month, the month of May, which is coming up, I'm going to probably be doing some

Final Fantasy 9.

I might be switching between the two.

Depending on

how much

Final Fantasy IX feels like a good streaming game.

But I've been meaning to play it for a really long time.

The funny thing is that.

You haven't played it or you have played it?

I have played it.

I've been meaning to replay it for basically the last two years, and I just haven't gotten around to it.

And streaming it seems like a good way to force myself to do that.

The only thing is that I forgot about the Lunar

re-release and the like

the RPG nostalgia itch has been scratched a little bit.

And also, I just got that love scene with March, so I don't know how long I'm not.

Wow.

I'm going to be willing to not be playing Mysteria.

So I'll probably bounce back.

I didn't quit it.

Jeez.

Did you you start playing the Xenoblade X rematch?

I did.

I did play a little bit of it.

I unlocked the mechs and then stopped playing, which is so great.

Like, what is wrong with me?

So I have to.

Well, that's how I did it the first game.

I got up to the cutscene with the cool line guy, and I was like, I'm never playing this again, I guess.

And I don't really know why.

I think it's because it's a big game.

The game is, yeah, you don't get the mechs until like 40 hours in or something.

And I feel like the movement in the mechs didn't really feel very good.

It feels so good.

Walking and running feels so good, and the mechs don't quite hit that, especially before you could fly with them.

The first time I played, I played until I could fly with them, and then I stopped.

So, oh, I see.

I'm at least gonna try to get back to there.

Yeah, um, also, one last thing about Lunar because we didn't really

cling on to Fantasy Life, which I completely understand.

I do just want to say that you should play it, it's very good.

The interesting thing about revisiting it is that, like, the character writing is so strong, and the challenge of the game isn't like,

am I going to give my healing girl this healing spell?

Or like, you know,

that isn't the challenge of it.

I think it's interesting that, like,

they will take people out of your party for plot reasons at different points.

Um, and like the game experience ends up being different because of that.

Um, and

yeah, and you're like, oh shit, that was my healer.

That was my

yeah, I just had, yeah, I just had one where like the the girls were cursed by a weird song because I was in this town.

Don't worry about it.

And then I like that was my big magic user and my healer.

And I just had to go into this dungeon with just the boys and I was like, nobody can heal anybody.

What the fuck is that?

What am I supposed to do?

I mean, use those purchases.

That stuff is great.

And you should, if you are hearing us talk about things like Lunar

the

Silver Star Story Complete, and you're like, damn, I love that vibe.

You should listen to Fabula Ultima.

Friends of the Table.

We are like doing that thing.

We are doing the you go to a town and get cursed type beat.

Yeah, if you're listening to this on Tuesday, the character creation came out over the weekend.

You can go listen to that.

And the actual first episode of us playing that is coming out this Thursday.

So go to the Friends of the Table feed and listen to it because it's good.

Yeah.

Janine, you haven't heard this side of the game yet.

So it'll be new.

Let me tell you.

I'm also just so excited to stop having to keep the secret of who I'm playing.

You don't have to anymore.

It's out now, isn't it?

Oh, is it?

Okay.

That was character creation just went out today.

I think.

It's going to go out tomorrow.

Oh, wait.

Was it?

Wait, I thought.

Oh, okay.

My bad.

Don't worry about the release schedule.

I'm currently

releasing it.

Now I understand.

Now I see where we are.

I did not understand.

Well, I'll cut all what I just said out so that we go back to Janine saying that she's excited and I'm going to then come back in on saying like, yeah, me too.

But I'm going to say say it legitimate instead of like that.

Yeah, I cannot wait for people to see the characters you've all made for this season.

It is wild.

Some real big swings.

Very excited.

So go check that out.

I think that that's basically everything.

Please leave us reviews.

Oh, Media Club Plus just finished up the Chimera Ant Arc

or is about to.

I know they finished recording.

I think maybe next week will be the finale of that alley.

I already said over there, I don't know if you heard me that I said said the thing, which is you did an episode and then I'm like, I don't know, an hour later messaged me, like, holy shit, about the end of that arc.

Yeah, no, yeah, yep.

I read up to what we were recording for, I recorded that, and then I immediately read the rest of the Chimera Ant arc, and then more afterwards.

Yeah.

Because I had to, because I just literally had to.

So if anyone's listening to that podcast and keeping up with them, I respect you.

I didn't do that.

And I'm fighting in the Chimera Ant Army on behalf of the Chimera Ants.

It's

like the best.

The Chimera Ant arc is the best love story ever told.

Like there's just no.

It's unbelievable.

I cannot believe where it ends up.

It's just.

There's also

multiple love stories.

You actually have an English, which is why it's the best love story.

And they're all, they're great.

It's all good.

It's all good.

It actually is great.

It's good, actually.

So people should go read it or watch it.

I know it's against what is being spoken about in the Chimera Ant arc, but if you don't like the Chimera Arc, you were a lesser being to me.

Allie Queen of the Ants just said this.

Yeah.

No, but I get it.

I get it.

I like Karaphika a lot.

I get it, but it's not enough to make me like York New more than Chimera Ant.

It's un

Anyway, that's our, we've had a real anime-focused episode today, so

uh, Allie, this is this is, it's unsurprising to given uh you're here,

anime fan.

Anyway, uh, thank you so much for listening to us.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks with more.

We'll have another outward episode in the intervening week, trying to do those every other week.

It's really supposed to be twice, I want to say this into a microphone so that I can.

have the flexibility.

The promise when we launched it was twice a month.

There will be outward LPs updated.

And I'd be doing every other week, which is more than twice a month.

So there might be a time when I'm like, I just can't fit a three in in a five-week period or whatever, you know, if that's how it evens.

Not to fall into the bodybuilding form, how many days is there in a week thing?

But some months

have five weeks.

And those months, if the first week has an episode, that ends up with three episodes in a month.

And so I'm going to try to keep the every other week thing up because I like when they're in off weeks with the podcast dropping, which is every other week, but I want to leave the possibility open that there might be a time when, because of travel or busyness, it doesn't hit, but I'm going to still hit the twice a month on those months.

So, saying that out loud just so that's true and clear, and everyone is on the same page.

Thank you so much.

Friendsofthetable.cash to be continued.