15: The Mama Button

What's good, Internet?

It is October 21st, 2025, and this is not a citywide combat tournament that takes over the streets at night.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends of the Table and supported by our patrons at friendsofthetable.cash.

Joining me today for this first segment, at least, Keith and Janine.

I wish you had told me this wasn't a citywide combat tournament because right before we hit record, I punched Keith in the face, and now I feel bad.

Okay, well, you really hurt the smarts.

You each tell me what your dream for changing the city will be if you complete and win this tournament.

I'm going to add an ice cream stand on every corner.

That's my dream, and I'm going to win the tournament.

That's a real student council president-ass dream, but okay.

It is.

My dream is: I'm going to take the

quality of the framing and animation of scenes in the first hour of the game and apply it to the whole game.

Oh, okay.

Okay, if that's how you're going to change the city, yes, that's how I'm going to change the city.

Okay.

What I'm going to do

is I'm going to make it so that

maybe there aren't young children in this city.

Nope.

Too bad.

Sorry.

There are young children everywhere, and some of them are in the fighting tournament.

That means that you're not a Pokemon Classic.

That's not.

Never.

I know, but I keep thinking as I'm playing that never has it been, like, never have there been more disengaged, derelict parents involved than in this situation where there are monsters in the streets and kids are just like, yeah, I'm really into venomous snakes.

I would like a venomous snake and they're going to take my venomous snake and I'm going to make it fight dogs that are haunted.

This sounds like the thought process of every 10-year-old boy to me.

That is like what 10-year-olds are interested in.

But like you shouldn't be, they shouldn't do it.

You shouldn't do it.

Yeah, you don't let them do it.

But like as a, you know, I got into Pokemon when I was

six.

And so it's before your Venomous Snake Phase.

Well, it really kick-started my Venomous Snake Phase early because Ash Ketchum was 10 years old, getting to go off on his own into the world to fight with animals.

Oh, my God.

That's he did do that.

Yeah,

professionally.

That's how he bought food from the winnings.

That's how he made a name for himself.

Yeah, it's true.

It's true.

It's kind of like just what he did in general yeah you know it's what everyone does

they don't go to school no he was late he showed up late and so all the other 10 year olds got yeah this all the starters how do they know how to build elevators their school yeah i guess oh they know how to build elevators because they have that book that was being advertised on youtube a few months ago the big book the book of rebuilding civilization or whatever and it tells you how to make elevators

i see okay i got you they've been following that along i got you okay yeah yeah well that makes sense.

We're talking about Pokemon.

Pokemon for Christmas.

We were talking about Pokemon Legends ZA, the new Pokemon game.

Zah,

which is an open world

pizza legends.

Legends Pizza.

Legends Pizza.

Pokemon Legends.

It's Pokemon Open City.

Pokemon Open Cities Open World Monster Collecting RPG with real-time battles set in Lumio City, which is the Pokemon Worlds version of Paris or their take on Paris set in the Kalos region, the France region for Pokemon XY,

which this game is a sequel to.

It is, yeah.

I did not realize this was a sequel until I started playing it.

And then it has that big man in it.

Well, that's the was that Janine?

That was how I knew.

I was like,

that's the big man.

And they're like, he's 3,000 years old.

And you're like, oh, he's not just, doesn't just look like the big man.

He is the big man.

He is the big man.

He was like a, I forget his deal.

He was like, he was like a caveman or something who befriended a Pokemon.

Keith helped me.

Okay, so I might have.

AZ.

I might have the order of this kind of wrong, but I believe he was a Pokemon king.

The king

might have come later, but his Pokemon.

He was not a Pokemon.

He was not a Pokemon.

His Pokemon partner was a Floette, and the Floet went off to fight in a war

and came back dead.

And this really upset AZ.

And so he built a big machine to bring Floet back to life.

Yep.

And

it did not calm his rage.

And so what he then did was turn that machine into a weapon of mass destruction, killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The power of the machine turned him and Floet into,

if not immortals, then extremely long-lived human and Pokemon.

And then he spent 3,000 years wandering the wastes in guilt.

And in X and Y, he makes up with the Floet who had abandoned him for his crimes.

After

he gets kind of kidnapped by Lysander,

the villain, the leader of Team Flair, who gets supposedly killed.

Yeah, Team Flair.

Right, right, right, right.

Yes.

But they make up and there's like a tearful reunion.

I'm like so struck by the idea, not of people using Pokemon to fight wars, because as we know from Pokemon Conquest, that happened in the Sengoku period in Japan, whatever.

I don't know.

I don't know when that takes place.

No, that's like

hundreds of years.

Whatever.

I don't know anything about history.

What I do know is that it's fucked up to not even go with your Pokemon.

You're just going to send your Pokemon to war without you like a

crusader.

My weird memory of this is that the flowette went off to war like almost on its own.

But it is

still weird.

And it is one It's one of those things, like every Pokemon.

I found.

Okay, it's way worse.

Oh, it's worse.

Or was it a human war that Pokemon were

going to read?

3,000 years prior to the events.

This is from Bulbpedia.

3,000 years prior to the events of Pokemon X and Y, a war broke out between two regions.

The long conflict was drawn out, and many lives were lost.

People treated Pokemon with special powers as mere tools in the conflict, so they gathered lots of Pokemon, including Pokemon with unique powers.

In order to emerge victorious, the soldiers believed that they needed even more powerful Pokemon.

AZ or As loved his floet, which he'd received from his late mother, but it was forcefully taken from him by the soldiers and became just another sacrifice in the war.

Right.

And so maybe the order that I got wrong, I knew that maybe I didn't get the order of this right, that it's only after he kills like 100,000 people that he becomes king.

Sure.

Because it seems like you can't forcibly take the king's floets

and send it to war.

Yeah, he builds this machine.

The machine works through

it.

It destroys both sides of the conflict.

So he's like the one left over.

So he wins the war by killing both sides of the conflict.

I can't say what that's like, but that's like...

Can you bleep out me saying something?

Yeah, sure.

It's

well, I mean,

yeah.

Yeah, we're not there yet over on AMCA.

What the fuck you're talking about?

Don't worry about it.

It's fine.

You know, it's a good thing Allie's not here because then we couldn't have said it.

You know, right.

Yeah.

Anyway, we're back in Pokemon Paris

for the second of the Legends game.

So that's that's what Pokemon XY was about.

Pokemon XY was the first one that was fully polygonal, right?

That was the one that they made the jump because the ones before that were still sprite-based.

And XY, they made a jump to 3D.

It was a 3DS game, if I'm remembering right.

Wasn't the one where they go to America kind of also polygonal?

Or did they

tricky?

It was tricky.

Black and white, that's the one.

Black and white and black and white too were both sprite-based, but there were like if you went downtown, the big downtown region had to be.

I remember the camera angles.

And like the bridge works.

Yeah, exactly.

The bridge was like the big 3D-looking bit.

But this is the moment where Pokemon are no longer sprites.

Trainers are no longer sprites.

They were 3D models.

There's a follow-up to that game narratively, but it's also the follow-up to Pokemon Legends Arceus or Arceus.

I like Arceus, but I think I'm Arceus.

I think people say Arceus.

I think that there's competing canon for how to say the word, which is why people are not sure.

Well, and that game was a big departure.

It was also an open-world game where there were a number of different, first of all,

it was a time travel game.

We went back in time to medieval, was it Kanto?

It was the Isui.

It was Sinno in

modern day, but in the

end the game, they called the region Hisui, which is the Pokemon.

Is that third gen?

Because Johto is second, right?

Fourth gen, I think.

Okay, sure.

Sinno might have been fourth gen.

Yeah, you were right.

Fourth gen.

Yes.

Also, wait, sorry.

I checked

how to pronounce.

And according to Polygon and GameSpot, and also

the search assist in DuckTuko, which I'm excited because this is so infuriating.

I'm not going to look at it any deeper.

It's just

in English, Arceus is pronounced Arceus, while in Japanese, it is pronounced Arceus.

Shut the fuck up.

I'm saying Arceus.

Yeah, I'm supposed to say Arceus.

I'll say Arceus.

Yeah,

why would it be?

There's no reason for it to be different because even in English, that C does not make that sound.

Right.

Stupid.

Grammatically, there's nothing that indicates a hard C.

No.

Anyway, that game took place in

ancient Japan or feudal Japan, basically.

It was a time travel game.

You were back in time.

And there were like echoes of primary Pokemon game characters or like ancestors, I guess, not echoes.

And you ran around and you threw Pokeballs.

And there was a little bit of battling, but it was not a battling-focused game, really.

No, it was very much a catching game.

Yes.

There was wild Pokemon battles that were very, that were nearly identical to what had taken place before.

But my memory is that the game only had like maybe 20 trainer battles in the whole game.

Because it was like Trainer Ring was Trainer, whatever.

It was like new, right?

Like, wasn't that kind of the thing?

Was like,

we're innovating.

We're inventing this ball.

This is

the B Pokemon.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And like,

your Pokemon were still kept like in a yard.

Weren't they?

Yeah, they still weren't.

They were the ones you were carrying out in the cloud.

Yeah, instead of in the cloud.

They're very happy.

They're very happy in the cloud.

They're happy in the cloud.

Don't worry about that.

Don't worry that there's a special ball called a luxury ball that suggests that that's the good ball and one would like to be in that one and the rest aren't.

Don't worry about that so much.

It's fine.

You fight with them.

They like it.

They like it.

They like

to do it.

When you make them kill other Pokemon, it's an expression of your faith in them, which

makes them happy.

Which is good.

Every Pokemon game game has to be about this uh i really i watched um some some pokemon game essays recently on youtube by someone named sky hoppers i'll drop them in the description uh uh or the show notes s-k-y-e hoppers h-opp-e-r-s um including ones about black and white and black and white 2 and those are the ones with the team that thinks that pokemon should not be allowed or should not be forced into uh into you know human slavery effectively yeah and And then the second one, it's more like, hey, it wouldn't be nice if they didn't have to live in Pokeballs.

And the takeaway from all that is like, it would be nice.

We're not there yet, which is very funny.

And I actually think this game is kind of a follow-up to that.

I'm going to pass that on, yeah.

In a big way, because

there's a lot of things that are unique about this game.

We should maybe talk about particulars, but I do think one of the big overarching ones is like, this is a game about living in a city filled with Pokemon.

And like, people being like, I am trying to get to work.

Or people being like, it's so much better to play with Pokemon than get to work.

Right.

And that's one of the things that makes you so interesting.

Sometimes, like, the same person is saying that.

Sometimes the same old lady is going, oh no, someone stole my wedding ring.

And then being like, oh, it was that sableye.

It stole the wedding ring from me when I was visiting the grave of my dead husband.

But that's okay.

It seemed to like the wedding ring.

Maybe I'll give it the wedding ring after I die.

But she says, I thought she says, it has good taste.

Maybe I should make it my partner.

I should make partner.

Well, she doesn't, though.

She doesn't say, like, go get me that sableye.

She says, like, I want to give the sableye my ring when I'm married.

I feel like when she dies, she wants to leave it in the graveyard for the sableye to do.

Oh, maybe I implant this.

I thought that she said that she wants to go back in there and like see if it wants to be her friend.

Maybe.

Maybe she said both.

Maybe she said that.

Maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If that sounds like that.

I could have just inferred that.

That would make sense.

I took some screenshots.

I'll have to go check.

Because there is a lot of that.

There is a lot of, like, this Pokemon was causing me problems.

And then it's like, oh, well, you're actually just like a fun little guy.

Do you want to come along with me?

Yeah, there's a lot of that.

100%.

Though not right away, as you arrive at the city from the train, and the first thing that happens is a different, it's a Sableye again, isn't it?

It's Sableye's must have.

It's a Pancham.

It's a Pancham.

Oh, it is a Pan-Sham.

It is a Pan-Sham.

You're right.

And a Pan-Sham steals, there's a little Panda Pokemon, steals your bag, your luggage, your like all-in-one hand, hand, leather handbag, and runs away, leading you eventually to bump into someone who is part of a group called Team MZ,

who are trying to investigate the, you learn eventually pretty early on, the arrival of

rogue mega evolved Pokemon.

Pokemon are just getting big for some reason out there.

And that is scary.

And so they're investigating that.

And you get caught up in that.

And then meanwhile, there is this tournament every night from

dusk till dawn where you can rank up and challenge

people every night by doing kind of battles against randos until you get enough points, and then you kind of cash those points in for a ticket that lets you challenge the next ranked up person going from Z to Y, etc., up to A.

And then in between that, you're doing main story stuff.

So that's the kind of big structure of the game.

Am I missing anything like big picture about what the I mean I am, which is the combat is way different.

The combat's way different, yeah.

I want to say this is big-ish picture.

At the very beginning, they show you a kind of mysterious cutscene that doesn't really tell you what's going on.

You find out later that this was like maybe the first rogue

mega evolution that had happened.

And AZ is there, and he says the worst line in the game, which is the strongest mega evolution user must be found.

Right, of course.

And so that is like sort of the thing that's happening in the city is that a lot of people with power and connections are trying to figure out how they can find the strongest mega evolution user, which seems like it's going to be the main character.

I bet it's the main character.

I bet it's the main character if I had to put money on it.

And meanwhile, the city is being transformed by

Quasartico.

Quasartico?

Quasartico?

Is that from, is that tied to a previous game?

Is there a Team Quasar or something?

I don't remember.

I don't know.

That sounds familiar.

Team Quasar does sound familiar,

but

the Quasartico to me is like they're doing holotech.

That's what Lysander's company and X and Y did.

Lysander Lab, like Pet.

So to me, the lady who does the hologram thing,

the CEO jet of Quasartico immediately comes across as a shady villain.

Oh, she's not just for being a CEO.

Right.

And not just for looking like that, like Corella Deville, but also for she's doing like holotech stuff like Lysander was doing.

I see.

I see.

This makes sense then.

Yeah.

I think that she's, and she's also doing city-city shit.

She's out here being like, a city is more beautiful than before.

A city more beautiful than anything we've ever seen before awaits us.

You know, like all sorts of, because again, the heart of this game is a lot of people being like.

What if a city was a little different?

What if a city was?

The first guy you fight in the nightly tournaments is a taxi driver.

And he's like, I am going to outlaw all all forms of transportation except for taxis, which is

small brain thinking.

I love that.

Absolutely.

Tiny brain thinking.

I'm not going to do anything to make it so that

I can stop driving a taxi.

His exact line.

I don't want to drive the taxi.

I just want to make more money from the people.

His exact line is, I'm going to reach rank A and abolish all forms of transit in Lumios except taxis.

Which is really good.

I think that's like crystal clear Pokemon world logic.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It is.

The only thing that would make it more crystal clear is if his car was a Pokemon he drove around.

You know, if he really was

getting a lizard dog from Scarlet and Violet.

He has to get the lizard dog, and then it would be perfect.

Because there's like a Rotom car, right?

With Rotom phones.

There's Rotom.

There's Rotom phones.

And like washing machines.

There's washing machines.

The Rotom phones make me so angry.

Yeah, I don't like it

because it's like, okay, this is a Pokemon I have, but I'm just like entitled to it.

We all just get one.

When you buy it at the store,

they farm them somewhere.

They farm them somewhere.

Oh, my God.

It's a ghost Pokemon.

It's a ghost.

Yes, it is.

So they're creating ghost Pokemon somehow to put into phones and then selling them.

An Apple ghost farm is on the show.

Oh,

that's like a haunting idea.

Yeah, and then it reads all your emails, Janine.

And it reads all your emails.

Okay, I kind of don't care about that part compared to the rest of it, but sure.

I don't like any of it.

it's like saying like oh my cat reads my emails when she's sitting in my lap like okay

but he's the email machine also i don't right the the rotom's smarter than the cat i think maybe i'm wrong for sure yeah for sure for sure the rotom has little rotom rivalries with the other rotom pones that it bumps up against it does do that sorry

i went to the rotom page yeah uh to look at what the little clips and different games say about it yeah specifically in legends Legends Arceus, they say this bizarre Pokemon appears to be a will-o-the-wisp powered by electricity.

Be wary, as Rotom is both smart and mischievous.

Yeah, it is a little dodgy to be like, this can be our phone.

This is what I don't like about it.

This is like classic Pokemon technology.

It works.

This is exactly what I'm saying.

This is classic Pokemon Blunder technology.

I said recently I streamed like a ton of Pokemon

Scarlet and then also a ton of this game.

And the thing that makes me so mad is that Rotom used to be a legendary Pokemon that you had to like figure out where it is and how to catch it.

And then there was like only one of them.

And that there's now they're ubiquitous.

Everyone has them.

And the thing that they replaced was the Pokedex, which is like an iconic Pokemon symbol that like you no longer have a Pokedex app on your phone.

And it's simultaneously, it says something real about the world that we actually live in.

Yeah.

But it sort of makes me upset to have the world that I live in being reflected at me me in Pokemon.

I want a Pokedex.

Give me back my Pokedex.

See, but that is why I like so much of ZA so far.

And we haven't even really talked about like what the, what it feels like or anything, but it's because I'm living in a,

I live in a major city and we're having an election right now.

And so, you know, talking to people on the streets who are like, hey, I, I believe that Pokemon should be able to be free in our cities, but I don't really have a good handle on what that means.

Or like, like, do they, there's someone someone who I ran into once who was like Do they like walking around on asphalt?

Like is that good for them?

And then you know other people who are like I liked the park before there was a creature that would attack me in it because the thing that this game setting has done is just given over parts of the city to be wild zones that were continuously that moment is incredible.

I did not expect that at all Keith.

Yeah, when more and more of the city gets like surrendered to the wild zones.

And I remember I'm running around the the first like three or four that they give you and they're,

and I'm like, wait, these are just people's houses and like businesses are just in here.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, like chunks of the city, public places, private places are now like within the bounds of Quasartego's Holotech as they're simultaneously like losing their grip on the city while also like with a smile saying like, this is what we're aiming for.

Yes.

Yeah, it's it's why I like the cemetery one so much because it's like a cemetery, a real human cemetery is filled with animals.

The animals exist.

It's cool that they're there.

There would be different ones there if we hadn't like put walls up and fences up and you know, had people uh dig holes into the ground and put stone in there and stuff.

You know, a lot of those places would have different ecologies than they do, but there is still an active ecology there.

But birds and squirrels and skunks and skunks and all sorts of other things, but there aren't lions in there.

And it's sort of like we put put lions in the cemetery.

And I

think that that's really interesting.

Right.

You know, well, I mean, I think the thing that's like actually,

the lions are in the park.

The ghosts are in the cemetery.

The ghosts that you can capture.

They hang out around graves and you can capture them.

The other thing, though, that's in the cemetery is like

the poisonous snakes.

The giant spider.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

And also, yeah, one of the ghosts is a sword and a giant sword that will cut you

Which by the way is the other big thing we should talk about the combat here because Keith I mean you said as soon as you played it for a little bit I think you played it for one you know big stretch you're like oh, this might be some of the most fun that I'm having with Pokemon in years the combat is really different and really different you so it's it's real time I wouldn't call it an action RPG in the sense that you're not doing like

Combos.

You're not like hitting a button.

You're not hitting Y and then throwing a punch or your Pokemon isn't just throwing a punch every time you press y you have four four face button abilities are on cooldown and the cooldowns are different depending on what ability it is what move it is

But you, the Pokemon trainer, are running around.

And whenever you use a move, or tell your Pokemon to use a move, they will either, if it's a ranged attack, like run over to where you are and do it from there.

If it's a melee attack, charge in and do it.

Some attacks are like,

they like turn into a little wheel of fire or stone and like roll forward some of them are aoes until they'll be around where they are there's all sorts of stuff like that but both you and your pokemon can avoid attacks by avoiding attacks and i say you because if you get hit too many times you get knocked out um which can help so you can get hit by your own pokemon's you can damage effects this is true and i think that that really sells the you're walking through a park and a lion jumps out at you you know yeah um

i was so surprised when i got into my first pokemon battle and it was like that because i knew that i was going to play this game i've been playing pokemon games since um uh 1996 uh or 1997 somewhere i was emulating pokemon games before they were out in america as a kid uh and so i knew that this was gonna happen and that I was gonna play it and so I didn't need to touch it and then all of a sudden I'm like oh my god I'm running around and giving commands

we let's played for run button Digimon World, and I was like, this feels like Digimon World to me, not Pokemon.

Because of it being reactive, because of it being...

Yeah, in Digimon World,

you're giving orders to your

Digimon, and he's doing the orders, but you're not like directly in control of anything.

Right.

Like you can tell your Digimon, like, use a strong move, and then he'll use the move and he'll position himself to use it.

Right.

So it's like very much like a Digimon World combat situation with a little bit more control over what's happening than the PS1 game from 20 years ago,

way more than 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 30 years ago.

Yeah.

And

so I was like so thrown off, but it's really fun.

It is really fun to do.

And the moments where I saw what I was doing, like causing my Pokemon to either get hurt because because I had done something stupid or not get hurt because I had put him in a good position.

I was like, oh, this is like a totally new way of like doing a Pokemon battle.

And it feels like

watching Pokemon on TV.

It feels like they're like Ash Ketchum is involved in the battle.

He's helping.

He is a trainer in a way that the,

you know, the hyper-abstracted sprite-based games never were.

And even more more so to me, the

less abstracted 3D games where I was playing Scarlet.

And like, when you get in a wild Pokemon battle and the framing is just bullshit, like it's just like, you know, you just have camera movement over wherever the two Pokemon happen to be standing at the time.

And it's like, I can't get the two Pokemon on screen at the same time.

It's just dynamic.

It's standard there.

It's not dynamic.

It's not all.

It's not dynamic in either the, it's changing to keep up with the combat, nor in the way that you might describe a visual shot like the the way that Pokemon looking over the shoulder, you know, classic view, it has a sort of dynamic composition to it.

It had neither of those.

Last time we talked about Pokemon, I talked a lot about how

when it's so abstracted, like in those 2D games, like I can imagine at the beginning, when you start a Pokemon Red and Nido,

Nitorino and Gengar are like fighting in the arena,

that they then, they then like double in the anime when like Ash is waking up.

I can imagine what that is like.

And so that they're not showing it to me, it's fine because I can imagine it.

But in Scarlet and Violet or Sword and Shield, like they're showing me what is supposed to be the reality, which is like a Gyarados sitting still until I use Whirlpool and then it like shakes a little bit and a whirlpool happens.

And

you can tell that they could have done something different because because when you get into a gym fight in Scarlet and Violet, it's highly choreographed.

The cameras are dynamic.

They're showing you Pokemon as they're using moves.

It feels a lot better.

Yeah, the gym fights.

And that's the only thing that game are great.

It's like 1% of the whole game is the gym fights.

And there's something about the active control that feels

dynamic in a way that I'm looking for from a Pokemon battle.

It feels like I'm taking part and I'm helping.

It kind of sells for the first time in ever.

Like, Pokemon and their trainers are working together to do a fight.

Right.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I find that the

way it can, it can, especially in the wild zones where you're getting, you're surrounded by guys, you can sometimes stumble into

like from one fight to basically another one.

You like roll up a second or third patarat or whatever, whatever, and suddenly a fight that should be going pretty easy is like really chaotic in a way that makes the spaces feel like there are living Pokemon in it who are getting involved.

Yeah, in a way that's like third-party to this game.

You get third-party in this game all the time.

And I did think a lot about your comments about the abstraction stuff, Keith, because as a reminder, people who didn't listen or haven't listened back to that episode in a while,

for me,

I never felt that

when I was playing the original sprite-based games, I never really felt the like, oh, wow, this, this is a whole world filled with Pokemon who are living lives and like doing cool things.

And I, I never filled those gaps in for me.

They were always little

cool designs that had movesets associated with them.

And for some reason, it just never cleared that imaginary bar for me.

So I didn't really feel that same

problem in Scarlet and Violet, where like, you know, oh, you just see a field of like seven butterfree or whatever, and they're just like floating around, yeah.

Uh, and it's like they're not doing anything, they never like hit bad tourists plotting back and forth, but I, what I, but I'm playing this, I was like, now this actually does do the thing that Keith was imagining all those years ago.

You're you're often seeing a kid chasing, you know, um, a sableye around.

I don't know why I keep going to say, because I keep seeing the sable eye get chased around, um, uh, or you're you're seeing a bunch of pidgeys hanging out in the street and then like flying away when you run near them.

It's really, it hits so different when you are wandering around and you hear like some chittering, and then you look to one side and you notice there's a bunch of little flabebes, like super tiny, like teeny, tiny little fairies just like fluttering around these flowers.

And like, even that is

a simple thing, but because they're so small and you don't notice them at first, it is that moment of like when you learn to listen for birds and then see the birds outside.

Yeah, totally.

Um, You know, and I mean, literally, even like often, you'll be running around the rooftops and you'll hear like some cooing or whatever, and you sort of go to the edge of the roof and look down, and there's like a there's like a

fletchling or whatever sitting in like a window or something, or like there'll be a pidgey sort of posted up or the lampsome trees, the

pants,

yeah.

I gotta go find those.

I have a quest to go find those, they're all over the fucking place.

Skywatcher, I had a really hard time finding a pan sage, yeah.

Um, But I eventually,

I found that they actually, there's a couple rooftops where all three of them hang out together.

And again, like, like, that's like kind of beautiful.

And it's, they did something really smart.

This game's really smartly made in a lot of ways, which is kind of weird to be saying about a Pokemon game in the last, you know, 20 years.

You've been a hater.

You've been a this is a series.

I'm such a Pokemon lover.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the same thing with Star Wars, where I'm like, I love it so much that when it comes out and it's like, you just shut this thing out, it makes me so upset because I want more than anything.

And like,

this game has a lot of frayed edges that I don't like.

And it is my willingness to buy into a Pokemon game that's trying that really has made this one of the most fun things I've played all year.

But like, they really smartly came up with this, like, the one city thing where they didn't have to make

smart,

you know, AI for

Pokemon roaming around a gigantic open space like in Scarlet and Violet, where, you know, no one's doing anything.

Gyarados is just sort of like flip around in the water a little bit

and go back and forth on a tiny little path that they're on.

In this game, 95% of the Pokemon you see are pathed NPCs.

They get to have bespoke animations and personalities because they are like interacting with their own trainer or walking through the city.

And so it brings a lot of, it very cheaply and efficiently brings a lot of life to the Pokemon

where the, you know, Scarlet and Violet Sword of Shield didn't have anything like this.

It didn't have any locations that were as nice as this one whole city is.

Yeah.

Even close, not even close.

And then you do get into the wild zones, and then the wilds are kind of have that same problem that the last two generations have had.

But

it's fine because they're so small and they're so contained.

And they've almost like they're unnaturally, narratively, unnaturally been like penned into this place.

And so it feels like even their inaction speaks to the

reality of the game.

Where are these Pikachu going to go?

They're in the one corner of this one park.

They don't have anywhere else to go.

They don't have anywhere else to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are they going to go do?

You know?

Yeah.

I think that that makes a lot of sense.

I'll even say, like,

the combat animations and stuff are such that even seeing something like,

you know, someone put down poison spikes and the poison spikes like get tossed out.

They're on the ground.

You don't want to run into them.

You don't want your Pokemon to run into them.

You want them to move around it.

All of that like helps.

Smoke screen, like all that.

Smoke, same thing.

Smoke screen, yeah, totally.

Really makes you, it changes the way you feel about like what the, that the space is obviously still abstract in some way But like it's more representational It's closer to I'm running around this city and my Pokemon are like doing the things my brain is not needing to fill in the gaps as much in a way that's really fun you know the the one of the things at night you are you go to these special kind of like um tournament zones what are they actually called like battle the battle zones battle zones yeah yeah where it's you and a bunch of other pokemon trainers trying to basically jump each other uh like yeah like and they everyone agreed on the jumping rule, so it's fine.

I saw,

I don't know if you saw

posting up like in corners where there's like two alleys.

Everyone's like, there's like a kindergartner who has found a strategic position to mug people with her animals.

Totally camping is a legitimate strategy game.

100%.

I am going to be above you with my flaffy.

I'm going to use charge to get super-powered sniper shot version of

Thunder or whatever.

Do you also have a video?

I have a video of sniping of uh a like pat rat or something that is so funny it's wild yeah you you use um charge to get extra you know electric damage or whatever then you use thundershock and like boom you've snipe this thing and like because you're up on a little rooftop looking down at this poor trainer who has no idea you're there there is a real like spatiality to the story of the fight that doesn't exist in the other modes, which is, or in the previous games, which is fine.

Those are interesting, you know, I don't need everything to necessarily look like this, but it is such a different,

more energized version of what Pokemon Combat is than I thought it would be.

Yeah, they encourage you to be as unfair as possible.

You get there's cards that like are like cards are cool.

Yeah,

take a few people out before they see you.

It feels like I remember being a kid and doing laser tag once for a friend's birthday party, and my friend's mom was also doing the laser tag, and she shot me.

And I felt this moment of betrayal of like, you're an adult like

you did that but you're an adult at the laser tag place and you shot me

and it feels like doing that constantly but like that's what it's built on is like everyone goes in there being like all right adults can shoot kids go you you lazed me out I've

I've got a

um I found a couple guys up on a rooftop or three three guys having lunch at like on a rooftop at a rooftop restaurant and they were all discussing like rule changes to the battle battle zone and one of them was like look it's important to have rules you know like we all agreed to the rule where you can jump other guys it's fine like if we didn't all agree to it then it would be different did you find the people on the rooftop having lunch inside of a wild zone and they were like i guess this place is a wild zone now like it's just

where we got lunch

It's really funny.

I was, yeah, like, again, I think that in general, I mean, there are things about this game that are so different than past Pokemon games, like the combat, like the parkour,

the parkour setups that are all across the town, the city.

Like the writing?

Well, this is the thing, actually.

This is the thing.

This is what I'm going to say.

I actually think this is like good Pokemon writing in the way that's like Pokemon writing has always had to be very efficient.

You have to like...

quickly communicate something funny about a guy you're about to punch in the face with your Pikachu in one or two lines before you do it And then they're going to get one little line afterwards, basically.

And when it's bad, it's just like rancid.

It's like nothing.

But when it's good, you're just like, oh, I'm charmed by this person.

This game is filled with really good examples of that, from NPCs you run into and talk to in the street to a lot of the side quests.

Have y'all done the side quest for the girl who

really wants to have the most kakunas?

Like a whole team of kakunas.

I'm getting sad that they evolve into B-drills, but that's just the price you pay when you are loaded by the drill.

She doesn't want the most kakunas, she wants the strongest cocoon.

You're right, which apparently means they're all going to become beatrills.

They're all going to become b-drills because that's what happens.

They level up.

And then the tie-log effort is like, actually, when my Pokémon get ready to evolve, they'll tell me in the menu, so yours must be weird.

Yours must be very special.

But every time I run past that park and see her with her kakunas, I'm like, there she goes.

I hope her kakuna strategy is paying off.

You know,

you just mentioned something that was like a huge thing for me that I was so happy to see.

Every Pokemon game that I play, I have like one Pokemon that I'm like, man, I wish I didn't have to evolve this thing.

But like, it's always technically possible.

But in order to not evolve a Pokemon, you have to like make sure you cancel the evolution as it's happening or give it

an Everstone, which prevents it from evolving, but also prevents it from having a held item.

Yeah.

Like, so you're making it weaker by not evolving it, and then making it weaker again by not giving it like this item powers up all your water type moves.

Uh,

this is the first game where you have to intentionally evolve your Pokémon.

And, like, I went in being like, maybe I'll just keep Totodile for the whole game.

And I was like, I don't care that it's annoying, I'll just do it.

And then the game just lets me do it for the first time ever.

I'm over, I now have a level 60-something Totodial.

That's cute.

That's cute.

Baby's too strong.

That baby's too strong.

Baby's too strong.

You can't mega evolve the tota dial then, right?

You're only mega from top, from the top to your side.

From the top.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

but it's just like something that I like about this game is that it's it's

for the first time in a long time, it's like fulfilling certain things that I've wanted out of a Pokemon game and haven't had.

Like, that's such a rare feeling as a person who plays every Pokemon game.

And I think a lot of that, like,

I, I, so I'm still, I've still been playing a lot of Grand Bazaar.

Um,

and I, there's a lot in common between them in my brain, because I think in both cases, they have sort of deeply looked at, like, what are the routines, practices, mores, et cetera, of these games, and what are some things that, like,

we have been taking for granted as necessary for balance that actually don't fucking matter.

Right.

Like having Pokeballs and having to buy more Pokeballs because you lose them versus like, no, there's just a guy.

He'll just give you Pokeballs if you miss.

Yeah, it's the city.

They can't let you litter the city.

Because it's like, who cares?

Like, who cares if you remember to buy Pokeballs or not?

Is that a meaningful part of this experience?

Not really.

Yeah.

Like, the more important thing is choosing which ball is smart and like, how badly do you want to make sure you get this Pokemon?

Because you got this one shot because it has got stars on its head.

It is going to disappear if you don't do this.

It's going to disappear.

Like,

they've done a lot of stuff that is just

smart in that way to reduce friction in a way where, like, it also kind of reminds me of the Pokémon Let's Go Eevee and Pikachu

ones,

where it is like, I could imagine some people who really are die-hard Pokemon as grindy JRPG who would absolutely hate this because what they want is the mechanical friction.

They want to spend hours out in the grass doing whatever.

but like

those guys are doing

but you know but like if you want to just have a fun time with pokemon they've really looked at the experience and been like you know what are the things that are actually worth having as friction points and what are the things that are just kind of annoying um like this was also the debate that came around when um

I guess it was Pokemon XY or black and white when they first introduced the thing, where you could have all your Pokemon gain experience, even if just one of them fights.

Yeah, XP Share.

That was like super, I remember that being super contentious.

Yep, it was a lot of fun.

A lot of people really,

really not into it.

I was really into it though, because it took a lot of the grinding out of the thing.

And it's like, you know, that's that's here too.

Like, all of these little things that make it a thing where it's like you could, you have more space to enjoy the world and not get hung up on mechanical things.

Which, to that end, it also reminds me a lot of the Yokai Watch games by Love.

That's interesting.

Not in the combat, the combat is completely different, but

in the like, in those games, there is a real joyousness to just like running around a city and helping people with little problems.

And sometimes the little problem is like you have to go find a guy to give them or whatever.

And sometimes the problem is just like, I drop my watch.

Yes.

Or like, can you take my Pokemon is cranky.

Can you take it to go get a little treat?

Can you take it to the cafe

so it can get its favorite little treat, even though I work at a cafe?

My cafe is not good enough for my Pokemon, but we don't talk about that.

Also, my Pokemon is a little candy treat, right?

Because it's one of the candy Pokemon.

Slurpuff.

Thank you.

Slurpuff.

Thank you.

Yes, yes.

I slightly disagree.

I think that in general, Janine, I do like that this game is like taking

a look at what is annoying about Pokemon.

It is the most fun when it's harder, though.

And that is one of the things about that.

Like, everybody has an I agree with that part.

So, but that's the thing about like, do you want to do a little bit of grinding or do you want every Pokemon in your party to always be over-leveled?

And that's what the EXP, everybody shares the EXP thing does for me is like, it's tough to find a challenge in this game because

my Pokemon are always leveling up so quickly.

Yeah, you blink and you're and you're level 30 and it's like, well, wait a second.

Yeah.

And I'm making children cry in the street and I didn't even, I don't even go here.

On the stream that I did the other day and I clipped the section, I put it in our chat Austin.

I don't know if the video ever started working.

Yeah, I did watch it.

Okay.

Like that I, my Pokémon were level 12 and I found a level 24 alpha Bell Sprout.

The Alpha Pokemon are like more aggressive, physically larger Pokemon that are like, they're almost like boss of the zone, of the wild zone.

And they often have others around them that if you move around too much, you are at risk of kiting in, is worth saying.

Those can be tough fights.

And those fights are really fun, and they end up usually being more fun than even the trainer battles in the game because

it's a fight where you've got to use your whole party.

You've got to use what your Pidgey has to offer and then pull the Pidgey out and then use what your Pikachu has to offer and then pull it out and sometimes pull it out just to

make force a miss or soak up some damage instead of your Pokemon.

There is a countdown on using items.

So you can't just pause, revive everyone and go.

It's like, okay, you can revive one and then you got to wait a few seconds.

You got to buy some time so you can get in this cycle of like trying to buy time to heal up, revive, heal up, revive.

As Allie said,

I think it's KOTOR rules.

You get one

every time your Pokemon does like an attack, it's like every, every, I guess it can't be that because it's seconds, right?

Between rounds, yeah, one.

But are there, there aren't rounds, though, because everything is rounds, but there's there are like secret rounds, they're like hidden rounds.

You can like pot around and buy time, though.

It's still large.

Yeah, yeah.

The round is the space between two moves.

any two moves any two moves yeah so okay after you've your pokemon has finished the animation of its move you can then use the item okay and then you after you've used the item you're then free to use another move but can you just wait for as janine was just saying can you just wait six

if the other pokemon makes a move I see yeah yeah that makes sense

that would make sense yeah move take but yes you can sneak in a heal or a revive but you can't just like be like okay I'm gonna use all of my healing potions

like heal up and kind of make it trivial.

Like, Pokemon centers are still really important, really important.

Yeah, but you do get the sense, Keith, that you're talking about, which is like, okay, I'm gonna pop, you know, the Bell Sprout's gonna do an attack on me.

He's gonna launch Stun Spore, and I don't want to get stunned, so I'm gonna pull out my Pokemon just as the attack is starting and swap to the next one.

And then maybe what I'll do is I'll swap to one that like can put up light screen, which sustains between I was just gonna say, yeah,

and then and then maybe debuffs the enemy, you know, does a paralyze attack or does a burn, you know, damage over time or poison or something.

And then I'll swap in something that's really tanky or that's really, and that's like, that's at best end game stuff in a traditional Pokemon game, you know?

Right, yes, at best.

And it's like they brilliant, Landing is a brilliant move.

They let you recall your Pokemon without sending out a new one.

You can do either or.

So you can just pull your Pokemon out to force a miss and then send it back in.

And if all your Pokemon go down, you're not just going to auto-faint.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, you don't just auto-faint like in the other games.

You faint if you take too much damage, but if your Pokémon get too much damage, you can revive them, right?

Totally.

And when you remove your Pokémon, what happens is the enemy Pokémon start attacking you, which is like, yeah, they will sometimes attack you even if your other Pokémon is out.

Yeah, and they will sometimes just go back.

Yeah, it's funny.

This is

kind of like a

28-year-old promise that this game is fulfilling because in the very, very beginning of the first Pokemon game, Professor Oak tells you, like, don't go in the grass.

The Pokemon will attack you if you don't have a Pokemon to defend yourself.

And in the first episode of the anime, Ash gets like almost killed by a flock of Spiro.

Right.

And this is a part of Pokemon that has been like

unspoken and sort of subtextual for decades that this game and to a lesser extent, Arceus

kind of bring to the forefront.

Arceus had a lot of problems, and

I think that a lot of people didn't like it.

I liked it, I think, more than average.

I had a lot of fun.

It broke normal Pokemon games for me because of that element.

It's just like, once I played that, and then Red and Violet came out, I was like, I don't think I can go back.

Maybe I'll try those ones eventually, but like,

it really, it kind of broke a little part of my brain.

It's not that you bounced off Scarlet and Violet that you you didn't even try.

Yeah, I didn't try them because I was like, well, why would I play this when I could just play more Arceus?

This is what I want these games to be.

Yeah.

I want to crouch in the grass and be like, damn, that ponytow is strong.

What am I going to do?

So true.

And I actually think my instinct...

My instinct plus reading what some like long-term Pokemon people are saying and I watched a video by Wolf Glick, who's like a VGC, a Pokemon competitive like champion who doesn't watch YouTube videos.

Is that a hybrid Wolf Blitz or Jiminy Glick?

Jiminy Glick, it's not no Wolfie Glick, different guy.

It doesn't really have either of their vibes, but you know, maybe there's like you know, sometimes you average something out and it loses all of its character.

You know, maybe that's he's just like a normal guy instead of being a weirdo.

Um, but he, his read on this is take taking this game along with the upcoming Pokemon Champions, which is going to be a mobile and switch and switch 2 game that is entirely focused on the traditional turn-based combat.

Like 100 bits, all it is.

They put out a big trailer for it during the big Pokemon tournament.

This is like just

Pokemon battling.

It's the Pokemon battling game, and it seems like it's going to be where all of the tournament stuff happens.

One of the things that

Wolfie's kind of position was, was like, I think it frees them up by giving you a product that is just that stuff, it frees them them up to potentially make a game that's just more like this in a mainline series these you don't have to you're still delivering the turn-based product for the people who the very small niche but a very dedicated niche who want that and you can still have the new Pokemon show up in champions if you do that

in the same way that the new mega evolutions here will show up in the competitive mode even though this isn't the competitive game i've been thinking and that's interesting like in relation to the you know remembering like playing uh let's go evie which was like not a game I'd been excited about, but I sort of had picked it up on a whim and I ended up having a lot of fun with it because it was just like really simple, like first gen, and it was, it was cute and colorful.

And,

you know, it was just like a fun little time.

Very much a game that feels geared towards a younger, younger, slash, more casual audience.

I don't mean casual or younger in a derogatory way because, again, I enjoyed it.

But I was thinking about this as I was comparing these games and realizing like

if for a long time

the core Pokemon games have been less and less like for children when like a lot of us have really fond childhood memories of Pokemon games but they you know cultivate sort of increasingly hardcore communities and the games themselves like

They are they can be really demanding, especially the further you get.

Like early on, it's usually super easy, but they're not games that have like, you know, Pokemon has never done the thing of like, do you want to play easy story mode?

Do you want to play medium adventure mode?

Do you want to play hardcore mode?

Like, you know, they don't do that.

It's just, it is what it is.

I would love if they could let me put a hard mode level scaling thing on top of this game.

Oh, my God.

But, like, make my day.

It's, it's interesting to me that, like,

that's a market that should be maintained.

You know, your future Pokemon fans, but, like, for a while, it feels like they've kind of

had to do more with like fringe products and the anime and stuff and like you know the pokemon puzzle games make mystery dungeon yeah yeah um you know that ditto game that's coming out that's actually looks pretty cute actually

sounds like pretty cute um they said we they scrambled to make a pal world is i think what they did

uh that's squirtle um

so they

it's i think it's a smart move to try and break those apart and I feel like it's maybe a move that they tried to do in the past and it didn't quite land.

Like I'm remembering like Pokemon Stadium,

Poken,

things where they've like tried to, I mean, Poken's a bad example, but you know, no, but I know what you mean.

I really want to play Pokemon.

I really want to watch someone play Pokemon Coliseum.

A friend of mine was telling me about Pokemon Coliseum this past weekend, and I was like, I don't know.

I didn't have a GameCube, so I like fully didn't know what that game was and assumed it was just Pokemon Arena or Pokemon Stadium two and in fact is this whole other different thing um so like i i like that they do those those side ones but like i yeah i think there's something about like if this becomes a model for

it's funny because it's like it's more casual in some ways because it's not high-end you know competitive pokemon is really interested in not just the it's not just the paper rock scissors of it all but it's also the uh hey i need i need for instance a a pokemon like aegis slash the shield, sword Pokemon, not from Pokemon Sword and Shield, from Pokemon XY,

switches between a sword mode and a shield mode every time it moves.

And so you want its speed to be low so that you can like stay in shield mode longer, for instance.

And that is like,

the person who's going to pick up the game because Pikachu is cute is not necessarily like...

gonna show up for that, you know, right away.

And so I do think that there's like ways that this is simpler than that.

It'll step them up into it.

But it will step them up into it.

They can learn about that as an option because they get really into Aegislash or whatever.

And they talk to their friends about it.

And the friends are like, oh, there's a person who sells, what is it, like leaves or some shit?

It's like a leaves.

You can give it mints to change the stats.

Give it a mint to change the.

Oh, your Aegis Slash is timid.

Well,

get the brave mint or whatever.

That's it.

You got it right.

Brave is the right one.

And then it'll fit.

And then that sort of, you know, it's really easy to imagine, like, they give you room for depth.

They don't cut you off.

They're not, like, sandboxing you in this, like, little,

you know, in this thing where you can't engage with these deeper systems.

You can still do that.

You can still grow into that if you want to.

Or you can have a nice time in the city of lights with your raichu, who is too big because he's an alpha raichu.

Oh, me too.

He's too big.

He's too big.

It's not cute anymore.

I wanted a big guy's party, but he wasn't supposed supposed to be in it.

That was supposed to be like Diggler or whatever the fuck his name is.

The rabbit?

The

big rabbit.

The big dirty rabbit.

The big dirty rabbit.

Diggersby.

Diggersby.

Oh, Diggersby.

I got an Alpha Diggersby, and like, yeah, okay.

You're in the Big Guy's Party.

I, you know, put like a Clefable in there, big guy's party.

Big guy's party.

Raichu's supposed to be in like cute sweethearts party.

No.

Raichu's like a car.

He's big.

can y'all send me your big uh raichu photos so i can put them in the show notes yeah totally i can take one yeah thank you

i think i took a screenshot earlier of uh my raichu next to um a normal guy's right normal raichu yeah the guy was normal and the raichu is normal uh-huh you should just you should just use keith's i'll use keith's i'll use keith's absolutely yeah um yeah so so yeah that's that's kind of those are my big picture things you know i i think there are people who are disappointed with how how samey parts of Lumios look.

I think, like you, Keith,

you can feel the way that it's a strategy to be able to maximize their art time on things like

anything they've ever done.

Like,

to be disappointed with how it looks, but to not acknowledge that it's also, it looks a hundred times better than any other 3D environment they've ever made.

Like, oh my God, what a wild step up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, that's where I'm at with it very much.

So, and I'm just, and also, I don't know, I got bad news for y'all about cities.

Sometimes that's the case.

That is kind of how they look.

Yeah, 100%.

And I really do think that's part of why I'm enjoying this.

It's like, I am, I am, in my heart of hearts, a city boy.

And running around and like seeing, talking to people who are like, I don't know about this new urban redevelopment plan.

Ah, it's not hitting for me.

It's like, yeah, that's what it is like to live and talk about, to live in a city and to talk about living in a city.

And someone who going, you know,

I I really wish there were more marathons here, or I, you know, I like that the Pokemon are around here, but they're really getting in the way of my daily commute, you know, like that's really fun to me.

I went to drop my garbage off from my apartment, and the alley's all full of trubbishes and garbodors.

Yeah, uh-huh, exactly.

What do I do?

So I'm curious what it ends up saying about this stuff.

Not that it's going to be like, you know, groundbreaking critique, but I think one of the nice things about a game that has such a clear single identity, this is the game about Pokemon living in the city.

Like, it gives you the opportunity to just iterate on ideas like this over and over again.

And it's when the core is something that I'm interested in, I'm often really interested in that, in the reiteration.

And so, yeah, I'm hyped.

And I'm enjoying it.

And I would love if Pokemon 10 or whatever,

the 10th generation Pokemon game

did take some notes from this, you know?

Also, the fashion is good.

there's so much shopping, it's expensive.

I love all of the shopping districts, they're so good, they're really good.

And I love the uh, not to bring up Grand Bazaar again, but it does the thing Grand Bazaar does where if you buy multiple colors of the same piece, you can then swap the like underlayer and overlayer and stuff around.

Um, so if you buy, like, you know, a purple sweater with a black shirt underneath, and then a pink sweater with a beige shirt underneath, you can then swap and have like the purple and the whatever.

I mean, like, it's that's like a top level.

It's really fun.

It's really fun.

Yeah.

I

was so excited.

Yeah, I was so excited.

You have to have multiple colors, though, and then you have to, like, it's kind of annoying to do.

You have to kind of like set the anyways,

but it's, it's, it's good.

I, it was nice to see that so close to another game doing that because it is a thing that like

adds so much variety, like, immediately.

Um, it's great.

Uh, I don't think this game's gonna win any awards for having like um a lot of uh you know really

like a main character with a lot of personality but with the fashion stuff and then compared to scarlet and violet where you played the most boring little boy in the world uh and there was no good fashion in that game there's no good fashion

every other character looks insane yeah and it's like like why did you make me look like this when everyone else looks like that Yeah, there's lots of cool character design in that game.

It's just not the player character.

And the way fashion worked in Scarlet and Violet was

you were always in a uniform because you're like, that's the thing.

It's the school game.

And so you get like uniform variations, but you weren't going to get like, you know, this is you're like shopping in the mall or like in the downtown shopping district.

And like, you can come out with wildly different looks in this game.

And I really appreciate that.

You know, there's also one store they don't let you shop at unless

I'm simple enough, and I'm going to get in there.

I'm going to get in there.

They're going to show me those clothes.

That is locked behind story.

Okay.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

And I would not get too excited about that store.

Listen.

I see some stuff in the window I want.

That's

right.

Listen.

I want to know what's up with Zygarde.

I want to know what's up with

the other body.

By the way, we never mentioned the guy that

the guy that we talked about at the very beginning, who's 3,000 years old, he killed everybody on both sides of a war.

He runs a hotel, a failing hotel called Hotel Z, which I wish was way more part of the game.

I don't know if it's failing.

I think he's kind of indifferent indifferent to its success.

He's indifferent, but the kids who hang out with him are all trying to get the hotel to be, you know, profitable.

They should be busy trying to figure out what's up with these damn mega evolving Pokemon.

That's what they said they're supposed to do.

Yeah.

Why are they trying to film TikToks for this hotel?

Have you?

I was so into the story until a certain point where I felt like they made a couple things, like they did a few things in a row that I wasn't interested in.

I'm about to go to the C or like the Quanticaros or not Quantico.

What's it called?

Quasardicos.

Quasartico HQ and I'm guessing that that may be where things start to turn.

No, there's so, okay, so what happens is one of the friends that you have is named Naveen, and he's a

sort of up-and-coming fashion designer.

Yeah.

But also kind of everyone.

He's like...

Also kind of an Eeyore.

Well, his friends don't respect him and they put him in, and and they're not nice to him.

And, you know, he doesn't want to share his backstory.

And his friend may be a very good person.

They're nice to him.

They're just

this particular thing they're shitty about.

Yeah, I think that they're kind of not nice to him.

I keep playing the game and they're not.

And okay, so I was like, why is everybody being so fucking rude to Naveen all the time?

Yeah.

And then what happened is that they introduced that he is a huge stand for a streamer named Canary.

Oh, I've heard echoes of there being a streamer named Canary through other dialogue.

Right, so this is this is where the game really turned.

I did not like the Canary stuff at all,

even though I kind of liked Canary.

Uh, but like, uh,

at the same time, as I'm like

really annoyed by this sudden, uh, massive dip into frivolousness with this arc, whole arc involving Canary, uh, I, and, and, and they were being so rude to Naveen about his Canary fandom, but also I'm like, I also find this very annoying.

He is being very annoying here.

And so, yeah, so, and then the thing after that is they introduce like a, you know, the team of the game, like, you know, the, the team, there's a team rocket.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They said the city doesn't work without them.

That's what they told me.

They told me that they're the ones who keep things going.

You know it's just a bit a lot of this stuff is a bit too yakuza without other games without without understanding what really makes the yakuza stuff work

i think this might be in a lot of ways this kind of is pokemon yakuza and i would rather play

i would rather play this combat than the turn-based yakuza combat frankly by kind of a lot oh same the turn-based stuff i yeah yeah

uh that really turned me off i don't know why they decided to abandon their identity as a beat-em-up because they do, they still do.

Wasn't the man who erased his name still a beat-em-up?

I think so, yeah.

I think so.

You're doing both.

You're doing both.

Is the pirate one also a beat-em up?

I didn't realize that.

Interesting.

I'm pretty sure that it is.

Yeah.

Stay tuned on beat-em-ups.

We're going to talk about beat-em-ups more just after.

We're going to talk about beat-em-ups more.

A very different kind of beat-em-up.

But like, I, I, you know, you're hanging out with Team Rust, and they're good guys, and they're bad guys, and you don't know what's going on, and they've got all this poison, and

like, their aesthetic is very poison.

They're poison-focused.

They're very poisoned-focused, and you're hanging out with this guy.

Is he a, is he, he seems like a lone shark, but he's acting very weird.

Everyone is sure that he's going to, like, betray you all and, you know, kill everyone with poison.

Is that a thing?

Is that like, because actually don't know?

Can the player character get poisoned in the game?

I've only gotten hurt, but I've not like, I don't know that I've actually stepped on poison spikes.

I've stepped on poison spikes, and it does damage.

Okay.

I think you just get hurt, and like, it's a severity of hurt thing because it does that, like, vignetting around the screen of like, you know, you got to find cover.

You hurt yourself too bad.

Do you get knocked out?

Is there like a death scream, like a snake scream?

There is a death screen.

How do you get it?

You go into the park, you get attacked by poison spikes, and all of a sudden, I'm dying of poison.

I'm dying of poison.

That's what it says, and it cuts to black.

Great.

The

yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, there are other things here that I'm curious to see if they continue.

Like, it does seem like it's going to be a big game.

I'm only a W or

X, or I guess I'm past X for sure.

I think I'm past W too.

Xavier.

I beat Xavier.

Yeah, yeah, who like hates the letter X, but loves the letter X, says I'm not worth the letter X.

I don't know.

I don't know his deal.

I don't get it.

I think he was trying to be like, you belong at X.

I belong.

Don't abandon X.

You should just stay here.

Let me.

I see.

I see.

Yeah, I think that was his.

I beat the next guy.

I think that was a real trick with the letters.

Don't worry about.

Well,

okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I was wondering if that was going to happen, but

don't say any more.

Yeah, I won't say more.

Okay.

Interesting, though.

Well, yeah, so I'm curious to see how that stuff continues to play out.

I'm interested in seeing just if the late game fights continue to get um tricky like you said the alpha fights are harder the mega fights i can imagine being feeling like boss fights in a similar way um i've only fought one mega mega evolved pokemon at this point um but i also even just think the trainer fights are more interesting than the like mainline series ones because

I mean, I guess random trainers are always have a mix of things, but because you're not like you, when you do the big letter, you know,

fights, the kind of like letter champion fights or whatever,

they're not like, oh, I have nothing but water Pokemon.

And so if you come out with grass type, you'll just crush me.

Like they're a mix of things.

And that produces a sense of like, oh, I'm still changing.

Like, oh, you're going to the water gym.

Right.

Exactly.

And the road up to the water gym has a lot of grass Pokemon.

So they're not doing that.

This isn't new exactly to this game, but they do, I think, an especially good job of kind of throwing a wrench in the gears of like, sure, they'll have a water Pokemon because they're the water person, but their water Pokemon will be resistant to the thing you would normally use against a Pokemon.

Yeah, they'll have some interesting like split types.

Right.

Right.

So they'll, so you've got to, like, your plan to go in with Big Raichu is going to be thwarted by the ground water type.

Yeah.

Right.

Although it's nice because, like, they've also, I feel like recent Pokemon games have also done this where they just show you on the move, like, is this effective?

Is this not effective?

They'll be like triangle, X,

circle, double circle, double circle.

Um, so it's really easy to just look and be like, right, okay, at a glance, I know that that's a waste of time.

I'm not gonna do that move.

Uh, this one isn't gonna be super effective, but it maybe has a knock-on effect I want to do anyway.

Yeah, totally.

Also, you don't have to move, you don't have to worry about move SP anymore, which is like huge.

Right.

Oh, I forgot.

Cool down.

Of course.

So you can just like, you you don't have to do the calculus of, okay, well, this is a stronger move version of this move, but I can use it less before I have to recharge.

So do I want to keep

right?

Yeah, do I want to keep, right?

It's PP, not SP.

So then you, like, it's like, do I want to keep the version that has more uses in it, even though it's a bit weaker?

Or it's like, it's like, no, you can just, you can just swap it in, you can swap it out.

Like, all those moves are just there.

And instead,

you're doing a calculus around: do I have enough

type diversity or

all of that.

How much stats?

Yes, exactly.

Do I only need once if it's on a cooldown?

I can't use Thunderbolt twice in a row.

Exactly.

So I need Thunder too.

Right.

Exactly.

I have to have both.

What other moves can I have that complement and build upon these ones that are like my main, you know?

My Raichu rotation, I'm going to give everyone a Raichu tip.

This is the greatest Raichu moveset of all time.

You have Dig, which has your Raichu tunnel underground and pop up where the enemy is.

It's also an off-type move, so it's a great thing to use against other electric types.

Oh, right, sure.

Yeah.

And then

I use Volt Switch, which is a close-up move.

It hits them as they've popped up next to Dig, and then it jumps back to you in an instant

quick attack.

U-Turn does the same thing.

It's so easy.

It's U-turn.

It's the electric version of U-turn.

So you have to step out from like Nuzzle or whatever it is, too.

Yeah, yeah.

And then I have

Thunderbolt, Thunder, and by the time I get through the rotation, Dig is ready to go again.

Dig is a long cooldown because it basically forces a miss because you're underground during a turn.

Dig is one of those ones that's like classically in

like, I was going to say real Pokemon,

in old school Pokemon is a multi-turn move, right?

Like it's you dig down,

you wait a turn, and then you emerge, or something like that.

Dig and fly are both multi-turn moves in this one.

It will force a round to happen.

Bide also, Bide, or

Bide, you get hit twice and then attack.

I haven't seen Bide in this game.

I don't know if it even exists.

I think I have it.

I think you have it, but I don't know.

So,

wow, any other moves that happen while you're not there?

I don't know.

Solar Beam and Hyper Beam and Giga or Giga Impact.

No, Giga Impact all

use multiple turns.

Interesting.

Charge up, but not while you're not there.

It'll be like Hyper Beam you use, and then you have to wait while you recover from using Hyper Beam.

Oh, it's interesting.

It's very interesting how they broke.

This is again what I mean by like, it's interesting how they looked at the things that were like...

They sort of took for granted as integral to the experience and the balance and then found other ways to do it, right?

Where it's like, I think it's impressive how legible it translates.

I feel like it really feels true to how Pokemon battling works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't break it, it doesn't discard it, it just uses it in a way that works.

Yeah, Volt Switch is a great example of that case because in the in the games, Volt Switch would let you do an it, you attack, you do a little bit of damage, and then it lets you swap in a new Pokemon, right?

And the reason for doing that is basically like, okay, I want to get one more little hit in and then get out of danger, you know?

Um, or hey, I go, my Pokemon's faster, so it's gonna go first, and then I'll swap in something tankier to take the hit and that's effectively still getting it out of danger by pulling it close to you it's just that the way the game thinks about like danger is different than a traditional Pokemon game and so it's like a different thing you know um I'm guessing that I've just done the multiplayer stuff at all.

I have not done that.

I'm curious about it.

We did trade a Pokemon.

Yeah, there's a 1v1v1v1 mode that apparently is pretty fun.

And

I

believe it.

So I'm going to try to try some of that.

But yeah, because Keith, if you want to play some of that later at some point, let me know.

Sure.

Yeah.

Cool.

Or Janine.

But I know Janine is not a big PvP person.

I was not just excluding you.

I just know each other for 20 years.

I have a

what the fuck's it called?

Spritzy that I need to get into an aromatisse.

You know, I'll hit you up for some trades later.

Oh, yeah.

We'll do some trades for sure.

Absolutely.

We did some.

I did.

I traded, Keith.

You had a shiny cadabra that became a shiny.

I had a shiny Abra, like out in the, out in, not in a wild zone, just like in the city.

I've seen there's a bunch of them on rooftops.

I've only ever seen Abras on rooftops.

A bunch of abras, yeah.

That's right.

This was like in this was like in a little hole between four buildings that formed like a little empty space, except there was two

abras in there just sitting.

I fell down into the hole, saw a shiny abra, caught it, and then climbed up a ladder back onto the roof.

Wow.

Cool.

Great.

I really like navigating the rooftops.

And

I've always been a big fan of games where the movement mechanics don't quite support the level of platforming that they want.

When you do a funny roll off of one tower and land on another roller.

You gotta roll.

You gotta master that.

You gotta master that roll.

I really like that.

They do finally eventually give you a little extra thing to get from place to place.

You can tell because there's something that I'm like, I have tried a lot.

I can't do that.

I think they show that in the trailers, right?

They show the glidy, floaty stuff.

Oh, do they?

Yeah.

Because Allie was like, why does every game need a glider?

Yeah, I was surprised you get that glider, but you don't.

Okay, here's what it is: since it's in the trailer, I'm fine saying it.

It's like a

mid-air jump.

If you fall, you can use your rotom phone to like pull yourself up higher into the air just for a second.

So you don't have a jump in this game, but you do have a falling jump where you can sort of jump once mid-fall.

Sure, yeah, very weird.

It's like a double jump, but only when you're falling.

Right.

Yeah.

That's fine.

Totally.

Why not?

Yeah.

Cool.

I'm into it.

Yeah.

All right.

That sounds like our segment on Pokemon ZA.

Keith, you're going to stick around to

do another segment on Apsalom, the

also kind of excellent beat-em-up, roguelike beat-em-up, roguelite, I guess, beat-em-up.

And we'll have some new people joining us.

Janine, thanks for that.

It's great to have two good games to talk about in a row.

So good to do that.

Janine, thank you for for joining us.

Do you have anything you want to shout out before we take a break?

I have been playing Witch Spring R on our Twitch channel

on the weekends, which is an RPG that is.

I mean, speaking of games that

sand off some of the pain points of their genre just so you can have some fun.

That game, I feel like every time I play it, I find a new little thing that makes it

even more like,

I don't know, consumable, I guess.

Like, it's so moorish

and only gets more moorish.

So, if you've ever wondered what that game is,

people really are like wild about it, but I don't hear a lot of people talk about it in our circles.

I don't know.

What is the game?

Witch Spring R

witch, like a Halloween witch.

W-I-T-C-H.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Those streams have been great.

Yeah.

All right, let's take a break, Keith.

Oh, uh, I was just gonna say that uh, if you want to watch me play approximately six hours of this game, I'm gonna upload the stream that I did the other day onto the run button YouTube.

Hell yeah, please do that.

If you have it up by the time this episode goes up, I'll link it in the description.

Sure, cool.

All right, let's take a break.

Okay, and we are back.

And joining Keith and I are Dre and Art.

Hi.

Happy.

Hi.

Big howdy.

We've all been gaming.

We've all been, we've all been like capital G gaming, I think.

With this next thing we're going to talk about, which is Absalom.

Absolum?

Absalom?

Absalom?

No one knows, and I think it's rude to try to guess.

Do any of us know why it's called this?

Yes, I do.

Oh,

oh, interesting.

Huh.

This is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in the style of Streets of Rage or Final Fight or

the more modern Streets.

Or the Teenage Reading Ninja Turtle games are probably maybe

the biggest, or the Simpsons arcade game in our generation was probably one of the biggest ones.

What is the biggest side-scrolling beat-em-up of all time that an audience that isn't

Castle Crashers?

Castle.

Oh, boy.

But did Castle Crashers make it off the Xbox 360 in culture?

I don't know.

A lot of fucking people had an Xbox 360, though.

Yeah, but they were mostly our age, right?

I mean, I guess so.

This is not the answer, but I found out when playing with Keith right before we came on here that

Keith has never heard of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.

Interesting.

The beat-em-up.

Or the version.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Or the non-beat-em-up, the side-scrolling well there's also a boxing game where michael okay no never mind this is just a bad uh

search result i was like oh they made uh they also made a boxing game called michael jackson's moonwalker but no michael jackson is just a playable character in ready to rumble to boxing right i guess for for people who've never played one of these uh these are action games uh that you might you know i think in some ways stuff like dynasty warriors inherited a lot of the design elements elements of this and the the warriors series and turned it to 3d where you're going from group to group fighting a bunch of people managing your health getting pickups items you know consumable items on the ground to like heal yourself sometimes you have super moves you're doing throws you're doing sometimes you're doing counters but the classic version of this was

really focused on walking side to side uh sometimes moving forward and backwards in the in the screen like towards and away from the camera uh both final Fight and Streets of Rage, and the TMNT game and the Simpsons game all did that.

Um, and um, uh, focused, a big focus on I'd say aesthetics, like aesthetic identity was like a core part of the beat-em-up, where it's like you were there for like big, larger-than-life character design, both for the player, player characters and the enemies that you're fighting, the big bosses you're fighting,

the environments were really highly detailed, and then the music was really like key to what made one of these one of these.

The TMNT game had a really memorable soundtrack.

Streets of Rage drew on house music and other club music of the era to create a really memorable,

you know, without crediting any of it.

And sometimes just for inspiration, but always like interpolated in big ways.

All these games are filled with really like...

All the best ones are filled with really sharp identities from that stuff.

And in fact, the studio that made this, or I guess the publisher that made this, Dot Emu, or the published this and then and then guard crush games who is one of the two developers the other one is super monks I say guard crush games and dot emu uh or dot emu dot mu dot mu probably like emulation yeah right right dot emu emu the bird bird right uh dot mu uh has done a bunch of um side-scrolling beat-em-ups for like like like uh new entries into old established uh series like streets of rage 2 um or rather like streets of rage they did streets of rage 4 that's um came out like five years ago that came out in uh 2021 i believe i don't know 2020 2020 so came out mid came out mid covid came out uh it's like uh april 30th

early covid early covet super early covid covet had just started and we were all like oh i guess there's a new streets of rage business owners were protesting lockdowns on April 30th, 2020.

That's what was happening.

That is what was happening.

And I will say,

very quickly, I was not a big Streets of Rage 4 person because I think it missed on some of those big identity aesthetics.

things.

I didn't feel like it felt like a Streets of Rage game, but I always felt like the combat was interesting.

And that's part of why I'm so excited about Apsalum, which is one of these, but it's fantasy and it is a roguelite in the model.

I think most directly of Hades.

Yeah.

You know, Dead Cells you can make in Paris, and there's lots of great, very popular roguelites, but it Hades is just kind of like all over this one, I think, in many different ways.

But Dre, you, you were the one here who like were came to us and were like, Hey, is anyone else playing this?

This is good.

Yeah.

How did you hear about it?

What do you, what do you, what did you, what was your initial take on it?

How did I?

I'm pretty sure I think I saw Dia on Blue Sky like like repost something about it.

Yeah, shout outs for real.

And then I went to look at it, like on the Steam Store and it was like, oh, this just came out.

Oh, it's like, you know, 10% off or whatever for its launch day.

Oh, this looks cool.

I'll buy it.

I'll check this out.

And then I played like 20 minutes and I was like, oh.

Oh, this is, this is like a game that I have wanted for years.

Like, I have wanted a beat-em-up roguelite in this style for a very long time.

And it's, it's hidden.

It's got the juice.

I think like that's what I posted like an hour after I linked it.

I was like, oh yeah, this game's got the juice.

Just like the immediate feel is so strong that

you're like, okay.

At this point, they have to fumble it for it not to be good.

You know, like the simple interaction of

moving characters around, doing combos,

knocking characters into each other and off the wall.

Like you can can do like, like you can air juggle somebody off the wall in this game.

And all of the ways that they're bringing in both interesting build options from, you know, roguelite style build mechanics, and then like fighting game elements without it getting like too interested in button execution in the sort of like you're not like doing, you're not doing like dragon punch

motions with the joy.

At least I'm maybe.

No.

Yeah, maybe.

You're not.

You're not.

You're not.

Okay.

Okay.

So, so, yeah, I think between all that stuff, I was like, oh, shit, this just feels good.

Yeah, I feel like Absalom is one of the like rare type of games where it is just as rewarding to be a vibes like button masher as it is to play like a very like technical precise style and both feel good and neither one feels like well it's not fair that i'm trying really hard and this button masher is just getting by.

Like both ways just feel really good.

And I think to your point, different builds also like encourage and lean into those different like approaches.

Yeah, definitely, because there's definitely times when, and I even think there's different moments that work that,

you know, encourage different play styles where like, oh, it's just a bunch of, you know, so it's a fantasy game.

You are a bunch of characters who are working with a goddess, the mother, who is very very pregnant, maybe pregnant with all of nature or the future or something.

It's hard to tell.

Yeah.

Um,

uh, and uh, you are

maybe for hundreds of years, and maybe just and maybe always pregnant, maybe just has never not been hard to say.

I don't know, there's something about the bad guys using magic to keep her from giving birth, right?

I see.

Yeah, the sun king Azra, uh, who has taken all the magic for himself, classic fucked up sun king, especially like a sun god king they always just like want it all so they always want it all uh uh has taken it all for for himself wizardry outside of his you know system outside of his his crew has been outlawed and you are a group of i mean you're a group of wizards but wizard seems to mean anyone using magic that yeah and that dwarf who has a gun

i don't even he could do magic i can do magic like yeah within the game lore you're a wizard because you are able you have gone through a process that allows you to attune to a ritual.

I think that's how you write

any of the right because the way the game works is like as you progress through a level or through the levels, you occasionally like you'll beat a screen of enemies and then you'll get a reward.

And sometimes that reward is like currency for the meta progress where you're unlocking new starter moves and stuff like that, or passive bonuses that stack from run to run.

But sometimes what you're getting is like

if you do punches, you start building up electric charge and then it cashes out into chain lightning.

I guess that's magic, even though it's not, even though he's just a little dwarf with a gun, you know?

So, yeah.

I mean, I played most of the time as an elf with a sword.

Yeah, this is true.

But that sword could do magic, could do like fire magic and shit.

So

it's pretty.

You were doing that all the time.

We played some multiplayer.

That's true, but can't the gun do fire magic too in the same way?

It can.

Is that fire magic?

I guess that's fire magic.

Yeah, you just put the magic in the bullets.

which well then i don't know if we're talking about other characters but then the next one's just like a robot

the next one is cider a robot cider cider is a is a puppet uh cider is a

cider is a hole like leg uh

cider is like extremely like a gender all genders at the same time that's yeah i i was getting i was getting that vibe you know who i was getting the vibe of for friends of the table listeners cider gives real hazard from song fial vibes with that mask and the puppet stuff you know uh sylvie's one of sylvie's characters over the course of the season um i guess probably we didn't really see a hazard do too many air juggles uh or use a grappling hook yeah i used to think someone with a grappling hook arm is a robot maybe i'm i see i see my options but what is there like the meaning yeah what's the meaningful difference between a magically animated puppet and a robot

I don't think we have time for this question.

This is kind of a big one.

Or we have plenty of of time because the answer is there's no difference.

No, I think that's.

There's a giant difference.

It depends on how much personhood the robot has.

This is true.

This is true.

Yeah, we definitely

think that the puppet or the puppet.

Right.

Well, is it a puppet if is it a puppet if no one is puppeting it?

No.

The game calls

them the puppet.

Okay.

In like an achievement.

The game goes like

the puppets.

Don't spoil this first game because there is this sort of character stuff happening, right?

I think you're furthest in than us.

Further in than us.

When I looked at the, when you like load your save, it gives you a like progress percentage.

I am at 95%

content.

You're gaming.

Yeah, I've played 30 hours of this game.

Oh, my God.

Go.

I would have guessed that.

We'll talk about how that came to be in a little bit.

Yeah.

I would have guessed I was so much further back than that.

No, yeah.

Um, you will once you like, I forget technically like what the unlock parameters are, but once you like beat the boss the first time and later on, you start to get like specific like character quest lines that task you to like, hey, go this route and make sure you have this item on you, or take this route and like make sure you have water magic so you can swim in the water.

Um, and those give a lot more like character story stuff.

Yeah, don't worry about that.

Okay, well, this is the thing that's fun with this game is because

we were on a call earlier.

Keith and I were playing, and Art was on the call too.

And Art and I kept talking about, like, oh, you know, when you do the heist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And Keith's like, the heist?

What do you mean?

Yeah, this is exactly what I was going to say.

You know, Dre, you talked about like, take this path, take this path.

That's like, one of the interesting things about this game is that, in addition to having these branching paths, there's a bunch of stuff to do on the paths, including like, it seems like random events or, or maybe like not random, but ordered events.

Like, I went down a path with Art because I played a couple runs with Art after, and it's a path we had both been down, and we got in a fight with two big bears, and we were like, these bears were never here before.

Like, what's going on?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's stuff that's like, you know,

clearly ship.

So we talked about the paths.

You start the game, you immediately get a choice.

Do you go down into the woods, or do you kind of go up through the like the

shoreline, and then into like a human, a human village, basically?

And if you go to the forest, you end up in a goblin village instead.

Uh, also, the goblins and humans fight each other sometimes.

Um, but along the way, you start running into characters, cider, this puppet-like character that we've described.

You'll bump into them a few times.

Um, you'll you'll run into a situation where there's like an NPC who has something to say, or uh, oh, hey, in the heist case, first you you walk, the first time that you play through the zone, you see that there's a locked door, and there's some people behind the locked door.

And then the second time through, there's someone outside the locked door being like, hey, if you pay me 50 bucks, you can come in because you're collecting gold in this game

in classic adventuring fashion.

There's a lot here that reminds me of the Capcom

D D beat-em-ups from the arcade.

Oh, fantastic.

For sure.

And like getting gold.

is one of those things and spending it on items and stuff.

And so the second time you go through, you pay the 50 gold and and they let you in.

And there's a group there that's like, oh, we're about to go do a heist.

Do you want in on the heist?

Here's where to go.

And that sort of stuff happens pretty often.

And it seems like it's going to keep happening, Dre, based on what you just said about character stories and stuff, which is a lot where the Hades vibes are coming from to me between that and the art style.

Yeah.

Yeah, because there's probably...

Have any of you all beat the Under King yet?

No.

I don't think The Under King is beatable.

This is like when I'm at the arcade, and it's like, well, if I put in 20 more bucks, maybe I'll beat the Under King.

That used to be a lot of arcade play when I was playing.

I was so close on my first run.

I got 70%,

maybe 60% of the way through solo.

And then Austin, you and I got about the same amount through.

And then Art and I disconnected before facing

the Undead King.

And so we both immediately lost solo going in with no health at all.

Yeah.

Dre, did you end up beating the other question, which is, did you end up beating the Under King through getting enough of the passive unlocks that are like, hey,

you get like a revive once per session and

you can increase how much you revive at, or you just get more HP, your crits do more damage.

Or do you feel like you locked in and like started doing the parries and the dodges and the learning

the uh loop and stuff um more uh a little both both and i think like the more i played the game that like that ratio would change so like at this point

i very when i first did it very much felt like getting those upgrades was what was like charting along with me progressing further and further in a run um

now i've played the under king enough with like all the different characters that i'm pretty good i mean i'm not like perfect but i'm pretty good at being able to like okay that's his tell he's going to do this animation right you dash these three times this is clashable this isn't clashable um

i've i've learned ways that you can basically like just ignore his like big fire gun and then just go punch him while he's doing his big fire gun um right it's it's very much a game that like encourages that kind of stuff too um

as far as like really rewarding you for for dealing with the mechanics Art, what were you going to say about the Underking?

Or was it just that he's invincible?

As far as yeah, the Underking is invincible.

No one can counter the Under King's attacks.

I'm looking for in the game, it's going to just offer me the opportunity to be with the Under King.

Maybe the Under King is

not the right idea.

The Under King.

That's what you're looking to be.

This is like the best trope in when television talks about video games and someone says, no one's ever made it to level four.

No one's ever beaten the Underking, even though he's very clearly like the developer said that beating the Underking was impossible, right?

Yeah, I can see the map.

I can see that there's stuff there's a whole second.

I like

the Under King, but what if they're fucking with me?

What do you just get around him?

Have you considered just being like, What if I don't fight him?

Fuck it.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm like, once you fail 10 times, you can't sneak around

the Underking path.

Right, right.

I mean, yeah, there's definitely been times when I'm like, I mean, we just, we lit that forge, Keith.

Maybe the Forge lets us

take an elevator above and around.

You take the Wonka elevator so you can just go sideways, too.

It's just not a big deal.

The thing that I like about this game is, you know, we talked at the beginning about, you know, how...

like solid the combat feels um and uh dre you mentioned like that you do feel like there's a mix between the upgrades, uh, really working to help you beat things that were difficult, but also you're just getting better at the game.

I had a moment, my moment of that came today where I was just like, you know, I had done like six or seven runs or something like that, maybe six runs, and

uh, I couldn't beat the goblin champion.

And I was like, oh no, I just suck too much at this game to play or to talk about on a podcast.

Uh, And I said it to my partner, Isaac, I was like, I'm so bad at this game.

And then I had the worst run that I've had in multiple runs and then upgraded nothing.

And then the next run made it

to and through the goblin champion, taking essentially zero damage the entire time.

And I was like, oh, I'm good at this game now.

And then I made it to the Under King on that same run and almost won solo.

And I was like, oh, something happened.

Something happened, and suddenly I could do this.

Was there like a particular because there's all these techniques?

I was going to say, is there a particular technique that you started like zeroing in on?

It was really just patience in general.

Like, I feel confident in my ability to execute the clashes, which is like a counter when

you do your big swing at the same time as they're attacking you.

I'm good at the, I'm okay at the deflecting, which is when you like dodge into an attack to block it.

And I'm, I think in between those two, like the dodge, where you dodge up, like off the attack plane, and then attack back down in to where they had just swung.

Like those are like kind of the three

defensive maneuvers that make up the combat.

And I feel pretty good at those, except that I get so aggressive.

And I end up getting really punished by going in.

And this happens in any game that is willing to punish me for getting too aggressive.

Yeah.

And

why would you ever use the brakes in Mario Kart?

Right.

Yes.

And so

every game that I'm like struggling with, it's always just like, can I find the fun in being patient?

And I think that I, that clicked with me to like today, like two hours ago.

Funny.

I'm fully the opposite of Keith in terms of ranking of

techniques.

I think I'm very good at deflect.

I think I'm okay at dodge, and I think I'm bad at clash.

I was like, I need to go do the clash tutorial.

Just do it over and over again.

Just do it a few more times.

Who are you playing as mostly art?

I've really settled into Carl.

Okay.

Ooh, okay.

We got a Carl player.

I like Carl.

I didn't like Carl at first.

Carl is a little dwarf with a cool gun.

Yeah.

Carl's arcanas do not speak to me, but but Carl's picking people up and

carrying them, that, that did speak to me.

That moves you unlock the thing that lets you do like the charge forward grab.

That was like I was going to ask if you'll have gotten that far into the game with those kind of

forever.

No, that's a per-run choice.

No.

Oh, it is a per-run run choice.

You're right.

You're right.

It is a per-run choice.

I forgot.

You get it when you're in the middle of the day.

That last run that we did, I had that and it felt like, yeah, it felt like, oh, this is, yes, this is the version of the character I want to play.

For people listening, there are arcanas are like, you hit RT or R2 or ZR or whatever the fuck it is.

ZR on Switch.

Yeah, that's what we're playing on key.

Z is the back button from N64, so any button that's back has to be the Z of that.

Now that there's L and R.

Right.

Now that there's an L and R, it's L, Z, and L R instead of just Z.

Oh, right.

And that's why Pokemon Z A is the behind.

Everyone Nintendo sucks.

They fundamentally don't know how to make a console that's not an N64.

It's really still.

Like, I bought a Switch to play Pokemon.

Yeah.

And I was very happy to have this game to also play

because...

It helped distract me from the fact that I swore an oath to myself not to buy a Switch 2.

And I just did it.

And I was like, ah, fuck, I can't believe it.

Luckily, Pokemon's really good, and this game's really good.

So I'm kind of happy playing the Switch.

I maybe love the Switch again as a form factor to have a Switch that runs the games that are coming out.

The games that are good that you actually want to play.

And if I could say something directly to Nintendo, you can keep going like this forever.

You don't have to make games that don't run on the console.

You can make games that run on purpose forever.

Okay.

Can they?

What if we can't?

What if they made a game that didn't, that was like future-proof?

Do you know what I mean?

Like made it where it was bad on this one but would be good if you bought it again on a different console six years ago see now i can see how that would be appealing because you might get me to pay 70 or 80 dollars for a game and then charge me ten dollars again for

the amount of a console yeah uh but don't do that because everyone hates you yeah but does that matter they're still gonna give us the money

It matters to your mortal soul.

What's the

emulation scene looking like right now?

It's

looking like a future lawsuit is what it's looking like.

Yeah, unfortunately, Dre, the lawyers have been sent to you for saying that, for suggesting it.

They're now going to say that you made it happen.

I'm sorry.

And I am also, I now have to publish this with you saying it, because if I don't, I'm aiding and abetting.

Sure, yeah.

That's how laws work.

None of us are lawyers.

You can't put us to jail.

That's how that works.

That's how that works.

Only lawyers can go to the jail.

Only lawyers can go to jail.

Oh, Lord.

But yeah, so

that's a good example of what...

We were talking about the ZR button, because I wanted to say what an Arcana is.

God damn it.

Every character has...

No, you're good.

We were doing pits.

Every character has a basic special attack that they can do with just hitting the R2 button or the ZR button.

And

there's a bunch of those that you can unlock over the course of play.

And so that's everything from like,

I'll talk about that again, the first character that you, or one of the first two characters with the sword, the kind of like draconic lady with the sword, does like a dragon punch style uppercut.

But then eventually she can also do like a big wave of flame with it or a counterattack.

And then on top of those, you find these crystals that give you the kind of passive Hades style buffs.

And those can range from, like I said before, oh, every punch you do slowly charges up a chain lightning attack.

Two entirely new verbs, like for Carl, if you hit up and your attack or up in your special move, maybe.

It's your special move, yeah.

It's your special move.

Not your super special move that takes bar that I was just describing with the like the dragon punch, but like your skill.

Your skill.

It's almost like a heavy attack for everybody or an alt attack because with cider, it's a grappling hook that lets you like zip in with them.

Yeah, I think the game terms are strike and skill.

There we go, skill.

So every time you use skill, you're getting your chain lightning up But there's also ones where it's like if you hit up and skill you'll charge forward and grab somebody or you get a new counter attack or you get a new follow-up after a

dash in or

like a like a dive kick I really like getting the dive kick.

It just feels good to do I think all of that stuff means that you do end up getting these builds where you're like

oh for this this character has all this different type of expressivity and and different ways to play but on this build or on this run i am someone who throws stuff um one time with cider i got a bunch of things that was just like more throw damage

um and

i got a stage like i got a screen where it was two dynamite goblins on each side of me and let me tell you I just waited and collected 20 bombs from them.

Oh my God.

And that was the run.

I got, that was the closest I've come to beating the Ender King because I just got to like the goblin champion and at that point I'd basically had the goblin champion down but I still spent like four bombs on him and I got to the underking and it was like listen buddy I'm just gonna throw bombs at you until you're dead and I was doing such high damage with that stuff and then I had the thing that you throw the coin like yeah you coin throwing that coin throwing is so total shock how good that is it's unbelievable so like those things are it's really the breadth you have and what even just these handful of characters play like is really cool.

And it's the thing that I think has always been the promise, right?

You said, I always wanted one of these.

And it's like, oh, they just made it.

They made it where it's a good beat-em-up, and there's lots of expressivity and lots of like variation in how the characters play.

One of those upgrades for Carl is that you can fly through the air with his gun.

Like you just like

Sam?

Yes, you're just like shooting, you're like rocket jumping around the screen, and you can do that three times before you have to land, and it does damage.

That's cool.

That makes a lot of sense because with Cider, they're so committed to letting you just be in the air forever with combos.

Yeah.

So it makes sense to find a way to give that to someone else, too.

Dre, there's a fourth character, is my understanding?

Yeah, the fourth character, um,

yeah, you all haven't made it to the island where the frog people live, but it's a

frog with the underking.

Yeah, there's a frog person.

The developers made it impossible.

There's a million dollars for the first person to do it.

Key, you pointed something out that I think we need Dre's opinion on.

Oh, sure.

They just fucking put Jonathan from Perpetua in this game.

Yeah, Jonathan's in here.

Wait, which

sales the he has to run the store after you

boss.

Hey, what the hell, game?

Yeah,

they did, huh?

Money, please.

That's right.

And he's got a loyalty card and everything.

And he's got turtles that we invented.

Turtles that talk and kind of are cool.

There's never been another beat-em-up with a turtle guy in it ever.

That's us.

But yeah, so I think at that point, you know, for me, I was like, oh, this is really cool.

This is great.

I'm really enjoying it.

And then, of course, I got distracted from it.

So I have not put in 30 hours to this game.

I see how you would do it, but I am surprised that you did get all 30 hours in in the time since you told us about this game the other day, Trey.

How did it just get you?

Tell me that was on Thursday.

Yeah, so this this game actually came out in the middle of a very recent horrible thing, which was us like unexpectedly,

our dog suffered what the vet described as like an embolism.

And she was basically like mostly paralyzed from it.

And so she was 11.

She was a bit older, but like not so old that we felt like we had to worry about losing her anytime soon.

And then,

you know, the thing happened.

We took her to a hospital.

You know, we waited kind of like a day and a half.

And if anything, things were getting worse.

And so that's when we took her to her usual vet and we had to make the decision to put her down.

Buddy.

Yeah.

I don't have any of what is your all history with pets.

I had pets my whole life:

cats and dogs and

rats and ferrets and fish.

We've just always been a pet household growing up.

And I'm still, and like, I've never not had a pet like in adulthood.

Yeah.

I had pets all through my childhood.

I had cats and dogs.

I had a steak.

And I even, you know, as an adult, I, I guess I've never had my pet, but I've often lived with people who have pets and I've had partners who've had pets and I've had, you know, roommates and stuff.

so like I've had pets in that way as an adult but I will say that like part of my

there's a couple reasons why I don't have pets one despite knowing that I am absolutely a cat person who would love to have a cat I know how busy I get and back when I especially when I was working at Vice or when I was you know going on trips a lot for my last job like I would I would feel really bad if I couldn't be around for the pet consistently, especially when I was living alone.

And it's like, I can get a cat sitter, I can get a dog sitter,

but

it makes me feel bad.

And not in a way that I'm like, there's no judgment about this.

This is a thing.

This is fine.

You can get a cat.

But it hits me in my gut in a way that's bad.

And on top of that, I'm afraid of losing a pet.

I know how hard it would hit me, you know?

And that is a cowardly thing to do to avoid love for fear of loss.

But sometimes a person is a coward.

And that's just the way it is.

I don't, I, you know, I'm not arguing for the position.

I'm just living it, you know.

Um, and I, the actual thing is, I, I had a really rough situation finding a roommate's uh pet

who had died, and it was one of these things like, oh, I can't do, I'm, I could only live through this because it was not my pet.

I can't come home to this with a pet that I have loved and cherished for a decade.

Um, and so that is my experience.

And so, with that said, obviously, truly sincerest losses or sincerest, uh, you know,

yeah, I I had cats growing up.

We had cats growing up.

I had a cat that died when I was pretty young, but that cat was a

mean cat.

But, you know, I was still sad.

I was four years old.

It was devastating.

Then we got a couple new cats, and they've lived a while.

The one that I was closest to died while I was at college, and I thought my parents kind of handled the situation badly.

And so there was a little bit of like resentment there.

Then I

lived in this, I lived, Austin and I lived in the same apartment, but not at the same time and interacted with the same cat there.

Smelly cat.

Smelly cat.

Did you ever see Fixed Jerry?

No.

They fixed Jerry?

They fixed Jerry.

Not fixed in

the

neutered sense.

Yeah.

Fixed in.

Broken and repaired.

Yeah, they fixed it.

They fixed his hand with Jerry's butt.

Yeah.

Now, did they fix it to the part where he would sometimes just shit on someone's pillow?

I only saw Fix Jerry for about 10 minutes.

So,

I don't think we still have a cat.

That's part of it.

Listen, Jerry never shit on my pillow.

Jerry just shit on one of my roommates' pillows.

And I was quite fond of Jerry and Jerry's

and Grizzles, who I think you did not share an apartment with.

Did not share an apartment with Grizzles.

And now I have Mabel, and Mabel is becoming an old lady.

And luckily, I think they've solved pet death.

I don't think I'm going to have to

do it because I heard like just Dre dog is actually the last dog that's ever gonna die.

Yeah, oh, that's good.

There had to be one.

I'm sorry, Dre.

No, hey, I'm happy for everyone else.

It's okay.

Yeah,

yeah, so yeah, it's it's a tough one.

Um,

and that happened right as Absalom was

basically because it was um, it will be two weeks ago, like this Tuesday, that it all happened, basically.

Um,

I mean, I think, like,

how, whoa, whoa.

I know that that was the real person, but it sounded like someone hit a

soundboard button.

The mama button.

Someone hit the mama button.

That's actually, that's what the fourth character sounds like, guys.

I'm sorry to

spoil it.

I see.

Spoiler.

Dangerous baby.

Dangerous baby is here.

Dangerous baby is here.

Magic.

But like Austin, what you were saying about like

feeling like,

oh, feeling weirdly like beholden to a beholden isn't the right word, but like feeling like my life does not allow me to like show up for a pet in the way I would like it to.

I think like that is also my experience with pet.

And the thing I like about having a pet is that it basically forces me to do that.

Right.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And obviously, like you were saying, circumstances for people are very different, et cetera, et cetera.

But yeah, it is, it is one of the great,

I'm a real do as I say, not as I do.

Getting a pet might fix you, listener, because it will give you a reason to get out of bed in the morning, in the morning and like take care of yourself so you can take care of the pet.

I, you know, I'm not, I'm not, uh, I would never say don't do that.

Uh, however, yeah.

And so, like,

I filled a lot of, I almost said Perpetua.

That's the other podcast we do, friendsatthetable.net.

I filled a lot of time in Apsalom because I kept having these moments of time where I was like, oh, yeah, it's, I just woke up.

I need to make sure the dog doesn't need to go outside.

Oh, I just got back from work and I'm carrying in groceries.

I need to make sure I don't hold the door open or the dog will run out.

Or like,

like getting ready for bed that used to, she was Ellie was the last thing that I would think about before like going to bed and so there was just all these like weird little cues throughout the day that I didn't realize I was basically like relying on Ellie and like her schedule and her needs to like keep me in a functional rhythm totally so in addition with all of those kind of like markers gone I also just like

disassociated into Absalom.

Right.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I couldn't tell if where you were going with this was.

and so I dissociated into Apsilum and lost track of time.

Or where you were, I thought you, I really thought for a moment that what you were going to say was, and I'm smiling, I'm not making it light.

I hope people understand that we are really good friends.

We've been, we've all been friends for over a decade now.

I thought you were going to say, anytime I would take Ellie for a walk or like feed her, I played one round of Apsilum instead.

Like, I really thought that's where it was going.

Just like the weirdest

exposure therapy possible.

Exactly.

I was like, damn, this is wild.

Okay.

I looked up what to do when you quit smoking and just did that.

I just did that exactly.

100%.

Listen, that's hard too.

Fuck.

You know?

I think actually getting a dog is maybe a good thing to take up your smoking time.

So then it just kind of loops.

Then you do Apsilum.

And then when you have to quit

outside a lot, walking a dog, and you're like, this is when I should be smoking.

Yeah, that's good smoking time.

That's why you you figure out get a switch because you can play the game outside instead.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't walk around playing the switch with a dog, though.

That's you know, don't do that.

Yeah, like a dangerous thing.

So, and don't start smoking unless you're currently vaping, and then you should start smoking.

Wait, is this what is that smoking?

Smoking's cooler than vaping, vaping's really uncool.

Do the coolest.

You're talking about coolness.

I thought you were talking about like how to live longer, but no.

No,

I mean, we're going to find out vaping's really bad for you.

I'm 100% sure.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Do you think in 50 years people will talk about our generation more as the vaping generation or the draft kings generation?

Oh.

Draft Kings.

I thought I was too old to be in either of those generations.

They feel like inextricably aligned.

You are not too old to be in the Draft Kings generation, let me tell you, unfortunately.

Well, it's illegal in the state, so it feels like I am.

No, but we were pretty much, we could replace generation with like decade.

Era.

Yeah.

Era.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I

think

I think people will still be vaping in 50 years.

Oh, I agree.

And

if we're also still doing draft kings, no one's going to be talking about shit.

So it doesn't matter.

So either we'll stop doing draft kings, but not stop vaping, or we'll still be doing both and no one's going to be talking about anything.

You know, I mean, if DraftKings isn't made illegal pretty soon, we're going to start talking about like really serious societal problems.

Brother, we already are.

Yeah.

Again, I live in a state where it's not legal, so I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know what the legality is here.

I don't know anyone who's doing that, but I'm sure I know people.

I don't know anyone who's like talking to me about it.

I understand that like young men are basically bankrupting themselves.

Like, it would be better if they were dealing with like

bookies because, you know, bookies will

cut you off.

They might.

There's a lot of cut you off.

Yeah, if they decide that what you are is you have a stable enough income in life that what they want is for you to give them 10% of the money you make every week forever and not all of it right now.

They'll cut you off.

We're tithing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Tithing to DraftKings.

Well, no, you're normally tithing to Jimmy, the guy who comes by with the book to see whether or not you think that the Eagles can cover the spread.

But now we're just giving as much money as we can to DraftKings.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't know what the words cover the spread.

I love that for you.

Don't learn.

I don't know what that means.

Don't learn.

Don't learn.

Don't learn.

I can't explain to you.

I don't know what a spread is.

I don't know what it means to cover it.

I think that a spread is like an amount of points that you need to score.

And covering it means that you bet over an amount of minimum amount amount of points to make money.

No, you've described another bet.

You're right.

You've described another different betting scheme.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

You've described an over-under.

It's, but we don't need to go down this way.

Okay.

It's, it's, I don't do that.

I want to be clear.

I just grew up in Atlantic City and I grew up with family members who weren't.

You in Atlantic City?

This is like the other day when we were recording Friends at the Table and Art was surprised that you liked mouse hunt, mouse trap, mouse, yes, mouse hunt, mouse hunt, mouse hunt.

Mouse hunt.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that hasn't come up before, but I'm also sure that somebody's just gonna send me tape of us having that exact conversation at another time.

Did anybody see Mouse Hunt?

The movie?

The Nathaniel.

Yeah, the movie Mouse Hunt.

Yeah, Nathan Lane.

Who's the other person?

Who's the other?

There's another

Ernie.

Ernie.

Ernie from Sesame Street.

Ernie Sch.

I want to say Schmidt, but but I don't know.

Is it Ernie Schmidt?

It's not.

Hey, Nathan.

We're going to try to.

It's somebody I don't know named Lee Evans, but Christopher Walken is in that movie, apparently.

So, okay,

that's what I'm talking about.

I'm about to reference the Christopher Walking character.

Oh.

No, he plays a mouse.

He plays an Exterminator.

Sure.

I was actually going to bring up the Christopher Walking character.

This is my touchstone here.

By the way, this movie was not well received in the 90s.

I think it has aged like a fine wine.

This is an excellent movie.

It was excellent then.

I saw that movie in theaters.

I also saw it in theaters.

I loved it then, but I learned later in life that people didn't like it.

And I think that they're wrong.

It's fantastic.

I don't know if we've had the conversation, but I just talk about it so much because I like it.

It's just one of the things that I'm an evangelist for because I so strongly believe in it as like this jewel of 90s filmmaking that was that was unsung at the time and not rediscovered.

Keith, did anybody see Mouse Hunt?

And I say the movie, and Art says the Nathan Lane movie, and Keith says, Yeah, the movie Mouse Hunt.

So, yeah, we've had this talk.

Okay.

All right.

How was it a long time ago?

This was Song Field, so not that long ago.

All right, but I mean, a lot has happened.

It's still like three and a half years.

Three and a half years.

Yeah, a lot has happened.

A lot has happened.

Mouse Hunt's really good.

I'd like to send you the study I saw about what sleep deprivation does to your brain.

And then

people having a kid is like,

oh, I thought this was an accusation about this is me that was JSC

for watching too much mouse hunt.

Well, every time I think about going to sleep, I instead watch.

Oh, no.

And you get so tired after watching Mouse Hunt that you just got to watch it again.

That's Ensompiel.

Oh.

Anyway, absolutely pretty good.

Yes, it's really good.

So I guess to wrap back around to the actual topic that you very generously brought to us today,

are you now at a place, though, where for me, when I fall into those holes, right?

So, you know, I've not fallen into one associated with pet death, but I've fallen into associative, you know, periods of my life when I'm dealing with,

you know, something in my personal life.

When I lost my job a couple of years ago, it was definitely a long period of just like time is disappearing.

Or if like I'm under a lot of stress at work i'll come home and then just like oh i don't exist for three hours and i'm scrolling or i've yeah you know i think there's a lot of tv shows i've watched or have watched that i barely remember because i watched them in a sort of dissociative trance in in a sort of just like i need to recover after work or after a long conversation with a loved one that went weird you know whatever

using that to scrolling is the worst because

i could be doing anything else and enjoying my time instead of just losing it.

Do you think we're going to be known more as the vaping generation, the drafting generation, or the scrolling?

Scrolling generation.

Scrolling generation.

I can't do anything about how the world is, so I'll just scroll through it.

The generation following us might just out-scroll us.

Oh, they're definitely going to out-scroll us.

Yeah.

We're like, I don't know.

The stuff that I'm scrolling has gotten worse every year.

So it has, man.

It really has.

But I, Dray, and I

want to know

about this with Ellie and losing this time to Absalom.

Like, for me, you know, two years ago next month, we had to very suddenly put down one of our ferrets who is very young.

And it was very tough because there was a month of giving her medicine to see if she'll get better and watching her closely every day was really tough.

And like my thing then was I had been already for five years, almost five years, been a huge Taskmaster fan.

But I forged an intense bond with re-watching Taskmaster seasons over and over during the month

where Honey was sick leading up to putting her down.

And like,

I'm really grateful that

those feelings that I have towards a show that I really like remain strong and intensely positive.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask was, do you still feel positive about this because of that association?

Yeah, it is, it was almost, I have, I almost feel like grateful for that time, right?

Oh, I meant to Dre.

That's where I had been.

We got way off track.

That was the thing I was going to ask.

We were on the same page, right?

Yeah, I was bringing, I was also bringing us back into that.

I thought you were clarifying what I said.

Yeah,

I'm curious about that from Dre, too.

Yeah, no, I think, I think, I, no, I'm not, I don't think I am.

I am very grateful for that game in the way that you described, Keith.

And I think, like,

it like

playing the game under those circumstances, I have definitely like, quote unquote, like tried to lose myself in a game to try and disassociate sometimes.

And I, I don't know what it is.

I can't do it anymore if it's not, like, really doing it for me.

Um, 100% agree.

Yeah, it's, I feel like I'm scrolling.

It's the same feeling.

It's like, I could be doing anything else, man.

I'm in the absolute nater of my video game enjoyment in my life right now.

Like, it's so hard for me to pick up and play and have fun with a game that isn't like really hitting for me.

Yeah.

I think that that has a lot to do not just with our own lives as we get older, but also with where games are right now.

I don't know.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who was like, what's happening in video games right now?

Yeah.

And, you know, normally I have like a quick gut answer, which is like, oh, this is the biggest, you know, four years ago, I was like, or six, seven years ago, and I was like, Fortnite is the biggest game in the world.

It's just kind of remained that.

And like, I can have the Fortnite conversation with you, you know, or I can have the Breath of the Wild conversation, the Roblox conversation, the gambling conversation, whatever it is, right?

The Switch conversation when that came out.

And it's like, I can say like Silksong did numbers, but like, it doesn't feel like that's what's happening in games to me.

Silksong was put there.

It was brought to Earth to do numbers

to like to make almost to make people go, video games are still fine.

But I think that, look, real games are still doing numbers.

You know, I think that it's a a labor of love for people who absolutely had the place and the time to like devote themselves to just making a version of the thing they'd already made, but like deeper mechanically and in a, with a sort of deep

focus, which I am all for 100%.

But I also do think that there's like

that can't be everything for everyone.

And I think that there's like, I don't know, I feel like we've not had a moment where I feel like there is a sense of,

oh, wow, I'm taken with this thing in the way that I was years ago.

And so, yeah, Dre, I totally get what you mean, which is like

there was a time in our lives where, oh, I could give myself to a game, any game, if what I needed to do was just not any game, but like the breadth of the Army of Two.

Or I could have played Army of Two.

When I was in my most depressed in undergrad, I absolutely could have played Army of Two.

You know, when I was in my most depressed at high school, I did play Army of Two.

And it's not like that, which does make these sorts of things feel different and does make them feel not as much like scrolling.

You know?

Sure.

Well, it's sort of a shame here, which is like the game that I think I would be playing if I wasn't playing this is Hades 2.

And it's like, when I'm done with this, I'm not going to be like, time for Hades 2 because I'm going to feel like I've just done it.

I've got a bitch.

Of course, Hades 2 will be out forever.

They're not taking it back.

There's no Disney Vault.

Yeah, so I have a long time to go.

Yeah.

Once Disney buys all video games.

Well,

I think I might have bought Hades 2 at Early Access, and I was like, I don't want to do this.

And so I think I still like

that.

That's how I felt about Hades 1

when it came out.

Sure.

Greek mythology is fun to play around in.

It is.

And it's like the other thing I'm doing is I'm just like turning on MLB the show still.

Just like, I'm going to

put in it and this week all they put out was the extreme program and it's like it's just like it will be the shows being like you fucking suck man

don't play this week

they're saying that to you they're saying it to me what is the extreme

program is like super super hard challenges like hit nine home runs in a row or something oh is that about right

well you have you have to do like the it's it's all like real stuff so it's like the nick curts game from this Jury have to hit four home runs in a game.

Right.

Or

what Shohei did the other night will probably end up being one of these.

We'll end up there, yeah.

Because this year they had Clayton Kershaw who threw nine shutout innings and hit one home run.

Right.

I see.

And it's like,

and then it's like

single player content that's like super hard.

Like

they have like modes they usually have where now you have to play it at much higher difficulties.

Right.

And it's hard to hit a baseball even on the computer.

Even on the computer.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

Some people do it in real life.

Yeah, it is.

I can't even imagine hitting a baseball.

Like,

I can imagine, like, shooting,

like, getting in any other sport, I can imagine that I'm able to do the basic thing that the sport is about.

Like, I can kick a soccer ball.

I can catch a football.

Hitting a baseball, that's like impossible.

Yeah, especially if you like watch pitching ninja and sometimes they do like, this is what it looks like from the umpire's point of view.

So, like, if it lets you imagine what it looks like for the batter, and it's like the when they have to decide to swing and where

and what, like, it seems impossible, the mental processing seems impossible.

Well, when a pitcher and a batter are in a duel, the time slows down for them.

Oh, because of how strong their nen is

how close to death they are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It does feel like that.

You know, when I was, when I was, I was taking an

anatomy and physiology class

because of, I switched high school, so I had to take like a weird elective for science

in my senior year of high school.

And

we had like a section on like

basically like that sports is comprised of genetic freaks in different ways and like how the amount of oxygen that your blood carries if you're like a professional biathlete is like

so much higher by percentage than the normal amount of oxygen that's carried by your blood.

And the baseball version of that is that like

really successful hitters in baseball can see fully like 50% better.

They have like 30, 20 vision.

I've heard that.

Which means they can see 30 feet for every 20 feet that you're supposed to be able to see.

But what about like fucking Max Muncie?

Max Muncie wears glasses.

I don't know.

And I'm always surprised that he's so good.

I don't know.

I can't explain Max Muncie at all.

You know,

he doesn't seem like he should be as good as he is at baseball.

This is part of why sports is so history.

Sports are great.

Sorry that I made it sports again.

No, it's fine.

You're here.

Never be sorry.

Yeah.

Now you just have to just keep doing it.

Making it sports anytime you come on the show.

Yeah, people will know just to not download these episodes.

No, our audience understands that sports are cool sometimes.

They just don't have to.

I think baseball is having a moment

inside of audiences that have historically not been super interested in sports.

That's interesting.

Well, and this is the time for baseball to a moment because the World Baseball Classic is happening this winter.

Yeah.

And one of the greatest living athletes is currently making wonders happen.

Yeah.

And then after next season, they're going to fuck it all up.

They're going to cancel the whole season.

We're going to lure the whole season of Shohei Otani's prime to the light

they're going to do because of money.

Yeah.

Well,

worth explicitly saying that art is blaming the owners, not the players.

Oh, it's 100% the owner's fault.

It's especially the cheap owner's fault.

Well,

this is an owner's lockout, right?

Like explicitly?

Yeah, yeah.

I have contracts going to the players going to be like, we'll keep going.

And they're going to be like, no.

Yeah.

A lockout is a...

owner's side thing, right?

Otherwise, it's a, or is there a player's lockout that's not just a strike?

It'll be a strike, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, It's tough because, I mean, the way that like media, sports media covers these things, they use the two terms like interchangeably.

Right, sure.

Weird.

Damn, the media is being bad.

Yeah.

Who knew?

The one thing that they're supposed to do, well, information.

They're not good at it.

It's bad out here right now.

It's bad out here.

It's been bad out here.

I know that we've been going for a while.

I have more to say about Absalom.

Please say some more things about Absalom.

Say some more things about Absalom.

Absalom.

We'll finish up some thoughts and then we'll wrap up because as a reminder to the people on this side of the podcast, we have another half of the podcast, which is our Pokemon episode, our Pokemon ZA episode.

So this will be a long one, but I think people like a long episode.

I am really liking the base mechanics that they've got going on.

I don't think we really touched on this much, but when you're done with your run, you're going and

there's multiple places to go for upgrades.

There's characters that are showing.

This is the thing that we said

makes it like Hades, basically.

It's that you have like a base that you're going back to.

You're getting a little bit more story.

You're unlocking permanent things.

And

this is the thing about Hades that I'm glad that they took because I had a lot of, I, that has a lot of potential in a lot of games.

Like, you know, what does roguelike or roguelite mean?

I don't know, or, and I really, I don't care.

I won't not use them

because they can be helpful to talk about.

But, you know, drawing those lines is not important for me.

But what is important for me is spending money to put on a tree to get a little thing.

This you like.

This I like.

Do you ever not like it?

Do you ever feel like it's not being done well?

Or does your brain just go, ooh, I got a little thing?

Yeah, I think

you can go, you can way overdo it.

You can have, look, there's 900 things on our tree.

And it's like, okay, and, you know, the things are really small or technical or, you know, 0.2%

like it.

Heavy punches.

And it's like, I can't count that.

I don't know what that means.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like when I have a big choice to make where I can get one thing or another.

And maybe I can eventually get both, but like deciding in the moment, do I want to unlock a new power for the blue lady or do I want to unlock a new power for

the new character who I haven't really touched yet?

Right.

You know, and then like the thing that I unlock makes a big difference.

Like,

Austin, when we were playing, you doubled the when you died, you can come back to life once.

That's an upgrade.

That's huge.

And then there's an upgrade to double the amount of health that you bring back.

Right.

And it's like, that's huge.

That

really changes.

That goes from

I can make it a few more screens to I might be able to take down this boss with this extra health.

Yeah, absolutely.

Those, those upgrades are really, really useful.

And those are universal in this game.

You get them for all of your characters instead of just like, you know, you get the single upgrade that is like, oh, I got a new

snot skill, a new arcana to use.

That's per character.

But stuff like how much HP you get when you revive or

how many arcana you can use, how many like, you know, arcana meters you have that can get filled up.

Yeah.

That's, that's uh like across all of your characters which is really nice so yeah and you've got like i think

at least one more upgrade vendor to unlock i imagine because yeah we don't have the fruit because we have to beat the king i guess to get the to use the fruit they yeah no one will take my fruit we have all this fruit it's just piling up i have 10 fruit they're fruit right dre yeah i think so i think

i thought i thought maybe you were hiding that they were secretly something no So here's what happened.

I'm comfortable sharing this.

It doesn't feel like a spoiler, but they're giving this currency that I can't use.

And

the area that you're running around in is it's not big, but I kept being like, am I missing the person who takes this?

Is there a room that I haven't noticed where this goes?

And so I was just like, what do I do with this third thing?

And they were like, that's your,

I don't know.

It's some kind of special fruit.

I can't remember what they call it.

But because I unlocked a character who gives me fruit for like doing achievements, basically.

And so I was like, oh, is that the ghost guy?

It's the ghost.

Yeah, the ghost gives me the fruit guy.

And I was like, I have all this fruit now.

I don't know what to do with it.

And I looked it up and it's like, oh, like basically the first thing that you find after the king gives you the fruit vendor.

Gotcha.

That makes sense.

Vendor who takes fruit, not who sells fruit.

Yeah.

Yeah, it'd be great to be be able to buy some fruit sometimes because you get damaged and you're like, oh, if I can just eat some pear fruit, that'd be great.

Yeah.

There's also, man, just like, there's such a level to the like class building or like run building that you all haven't gotten yet because there's like a huge mechanic thing that unlocks

after you beat the Under King.

Does it have to do with your left trigger that we don't have anything on yet?

Yeah, it unlocks your left trigger.

That is huge.

Like there's a whole button.

It's right.

It's front and center that's like, this is not usable.

Have you unlocked your triggers together?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And that was a surprise to get them both together before getting this.

Yeah, I thought I would get the other one first.

Yeah.

Do you want me to tell you what the left trigger is?

I'm comfortable knowing, but I'm also happy if it's just a core.

Okay, here's a question.

There's a lot more of the game after you get the left trigger.

Yes.

You were at like the halfway point of your run when you hit the Under King, basically.

And then this is a multiple run game.

Yes.

Yeah.

100%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, what is it?

It's just you get a second arcana.

So whenever you beat the Under King, he drops a second randomly selected Arcana for you that you then put on your left trigger.

That's great.

And each run, you get a second one at that point.

That's really cool.

That's cool.

So you don't get to pick it either.

So

it's also fun to be like, oh, well, I wasn't thinking about getting the dwarf like grenade launcher bullet, but I've got it now, so I should keep that in mind when I'm selecting my upgrades and things.

And those both, those are just another option to spend your mana on or whatever, right?

Okay, cool.

And there's never.

When I get past the dwarf kick, they're going to give me some health back, right?

I'm going to.

Maybe.

Maybe.

I mean, I guess this is the other thing worth saying about this is like, I've played a lot of beat-em-ups over the years, and, you know, I got really solid at a lot of them.

Uh, and it's been a long time since, first of all, you get one life, and then you eventually get the ability to resurrect with a little bit of life left.

That we've talked about this, you can get more and more, but like, you're playing a game that's fairly a run is, I don't know, a full run must be like an hour, right, or 45 minutes or something, yeah, right?

About there, um, but you have the one life, uh, and then maybe an extra life, and then you get to like some healing items along the way, and it's, it's, it brings attention to the side-scroller that I have not had

with a beat-em-up in since I was a little kid.

You know, you're like, ooh, every time you get hit, it doesn't just feel like, oh, yeah, well, of course, I got hit, it's a button-mashing beat-em-up, you're gonna get hit along the way, right?

Every time I get hit, I'm like, oh, I'm managing something poorly.

I shouldn't be in the middle of all these enemies, I shouldn't be, you know, I should be doing my side dodges.

The, the, because it makes you think about the run, right?

Exactly.

You're like, oh, shit, like, that might be the hit I need to beat the boss.

I just wasted it on this random goblin or whatever, like, or this, this you know seashell hermit crab monster or whatever right like I the hermit crab shouldn't fucking hit me the hermit crab set me off the

leg I hate these fuckers them and the birds I hate birds are that's how you know it's a good a good retro inspired game bad birds birds that that beat the shit out of you oh that well that too yeah like when it inspires you to hate yeah when it inspires you to hate like

a particular enemy that's retro gaming to me

you know that guy in particular don't follow the rules, in my opinion.

No, they don't.

Where I need to look for the birds, and if they're going to attack me, it's just higher vertically

than I have to look at anything else.

And I just don't like having to adjust my eye level.

This is also why I could never be a major league baseball player.

I don't like having to adjust my eye level.

Your eye level, yeah, totally.

They say adjusting your eye level, it's impossible to do.

No one's able to do it.

No one can do it.

No one can do that.

No one can beat the Under King.

We're all just stuck.

I really love all the clash and parry and the side dash.

I really love the side dash where you can step forward or backwards by...

It's either hitting the dodge button, like A and up or A and down or...

Double tapping.

It feels great.

Oh, double tap.

I didn't know about double tapping.

I've spent the whole time double tapping.

And it feels like the thing that it feels like is like sidestepping in Soul Calibur and then getting a hit in, you know?

Yeah.

It feels great.

It's really important to the fabric of the game that they have like three distinct defensive counter things.

Yeah.

Like that it really kind of sweetens the whole meal that

you can kind of like you can get really good at one, which is a sort of a difficulty thing.

Like like I just picked the one that I'm best at and I can get really good at it.

But then, the second level of like getting really good at all three of these things and having the patience to use them in the right space, like, that becomes

basically a superpower.

I'm so glad you said it's sort of like difficulty

based on how good you get a thing.

Because, have any of y'all seen the assist options in this game?

That's like the other thing that I wanted to really shout out.

I didn't know that there were.

There are like really good assist options in this game.

So, like, what we've been describing is a really a game that requires some real,

you know, um, uh, technique and understanding the systems and stuff.

But there is an assist mode that lets you change things like the damage values for yourself and enemies, um, uh, outright.

And you know, there's like the classic thing where it's like, oh, hey, if you know, this isn't what we intended, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, you could just straight up go in there and

change how much damage you receive, how much damage you deal, and you can also change uh you can change it on a per player basis so like if you are someone who's like i want to play hard mode you could specifically make i'm going to deal less damage and i'm going to receive more damage But if you're playing with someone who's like, I just kind of want to cakewalk for me,

they can have their own separate numbers.

I think that that's really cool.

There's not like a ton of assist options, but even just having that is huge.

That's a big one.

That's a real, because that's like, that's the meat of what

it is.

And it means that you could like dial it in in a way that you're like I don't want to play with no it's like by quarters right so it's like 0% 25% etc up to 200% so you'd be like I want to take a little damage I want to feel like I'm not having

a good enough time with where it's at I want to take 75% damage or I want to take 25% damage and that's really nice about that oh go ahead that's all that I'm just saying it's really cool okay uh it's that it it doesn't change that it doesn't change like behavior or number of enemies or like move sets right it kind of makes it feel like practice to like this could help you get better at this, not just like, you know, when you're dialing difficulty down, you know, making the

AI like less competent is, you know, doesn't doesn't help as much as just like taking less damage.

Right.

Yeah.

I hadn't thought about this, but you could imagine going into,

imagine

I've beaten the Underking finally, an impossible task, and I get to the Underking again.

And I'm just like, I can't beat this motherfucker.

I got lucky last time.

It might be nice to just go in and drop all the damage values down and just like spar with the underking.

Yeah.

Just learn the rhythms.

Learn the rhythms.

Yeah, exactly.

Or turn both things all the way in opposite directions and just whoop the underking right to prove there's no game after that.

Or turn it all the way up.

And you're playing like Bushido Blade, but with the Under King, where it's like basically one of the things.

Everyone's doing max damage.

Everyone's doing max damage.

Exactly.

I miss Bushido Blade.

Bring it back.

Yeah.

I don't think that's coming back now.

I don't think so either, unfortunately.

No, probably not.

What was the last one of those they made?

Two.

Bushido Blade?

Two.

I guess.

That would be about 50 years ago.

That's right.

There was a game called Kengo Legend of the Nine, which is like a Bushido Blade

alike.

And I think that it's actually actually directly connected in some ways because Kengo was

made by Lightweight, who had made Bushido Blade.

So it was like Bushido Blade, Bushido Blade 2, then Kengo, then Sword of the Samurai, and then the Kengo game I just mentioned.

So that's my, that's my, my, people don't know about the Bushido Blade and the Lightweight games series, but yeah.

I'm looking here.

The last game that they made was in 2022, and it was called Baku plus Neko.

So I think different energy.

I think.

Before that was Drive Girls.

I think maybe they're doing a different thing these days.

Yeah, it says now they're known for Hello Kitty games, according to Wikipedia.

There you go.

Good for them.

Yeah.

It's a strategy game that combines poker and flipper mechanics to rescue captive guests in a kingdom.

Baku plus Neko?

Yeah, you rescue little cats, I guess.

That sounds nice.

Yeah, that sounds nice.

That kind of connects us back to

pets.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Kind of the whole episode's about pets, really, when you think about it.

You go back to Pokemon.

So we did it.

That's true.

Yeah.

The ultimate pet.

Pets who can kill.

Pets who can rob an old woman in the graveyard.

Oh,

okay.

Yeah.

Pets who can rob you.

Pets that can rob you, right?

That's like the first thing that happens.

The first thing that happens is you get robbed by a pet.

You've probably already heard us talk about this because it's the first half of the episode that we haven't yet recorded.

So, you know, we kind of

just sound like you're bringing the callback.

That's right.

Yeah, we have to set up.

Say, Keith, say something really weird that we can set up as the punchline early.

We're going to do a backwards callback.

That's right.

So you have to do the punchline now, but the call, you know what I mean?

We're doing a callback.

We haven't just done the first part yet.

And next thing I know, I'm dying of poison.

This is going to be great.

People are going to be losing it.

And we're at friends of the table.shop for the and then I died a poison t-shirt.

Poison t-shirt.

Yeah, exactly.

This is episode three of the Outward LP all over again.

It really is.

People should go to watch the Outward LP.

If you go to friendsofthetable.cash, you can gain access to our Outward Let's Play for $10.

That is me, Janine, and Jack playing through Outward, getting poisoned pretty often now.

You can also support us at a bunch of other levels to get things like access to bonus episodes for Media Club Plus, our excellent

television and film and anime watching podcasts that Keith hosts.

This season, Keith, you are hosting a bunch of

great, spooky episodes.

Terrifying, storm-chilling for the Halloween season.

Of the M-Night Shaolan Oeuvre.

I just guessed it on something.

I don't know if that will be out.

It won't be out by now, but it'll be out.

No, but it will be out very shortly after.

I guessed it on.

It's coming out on Tuesday.

Actually, it is coming out this week.

So if it's not on Tuesday, it'll probably be...

My early week filled up very quickly, very suddenly.

So if it's not out on Tuesday, it'll be like Wednesday or Thursday.

There'll be a

bonus episode

of us all watching.

We do a watch-along of

The Last Airbender.

The MShamala.

It'll be on the next main feed episode.

It's true.

That's true.

true.

Or I don't know.

It's next.

It won't be next.

No, it'll be the one after.

It's the next one that we're recording, but not the next one that comes out, which is The Happening with Jack.

Yes, I'm currently listening through Lady in the Water, which is an excellent episode so far.

I'm really enjoying it.

Art, thank you for reading that book about Lady in the Water.

I only wish there were more books for me to read about these movies, not in general.

I've read in general.

I've been saying

you've read every book, but you still haven't beaten the Underking?

In reality, I keep reading the books, hoping they'll tell me how to beat the Underking, and they never do.

Yeah, Prima's gone.

Nobody's making a strategy guy for you anymore.

Damn.

Please follow this Russian literature.

They don't even mention the Underking.

Okay, the Underking has to show up in the Russian literature.

Actually, Dostoevsky's always talking about the Underking, actually.

Tolstoy is not, but Dostoevsky is.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

All right.

That's the main difference between them.

People are like, who should I read first?

I'm like, well, how much do you want to hear about the Underking?

That's right.

You can follow us.

We are on Blue Sky at Friends Hyphen Table for some reason, I think.

Is that right?

Yeah.

On Blue Sky, because they don't allow underscore table.

Yeah, I'm aware of that part because it sucks.

You can follow this show,

you don't follow, but you can send people to us by telling them we go to sidestory.show.

What else?

What else are we going to shout?

Are you friends at table.shop?

We don't really have any side story merch here.

We should get some side story merch going.

Yeah, we should.

I think we've got a pretty good lead.

Yeah, I think we've got a good.

Yeah.

That's true.

If we turn that around real quick, that'd be amazing.

You should go check just to see if it's.

Just check to see if there's a dying of poison shirt or something.

I don't think there will be.

But what if we made it just for a day and it was like bad?

Like a bad version of the show?

Yeah.

But only for the MS Paint.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Black Friday.

You can tell me.

This came up on the Crusader Kings.

Let's play that I do on the YouTube with Jack.

There's so many very funny words and phrases that come up in that.

I'm just like, we should just do the

Phrygian,

the dead cop shirt.

For a bunch of different things.

Just for a little bit.

Just for a little bit.

Have you seen

the excellent

Ranged Touch, the group that Cameron, Danny, and Michael run that I do Shelby Genre with?

Jack had a dream once that a shirt existed that said ranged touch investigates the cascade and made a post about it.

And so Cameron, for like a week, made that shirt available.

The shirt from Jack's three.

I did not know that.

It's a great shirt.

It's just like blue text on white.

Ranged Touch investigates the cascade.

So this is what I'm saying because we have a girl pope in our Crusader Kings, and I think a Girl Pope shirt would be amazing.

Wow.

Shirt would go crazy.

Yeah, I think it's the specific.

I actually mocked it up in

the girl Pope, but in the Got Milk text, it says Girl Pope.

yeah i've been hoping that the catholic leak would turn their attention to us

you said the catholic a league i thought you said leak at first which we got got a stuffy nose so yeah i don't even know if you can get a far-fetched in

all right friends of the table the catholic leak dot cash

i got it

I didn't.

Okay.

I remember I died of poison.

I have a

my arcana is that I can feel when someone hasn't gotten I see.

I got it.

I see.

Useful.

Unfortunately, very active these days in this world of ours, especially on Blue Sky, where you can follow us at friends-table.

You can also leave friends at the table.cash, friends of the table.shop, twitch.tv slash friends at the table, youtube.com slash friends at the table.

Those are all the places that we are,

I believe, media club.plus.

Please leave us reviews.

I don't have one in front of me.

Should I just, should I just, can someone

go find some?

I can find some.

I got it.

I can vamp.

Or you can vamp, and I can find one.

Yeah.

Hey, Art,

what's going on in LA right now?

All of it.

Yeah, all of LA is doing great.

I know that

there's a big street fair today that I think Jessica was going to

take the kid to, take MJ to.

And I think it didn't work out because the nap went too long, but it was like a cultural fare.

Oh.

Oh, that's fine.

I also really liked this summer's summer reading tote bag from the public library.

I thought it was very...

Ooh.

And if you have a public library near you, maybe they have a summer reading program.

And it's fall now, but next year.

They might have extras.

Yeah, they might have extras.

You should just go to your local library.

Yeah, I mean,

I've been going to the library so much with a a kid and it rules there.

Yeah.

Weapon Thane says,

Star Ocean will always be two.

And I don't know why.

I don't know how to read that.

No, that's not what it says.

I can see it.

Wait, what's the full thing say?

Because I can't say that.

Star Ocean will always be 25 cents plus deleted from cart.

This is a universal vibe.

Heard

Austin called me out personally for never even playing PSO despite claiming to enjoy dice and to hit in video games.

Yep, the I stands for I'm a coward.

He's right.

Maybe it's time.

Cursed DM sender.

Oh, this person tried to DM me on Blue Sky, and then Blue Sky

blocked them, like, temporarily banned them.

Yeah, and it was just to be like, oh, yeah, I should play PSO.

That was what the message was.

Like, it was not anything outlandish.

Does that stand for something else?

Is there like...

Oh, I should play PSO.

I should play Palestinian Solidarity Organization because this guy was like, we cannot have that.

We can't have this even in DMs.

We're reading your DMs for this now.

They would do this.

They would do this.

Blue Sky is terrible.

Follow me on there.

And as they have prophesied, the cycle is complete.

Thank you for listening to us.

We will be back soon.

Please go review us.

We're still at 4.9 on the Apple Podcast app.

We would love to hit that 5.0.

It would mean a lot.

We'll be back soon with more from Side Story to be continued.