The Pirate Yakuza Game Has Something for Everyone – Even Newcomers

So it's cold and flu season, and I got an important question for you guys.

Sure.

Where are you putting those sneezes?

Um,

explain.

Well, it took me about 27 years to realize that you, you know, to do the elbow sneeze.

Crook of your arm.

Crook of your arm sneeze, which is now generally considered to be the healthiest place to sneeze.

Yeah.

Apart from, I guess, the tissue.

But then it's in the crook of your arm.

So where are you putting that sneeze?

Oh,

well, you kind of zip past the thing that you're probably ashamed of which you what come on what you would do back when we worked together like 10 years ago griffin do you remember this that frush would carry around a ziplock bag and sneeze into it every time that's a very

nasty nasty sack yeah he would he would carry it around and he would it was so big that he couldn't like put it in his pocket so he always just had his nasty sack sort of like bundled up and it was a biohazard so he would just staple them to his bedroom wall across the season until we did a big nasty sack emptying.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, that, that certainly, I would hate for you to go to fall back into your old ways, Russ.

Yeah.

The new guidance I've seen coming out of RFK is to get real low down to the ground like you're doing a push-up and just blast it down onto the ground because your sneeze particles settle.

So his point, and I disagree with this clown on a lot of ways, but he says get real low to the ground and just sneeze right on the ground and then it'll stay.

A push-up sneeze.

A push-up sneeze.

Yeah, and what he says is really great about that is also you're doing a push-up.

So you're marginally stronger every time you sneeze.

And he has kind of like a catchy song

that they're using to promote this, right?

Yeah, he goes, push it up, push it up, push it up, get down on the ground and sneeze, you clown.

Fuck.

And I don't know why it makes fun of you at the end of it.

Well, he wrote it, you know.

But I mean, he's so fucking built.

He is.

He's so built.

He's really in one specific area and nowhere else.

He has a lot of what I call external physical health.

And that's got to count for

something, right?

My name is Griffin Mackerel.

I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Clamp, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Russ Fruschik.

I know the best game of the wee.

Welcome to the Best Season Show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive intergamement.

It's a game of the year club.

And just by listening, you, my friend, are a member this week.

Very excited.

Justin is on the toilet.

This week, very excited.

It should be noted, actually.

So last week, I made a mistake and said that Griffin died.

He didn't die.

He's here.

He's recording with us.

Justin died.

That was my mistake.

I frequently confuse the two.

I was

having trouble getting over a respiratory thing until I did my push-up seasons, and now I'm all better.

Yeah.

This week, we are talking about

like a dragon, pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

Okay, that one doesn't, it's not as hard to say actually as I thought it was.

It covers so many bases.

It also takes care of my job because it says exactly what it is.

Literally, exactly what it is.

Unlike a dragon game where you would play as a pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

In Hawaii.

It covers genre, it covers location, it covers character, everything you need to know.

Ryu Gagatoku has done done it again.

And we're going to talk more about it after this.

So who wants to bring me up to speed on what old Goro has been up to?

Okay.

I don't know this man aside from his appearances in Yakuza Like a Dragon and Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

I believe, maybe it's Yakuza Zero.

I don't know where

Goro made his first appearance.

Oh, he's in all of them.

He is the kind of canonical other guy.

Kind of an antagonist.

Kind of becomes more of a friend along the way.

Fast and the furious.

Sort of a mad dog.

Yeah.

Sort of wild and crazy guy, unhinged Yakuza type.

But in this one,

he's the protagonist, and he's an amnesiac for a little bit.

He's kind of an amnesiac through a lot of it.

and he washes up on an island and he adopts somebody's son basically he adopts someone who definitely already has a dad and says i'm your dad now come with me jason you're gonna

adopt the dad as well he does kind of adopt the dad uh and and then he steals it by rich

can i ask uh so in because i as we know we didn't i didn't finish infinite wealth does he like crash on a boat in infinite wealth do we see what i don't believe we see see

we see him crash on a ship.

I assume we will find out at some point.

And is like the tiger seen in Infinite Wealth?

No, the Tiger, the whole boy family, they are not characters in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

So we don't have a preamble for where the tiger came from.

No.

This game does take place after the events of Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

You learn about

Palemaku Island, I believe, which is sort of a big story crux of Infinite Wealth.

Yeah, story-wise, basically, in infinite wealth, the main story is about you as Kazuma Kiryu, the rival of the character in this game, and uncovering.

Huh?

It's Ichiban.

Ichiban Kasuko's health.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Oh, oh, sorry, Ichiban and Kazuma, yeah.

You are uncovering the mystery of this kind of religious cult that you discover.

Spoilers for the next one minute

is

using a island that is nearly impossible to find in this pacific ocean to house former yakuza to do basically like maintenance work on a giant warehouse full of nuclear waste and all the nations across the world are sending their nuclear waste here to be taken care of and quote disposed of which it of course isn't it doesn't matter it matters

it matters it matters listen i put like 120 hours into this if i don't get to pretend it matters then why do I use it?

Oh, no, no, no.

It matters to me a great deal.

Infinite wealth is one of my favorite games ever made.

This game's connection to it is tangential at best so far, I will say.

It matters in the sense that this takes place after all of those events.

You are going to see a lot of what happened to that religious cult and fallout of this game.

You're also going to meet basically all of the same characters, and they're going to do a lot of the same missions and jokes and part of the gag of this game okay is hey uh remember when you met this mascot character who asked you to pick up uh religious pamphlets not religious pamphlets just very pamphlet sportions uh you're gonna do that exactly exactly again all over again it is very siloed off this game in that it is yes i mean it's insane it's it's it's patently

you lose perspective on it the longer you spend in pirate yakuza and a wide that it is fucking bonkers that you are this character from this series who's an amnesiac and because in the absence of knowledge that he possesses he fills it with pirate garbage and he becomes an actual pirate and enlists a pirate crew and goes on pirate adventures for treasure and shit like that and then also at one point you do roll up on honolulu and just do all the same shit that that Kazuma Kiryu did in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

All this, most of the mini games, nothing.

I haven't hit Dondoko Island.

It feels insane for there not to be some.

I've met some characters that I met on Dondoko Island, but I want to manage another modern Animal Crossing style city island, please.

But like a lot, a lot, a lot of the like side quests and like big beats from Infinite Wealth you will see in the side quests.

Once you do finally get to Honolulu, it takes you quite some time to get there.

Yeah, so because I didn't finish Infinite Wealth, I thought I would be lost in this game and not really be able to follow it.

But it turns out this has been like maybe the most pleasurable Yakuza experience I've ever had.

Gosh, I'm so glad to hear that, Russ.

It's really quite enjoyable because

there's very little.

The preamble is like an hour.

You spend an hour like on this island, kind of getting your feet wet and meeting the little boy and the tiger and his dad, et cetera.

And then once you're on the boat, the pace dramatically increases.

Yeah.

And you're doing fights and you're doing, you're taking over like islands filled with pirates that have treasure on them and doing mini missions.

And it's all so fucking buckwild silly.

Yeah.

I'll give you an example.

The title credits, which again happened like an hour in, it's a full-on pirate musical.

Yeah.

With singing and dancing, and Matt Mercer does the English voice.

Really going as cam as I've ever heard him go.

And that is saying something.

Yeah.

No part of this game is holding back and as much as i appreciate the slow uh character driven build that is a normal yakuza game yeah i have no patience for it or time okay so this like light speed fast and the furious style pacing even though it doesn't necessarily earn the character connections that make you love this game and not at all if it doesn't earn that stuff that's fine for me I'm having an enjoyable time and the gameplay is fun and like it just feels like a romp.

Yeah.

It is, I think, maybe like 20 to 25 hours, not 100%ing it.

You can play this game very, very fast compared to the other Yakuza games.

And it's not surprising for the reason that you're talking about because it's almost like somewhere between a,

you know, weekend tour and a parody of a Yakuza game.

And that's, I'm still not sure where I land on this oops all berries nature of pirate Yakuza in Hawaii because love the main character love all the silliness it's why I play the Yakuza games but I also love you know salt and sugar but I don't want that to be my whole meal and there was a little bit of that when I was playing this where

I did wish it slowed down a little bit so that I could get just a little grounded before it did the thing that it does in every Yakuza game where suddenly the silly mission turns like really serious when you realize that someone's dad's you know terminally sick I mean yes the Yes.

The game's characters are waffer-thin,

I will say, pretty much across the board.

Their main motivations usually boil down to, I used to be a pirate, and now I'm not anymore.

But this

amnesiac Yakuza here has inspired me to get back out on those big, beautiful ocean waters.

And that is, I mean, not anything that I am finding particularly compelling.

Whereas I think...

I mean, that's not the plot of Infinite Wealth where he's convincing all these former yakuzas to like have a purpose in life.

Absolutely not.

No, it is.

I mean, it handles that subject matter with a lot more nuance, I will say, dealing with the sort of like reality of stigma of being a formerly sort of incarcerated individual and all of the bad things.

No one more incarcerated than pirates throughout history.

I don't think so.

I think if they got caught, they pretty much got killed.

I don't think there was a lot of jail time suffered by pirates.

So, like, I don't know.

It is, i i i love the uh rpgs we haven't even talked about the the action combat in this game but i i like infinite wealth and like a dragon so much because the characters especially in infinite wealth are so well written and so thoughtful and so like well developed and you go on these little side missions with them that really really make them compelling characters and also just sort of like the broad storyline of the game you know starting in like a dragon where you are uh a betrayed, you know, Yakuza member having to literally rebuild his life from scratch.

Like, that's really good stuff.

And it goes hand in hand with like the RPG mechanics of, you know, being a powerless hero growing to this like demigod by the end of the game.

Like all that stuff goes hand in hand really, really well together.

And it's just, as I'm like seven and eight hours in so far, I haven't gotten literally a morsel of that from this game, but it's still fun.

It's still very, very fun and i do i am enjoying the beat-em-up sort of combat a lot more than i i still definitely prefer the turn-based stuff especially the kind of hybridized stuff they did in infinite wealth but i i i don't know i thought i would get bored with the combat after my first few encounters but uh they definitely do add some stuff that makes makes it a lot more i don't know interesting it's quite rich and it's very fast it feels different than a lot of things that we've had in other yakuza games even ones when you can play as this character.

It

most closely resembles the

spy Yakuza game that came out.

Yeah, whatever.

Yeah,

it has a little bit of that, but even still, it's much faster than that.

And there's a lot of different unlocks that you can do and add all these new move sets and stuff.

You can also switch on an auto-combo feature, which Fresh, I know that you use.

If you're the type of person who wants to unlock the cool stuff, but doesn't want to have to memorize XXXY Y pause Y.

I think you mean XXXY pause YB.

Oh, sorry, yes, yeah, yeah.

That was what I was meaning.

But what I think is really useful about this game, and I think it's telling that you got into it, Frush, is it's a great instruction manual for the Yakuza series.

And in the past, Yakuza Zero was the one I recommended for that.

Yeah.

I think this might be even better because it is so fast and it actually has a clear UI.

The Yakuza games, like a dragon games, have, I think, struggled with this for a long time.

Even Yakuza Zero game, I love.

You have a double whammy of the UI doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first, and you don't really have an excuse to use it for hours and hours and hours.

And the way that this game just guides you through all of the kind of fundamental pieces of a Yakuza game, you play this, and I think you can be sent off to any other part of the series.

And the pace will be different, but the overall, like how to play it, you'll have learned.

And I think that's important with all sorts of games that we've seen from Dark Souls to Persona.

Half the battle is just learning how to experience the game.

So, Pete, I'm going to get letters over what I'm going to say.

But there's another aspect that makes this one of the best onboarding for Yakuza games

that I've played.

Oh, no.

It does not star

Cosmic Kiri.

I fucking knew it.

No, I mean, hey, no, for sure.

I have played a lot of these games because of Chris Plant, probably four or five of them.

Yeah.

And every time I play one that stars Kazima Kiryu,

I stopped playing because you know what isn't fun is spending three hours with a sad, sad man.

And that is Cosima.

He has a sad past and he loves to talk about it.

But that's the pleasure.

But you have to, and that's the thing is like, if you have the patience to power through the sadness to get to, oh, he's now hugging a bear and doing a dance, and that's really funny.

Great, but I don't, and I haven't.

So, here I'm playing as a fucking goofy ass pirate with tons of tattoos that's a total badass, but also silly and loves musicals.

I'm in.

Yeah.

And, and this could potentially be the thing that allows me to play the other games.

I mean, look, I enjoyed what I played of Infinite Wealth.

I just didn't have the patience to like see it through, but I played 15 hours of that game.

And then Cosma showed up.

He's like, man, I'm sad.

And also I've got health issues.

And I'm like, eh, I'm good.

It is hilarious that they did design a game specifically for you.

And that they're like, so how many hours did you play?

15.

Got it.

And what do you want?

Oops, all berries.

Okay, got it.

Oh, and new combat?

Okay, got it.

This game?

Is this the one you want?

We haven't talked about the comment, but I do want to talk about it briefly.

It is fully...

real-time as we've sort of addressed.

It is a beat-em-up, which is the style of the original Yakuza games before it switched to turn-based.

Switch to turn-based is also kind of a weird way.

Like, I feel like the

like Yakuza Like a Dragon, which was the first RPG and Infinite Wealth, are their own thing.

And they are hugely outnumbered by games that do not have turn-based RPG combat.

But don't you think, like, my understanding is like the mainline Yakuza or like a Dragon games are now that.

I mean, yeah,

that's true.

But again, it's even complicated in that the combat here feels so different than

the early Yakuza games.

I mean, you're fighting crowds of like 20 people.

You can't jump in any of the other Yakuza games, as far as I know.

And so like the ability to air juggle in this game gives it a like a, you know, Devil May Cry platinum-esque flair that I am finding very, very, very fun.

There are stages in this game, you drop into an island, you're like, oh yeah, I need to go kill off some pirates.

And then suddenly a number pops up on the screen and just starts counting down 80 pirates are going to come at you and then they start dropping from the sky rapid fire just dozens of pirates

yeah yeah once you get into big ship battles that okay so there's a part of this game that is also naval combat right you have a ship so good it's it's it's like as

As arcade-y, I think, as they possibly could have made it.

You have like a boost button and you can drift in your pirate ship very easily.

And there's like rings all over the ocean that you go through to get turbo boosts.

And then you have like a cannon button on both sides and a machine gun that fires forward.

So, like, Sea of Thieves, it ain't one.

One other feature.

Oh, right.

Sure.

You can at any point shift back into the boat in the middle of all this.

So you're like suddenly just walking around the boat.

And while you're on the boat, you can just pull out a rocket launcher.

Yeah.

Because why not?

Why would you not want to do that?

Because it kind of sucks.

It's like hard to actually land shots with that thing.

But then sometimes after you finish knocking out the ship of a big battle, there's also a thing called the Pirate Coliseum, which is like these big featured one-on-one battles.

After you knock out someone's ship, you have to board with your boarding party, which you customize fully.

You can unlock new crew members.

You can customize the different parts of your ship quite a bit.

You can give them bouquets.

You can give them bouquets to level them up, which is an insane mechanic.

And then all of a sudden, the game turns into fucking Dynasty Warriors, and you are doing this big, like, you know, 20-on-20 battle on the deck of the enemy ship.

See, here's the thing about mainline Yakuza games that I've played.

If I have 20 minutes, I am not guaranteed to have a good time in those 20 minutes in the mainline one.

In this, for sure, I'm going to have a good time.

Yes.

Even if it is the cutscenes, the cutscenes are

so fucking goofy.

I just met.

You go to Madlantis, which is a

place sort of referenced in Infinite Wealth.

It's where the bad guys from Dondoko Island came from, I believe.

And in this game, you meet the Queen Michelle, which is great.

That's wild.

And also the pirate king of Madlantis, who is just played by Samoa Joe.

There's just Samoa.

I was just watching this cutscene and then all of a sudden getting kudos from actual Samoa Joe.

Like, what the fuck?

Where did he come?

It's so goofy and so weird.

It's, it's just like the silly cutscenes, the silly side quest cutscenes usually from the RPG Yakuza games is the vibe of the main story in this game, which is like, you know, double-edged sword.

It is not hooking me in terms of like, I actually care about these characters, but it is like, man, it's, it's like popcorn, man.

It's just enjoyable to pick it up and, and, and play a little bit of it.

I'm really enjoying it.

I'm glad you are on board with it, Russ.

I know that you have not been.

No,

it's clicking for me.

It does.

I'm also just impressed from a logistical standpoint, like how they converted a lot of the assets and content creation that they made for Infinite Wealth into another format, obviously, so quickly.

I'm sure, obviously, a ton of the development was happening while Infinite Wealth was happening.

Convert it into something that feels like very, very different, but also uses a lot of the same stuff.

Yeah.

It's just like pretty impressive i i will say so i uh after i don't know a few hours of the game you you reach honolulu and then you you get basically access to the big wide open world

part of honolulu from infinite wealth and i ran around i did like a dozen side quests and unlocked a bunch of crewmates and like played a bunch of the mini games and stuff and now that i've like done that and moved on to like other parts of the story i don't feel particularly compelled to go back and do a bunch of the other stuff that is there because it is sort of the same stuff that I was doing in Infinite Wealth and I played the shit out of that game.

And so the

idea of going back and replaying all of this stuff that I, you know, already spent dozens of hours doing is slightly less compelling to me.

Do you get the sense that like it's going to make you?

No, I don't get the sense that it's going to make me.

So like, I guess that's the thing, right?

Like I probably will be

one to finish this game fairly quickly

just because, like, I'm enjoying it.

I don't, I am not loving it to the degree where, like, I loved the RPGs where I feel like, well, I got to fucking unlock every class.

Yeah.

I've got to do the photo rallies and I got to do, I got to

do all of

some perverts and make them battle each other and then max out my Animal Crossing Island.

Like it is, it is a little bit less meaty than all that.

And a lot of the meat that is there is meat that I've already eaten in Infinite Wealth.

So I also will say, I was shocked to find that Infinite Wealth does not have a difficulty setting when I played it originally because I wanted to speed up the process.

This does.

You can play on Easy.

And we mentioned earlier, there's like an assisted combo thing.

And because of that, it allows you to not do every single little thing and still keep pace with the game's difficulty.

Yeah.

Which has been great.

I've really enjoyed that.

option as well.

It just allows it to fit into my life.

I do think that there's a lot of upgrades and progression and stuff that it definitely hits harder if you are playing without the assisted combos and on a higher difficulty.

God, there's so many systems.

There's like rings.

You have 10 rings you can equip with.

Every finger has a ring.

Yeah.

And then like you have to be pretty like, you know, thoughtful about how you spend your money.

Money is how you unlock like stat boosts basically for Goro.

And so you have to be very thoughtful about that stuff.

But also you can just blow right through that shit if you, if you don't care about it, which I do appreciate.

Yeah, I like it.

I just, it, it, honestly, more than anything, this game continues to drive home my just

unrepentant adoration for this whole series and what they have done with it.

Like, it's so, it is leaning into the best instincts and like my favorite shit about this franchise and what this developer does.

And there's just no analog for the tone, for the way it's played, for like the visual stuff.

There's no analog to this anywhere else in the video game industry.

No,

there's nothing this.

I don't know.

A game that is this like funny and lighthearted usually doesn't have like a ton of other stuff going on for it.

It also doesn't have the sincerity too.

That's the magic sauce

for me.

That it's it's very funny and goofy, and it then like surprises you with an uppercut of,

hey, you know, as you get older, it's harder to make friends, and you really should put in the effort or else you'll just be lonely forever.

And it's like, what the fuck?

Occasionally, there's some dissonance, uh, which I had to overcome.

I sent a, I sent Clant a video clip.

Uh, one of the earliest characters you meet is like a chef aboard the pirate ship, and you predictably have to fight the chef until he becomes friends with you.

And using my assisted combo combo thing, I at one point like kind of accidentally activated a finishing move where I snap his neck.

And

it does look like he is dead.

His eyes are open when he falls to the ground.

It's really actually pretty easy to execute that move.

If you like dodge step out of the way, it like it gives you a prompt to do a heat action to snap the person you're fighting's neck.

And sometimes...

If you do it right in a boss fight, you'll do that four or five times to the same guy.

And it's got to be like after after the third one, just lay down, man.

Just stop.

I'm hurting you.

I hope it's more just like a chiropractic adjustment.

Yeah.

One last thing before we head out of this section.

The series is known for reusing parts of other games that, you know, you visit the same location over and over and over across the Yakuza series.

Right.

And with like slight modifications or sometimes substantial.

How do y'all feel about this as like a practice, especially something as big as Hawaii?

I'm a fan of it, to be clear, but I'm curious what y'all are kind of thinking about it.

It's tough.

If I had not spent,

if infinite wealth, if the genre of that game and the construction of that game was not sort of, did not lend itself to spending over a hundred hours on it, then I might feel a little bit differently.

It is not

when you first roll up to Hawaii in Infinite Wealth, it is such an insane, humongous playground with all of this just exotic stuff and stories to find and little side quests that you do.

And when you discover like, holy shit, there's like a whole crazy taxi game in here.

And there's, there's all of these different little

side things you can do.

It's so like, thrilling.

It's genuinely thrilling.

And you can lose dozens of hours right there just to like, I want to see everything that there is to see.

And that I didn't, I, that does not hit remotely as hard this time around.

It's still fun to mess around in that, right?

But for me, it's the fun is the enjoyment I'm getting is weirdly like nostalgia for a game I played last year and not like

I don't know like the excitement of discovery or whatever.

My MO on this stuff is if you're reusing assets,

make sure that for people that saw them the first time, spent a lot of time with them the first time, that there's either something new, like dramatically new there, or make them optional.

Don't force people to do the same shit over and over and over again just because you have the assets lying around.

Yeah.

That being said, I have attacked a lot of islands with a lot of pirates that look all basically identical.

And I'm kind of fine.

The islands and the pirates look identical.

I'm kind of fine with it.

So that doesn't bother me because they're so short and goofy and like just like beat-em-up areas Yeah, I dig it and I think the thing that they understand is it can't be the whole game So in a lot of Yakuza games Yeah, you'll go back to camarocho, but you'll also go to new places here the main island from the previous game isn't the only place you go.

No, I do think they're they're clever in the conversation that they're having with the previous game.

So like for example near where you start in the previous game, there's a bar that you go to over and over and over again.

Right next door is this big open lot.

And as you progress through the game, you have to get more powerful to go fight the enemies in that lot and go get the treasure.

Well, that's just not how this game works.

But you know in your head, well, there's always treasure in this huge open lot.

So you run over in this game, you find a whole bunch of enemies that you can beat the living shit out of.

But you also find all these seeds.

everywhere in it that you can use to fill out your garden, which is a new mini-game in this game.

So it's rewarding.

That's being quite generous to say what the garden is yeah thank you but it is it's rewarding you for being a previous player yeah and if you hadn't played the game before this whatever you do you don't need to know that you don't need to know to go discover that you'll probably find it on your own i think that is all very clever i also just think

This is something Sega and Atlas also are like trying to figure out, I think, with how do you fund video games.

We see this with Persona 2 of

these games cost so much to make.

We almost expect to double dip.

And we're thinking about that, I assume, from the beginning.

We were thinking of how can we design spaces that serve multiple purposes.

That way we can justify these like increasingly absurd costs.

And it's like the way they have done it is so laudable.

Like I cannot think of another example of a studio doing what this game does, which is we're going to use a lot of the same assets from the last game, but make them its own sort of like standalone thing and handling that with like, we're going to justify that by making the tone absolutely insane and let you do stuff that is so wild and so out of out of step with the rest of the series that it feels it feels novel and it feels earned and it feels sort of like justified.

It doesn't feel like a, you know, half-baked cash grab.

Like it is a fully formed idea that is bizarre, but like that's kind of what is so pleasurable about it.

You know what it reminds me of is Tears of the Kingdom.

Honestly,

if you think when you first heard it's going to be the same map as Breath of the Wild,

there was a part of you that was like, oh, really?

Oh, that's kind of a letdown.

And the fact that they were able to not only have the same map, but also make it feel completely different because of the things you were able to do.

Granted, not as silly.

The term is very consistent across both games.

But from a revamping existing content in a way that like felt really new and different.

Yeah.

I guess the comparison doesn't work for me because I think of Tears of the Kingdom as its, I mean, I think of Tears of the Kingdom as maybe the best game ever made, but this definitely has the feel of a side quest.

This has the feel of the offshoot.

And that to me usually is a red flag.

That usually to me spells.

And honestly, there were times where I was playing this game where I kind of wished I was playing just Infinite Wealth again, but it would be insane to go back to that game already.

But it also, like, it stands apart and it, even though it is very much

on its face, a side quest or a spin-off or whatever, like, it is, it's a really good one.

Uh, and I'm, I'm so happy that it exists.

Yakuza Zero splits its time between Kazuma Kiryu and this character.

And there's a version of Infinite Wealth that feels like it could do that with this game.

The reason they can't do that is because Infinite Wealth already has two full games in it.

So, like, adding a third just would start to feel like it's God.

How good is that?

How good would an RPG with split characters with Ichiban Kasuga and Goro Majiba

as the two?

And when you played as Goro, it would be a beat-em-up.

It would be a pirate beat-em-up.

And then when you played as Ichiban, it would be a Dragon Quest-style RPG.

Bring it in, bring it.

Yes.

As long as Kiryu's dead, I'm great.

He'll never die.

His health issues have been, I think, dramatically overblown by the press.

Hey, let's take a quick break and then maybe talk a little bit about those little critters from Japan that we all love so much called Pokemon.

This week's episode of the Besties is brought to you in part by Rocket Money.

Do you have a bunch of subscriptions that maybe you don't need?

Well, I have great news for you.

Rocket Money can round them all up, show them to you in a simple list and say, hey, which of these do you want to keep and which of these should you probably have canceled a long time ago?

It is a humongous help.

And Rocket Money has all sorts of other features.

Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings.

It has been a huge help to me, which if you listen to this show, you are already aware of.

Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features.

Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money.

Go to rocketmoney.com/slash besties today.

That's rocketmoney.com/slash festies.

Rocketmoney.com/slash besties.

Okay, we are back with the big news of the week.

Pokemon Go and the games division of Niantic, that's the developer of Pokemon Go, are reportedly being sold to Saudi Arabia-owned Scoply Inc.

This is based off a report from Bloomberg, and it is going to cost Scoply a lot of money.

$3.5 billion.

Now, they're getting the entire Nantic games division, sure,

but like that at this point pretty much is Pokemon Go.

And I thought what we would do is talk about how the hell did we get here?

Because, you know, almost a decade ago, it's 2016, Pokemon Go is the biggest video game on the planet.

One of the biggest video game releases of all time.

The year it came out, 500 million downloads.

That is just a staggering number.

It's half a million.

Half a billion downloads.

Half a billion.

And it did so well for so long.

Nantic seem to be on track.

They have games, or they had games with Harry Potter.

They have currently a Monster Hunter game.

They have done other partnerships with Nintendo.

They have been funded by Google and Nintendo and the Pokemon Company.

You'd think they would be doing great.

And yet, here we are.

What happened?

I mean, let's be real.

They are doing great.

I mean, last year

their revenue was $500 million.

That's true.

You don't get sold for $3.2 billion.

Yeah, it's not a punishment to get sold for

making money.

But I think there's a version of this where Niantic would prefer it to just be a super successful company that doesn't have to sell its game division.

You would think.

Yeah, I mean, internally, it's hard to say

whether the people that have make these final calls really just want to be done with it.

I think the important thing to remember is it's not just the fact that they're making $500 million a year.

They also have a cache of pretty staggering data

regarding the comings and goings and movements of basically every player that's ever played Pokemon Go.

This is the part that I am so confused about and how this deal is going to happen.

Obviously, we live in a very different country now, but where everybody was freaked out about TikTok, I can't imagine how people feel about an app that literally has players scanning the world around them and creating that data to serve a giant database.

Yeah, I mean, I think we've learned, if anything, over the last

six weeks that people's interest in giving a shit about

the breaches of privacy and data security is sort of selective, I will say.

It is sort of context-sensitive.

And And maybe some folks don't give much of a shit about this

as you might expect.

Which also might be why Niantic is okay with finally selling its game division.

Do you all know the history of this company, how it came to be?

I did at some point, but I've definitely replaced that information in my brain with other stuff at this point.

Understandably.

A quick recap.

John Hanke is the founder, basically, of Niantic.

But before that, way back in like 2001, he founded a company I believe called Keyhole that would get bought up by Google and would set up Google Maps and Google Earth.

Needless to say, he was very successful and could kind of do whatever he wanted.

And at Google, he goes, Hey, I want to make augmented reality video games.

And they're like, sure, John, whatever.

You made the thing for us.

Go off and tinker with it.

He makes a game with his team called Ingris, which did have like, I think, seven, eight million players.

Yeah.

It was a mild success

for what it was.

And with that success, Google funds them branching off, that like team branching off and becoming Niantic.

So this company, in theory, is meant to be a video game studio from the beginning.

But what's so weird about this is

I have seen him talk at conferences.

I've actually done a Q ⁇ A with him at a conference, and he doesn't talk much about games.

He talks a lot about augmented reality mapping and data collection.

And the kind of, I think, larger selling point has always been that if you have 500 million people across the world capturing literal like data of the world around them using increasingly improved augmented reality focused phones, you are learning how to do it.

Well, not just the augmented reality, but also the GPS data that is being sure and the GPS data, but I mean specifically, if you have people using it in their house, you're finding out how many people in the country have uneven foundations because I guess so hot between their ceiling and their floor, which is not theoretical.

Yeah, there's always been a really big disconnect for me.

I've played quite a bit of Pokemon Go.

It was like a big way that I got Henry interested in like exploring DC when we we moved here a few years ago

Was that you know unlike living in Austin in you know not downtown There's just fucking nothing you can really do because it's not walkable and there's not a bunch of Poke stops everywhere and here there was and it was like an exciting way to go around also the AR thing you switch off literally The the first couple minutes you play the game and you never turn it back on again because it makes it harder to actually play the game and catch the Pokemon.

So there's always been this weird disconnect between like the technology and sort of maybe

original artistic intention of Pokemon Go versus the reality of like what people have wanted when they actually play it.

And their, their, the speed with which they have tried to rectify that gap has been so cartoonishly sluggish and still like not something that they stick the landing on fucking 20% of the time.

It's always been a weird thing for me where it's like, you guys have a Mondo hit on your hands and also you are you do not know what your players want out of it a lot of the time i think they also expected the technology to move much much faster than it did and i do think i'm talking about all this data i don't want to be like so crass as to say there wasn't an alignment between collect data and make the game they want to make because the big goal for the company was to be able to create basically situations where you could have an augmented reality experience in Austin, Texas, and one in Washington, D.C.

and one in Orange County, California.

And all of us would be out in our parks, but we would be having a shared experience in augmented reality.

So if we wanted to have a Pokemon battle out in a park, we could all pull out our phones in all these different places and create like shared augmented spaces.

Very cool.

A wild.

Yeah.

It's just not what people want.

I can't really fucking trade Pikachu to Griffin if I wanted to.

Because he's in Farm.

Yes.

The other problem is you couldn't even have a shared space in the same park with the degree of believability that you would want.

Like it would be great to go to a park and have Pokemon and be able to have a Pokemon battle that actually looks like a Pokemon battle in front of you in augmented reality.

That is not like what we got.

They will, I assume, be fine.

On top of the $3.2 billion,

assuming the sale goes through, they also have started feeding all of that data into what they're calling, I believe, a large geospatial model.

Will you be surprised to hear that they are using AI tools to basically create an AI version of mapping?

No, of course not.

So I think that is probably why they got the juice from the orange, and now they can pass on the rind.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's, it's, it's weird.

It wasn't on my bingo card for this year's news.

No, but if you still have a bingo card for the news, you're, the hubris you are exhibiting is frankly unhinged.

I did have last year, Robbie Williams makes a movie where

he's entirely as a monkey and nailed it.

You did have that.

That's so funny.

But he thought it was going to be a big success.

I did.

I really thought it would hit.

We have a good piece of reader mail.

This comes from Jonah.

There's a question.

Love the idea of an FPS first-person snapper.

This was in the context of talking about photograph games.

Are Are there more slash others that people know of?

And Jakey responded with a few other suggestions.

Some good photography games.

Toem,

Umarangi Generation, Paparazzi,

ones I haven't played, but I heard they're good, might fit the description.

Season?

Plant.

Did you play Season?

I don't know if I remember that one.

A Letter to the Future and Toripon.

I believe Season, A Letter to the Future, is the full.

Oh, that game.

Yeah, I really liked that game.

Yes.

You ride around on a bike and take photos of a world that is basically doomed and create a scrapbook that you put into like a Fallout shelter, more or less, for future generations to look over.

It is.

Fun.

It has like a nice vibe.

Yeah, sure.

Jakey also mentions the Fatal Frame games if you want to get scared.

Did anybody say Panko Park?

Did Jakey say that?

There was a lot of great games.

Panko Park, we've talked about this on, I believe, the Resties.

But if you've ever wanted kind of like an Edward Gorey Pokemon snap, Panko Park rules.

Strongly recommend it.

And it is a true Pokemon snap type.

Love it.

Beyond Good and Evil is like an oversight not being featured on this list, it feels like.

How dare you, Jakey?

That game's sort of approach to photojournalism is fucking rad.

It's very, very, very good.

It doesn't age well.

You don't think so?

I played it for the first time, like 10 years after the game came out.

And it was not, it felt like very dinosaur in terms of well, Beyond Good and Evil 2 when it comes out, I'm sure.

It's going to be research for you.

It's going to be real good.

Real good, real good.

Should we do some honorable mentions?

Yeah.

I have any honorable mentions.

I got a big one.

Oh, boy.

In the

my house has become a den of plague, and it has

since like mid-January.

So I've had a lot of time on the couch playing Steam Deck as everyone kind of convalesces.

And I got hugely, deeply into Grounded,

a game that I played a bit of.

I know that I think we all sort of played together, had like a server or something.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids game.

It's the Honey I Shrunk the Kids game from Obsidian.

And it was a, you know, a survival craft sort of game where you are in this yard and you have to find resources to build armor and weapons and you can build a fort.

And,

you know, you're trying to figure out the mystery of where you are and how to, how to get big.

The game is like fully feature-complete now in what they call fully yoked edition.

Is that a joke?

Like an egg joke?

I don't know.

It's like part of this like in-game

fiction TV show.

I don't know.

The game has like made for

like Saturday morning cartoon sort of vibes a little bit.

Sure.

But

I'm not like 100% sure like what is different in the game now compared to when I first originally played it.

But it feels just really, really, really good to play that game.

There is so much quality of life stuff that makes every element of the game like really fun and meaningful.

So like basic stuff, like when you're building a base, there's like a single button that you press to immediately like dispense everything in your inventory into nearby boxes that you might have that is very like smart and context sensitive.

And then when you're crafting something, it automatically pulls stuff from your like your nearby inventory stuff.

And the building system is so rich and so,

you know, there's so many practical uses for all of these things that I ended up like, There's a big tree in the middle of the yard.

And so I built a ramp up to like halfway up that tree.

And then I built a little tree house in that and then I built a walkway that went all the way around the circumference of the tree so I could run zip lines from that walkway because there's no fast travel in the game you have to build these little zip lines that go so by the end of the game I had this spider web of zip lines going all across the yard it's like someone's ready to point death strang I was gonna say man I don't know it's that's what it sounds like it sounds like it it's also just like discovering stuff in that game is so exciting because it is hard like the world is turned against you you are a it constantly drives home this feeling of you are a little guy and if you come across the wrong bug while you're out there you're gonna get smoked and so when you find a new armor set or you find a new like weapon schematic that like it really feels super super meaningful uh did they tone down the hunger stuff because that was something that i so the games like different systems are like customizable there's like definitely ways of like turning off that stuff if you do not like it uh i forget what setting i played on i think mild maybe, where like that system is in the game, but it's very easy.

You can build a do catcher in your base that then basically you never have to worry about it.

Dew?

Gross.

D-E-W-Dew,

the sweet clear stuff.

I think it's astounding.

I think it is a fantastic game.

Are you mostly playing solo?

I played entirely solo.

I finished the game.

I'd like genuinely

start to finish.

Like really explored the shit out of the yard because, again, I had a ton of time to kill

while I was sick.

Were you playing on Steam Deck?

Played it all on Steam Deck runs perfectly.

I think it is probably better multiplayer.

Like there's.

Well, we played multiplayer a little bit.

It was

an IROE.

I really, really enjoy the base building stuff.

And I think having buddies to do that stuff with and feel this sense of ownership over

the backyard.

That's the main thing that this game does is it gives you this feeling of mastery over the wilds.

And I think that that's like the intention behind behind a lot of, I mean, the whole survival craft, open world survival craft, I believe is the full title

of that genre.

And I think this game does it better than anything else.

And I just, man, I really loved the shit out of my time with this game.

That's cool.

So, so if you did not play Grounded, it is in a really, really good spot right now.

That rolls.

I played Mario's Pitcross, which is a Game Boy game.

All right.

Okay.

It's It's just a Pitcross game.

It might be the first Pitcross game that Nintendo has sold.

It obviously came out many moons ago,

but it's a great introduction to Pitcross as a genre and like just learning the rules of Picross.

And if you get into it, there are a million like mobile versions of it and things like that that you can get into.

But I just really find it very soothing.

And if it's kind of like a

It's like Sudoku, but at the end of it, you get a cute little picture of a cat.

And that's great.

I really like that.

That, yeah.

I think I had this game, and I didn't understand how it worked.

Yeah, you could probably handle it now.

I believe in you.

Is it scratching the itch?

You know what?

Like, I played the like 3DS one.

So, people,

yeah, they evolved into like more 3D pit cross games, uh, which I haven't played, but I know a lot of people get obsessed with them.

It feels like my guess is once you evolve into that, it's kind of hard to go back the other way because it'd be so simple.

But there are 3D, uh, they're called nonograms.

There are 3D nonogram games on iOS that I, if I had played any of them, would recommend to you right now.

But maybe people in the comments will recommend.

And you're recommending the Game Boy one or the Super Nintendo one?

Well, I haven't played the Super Nintendo one.

I only played the Game Boy one.

I think the Super Nintendo one is, it was released exclusively in Japan, but I think they released it on the Switch.

Yeah, I think it, yeah, it came out on Switch Online in September 2020.

So if you sub to that and it's on Super Nintendo, so you probably don't need the ultra edition.

You can play that.

That sounds like fun.

Nice.

But nonograms.

I've been watching this show called Severance.

Oh, finally this is a show.

We're going to talk about this show.

I'm not going to say any spoilers or anything.

I'm just going to say it's a pretty good show.

Okay.

That's it.

Watch.

Just shining a light on an unheralded piece of media.

Good.

I'm glad that.

I'm glad Ben Stiller's getting his flowers.

Yeah, it's fucking astonishing.

Every episode of this show feels like the season finale of the show, which is a really remarkable achievement.

Which is funny because that's how I felt about Parks and Recreation, too.

That like every four episodes, because they thought they were going to get canceled, they were like, yeah, here's another season finale.

And oh, we're not canceled.

We're going to keep making more episodes.

Great.

Adam Scott, man, I could just look at that guy's face forever.

Yeah, and he has two faces in this show, which is crazy.

He has his weathered outy face and his fresh innie face.

That's what I say.

How do you do that?

How do you do that with your face?

It's like listening to people talk about Bellatro if you haven't played Bellatro.

It's just like a fever dream.

You should play Bellatro and you should watch Severus.

I don't know.

I liked it.

It's the best shit out there now.

I know, I know, I know.

Do you not watch it?

Have you not seen it?

I know.

You're watching the first season, though, right?

Nope.

Haven't watched it.

I want to.

It's really hard because

I've mentioned mentioned it before.

I'm in a movie club and we have to watch movies and I have to watch.

I'm halfway through three colors blue, which I'm sure

is like a huge fan of.

No.

It's complicated.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing.

I have homework

outside of the besties and outside of normal work and outside of raising my child.

This show is already homework.

It's fucked up that you have built more homework into your life.

It's fun.

This show's fun homework and I love to do it.

But you can't have many sources of assigned media consumption.

Too much homework.

Well, here I am.

This is where I'm stuck.

I'm not saying walk away from besties.

I'm saying walk away from your movie.

Friends, obviously.

Thank you so much for listening to the besties.

We got some friends.

Oh, yeah.

We got some Patreon friends.

Let me call them out.

Thank you to new subscribers.

We have Oliver.

We have Miles.

We have Mike Chuck and we have Orville.

Thank you for being patrons of the besties.

You can go on to patreon.com slash the besties.

What did we talk about this week, Chris?

Oh, man, so much stuff.

Oh my gosh, what did we talk about?

We talked about so much stuff.

We talked about Like a Dragon, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

We talked about Panko Park and Grounded and Beyond Good and Evil, Mario Picross, Super Mario Picross, Toem Umarangi Generation, Paparazzi, Season, The Letter to the Future, Tori Pawn, the Fatal Frame series, and the TV show Severance plus Pokemon Go.

You can find a list of all of those things and more over at the newsletter, including a Mia Culpra from me, because last week I was a little sleepy and I wrote that Obsidian made Fallout 76.

Obviously they didn't.

I know it.

I don't need any conspiracy theories about how I've turned into some like AI robot who doesn't know my video games from my WhatsApps.

I got it.

Go read the newsletter.

It's fantastic.

And if you want to become a patron, patreon.com slash the besties is the link that you can go to.

Next week, Monster Hunter Wilds.

Oh, man, there's a big one.

Out there going to kill it.

This is gonna be the game that gets people into Monster Hunter.

This one.

Yeah, this one's the one.

I actually do.

I mean, it is.

Every installment becomes a little more easy to get into.

I think World's Better Than Rise, but we'll see how this one treats us.

Okay.

We're gonna talk all about it next week.

So join us then.

Till next time, join us for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends get the world's best games?

Besties