Castle Super Beast - CSB323: Persona 4 Remake: Gay 4 Pay

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Twitch VODs are now being uploaded to the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Expedition 33: Clair Obscur Ending Spoilercast (Starts 3:00:04) Which DMC Orb Is Getting The Best Head? Nen Impact Has Too Many Buttons There's No Time To Care About Lore In Nightreign Do Choices Matter In Night City? Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 15% off Raycon’s best-selling Everyday Earbuds. - Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. - Go to https://ridge.com/SUPERBEAST to get up to 40% off during Ridge’s once-a-year Father’s Day Sale. Akuma is the 15th Weapon - Monster Hunter Wilds x Street Fighter 6 Yuri Lowenthal (@yurilowenthal.bsky.social): And for those who keep asking, no, I will not be returning as Yosuke for the Persona 4 remake. I asked. Maybe I even begged, but they don’t want me to come back. Erin Fitzgerald still on strike @erinfitzgerald.bsky.social‬ For those asking, I have not been asked to reprise my role as Chie Satonaka in the Persona 4 remake. RIP 😭😭😭😭😭😭 I am blessed to have recorded as many Persona 4 games as I did playing her. EA cancels Black Panther game, closes developer Cliffhanger Games: It’s the second round of layoffs in as many months at EA Gene Park: so i also played more Welcome Tour during the Nintendo preview event (my pod shown here) … guys i think this game is deeper than we thought. there are potentially a TON of zones with fun minigames to find and beat. i was lowkey wanting to play this more than Mario Kart. there was no time to unlock it all, and i don’t think i was even a quarter the way finishing it. if this is a demo, it’s packed with games. still should’ve came with the system yes. but it might be a longer game than astro’s playroom Assassin's Creed Black Flag Remake  

["Sailor Moon Theme"] Yo, yo. Yo, dude, what's up? What's happening? Clog Obscure, beaten. Want to talk about it at the end? What's happening? Club obscure beaten. Want to talk about it at the end? That's going to be that's got definitely got to be at the fucking end. All right. That is that that is the end of the show.

Expeditions 33 game beat spoiler cast at the end of the podcast. You can talk about the game part. Yeah, well, I mean, I gave me the general I'm giving a thumbs up to the camera game of the generation potentially one of the best RPGs ever no qualifiers just page asked me because I was listening to music and I was like reading about it afterwards and she's like wow you really like that I'm like this game feels like it came out in 1998 is is the best is the best compliment I can give it is like this feels like a game that came out in 1998

Yeah As far as what video games do Disco Elysium hit me as an RPG in terms of writing and like soul grabbing, you know Existential everything and you know in a brand new way This game is on every single level carrot like every level every single level just was one of the best things ever and Yeah, again, no qualifiers needed just yeah, everyone who enjoys the video game should play this game at some point Done and done and if you haven't played it, you should definitely not listen to anything

We have to say at the end of today's podcast And if you haven't played it, you should definitely not listen to anything we have to say at the end of today's podcast. How about this? This is what happens when you take ex-Ubisoft developers and you unchain them, right? Let them cook. Let them breathe. Instead of telling them to shut their eyes or grit their teeth. What you could have, right?

You could have had a bad bitch. It's crazy how much good work people can do when they're not afraid of being bad touched by their boss. It's wild, it's amazing. Or just being trapped in the dungeons, really. I mean, all, like realistically, for all the dumb fucking Sekuhara that we touch on every single time Ubisoft comes up. No, the day-to-day experience of the people I know that work there and just give the vibes

on stuff is like, yeah, you get locked on a project as a dungeon in a way and you're just like, if you have aspirations and you do too well, you're not going anywhere and that feels bad. So... I think the one that makes me think about it is think of all the studios and all the cool new interesting things we could have had that just were fed into the gaping maw of Call of Duty map packs. Just like they're like five or six developers that were just fed directly into the

Call of Duty beast. I mean one thing I know for sure from like, you know, working external and then internally at studios is you get to see how many talented people inside the studio are like, I'm above the gig. I'm, and I do my own stuff for fun. That's like way higher concept, way more interesting, you know, office work time. And I'm in here because I'm competent

and get paid quite well and have at the time, quote unquote, job security. But it's like, if you're an artist with amazing talent and like you want a reliable paycheck, you can absolutely go work internally at a team. And like, hopefully if the dice rolls right, you'll get the chance to put that passion that you care for things you care about

towards a thing that you're really able to pour yourself into. Make sure that the company doesn't own your thoughts while you're there. They all do, right? That's a clause. Oh, just have your thoughts right after you quit. Just have every thought that you had the day after you quit.

Mm-hmm. All at once. But yeah, it's always kind of interesting in that, like, you get to have as much, you get passionate about the first version of the project that you're on. And then, you know, eight sequels later, you're kind of just like, all right, you're punching in and you've taken somebody who you've given that job to because of this amazing talent they have and you just beat that burning spirit out of them by nature of the industry.

And then they get let go, shit gets shut down whatever and then all of a sudden Like a phoenix from the ashes that spirit rises again and the inspiration to make cool creative shit that you've been Like tinkering away at and keeping away from the eyes of the bosses hiding it behind the poster you fucking Uh, uh, you see this this the same like energy that was there when you hired the person rise up again and they make a fucking banger ass game and also like a lot of these people are like new like this is a team of relative amateurs which makes it double crazy incredible double bananas I mean first gig well

composer first gig for the writer you you know, we're definitely looking at the This is the standing on the shoulders of Giants bit, right? Like people that have been playing games their entire lives certainly and like first gig writer and composer and and all that stuff You're coming in going. Okay you but we know the games you played and loved and you like And you studied that shit aggressively, you know? Fantastic video game. We'll talk about it later. In fact...

What else is going on? I think there is a... There's a huge discussion that we have somehow avoided for a long time. I can do this. What you got? And it's, you know, it's kind of... It's kind of embarrassing that we haven't like just gotten straight to the nitty gritty. All right, I can do that. Of all the

people to talk about it, let us be let us be the official final word. Pat, which devil may cry orb is getting the best head? This is the question, right? The meme doesn't show you the complete list, so here you go. I can do you one better. I have the entire chart. There you go. Oh, did you just send me? Oh, I just found that instantly.

It's very important. Okay. It's not any of the ones from 4 and it's not any of the ones from DMC. See, I disagree, because I think Four is super fucking, all the ones from Four have the same face, but that face is loving it. That face is going nuts. Four in particular, all the ones from Four in particular

are like jaw agape, screaming, screaming at the world. Right, ah, like oh, she keep going, right, screaming at the world. Like, oh, she keep going, right? That's, yeah. But like the real, the meat and potatoes, I would say, comes in when you get to like three, because three- Three has a unique face for every single one. That's what I'm saying, right? The ones from three, the ones from three

actually change it up, and so you get a more interesting discussion out of Three, because Three Red has got the teeth gritting. I think Three Red is a contender. Three Red is like maybe about to leave. Vane is about to pop. Like I can't. Vane is about to pop. I can't. Vane is about to pop. I think the three's orb. Three's orb. Three's orb might be contender, I would say.

I have a different contender. It's also a red orb. It is five's orb. Five orb. Oh, shocked. Five orb is screaming and their hair appears to be getting blown back hair getting blown back is a good qualifier Eyeballs are exploding out of face. That's good. That's good Three three Porb is kind of like watching someone else do it and enjoying it three porb is Hiding in the closet with a Superman outfit on three Poor was the guy with the sickos shirt on big sickos energy coming from three poor I would also like like like a

three warb is Absolute stoicism is the worst they've ever It's the only one that's like nah man not at all not at all You know this chart actually is the first time I've realized it ever mm-hmm DMC devil may cry Doesn't have blue orbs or purple orbs at all well. There's that also devil may cry to the most

unexpressive bland Nothing going on, sauceless orbs. Yeah, one of them's just an eyeball. Is that just someone's face on the team? Is that just like Ninja Tam's photo? Like is that, you know?

What's going on there? Yeah, I'm gonna go with DMC5's orb. Five orb? Okay. No, I think I'm saying three orb, definitely red. That would have been my number 2. Unless you want to say... It would be the Devil May Cry 4 orb. Unless you want to say DMC Devil May Cry where it's like, it's so good it turns you into an alien. Oh, like you've become like, you've enlightened yourself past the ascetic fault of getting ahead.

You've transmogrified and left our plane. Oh, yeah. You've become like, you've enlightened yourself past the aesthetic you've all you have of getting ahead You've tried you've transmogrified and left our plane. I would say so Yeah, turn it Lee alternatively if We're going down that way then the person who's getting the best head by via a level of enlightenment Go yellow or yeah via a level of enlightenment. It's definitely Devil May Cry 5. Gold. Yellow Orb.

Yeah, yeah. Where you've ascended into a fucking tetrahedron. This, yeah, okay, post-judgment night, you become a tetrahedron, you're no longer, yes, okay, that. You're no longer bound Yes. Okay that you're no longer you've ascended by like Conventional lines. Yes geometry you are now a big biblically accurate angel You look you look like an Ava enemy you look like an angel and yeah, that's that's gonna be it That's gonna be it Rami El

Becoming like nothing so hard you fucking trigger the the the third impact the third Thank you all right done and done I knew I least a Rough agreement on this the red orbs are definitely having the best time overall Yes, they read they are they are but like I knew that we could do that within five minutes, right? Oh easy light work trivial light work not a problem, okay You know what else is is is light work, what's that carrying your team in night rain?

bro, I had I have a I had I have a Sentence from Gene Park friend of the show. I played night rain with also two days ago right after I played with you and Reggie and He really summed up everything about how I feel about the game in like a single sentence This game sucks when you lose and it's awesome when you win. And that's kind of it. Sure. Like I've had like a couple of runs in which everything went great.

I was like, oh man, this game's awesome. But as soon as it goes off the reins, the night as soon as it like you're having like a not great run, like just every part of it just starts to become like hostile and miserable and fucking awful I'm having a really weird time with single-player for two reasons right and it could just be because which single-player so expedition with One player mode on mmm. No, I mean the single-player from fucking Sunday to Friday to Sunday or single player

from Monday to now. Oh, I don't know. What changed? They completely overhauled the balance of the solo mode literally yesterday. Well then definitely not yesterday, no. Okay. Prior to- So pre-patch. Pre-patch.

Will it be solo? So for one, the feeling of the stress just accelerates so much higher when you're on your own, right? Well, it's two forms of stress, right? There's the stress of coordinating with your team and your team being a bunch of shitheads and all that thing. That's gone. But like the performance stress is is times 10.

It like, yeah, it's all on you now. And I'm doing it even though I'm in my brain. I'm like, OK, I'm doing this to learn. Right. I'm doing this to learn areas. I also wanted to play solo. Right. I wanted to like figure out how the map worked. Exactly. Even if things change and don't change, you're still familiarizing yourself with the pieces

will be helpful. And I found, I'm like, oh my God, it's just way trickier and harder to get places in time, taking shots on bosses and not having... So I mean, mean overall the thing that we've known about every Souls game is the ability to fight a boss whose attention is drawn elsewhere is crucial it's humongous and that's a difficulty it's the difference between a 10 out of 10 difficulty and a 5 out of 10 difficulty maybe even less maybe even three you know what I mean if it just

happens to never and that that as as a major factor being like oh every boss fight has to become like do it the perfect solo run it's like oh shit like imagine doing a deathless run in a souls game like but you asking more of you you know you also get to find out as a solo player just what it feels like to be the Dark Souls boss fighting multiple opponents at once. So when you load into a boss that's built for three people and it's like, okay, this is actually a triple boss fight the whole time. And you have to split your attention three ways. You're like, I can see why I was able to stomp on bosses with co-op partners

because this is really fucking hard to keep track of. Uh huh. And so what I kind of did was I kind of found myself being like, okay, let me map familiarize more than taking on these bosses directly because I'm just like, oh, like this is there's no time for me to like call this one solo beating a boss involves a lot of calm down, learn its pattern, dodge effectively, don't get greedy. But you don't have time in these contexts, you know? And if it's the end of the end of the the run boss, you have hopefully another shot in 40 minutes. Maybe. Yeah. So the pressure is up. So there's that part of it that's like definitely a weird one and it's to take some getting used to.

And yeah, it's the anti-lab. I find all the biggest, sickest moments for me in Eldenrain God, whatever, in the base game originally, were having these sermon sessions with the millennia or Lord of the Frenzied Flame or you know what I mean all that you like it's like you and me were locked in here moag and we're just gonna spend our time doing it and this game is directly leaning as hard as possible into the opposite direction where it's like fucking no time gank run go you know fucking no time gank run go, you know. It's 1 a.m. on a Sunday night

and I don't have to get up early tomorrow. I'm gonna sit here until I beat you, Radon, or Melania, or whoever. I'm just gonna do it and I'm gonna move around my fucking bullshit and see if that helps and I can look up a, I can, I can look up a statistical variation. What are you weak to? Do you kind of, do I have rot shit in my inventory? Let's go. As opposed to you're going to do it now or you're not going to

do it. And you're going to do it with the reward you got last time, which is not the one you were hoping for, but oh fucking well, right? And so a little, and so because of that little binding of Isaac sort of, you know, like, ah, I didn't get what I wanted. The boss didn't drop the thing. There's a little bit too of like, okay, well fuck this run.

Like if I get there, I get there, but I've already given up on this run if I don't see two decent rewards early on, you know? So you're not decent rewards in the early on you know You're not guaranteed rewards of the element at the place that you go to which seems insane Like I'm fighting gladius alright. I'm gonna go to the holy ruins to get a holy weapon Not a single holy item in the entire place wow. I'm glad I spent like six, seven, eight minutes of this trying to get a fucking, oh shit, oh fuck.

And after that first, after we beat the first boss there and then the elements get introduced, I drop back in and it's like, hey, the bird is just gonna drop you on a lava pit. And everything around you is not like starter enemy. Like it's a bunch of perfumers that are actually like they want you to be a little bit tougher before you fight them hit it so the the The the the there's four types of changing like

Environment I've only seen the the lava pit But all of them are for like day two. They're all like yeah super super for real All of them are for like day two. They're all like yeah super super super for real It's the it's the what they it's the how a Lord of the Rings should have ended with the fucking Hawks dropping the ring Yeah It's just but you are the ring dropping into lava and then you run out and then get perfumed in Point-blank and like that was the first like five minutes of the game, you know So me and Gene had like a batch of like incredibly shitty runs where we just fucked on it really bad and we came to two conclusions that no matter how they fix this game up, I feel like

I'm going to hold on to one. If the whole fucking team dies at any point, the fucking run should just be over. No, no redo. Because once the whole fucking team dies, it feels impossible to fucking possibly get back to where you need to be. I would disagree. I would say if the team wipes and you can't get your souls, if you can go pick them up. Like on a timer?

Yeah, if you can go get them, you can salvage it it if you can't go get them and those levels are all lost and you're fucked Then like yeah, just rip the reason I say that is because there's no way To fucking leave The game in between the night bosses if you give up one of the things that like I find is like definitive about like the battle royale genre which I played a ton of them is When I'm playing them battle royales and I get killed in the fortnight and like I'm not gonna get my victory royale Okay, I'm back queuing up within 90 seconds. I'm back in a new match in 90 seconds.

And I'm dropping in 90 seconds. You can vote to abandon. That is a feature. You can? Yeah, that's a thing. How? I think you press start and go to like, if everyone agrees, then we all abandon it. I had that happen during the demo.

Yeah. No? I saw that during the demo. Yeah. No? I saw that during the demo. I didn't see it during these but I- Oh, maybe it's not here. I believe you- I saw that during the demo. I don't remember seeing it in the full release so far. So the number one was like, there needs to be a way to- it needs to be meaner. We also think that it should be the range should be slower. Am I lying?

Hold on what what you might be hold on. I've invented that in your mind No, cuz someone mentioned it and I was like, oh, yeah, there was a game that I that I saw Something pop up during the that demo run Let me just confirm because maybe I'm Just quit the title and that counts as like rage quitting apologies if spread for spreading this information. Oh. Hmm.

There should be a way to whether the Runs of Hell players should agree. No, okay. You quit. So is it that when one person quits and then, is there a message that pops up after one person leaves forever or something? I think so. And it does alter some of the statistics.

Okay. You know what? I apologize. I do remember seeing some message of some kind when somebody left. And it is not what I just described. So sorry about that. The other thing was that me and Gene are very much of the thought process is that the matches ... So the matches should be longer overall with the ability to just fail out because

that cavern, that gigantic zone that's this massive cavern, is this enormous wasted pile of real estate because the only goal is to get to the absolute bottom and fight the boss at the tippity-tip bottom and get the reward from there. So you have this massive bespoke area that has all these mini bosses rolling around and churches and like a mini boss you have to fight to get through a fog door, etc. and you are just sprinting your ass off the whole way down, the whole time because going down there is like best on like the second half of day two. So you have 15 minutes to do it and you got to go.

So I suspect that like some of this like getting dropped into fucking insane environment bullshit and the spiking and difficulty is also based on the idea that you're supposed to get better relic rights. And I think that like the relic rights are supposed to drastically affect your build and not be passive. I've seen some relic rights that would drastically affect my build. Yeah, yeah. Again, getting sacred, dropping in with sacred right off the bat is nice.

A lot of the basic ones are throwing items get better, which is like whatever, but anything that adds a decent stat sounds massive. The remembrance ones give you new character abilities. So I got one for Wilder where his ultimate leaves a flame puddle on the ground, which does a bunch of damage. And I got one for Wilder that when you hook in with the hook shot, you get a unique

flame series of attacks Fire but only for greatsword nice interesting. Okay getting those two may wilder way Stronger. Okay. So there you go. Yeah that that that feels like you know, so you're dropping in and immediately you can actually be a contender You know, yeah And then a second games remembrances are so broken like you know so you're dropping in and immediately you can actually be a contender you know yeah and then a second game's remembrances are so broken okay gotta go look further okay so here's how it works you ready when you load up a remembrance it gives you like a little quest so the wilder's first remembrance which is the one most people are gonna do is go to the mine in the southeast of the of the environment and get like a slate wet stone off the wall okay right yeah I loaded up one for the um the summon girl but I didn't actually go to the run for him that's what it is and then as a result of him

having that quest active it causes a mini boss to show up in that spot that wouldn't wouldn't there yeah Yeah, right The reality of that is that only one person can ever have a remembrance active at one time Which means that if you have a remembrance active which everyone does because it's the best way to complete quests your matchmaking pool is cut by like 90% and once you complete the remembrance it says the quest is over as well, right? Yeah so if so I saw I you unlock the Summon lady, I forgot her name

Yeah, and for her it was beat the Cerberus or go to this can beat a night captain and It's and it's like okay If you can get the team to join you in helping you go beat the night captain then fucking good luck But most people are trying to go beat the Cerberus so at least that first one was like hey We're our goal is in common, you know, but the ones where it's like, yeah Everybody come help me do my specific thing, like... But also you guys have to turn your quests off.

Yeah, that seems counterintuitive. Insane. Completely nuts. There are tons of things in this game that are like really structurally messed up. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking that like so they rebalance solo on Monday They they rebalance solo by the following things You gain 50% more runes as a solo player overall Okay, just straight up 50% increase

which which makes it so that It evens out because you don't have three people killing things. You have one person. They increased the rarity of items you get on the third day from the merchant or from drops. And they made it so that you have one free life a day during the night boss.

Just a freebie. Okay, just a built-in resurrect And they also have it in solo and so you got one of these items the Gold item that resurrects you once if you die. Yes. Yeah in solo you can just buy those off of merchants How for money interesting? Okay, and they cost 10k so it's relatively cheap. Okay, so I you gotta go on a gladius Last night. Yeah last night and Just to fuck around with it and I rolled into gladius with four lives Like the freebie for the third day two of those items lives Like the freebie for the third day and two of those items lives

Okay Okay solo is asking you to go buy those chances Yeah, okay that makes a bit more sense then and the other thing is that I discovered that Gladius And I'm sure we'll figure this out over time When he's not running around with a billion health, fighting everyone in every direction, actually has like a really simple move set by Dark Souls boss standards. Gladius was which character again?

Is the three-headed dog. Oh, okay. It's the first night. Yes. Yeah, the Night okay. Okay. It's the first it's the first night. Yes. Yeah the nightlord. Yeah actually has a really really like simple move set so one of the things that I noticed is that because His big jumps and big sword attacks always like leave him really far away He always rushes you and always does like the same bite attack.

So the way that I beat him is that I just like rolled on every single one of those. It was super easy. And then stabbed him and then did like a jumping attack. And then when he split into three, I would just run. I would just run to the absolute edge of the arena until he reformed. Yeah, you know what? I'm not surprised to hear that, because as we were saying, like the, I don't know, like Consort Radon is on the basis of, again, you are getting married to this boss.

You know, you are locking in. Consort Radon is as far as they could ever push it, ever. And I think when you're doing the whole time limit, fuck you, chance limit, et cetera, arcade mode thing, a simple boss is probably gonna be all of it. Yeah, because you could be walking in it with like a massive numerical disadvantage in fact it feels like Marget is actually an outlier in How many moves he has and how complex he behaves compared to the rest seems like the hardest thing in the game

Yeah, that like every other boss is kind of like on a fairly Limited bar yeah, no agreed cuz he plays like one of those real super Hard lock-in bosses from the original game Most of what you're running into in terms of fucking you know bell-baring nights and foreskin night warriors and all that shit is like Yeah, okay. We know it's that's the kit. It's it's the the the four or five main moves So the other part of this that I found quite strange and, you know, it's by nature of the game being a like spin-off kind of title, by nature of it being so rushed in its like gameplay design and panicky, I find myself less engaged with the lore at the very least as far as like souls goes

I'm not taking it anywhere near as seriously as I've taken every other game You know reading the description going over and thinking about the connections I'm just going like yeah button next hit not leave that to Vaati to put out of you know in like two weeks And then we'll watch it and we'll there are that was night rain Yeah, you know you have a little thing you read that says, hey, here's what the characters are up to. Do their remembrance to find out more about their origins, and you seem to get more pages as it goes.

Talking to them, they say some little tips here and there, but I'm completely, like, I'm treating, you know the way you treat Souls game after you've done it all in your new game, plus saying, and you're just running around, engaging with the mechanics. Like you were already there on launch for this. Oh, one of the other things that they patched yesterday

of massive note is that they made it so that jumping and mantling on the climbable surfaces is a million times more reliable. Yeah, I gotta go see that. There's a bunch of dumb jumps. It's terrible. Mashing jump and then seeing you fall over and over again sucked I know it's it's way more reliable now And it really feels like the patch that came out yesterday was like the day one patch but five days late

hmm The lot what I was gonna say just back on the lore bit is that the moment where you go and talk to the summoner lady, it's going to take me a minute to get the class names in. But that's my point. That is my point. I don't have their names locked in. And I'm looking at her as the ghost and you go talk to the ghost and then you fight her and get it.

And I'm like, you know, if this was the proper LP we would have been like oh she's staring at a painting of Radon what does that mean? You know like you would actually stop to go oh yeah she's actually hanging out in this room what are the implications of that and you know and now we're like whatever. It's just it's interesting that like things that usually would matter currently don't because the nature of the game is shut the fuck up Put in quarter go now go go go go go go go go And and you know, maybe I'm sure there's gonna be cool shit when you know, the the the poster Like boss shows up eventually or you know, the the night lord of the whatever the scene the night lord

I seen the night lord phase transition is fucking cool. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, no and like you're gonna you're gonna see it and you're gonna care after you see how cool it is for sure like Artorias, you know, but in the meantime, I'm just surprised this is the first time I'm like I've Booted any of these games up and just been like yeah, yeah, whatever get mechanics You know one of the things that's like of note is that like unlike your average Souls game People have freaked on this game harder than they've ever freaked on a from software game before There were people by the end of the weekend being like I beat everything and I did all the remembrances

What the fuck? Where's the rest of the game? Okay, yeah, yeah So like normally I'd be like go outside Nor like genuinely normally I would be like but go outside with one Change is that this is supposed to be like a multiplayer game Mm-hmm that you play over and over It's weird that there is such a definitive end to the game's campaign Which is did you beat the nightlord? All right, you're done, which is why it's good that today

They announced that they are gonna have new Kings of the Night version of those bosses coming next month. Great. I mean look, it's also a genre and company that have conditioned the most anti-grass touching, you know, into its player base. So you'd have more stamina if you went out and touched some grass. Yeah, I can't look at you know Oh, you mean eat it like as an item that yeah, I remember those. Yeah, okay No, I just I'm like I'm not gonna say that like if someone sits down and just fucking bleeds out their eyes to get there Within one weekend, but you know that that's not from softs fault for

anyone going that hard on the game but the That's not FromSoft's fault for anyone going that hard on the game. In the meantime though, I do hope that the end experience does kind of build into this weird Isaac-style thing of, yeah, if you beat the game and you go back in, you're going to have enough random variation with some friends that it can still be fun. I would say, by the way, I played a couple of runs solo yesterday, and the changes they made to solo have been a fairly dramatic improvement in that experience. Hmm.

It is now a game you could be like, I have no desire to play it multiplayer, I'll just play it solo, and I would go, yeah, you can do that. Well, they bought it in duos now. It's been in less than 24 hours. Yeah, so duos is coming for realsies in a month. I am curious if the end game is basically people reducing RNG with relic rights and

other... Oh, it is. Okay, so you really have less variance in your character. The single best relic in the entire game is start with a stone sword key, increased rune acquisition, and decreased cost of items in the store. Okay. So you get more runes and buying things cost less runes and you start with a stone sword key that you can use to get a shit ton of runes right away so basically the the best item is get tons of money to spend it to just get what you want okay from the store because I was looking at the inventory you know when you're in the the

roundtable hold and I was like, are you going to be able to get a weapon before you even leave on the expedition? Is that going to be a part of it? And it's like, not in the shops we've seen. And how far do the relic rights go? Do they replace your entire, like, yeah, starting armor? I think it was Vaati or maybe it was Iron Pineapple, I forget who it was, but you can get multiple of those rights that is start with a weapon that does ice or start with

a weapon that does poison. And I believe what he had was he was playing, I forget who it was, but it was the executor can start with his katana that does bleed that also does poison, that also does frost. No, no, no, no. And then you just run to upgrade that with smithing stones. Two relics that conflict with each other don't stack on your weapon. If the weapon itself has a base thing, that applies with the extra, but I put on a relic that had sacred and I put on a relic that had sacred and

I put on a relic that had fire and there was an exclamation mark next to it and said and it said no yeah so both it specifically highlighted the sacred one to say this one is on and the fire one is off you know so that sucks because I would love to stack that shit like you in base game. You can definitely do that, you know And and or if you want it and like I don't know if you can choose which one either Because if you want the other skill, it seems like you're kind of stuck with whichever one is in first priority slot, which sucks um but yeah, I'm curious if like the end game relics are like

Massive build changes from the moment you drop in that regard. But yeah, no, brainless fun. Poke around it. Poke it with a stick. The game. Oh, one other thing you should know. They changed the way boluses work.

Oh, yeah, staunching boluses and whatnot. Yeah. It's like, oh, I pop it. I've started eating them right away because whatever yeah, so the slot permanent buffs now permanent Permanent resistance to the oh Okay Just eat it immediately. Yeah, that's correct. I'll tell you what though. I fought the absolute shittiest boss

I've seen in night rain yet solo last night scarlet right. I don't know what the fuck I fought the absolute shittiest boss I've seen in Night Reign yet, Solo last night. Scarlet Rot. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking. It was Wyrmface. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And Wyrmface has a permanent Death Blight aura on them. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That you have to constantly manage. And in order to deal with that permanent Death Blight aura,

Mm-hmm. It spawns in ads constantly the entire fight that all drops a bolus yep fought that fought that during the demo sucked that is like absolutely so the worst design boss encounters I've ever seen in my life yeah I did two runs trying that and I'm never every time I see it now like fuck that all the ads and I picked up the bolus and I'm like, all right, I'm ready to go. I bet I can do it. And then like the ads all showed back up

because they need to have a way to drop the bolus. Nonsense. It's super weird fighting bosses in the field that are meant for torrent on foot. You know, it's, you can like, like. There's mobility issues. There's mobility know, it's you can like like there's mobility issues. There's mobility issues. Absolutely and in the May in the demo I think is where we discovered that like the

Intended game loop or the intended way you're supposed to move is sprint through the map But what you're in combat use your circle button sprint, right? Because this the real sprints like three times as fast as your circle-brutton sprint. So even with the stamina loss, the way I'm getting there in time is with the sprint. Well, what I was about to say is when markets toss in fucking kunai at you, like 10-10, your regular sprint doesn't feel like it's cutting it. You can try the timed rolls and such, but just hoofing it ninja style to the left or right is more effective, but your fucking stamina it ninja style to the left or right is more effective.

But your fucking stamina management is dog shit at that point. But switching between the two sprints for optimal stamina management, I guess, is like, I don't know. I think it's intended. It's also the legacy way the sprinting worked in those you know so I can see why they wouldn't necessarily completely get rid of one or the other But you're so much slower doing a saunter jog versus

Get in you know it's also more awkward because you have to hold the circle button Yeah And when you have if you're playing with somebody who dad get who downs the opponent and they're too busy to get the counter Hit in you got a fucking you know dash in as quickly as possible. So Yeah Anyway, I'm sure optimally that'll look a little bit different But it works the game is gonna look like really different from month to month. Mm-hmm Just to see how people are playing it. I think the fact that we got like a

balance like see how people are playing it. I think the fact that we got like a balance, like genuine like balance changing patch within like five days, and they're going to add a new mode and like harder difficulties in like a month. I feel like when this game is maybe done in like two years, it will be a significantly better game. But I think that it has like really really core structural problems and the biggest one is that I Kind of like vibing in from software's environments more than I like running point-to-point to fight shit I don't disagree. I know what you mean. Yeah sitting and looking at that distance and then think making a decision

I like inhabiting a different planet that's violent and hostile and weird more than fighting the big boss, which is crazy, because I love fighting those big bosses. But ironically, you say that, but I think the game design here is taking into account how the most hardcore people have been streaming the game design here is taking into account how the most hardcore people have been streaming the game

as Twitch challenge runs. Yeah, you know? So it's like, yeah, we're aiming this at the meme runners essentially, you know, more than anything. I wish they had actually just put like the randomization at like the speed run mode or or the randomization as a mode in base Elden Ring. That would have been of much greater value to me. That could have been interesting, certainly, after you've learned it all. I feel, I mean,

who knows what the future will hold, but I wish that there was more clean synergies between classes. It would be super sick if there was double techs. You know? I would love it if what you described about the Wilder and the Fire hook, if you could like. There kind of is, but they're soft double techs. Like certain people's moves just work better together. Right?

Like restage works on any high-amaging alt. Oh, any alt. Yeah, any big alt, yes, for sure. Restage is great in combination. And more moments of intended synergy would be really cool. It's a little something that, even in the most passive way in Marvel Rivals, it's like, oh, that's cool. Okay, we get some good synergy together. Let's grab these two and you know,

Gamma energy on Iron Man or Fastball Special or whatever. Jump on Groot's shoulders. You know, I think little things like that would have been fun to see. I think that the game's overall design is kind of a mess and the game has huge problems, but kind of a mess and the game has huge problems, but I want everyone at From Software to look at the roster in this game and realize it's really cool to pick classes in a game that they make that feel different. They really actually feel different. That is by far the best part of the game is playing as guardian and having a big heavy shield and a terrible dodge We're playing as Duchess with a double dodge. We're playing as rec loose with a super long weird dodge

Or people who have different move sets the different the Raiders axis is such a unique axe compared to regular generic Axes the double claws that you do as summoner are very different, very unique moveset, comboing around. Like yeah, no, the uniqueness between the classes is wonderful. Having characters of different sizes and how that affects your hitbox. Like the Wilder.

Do you know the Guardian has a charged guard counter? Oh, I think I did. So if you hold R2, he does a really really really big guard counter, but with halberds only Interesting cool. And I think about like man I just back port these fucking characters into awesome fucking base Elden ring awesome awesome uniqueness going on 100% Probably working on that right now actually I mean modding at the very minimum Well, cuz I think about like remember when you picked a class in Elden Ring, you're like, do you play as the confessor or the prisoner or whatever? Like, if they just fucking

played like this cast, that would be fucking awesome. Do you then get to change, modify them back into whatever as you go? Sure. Yeah. Whatever. Respe respect it. I don't care. It's a cool set of abilities. Have them feel super different from the jump. I agree. No, look, we love character select screens and especially ones where you have abilities

that change and matter 100%. That's way more fun than a couple versions of dress up for the main naked look you get. Also, yeah, starting you out like too powered in those games is also what they don't do you have to kind of suck With whatever so you got a shitty knife or a shitty sword or a shitty spell You know is also the thing or whatever the fuck so you being weak at the beginning is different from this game where you're supposed To start out kind of you're coming in is like your damage is low, but your kid is finished. Yeah. Yeah, that's the intention

So this is made by a separate team. This is made by new people, like young developers on the Elden Ring team, who I don't believe are working on Dustblood. And it's really interesting because I saw folks saying, oh, you think they're gonna use the lessons they learn from Night Reign and apply them to Dustblood? And no, absolutely not.

Those games are being simultaneously developed. They're never going to even talk to each other across the office. I mean, you know, we'll see if they have a completely different design philosophy for that one too. You know, Miyazaki said in an interview a while back, I'll never be able to find it. But like the reason why you always had to go back to the hub to level up instead of doing it at the bonfire is he didn't know that mattered to people until before Elden Ring. Like he just didn't know. Because feedback's for pussies, I guess. I kind of respect that.

What we do know is whatever the game after this that they make, the multiplayer will have significant improvements because they're gonna have two fucking test cases running live to figure it out. So that'll be interesting. It's also gonna be interesting to see these games competing. You know? With very different beasts, but at the end of the day,

they're multiplayer from software games at some point It's gonna be like are you do you do you load up your switch and go for the fucking? Blood-borne Nintendo at home, you know, or do you do you do your your souls run because they just dropped another they dropped another fucking Dark Souls character into it, you know, hey look, it's law-trak and Dark Souls character into it. Hey look, it's Lautrec. It's fascinating to me and me and Gene were laughing at ourselves silly because we couldn't stop talking about Marathon when we were playing Night Reign. And the reason why we couldn't stop talking about Marathon is that Marathon had one of

the biggest things like, man, you got to put fucking solos and duo modes into this fucking game, dude. Like, holy shit, are you insane? Three people only. And we're playing Night Rain and like From Software has the mandate of heaven. Like From Software couldn't be more blessed by instant success no matter what its flaws. And you look at the steam reviews and you look at the way people are talking about it and it's like, give me a fucking duos mode, you fucking psychos holy shit goodwill and not lifting your entire texture pack from a website sold almost four million copies right now it can't escape from like no put a fucking duos mode in. Making playable solo, god damn it. It took Apex years to do that.

I saw a tweet, I saw a skeet from Lumen, screw you on Beast Guy said, just realized there's gonna be a game or series of games shown off at the state of play. That. That's tomorrow. Are going to be far longer than intended because the runtime originally belonged to Mar marathon before advertising got yanked bro boy oh boy we got a fill for time hey you got any more like pre pre-rendered

footage going on anything else any interviews demo of some indie game you love that doesn't look that good, but hey, it's not marathon We're not getting sued. Can you double that vertical slice length? What are we doing? Yeah? Oh my god? We'll see what happens Yeah, no Night rain that rains that rains fine that rains fun. I had like a I finished my stream with gene I was like I don't think I'm ever gonna stream this game again And then they they fucking patched it literally the following day to make solo way more playable

And they streamed it again, and I was like okay. Well. This is a lot better, so hopefully that exact trajectory continues hmm Yeah Because that that first patch is a massive improvement It is really pretty dramatic it's funny though because like the Intent the game is designed for streaming for low effort

Like just oh, yeah drop it into a run, but absolutely but I like The like you said the the chill taking in the lore Like you said, the chill, taking in the lore, dissecting bits of these games. Well, you don't have time to talk. Yeah, and that changes the appeal. And so when I saw some folks, I saw some people discussing, oh, how are they gonna handle playing this game?

And I'm like, I'm gonna stream it once or twice, and that'll be that. I'm not gonna commit to uncovering all these bosses on camera over time. Absolutely. Me and Gene were gabbing our asses off and then we started playing and the entire conversation for like an hour and a half just boiled down to like, okay, what artifact? Okay, holy, okay, we're going to go here. Okay, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, faster, faster, faster. Does anybody have a stone sword key? No? Okay, go, go, go, go go go go go go go go faster faster faster does anybody

have a stone sword key no okay go go go go go like that was the whole thing it's a blessing if you're if you're not a variety streamer though if you're somebody who's like like a souls particular then you're gonna just fucking blast you're gonna crush it too hard done hmm hmm well yeah but then you start bringing your own stupid rules in like okay, so level one this thing Okay, you like him like yeah archer only no bow and arrow fucking you know like you start working on whatever dumb extra weighted chain rules so Anyways good stuff on that Game gonna keep playing it gonna keep complaining

Okay, that's my review right now. I'm gonna keep playing it, and game, gonna keep playing it, gonna keep complaining. That's my review right now. I'm gonna keep playing it and I'm gonna keep complaining. That's fine, that's fine. You know what? That's actually the sign of a good game is if you're still playing but you're still complaining about it. Right?

In this day and age, you know, it's much worse to just have... Engagement. No complaints and dropping off is actually the worst possible outcome If you think if you think about engagement no thought no, whatever. I don't have anything to say about this I'm actually just completely done. You know So speaking of weird games The hunter hunter nenpact

Demo has just all it. It's a feature in the game nenpact demo has just... Is that what we're calling it? It's a feature in the game. Nenpact is the name of the system, actually. Okay. You know, so I'm going with Nenpact according to what Aiding has decided. The Hunter Hunter Fighting game put a demo out on Steam and you can go play it. And this shit is super funny because originally this game was going to be out a lot sooner, but it got delayed

because they're adding rollback. Good. Right. Great. Excellent. But the team definitely intended for it to be in people's hands a lot sooner. And as it's coming out in about a month or two, the idea of waiting too late for people to get hands on it is bad for marketing. So they released the demo with a tutorial, a single player mode preview and labbing, but no online in the demo, which is really, really wild. So it's a full training mode. The Nen Impact has a full training mode and you can play local versus up to six with six characters

But you don't play online in the demo for this fighting game Very funny, right? I'm like, alright, so the rollback ain't done yet and they don't want to show it off bad You don't want to give a bad impression. That's fair get it out of the game, but people have to start playing it though Okay, well doesn't give them a lab, you know the game, but people have to start playing it though. Okay, well, give them a lab, you know. So yeah, I mean, you can just have your own local little fucking skirmishes and so on. That's it is what it is. Also hilarious is that the tutorial, the story, there's a story mode and there's also tutorials. And the way that all comes together is there's, it's just screenshots of the anime, right? So, you start the tutorial for the mechanics

and you're getting blasted with spoilers from future arcs immediately. Great. And I'm like, god damn it, can I just learn how the mechanics work without finding out about fucking Green Island? Spoilers, dude, Nan, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That happens like five arcs in. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do there's nothing you can do right? It is what it is then you know what you're playing a Dragon Ball game You're gonna see some colors, and you and they mean what they mean you know But it is it's just funny that like if you go into a particular story mode or whatever like Quests and you you could get hit with like recreations of story moments in any fighting game. You're like of course That's what that's for. But this tutorial to learn how to play is showing you scenes from far into the series.

Here's what happened. Here's... I have a direct one-to-one explanation of what's happening here. The game's called Nen Impact, and everybody uses their magic nen moves. This is the equivalent of you playing JoJo's Bizarre Adventure stand, all-star stand battle. And you start up and they start explaining to you what stands are and you're like, I'm only halfway through part one. No, no, no, no. Ah, fuck, it's a stand shit. It's not that part. The part I'm trying to emphasize here

is that the tutorial goes hard into just like screenshots of the anime. That's it. Punch Ghost, what the fuck is that? It's as opposed to the like, just like the breakdown and then the context is, you know, fucking whatever, Dio and Jotaro staring at each other. If you go in, it's the mode that I find that hilarious to do that in.

Also tutorials in general don't have story segments in them. It's weird to have two story segments in that mode. That aside, gameplay is 3v3. it is Marvel-style, it is fast, it has got assists and all that stuff. And I find it feels weird. I'm not super-duper hooked on the way it feels. Yeah, I should say J and Play right now It's it's it's definitely like dividing people because some people really love it and I've seen

people talking about how it's great for their old man reflexes because you float so slowly when you get launched up in the game and So much of it has like the moment you like it's very fast and chaotic like it's fast and chaotic when you're Point blank mixing each other up and stuff, but jumping around and like hitting landing hits it becomes a lot slower Characters kind of bounce really through the air and kind of float for a while Yeah I'm noticing ground bounces have characters bounce off and like this nice smooth parabolic arc that gives you all the time in the world to hit them. It's quite, it's you know, and then on top of the arena facing each other, there has never been more space between two characters in any other fighting game I've ever played. Like, it feels like you took...

All the characters are pretty small, actually. It's crazy. Well, I mean, so Uvogin and some of the bigger people are going to be there to feel a little little more tank sized and normal sized. But with the kids that have really stubby limbs, they have a couple of buttons that make them fly forward. But you really just get this feeling of like you're staring at each other from super far away. And imagine any like arena fighter running to the two walls of the arena. It feels like you're kind of that distance from each other. So there's a little bit of weirdness with the spacing going on too. And yeah, look, there's 100, 100 net impact.

They said that the budget of the game that Aiding had for this, I think it was rumored to be like 400K or 600K, something like that. I can tell. They didn't have, they had a whole lot of resources on it. You can see it. Yeah, and it's like, okay, so just work on the gameplay and making sure that that's fun.

And it's Aiding, Aiding has made a ton of, they've worked on so many amazing fighting games over the years, they know what the fuck they're doing. They're behind Bloody Roar, they worked on Street Fighter IV, they worked on Marvel. I mean, Aiding and Dimps are basically the secret developers that get called in to make some of the best fighting games. And then they go, not uncredited, but secret credited. But this is one of those cases where it just doesn't... I don't find it's

grabbing me. you know? And that sucks because I wish, you know, for all the lore and bullshit with me in this series, I wish there was more of a pull towards it. But there just kind of currently isn't. It also, you know, we'll see what the full roster, maybe I'm going to like some of those characters a bit more, but right now I'm kind of not super drawn and falling in love with any one of them in particular. No, you have it backwards. You fall in love with the characters and then you play the

fighting game and play the character you want. Of course, of course, but that's my point, right? I like Uvogan. I think he's cool. I don't know about the rest. Krapaka is also pretty chill too. I like Krapaka, but in terms of carrying my interest into the game, I'm like, I don't know man but the weird part is that you talked about how like games from 1998 were if I played hunter hunter nen impact on the PlayStation 2 I Would have been going like yo y'all remember net impact that fucking crazy hunter hunter game that came out on the ps2 Wow, what a fucking weird goofy fun game, right?

If it came back, if it came out on the PS2, this energy would have been super different. But coming out, coming out alongside everything else right now, it's like, yeah, it might not be for me, man. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, learn a bit more and, you know, get a team so that I can play it when it comes around and stuff. But I, there's just, there's that feel, you know, you talk about that sonic jump feeling, you know, there's a little bit of that feeling going on here where it's not, it's just not hooking me in. And there's a larger problem too, I would say, aside from all of that. We are now in the space where you can play a fighting game on any controller you want and no one can say like, oh, don't use a pad for that or don't use a hitbox, whatever. Anything works on anything, right? Everybody, we're in a controller

agnostic universe, have fun. It's great. I now have to put an asterisk for this game because if you play on like playing Mortal Kombat on a stick, you kind of run into this issue where like playing pressing the supers of the the two trigger buttons together, it really wanted you to do that on a controller. And now it's getting weird on a stick. This is kind of the worst case of that because the game has technically has technically eight buttons to use and seven if you count the main ones and most fighting games are like, we'll do it all in six, right?

You're on a stick. And then you'll do combinations. Your hand comfortably rests on the first six buttons, you know, and then that's kind of what it's always sort of been. And now this game has light, medium, heavy. It's got the NEN button, which is your shield and launcher. Then it's got assist one and assist two. So that's your six buttons. And that's just like Marvel, right? But it adds a super button, which is a special move

button, which is basically modern mode, you know, tilts to for your special moves and that's what you need to use that button you can't just do quarter circle hodokan inputs or anything the shortcut button is mandatory for doing special so that requires a seventh button to be on your stick which is weird to reach out to much less to hit in the middle of a fast combo and this is also really weird but the game has auto combos where you know we've that's become more standardized but the auto combos that you do with the auto combo button are full damage Unscaled there's no downside to just doing them instead of doing

Real combos type of thing and and they do 50% damage. Oh Yeah, just off the auto combo off a light in some cases, you know, honestly combos type of thing and they do 50% damage. Oh yeah. Just off the auto combo off a light in some cases. You know, honestly, I remember you didn't have the same feeling that I did with City of the Wolves, but this is very similar, is that when I was playing City of the Wolves on pad, I couldn't get a button layout that I was playing City of the Wolves on pad, I couldn't get a button layout that I was happy with.

And it massively brought the game down for me. And hearing like, seven? Seven? That's too much. Even on the pad, that's too much. That's too much. Ben Fiesel I get used to shortcuts on the shoulders for sure. I mean, so with City of the Wolves, there were a couple like, oh, this could work if you wanted to bother, but I think it's more past that point for making sure that you could press both buttons together to get your EXs out. But yeah, I think here the problem that this game has with the stick thing is just most of the time, if you wanted to press the button to do a Hadouken, you could also just do, you know, down quarter circle forward and then punch,

and it would be fine too, and you don't have to think about it. But now when you force them to use the shortcut button, it's like, oh God, your hand has to fly all over the stick now, and that's like, you don't wanna make people unable to use a stick with your game, you that's not a great decision I think in a game genre that is so vitally defined by player input that fucking around with

like known button combinations is particularly dangerous. Like the goal for every fighting game is to like have the controls disappear for most players. Yes. Yeah. Become a decision to game direct connection. 100%. And so when you're telling me you're sitting there with your stick that you love and you have many years of practice on and going, ah, seventh, but, um, uh, and the thought for like an experienced fighting game player and the thought process there is essentially them going every like people aren't buying sticks as much as they're just playing on pads. So let's just design around the pad. But like a good design, a good control scheme will allow both to work, you know? You want to give people the ability to play on a fucking DDR mat if they want to. That's the fun of these games too.

Somebody shows up with a fucking keyboard or guitar and it actually plays well. And you're like, that's crazy, you're insane, but it actually works, you know? And then we have to figure out this auto combo situation because in the one hand, I've seen it's like, it can teach you how the characters move string together and that can be a useful kind of guide. And then if you can do it on your own, you can just do way more damage manually.

But it is kind of funny to have a game where you're like, yeah, if you wanted to just auto combo someone twice, they're dead. So yeah, just do it You can just do that and figured out wooly. Yeah, there's there's no downside You know or if you want to like go halfway through the auto combo and then switch to a manual one you can You know that sounds like it's been figured out What's there to figure out? I guess the idea is just like, is there going

to be touch of deaths, which someone found some bugs where you could do like, you know, what hit kills with Leo Rio. And I think what are the, if you're going to do a like drop your combo in the middle of your of it and mix the person up with like a crazy left to right thing. That's possible too. But right now auto combos have never been more real. And like the only thing telling somebody, hey man, don't rely on that, is your pride, which is like, okay, whatever. You know?

Okay, I'll have pride in my wins, thank you. So they're going a weird way about this game, and these are veterans of the fucking genre, you know? I can't tell what they're going for, but we will find out. I think what they're going for is that Hunter x Hunter has never had a fighting game before, so they want Hunter x Hunter fans to be able to do cool stuff with the characters they like.

Has it really had nothing? It's had nothing. What video games? Hunter x Hunter has been crazy underrepresented in video games? Hunter x Hunter has been crazy underrepresented in video games. You'd think any fucking Shonen Jump franchise would just get the cash behind it to even come up with like a shitty Game Boy Advance thing, you know, like at some point. But yeah, okay, fair enough. And yeah, okay, here, sure enough, there's a ton of Hunter x Hunter video games, but

they just kind of never went all in that. Jump Superstars, yeah, cameo characters there. Weird shit. We'll see how it launches. But the... Yeah. When we talk about the magic of a game with a lower budget, and in this case, it's like even with this budget, some of the decisions just didn't have to be what they were regardless.

It shouldn't factor in there. I think game with a lower budget doesn't apply equally to all things. And I think game with a lower budget being paired with large rostered existing property that everyone wants to see everyone on is maybe one of the worst combinations. Expectation for existing IP crammed into limitations as opposed to zero expectation brand new IP. Because when I see a Hunter x Hunter fighting game, my expectation is that the fighting game part is okay and that it has every character I would want to play as. But I don't want the misread on this to be therefore games with established IPs always

need to be quadruple A because I do not want that. No, I think that Hunter x Hunter should have, I think that giving it to CyberConnect to make a goddamn Naruto All-Stars or whatever the fuck those games are called. I can't even remember. What are those fucking games called? Fucking? Great Ninja Clash. Great Ninja Clash.

I think that would have been a better use of everyone's time and money. Because I look at that roster and I go, well where's so and so? Where's Kurepika's brother? I didn't even know that was a character. Where's Pito? Like fucking, fuck off. Where's Kurupika's, not Kurupika, sorry, where's Killua's whole fucking family? Oh, the Zoldyck family, yeah.

Like, where's the whole fucking family? Mmhmm, mmhmm. Like, sorry, I got Kurupika and Killua mixed up. Where's that octopus sniper that had that really emotional part during Chimera Ant? Where's that guy? Behind a season that is of DLC that can't come out because the performance is not going to reach that level of success. Where's that chameleon guy who turns invisible? is not going to reach that level of success.

I mean, the chameleon guy who turns invisible. All right. Well, there's a lot of like, aiding has a legacy. And like, I trust them in a lot of cases. But you know, and I feel like this, we'll see how the launch goes. But like, it feels like a rare miss for me at this point But I'm you know I'm

I'll make a final call once and once it launches you know oh wait moreau is not in the game. Are you serious? But is the fucking is the big guy with glasses and a giant pipe not in the game Should I take my headphones off It's for for future shit. I'll just like you let me know when it's clear morale morale my mistake He is okay, okay I can't remember anybody's fucking name in that show. That's crazy So that's all on Nenpect. The only other thing, Beat Cyberpunk.

Nice. Super enjoyed. Is it good? Yeah, yeah. And bugs were fucking rife the whole time in fact So now that we're now that we're now that you're done, and you've bugged it out real hard Oh, man, I'm gonna say it once more for people in the back When you have a PC save file that you pull mods off of that save file is probably fucked forever

Pulling mods off does not make everything back to pristine state. Yeah, that could be the case, although again, I did go and start a fresh one. It was fresh on PS5? I did the the the transfer over for the character, I I did the the the transfer over for the character Lucas because I had the character model or whatever early on in but at a point after a point I just made a fresh character Okay, so the game is still busted as fuck and I saw like even people were going into threads going like oh is this a SSD issue or installed on a secondary thing and it's like no no no it's a PS5 version, right there's a console and they're like oh yeah even on a secondary I'm like no no no nothing's

on any secondary drive like there's the game is built in like shit and it's and you can see it falling apart and you can try to reach for any other reason why I did something stupid and fucked up the process here but what you're seeing is the game running on a PS5 and running like shit I don't know what else to tell you you know a broader question you're seeing is the game running on a PS5 and running like shit I don't know what else to tell you, you know a broader question You can get is actually like relates a lot more to my life. Mm-hmm than then you would think so you and Paige are The only two people I've ever met in my life like this and I don't know what it is about the both of you, but you

both produce what I would call never before seen results. Yeah, I don't know. Every time you interact with technology, which I have walked out of a room and heard a noise and like a fucking device will be on fire and page will be like, I didn't even touch it. Yeah. Made me a great Q a going on make me a great to a tester. I was really good at my job I was very good at QA. That's the you know, that's the best I can say but um This the start of this whole thing cuz you just reminded me because I kind of forgot about it until you brought up the whole

Save file bit but the amount of fucking audience gaslighting on no you idiot, it's your fault for doing it whatever way you did because you heard old news or what was some of the most frustrating, annoying bullshit, it was so stupid and shitty. I hated that, that sucked, right? When I'm like fucking clean the thing, boot the game up, buy it, start the game, make save go and has nothing to do with it

because what happens is we're traveled slowly and things, whatever I say. So you hear about the, oh, you're doing the Mass Effect thing again and you're doing mods. Why are you doing mods? You don't want to do the respec, but whatever. Okay, fine, right? All that mess comes and goes and we go,

all right, fine, fuck all that. Let's just go with the PS5 console version. There shouldn't be any issues there. And like after that point, it doesn't matter. Everything I do is stupid in some way. That's going to be a problem. And like it, I hate that shit man I'm playing on a clean file and the game's fucking up and you got to go like no

It's cuz you installed it to an external hard drive on your ps5 or some shit fuck off. That shouldn't matter right that sucks Don't be an asshole. Um Anyway, the game is done. I'm sorry if I came off extra critical. No, it's it reminded No, it's more like the amount of bullshit going on at the beginning of that was like Anyway, it completely unreasonable for We have moved on to an entirely different like setup that has nothing to do with how I How I was playing it on PC and there are still problems, but because it's me. They're all my fault. No matter what I do Okay, that's that's a fair take that's reasonable. Sure, you know

Anyway the The game is done and I definitely enjoyed how going through it the choices you make with some of the with a lot of these characters are You know make with some of the with a lot of these characters are you know they weigh on your decisions and then any like I imagine a good Western RPG always has these moments of like gray with all the characters and you know you follow projects like particularly good at it they're so vaguely like oh you can't feel good about helping anybody you can't for the Witcher games they they have a really excellent

Time making sure you never get a clean win Like you can get like yeah, you know what I got most of the things I wanted and they're like, okay But what about this part that you don't like actually that came along with that? Yeah, it's you know, it's very clear that like Yeah, it's very clear that like, Night City is of course your main character, therefore you should not feel good about your, you should not feel clean. If you feel too clean morally about your decisions, maybe you're not considering a certain part of it, right? If you're too, if you're like, yeah, Johnny is, let's go with Johnny all the way, right? He's right, and we got to fight the powers because Corpos suck, you know?

And you're like, what about the fucking bodies that got cooked with a nuke, you know? No, man, don't you get it? And that applies across the board, you know? And so like when it came to Phantom Liberty, I'm not gonna like spoil any of the choices, but some people were confused by the way I played it and why I did what I did, and were going like,

oh, did you think this or that or whatever? And I eventually clarify in terms of what I did and why I did it, because they completely filled in the gaps on something that was not the case with why I chose to help and not help certain people and why. But something that also happens in games sometimes when you have a crucial decision to make is like, there's the way you would decide in real life

and then there's the video game version where you're like, narrative stories sometimes give you a little invisible thread where you would expect there to be none. You know, sometimes they give you a little ladder. And it's like, oh, if you find it, then maybe you can, but you have now closed the door to all ladders. So the idea of like letting that kind of like, maybe I can find a way out if I keep fighting to find that way out,

happens in video games a lot. I would, so how far did you get into Baldur's Gate 3? We got... I mean, everyone joined the party. You did the second act. Just tell me if you got to act 2. No, no, no. We didn't get to act 2. Okay. So at some point in act 2, I encountered a scenario that is very similar to what you described in which... How would I actually deal with this in my personal life if I was a Dungeons and Dragons character?

I would make an impassioned plea and just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk forever, right? Because that's how I try and solve interactable problems. I just keep talking until it's solved, or everyone tells me to shut up. Rhetoric up. until it's solved, or everyone tells me to shut up. Rhetoric up. And in Baldur's Gate 3, I grasped the tiniest implication

of a hint of a whisper to maybe not do that, and then didn't. Okay. And that was not how I would have ever, in almost any other game, done that. Yeah, yeah. Because it all depends on the creator of the game and how they view the world

and what they want that to be, right? But there are cases where a game will be like, make a choice here, none of them feels great, and you gotta internally go, all right, I'm going with this, and I'm standing by it and hear the reasons why because ethically, this is worse or whatever the case is, you know? But then when there's those moments where it's like picking the one that seems wrong, or seems like, you know, more selfish or whatever the case is, but then there's a little, but if you struggle, you can find that way out or so,

always makes me go, oh man, well, now you can just as easily go, you're an idiot for giving up when you shouldn't have given up, right? That's the kind of the idea. It's like some people write stories in a way where it's like never give up no matter what. And some people write stories in a way where it's like, no, there's a time and place to give up and accept that because life is hard.

And you don't know who you're dealing with and what kind of story they're telling you, you know? So let me ask you, because I haven't I played about so I only really played the first chapter of cyberpunk. One of the things the Witcher series does very excellently is they give you decisions that don't really seem all that important, only for you to later realize that they did have more value than they expected. And it's not like, well, because you went to the bar instead of the graveyard, so-and-so died, right? It's, this affected your relationship with the character and therefore the character had a different motivation

and the character went on. Okay, this game is the opposite. This game has multiple choices that always feel drastic even when you have a way out after you've committed to them. Sometimes you make a drastic choice that feels like binary, but then you can still RPG your way into a different outcome. And then sometimes with the moment you choose it, it's set. So, Witcher 3 does something really interesting. Its ending is incredibly opaque,

and it's how you get it. There's no choose the color of your juicy fruit mass effect at the end of it. Like, Witcher 3's ending is a direct culmination of acts that happened way back, like a dozen hours beforehand. And so you arrive at your ending, and it is the ending that you have built for yourself

and described for yourself. And then it gives you like little flashbacks to the choices that you made that mattered. Okay. And none of them were presented as if they were important at the time. Interesting, okay. All of them were like as if they were important. Interesting. All of them were like really, really simple.

The one of the most interesting ones, and this is just, do you accompany someone to a conversation that should be private or do you let them do it by themselves? Okay. And miss out on the cut scene. Right, right. And that's one of those things that like leads in.

And it represented this thing where people like got to the end and some people were like outraged. That they got the ending that they got cause it was like a downer or it was like not what they wanted. And then you will, what did you do here, here, here, here? And like you played your Garret like an asshole. So so but you were given like a dozen opportunities and you played him like an emotionless callous freak. Okay, so the ending is going to represent

that. Okay, interesting. So two things that come to mind here. One, there's there's one major part of the game that does what you're describing, which is your relationship with Johnny in the in the game Is very subtle and you're like putting him down or agreeing with him or what you say Choosing to chew him out or not are all decisions that matter that are much more subtle compared to the other relationships and choices You make right? There's a lot of like life and death walk away or stay here kill or don't kills and with Johnny it's kind of like we're having conversations about whether or not

we like each other and whether or not I trust you, you know? And there's an actual Johnny meter when you pause the game to see what percentage sink. Oh man, how much Johnny you got. So that one part of the game is treated differently. And it's cool how subtle that is, right, in contrast. What you're describing is like, I would subtle that is, right? In contrast, what you're describing is like, I would say that like not in defense of this,

but if the game presents itself with enough robustness in its quest making and giving that you don't feel like playing it like a video game and turning your brain off is just the optimal way to go, right? Exploring all dialogue options and then, you know, as opposed to like commit to the one and never say the others, right? You know games where it's like, you have five things to say

and you can always go back and hear them all and it won't mean anything versus the game that's like, no, the one that you said matters and the others go away. But what about the game where you say the one that matters, but you can go back and see the others and the saying this one makes them like you less. And you just did it to explore what the character would say. But now you've created a consequence. Actually, I'm a big fan of like, Hey, don't ask me about my face.

Yeah, you will through all the discussions about your face. I fucking told you not to ask. So you fuck off. So it depends. But you don't know what the game is like and who's making it and why they're making it in that way. Right. And if you have these unintended consequences where, you know, it's kind of like when I talk about a game has stealth and you're like, okay, what does this video game consider stealth? Is it lighting? Is it crouching?

Is it crawling? Is it sound? Is it line of sight? How many different things are this video game taking into account so that you don't have to just crawl at the slowest possible pace out of sight in the dark, in the bushes, you know, to still be invisible. You don't know what matters or what doesn't. And the moment you do, you just game the system

because video games work that way. So what you're describing at its worst, in my opinion, let's go back to it for a second, the fucking hold the line system in Mass Effect 2, right? Where the whole game plays a certain way, but in the finale all of a sudden you want to get subtle about things, you want to be more deep and interesting about what the representation of these characters is than the rest of the game applied, and now these invisible metrics kick in in a way that's abysmal because you've been playing the game with

zero amount of this subtlety. I think, um... And it falls apart. Nightmarish. I think that the Suicide Mission and Mass Effect 2... ...um, exists in two states. Um... There are two versions of that system. And there's nothing about the system that changes, like it's all the same numbers.

The question is its context. Playing Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission within like the month of its release with no plans to play the third game is very different than playing through that suicide mission as part of the Mass Effect trilogy. Because one is, oh man, that was a crazy ending I got. I can't believe Thane and Morden didn't make it. Oh, rip in peace, guys. Versus, oh, let me look up the numbers so I can do it again so that everyone can survive. So that everyone can talk to me in their normandy for the third time. Those contexts dramatically changed everything about how that works.

Yeah. Nobody, nobody rolled into a fucking file, Mass Effect 3, with only Shepard alive, you freaks! The absolute obtuse-ness, you know? It's the writing equivalent of the moment where you have to walk up to the party in the James Bond mission, moment where you have to walk up to the party in the James Bond mission, and where you have to walk up to a window

and shoot it to break the glass. And I remember I was describing this as like, pause, let's talk about game design. Is glass breaking anywhere in this series, a part of the franchise at all? Is shooting through glass anywhere in our brains in this world, or have we internalized the idea that glass is just glass and then you have to move around it or whatever, right?

So why this one sudden moment of shooting the glass? You're crazy. You're crazy if you train the player to expect something and then suddenly go, no, do the other thing. That's real life, isn't it? And you're like, you asshole, you're a video game. And we know there's limitations. And I can understand when like drawing assumptions about things are going to lead you down, you know, a well and you could use that as a trap in a way where if you expect the game to play a certain way, and then they can use that against you

to support your expectations. That's cool sometimes, right? If you it depends on how you execute it, right? But the moment I'm describing, the way the rest of that game played was such a like, this is not at all the same thing. This is not what I've been doing for the last few hours. This is super weird to expect the person to intuitively just come to this conclusion. And that's what's going on in that fucking up to suicide mission, you know? Like you can't suddenly at the last minute decide you want your game to be more subtle and deep than it actually is. So if you're describing The Witcher in a way where from the jump, you get a sense that the game cares about and or is paying attention to things that you otherwise might overlook

in other games like this. That's good, because then you're like, I'm on edge the whole time I'm playing about I'm playing this and thinking a little bit more about it. Kind of like in disco when you fucking trip over the old lady and do the double deuces, right off the bat I'm like, oh, failure is something special in this game, you know? So the very first choice in Witcher 1

is the Kaer Morhen is being attacked by goons who are trying to steal all the witchers magic bullshit and They go. Okay. Do you go down to the basement to head off the goons or do you fight off the gigantic fucking monster? that's attacking your friends and That is a dip like that just seems like it wouldn't matter all that much, right? You fight the big monster and you get like the monster parts which can get you an upgrade, but then you get to the bottom and discover,

oh, they had extra time to steal more shit and enemies in later missions will be more mutated as a result because they got to steal more which whole shit. They got more, okay. Because you were busy. Okay, yeah. And you find those consequences out like how soon a full chapter later like 12 and a half hours later

Okay, like like like way way in there way too late in there you find out okay, okay? Cuz cuz again like it's like I don't I I'm not against game design and the writing and such, planning that to be the case, but you can't go one full way and 180 at the last second and expect a good result there and expect this to say that, you know, in a game like Cyberpunk, when you like the more you kind of and the more you kind of feel self satisfied with the choices you make, I think perhaps the more wrong you're going about this, you shouldn't feel okay with any choice you're making, you know, for most, at least for the for the major players in terms of who you're supporting and what. But with that, I think it's great. I think it's very cool. And I

like the journey through this world. The one thing I will say that like, I don't know, maybe I'm maybe I was expecting a bit much or maybe CD Projekt taking a world that already existed in the original cyberpunk tabletop universe and then expanding on it didn't want to crack open the sausage too much. I'm not sure. But there's a couple of moments in the game where I found talking with Johnny and a couple other characters throughout the LP, I'm like, the idea of how cheap and disposable life is in Night City is such an interesting discussion to me, right? And it's the part that hits the hardest and it's the moment in Edge Runner's episode fucking

one where David gets hand a package. And it's like, yep, here you go. Here's the remains. Bye. Life isn't cheap. life has actually no value at all. Therefore, if we're gonna care about people, who should we care about and why, right? What is the world's viewpoint on this? Is the giant fucking pen in the sky

as cynical as the world it within it? Or does it say to like have meaningful relationships with who you can for the time you can because that's all you get right? Or is there something else to it? I don't know. I don't know right I'm but I'm always curious to find out what the players and pieces on the board feel about the game that they're in and feel like this applies to like runners or like literally every person in Night City? In this game you get to experience, so I go, you know what runners' lives are like and then in this game you get to experience life as a solo, right? So you know how bullshit that can be. But the average person just wandering about the streets, going about their life is suffering horribly

because every time you do an NCP mission, every time you do a cyber psycho hunt, every time you do a fucking random side mission of gig of any kind, it's filled to the brim with normal people living normal lives, dying for no reason. Because life means nothing in the city. I mean to be fair that's like kinda like... regular life. Sure. There's not death races such as drifting around with people gunning full speed Mad

Max at each other around... I mean we're not quite there yet. The Dekari Expressway is not getting me riddled with bullets for going for a Hot dog just because I went to the wrong street, but people do live in Angeles like that is like but there are places there are places right make no mistake some places are more death-raced than others um But yeah the the overall feeling that you get is like if you think this is localized to people who are like, oh, you picked a dangerous life, right? Live by the sword, die by the sword?

No, this is everybody, right? It's over- No, because there's a crazy amount of collateral damage all over the place. Nonstop, insane, insane amounts, you know? And overall, you get that whole, again, the corpse on top being like, whatever, cost of doing business, we don't give a shit,

and you know that's the vibe. So how the pieces on the board feel about the pieces, about the game they're in, is like I love that, that's such meat on the bone, you know? And that's why I love Kreia so much, because she has the most shit to say about the world she's in, right? That's why she's my favorite fucking Star Wars character because oh my god spit spit granny spit I think I think Krea is is one of my favorite Star Wars characters, but for like maybe the opposite reason That you're saying right now

Maybe like Krea believes that at the end of the Krea is like South Park made manifest in in fucking What do you call it in Star Wars where like she would rather complain about how everything is stupid and dumb than actually do anything like she's she's wrong at the end of the day but she wants to there is something she wants that she is wrong but there is something she wants to do and the deal is that her version of The the the world that she lives in basically what if Johnny is is shitting at the corpse? But the corpse are a walking living breathing group of people called Jedi and Sith

You know the world we live in is shaped by these assholes. Who are the assholes? Arasaka and Militech? No, the fucking Jedi and the Sith. We don't give a shit about your stupid war. We're trying to live normal lives and we fucking suffer because you're too busy having your religious bullshit, which you know, and going off,

and we don't give a fuck, man. Don't kill me and my family, you know? It's interesting, right? And so I'm super always down to hear the cracking open of that idea in the world and where that goes, right? And Johnny's like, so let's drop the nuke and fuck plans, let's just go for it, who cares?

And you're like, okay, Johnny, is frying collateral damage, AKA called protein, is getting more protein involved in the terrorist attack a good idea, you know? And you kind of run into other people who are similarly minded and you go, oh, oh, how badly do you want to make your point here? Right? Because if you're down to fucking fry entire innocent families for simply standing in the way to make your point, maybe-

Don't you get it, man? It's about the system. Right? Maybe- It's all just cogs in the machine, bro. Right? And maybe I don't want to stand next to you while you're spouting off about that. Right?

Maybe- I just want to pretend that I just met you outside and I don't really know you that well. Yeah. We agree on the problems, but what are, do we agree on the solutions? It's very important that we agree on the solutions. There's a lot of that in the world today where, oh, you and I, oh, we agree on the problem? Oh, that's nice.

What are your solutions? Oh, oh, interesting. Okay, cool. Right, I'll be over here, go fuck yourself, you're just as bad, right? So I kind of was hoping to see that get cracked open a little bit and it dances and touches,

but it doesn't quite fully lean into that amount. I don't think V is smart enough to engage on this topic in the level that you want him to. No, and V doesn't have to get to that point. It just needs to happen in the logs we're reading. It has to happen in the conversations in the level that you want him to. No, and V doesn't have to get to that point. It just needs to happen in the logs we're reading. It has to happen in the conversations in the background. It has to happen when you're chatting with the leaders of the Militech or Arasaka corporations,

or you know what I mean? Just, we need to kinda, we need, just give me something to chew on, you know? And there was a lot to chew on, and I didn't scrape the game to 100%, and there's always like fun little bits and pieces of lore that I was missing when I'd find stuff off camera and read it, I'd be like,

oh yeah, okay, that's good stuff, you know? But the narrative of the main story of V was not about what I'm describing, you know? It touched on it because that's what life in Night City is, and it's interesting that like, Edge Runners is kind of distilled into that one screenshot, you know the one. And that's kind of what people feel.

When it's like, oh, that song starts playing and people feel away about that song because of what it makes them feel, that's exactly it. I'm like, why do we feel that about this? Do we feel that about that? And there's a part of this too where, of course, you're a video game character. So you're going to go through this in Tomb Raider mode, like mowing down a cult of people on an island, where you're like, OK, the story wants

to pretend she killed four people, but it's closer to 400. So all this to say that without scratching that most interesting itch of the cyberpunk world, I still was satisfied with where the game goes and how you get there. And then, beyond that, you kind of just like, a lot of it depends on how hyped are you for fuckboy Johnny to just be a fuckboy and be wrong and have a point but be super wrong about it. Do you enjoy that aspect? You know, and and then within that too is like, do you want to, you know, kind of just

how much are you enjoying being in this setting and this world scanning things looking at the the the the the different cultures as they crash into a cyberpunk world. Yeah, right? So we get to see Buddhist monks mixed in with a cyberpunk setting, awesome, right? Japanese like Zaibatsu's crashed into a cyberpunk setting, a quintessential has to be there, you know? And all these little bits and pieces where you get that,

the Voodoo Boys, the Haitian culture, crashed into a cyberpunk world, super fun to see you does that just like feed your brain and give you the right feel the right synapses firing the jitters okay cool this you're gonna enjoy the ride regardless so let me ask you a question you had a very very it sounds like you had an excellent overall time with cyberpunk and you're extremely happy with what you got out of it. I recognize the flaws for what they are and I also... Sure. Right.

And there are bigger flaws I didn't touch on yet, mind you. But in terms of just getting the feeling of this world right and walking away from it going like, oh man, it fucking sucks to live there. Yeah, they nailed it. But also you had like fun playing it. Like it was an enjoyable romp and you were like, yeah, good CD project makes good games. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, with an asterisk, but go ahead. So that's my lead up. So with that being said, and the technical problems that you ended up having multiple years after the game's release, how excited are you to hop on Witcher 4 day one? Oh. Cause let me tell you man, as somebody who's done,

who's ridden this ride four times, I'm done. Every single one, huh? Every single one. I am done. Every single game they have ever put out massively met crazy fucked up like fucked up enough that I was like I'm gonna wait like a year oh yeah no reward for early adoption if you can if you can, you know, deal with dodging big lore points and potential, you know. Like, I'm watching a tech demo of Witcher 4 today going, I will play this game when my son is in high school.

Is there like, is it usually a big patch that gets announced or is there like a proper re-release where you go, that's the step? Traditionally it's called the enhanced edition. Okay, this time around it came with Phantom Liberty But they didn't call it enhanced edition. They called it version 2.0. You remember that? Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep Well, so, you know what I'll say to Some of the stuff I kind of wanted out of the game that I didn't get gameplay wise is like, it's almost I don't want to ask too much or be unrealistic in the demands. But one thing that I went into the game kind of like, initially, I was kind of overwhelmed.

I don't know if you remember my first sessions being like, oh, man, there's so much and I don't know how to handle all these choices and builds and stuff. And then when I went off camera and I went through it and I kind of came back and I don't know how to handle all these choices and builds and stuff. And then when I went off camera and I went through it and I kinda came back and I went, oh, you get three classes. Three OSs are gonna decide the majority of how you play. And then on top of that, you can pepper that with melee weapons of different kinds or different guns. But for the most part, your OS determines what you are. And I wish there was more, you know, I wish there's more variety to that.

I wish that maybe you could choose to dual wield and pick a gun with a different gun or, I mean, there's three classes swords, alchemy and magic. I'm sorry. We're talking about cyberpunk. I meant Yeah, okay, all right, all right, all right Yeah, I mean in this case fucking time stop, you know melee and magic so And then it turns out that back in the original game, the classes were based on your job. So you could be like, your whole play style was based on, are you a medic? That makes sense.

That's your gig. That's what you do. And then everything else after is a sub-choice from that. But this story about a particular person going through a particular adventure, it would be way too ambitious and way too hard to be like, oh yeah, here, you is a, you know, you're a corpo that spends the whole game being a corpo,

but still have the story of V. It wouldn't make sense with the way the game is designed. So you kind of go like, I understand why they did, and I look forward to seeing how they expand on what they do. Might be more subclassing, you know, because again, you can pick up a sword and still hack things. You can, you know, grab a whip that that hacks people or pick up a gun and do

berserker stuff. But, um, more implicit, like baseline variety, I think, would be a lot of fun, even if it means like taking out how far down the path, the road you go and making it a little more shallow, but widening the base. Uh, and then I go, Oh my God, fucking Larry in Baldur's Gate 3 though. You can't expect anyone to hit that. More subclasses? You can't expect anyone to do that. That's unfair. That's an unrealistic amount of open play.

And if you want to go even further, you can be like, you can look at a game like Pathfinder, Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous and be like, here is more subclasses, abilities, feats, etc. than you could ever hope to possibly understand, but you're trading that for a game that fucking barely works for multiple years. But when you're not doing that stuff, you're walking through somewhere in the city, and conversations around you are great and interesting. You're picking up garbage that tells you about the setting, and fun stuff is happening around you.

You're like, yeah, this is cool. And what I would say, too, is my own personal love for the genre and that sort of what's rad about it. This is the part where in an open world game, I might get bored already by seeing the pieces. You can see where the NPCs spawn and walk in their circles. You can see where the chariots, cars, or horses spawn and then run throughout.

And you're kind of like, yeah, OK, we get it. It's big. It's empty. There's story happening over there, but there's a whole lot of nothing in between. And in this kind of like, yeah, okay, we get it. It's big, it's empty, you know, there's story happening over there, but there's a whole lot of nothing in between. And in this case, I'm like, no, like, there's enough in this that's like cool about the setting that kept my interest peaked, even off camera.

I think CD Projekt makes really incredible spaces. Like I think even in Witcher, I think Witcher 1 takes place entirely in the city of Vizima. And it is like a 2000s era PC game in which characters like are... Characters that walk around are like completely faceless nameless like whatevers. In fact there's only like 10 separate character models. And the people you actually have to talk to mostly stay in one spot. It's a really great interior space.

Okay. Like it is a really fantastic, explorable space, even within its own limitations. And so I'm curious because when you walk around, I don't know, fucking random, just cause, you're not expecting to be like, ooh, look at this city and its living, breathing vibes. No, the city is there to be blown up. Fucking whatever, right? And then I know that the earlier GTA games, certainly you kind of like, you see the bones for what the city is at a certain point and it stops being interesting.

Does a game like Red Dead Redemption actually have interesting things happening out in the wilds where with random animals and forests and dark, you know, in the woods? Like, is it does it actually is the money in that game keeping the like spaces interesting in the same way that you're describing? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay.

You can do that. You picked the you picked the one. Where they- Single example. They did it. That proves the point in the other direction. Okay. No, it's okay. I'm legit- no, because I'm legitimately curious, because I know not every studio does this, right?

Some places just like go like, grab tree generation, grab grass, and stretch a mile in that direction and go, you know? And this in cyberpunk, you're like, what the fuck does that sign say? What is this conversation happening? You know, there's there's enough interesting going around that you don't kind of feel that, you know? Ooh, one of the things though, it's like there's a there's a there's a really fine line. In most I made a little I made a little oopsie spill.

Give me a second. Oh, okay. Do you want to keep talking or did you really spill it? No, I'm going to get a napkin. Hold on. BRB. Okay, I'll pee while we do that. Right.

Excuse me. Oh yeah, anyway. So I think those are kind of the points that worked and those that didn't. As far as cyberpunk goes, this is an enjoyable experience and I hope that one day a maybe cyberpunk Cotor 2 type moment will happen or maybe it's got to be cyberpunk and or, I don't know, whatever the equivalent is. But I would love to see that material get analyzed and handled and treated in ways by different folks. Kind of like edge runners, you know, where you get to just explore an interesting world

and kind of think about what all these things mean, you know? Because if we were to like take on Star Wars again as our case in point example here, you're just like, there's good and there's bad. And good is good because the fucking spirits of the universe say that's what it is. And negative angry feelings are bad because that's just the way... I don't know, fucking midichlorians, shut up.

Dude, good vibes only? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So someone else coming in and going like, yeah, let, yeah You know, so someone else coming in and going like yeah, let's let's let's talk about that Let's see. Let's see what that actually means in a setting like this is a lot of fun You know Thinking about cyberpunk and like joking about how like the game was finally finished and then like as you were playing it they still Fucking patched it a couple more times dude being a fan of this very specific style of genre which is like large-scale computer RPGs is absolute suffering like

Baldur's Gate 3 is currently the peak but like we didn't cover it but the Warhammer skulls event was like two weeks ago and they showed off a bunch of stuff there and they were like hey guys here comes the last expansion for Warhammer 40k rogue trader by Alcat and I'm like fucking sick I'm finally gonna be able to and before I could even finish the sentence, they're like, here comes season pass two, ending in 2026. And I'm just like, oh my god, why you fucking pieces of shit? Oh my god. Yeah, listen, this is this is one of my first experiences with completion of a full on Western RPG. Right? And they're not, and like even you, even all that time, and then them saying it's done,

we promise it's done, it's done, it's done. I mean, I'm like, I don't think people would believe me if I didn't have it on camera, that it's like I took on max tack, beat everybody, tried to get the secret weapon or whatever didn't get it But still cleared the hardest challenge possible and drove away and the game Exploded as I did my victory lap, you know, like you hit that five stars and roll out and the games goes And it crashed so hard that it took like five minutes before the PlayStation 5 actually went. Oh shit you crashed It didn't even do the catch right away thing, you know incredible

There is there is no reward for early adoption 15 20 hours and be like this is a good game I'm gonna play it later like what happened with Kingdom Come Deliver 2? Like I'll wait till those DLCs are out and I hope to God they don't announce another set of them because then I'll be sad Yeah, I look if games like continue to discourage like people from early adopting them in this way, it's like It sucks because they're not gonna get there. There's people that are gonna be like I would buy that but now is not the time clearly You know, um, it's it'll hurt them in the long run, but also like cool like things can chill I'll bet I'll look elsewhere, you know, I buy it on sale Let the world come to my pace. Let everybody join me over here where we're like, yeah, no rush, you know

Like night rains one of those games. Kick your feet up, grab a Mai Tai. Right, there's no rush on Night Reign. Wait till night, like, if you're like, I don't know about Night Reign, just fucking wait till it's like $15 on a Steam sale and has a year's worth of updates. I mean, till that character select screen

still has a scroll wheel on it. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, big, big games for some of that stuff. We are going to go into, yeah, like I said, Cyberpunk, not Cyberpunk, Expedition 33, spoiler cast at the end. So coming up on the channel now that this is done, we've got a couple more alternate pathways

for some of the endings and Phantom Liberty stuff to watch through. This is just some epilogue work. But the plan this Saturday, we're gonna have a special game to fighting games. Gonna be joined by buddy Freddy Loco, an old CVS2 player from the arcade days, is gonna come play through some Capcom versus SNK2,

which is on the Capcom classics collection. We're gonna dive into that as well as Elena, who's coming out, so we're gonna explore. Her costume three looks fucking amazing. Looks great. Super cool. Everybody's costume three looks great. Love those, love that look, you know?

Did I give you, by the way, on those costumes, did you hear the reason potentially why it's taking so long for Street Fighter 6 to do these things? I do not, actually. I do not know this. So apparently the reason why this is, I don't know if this is confirmed, but at least it's rumored is- Floatin' in the Aether? Floatin' in the Aether is that there is a team of people that are, like there's a Korean dev team that's hired, that's just working on the world tour costumes, and those are outsourced and their job is to deliver 400 people and their job. Well, their job is to deliver those costumes, you know, once every

two months or so, right? And the main team working on the fighting ground, main mode, don't want to outsource the costumes because they want to quality control them and are making sure that they themselves do it. But their hands are full with the game itself that they can't get around to costumes as often as the team who's hired to just spit costumes out. So the outsourcing team is like,

we're just doing our jobs, right? We got hired to make content frequently and we're doing that. That's why you're getting a bunch of world tour stuff. And the main team is like, we'll get to these costumes when we get to them, but they're not the highest priority for them. And this creates a super weird, disparate feeling

of one mode getting ignored and the other mode getting a ton. Because if you're not communicating that like, oh, they don't wanna trust an outsourcing team to make sure that the quality of the costumes is high, Then you're just gonna get them way less frequently once a year It's really a shame that Capcom doesn't have that many staff that are Experienced in working in creating assets for the proprietary engine that every single game and the company uses game and the company uses.

I mean. That there's just nobody at Capcom that could possibly help with this. I mean, clearly the priority is not leading to them grabbing anyone off of fucking Monster Hunter or Resident Evil to bring it on. You're right. In fact, it's going the other way around. They're sitting down to go like,

yo, Akuma better be faithful as fuck. And he is. He looks incredible. Akuma is insanely detailed. As the 15th weapon or whatever they're saying, you know, like he's basically just a whole play style. Amazing. But yeah, that reasoning makes sense, but it just feels like shit for anybody that's like, but I want to

not have this asymmetrical amount of attention. And the question is, do you then go, all right, let's outsource the main costumes and then some of them are going to be fucking stinkers, but they'll come out more often? No, you're not going to do that. Absolutely not. Right. It's just such a massive gulf from like Street Fighter 5 where you'd get 10 new costumes every single day.

That's what it is. And some of them would be stinkers. Some of them were absolute dog shit. But some of them were great. It's a mixed bag and you'd be like, I don't know. But here they want to make sure they're all solid. They're all good. But this is the exchange. And the Outsourcing team, it is kind of, because they're just like, what did we do? They hired us to do a thing, and we're doing it. What? It's like, yeah, people don't. You're not going to advertise.

Capcom's not going to say, oh, yeah, this game is actually separate games being worked on by different teams. Perception is everything. Anyways, all this to say, we are going to be checking that out, and then we're going to start our next LP. Oh, see, this is fun, because sometimes I know what the next one is, or like you've implied to me, but I don't have a single fucking clue today, so I'm just, I'm with everybody else.

I'm excited. What do you got? Well, I've gone back and forth on this, and I I have to admit I've changed my plans a couple times, right? Like I was originally going to whatever. It doesn't matter the details. Hey, guess what? El Shaddai. Reggie is going to play Expedition 33. Oh. Don't let Reggie listen to today's show. He won't.

Important, Act One. We're gonna play Act One. Just the first act? Well, Act One for now, We're gonna play act one Just the first act well, I'm act one for now and we're going to work the rest in schedule wise as Possible. Oh, so you're gonna treat it like three different. I'm two and a half different. I'm a now for now we're announcing act one and then That that's then then we'll figure out the rest

You know so There right yeah, so so that's that's the plan, okay? I wonder if his takeaways on the that game will be Different with a little more time to sit Perhaps with act one perhaps perhaps because you and I just went Zoom you know and and and you know we just I did also just the way I hit the end of cyberpunk was by hitting As many back-to-back sessions of that game as possible without starting a new LP right so we We compressed as much as possible into that.

In this case, well, I just wanna let people know, the, like, by having, by saying just act one for now, we at least have a end finite point that is not the infinite horizon future of a big RPG that allows us to kind of plan when to start the next part and or if it's You know or if we're gonna mix things up or so so more details on that later How's Reggie's parrying in

general better than ours So okay. He has better. He's a better fighting game player than both of us He's has the best reactions and abilities of yeah, absolutely So, okay. He has better, he's a better fighting game player than both of us. He has the best reactions and abilities of, yeah, absolutely. Alright, I am interested to see if he goes down the same path that you and I did. Dude was- Which is feast or famine, no it's all feast. Dude was chain grabbing space animals all day in Melee, man.

He's fine. There's no question there. There's a bigger question that I'm going to ask and I'm really curious to see how we go with this one. But the bigger decision is what language because it might be very interesting to play through that game in French with a French speaker and to have that be a part of what we do you know I think it's interesting it's it's yeah I think it might be fun a lot of people at this point know that the English voice acting is ten on ten. It's phenomenal

But how many people have gone through it in French right that could be interesting. I think that that would I Think that if Reggie was playing that by himself in his house That would be an incredibly interesting experience. I think you guys playing it on stream are going to end up in the situation where tons of people are gonna be like, dude, I'm doing the dishes in the other room just listening to you. I don't know what the fuck any of these characters

are talking about. I know, I dealt with this with Naruto back in the day when I wanted to hear the Japanese voice acting, because that's what I was used to from the characters and I never had the adult swim experience with it. And I remember the pushback on that. And, you know, I do fully understand that this might be the case here. So it's not set in stone, certainly. But I am entertaining the idea because if an over... Also, they're Parisian, so like, ew. Like, I, like.

I understand that the background listening experience kinda gets compromised in that way for some folks, and that is, that sucks. I do not want it to be harder for people to enjoy that, but I'm also super curious as, you know, again, going through this game with a different vibe from the rare French dubbed game, it's such a rare thing, you know?

It might be a really cool, different experience. And if people are willing to have the subtitles up, you know, in a way that like you do when you're going through Japanese games, then it could be fun, it could be cool, you know, but I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. Right. I can already look over and I can see some people are like, that sounds cool. Let's do it. And I can see people going unwatchable, unlistening experience. So I am loathe to trust literally any voice I see scrolling past my eyes. Because I remember a long time ago,

you was like, hey, should we do this? I forget what game it was. Should we do this game? And then you immediately followed up with, okay, but if we did do the game, would you say you wanted us to do it and then just never watch it because you thought it was cool?

And tons of people got caught. And we're like, oh yeah, okay, well, yeah, maybe. Are you just saying yes, but then you'd never actually bother? Oh, fuck yeah, that was me. Yeah. That was me, I lied. And for sure I can understand the part where like, if you're on your phone, that might be a thing too as well.

So like I said, I'm not married to that idea. I'm just floating it out there, as an interesting concept for how we could do this. And we could do it in a way that's different from the other people playing the game right now. And again, we're French speakers, so it has an extra personal fun connection. Oh, dude, I can't understand any of this shit in that fucking game. Like, you know, people were telling me to listen to the lyrics of the songs. Yeah. And I was like, I don't understand the lyrics in the songs because I don't have subtitles and it's a different dialogue.

I don't know what the fuck they're saying until I listen to the songs on Spotify with subtitles and I can read it I can't hear Parisian and understand it like period I can read it but I can't understand that shit by ear at all I it's definitely more difficult for me than other slower forms of Quebec French for sure but and again as an anglophone I I still am like, I'm not 100%, like my brain has to go through a translator every time. But like I said, I'm just, I think the idea is an interesting one. At the very least, you know, he's gonna make a call

on how he feels about that, we'll see. Again, we know the English is amazing. And, you know, this might be another situation too, where it's like, okay, like, it could be one of those ones where it's like, you do it, and then it comes ones where it's like, you do it and then it comes out and then you see a bunch of people going like, oh shit, that's cool. But then like a massive shit storm

of overwhelming amount of people go, I hate this, this is the worst. And then you're like, okay, maybe we should switch it after session one or something. And then you gotta do the whole thing over. Well, no, you don't. But it could be one of those bits. When I played it myself,

I did do an offline session and then switched it. I did the intro and then switched it back and tried to see what it was like in both. So I don't know. This is gonna have to, I guess, rely on some audience feedback for like, how many people are like absolutely nuclear

on the concept of it being there. Everyone who is listening to this part of the show, reach out to Woolley on his social media for your feedback. But if it comes- He's asking for your feedback. Oh, God. If it comes down to sessions of starting it in one language and then switching over for

the next one, you know. I mean, look, we know that the amount of people that are like- people that want it either language that wouldn't care are not going to be like fighting for it to be in French per se. Right. But people who are like, I don't want to watch because it's in French are going to be like it's a it's an on and off switch. So anyways, that's what we're doing. Should be fun. Expedition 33 Act one. Tell you what, man, this game is fucking special. We're going to be talking about it for a while is pretty good

And Yeah in my in my opinion act one is a much more linear Experience oh it definitely is so you can get there within a couple Sessions much quicker than you could like handle the opening up Yeah, I feel like I spent half my time in act two Mm-hmm cool. So that's coming up Over on wooly versus on twitch and on YouTube

And yeah, just also while we're at it, reminder, the Castle Superbeast Archive is now up and pretty much it's up to the latest ones. If you've been waiting for the feed to not be taking over your entire fucking sub box, you can do so safely now. Oh, did you fucking just go for it and just fucking bam? not be taking over your entire fucking sub box, you can do so safely now. Oh, did you fucking just go for it and just fucking bam? Well, that's what I kinda soft launched it, cause I warned everybody, cause like the Vodpocalypse happened,

and then I said, look, we're gonna have to release a hundred videos in one shot, in two big drops. So, it's the way the channel works, right? Watch CSB, fuckhead. Baaaaa! You know, so that's happened, so you're not gonna have that happen anymore, you know? Great. It's the way the channel works right watch CSV fuckhead You know so that that that's happened, so you're not gonna have that happen anymore. You know so yeah But that's what's going on for me all right, so hey, here's what's going on with Pat. I beat expedition 33 That that was like 99% of what I did the other thing that I did is mean page went through and beat chapter 2 of Delta rune

Which good that we did that? Because it's been a couple of years since that and turns out we forget like most of what happened in chapter 2 of Delta rune Like damn damn near forgot almost all of it. Mm-hmm Like we forgot the fucking ending of the fucking chapter damn Okay lead into the like that Jesus Christ like good thing that we did it Yeah, me and punch mom are gonna have to refresh on what's going on in that game. Yeah. No, it's been a while and I played that night rain That's the that's the things

What's more interesting with what's what I'm doing this week is what I'm doing this Coming week, which is the busiest week I've had in like a year. So today is like day 24, 25, or 26. I'm not sure which one it is of me streaming literally every single day. It just ended up working out that way. Which will then be followed by this tomorrow Sony state of play, followed by two days of me and Paige no-lifing the absolute shit out of Deltarune's chapter three and four on the fourth and fifth. The babysitter is locked in for fucking eight hours on both of those days. So we are going

to do it. We're going to fucking dodge all the social media. We're going to fucking just go and just do. We don't have anything to do. I have a question. Fucking play Delta Rune. I have a question. Yeah. If you were experiencing burnout, would you even know? Oh, absolutely. Okay. Is it an invisible status in the background? You know? Oh, yeah. No, it's this. Are you ready? Are you ready what it is? It's really simple. It's me sit down. I go And then I okay OBS, it's all right and I Okay, all right. That's what it is. That's the start. That's the fucking just like the big... You know what it is? I'm eating a bunch of spaghetti and then I look at my spaghetti and I go, and I have a big sigh and I have another bite of spaghetti

and I have another big sigh. Right? Yep. But as so today's like, what? I don't know, it's day 25 since May 9th or whatever, May 10th. I was like fucking jazzed to come. I slept like shit last night. I slept terrible and I woke up like, fucking good morning everybody. Today I get to do the fucking Expedition 33 spoiler cast. Today's going to be a fucking good to hell, yeah. Oh yeah. See what you might have, so the fun thing that I still get to experience over here is what we used to have a long time ago but you might remember the ding-dong, hey how's it going? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like hey Reggie comes in, hey Reggie how you doing man?

Okay got it, got it, all right. Let's feel out today, let's look at the clock. Let's see how we're doing You know or vice versa, right? so After gel gel to ruin after after Delta rune On the fourth and fifth which page and I are gonna know life the fucking shit out of it God throws the summer games fest June 6th at us Fest on June 6th at us. You're allowed to do anything you want in life. And then on Sunday is the Xbox and PC games show. Is it? And then on June 9th, my Nintendo Switch 2

will arrive in the mail. That's crazy. crazy incredible one of those days they're gonna shadow drop silk song oh it's just it's so fascinating how little I care about everything you just say no I mean not not actually but no no I know, I know. No, I mean, not actually, but more. No, no, I don't, not that I'm saying things and you're like fucking whatever. No, no, no, you're like, I don't give a fuck about Summer Games Fest or Xbox. Well, you know, we'll just, we'll get around

to the most exciting. Dude, I love that shit. I love ad, give me more ad. I love that shit, I love that shit. Though I did have a fun experience. Cause I was streaming yesterday and somebody in my chat was like, hey, why didn't you put the Xbox show

on your schedule for the week? And I'm like, you fucking bitch. You lie. You invented that to fuck with me. No, no, they were right. And then this morning, Sony was like, by the way, there's another show tomorrow. Yeah, there is for your Delta Rune stream Before your Delta Rune stream dumbass. I mean again, I just to see the lack of the the marathon should be here segments

It's kind of curious. I'm excited for that. It is a curious watch. I have to admit, you know Someone in the chat asks Why'd you put the awful PC gamer show in there because the one that I don't watch is the one that will have the silk song Shadowdrop dude page didn't wake up with me to watch that fucking Nintendo thing and silk song was there Like yeah, like this is superstition was it is so it's silk song in the room with you right now It was it was there It was there mm-hmm The superstitions work well, I hope magic or something. I don't know. I hope you got a good reaction image out of it

I always do it. I'm a very expressive face in a big mouth Oh boy. Oh The one that usually people clip is I I put my hands on the sides of my head. Yeah. Yeah That's what that's a pretty good one. That's a pretty good one, too. Yeah, I got a fucking expedition 33 fucking Fucking pog face out of out of something and it's this it's all my hair my hands on my bald Oh, no Man that was so great how that game had a trailer and I went what is that and I was like Oh, that looks cool And then it had a late and then there was nothing and then there was another trailer and I went whoa that looks really good

Actually, and then there was nothing and then the game came out and it was like yo wow this game's great and it was just like hey look it was just a normal kind of like an idealized like it was just a normal product release that we all enjoyed you know there's only one part of the of the expedition 33 PR cycle thing that came up but it's a a spoiler, so I'm not going to talk about it. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Difficult challenge for any HR department, or PR department, rather. Cool. All right. Shall we go to twitch.tv Pat Pat Pat show Pat stares at and the paddle be on paid battle be on The show will be going I mean no empty chair tech yet, right

Okay, we are quickly approaching the the the empty chair tech streaming era Quick word from our sponsors. Yeah, let's do it This week podcast is sponsored by Raycon and That is the everyday earbuds as you're getting into the summer. You want to get good listening, you want to get something that you can rely on, and yeah, getting the wires out of your life, very important as we say each time. Raycon's everyday earbuds, perfect accessory. You can be listening to your premium audio quality with 32 hour battery life, multi-point

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Get up to 40% off your order at ridge.com slash superbeast. Just head to ridge.com slash superbeast to find the perfect gift for dad or yourself. And when you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them. You can support our show and tell them that we sent you. Give your dad the upgrade he deserves this year. One more time. Ridge.com slash superbeast. Support our show and tell them that we sent you. Give your dad the upgrade he deserves this year. One more time, ridge.com slash super beast. Super cool wallet, really, really handy.

Love the form-fitting extra leather garbage out of the way. Get down to business with it. Thank you, Ridge. Thanks, Ridge. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. Alright, so couple things. This week, we already touched on it. But yeah, Akuma and Monster Hunter is a pretty incredible integration. It's like a 15th weapon. Yeah, it's fucking weird. It's just a full on it's the character with all his moves playable.

And it makes me feel like these things from the past like Dante showing up or just kind of like lazy by comparison. You know, or like other. I mean, it's their own guy. Of course, of course, of course. But what I mean to say is, is like no other guest costume got that treatment Right that is a super in-depth Integration that is a lot more fun than just the the cosmetic or you know a weapon or so Super cool. I I hope this leads into like

the punch weapon for Monster Hunter. I mean, you have to look like him to use that move set, right? Yeah, but hunters are freaks. But I know, but I mean, like, you can't just be like, I want the Akuma move set on my own character. Yeah, you can. Yeah. Oh, it's not good no no no I want that I agree with you but they're not letting you currently do it is what I mean later they could just have a fist weapon yeah like yeah I know you're your shit is buff I would like it if they let you just do the Akuma moves with your own character that would be fantastic modders let you do that already all you do all sorts of things exactly yeah, my asshole just fell out. Oh boy

Can you give me a second to poke it back in mm-hmm? Oh? It's my phone oh So a large clamor hit the floor, and I thought it was my asshole I see it's important You don't want that to happen Sometimes it was my telephone. Okay. Well sometimes things fall out that people were not supposed to see It's true for example What the fuck is Yuri Lowenthal up to over on his beast guy like man? Don't don't don't tell voice actors shit, okay, so okay, but are you on that shit where you're like?

This is way too like weird to not be it's coordinated But I don't know if it's like it clearly it's not an official thing. It wouldn't be that's insane But what is the is it why so like is this an aggressive passive? You know like are you trying to like bully them? Is that the goal of this type of message? Because so first of all, let's just break it down. You're a low and fall on his social media is Guys, I'm not gonna voice Yosuke in the persona for remake

I really wanted to and I asked them if I could and they told me no. And then that tweet gets deleted and then Aaron Fitzgerald shows up and goes, for those of asking, I have not been asked to reprise my role as Chie in P4 remake. Rip, I'm blessed to have recorded as many games as I have playing her and you're like so like is this because of P3 reload actor also just said the same thing okay okay so the unconfirmation right kind of like P3 reload we're doing this as a preemptive announcement here's what I believe happened a third one hit the timeline happened is that Yuri Lowenthal did in fact hear that through the grapevine that that was going to happen and he contacted

Atlas and was like, hey, I love that character. I would love to be that character. And they went, no, we're going to go with all new guys. And so he was like, oh, I'm sad about it. And then someone somewhere asked him, hey man, are you you gonna do it? And he got like a bee up his bonnet because he was upset about it and responded to that person non directly And then once that happened everybody just started hassling all the other voice actors Okay, and they just immediately responded right away going Okay I'm not gonna be in it either because if because if this was that theory of like this is a stunt That is being part of the intended marketing for the game or whatever

No, dude, that's good that game's gonna be announced on fucking Sunday But and also just like it seems insane because that's bringing bad energy Immediately to the thing that you want people to be excited about because you're kind of like The what the response to that from the people following them will be, well, that sucks. I love you when I want you to come back as those characters. Why would they do that? It's a kind of antagonistic framing immediately,

which is why it doesn't work as a stunt, you know? But it certainly is, like multiple of these actors are coming out being like, ah! And it's just like, yeah, everybody is Dan Southworth thing all over the place Don't tell voice actor shit. Just never tell a voice actor Anything ever never do it. They're not even allowed to know their own character. Just read the lines So persona for remake again is now super fucking super confirmed And it's gonna be really interesting because it's pride month and

persona for discourse is terrible, but More than that is like do you think they're gonna put the gay yosuke stuff back in oh? Oh, yeah, okay, right. I was like I was like I'm like if we're talking about s-links again I don't want to do this, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Deleted deleted A little bit let's find out let's what they're not gonna do it. Oh come on DLC Pay for it.

Pay for pride! Come on! Do it! Pay! Shell it out. You want it, we'll do it, but you have to fucking... It was already there! You already actually like recorded things for it in English yeah persona persona for gay for pay

Doesn't count if it's for pay oh No not like that. Man, listen. Whatever the fuck they do. The idea of some of those characters not sounding the way they do currently, my brain is gonna have to rewrite that. So I thought that that was gonna be the case for Persona 3 Reload, and man, a lot of the new people did absolutely incredible work, not just in general, but also emulating the old style.

Yeah, I remember Akihiko was a big one, and then I was like, you know what, no, he's doing a great job, I get it, you know? I didn't finish Persona 3 Reload either. You get to that point around that game's 80% mark where it's like, do 80 to 100 more fucking floors. Yeah. And I just went, ah, I already know what happens.

Yeah, so I've been kind of like, like Punch Mom busy working her way through it. So I'm kind of vicariously just checking in on how that's going. Because I just want to see that final fucking Knicks bit, see how that's handled. But I'm like, OK, you can absolutely cast people that'll do a great job.

And then you re-releases and stuff here, culprit needs to have a level of pathetic, ugh, in there. You know, there's one person I know who can do it. Mm. And he has to do both, just like the original, and it's gotta be Alex Lee. Alex can do anything. Alex can do anything.

It has to be Alex Lee doing both voices again. Yeah, yeah. Okay, you know how you said- I'll also take Alex Lee doing voices again. Yeah. Yeah, okay You know you said take Alex Lee as as Yosuke. Okay, you said don't tell voice actors anything Exception you can tell Gianni anything and then just have him lie about it. Yeah, just don't believes anything Just have him wharf some bullshit up on the timeline and call it a day Let's see. Let's see where this goes. But wild, wild.

I'm telling you right now that's gonna be announced on fucking Sunday at the Microsoft thing. Hey, so like Persona 3 Reload coming out, I was like, wow, that's a good game and I'll play it. Persona 4 or whatever coming out, I have a very different emotional response to that. I have a fucking hook it up to my fucking, shoot it between my my scrote and my toes. More though, give me more.

Please look forward to the video of Ben Starr applying for CHI-A. Oh my god, You're totally right. Don't think. Feel. Oh, man. I love Ben Starr. Ben Starr's a good actor. It's just meat. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see what we get here. And you know, getting into full cosplay as well. And committing 1000% to the bit. Anyways, speaking of not committing to the bit,

rip to Cliffhanger Games, who were working on a Black Panther game for EA and just like Respawn just lost 300 people and cancelled the Titanfall game, they are ripping through their other studios and Black Panther game is now cancelled. From the team- Did we ever even see that game? Nope, never got a look at it. It was

Cliffhanger games made shadow of mortar, so they were the ones that held the fabled Nemesis system right they're the ones that had access to it So stupid and sucks. Oh, okay, but the foot the the fucking the funny and dumb bit here Because it's like Okay, EA is continuing to be the absolute shit show and just laying off people non-stop and hey guess what? It's the latest fucking story on Castle super beast more people got fired in this fucking industry, right? You think they would have cancelled White Panther? You see Pat you're supposed to think it and have that show up in the title beneath

you, but then you don't actually say it. Oh, okay. You're supposed to just go, ah, you know what? It was like, dude, what the, yeah, yeah, I'm just going to go. I think that might be the funniest show Mega64 has ever done in their entire career. It's the funniest thing they've ever done. Rocco walking into the studio. The video name is called, Why No White Panther?

And in the video, no one acknowledges. Everyone is just reacting to the title of the video going, yo, what the fuck? And the dude's like, oh, mm, yeah, yeah, no, no, yo, you're right, you're right, I know, I know, yeah, I... Yeah. Incredible, incredible. Anyways, so yeah, this got canceled.

And the bit is that we talked about the fucking Nemesis system for so long, and now, sure enough, they absolutely were working on the evolution of the Nemesis system in this game. Wait. Wait. We're talking about EA? Cliffhanger Games, the studio that made shadow of Mordor.

Am I wrong about that? Is that not part of what was going on here? Didn't model of make that because Warner Brothers owns the nemesis system. Uh, then let me pull up what I was reading. The Shadow of Mordor nemesis system was going to be expanded on in the Black Panther game. What? But that's the wrong... That's the wrong company.

Was it founded by former staff? Did Monolith people move to Cliffhanger? It's the wrong company. Was it founded by former staff? Did Monolith people move to Cliffhanger? No, the people who made Cliffhanger Productions made Jagged Alliance Rage and Shadowrun Chronicles Boston Lockdown. Alright, let me pull up the article. So there's one, here I have three things. Who are we things for this well I'm currently sidetracked on on what's going on because I don't I'm

not inventing my shit here I'm thinking about the Wonder Woman thing let's see there's an article with Bloomberg there's this article over here from Gizmodo. Oh no, Cliffhanger Games was a brand new company in 2023 that was only made to make the Black Panther game. Okay, so the fact that Shadow of Mordor devs were on this team means that I guess a number of staff came from there? Is that what I'm going to understand Cliffhanger was led by Kevin Stevens who oversaw production of Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor Middle Earth shadow of war at monolith Okay, so ex monolith staff were on the team and that's why the nemesis system was being mentioned

Warner Brothers owns that nemesis system. Okay, because the Bloomberg article Warner Brothers owns that nemesis system. Okay, because the Bloomberg article mentioned essentially that EA executives were frustrated that the game had not left pre-production phase after nearly four years in development. The studio was building evolution that would expand on ideas like the nemesis system from Shadows of Mordor and players would take control of heroes like T'Challa, Killmonger, and Shuri vying for the Black Panther mantle to fight off the Skrulls. Holy shit, cancel that now! I am reading what is in front of me.

You should have canceled it two years ago! So I think the... So what was the dev time on Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy? Was it any different? and Guardians of the Galaxy. Was it any different? I bet it wasn't fucking four years of pre-production. People put out fucking games in four years. I mean, it looked like Marvel was trying to get a bunch of

third-person action games going for various IPs and spin offs. What are we looking at here? Black Panther school. I don't get it. Okay. Well, we never got to take a look at the game and there's a couple details about it. And maybe this is one of those things where something will hit a big MP4 will hit fucking unseen 64 at some point or something to that effect. And yes, okay, several alumni from the Lord of the Rings duology reunited to form Cliffhanger studios. That's how the studio came to be, which is why part of why that came up. And it was an open world game, single player open world. And I guess the idea was gonna be, yeah, basically both Black Panthers and so on and so forth. What is the deal with EA just allowing their studios to just die in pre-production for like four or five years?

I mean, mismanagement is a single easy word for that kind of thing. Oh yeah, okay, I did it. We did it. Am I crazy for thinking that like four years working on a game is, that's not, it's the high end of what you should be doing for like an IP title.

I think three years of pre-production is completely insane. I think that was like the definition of like, what? Pre-production specifically, yeah, okay. That's the active one though. Like you didn't have a working prototype in four fucking years? You're fired, get the fuck out of here. No, no, no, that's fair. That is fair, correct, yeah. Okay. Where's your fire? Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. That's fair.

That is fair. Correct. Yeah. Okay. I would have enjoyed seeing what a fucking Wakanda setting would have looked like, but whatever. See it never, I suppose. One goofy little bit is there's a toy company that's currently working on a number of Assassin's

Creed figures and they had all of the assassins lined up but for some reason Edward Kenway was not on the table. Oh, that's weird. And then when they asked them, hey, why is Edward not on the table? They basically went, oh, well, it's no secret that something is happening with Edward, so, you know. And then they went, is that announced? And then they're like, uh, well,

there's articles about stuff happening. There's rumors out there, so. Everyone sucks at this, dude. Everyone sucks at this so bad. I was like, all right, Black Flag is getting remade. Sure. Like, you and me are like people who know like a couple of things and we've never fucking slipped up and we're dumb idiots. Like, I don't get why it's so hard.

I think there's a voice that we turn on that is the I am slipping up voice exactly wouldn't it be fucking crazy if I don't know when we start talking like goofy like yeah but but no there you go basically soft confirmation that a black flag remake is happening so that's so fucking I gotta tell you man, picking like singular Assassin's Creed games to remake is just like the absolute peak of a collapse of confidence. It's so fucking lame. Well, I find this is an interesting peak at the idea of like the discussion we have where you go, do you remake the games that need it the most? Or do you remake the ones that people love?

And remake Assassin's Creed every time. It's the same game. But like the option to like, like, okay, of the franchise being like, whatever it is, the repetition. In this situation where you're like, if you grabbed the predecessor, you could save the past, or you could re-hit, you can re-release the hits, you know? Like, which game needs more saving? Assassin's Creed 3 or Black Flag? Okay, but what would people actually buy, I suppose, right? And then you have that argument. So, and I don't know that you're ever gonna see like a large IP go for the game that needed fixing over the one that is already fine.

I think with Assassin's Creed, it's a totally moot point because every Assassin's Creed is the remake of the last one. Also, Skull and B bones and that whole thing means, you know what? That's true, we need to have skull and bones. But maybe we need to get boats out here because people want their boats

because they're not gonna get the boats that we promised the boats they'd be getting. The first quadruple A game ever. So, what happened to those boats? Quadruple a Yeah So this was just funny, but you know just a little earlier this morning Jean Yeah, so I get a shout out Gene Parker. He's just like, so

I played the Welcome Tour at the Nintendo Preview event and the game is deeper than we thought. Oh dude, he was telling me about that on my show a couple days ago. He's like the most, the most excited game to play is Welcome Tour. Welcome tour. Pilled. There's there's potentially tons of zones with fun mini games to find and beat. Wanted to play it more than Mario Kart. No time to unlock it all. I don't think I was a quarter of the way to finishing it. If this is a demo, it's packed with games. It still should have come with the system. Yes. But it might be a longer game than Astro's play room.

OK, I'm going to tell you this right now. What the fuck is happening? I'm goingroom. Okay, I'm going to tell you this right now. What the fuck is happening? I'm going to tell you, I'm going to, so we had this exact conversation on Sunday, right? That's so insane. He was like, he was like super like no welcome, welcome tour is the shit. Welcome tour. And he told me about one of the games in welcome tour. And it might be the single best like demo thing anything has ever

had ever. So in Welcome Tour you can walk up to a bouncing ball and the Welcome Tour challenge is for you to correctly answer which of the bouncing balls is running at 30, 60, and 120 FPS. Whoa. And you can correctly guess it a couple of times. It gives you a little badge to put on your character and unlocks more mini games. Whoa. Damn, okay.

I mean, look, but who's gonna know this? Who is gonna look at Welcome Tour for $40 and be like wait what it's not it's seven oh What wasn't sorry seven dollars? Oh, okay? All right well then making Extra insane that it's not a pack-in game. Okay, okay, all right pack in game okay okay all right that's it's crazy that this is like he's like nah this has more going on than my only change it to ten bucks okay yeah it's ten dollars okay man welcome tour is packed yeah I know welcome tour fucking L it's so funny dude I just ok so word of mouth is going to have to

spread that there's stuff to see here other stuff and was tossed on you know crazy that's like this is assuredly Miyamoto just fucking stomping his feet going no we made is called money right and it's Reggie doesn't work there anymore so Reggie can't be like you dumb idiot

you gotta put a fucking pack but also like if Nintendo's gonna acknowledge like a tech demo and or show off more technical things It has to do so in a fun and tender friendly Nintendo like way You can't just talk about framerate cold. You know yeah Crazy all right Let's take a couple letters. Hey, if you want to, oh, there's a small thing. Ubisoft's having court stuff and they all sound like horrible criminals. So you can go look that up if you like. Oh, yeah. I just didn't bother with that. We'll see where that goes. It's exactly all the stuff that we've all heard for years and years and years, but now

in a courtroom. So they're having a really good time with it. If you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail.gmail.com. Hello, it's Pat the Sloth and Woolly the Turtle. May says, I've been on a MechaKick lately and I decided to go through Zone of the Enders games to stream them to a friend. While I was playing the first game on emulator, I decided to play Mars remaster of Zoe 2 on Steam.

Both my friend and I immediately noticed just how much faster it was than the original. As I played only an hour or two, only an hour or so of Zoe 2 many years ago, I thought it was a massive increase in speed from one to two. I thought the massive increase was normal. Every battle was incredibly fast and we were impressed at how quick and fluid the gameplay

was. It was hard, but it was fun. However, when I got to the final fights, the difficulty increased tenfold and I spent hours on both fights with Viola, including the battle where you must parry the boss to delete the virus without killing the orbital frame. It was absurd It was absurd that developers would throw the player into a small arena and force them to learn how to parry 80% Of the way through the game let alone parry in such an incredibly fast game 60 plus attempts later I was victorious spent the next two hours on final bosses after more than 70 attempts at 133 total deaths I beat the game and sort of never it again from the amount of pain I felt afterwards in my arm. I checked out YouTube videos to see what I could have done differently, and I wondered why all the gameplay was so slow.

Did a little research and found out that the game ties its logic to the framerate if V-Sync is turned on. As I was running the game on a high-end PC and 165 Hertz monitor, I was playing Zoe 2 at 275% speed, which explains why every battle was a Dragon Ball fight. Had I checked earlier, I might have saved myself some frustration and pain, but my stupidity ascended me to Mecha Godhead as base Zoe 2 feels too slow now. How do you not, like, interpret that the game is, game is running in fast forward? Well, I guess, wouldn't dialogue or any other assets also be super strange? I mean, cutscenes might play out a weird way, but I would assume every other Conversation or asset played would tip you off that something's really wrong and off Can I look at a fucking I'm gonna just play amazing

But now regular like fight at two times speed But now this looks like looney tunes and this is only 200% How could you possibly think that it was normal? And now their brain is broken because the regular speed is too slow They've conditioned the whole game off of 275 That's psychotic That's like those weirdos that are listening to us at two times speed right now. God forbid. Listen, folks, if you're going to open up a fucking emulator and do this shit this way.

This isn't even an emulator, right? He's describing the PC release, like the Steam version. They mentioned the emulator at first, but then the Steam release was only two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Right? Right, right, right. Uh, fuck.

Yeah, I'm watching like the final boss of ZOE 2 right now on two times speed and it's nonsense. I don't know how anyone can think that 175% more than this. It's like, wow, this game's really intense. I know that with older games too, you run into that constantly. Anything you run on a fucking DOS box or whatever is going to be super subjected to that problem. But I didn't think the Zoe 2 PC remaster was so old that that would happen with it. It's not a very good version of the game.

Tough times. Alright, let's see. Over here, high crossup and frame trap. A couple weeks ago I was discussing how demanding games can be on game design. You were discussing it. One of you gentlemen brought up Arma in passing. I am the at and dance manager and partial game master of an Arma 3 clan with 50 consistent members.

And I'd lend my 2.5K hours of Arma playtime since 2019 to confirm just how right you are. The unit isn't the type that we, the unit isn't the type that to require that we LARP as actual military, though many such units units exist But we generally respect the command structure so that we can smoothly play with our weekly two-hour operations and above all else We are picky as hell Bohemia interactive couldn't possibly meet our demands for realistic milsim sandbox Guns and their likenesses are protected intellectual property after all let alone the work hours required to make everything we want in an ARMA So we get what we want by doing it ourselves. I'm confident when I say that Arma modding scene rivals Skyrim's in terms of depth. Oh yeah, I believe that.

Untold swaths of gun equipment and MIA vehicle mods, map mods, ragdoll physics, frame physics, ambient sound, AI behavior, depth, the list just goes on. It's crazy. Well, there are entire genres of games that I look at and I go, did some Arma weirdo fucking ambient sound, AI behavior, depth, the list just goes on. It's crazy. Well, there are entire genres of games that I look at and I go, did some Arma weirdo fucking spin this off from something? Well I, a lot of these mods also have multiple versions of different people with different coding approaches. At this point, the community sentiment is that modders are responsible for all the game's

content. We're so specific about it and we don't even ask the devs to make content anymore. We just want them to make a better platform for the mods. At a certain point, does the game hobby get more complex than just joining a militia Like I don't know That's crazy. This isn't this isn't like death of the author. This is like murder of the author We don't even give a fuck what you have to release anymore Make make sell us a canvas, and we'll do what we want with it Yeah, I guess that's I love that there are people out there doing that weird shit. I love it I don't want to do it. That's fucking crazy, but I love that there are people out there doing that weird shit. I love it.

I don't want to do it. That's fucking crazy, but I love that they're out there. And one last one over here. Todd the Rod Johnson says, dear Wooly, no, you're not going to get these dumb, no, fuck that. Anyways. Oh yeah? Good start. I heard your request for better emails. Well, your titling is garbage on that. Oh, sick.

The question is, how do you feel about brushing your teeth in the shower? Is it fine? Is it gross? In my short 30 years of life, I've done it a handful of times, usually when I'm in a hurry, thinking I'm saving time. I know Pat's weird about doing things a certain way. You're not. You're not even saving time. Because they have to be done a certain way. How do you feel about this? What the fuck are we doing? I don't like to brush my fucking teeth with warm water. That feels disgusting.

What are we doing? I just... If you want to save time, why don't you just do all your bathroom tasks at the same time? Like what the fuck are you talking about? Like just shit in the toilet? Oh look at Pat, he shits in the toilet because he always has to do things a certain way. Also some showers and or tubs depending on what you're in like a tub will usually have like a decent like drain And that'll you know, whatever everything will go but some like stand-up showers don't have like the most open grating so like spitting out foam from Like brushing your teeth the foam will just kind of sit on top of the grate. This is nonsense. You know what I mean?

Like, if you have a shower that's a stand-up shower with a really thin, slow training thing, then you're just going to have a bunch of, like, toothpaste foams collecting and gucking it up. That would suck. Also, I brush my teeth more often than I take a shower. So like, how are... I guess the idea is, the idea behind it is you're late for work and you're getting up and you're like, oh god, I have time for nothing.

So you're just doing everything at the same time. But yeah, no. Also I use an electric one. So like, I don't want to fucking have that getting water on it andilling me in the process. I don't think that's a reasonable fear Well, it's not a radio, but still why would I hold an electric device? Under the shower if I don't have to take that risk that's a dumb so like I agree with you, but I I Okay, don't think it was a risk there man. Okay Okay, well the risk is that my thing will stop working.

How about that? Yeah, no, that's a much closer risk, yeah. Okay, well. I don't... This seems like, oh, I saved so much time and then you just didn't. How much, you saved fucking 45 fucking seconds. I don't know. What people do in the showers is, my consciousness is expanding. You know about shower beers?

You seen that? You know that's a thing? Yeah. Shower beers is a thing. People are doing shower beers. People are doing all kinds of shit. You're not supposed to be doing in the shower You should be washing your ass in the shower. That's what the shower is for Anyways do your do your do your thing Yes, these are all you search is called alcoholics. I mean yeah

Yes, these are all, these are just called alcoholics, I mean. Yeah, I, oh, cool. No, it's a shower beer. No, dude, it's this new thing I'm doing. It's a way to relax. It's just a different feeling, you know? When you're shaking and then you have it and then you stop. You know when you're relaxing and you're being belted by hot water? And you're like, what if I got to drink an extremely warmed up beer in this scenario?

Mmm, yeah. And then the nerves go away. Then the nerves stop. It's really relaxing. Anyways, alright, good stuff everybody. Wonderful. That'll do. We'll see you next time. The Expedition 33 spoiler cast will commence right now.

OK, so this is going to include spoilers for literally every single thing in Expedition 33. So if you don't want to hear anything that could possibly spoil you about the Expedition 33 clear obscure the video game, it would be a really good time to stop listening to us right now. Goodbye. Leave and turn your ears off and do whatever you need to do. Giving them a nice little, little delay. There you go, everybody out. You know what, if you type I'm out, you're taking too long, just go.

Yeah, you've already taken far too long to be like, ha ha. If you're saying goodbye and you still get spoiled because you're taking too long to type it, then too bad for you. And we've given you like way longer than we usually do. Okay, so here's where I'm at. FYI, the only thing I have not done is Simon. Yo, that dude's a motherfucker, man!

Simon is a fucking problem. Oh man, hey, could you not tell that they liked from software games? Holy shit, dude I I I wandered up as I said I was scraping through act three and I wandered up to Renard's drafts and I got to the end and I was like, okay I can see this room is meant to be a challenging Heavy heavy everything here's like a super freak every got it is crazy, but not as crazy as doing 11 million damage You know and then you walk down and fall to the bottom of the abyss and Artorias is sitting there You know and he's got the French Moonlight great sword, and you're like oh

You know and he's got the French Moonlight Great Sword and you're like Oh, it's the guy who made the map look like what it looks like It's the guy who committed an atom bomb on the fucking the axon you never get to fight exactly and I'm like, let's see what it's about and then the first form goes down like nothing. I'm like, oh no Oh, yeah, it's not that bad. That's like a real fight But and then the real fight begins and you're like, oh they're waiting this this is the fight that's left for the stupid freaks The ones like this this is this is like hey listen. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna Mandate something that only like two bosses in the entire game do which is parrying within your own berry animation. I mean as in the entire game do, which is parrying within your own parry animation. Fuck. I mean, like, and putting strings of variable timing out there that are like 10 hits long,

you know? And with double timing on all of them. Yep, yep, yep. There's the ghost swings, right? And then you just get the like, oh, did you go down and have a turn go by? Bye, party member, you're removed. From the canvas. So I was like, okay, okay, this is real?

This is the last real thing? I can tell, I can tell, and I will be back for this. He's breaking the rules. It's like he is smashing the rules of the system. Yep, yep. So I don't know, are you getting back to it or did you do it? Oh, I killed his ass. Oh, you did it?

Okay. This is fucking cooked. So I didn't- Did you get to phase three? Huh? Did you get to phase three? No, no, I didn't. I got to phase two and I was like, all right,

I'll be back later. If you think phase two is crazy, phase three is so crazy that I built my party around skipping it. Oh, okay, okay, wow, okay, interesting, interesting. Phase three is so nuts that I built the entire team around feeding my L okay, so she could do a

25 million point hit so and just Fly through okay higher things so that min told me that there was a bugged out Damage on stead fall stead hall no that's not it that there was a bugged out damage on Stedthal? No, that's not it. Okay, cause he told me that there was a bug on the amount of damage that you can one shot everything. And I was like, and he said, I just did that. And I was like, oh, so you like the fight skip.

Okay, so Stenhal got nerfed. Stenhal was bugged to do way, way, way, way, way, way more damage, but it was patched by the time you ever got to Stenhal. Okay, okay. No what I did was I used Roulette and every single damage buff picked out that the game allows and every damage buff thing that my party can throw on and I hit him with fucking Gomage.

Ahhh. And I had to fight for phase 2. Gomage. And just evaporated his fucking ass. Okay, okay, Gomaj would do it. Yeah, yeah. Cause I'm like, I have all the damage on, I have none of the life, and I have all my stats geared towards maximizing the scaling and, you know, damage points. Scaling on the weapon, etc.

All of it cranked, and I'm like, I don't know what's gonna hit for that number unless he's stunned and So then yeah, that would make sense. So that is call every very so I did mine was 25 million Some people in the chat are saying a hundred million. Some people in chat are saying like a billion Whoa That there are two ways To fight Simon you get through phase one, everybody learns phase one. Phase two, you can either do the fight normal and learn phase three, at which point you are going to learn pain like you could not imagine, or you will see that one time

like I did and said, I'm not doing that. And build your character around blowing through the health bar so hard that you don't get to see the third phase. I look forward to it because I'm glad that at this extent, right, Guillaume and crew went, we know that people like Mew and I exist and this is for you to sit here

and fucking throw your ego at it, right? Because here's the bit, you talked about it many times, and like yeah, for sure, it's been clear, you gotta throw that painted power off when you're walking around a lot of that map scraping. Do you wanna do the reach or fight with Alicia? Well, turn painted power off

if you actually wanna have that fight and fucking Do it and here's the thing I turn it painted power off on a lot of those But I still had such turn skipping fuck builds that I still evaporated Okay, so um What I did like at a certain I've never had such a wild experience where you want to talk about feast or famine by the end Of this game I'm playing so hard. You're playing with your food, right? I'm literally like I started stopping. I wasn't doing moves anymore

I was just doing single hits and then I'm like, let me skip my turn because they're going to die before they say all their dialogue Well, I got to a point with versoo where I was doing like a burn build for Verso and it was like double burn on break, base attack breaks, combo attack for, cheater, and all the crit buffs. Yeah. And like enemies were getting like fucking burn stacks of like 300 to like 900 and they were taking like millions of damage a turn unavoidable. Huh. I was like, Oh, I can't. So I didn't even lean into burn in that way.

I tried it out a couple of times early on and then I saw some stuff that attracted my attention much more. And what I thoroughly enjoyed was the break and then unleashing full power virtuous max damage nukes on broken enemies. Yeah, see that's fun. Monaco with his level three will fill and break, right? So you just immediately go into life bar evaporation on everything you can see. Honestly, they're all busted.

Like CL was a character I didn't use for a lot of the game, and then I built her up at the end. And the reason I built her up at the end is because she can just make someone else's turn do double damage. That's the po- yes. I was going to say, like, I tried to find her highest, like, DPS kind of, you know?

No, her highest DPS is to feed my L. It wa- yeah, her on her own, it just wasn kind of, you know? No, her highest DPS is to feed Maiel. Yeah, her on her own, it just wasn't working, you know? Even when you're like doing with her strongest abilities and critting every turn and using something that like adds extra foretell for critting, none of that was anywhere near the level of damage the other characters are doing. So I'm like, okay, you're just passing off the bot.

I don't think almost any, in a game that's built in this system I don't think anyone could ever beat the other character does twice as much damage. It's just put a meteor behind your meteor. Yeah. Yeah. And Verso as well was obvious. He had like five different ways to do annihilation level damage. Infinity damage, yeah. I started liking, I'm like, which one of these has the coolest ending animation? Phantom Stars looks sick when you finish it off with it. Is it ever vital that you pull off Painted Power for a bunch of things? The final confrontation,

I beat the final confrontation once with Painted Power off and had a grand of things. Like the final confrontation, I beat the final confrontation once with painted power off and had a grand old time. That was a great fight. And it feels like a fight that was built assuming you had painted power off. And then I fought that fight again with painted power on and like the fight broke. You don't see any of the cool shit. The cut scene like straight up like broke. Yeah. Okay, so I did it on, you killed the first,

you killed Renard first phase. And then everyone's all tired and going, he keeps healing. And I was like, oh shit, whoops. You know, and so then I reloaded and I turned it off. And then I was still like, okay, I'm gonna hit you for 999 a piece, but you're acting once every like 15 turns that my characters get. Yeah, because you're...

I'm like, I have destroyed the system. I pulled cheater off. I had picked like, you have to work to make it a fight. And so here's the thing, like the game, it's fun to be busted and cruise through it, because I do admit, I'm like, anytime an enemy has nothing new to show me, I'm like, delete, delete, delete, delete, you know, who cares?

But yeah, you could- Oh dude, I ran through an entire dungeon with Death Bomb on all my characters. And second chance. Death Bomb is which one? Auto Death, Death Bomb, and second chance chance so I would enter into the fight everyone would Explode and die and all the random battles, okay And then they would revive so that they counted as a win, and I just ran through like an entire

Shit on yeah, and I even see like I don't care you can't fight me well at the end I saw the one you know and I was like oh, this is just for that extra flex No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no When you're at one of one HP does that count as low health? It counts as full health. It counts as full health. Okay, which means you can put on the 20% damage boost when at full health Picto, yeah Also, it means that that moves that take percentages of your HP and stuff like that don't do anything They're just free Moves that take percentages of your health don't do anything. Like Verso has a move that puts him to A rank but puts him down to one HP.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well guess what? I'm at one HP. So I'll just get free A rank at the start of the fucking fight. Okay, okay. The subtraction moves. I see. Right, right, right. Because there's start the fight with this high health damage boost and there's low health damage boost So I was like we'll just pick one or the other right fight number one The first fight you ever do with the one on everyone is set to one and one HP The second fight you do with the one on you are one of your existing masks HP

You are one of your existing max HP. So depending on which one you actually wanna do, you can build it for full health builds or low health builds. The one lets you do either or. Okay. It's super good. Cause I saw it drop me to one of my whole bar. Yeah, that's because that was the second fight you did.

So then only the first fight you do after equipping it and resting, you have one of one HP. All other fights after that, you are one of whatever your real HP value is. So you can decide to use that Picto to either have full health 100% of the time, or have like the tiniest amount full health 100% of the time or have like the tiniest amount of health 100% of the time. Oh and you choose to heal or keep it? Yeah. Oh okay. It's incredible. I see. It's a really good ability. Well that is not explicitly stated in that little text. Yeah yeah that's a lot of extra depth to it. Interesting. Okay that is yeah that doesn't that that sounds confusing but I get what you mean.

It is. It's meant to be used in one or the other ways. Yeah. Okay. In any case, so, I mean, mechanically, I don't know, like, there's not much else to say besides just, like, it's incredibly fun to power things and obviously I love that a lot. I love the like the the challenge in like did you can you adapt to an animation immediately the first time you're seeing it? Sometimes yeah, sometimes no. Well how about we're gonna start fucking with you right and then also sometimes a slam is like in like a three frames and sometimes it's like nine and you're like Oh god damn it. You wound up and you came down way slower. You liar I think there's one fight in the entire game that is like explicitly poorly designed from a numerical perspective and it's Clea

Because of the healing no not because of the healing because She has way too much HP to not use Painted Power. But if you do use Painted Power, you evaporate her in like two hits. Like she exists in a middle ground for no one. Maybe there needs to be Painted Power 2 where you can cap at 9999. I was talking to people.

I think there should have been painted power 2. Painted power 2. Capped at like 100k. 100k. 100k cap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That middle ground. I think so.

I think so. Because yeah, as I'm doing these final cinematic moments, you're just like, oh, I'm playing with my food at this point, you know? The final conversation, I stopped playing to let them talk, you know? I'm skipping five turns and doing one poke and then letting them talk, you know? I would like two things from this game ever in the future.

I would like a patch to ink to put loadouts into the game. I think that would make everyone's life a lot easier. Absolutely. And I would like a patch to ink to put loadouts into the game I think that would make everyone's life a lot easier absolutely and I would like a harder difficulty Yeah, that did it to be there that tones. It doesn't it doesn't increase any of the values. It just tones you down It gives you like hard maximums on Lumina and and stuff like that because like Visage and syren are like insanely poorly balanced for their own spot in the game, and that sucks because they're awesome.

The interesting reveal that is like, if you are a Devil May Cry player like the director, this game, you can fucking stomp it so hard that it can't keep up with you, you know? Fortunately, the actual story going through this is fucking fascinating. It's fascinating, it's interesting, it is so much more interesting than its own synopsis.

I, right, like, so hey, here comes the big spoiler. It's a painting. It's all a painting. What does that mean? It's the Matrix. And I had, I got into like a yelling match with my chat over and over. And my main thing was like, the question of are people in the painting even real is like so boring and pointless

Every every character in the story treats all the people in the painting as if they are real Renual in the final conversation of the game Listens to Ciel, yeah listens. Yeah and says that they're right But he doesn't care. Right though you may be. And I was like, oh my God, right? And so that's, yes. And I think too as well, the framing of it as a painting

makes it weird for, like, it tricks, I think, people because if you were to call it, like you said, you're the matrix or something, if you were to call it a full realized reality that you're playing God in, that's one thing, but you think of it as no, brushstrokes on a canvas, that's no big deal, that's disposable, whatever, you know? And then you have to internalize the idea that the logic

of the world is so realized that people that were just stroked into existence had children who grew up normally lived full lives and had kids and passed away and had nothing different from your own life because the cycle of life is that realized in this in the setting it's also extremely clear that's a person painted people have free will. A million percent. Because Eileen did not paint an entire society of people with the hidden desire to come kill her ass. Right.

Okay? That was reached as a societal reality of what was going on in the painting. On unintended consequences of these are realized individuals with the most free will. And to the point where when you get down to the ethical question at the end, and it's such an interesting way to put this, you're like.

It is the most interesting ethical question I've ever seen. It's so fascinating because it's like, are you a dumb ass who's just going to stick by the idea of like, no, none of this matters, you're just distracting yourself like no you're choosing to sacrifice One or the other right there's no in between here right and like oh, it's not real This is obvious is like so not a conversation

right and and and that's and that's the bit is where you're like the the conversation between The conversation between. The villain doesn't even believe that. The conversation between Mael and Renoir is so much more compelling than the version between Mael and Verso because you're like, Verso. Oh dude. Verso, you know this.

Right? Okay. You're like, come on dude, right? And I think. So can we all. But here's what's so interesting too, is the idea that for him, on his version, because you did both of course, right? Of course I did both. Okay, which did you do first? I did my Ls.

Okay, same. And then I went back and did versos. And then I did versos, and then I reloaded my save to keep my L's. So yeah, I kind of, I did both and I kind of want to go back and do that as well because that's, that's, that's, that's exactly it. Right. And the thing with Versos, cause when we're talking, we're talking earlier about cyberpunk and giving people that, that like seeing their perspective on it. And in this game, it's super interesting to see like everyone's,

why they're convinced and to believe what they believe. And everyone at right admits we only care about the ones close to us while we're making others suffer. Right? Every single character, every character, all the painted characters, all the painted versions of existing characters, all the real world versions of those same people,

all the painted people who have no analog, the guest trolls, the fucking ice dudes, every single person is a hypocrite and they say it out loud, we are all hypocrites and we just keep doing this to each other. Right, what I find so, go ahead. Every single person is right in their own mind because all of their priorities are different. Every single one goes, this is the thing that I care about. Here are my reasons that this is what I care about. And nothing you say will ever convince me to change my mind. And all of them are compelling. Every single one of them is compelling. All I have to do is move

my perspective over like an inch and go, well, if I was a painted version of me, then all I had was a real dead family out there that was killing themselves. The only thing I would care about is my real family. And that's the beauty of like Renor's final bit where he's basically like, he's being lied to, but he's like, I want to believe in my daughter. It's going to just bring my heart a little bit of peace to believe that you mean what you're saying.

He knows. He knows. He knows. But he's choosing to be like, ugh, you know? And you're like, fuck me, that's so much more painful, right? The Verso question is one where he's- Oh, I need to stop you for a second. We all can agree that Verso is like one of history's

greatest monsters, right? I'm not there with you. Like, he is the most lying piece of shit that's ever been. I'm not there with you on it. I, no. I'm piece of shit. No, I'm not there with you on it I see I see where he's at and I know I know because I can see how it's like the game is meant to be like divisive and have these these miss these messes and he has one that's very very hateable on the surface there But I think to me at the very least the I think his problem is there's two things you see him going through the whole Game being like undecided and you see him going through the whole game

Being like undecided and you see it. He's like, uh, right, he's looking at like what he's compelled to do what he's painted to do and you're looking at him seeing his family and having all those those memories and stuff and kind of being like I'm Okay With the bad outcomes here and I'm not exactly trying too hard to stop that. His old message about how he had to fucking kill his girlfriend, but it's like, it's okay, once we fix this, we'll just bring everybody back. You see that look on his face constantly of him being like,

I don't know, I don't know, it's really interesting, right? And I feel like the moment you finally get to know him is the last, last, last lines. It's him on the ground suffering, just being like, I can't live like this. I can't, I can't. It's the most, it's all the, it's the most selfish in the moment, purest form of where he's at the whole time.

And to be fair to him, his circumstances are completely different from everyone else's. And they're awful. They're terrible. Like he was born out of like a sorrow of a wish of an image of a dead person. And the remnant of the original is left to be that child in Omelas, the one who must sit there doing this forever in order for the system to work, right? You tell the kid that needs to sit there the whole time that that's your job forever now, right?

And you don't get enough of that kid's, like, you get the energy that it's like, he's like, maybe I should, you know? But he's also willing to listen to Verso? Yeah, Painted Verso, when you do rarely, very rarely, get to talk to Painted Verso, and usually you don't know when you're talking to Painted Verso.

So you be the one that tell him that he needs to go through that forever, you know? Here's the thing, he doesn't want the painting to go either. There is a line of dialogue. He feels that the people in the painting are real and he loves his painting painted versus primary issue is that his painting is destroying his real family. And it's yes, it is destroying his real family and and he knows that that that the the memory also He's there's two things of him right there's two things going on one. There's the baseline idea that immortality is torture right?

It's just very from software right discussion clear Then there's the idea that the memory of who of who I'm based on is Doing the worst thing to the people I care about the most, right? And to that end, I am somebody who would sacrifice myself to end that and bring them peace. But that agency has been removed from me, right? And so now the idea that it's like, so we go through this whole motion

where he is not looking at these people that he's equal to as lesser than, he's not seeing it with the eyes of a god. He's amongst them, but he's still willing to sacrifice because of his own version of his own struggle is like, no, what matters to me the most is I can't live like this, right? It is one where when you look at the Maiel version of things, it's fucked because you're like, oh, she chooses to live in this, which is the life preserving outcome, let's be real.

And, but she finds an outcome for him that is, okay, what if you could age? And she asked him if you could grow old, would that find, would that give you a reason to smile? Right? And that was the thing where it's like, that was an outcome that I get that he was not factoring in in an all or nothing situation. But he still hates it, you can tell he hates it.

And there's that moment and the brilliance of that like short film is look, it's the happy ending, everything is great, never forget what the fucking truth is. Never forget that outside the frame, someone with a fucked up bloody blue eyed banging their head against the wall reality is just living in here forever. And Renoir is staring at that. Never forget that.

I've gone in a circle about this. I've gone in a circle. So when I got the Myelle ending, so Myelle and versus endings are beautiful because they are clear obscure. Myelle starts beautiful, sunny, hopeful, ends in darkness to make you feel bad about the idyllic situation you created. And then on the flip side, Verso's ending forces Ciel to just kill herself at the altar of the fucking painting and Lune sits down and stares him down and goes, you're gonna look at me when you do it.

You're gonna fucking look in the eye. That is my favorite thing of the whole ending sequence. The best part of that entire thing. Because, okay, hold on a second. Who did you form a relationship with, if anything? Lunae. Okay, same, same. Yeah.

Right, I waited, I waited, and it paid off, right? Yeah, absolutely. Because I was hoping that it was like, this was like, I'm like oh We got options. Please tell me we got options and fucking hey we have options right so I went Luna and When that moment happens, and you see CL walk in and you're like oh, that's brutal. He hugs the friends, okay? What's up now dude? What are you gonna say to her right and she's like you don't even get the fucking chance You don't get the chance

I'm gonna sit right here on the other other side and you're going to look at me as you do this. So listen, she's not going to walk in and disintegrate. Oh, she's not going to leave and give him the chance to forget about her. No, it's so powerful. You're going to look me in the eye. But then we get the Dessandre. we get their grief and moving on. Also, you also see the moments too, where like Ciel having that conflict with her, facing her earlier backstory, which is the saddest fucking thing in the world. It's the saddest thing in the world.

To me, Ciel's backstory is the moment that I ceased caring about the level of reality of anyone in Lumiere done and done because Because Aline created these people and put them in this situation to endure these hardships I don't care how real they are. They're real to me damn it more importantly CL's story She is realer than the entire Dessentre family with a backstory like that. She had the same thing happen to her that fucking the Dessentre adults had, but she moved on in a progressive, constructive way.

And when you're talking about this game about grief and handling grief, she's been the fuck through it more than anyone else has and understands it, right? And so that's why when she comes through at the end, that she's fighting for the world and she's fighting for their reality, but is also like, I've, I'm seeing an old friend, right? I'm returning to this abyss that I almost once entered myself and tried to, right? If not for fucking Esquire, right? And she can accept that with a dignity that's different. But Lunae, the entire game has been fighting, crawling, scraping for survival. There is no give up in her whatsoever.

And all the way to the end, like the shock on her face the first time, right? In the harbor is clear. She's just like, what the fuck did we do this? And he gives that look. And now when she knows that it's all been for what, dude? I, oh, that sit was- I think it's genius-

My chest caved in on that sit down. CL. Lune and CL like mirror the Desandre in like Lune is somebody defined by the legacy of her parents and feels like she never had her own path to go forward. So she had to be super gung ho about technology in the expedition but that wasn't really what she wanted to do.

She wanted to do music. Which is what happened with all of the Des Sable kids. You have the perfect eldest daughter who's a total prodigy. And then you have a musician who's implied that he should be painting. And then we have a writer who should be painting and it backfires on her, which is why Alicia has a her her method of talking to the audience is via a very, very well written prose letter instead of dialogue or music. Oh, okay.

That's why she writes a letter because she is a writer. I didn't get that. Okay, that makes sense. Also, let's just speed past the fact that they mentioned the writers. The writers guild. Yeah, the sequel. Whatever. What the fuck is going on with that?

That's a bunch of Alan Wake's over here doing goofy shit. The interpretation of her potentially being like, yeah, that it's not expressly spelled out, but that is a moment of a character. Yeah, I can, I can buy that. That makes sense. Okay. So, so I've spun in a circle about these endings, right? Because like, yes, Verso, Verso's ending has the cleanest break, and he is like massacring an entire generation of people, but the people who caused this can actually heal. And maybe it is better for Maelle to live in the real world. However, she is horribly

disfigured and can't speak. So it makes it's very easy to understand why she would go and live in Lumière and keep all those people. I mean, the most understandable. Yeah. Because everybody had a good reason. I think Aline is the only person. She's like objectively evil. Like we I think we cycle around to the paintress being the worst person in the story for causing this nightmare of misery. But I still fight back on that and I still push back because even though you can circle around and then land on that, the moment of extreme grief from a mother in that you're not thinking clearly. You're just vibing.

You're just going on my suffering is all I can see. There's nothing in front of me but despair. I can't take that part away from the equation of her character, right? So then I go, well, Verso, I hate Verso so much. She's fucking grieving, man. I hate Verso so much. And at the end of the day,

my thoughts are currently resting with how much I hate Verso. Interesting. And there's a really interesting. simple set of reasons for that. Both endings are terrible. Both endings are amazing. with how much I hate Verso. And there's a really simple set of reasons for that. Both endings are terrible. Both endings are amazing. Both endings have crazy downsides.

Like outrage. Which is the point. The absolute point, yes, a million percent. Like my gut, and if I had to go with my gut at the end of the day, I'd be like, I didn't go and do this shit so that fucking Gustav did that shit for nothing No, no, and so yeah, no Gustav and Sophie and CL and Luna and Pierre and their kid they get to live

Fuck you and that's it. And that's it, right? Right, but fundamentally fundamentally and that is to do what the characters kind of do as well to say I care about what I care about the most Regardless, right? It is the same thing. And this is a difference between our personalities directly because I say and look at it and go every single one of these people is Claire obscure. They're all there's a little bit of that darkness inside every good solution. I got I can put my I got my boy right I can put myself in the

walls shoes or a lean shoes dude I want my family I don't care man this is insane considering it is a nightmare and then my priority would be rock solid and I don't give a shit who has to fucking go like I don't give a fuck right and and round and round and the reason why I focus on Verso painted Versoo specifically, is because there's Un Vie A Taimé, there's the Life to Love, and there's A Vie à Pendre, which is a Life to Paint, which is our two really bad endings. And on Spotify, they both have 11 minute tracks associated with them. However, there is a third 11 minute piece

of music called Un Vie Arrivie, which is a life to dream. To dream. Which is what's written on Alicia's letter to Verso. Yes, that is what's written. Yeah. Alicia's letter to Verso says, basically, all of you are totally intractable. No one is willing to budge a single inch in the entire discussion. And that is what is causing the problem

because no one can compromise. The compromise, even Verso's fucking painting, even the painting itself says, if this wasn't annihilating my fucking family and Aline and Renoir and Alicia and Claire could come visit. That's what I was waiting for. And leave. Yes.

Yes. Would actually we could maintain. Yes. Fucking Lumiere and everyone's lives. That's. We could move past grief. And you know what Verso does with that letter? He fucking throws it away.

He tosses it. He tosses it. Right. And that's Verso's legacy on the game. He allows Gustav to die on purpose because it would allow him to manipulate my L, but Gustav would have argued for Verso's point of Gustav would have pushed my L out. He would not have allowed her to stay.

Would have been able to convince my L to leave. He would have never let her stay 100%. Right. That's clear. would have been able to convince Maell to leave. He would have never let her stay, 100%, right? That's clear. I think that wrinkle is what's so fucking fascinating is because what we were gearing up for right before he walks through is a situation where I go,

okay, if everyone can compromise, then we can have a world where, look, you'll come to visit and you'll leave sometimes and that'll be okay, right? And that's all there is to it. We can continue having things exist and nobody has to go to the extremes. And we don't have to have this destruction

and horrible suffering, but we can also say, you can visit the people you care about over here and continue to have your family over there, right? But you walk through and you have that thing with the letter, which is again, a horrendous thing, but what else is going hand in hand with that letter is the idea of forcing this immortal suffering on a person who's the one who must deal with it.

Everyone else can do what they want, but one must suffer eternally. And like you can weigh the cost benefits all you want over the numbers, but tell the person who's suffering forever to bad fucking deal with it. You be the one. I would have a lot more sympathy for Painted Verso

even in his immortal suffering if he wasn't a traitorous monster at every opportunity. And the thing about the child is that we are not given enough, like we're given enough ambiguity on the willingness of the child to continue, but just because a child is willing to continue, it's not clear that that's actually an existence that would not be torturous to them. Right? You can't say for certain that the ghost faced fucking child painting for in

forever is a happy outcome for that child like I can't say entirely negative one either There's not enough. I am calling they walk out of what a compromise might look like and the next door over is Fucking oh my last dude, and you're looking at you're looking that or Minority Report or whatever and now you have to go Alright, you can have your happy ending as long as one person must suffer for it. And that's- And now we're back to Aline in which, hey, Aline, maybe you shouldn't have turned that child into a battery for the entire universe.

But when you come up with the mechanics of how to make her, when you, but doesn't that tell you how much of an amazing painter she is? Oh yeah. Because like, you're like, how is she so much more skilled than everybody else? Because she doesn't just make it,

she creates the code behind the world to make the world. Right. It's a Minecraft server where you just build up a fucking building versus the one where you make it actually have a working calculator. You know, I'm so impressed by that logic of it as well. So here's the thing. I never interpreted it as painting Verso's soul is an agony and torture. I interpret it as painted Verso is living agony and torture because he was built out of grief.

All of the painted family except for Renoir are desperate to kill themselves because they are painted in Elin's image of themselves post tragedy. I think that the inner voice you hear as he's on the ground revealing his true self is the same of him as the person of the soul he's based on and deep in that inner child as well we're looking at a possibility that that child is suffering. I don't think there's enough to convince me otherwise, right, and so you don't get a clean, you don't get a clean break on anybody here, right? And that is so important because like,

hey, if that was my kid, yeah, I would, like I'd be, I don't want him on life support forever. Your family, your family then. Family's complicated. But then if the fucking solution here is like, okay, well in order to pull my loved one off life support, I'm gonna hit that fucking fictional button that kills a million people.

And I mean, and that's the thing is the whole time I'm wondering, I'm like. And then I would slam it. Well, cause if you were standing, if our positions were switched, right, that day, right? Yeah, I mean, the way we're in our talks, when you first enter the Act 3, and he sets off the pieces where you're like, oh, he doesn't think of these people as real is like, no,

no, he doesn't really believe that he gets it. And then later on, you find out he goes, I was lost in there myself, and Aline pulled me out. It is so, so wild to have the villain who is past the arguments that you're having with the party. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was lost in it myself and then I got saved because it's too tempting. It's too insanely tempting to live in a world

of your own making like that, you know? And God, here's how fucking great my greatest is. How great Lunae. Lunae is so good. my greatest is how great Luna Luna is so good She's so good. That's it is so good. It's everything and the just again the part where my brain is going I said it last time, but how does one respond to the idea that you're like hey, you're not real your life doesn't matter You're a fiction you you should be just how do you accept that reality? You know and the fact that she comes back from the fucking beyond and Goes fuck you dude. I don't give a shit. I still I'm fighting for the same things. I believe in this was exactly what I wanted

Because I think that are they not real are they not doesn't matter Luna and CL both come back one They not doesn't matter Luna and CL both come back one outrage. How dare you bullshit? How dare you I don't give a shit, but yeah. Yeah, you got your own real family. I don't give a shit Fuck you. You betrayed me here for real, but also They then even go on to be like, okay, so this is a canvas Myel and them are gods. Okay, we're gonna go beat him up. You're gonna bring my fucking parents back to life. You're gonna bring my husband back to life. You're gonna give me back my baby.

That's only fair. Fuck you, we're gonna go. And like, they just immediately move on. And like, how could you not? If God came down right now and said, Wooly, by the way, you're not real. And you'd be like, fuck you. I don't give a shit, I'll cut you.

What are you supposed to say, right? How beautiful, just little notes, random, how beautiful is it that the fucking curator, when he powers up, steps into his family and comes back out in the next phase? Isn't that the most beaut, like, the frame drops and I go in and walk back out in the next phase. Isn't that the most beaut- like the frame drops and I go in and walk back out ready to take you on is so hype. I'll give one up you. I'll one up you for maybe the

my most pop-off moment of the whole game where oh no it's the end he's gonna go for phase two for one final attack. He's doing a one more one. And Mael's like, no! No! Yeah. And it's like the game has a great experience with breaking the rules. The whole game, those are about breaking the logos of the world. Like you are damaging the internal logic of the way the painting works. And Mael leaves the battle system

to attack him. Showing that Afshe is now like ascended and it calls out the move to it says it he's doing it and you're like No, you don't you know so satisfying I mean wondrous wondrous Gustav Extra shout out as Gustav is the realest person in the story Gustav within the confines of the game's own logic within the storyline, Gustav should not have been able to invent the Lumina Converter.

Like, Gustav was able to create a technology that fundamentally changes the reality of their experience. I love the idea that what's special about you besides just being a pretty good dude who can't who's not built for this pressure, right? He's someone who's like if he finds out the truth of his nature, he might have buckled, right? He we don't but like he until he learned that my L was trapped and then he would have become re refound his strength. Yeah, I can buy that right. But the Lumina converter Until he learned that Mael was trapped and then he would have Refound his strength. Yeah, I can buy that right but the lumina converter is not the idea of Like this in-game device that lets you like learn skills or whatever It's the idea that everyone on the party can learn them together and break what a traditional Final Fantasy game would teach you

Right. Yeah, it's the ability to stack up way more skills than you should be able to across the party. He broke the video game rule, you know, with his invention. I love how fucking, again, I talk about how- The painted power is supposed to only be given to Maiel because it's hers. But the Lumina converter. Converter, they can give the power of the painters

to Lunae and Ciel and Monaco? The team can fight gods because of his invention. That's not supposed to happen. That's not what Aline imagined, right? The fact that they're able to remove Renoir at all is not supposed to be how it works. Right, by just beating him down, mind you. And then you get the whole unapologetic French bit, right?

I'm so happy with that ending and how the, one, you're almost like, you know how Japan's obsessed with Tokyo Tower and all their shit, right? What the fuck else are we gonna fight under? You know, the goddamn Eiffel? And then with those endings, one, the French film that is the realistic Hyper-realistic faces in black and white as you're reacting to everybody and then the horror shot on the eyes is the most French film ever

Right absolutely and then on the flip side you know with with the verso side of things you get the eyeful in the fucking I mean what amazing real estate mind you but did you catch did you catch the dates on the tombstone? Yeah? December 33rd December 33rd, right? This is not our world Of course of course in the in the in the past mind you but yeah, um how about fucking expedition 60? We got all the way there we got there and we did it we beat the fucking shield down and we glistened our way to the bottom and Realized the truth and then we just weren't able to be do anything about it because we didn't have a lumina convert converter or a Painter saw on our side, but you bet your ass we fucking scuffed the damage numbers to get through We bet your ass we fucking scuffed the damage numbers to get through. I think this game and its endings are like a complete triumph because like my takeaway

was that I was 100% certain that I was going to be team IELT and you were going to be team Verso and I was like theory crafting just a bunch of shit to say. Really? You had an invisible, you had a conversation in your head about me? I had a steel man conversation in my mind And and I had one and the thing that I would say to everyone who is like obsessively team Verso is that like well Did you go back and keep playing the game to do the postgame challenges because if you did you're massive fucking hypocrite Okay, so you think you think I'm going to you think I'm going to excuse evil on the basis of they were just following orders

Do you are you you fucking like? Listen, I'm simply saying the core of it and the more that I talk about it is like the Intractability of position is the issue. No and and and I still say no matter I will argue this forever, but I'm still choosing my else ending, right? I am still choosing that ending because I am saying you are giving a compromise to a solution You're that that verso never would have pictured which is aging is a bad compromise. It's a bad compromise Objectively bad compromise it gives him aging but it creates a But her reality outside in the real world is suffering forever.

Right? There's no win. There's no win. Yeah. She's choosing that. I can't live in a situation in which the entirety of Lumiere is annihilated. That's just an intolerable outcome. That's it, right?

And here's what you can compromise. Once you've made that decision and you have to start justifying your points Okay, you can't justify a child suffering indefinitely. I don't give a fuck fuck you what you can say is that No matter how much you love your family, right if your family decides that they're choosing a life without you You cannot stop them. Ooh, I like that Informed Informed I Informed. By the way, I think Aline is like the worst character in the story by far.

Like she's so awful. Like she is the root of all the problems. Genuinely. Grief. And hold on. Hold on. My core of that, my absolute like I feel so strongly. It's like Aline, why did you paint your daughter? Oh, God. Oh, God, that's so true telling. It's so telling, it's crazy.

It's crazy, yeah. You created an ideal world to live with your son and family. Oh, man. And you're like, but you know what, Alicia? You get to keep your burns. You can't talk because it's your fault. I will give her the grief card. I will not allow that to pass.

That's insane. That's so fucked up. She is canonically weak to fuck. That's so fucked up. Furthermore, Kleia is such a weird, interesting X-Factor. Kleia is a character I am 100% certain we will follow in the future.

I imagine so, right? Because she is like, I don't have time for this shit. I'm the girl at college. I gotta go kill motherfuckers. I'm the girl at college and my fucking family bullshit is pissing me off and why can't you get your shit together, right? Well, she is like they they they discuss it like everyone has dove into an unhealthy pursuit to deal with this and Claire is fighting a different games worth of a war against a group you

only know as the writers but but make no mistake if you're gonna sit there and go Claire is correct in her assessment that, yeah, fuck this world, let's destroy it, and let my childhood home is trapping my mom, let's get them out of there, and you go help that. You need to acknowledge that Clea herself went in, fell in love, and became a part of this world, right? Also, she says to Maiel that you don't owe anyone anything, and you should

choose the life that makes you happy. Hmm. That's at the end of the endless tower. Okay. You don't owe mommy, dad anything. Interesting. Okay so that I waited because I'm like I don't want to get spoiled on ending stuff for tower but um that's fine. But the Simon bit. No that's that's all she says. like, you don't owe anyone anything. The Simon bit is... I love Simon. So that was painted Clea? Painted Clea fell in love, yeah. And then real Clea painted over painted Clea to make Clea more to her liking.

Oh, okay, I misunderstood. I thought that that real clay saw painted clay from her mom's side and went fuck that. I hate that. That's not me. And then I thought she also painted Simon to go kill the other representation of her. Simon was one of Aline's.

Simon is a freak. I don't know what is up with him, but he's crazy. of her. No, Simon was one of Aline's. Simon is a freak. No, no, no, no. I don't know what is up with him, but he's crazy. But he's one of Aline's paintings, he's a person, right? But what I mean to say is, I thought that Clea took him as an example and went, I'm gonna use you to go take out my Axum representation from my dad. She hates her parents' representations of her

in both forms. She hates her mom's version and her dad's version. And she used both of those to intervene and shut those down. So Simon's eyes in his second phase have the charm effect like Eileen's charm. Like he is being like actively manipulated. And he is also painted over to be like a super fucking freak.

Okay. I like how the hauler axon is like so hidden away. Like you see it and it's never brought up. And the only time the word the hauler is in the game is when it attacks you during the final boss. I didn't even see it. I didn't even see it, no. I just saw it on the map with the fucking get stabbed.

There's a move that then while does where he throws a building at you. Okay, but you never even see it on screen It just throws it from far away did so did So the idea that the painted Clea is the one that fell in love. Yeah So when he's hearing the voice That he's listening to he's listening to the sound of that Kleia before she got painted over? No, I believe he is listening to real Kleia's manipulation. That's what I thought it was. That's what I'm saying. I thought real Kleia manipulated

Simon and painted over Kleia to get both ends to destroy her representations. Right? Yeah. So that's the part. But like you guys said, it was painted one that fell in love. So I guess that she could still manipulate after the fact. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of pieces of the game that are a little heebie-jeebie and not clear. But the core of it is that everyone was wrong.

But Verso was the most dumbest and wrong. Verso actively sabotages all of his own goals. That's the thing that gets me. I understand in each of the moments that he makes these decisions, he only protects my Al, but he doesn't protect Gustav, he's like, well, this will let me do this. And he's right for a while. But if he had done the other thing in all of the if he had given her the letter and if Gustav was alive, there would have been a compromise. The happiest compromise ending for the most parties involved leads to eternal suffering for me.

Well, you can blame your mom for that one. I just like that you can say this like that, you can blame your mom for that one. She made you like that. You can say this however many ways you want to say it, it doesn't matter, you're never going to erase that fact. I'm like, that's the beauty of the game. You will never erase that fact no matter how convinced you are. It's such a good game. It's so good. Well, it's good then, that I don't really like Verso so much game of the

generation man I mean it's pretty unbelievable it's cool also makes me think like did real Verso also kind of suck ass because this is all your eyeballing that child being like you fuck kid yeah little shit kid face painted painted Verso based on her own view of her child and the painted Verso kind of sucks and is a massive liar. That's not my read on it. So my read on it is Verso was the spoiled, could do no wrong boy. Oh yeah, he was the eldest boy, absolutely.

And he, like, the grief they feel might not have been, I don't know if it would have been the same if the other kids It's not she paints a fucked up burned my alicia You know The idea that he is the star the phantom star You know I also think you just can't you can't you can't do that to your kids man I also think very soon the real world might have sucked because of his axon so Aline is Seren who is the family member who just bombards you with visions of your dead loved ones, which is a little on the nose. Oh

That's what made me fault. Like that's okay. The music of that moment. I didn't, yeah, I didn't, I didn't go on my rant about Siren being beautiful. Sorry, go ahead. I just gotta get through this. Yeah. The hauler is Clea, who is the backbone

of the whole family. Holding it on her back. She carries it on her back. She literally does. Maiel is the princess who wants, who's destined for great things. Reaching. And Verso is a two-faced liar like his

dad painted him as the mast visage amazing amazing yeah yeah and you know I was wondering if like are you going to elaborate on exactly how the tragedy happened and you don't need to like you can it's you can, but it's not what's important because it's all about the fallout afterwards and the blame game. And then this, this exact idea of like, Oh no, the one that should not have died, died. You know, I think, I think there's one detail that would really fuck up the whole, whole arguing about the game and they do a really good job not going into it, which is, what is the time ratio of time

passing through the world to the painted world? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 67 years, what does that mean? Because it's like, I don't know, did Renoir fucking walk out of the painting, and then Alicia drop dead 10 minutes later? I mean, I think, no, I think painted power makes you kind of a god

You know in reality too like you just got it. You just got to check out on that I mean verso standing there in the flames being like nah, it's cool. I like it actually you're good, you know, um God yeah fuck. I had another thing. But anyway, it's it's it's great. It's um Peak game very good game. Excellent game. Very smart game. Too many things. I think people arguing about which is the right ending are maybe missing the point.

And I think that's kind of amazing because both endings are terrible. Both endings are amazing. Feel bad. Endings are terrible. And I love that they start. One starts positive and ends in a nightmare. and one starts with a nightmare and ends positive. Yes. Thank you. You don't get a resolution for free on either. I didn't go into it over here, whatever you could, but just the journey through that long, massive dungeon that took so long. And my exploration to find the fake corners was like- Oh, it's enormous.

Getting punished for that. And then the musical denouement into the finale and the lyrics are beautiful. It hit on every level and and all of that, like, was amazing. And then when the fight ends and you have that, I'm going to show you your loved ones bit. Fuck me, I just, like, I just shit. Like, I just.

And you're such a manipulative piece of shit. Oh my God, you know? And then, like, and then who steps up and pulls it down but steps it pulls it down fucking Luna Luna gets up and goes nah fuck this and she's the one that pulls it down, you know, um, I Love everything about that what fucking represents you also never get the hard underline about Monoko being the dog, but yeah It's never it's like like, oh, oh! I was waiting for that.

I was waiting for that. He's a loyal companion, and he's a rough and tumble guy, and he loves feet. Oh, right, he's a dog. They didn't have a moment during the funeral where they're like, hey... He's a dumb idiot dog, look at him! Little Shien Monoko, you know? But yeah, yeah. And you know what you do get in that second ending though?

You do get to watch the family get closure. You do get to watch. Yeah, I don't care about them. No, no, no. You're seeing the best resolution they could have while acknowledging that you just wiped out billions of lives. So it's something. And they ghost away too. They fucking

force ghost and you're just like, yeah. Yeah, Genoa says something in his final monologue in which he's like, we're painters and we've found ourselves enthralled and intoxicated by hundreds of worlds and all that. And it's like, they're talking about video games. They're talking about? They're talking about television and movie and games and inhabited spaces and escapism. And it's like, it's so easy. And then under that context, for me, it's like the discussion about are they real or

not? I'm like, well, the fucking DeSantos aren't fucking real either. I am the painter of their fucking reality and I don't give a shit about them compared to the people one level below her. When I say billions of lives, do you not think that a place existing with a population over enough period of time will have had a billion people come and go over time? It's a real living world guys. It doesn't have to be a planet to be a billion people.

You can just wait long enough and you'll get there. It's lives snuffed out. All right, all right, all right, all right. Yeah. Everybody have a good week. We did it. Take care, everybody. Bye bye.

Amazing. Thanks for watching!