Castle Super Beast - CSB367: Fire Emblemcest: ONE House

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode | Full Timestamps Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Invisible Baby Meters The Expedition 33 Ending Doubledowncast Mass Effect TV: Chain of Memories "Arc Raiders Was an AI Trojan Horse" River City COWARDS Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 15% off the Everyday Earbuds Classic. - Go to http://hellofresh.com/superbeast10fm to get 10 free meals + a Free Nutribullet® Ultra Plus+ 2-in-1 Compact Kitchen System! - Sign up for your 1$-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/superbeast Docket: In Finally Clarifying The Release Schedule Of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Netflix Somehow Made It Even More Complicated Take-Two Interactive has laid off their Head of Artificial Intelligence, as well as an undisclosed number of employees who were working on leveraging AI at the company. Ingrid Erases a World in a Street Fighter 6 Trailer Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 - patch notes Mass Effect TV show ordered to rewrite scripts and make them "more appealing to non-gamers" deleted scene of Miquella planting the Haligtree Return of the Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope doesn't feel comfortable talking about new projects because maybe they'll be "slurped up by AI" Nexon calls Arc Raiders a "Trojan Horse" for proving controversial AI tools can build triple-A hits with smaller teams

Hello. What's up, man? How you doing? Not too bad. This weekend, I had a big family function. Ooh, okay. And Punch Kid was ready to debut to a number of the fam. That's awesome. And, you know, Punch Kid, whatever.

She's solid at, like, handling the giant, this is the biggest room full of the most people she's ever been. and she was pretty just faces and smiles and all good for the most part. But I truly can say that, yes, babies run on a Nagori-like blood install system. And every time you have a big high, a big smile, a big enjoyment, and like you're being held by strangers and you're not popping off, it's all delayed. It's all going to come later, right? And when it comes later, it comes back in orders of magnitude. So you can push that nap for a couple hours, and the intensity of the nap that you're getting on the backside of that is not to be trifled with.

I'm sure you've experienced the force multipliers of like delaying the nap but we recently got hers down to like three a day from a much higher number and I'm I can say that like I feel like we're you're just yeah you're you're managing it's systems there's bars and meters that are invisible that you're managing at these events and I can say that like we're getting

pretty alright at it. Now, I don't know, but I can only imagine that the screaming kid running through an airport smashing into walls and bouncing off of everything and everyone

has significantly more meters that get introduced however the the the the the the UI is revealing itself to me does that make sense yeah um you're mentally ill okay

you sure you're you're you're you all right you you you have an illness in your mind okay uh that being said your your core point uh is is dead on all right well forgive me for trying to bring a fucking video game bit to a video game

podcast. Fucking go then. Your core point is correct. There's a couple of wrenches in there. So it's in your parlance, it's all the same meters. They're all the same. Just certain

ones get longer or shorter depending. Right? And they will change up on you. So you're starting to feel like you're like hmm, okay. We got this. We got like kind of a loose schedule I'm able to anticipate

and like I can go like this is about 15 minutes away from disaster and I'm able to peg it All right and she's what September Well just a 90 Yeah she's she's she's between

She's between her 6 and 12 so she's getting So you're getting it And you're gonna you're gonna You're gonna have a couple of weeks Uh maybe a couple of months of like yeah all right

then you're gonna have to start the whole fucking process over as soon as the next sleep regression hits and every single fucking part of her schedule completely resets to some new bullshit that you have to just re-intuit so the regressions didn't

really hit like I was expecting in the sense that um like the times where she would yeah there's definitely nights where she'd just be like Hey, yo, I'm up.

I don't give a fuck, right? I think the funniest part about that is, is like, hey, is the baby asleep? And you, like, look at the monitor, and it's just like, ah! Like the widest eyes and the biggest goo-gagas. Yeah, it's weird because, like, it would never, like, it feels like it wouldn't regress for, like,

stretches of time. It would instead just be, like, sporadic, like, this night was just off. And what has been more. more telling, at least with her, has been like teething. And teething pain is a way larger determining factor of like how the overall mood is going to go. It felt like my guy was teething every day for like 20 months. Right, right, right, yeah.

Like, it really, like every single time he couldn't sleep or whatever, must be teething. But that's what I'm saying, though, is that like, okay, so I know what the tiredness system is that I'm familiar with where that's at based on how she's behaving. and how that when that, how it looks when she's getting low. And then you go, you go through the, the solving all the other problems. And then that doesn't solve the irritability. So then you're like, it's got to be teething. And like, it makes sense because teething frustration is a different. Yeah, it sucks.

It hurts out. But it's a different kind of frustration because she can be, she can be in the middle of being happy. And then teething pain will happen. And she won't stop being happy. But she'll still be like, yeah. And then she can go right back to smile. or doing whatever, you know? And so you see that and you go, oh, okay, let's give the cold chew toy or the other little

things or whatever. But sometimes you're getting those like those in the middle of the night and it's like that's not a sleep regression. That's a teething overlapped with sleep is now turning a sleep, turning a nap into a teething interruption, you know? Yeah. So again, you're just new subsystem introduced. okay, we have a new bar to keep track of here,

and you've got to test it to see if it's teething pain, or is she going to take the cold toy and throw it away and be like, no, it's not that, you know? Yeah, right now I'm in the period that has been going on for six months or more, and I have no idea how long it's going to go, which is this kid could really use an app. They disagree. So either,

they're going to take one nap and it's going to be at the worst time a human can take a nap it's going to go from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. Fuck. Or they're going to just like

speed up and speed up and speed up and speed up and speed up and go faster and faster and faster until 845 at which point they're just going to if they sit down for even a second, they're just going to tilt right the fuck over and pass out. You can't do the long nap as the last one of the day.

You can't do it. It's a fucking trap. It's a trap, bro. Yeah, you know what else is a trap? You know what else is a trap? You know what the most dangerous thing of all is? Okay, usual bedtime, 930, 10. It's 745.

Mm-hmm. and I'm looking at him just tilt and throop and I'm like I yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah uh uh dude hey wake up wait up wait up wait up hey woo let's dance no he's gone he's out he is now back up after his three hour nap at 1030 uh huh fuck yeah so I mean again we had a we had a fucking nappy little like potatoes. So she was like passing out in like 90 minute intervals at one point practically. Yeah, that's that's the, oh man, that part of the infant cycle is like you can set your watch to them.

It's crazy. You, you know when to start doing dishes and laundry because you just fucking got it. And you've got your exact like timer of like, and there it is, you know. but yeah no that that's that's otherwise like you know getting a little bit more predictable by being less predictable uh the other thing is and it's like okay so we're hitting the different um different solid foods or trying out getting messy trying out all different kinds of stuff and i have to say i'm like oh boy i'm like just wait till you taste like fruits that shableness It's going to be fucking crazy. Like, you get sweet and things like that.

And like, oh, man, a mango, you are, your brain is not even ready for how good that is. Does not care about fruits. Yeah. Try it a little bit of an apple thing. Nah. Tried a little, tried some pear stuff. Nah, the mango, little tart. Nah.

Going in for tahini. Going in for, like, potatoes just fine. cereals just fine, but the good shit. On this earth don't like a cup of Cheerios, man. But like, but the good shit, though. And it's like, it's like, it's like your mouth is just not ready for how much is going on there. It might be too complex. Well, the other thing is that a huge proportion of those tastes are genetic.

Do you and Punch Mom have different tastes and food? To some degree, yeah, to some degree. Okay, so like, for example, hey man, you want to eat some chicken? no do you want to have do you want to have a piece of steak that we cut out so you could suck on the steak

mmm delicious steak no is he stealing a pickle off of your fucking plate yes yeah yeah yeah like a vinegar drenched pickle

sour and briny yeah in it goes all right fuck it yeah I mean, like, whatever, whatever means we get there, my whole thing is like, I'm just, I want to avoid the, the, the pickiness if at all possible, you know, and I can see it's starting to develop. Yeah, there's only so much you can fucking do. I'm going to fight it with all my being. I'm going to fight it with every fiber of my being. It's super important to me. I just, you know what I got right now, bro? It's like, he's a little picky, but nothing to the end of the world. What I get is just like the shittiest customer I've ever served.

where hey man here's all your food I got you yogurt I got your I got your fruits and veggies I got your chicken all this

and like he sits there and he's like looking at it and he's like where's my dip dip mm-hmm mm-hmm like

oh my mistake your majesty yeah yeah and then I get the ketchup and I squeeze out some ketchup out

and he's like thank you dad Dip-dip is very good. Chicken is only good with dip-tip. I'm like, okay. Yeah. And listen, these are the moments because I'm like, right now I'm just, I'm pre-planning and I'm anticipating.

And I know it's mandatory, but for as much as possible, I'm like, the kid's menu is the enemy, is how I'm approaching this. And this is one of those bits where I think simply being in. like North America in general, there's a, there's a vibe to this that is like omnipresent almost. But when it comes to like how to approach the taste and some of the weirder flavors and all these different things, I'm going to have to revert to some Caribbean style approaches of like you got to taste some wild shit. A big, like if this is what the range is usually, I got to open it up massive. and have you taste a whole lot of crazy things, and then just know that that's out there,

and then you can still pick and choose, and your preferences will develop, but they'll develop from a much larger base than the usual of what you get up here. I am reminded of what our pediatrician told us, because we were like, we're worried he's made me, is he getting enough iron?

And, you know, we were going through, like, the list of, like, macro nutrients. and he was like, okay, how old are they? I'm like, 18 months. He's like, okay, cool. Are they eating? Like, yeah, he's eating food. It's like, good, great.

Yes. That's it. Yeah. And we're like, but is it? Nope. Yeah. Well, hey, that's it. I know, yeah, there's so many moments of just like,

hey, I'm concerned about this detail. And then, like, pediatricians, like, I'm not. Get the fuck out of my office. You know. You're like, fine, fine, fine, no, I, fine, sure. Right? And I'm sure that like in the, when you're going down a massive list and a bunch of different kids are there and you're like, these ones actually need my attention. You know, leave me alone.

You bring your kid in, they look healthy, they're well fed. And then in the back of his head, he's like, listen, I got motherfucking toddlers coming in with fucking scurvy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay? Like, John just to shit. Like, you got to, you gotta just, and I'm like, okay, fine, I know. You know, and I definitely, I don't know. I feel, I mean, you know us, you know our demeanor and such.

So I feel like there's a lot of cases where, you know, talking to a couple different levels of professional, you know that they have a system in their brain that's running for just like, okay, we don't want to panic parents at any point, right? No matter what, even no matter what we're looking at, we've got to just go. through the next level of like, yeah, yeah, it's chill, you know. And I'm, and like, we're conversely also trying to run a system of like, hey, we don't want to look insane. We're not insane. We're just, it's, it's, don't want to be insane.

You don't want to look like the crazy, you know, while you're up in the office going, ah, right? But I'm just like, but we ask questions because we like, actually want to know how this stuff works. And I feel like for a lot of things, we're pretty data driven people, you know, so we'd be like, oh, yeah. Yeah, like, what's going on with that? You know, and so, like, the conversation is like, you know, sometimes you're talking about, like, oh, well, what would happen if this were to be occur?

I mean, it seems like it's not, which is pretty cool. But how does this usually go with kids and stuff, you know? And you kind of have that thing, and you kind of poke at it in, from around the edges a little bit, just to just to be aware. But there is, there is definitely a, like, wall you'll hit of sometimes where it'll be like, well, you know, and then, you know, and if we don't see any good results there, then I guess we'd have to just. just start talking to some other people, you know, I suppose. And they just kind of just, you don't want a date and just like, yeah, no, don't worry. You don't need to know what goes beyond this step or what's going on over here.

And, yeah, the last thing you need is like, well, what if my kid never eats an orange? Then we're going to have to hit him with a feeding tube in two years. There's no fucking purpose. That's such a minuscule amount of cases. But it is a system that I've encountered in place where there's definitely a level of, like my anti-parent worrying system is now running and it's like you're going to get a you're going to get a stop on the amount of information after this point, you know? So it is, it is interesting. But yeah.

But yeah, at the end of the, ah, they're fine. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it. And then exactly. What if we just want to short the baby, you know? Um, anyway, she is, um, perfection incarnate. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Uh, what's going on this week? Oh, with me? A week occurred? Yeah, I played some of that, them, them, their kingdom hearts some more. Are we, are we? I beat chain of memories. Sorry, re-chain of memories. Mm-hmm.

And I beat, I beat, rebirth, recum. Reverse. Reverse, rebirth, recum. Okay. Usually you would go in the other order, but yeah. You know, you would think, you would think. That game sucks, dude. I have now beat both campaigns.

Yo, that game fucking sucks ass. That's unfortunate. Uh, the, the, the, the, the soror, there's two campaigns, one's Sora, one's Riku. Wait, hold on. Um, this is, you're talking about, come. I'm talking about com, yeah. Yeah, okay. Recom.

Rebirth, recomb. Yeah, it's re-chain of memories. In darkness. Not chain of memories. Um, yo, that game sucks shit. You ever recum in darkness, bro? The Sora campaign is about 19-ish hours. fucking terrible

like god awful um the shittiest pacing possible where you're going through all the Disney worlds from kingdom hearts one and you're just doing them again like like everything that happens inside of Disney world is like just literally a retrid of last time

you mentioned you go to the exact same places they just don't do any of the new shit because they save all the good shit for K-O-H-2 yeah and um it It features a combination writing style that is like maybe genuinely the worst combination of factors that you can see in a story. Characters so stupid that you're like screaming at the screen. Like Kingdom Hearts Re-Chane of Memories Sora might be the dumb.

dumbest motherfucker I have ever played as in a game in my life. Now, they are like 12 or whatever, right? Yeah. No. Like, absolutely fucking so stupid. Like, astonishingly fucking stupid. Even for a 12 year old. Okay.

Yeah, no. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. He is fucking so stupid. And you're like, well, he's a child. His slightly, and I mean like maybe a year older friend, Riku, not stupid. So it is actually Sora. Sora is the dumb one.

Now, is it? Very dumb. Is it dumb in the way that it's like protagonist's good heart is just too pure for this world, thus it informs him to make dumb decisions? it's a little bit because that's like the cool of Sora as a character is that he's a good boy um it it may be it may be it's it's like that because other characters have brains in kingdom hearts and it gets to the point where some of the tertiary characters are like I can't believe he is falling for this.

Because what you're describing sounds like, especially when you also contrast it with the edgier rival kid being smarter. And I go, right, it's the Shonen protagonist who believes the enemy and does the dumb thing because like the heart of the situation will prevail. And in the end, you know, the plot will often prove.

them right and and the darker one who would have been more skeptical and and about things and more practical but might have overlooked something and then it would have been bad if they followed them through so how much can i get into like the nature of how dumb this is with you because it goes to like the plot of chain of mental i mean i i am for what here's what i am with kingdom hearts like for what little there is to the story i'm i am going to do this some day so I'm going to say don't go too far in. Okay, so I'll just go like basic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The very basic premise of chain of memories is about memories. Right. And they walk in to the Castle Oblivion and within entering in the door go, we have lost some of our memories by arriving. And every floor we go up, we will lose more. memories. Okay. And they, they take it very, not seriously enough, how much damage that will do to their decision-making process over time. Okay. And it's, it's just like, I want to, like, scream.

it's it's bad um on the and on top of that the gameplay is terrible um the the the kind of interesting core concept of using cards for moves uh is poorly tutorialized and a little hard to get a handle on and just makes its way for a bunch of insanely insanely insane insanely busted shit that the game like hands to you. Like the strongest move in the game is one you earn by leveling up.

It's not something you have to go seek out. They just go, hey, you leveled up to level 27. Why don't you try this move? And you try this move. And you're like, there's almost nothing in the game that can fucking handle this. There's no reason not to do it every single turn. You broke the combat system.

Yeah. And then you... So there were two. things. One was essentially a judgment cut style move, which bosses can't, like their AI can't handle it at all. And the other is

a move that just, it's like Zan Tetsukin essentially. So you start a random battle and you hit it and it just disappears every single enemy. Okay. And I went from really strongly disliking the gameplay for about five

hours and being like, this is kind of a miserable piece of shit, to mashing triangle while reading chat for 15 more hours because nothing could touch the system I built. It's like Expedition 33's like difficulty scaling problem happening like a third of the way through act one. Okay. You remember in act three when like, oh wow, nothing can fuck with me anymore. What if that happened like right away? So the thing is with this being like a portable side spinoff though,

like I would assume that it's a fraction of the length of the main game. You would fucking hope, huh? Nope. My total gameplay time was about four hours less than 100%ing Kingdom Hearts 1. Wow. Okay. It like, it, it, it, oh. And, um, you get to the final boss and the, and the final, final, final boss of Sora's campaign could stand up to the nonsense I was doing.

And I'm like, ooh, am I going to have to like, relearn how to play the game? No, I'm just going to have to swap out this broken move for this other broken move that hits the boss in the air. and dog walk him. And the only fight in the entire game that has any mechanical depth is the final phase of the final boss. Is there like a Sephiroth equivalent at any point in it? No. No.

Okay. No. And then you do Riku's campaign, which is, it's called reverse rebirth. where you play as Riku, which is cool, because Riku's cooler. And that is like an 8 out of 10 game. Oh, okay. Yes. And the long and short of it is that Riku completely flips the entire system.

You don't earn cards. You don't manage a deck. You are given a deck that is set up for every level in the game, and that's the deck you're going to have to make work. Oh. And he gets special bonuses for breaking opponent's cards with good timing or matching cards and then going into like a dual mini game. And he is dramatically more fun to play. He is like, he is also, he plays way closer to what Kingdom Hearts plays like. That to the point that this probably should have been the main system.

He also has no storyline in any of the Disney worlds at all. So the pacing is way better. His bosses are more interesting. And his storyline is better and more interesting and better acted. Yeah. I was going to say, is this a Jetstream Sam slash Virgil DMC special edition? A little bit. But it's like you have a eight out of 10 bonus campaign that lasts about five hours

stapled onto the end of a three out of 10, 20-ish-hour campaign. And after, so a long time ago, I read a text synopsis of what happened in Chain of Memories before playing two. I was like, that's good enough. It wasn't. Like, this is the second most important game in the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise in terms of shit that happens. And it is

stapled to just slop. So it is the worst combination of legitimately terrible story slash gameplay. That's really important. I'm going to guess because

the bits, the, what I do remember of King, Kingdom Hearts 1 that we played, Riku was in the background and you didn't know what he was up to, just pop and every once in a while. So I guess this is one of those. Here's the most you're going to see of him. For a bit.

For a while. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, well, he gets to play a full campaign. You get a bunch of cutscenes as him. And it also, they do a fun little thing where he has a similar, like, you know, moving around move set as Sora, but he plays better. His default combo is faster and cooler looking.

His jump is higher. His role goes twice the distance. You know, stuff like that. Like, no, Riku is best. better. Kind of a, and I've been told quite a lot that the GBA game is better. I strongly doubt that a lot because in addition to having no cutscenes or voice acting, right? It also doesn't have any of the mechanics that make Riku's side of the game interesting.

It's also a big ask to like go back to that. I mean, like, for LPN purposes at the very least. So yeah, yeah, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories is like the least skippable most I want to skip this game I have played in a long time in a series. It's like somebody described it in my chat as What if DMC2 had vital plot relevance? Well, the Argosax was the second strongest demon in hell, Pat. I mean. Yeah.

On the plus side, next up on the list is Kingdom Hearts 2, Final Mix, which is the top of that series is bell curve of quality. As good as it's ever going to get, and it's going to get pretty fucking good. So very excited to start that on Thursday. That stream will be a little later

because we got a vet appointment for the cat. But, yeah, no, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories. Bad. Bad game. Not good. Very important. Very important. important. Very not good game at all.

Except for the new game plus. Except for the tiny bonus campaign that is like the dessert after you play all the slot. I mean, I do feel that like, you know, making the, making the rival playable is often a way that, like, they're not going to, they're not going to think about, like, making them depowered or having any sort of like progression scale. They're just going to be like, yeah, you're super nuts. and you can go crazy from the jump, and thus it's way more fun. So, especially for the way games were designed back then,

it feels like they just wouldn't want to give that to you right away, but it's like, why the fuck not? You know? Well, the Riku thing is more interesting than him just being stronger. Like, his attacks are stronger, and his movement is better. But unlike Sora,

he doesn't get anything other than attack cards. Okay. He literally has just his three-hit combo. So you have to focus on breaking cards and like engaging in the card system more than nothing. God, I was so upset when I played Mega Man X3 for the first time. And it was like, finally, zero is playable. And you're like, let's fucking go.

But he can only die three times. After all this time and like recall it in zero, you take over. Ah, shit, he's here. And he's gone. What? What? You had to wait to X4 to get your Insanity. Your real fantasy. Insanity. You went through all the trouble of making him playable

And you just didn't fucking make it real. You made it a super basically. And it's gone off your save file forever. Zero, are you there? He's fucking gone. Piece of shit, man. That was the that was what a crime. What a fucking video game crime. That was.

And then yes, X4 you get the character. I had the exact same feeling like borrowing a friend's Super Nintendo and like, oh, I want to play a Sierra? Oh, fuck. It was the number one thing everyone playing that game wanted. It was universal.

And someone really angry at the world said, no, no, no. You just get a taste. And even then, your taste is extra limited if you can't make it through the stage perfectly. You know? It's almost, yeah, I wonder if like looking back it there was something to it where they're like this is buggy as shit or there's some shit we

don't want people to find so maybe we have to like highly restrict it you know and don't let people get too much time on it I don't know anyway so yeah I play kingdom hearts rechain of memories oh that makes that I am now um two ninths through kingdom heart yeah sure one one-fifth, maybe? Because there's one recomb, two,

um, 358. Divided by two. Yeah, divided by two. Then there's BBL. Then there's, is it called recomb again? Um, what's

the, what's the, code? Code. Recode. Recode. Dream drop distance. 3DS. Then 02. Then Then three, then the rhythm games.

I remember years ago on Frankast, you said like, hey, there's a good reason for every one of these titles that exists. That's like, it explains them. Well, no, like the literal titles. Yeah. And, um. birth by sleep does have something in there that's some sleep birthing. Is this, is the Kingdom Hearts naming conventions just chuny before chuny in the titles?

Because, because chuny-ass titles are, and chuny-ass like, like, like, you know, logos exist. And there's always a telltale moment where if you look at a logo for anything

and you see a paragraph of English text, you're like, oh, we're just churning hard. Like an undernight in birth thing. Yes, a million percent. Undernight and birth, perfect example. Any other thing you can think of your favorite show anime, whatever it is, with a paragraph of English text in the background that's gibberish, we're just chuting hard as fuck, right? So is this just another form of that? It feels like that energy.

Well, so Kingdom Hearts, so I played Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories on Easter Sunday. and as I did so I was overwhelmed by the Christ analogs of Sora in Kingdom Hearts and how easy it is to just slap mainstream Christian ideology

onto the Kingdom Hearts narrative like Of course you can like it's like kingdom hearts is the light and the way I believe and dude and the devil needs there to tempt you with the darkness the game opens on a stained glass portrait stained glass I'm surprised there's no fucking paragraph text over those game logos that like it feels like that that would have been right in the time and the place zero point two of fragmentary

passage is pretty fucking out there. A man haunted by a tragic past but also great sorrow it will change when he meets a girl named Dominique. These are the residents of Dog Street. The Bouncer.

But yeah, no, there's a lot of Jesus. And on top of that, I was talking to my chat about this, Kingdom Hearts is right there, holding hands in church with your friend and mine Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes.

The coolest slash edgiest thing that just like, oh, it's a Disney game. Of course you can have it. Oh, and it's wholesome and it's about friendship and light and all these things. Like those parking lot kids are probably coming straight there after church.

Like, it just fits. uh it's the coolest thing they're allowed to do man yeah it's like oh man those guys are wearing cool black leather jackets with the full hoodie like a leather hoodie that's crazy bro the jinkgo jeans are ready for dancing they're flared out and everything okay well the other thing that that made me like laugh really hard in the context of like this is for like a bunch of church kids trying to get edgy with the kingdom hearts was that like sora and riku's dialogue is so gay it's it's so so gay like it was pretty gay in kingdom hearts one it's oh man it's it's full on gay baiting is it in chain of memories i just i just remember it being again

kids going no yeah you have to i won't so Everything they say in the parking lot is just fucking... Oh, that's all Kingdom Hearts 2, rocks of stuff. Okay. Okay, excuse me. That's my context of the dialogue. Like 60% of Riku and Sora conversations is like a guy getting mad that his boyfriend came home late and being like, oh, I guess you did want to see me after all.

Like just getting all catty and bitchy about it. I mean, that last thing I remember is, is... him looking in the window as everyone was having fun and he was outside not allowed to be in the house where everyone was having fun. Something something. Something like that. Something like that. Peaking in.

Okay. But yeah, no, very excited to hop onto two on Thursday. That is the goal of playing Kingdom Hearts. The goal of playing or starting to play Kingdom Hearts is so that you can play fucking Kingdom Hearts two final mix. Because that game fucking kicks ass. That's the best one.

That's the best one easy. There's no arguing. It's one of the only franchises I can think about where people go, what's the best one? And literally every single person goes, it's that one. That's the best one. And then everything after that is arguing. Everything after that is like,

this um, this one's got See, because after that, your voice got deeper, right? And, like, life got a little bit more complicated. And you started looking at, like... And it wasn't as simple and clean as it used to be. Yeah, I know. And some of those boys and girls in class,

and you started feeling a bit funny, you know? And, you know, maybe you had to move to a different place. And, you know, maybe your parents changed jobs. Who knows? But life got really complicated after that. I saw a really good comment where somebody was saying that the reason why a lot of people, they feel that a lot of people complain about, like,

Kingdom Hearts 3's handling of the story is that they play Kingdom Hearts 1 when they were like 10 years old. And they play Kingdom Hearts 3 when they were adults. Yeah. Yeah. And that it stayed the same, but you didn't. So it's really interesting to me going through these games, some of them for the first time, as a fucking 40-year-old man. Yep. because that that shit is over.

Like I'm old now. This is also a foundational aspect of our relationship with the entire medium you realize. Mm-hmm. Especially doing this all this time later, the shit that we took our fondness for the late 90s, which we do go back and audit every couple years to just make sure that it did in fact rule. 1998 was the best, right? And then we also gave flowers to, I think, 2006.

We always do this, but it is super true that like where your life was at and what you were experiencing makes a huge difference. And even if you weren't experiencing that much, that in and of itself, the lack of other things still makes a difference, you know, if you didn't have as much of the outside creeping in and you were just playing and enjoying your time and that's all you were focused on or whatever was happening in your life. It's the context you have these memories and makes all the change the difference in the world. There's a really good example that I talked at length with chat about this because the Disney is such a huge appeal of Kingdom Hearts, right?

And it's like, okay, I was born 86. So I was 17, no, 16 when King of Hearts 1 came out, right? And then I was 19 when Kingdom Hearts 2 came out. And then I was in my 30s when King Hearts 3 came out. right and so like okay what's the what's the movie breakdown of of what's in what right um because uh the audience that plays kingdom hearts was whoever started playing fucking kingdom hearts back in 2002 2003 it was maybe mainly that same group of people regardless of how the fuck old they were right so it's like oh what do we got we got tarzan and winnie the

Pooh and Aladdin and and little mermaid. Like, oh man, these are like the classic classics from the 70s and 80s that people like you and me in our age group like grew up watching all the time. Everybody had a Disney movie that just played on fucking repeat in their house. Right? It's like, okay. Well, what's Kingdom Hearts 2 got? Okay, well, it's a couple years later, but not that many years later. So it's just going to go for stuff that's slightly newer or more classic.

like, oh, beauty in the beast or Hercules again or Tron, that's a fucking weird one or, you know, general, like, oh, these are all super, super classics. But by the time you get to Kingheart's three, Wully, you're 39, right? Mm-hmm.

No, 40. Okay. How fucking stoked are you to play frozen and tangled? Yeah. Yeah. And fuck it. I do remember wondering

when at one point like when Lion King was going to get in there because I believe in two. Yeah, it was only in two when it got to it, right? So, but, but, yeah, two also has like the luck of it has the best movies at stages that they ever did. And, yeah, Tarza, because I also wasn't like big on Tarzan at the time.

So that was another one that was like, I, I, Well, don't worry. They forget about Tarzan. Yeah, yeah. They lose the rights to include Tarzan, so Tarzan's only in Kingdom Hearts 1. There it goes. And then it took a while for Toy Story to actually happen. Yeah, true.

In any case. What a weird series. The other thing is that one of the reasons the later games aren't as good as Kingdom Hearts 2 is that Kingdom Hearts 2 was the last time that core group did them. Like Numuro didn't work on any of the ones afterwards. until three, and like the core group got spun out to other square properties. It's like that that core gang just got disassembled. Yeah, I mean, it also is, again, a absolute nightmare in terms of not just voice acting, but like the amount of rights and different things back and forth and all.

The games are made up of every one of those MCU conversations we've had about like, you know, pushing this over that, et cetera. The entire existence of this of this franchise is the most complicated super robot wars ass deals, you know, ever. So even if it all is Disney. I've been told the what I just said is fake-ass news. I don't know. I read it on the Kingdom Hearts Wiki. I don't know what you want for me.

Okay. Anything else going on? Yes. What else is going on? I hit master rank with the cousin fucker. Ah! I'm one of the top cousin fucker players in the world. Well, you hold on to that because soon Ingrid will come and rewrite reality with her special CA level three where she puts Alex's head in the door and fucking smashes that shit.

Shoutouts to Quasimodoksh for the new troll. Ingrid art where a troll ingrid is opening up the reality door and just come in to smash Alex's head on it and break everything. Yeah, I hit, I hit Master with Alex just in time to go back to playing to XKO. It's a collie patch today. There you go. Just in time. The whole time I was grinding Alex out to Master. I just under my breath

I was just like fucking god damn it like the whole time the whole fucking time just changing the vibe a vibe that did not exist that that means nothing

yeah yeah yeah I also dicked around with a couple of some backlog stuff but the one the only one that I really want to bring up is something called Eldon Ring reforged it's a total overhaul mod

for your friend and mine, Eldon Ring. It's really cool. It does a lot of really, really interesting stuff. The main thing is it does what I wanted. So I beat Shadow of the Earth Tree. You beat Shadow of the Earth Tree. And one of the things that I took away from Shadow of the Earth Tree is, man, this fucking Just Defend Tier should have been in the whole game.

They should have moved this fucking thing to Limgrave. and let you play the whole goddamn game with it. Block at the last second. So Eldon Ring Reforged has block at the last second, perfect, frame perfect block at the last second, roll at the last second with timing, and attack with perfect timing. So when you roll or attack at the correct time to roll again or attack again, a small indicator will pop up on your character's hand or the middle of their body, and the subsequent follow-up attack or roll will be faster and take less stamina if you perfectly time it.

Because, you know you can mash out Eldon Ring or from software combos, but there is actually like, this is the first frame that the new attack becomes active. If you actually nail it, you will be attacking at like a 40% faster speed and rolling at a 40% faster speed. It also changes all the weight So that you have a bloodborne dodge if you're nimble So if you do the just offend Your reward is Your reward is almost no stamina loss

No stamina loss, okay Yeah, and your guard counter gets better As well And there's a million It's one of those mods that's just It wants to be vanilla plus plus plus plus plus So like everything has just tons Of shit added onto it

Like one of the things of note is that they made it so that you can always attack with the weapon in your left hand. So if you're blocking and you hit any of the attack buttons, you'll just attack with whatever's in your fucking left hand. So shields all have their movesets available at all time. So when you're blocking, and you have a moment, you just fucking pop them with the shield and fuck their poise up.

So is it like tap and hold to block, but then tap multiple times to do the combo, I guess? No, it's tap and hold L1. and then your R1 and R2 I've just now switched to your left hand while you hold lock Oh, okay What happens to your strong skill

Or like, because isn't there Isn't R2 taken up by So L2 is to do your skill Or to go into your stance with your skill And on top of that it makes like Two-handing weapons like super viable Because you can just Perfect parry, you can turn the fucking game

into Sekaro. Okay. someone asks how does that work for spearpokes? It doesn't Yeah The spirit poke overrides it Or I was going to say for for

Power Stancing Right Yeah so they made it They also made it So that Power Stancing is automatic With any two weapons That have an animation for it at all It just goes into it automatically

There's no alarm It's in any way Okay okay Okay Because I used to Because I was power stancing fists Right Yeah okay

So like I was power stancing with like a long sword to short sword as long as I could equip them they fucking went um it reed the whole crafting system to work better uh it has a bunch of extra stuff it's just a really cool way to replay the game

okay yeah I was worried when you said that that it was an insanely massive remix and like I preemptively felt tired so for example they redo the tutorial area right the the cave of knowledge or whatever it is and the final boss of that has been turned into a skill trial

and it's a test of the new movement mechanics. So they go okay listen you can only take damage the enemy only take damage when you roll out of the way to the side. If there's if there's moves bad tracking roll to the side. But it also goes okay backstep is gone and it's been replaced with duck. So any stabbing move that would go over your character's head

tap circle and duck underneath it. Whoa. And every single weapon in the game has been given a new move to come out of the duck like stance. And then it teaches you, hey, there's low attacks. Wow.

You're only going to be able to get away, like jump them. And so the final boss is roll, duck, jump, etc. And it's like you're going to be using this and perfect blocks to do a lot of stuff.

That is better. Backstepping is not as useful. Backstepping sucks. Yeah. That is a way better thing. adding another level of height to the to the game interesting okay and you know there's some stuff that like they've they've like made a lot of stuff more unique so i was able to kill the the tree sentinel right off the bat because i was able to use perfect lock to beat him uh and he dropped

his um his big old spear right and the first thing that i saw was that um it casts golden vow on yourself when you hit enemies and it increases the power of of miracles. So it's like, okay, that is very much better. Okay. For a very specific build. It's, yeah, it's just a

really, really cool, like, vanilla plus way to go. Like, because I look at Alden and Rang and go, man, that's a really fucking huge game to replay. Yes, exactly. I would kind, and I've already replayed it in its entirety twice.

So if I ever went back to it, I would very, very much like it to be significantly different. The kind of mod I would be interested in seeing is like someone grabbing the the traversal systems from Night Rain

and dropping that into I don't know if that would work. It would be crazy but I'd be curious to see like you could just bird fucking fly over and then crawl and then like fucking climb a wall. I'd be curious to see that dropped in. and what it does.

There's like way too much of this to get into. Like they added a new collectible for a new upgrade system and they made the game overall harder to deal with all the new powers you have. But the thing that makes the single biggest difference is that you just regenerate FP by hitting enemies. Okay, cool. So like, just like, hey, do you want to just fucking play the game and fucking use your skills all the time?

Here you go. Not hitting this halfway through the hard dungeon. time to stop and sit on top of my fucking heels and yeah what's really impressive is that they have a private server running so when you install reforged

which is super trivial you literally just download you install Alden Ring then you download Reforged and you go into the Reforged folder and go play Reforged and that's the entire installation it auto connects you to the private server

so your online status with the real game is safe. Okay. And you're still playing online with everybody on the private server running Reforged and you still have messages and you still have ghosts and you still have bloodstains.

Not getting banned. And it's it was trivial to set up. Yeah, it's super cool. I'm gonna keep messing around. Sick, sick, sick, yeah. That's pretty much it for me.

Me and Paige watched a couple more episodes of that new One Piece show. That new One Piece show is pretty fucking great. That's it. That's it. It's good. Oh, people want me to talk about Small Saga. I played a game called Small Saga. It is a JRP about mice in London. Oh, like red. You might recognize a photo of a mouse holding a Swiss Army knife. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um, it's very, very good. Right, right. Martin the Warrior.

It really, really, it really plays well into the, like, it has a premise, which is your little myces and moles and shit like that. And it really,

really goes for it and does an excellent amount of work with the setting. So the very start of it is your little, two little mice guys and you're like, oh, we're going to go break into heaven to get food for to get food for the

village, right? You're like, okay, so you go through the sewers and you do this, do that, and fight a boss, fight, blah, blah, blah. And you break into heaven, and what's heaven? It's a Tesco supermarket. Okay. With infinite food as far as the eye can see. But you are warned

to beware of the yellow god because everyone who goes to heaven is killed by the yellow god. And you're like, whatever, I don't give a fuck about that. At which point you have to try and push a big old bag of sunflower seeds and in the back horizon you see the biggest

door ever open and out comes a giant in a yellow hazmat suit putting pesticide anti-mouse gas throughout the floors that's making you sick and every step shakes the screen and terrifying music goes on which leads to

you getting caught in a mouse trap and having to cut your own tail off to escape. And its influences are really, really outrageously clear. Is this golden sun combat? Yeah, golden sun combat. So you're fleeing from the yellow god and your tail gets cut and your mouse tries to cut the mouse trap and the sword breaks in half and becomes like a shiv.

And all you can do is cut your own tail off. off and then it does a then it does a flash forward and you're running around with a fucking uh swiss army knife that everyone describes as being too heavy and too big for a mouse to use and you're

fighting fucking cats and shit wow and it's like it's berserk it's berserk but with mice that's cool okay was uh it's fucking cool like you meet um you meet a mole and you're like how are we going to

defeat this cat and he goes into his fucking collection of God items and pulls a Bick lighter from out behind a Gameboy and goes we're going to use this so you go into the boss fight with the cat

and he fucking sets the cat on fire with a Bick lighter while you stab it with a fucking Swiss Army knife to fend it off and you're like this is a fucking great use of this idea like this premise is being absolutely perfectly utilized.

Another one for the fantasy mouse wearing clothing genre. Yeah, they just wear little capes. Yeah. I think I don't know if Redwall or Secret of Nim came first on that. I think Secret of Nim was probably first to the clothing

wearing mice fantasy fighting big cat threat. That feels right. but that's a fun one but yeah that's pretty much it for me if you want to see more kingdom hearts this week go down to twitch.tv.tvy slash patstairs at and youtube.com slash pat stairs at secret of nym 1982

Redwall 1986 I'm not as familiar with Redwall yeah Redwall is it's another it's a mouse knight you know Again, my swearing... So I know it's bunny rabbits, but when was Watership Down? Oh, that feels way later.

What year do we got? Like the book? 1972, never mind. Okay, yeah, because to me, the start is actually Watership Down of like adorable animals engaging in like hyperviolence. But those bunnies are naked and they're just bunnies, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's very... Watership down predates the furry.

revolution. I say that the category does not include them because they need to be, they need to be wearing a little outfit and maybe holding a sword, you know, or not. NIM, you got, you know, the main character to be at least. When was Disney's Robin Hood? Disney's Robin Hood was 73. That's it. That it's right there. That's the moment. Okay. Okay. Not. Yeah, okay. If we're, if we're expanding beyond mice. But the thing with the mice version of it though is that you got to do because the mice version of it is that it's always like the world

is scaled down, right? You're getting the fantasy, you're getting the castle inside of a hole in the wall in between the things and the whole world is scaled for that kind of a detail whereas Robin Hood is still like, you know, bears and foxes and everything at our scale.

But yes, it's a fun genre to return to. So I might go back to a small saga because apparently the game is extremely short. Okay. Yeah, but that's it for me. All right. What's up with you, Walt?

Okay, so a couple things on my end. Yeah, not a ton. Went back to Slay the Spire, been messing around, trying to get a better feel for it. And I still love me, some defect, and, you know, I'm getting through a, a bunch of fun builds with that and getting falling right back into kind of how much I enjoyed it in the first game. I have to say that like, you saw that three ball system.

Yep. So you got the three or more orbs and each orb you generate a different element. And those elements can either be auto attacking at the end of your turn or you can invoke them to do a powered up attack during the turn. and if you want to set them up to be offensive, defensive, whatever the case is, it's like a secondary thing system that you're tracking while you're fighting. And I fucking love it, you know. And then while you get your orbs out, you can spend your cards to focus to make them stronger

or you can just go for, you know, direct damage or whatever the case is. But if you do it properly, you can do cool shit like spend your entire turn blocking because your lightning orbs are going to do the damage for you, you know, once you've defended against whatever. is coming. Fucking love him. But I've been trying to figure out the necrobinder more. And I have a, so I have some friends who've been playing

that have been doing a multiplayer and we're kind of talking about that a bit. And yeah, and one of them was going like, yeah, they may necrobinder and have been just going all in on it. And I can't figure it out. I'm not sure. Just make the hands stronger. No, I know, right?

But like, But like I guess the tricky part with, and maybe what I'm missing is like unlocking a few more like specific necrobinder cards to make the, the kit work. But make the hand stronger, right? So, but the way you make the hand stronger is by using summon. So there are not enough summon cards in your deck right away. You start out with like a handful of like defense and offensive like strike and block cards. Way too many. A bunch that you want to discard, you know, for your system to come to come online.

And I feel like I was looking out to try to add as many summon cards as possible in a couple runs. And I was not seeing that many. So I was like, oh, like, I would think that building up the Osty's summon would be the plan here. But I was finding it hard to get enough summon cards to make that a reliable defense. In most situations, I found I had to just do normal blocking on top of that, right? So then I was like, let me try running Doom. And Doom seems to be one real solid route to go. And it's the only route that I saw that made the character feel like viable.

But I'm wondering if is it like, is Doom the only way? Because the Doom system is like you basically stack gray life on top of them essentially. And once their life drops below that threshold, they automatically die. but it's you have to you know still defend whatever they're going to do that turn and survive it or you can do cool things like have them stack their doom in a way where you do as much damage to their life bar as the doom that they already have on or multiply it and have it like just build up and build up and build up you know it's a cool thing

that makes the character work but besides that that's the only like way I found to make the character work in a way you know so I'm kind of kind of curious to like, because you were telling me about them, but I don't know if you got a... Oh, I only did one run with each character, and I am noticeably shit at card games. Okay. I'm shit-ass.

Yeah, I felt like, I feel like I'm not seeing the vision. Outside, like, Doom is one way, but outside of Doom, I'm not really seeing, you know, the vision with the character. And it's, you spend so much time and money, like, trying to trim down your, your deck to maybe to get better things in there that I'm just like, yeah, I don't know, you know. You're kind of, a lot of the time it ends up feeling like, well, might as well just play the, the, the, the night, you know, in a way from just going to be blocking and attacking and, you know, hoping for an occasional extra hit with Austie and stuff, you know.

Yeah, that's always frustrating in a game where you're like, I'm going to play the weird character and end up doing the normal gameplay with that's not as strong as the guy who just does the normal game. That just does the normal gameplay, yeah. So I'm going to, you know, take a look see and maybe there's more to it. But right now, it's feeling a bit confusing to me. Good shit, though. Slay the Spire, too, is, yeah, that shit's very addictive. That game is very early.

Mm-hmm. I also, maybe my, for me, maybe it wasn't like this, but I feel like runs take longer. Like, I find that I used to get to the bosses, like, I don't know, in the first game, I feel like it went quicker. And I, and there's points where I'm hitting, like, you know, oh, you're hitting that first boss and you've been playing like 45 minutes to an hour, you know? And it's like, you're taking a while getting through some of that. I'm kind of like, hmm, I wonder if, you know, if that's what the deal is. But in any case, in any case. I have nothing to offer you because my brain just goes, just play whatever card. Who cares?

But that's why I lose all the time. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a lot of, before you even choose, like, there's a very, the most, one of the most difficult feelings to get used to is here's your reward, pick a card. And the best option is none of them. Learning when to do that is the hardest, most like, this is not the point of games. Games are like, here's a reward. You've earned something good. And you're like, actually, you're hurting yourself by taking the reward.

So skip it. That's such. I can't. It hurts me so bad. No, no, I know. I know. It makes me so insane. Mm-hmm.

And you basically, you have to pick. really early on. It's almost like Ballotro, where you have to decide almost before you start the run what you're going to try for, and you see your first fight or second fight and go, okay, looks like the game has told me to pick one of these roads,

and anything that is not super conducive to what you're going for, just don't even try it. You know, you have to fucking abandon any sort of, like, weird middle ground. oh, maybe sometimes I can build up one of these abilities. Maybe I can go for lots of focus, but also

I'll go for lots of orb generation. And they'll do a little bit of both and it'll be... No, you're going to be starving. You have to pick one and fucking stick to it. I think I think when you play the video game and you win, you should get stronger. And

and this It's what I think? Yeah. And when you get to like those Act 3 bosses or Act 2 bosses that are like, hey, half your deck is fucking status effects, an unplayable fucking guck. So you pull a full handout and you've gotten two cards you can play out of it and the rest is just bullshit. You know, or you're going to take guaranteed damage. Hope you can survive it. Pick your choose.

You know, and you're like, uh, how fat is your deck? Did you make your deck too fat? die um anyway you know what was great about fucking rikus campaign and chain of memories i got to a couple boss fights that were tough and i'm like well i know this fucking fights winnable because the fucking game mandates a deck for this fight right right right right right right Like there's a fucking trick here that I'm not getting or there's a way to do this because there is no deck building. This is the fucking deck they built for this fucking boss. Figure it out.

And I'm like, oh, wow. I hate customizing my shit at all so bad. Like, I want, I want, wait a second. I'm the one playing the game. The developer should be doing the work to customize. the fight to me. What am I doing working to figure

oh, I made my own thing. Fuck that. You do it. I mean, I paid you the money. You can, there are runs in terms of just like what's possible and knowing that you can do it. There are runs of Slay the Spire too

that you can just turn into a regular RPG because you have a bunch of cards that are innate and retain. So they start in your hand and they stay in your hand if you don't want to get rid of them. And you can just be like, yeah, this is a menu. You know what I mean? That I'm picking to attack you with. And on top of that with fucking defect, I can turn all the status effects into fuel and just get more pips of energy from it.

So I'm playing a different game right now. Honestly, that's like at the very end of Soros campaign and chain of memories. you get the ability to use item cards to give yourself back the cards you burned on moves. And so it's like, oh, I just, I have enough, I have enough resources to just use any move I want like it's a fucking video game. I'm going to use the moves that I want.

Yeah, thank you. Just cards are barely, they're just representative of button presses at this point. So, okay, beyond that, wrapped up Expedition 33 and had a very great conversation afterwards. I'm sure. So yes.

Taking like once more into the trenches, standing there this time around, I feel for this journey for the entire game, I have had so much restraint like the entirety of the time. that there was an opportunity to push in any direction or I fucking abstained. I was Switzerland as fuck the entire time. And Reggie made his choice and stood on it.

And I was like, okay, we can steal, man, both sides of the argument here. Are you sure of your choice? You know, and then he did. And I'm like, that's the wrong choice. Let me ask you a question. I think. So this, this,

the time has passed for this comment. But there was a DLC that came out. Mm-hmm. Right. And I think that anyone who chose wrong

and played the DLC should be shamed. I mean. For being absolute bitches. So, yeah, look, you know, to not get into it, but of course, just obviously turn or steer clear if you don't want to hear major spoilers for Expedition 33. I'm not even going to fully pull them out. I've said everything that I want to.

Okay, okay, okay. Well, suffice to say that, like, the more you enjoy what the world of this game has to offer, the the more that proposition on the back end changes you know and um some real uh interesting stuff because you know even going through it um there were points that uh i didn't catch um in my run in my in my going through the game a big one of which was your verso um lore drop and your recontextualizer for his feelings and how they changed over time. And you just are like, oh my God. A little more complicated.

Oh, my God. The hypocrisy digs even deeper because you once stood where we all are now and agreed with us. You were on the correct side. And then time passed. People change. Things happened. you know um man what an amazing finale to a game what a what a what a good that even all this time later it's like the game is so good gameplay wise and you're not even talking about that you're

just talking about the the you know the the plot itself i i just are you gonna are you gonna go up against the freaks in the tower no we took a look we took a look already it's Yeah. Those exist in my heart for when I replay the game myself in whenever, I will know that that goal exists at the end for, you know, when I'm fresh, when I've played through the whole game myself, and I have my highly, highly optimized party that I've built the whole way, not something that I came back to six months later to do the DLC. and, you know. But the best part, at least about the biggest challenge there is, all right, is just you can never be ready.

Like, the readiest you can be is still requiring split second decision making moment to moment with every swing. But the goal of the number is to make it so that you don't have to make as many, of those split second decisions. You can make 10% less. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fight doesn't have to last any longer than it needs to. But there is a... The best mitigation is more damage.

But the minimum you're going to have to do is I would imagine three turns, right? Probably. You're probably going to have to survive at least three. you know, maybe, maybe more if you're trying to fucking fuck with the Divergent Star. Anyways, yeah, just loved, loved that finale once again and everything from the discussions to come afterwards. So good stuff there.

And the... And the... It is interesting to... Well, whatever, not to crack it open too much, but like different interpretations on what your third path could have been, you know? That, um, uh, I think it's actually fairly clear. Mm-hmm.

But, uh, I guess there's an element of it that, okay, I'm going to get into details for this part, uh, for, for the expedition 33. Um, all right. So the letter, represents a path that could have been achieved if they... To dream, yeah. Right.

If they talked about it and if they were open and honest about what was happening with the world. And my question is, would that have been enough for them merely to present the letter that Alicia wrote and then discuss what the outcome should be honestly? or would a requirement have been the letter and Gustav being alive? That would be the second one. Right? It feels like that on its own is not enough. You need Gustav alive with Miel for this third thing to work. So I've thought quite a long bit about this.

And it's like the decision, Versa makes the decision very early on that he's going to uniformly go for a singular goal. and he's going to eliminate or allow things to be eliminated that will stop him in that goal, right? Regardless if he changes his mind in the future, allowing Gustav to pass as well as throwing the letter away, like those decisions are made, right? If neither of those two things happened, somebody Gustav could have mediated a solution between all parties. involved and even still possibly actually fabricated

a solution. The Lumina converter cheats the logic of the world to such a significant degree that given time and a non-threatening environment there could have been solutions made.

Which means in that a product of the world created a system that breaks the world in a way that the gods of the world did not intend, meaning that that is possible, thus putting another feather in the cap of how sophisticated life might be if you're willing to just dismiss it as disposable and put your toys away, go home. You know? It's, yeah, and I think too as well, like there's that,

And then of course there's him as, you know, also representing the ultimate in something myel doesn't want to lose and will never want to let go of. And so on such, you know. It's like, hey, congrats versa. You recreated the events that formed her personality the way that it used to be again, thus solidifying her resolve into being completely unshakable. She wasn't for sure about shit until the end of act one. And one of the funnest details on this replay that I caught.

So, okay, there's, I had like, I had like three pop-offs in secret. One was seeing Julie in an early cutscene in the black and white vignette. The second was hearing real versos screaming, burning to death and how fucked up that is because that's not your happy memory of the brother extending the hand and whatever that trauma ends up being. But third and huge is at the cliff sides at the top of the reacher when Verso is like, no, wait, don't do it. Don't do the exact same thing that I'm going to do because I don't want you to, when it's my sister, I don't want you to do it. I want to be able to talk them out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's me though, right? Because it's my sister, so no.

And it's like you are in the exact same situation doing the same thing that you are now chastising. myel for barely a few moments earlier. And similarly, myel is like, well, it's what they wanted. But later, when it's her brother, you've literally reversed the exact dynamic on each other with the same character even, you know? Yeah, no, the whole, like, Verso at one point says we're all just hypocrites. No, is it Renoir, I think? Says we're all just hypocrites doing all the same things to each other. Baked in hypocrisy. And the whole the whole narrative is propped up on like a singular

assumption which is a deeply human sentiment which you and I feel very strongly which is no but that's my kid but me though that's my child no no no no no no no no it doesn't matter it's different when it's me that's it that's it you know and you take that and you put that on Renoir. And it's like, yeah, no, he gets to say it. He gets to stand on that. He gets to be

like, I don't give a fuck. That's my family. I don't care what you say. And, you know, and him looking at the creations as well, like Lund and Ciel are at the end talking to God and going, and like actually like having a discussion about what it means to like, you know, accept the reality of this. And he's like, yeah, fair point, creation. That's absolutely fair. I'm very sorry, but I got to do what I can do for me. You know? Oh, man. I think, I think one of the most frustrating things that I've ever seen about any discussion is, ah, they're not even real. Who gives a fuck? It's, it's so, not a single character in the whole story has that view at all even once. The close, I'm going to infer that

Clea feels that way. I'm going to infer that Clay... You know what? Yeah. Okay, her. Her alone. Yeah, I'm going to put that on her even though she doesn't say it, right? But like the actual villains? No. They represent the autonomy and reality of the fake quote-unquote people.

Yeah, yeah. You know, these citizens of Lumier are just being so selfish by choosing to live. Like, don't they know that Verso's sad? You know? Yeah. It is, so it's interesting. Yeah, no, Clea sees a version of herself and goes, ew, gross, I'm going to put it into torment forever. Like, yeah, yeah. You know, something that, like, popped up to in this discussion is almost like, I had a moment after we finished recording where I was thinking about, like, the, you know, the idea of the child and Verso continuing to exist and, like, how it's like the darkness of forcing that on somebody, right? That doesn't want it. And it's like, it is cruel to force an outcome on somebody

like that doesn't want to live like this but according to your logic they're not real people who matter anyway so who gives a fuck right why would it matter why would it matter if they're painted you know I was like if I could do something that would make Verso suffer more I would have done it like I oh my God oh man

fuck that piece of shit Yeah, it's real interesting to look at it and be like, you know, you need to close the book and grieve and do all of that. And also, who could leave this poor suffering child and person here in this environment? I could. But from the person who's saying in the same breath, in the same breath, what you're saying is none of these people matter. So it's horrible to leave this person who doesn't matter suffering indefinitely, even though I just said they don't matter. You know? Yeah, yeah.

But, but, but, but, you know, the, the, and, and, and this does go, uh, up and down because one of the other takes on this is like, no, but if you're looking at it as a text, right, as a, as a text that a writer would, uh, wrote and as, as a script and the, the message of the story and what the intent of the writer is going for is to say that grieving needs to come to a close and part of the process is to say goodbye. and because that's the text of this message, it means that automatically his choice is the correct choice because anything that prolongs it

is going against the message overall of what I have said, of what I think the whole thing is about. And it's like, that's a horseshit. You can't just say that no, that's the only reading of this and then decide that, so I'm pulling out of the discussion because that's all there is to it. I mean, at the end of the day,

the whole omelos child soul thing created life whatever is is just a large scale trolley problem and and and the trolley problem is this person hates being on this train track um but it keeps all these people alive do you blow up the train depot and shoot everyone inside i that seems like a remarkably poor solution. And then the... Even by trolley problem standards. And then the other argument point there being that like, no, they were all dead anyways. There's nothing you could do.

And it's like we don't have that level of information about the state of affairs after the fact. You can infer it. You can guess it, but you don't 100% know with absolute certainty that that's the case. Like I saw such a good shit rebuttal of us talking about the reality of certain characters, which was, bro, it's not even that deep. They're not real, L-O-L. Which valid, but the real people in this story aren't real either. Pat, that's a story.

Pat, that's why. And they even look at the camera and say that. That's why my favorite part of a life to live. love is the fact that that motherfucker is buried on December 33rd. That underlying thing that even if you wanted to go, okay, yeah, canvases aren't real, the writers aren't real, this magical world isn't, like, no, no, no, no, this reality that you are saying is more important is also not real. Because it's part of a video game.

We have underlined how much we have made it. wrote it. You cannot ignore that the reality is still not reality here to have this discussion. It's so brilliant. The multi-layering there is phenomenal. I'd like to get into something that we never got into, which was, as we are talking about how good this shit kicks ass, that, wait, what? December 33rd used to be real? Is this, is this the fucking French Falmer's Almanac calendar type of shape? shit. Are we pulling up Lavanzamer, Termidor,

Frumidor, etc? The months and the calendars, things that don't exist? When was when was fucking December 33rd real? Ever? December 33rd

does actually exist on the French Republican calendar. Of course. Fucking Ash crimson. Because every month had 30 days for the five or six extra days added at the end of the year to make up a 365.

When was the French Republican calendar? Fucking Ash Crimson ruins everything once again. The French Republican calendar was... Oh my God, yes. 12 years from 1793 to 1805. Yes. And for 18 days in the Paris commune in 1871. That means the French calendar would not have December 33rd, 1905.

And there were the extra days that were some. Kula, right? Oh my god. Go look at fucking Ash. Still fake! Still a fake, not a real place. France isn't real. Every single one of... This is the Frenchest shit ever. Go look at Ash Crimson's move list and watch that every name there is from this exact bullshit. These fake names, these fake months, these fake everythings. Funny how his plot ended up also being about like erasing and changing reality. Oh my God, the France that doesn't exist. This is the France that doesn't exist brought forward. Is this France as nobody?

Oh, man. Of course it's that same shit. Ventos and Nivose, et cetera, whatever. Okay, well, in any case, though, yeah, that's such a brilliant aspect of the way that shit was written. and um yeah and and the the hypocrisy is baked in you know with with with the characters on that one but i think in the end uh you know as much as we let it down easy and i'm like okay reggie has picked aside and uh i'm like cool i understand that i respect it uh i also think you're no longer human and we'll just have to move forward in this

reality. And I'll just, you know, your, your, your subhuman status is now a permanent stain. And we just, it's fine. We'll learn to live with it. So, uh, uh, someone in, in the chat brought out something that we never got to, which was how come I love Expedition 33 so much, but I will shit on Star Ocean 3's ending until the day that I die. Oh. Can I guess? You want to guess? I can guess. have to go for it is it because the absolute audacity and fucking gall

to pull that rug in the third game after two games of established existing lore that you went to bed completed, slept on and then only in the third entry

in the franchise you went actually none of that mattered even though your feelings have already been settled the events of the two prior games you played they were fabrications.

How do you not know that that's a, I mean, that's a silly thing to ask unless you, And obviously, the, the bonus on top is for every subsequent Star Ocean game to go, yep, just, just gonna keep going with this nonsense

in the background and we're never, ever, ever, ever, ever, going to talk about it ever again. If you, if you are going to do that and it's going to be, let's, okay, it sounds dirt like dog shit regardless, I remember, but if you're going to do it, you at least do it in the same game so that it happens and you feel the way you do about that world the first time you're introduced to it, right? Um, but this is like fucking introducing the concept of the animus in black flag.

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things like people are saying, well, due to your own logic, those things did matter in Star Ocean 1 and 2 because they mattered in 33. No. The story. of Expedition 33, there's absolutely no discussion of free will. Everyone obviously has free will. They're all interacting with the universe as is. In Star Ocean 3, the only people to get free will ever are the protagonist of Star Ocean 3. Everybody else is just a bunch of fucking NPCs. Sorry if you just watered into that and you're planning to get around to it after all this time later. But just, yeah. I love the different. Also, here. I'm going to give you one more as to why this is such a big deal for Star Ocean 3. Star Ocean 3 is okay. Star Ocean 1 is okay. Star Ocean's 4 and 5 are okay. Star Ocean 2 is the good one. It's the one that's super good.

And so as Star Ocean 2 is the good one, Star Ocean 3 coming along to be a, ah, that one was kind of fake. Just to do it. Mm-hmm. And... It's like, shut up. And here's the thing, too. One, not only are you erasing an entire game that never acknowledged this entire,

two things from the past that you already felt good about or whatever, but the discussion in Expedition 33 as well is more sophisticated because it's also bringing up and questioning the value. Now that you know the nature of this world being what it is, do you still care? Right? and correct me if I'm wrong. Well, my big problem when I was playing Star Wars and 3 is that I got to the end of the game and I'm like, I already kind of don't care about this cast. That's already.

Okay. Okay. So the part where you've pulled back the curtain and you've made it like none of this matters, it's like there's no proposition to go, oh, but do you think it should? Because, I mean, the whole point going through Clare Obscure is like this did matter deeply, immensely. It was, it absolutely mattered. And there's something human here that you have to kill in order to decide after all this time. I changed my mind. It doesn't matter.

You know? And I don't think that that's what Star Ocean 3 was doing by pulling up to that top layer, you know? So here's the thing. At least. I genuinely mean this. Quality is a factor. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right? Mm-hmm. So if I had gotten to the end of Star Ocean 3 being like, holy shit, this is like the best fucking game ever. Oh, this blows Star Ocean 1 and 2 out of the water. Holy shit. And then I got to that twist, I'd be like, I'd be, I'd be softer. I'd be a lot more willing to engage with it. Right.

But I didn't. The whole time I played Star Ocean 3, I'm like, man, this just isn't as good as 2 at all. And I'm going to say too that like with quality being a factor as well and this is nowhere near in the same realm, but still just for the purposes of discussion. When it comes to that Assassin's Creed animus shit that I was just saying, like at least in that situation too, you're like, well, I'm replaying events of history that occurred. So they did matter at some point, right? It isn't just a complete nothing here matters at all, you know? Yeah. When you get to the later games and they start playing fast and loose which actually may have happened. Okay, okay. But there's a point that things are going through at least in those early ones where you're like, this is also you looking at events that occurred and so on, right?

There's no complete just none of this means anything moment. In any case, yeah, yeah, that is a... In totality, Expedition 33 is a 10 out of 10 game, and as such, I was a lot more open to this type of twist, whereas when I was slogging my way through the 6 out of 10 Star Ocean 3, and it decided to tell me that the 9 out of 10 Star Ocean 2 was actually fake. I was not open to this fucking twist. Yeah.

This is your Yoko Taro treatment of a script versus your David Cage. You know what, Tiger Fang in the chat is, right. Tiger Fang 86 says when things are good, it's better. Sure. Sure. My favorite... He's right. Dead on.

My favorite part was at the end of the Expedition 33 discussion when I asked Reggie, can a robot learn to be a human? Can a human? What? The real question

is kind of painting. Yeah, but that's literally, I was like, and I'm like, okay, but all joking aside, this question actually represents this moment

and I'm really asking it. Yeah, no, because it's, can a painting learn to be a human? And then fucking, and Gustav and Orverso goes, can a painter?

What? Can a painter? Learn to be a human? Yes, exactly. And then fucking Renoir and Aline are like, I don't get it. Right.

What do you mean? I'm a person. Yeah, and it was like, what is a human? And I'm like, well, whatever the fuck you're gathering out of this group of, out of the, the, the Sant'r family that you're saying matters enough to you emotionally to consider them people whose priorities are and lives are worth saving. The same group of things is in all of these individuals in this city and has been demonstrably equivalent to me. And there's nothing here that says these, these fuckers on Mount Olympus are worth anything more than these people down here.

Guy in chat asking in chat, are they still on spoilers while the spoiler talk logo is directly above our heads? It's right up there. You could move your head two centimeters to the left, bro. Yeah. You know what? Here's a hot take. I bet the writers were right to burn its boss. These people are out of control.

These fucking painters are such pieces of shit. I was, Pat, I had in my throat, I was preparing to say, well, at least, hey, you're on the right side of history here with me, buddy, and I appreciate that. And holy... What the fuck? Okay. Okay. We're going to need more context. but we know that writers hate that and subtext while we're at it.

But we listen, the jury's out on how that fire started really, right? I'm of the opinion that the way that fire started is that the writers wrote a story in which the fire started. Because when I was streaming it, every single person and me all came to the same conclusion, which is that the writers operate under Alan Wake logic. But then, but then how much did Myel have to do with it, though? You know? Like that's the... I don't know.

Like, was it just, did you just open the door and let them in? Or did you, like, fucking go and get the wicker and start... No, in my head canon, they asked her to write a story about her family, which you would obviously know. very well and be able to get all the details right and then someone snuck in and fucked with her draft and said and then they fucking burned down in a fire or they gave her something and she read it and by reading it manifest it could be that but alan wake dream logic is so is such a good companion piece to playing expedition 33 because alan wake logic seems incredibly confused

and nonsensical and retconny, but it's literally just, it happened because that's what was written down. And what, and your logo, well, that's not internally consistent. And it's like, no, it is at the second that you are looking at the page, is that what's written down right now? Then that is what happened.

It's not when the pen lifts off the page. or the typewriter? The pen lifts off the page and that's the way it always was. Okay, okay, okay. And you're like, no, it wasn't. And you're like, yes, it is. That's the way things always happened

unless you get a new page which explains that no, actually it didn't. Okay, I see, I see. Okay. It is like permanent retroactive continuity at any given time. If we are in a situation where all Myel did was curiosity, read something that a child wanted to know.

Oh, that's crazy. That's insanity to put that level of guilt and build it and shove that on the kid. That's fucked up. If it was she participated in some way creatively, then yes, there's more to be. No, you know what it is? But I don't get the sense that Alina is being reasonable. They wrote in a little story, her little narrative, and they're like, and then that bitch left her curling iron on

and the curling iron was like, I'm gonna fucking do it, I'm gonna do it guys. She fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. You know, oh, that's such a French way to burn your brother down. That happened in my family. I have a relative

who fell asleep with a lit cigarette and burned their house down. That happened in an apartment I used to live in, dude. In the most French place in North America. On the French side of my family, I should mention. Here in Montreal, I lived in a building that like a lit cigarette and fallen asleep fucking cooked everything. It's the most French way. I know what a lot of people are thinking, why would a lit cigarette burn your house down?

Because we're talking about the mid-90s in which every single floor surface in the world is covered with the shittiest carpet you've ever seen. Dubois, Zubois, Munga. Of course. The firmest, oldest, strongest wood. Anyways. Yeah, okay. Good. And all this to say that, you know, as as I as I reach out and I talk to different friends, people are falling on the wrong side of history more and more on this one. And I cannot wait for

whatever Sandfall makes next to come in and extra complicate this discussion. Hold on. Hold on. Expedition 33. Achievements. You know, if we're in a situation where, like, the slightest bit more context about this world in the future changes everything. There's no achievement for beating the DLC. Shit.

You wanted to see the percentage? Well, no. What I wanted, because I, and there's no, there's no, there's no achievement for a specific ending. It's just you beat the game. Because like the ideal for me is that you could check out the people's achievements and be like, oh, they got the achievement for the VERSO ending. And then they got the achievement for beating the DLC, showing that they are in fact a coward bitch hypocrite. okay for for caring about the world and returning to it yeah yeah yeah okay yeah okay yeah okay all right

yeah i mean listen you know what they should have done they should have made that dLC only playable before the ending or after the myel ending i mean if you pick the versatile ending you should you should not it should have fucking deleted the game off your heart okay okay we're in the Undertale genocide run like hey Yeah Never mind the paid product You never you know Or gamer curiosity

The the ethics override all of that The plot ethics mean you need to never open this game again It should have deleted your facts A file like a Yoko Taro game Oh shit Yeah I remember having a proper discussion about that With Undertale as well

Of just like you know Did you, do you, do you properly, uh, um, see that, do you probably see that genocide ending and the, and the permanent conclusions thus are of, do you see it as curiosity for someone who's playing a video game that wants to see all things? Or do you, absolutely? Or do you accept the in narrative like, no, you don't need to, you know? And I'm like, here's my favorite part about that. I was like, I want to see everything there.

But you know what? data mining and fucking around in the guts of the Undertale save file system, also canon within Undertail. Sure. Sure. Yes, exactly. Right. If you want to gaster your path. I mean, you should at that right.

But at that point, it's like, okay, don't do this. But you made it the sickest, funnest moment in the game with the, the, the highest challenge possible. Appealing to the deepest, dankest gamer in you. So anyways. All right. all right, all right. That's all good stuff. Spoiler discussion over.

Well, how's it go? Let me find the tweet. Rip to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris, but I'm different and better, maybe even better than the gods. Beyond Expedition 33. Played a little bit more. Soul Reaver and, uh, I mean, the age on that is, is showing. And boy, um, legacy of blocks

puzzle Reaver. Uh, I thought last time that getting past that puzzle, Egyptian block pushing area would have been the end of it. And in fact, I believe, uh, you said, don't worry, you're past the worst of the puzzles in the game. Um, Asterisk. I said you're past most of the blocks. Yeah. Asteris. Per capita.

That fucking one where you have to move the blocks between rooms. Like, guys, I know this is Tomb Raider Idos of the past. It really is. Isn't it crazy? Oh my God. Like, you can just see like, it's like, no, this is what video games are. video games are about pushing cubes into slots. Like, that's, of course, what else would you be doing here?

It's occasionally fighting, but this is the whole point of these things. Why else would you boot it up, you know? Man, and I will, and like, I'm thinking back to, yeah, in God of War, that moment where they're like, okay, I know you have to push a block, so I'm going to make you push blocks to Kratos, but at least you can go, oh, and kick it all the way across the, the grid, you know. Also, swimming that water area, the boss fight,

your water temple equivalent here, the boss fight there is absolute clown shoes nonsense. Yeah, Ra'u? Rhab. Rahab. Yeah, I don't remember that shit at all. I remember light? It is nothing. It is a nothing moment. He sticks his head out and he stares at you,

and then you look around the room, and then you hit some glass and then you're like, yeah. The decision to make, I guess, you know, every one of these encounters like a, mainly a puzzle-solving bit, not quite shining in the strongest there,

but you are also then rewarded with the swimming mechanic, which, you know, it always does feel nice to have the ability to move in all directions, but the camera is fighting you and aggressively you can feel like, oh, so the Okarina of time comparison comes back here, but this time around, it's with Majora's mask where you use the Zora mode,

and it feels way better to swim around as Azora than it does to go around as Razelle, where you can't control the camera anymore, for example. Yeah, the water thing is, it felt more, like, thematic than gameplay-oriented, because water is what fucking kills Raziel's ass, and then you spend the whole game going fucking instant death

and you're like oh cool that's not happening anymore but but also when I think back to Tomb Raider not only am I thinking of block pushing I'm thinking of fucking Lara doing the butterfly going up and down awkwardly in a bunch of tubes and you know navigating that space underground as well

and then the sharks and everything so you're like that is super old eye us too you know it's it's it's it's right on board with with everything that tombraider was and just yeah boy you feel the age on it um it's really interesting some games you're like this is just as good as the day it came out and other games you're like wow this was so great for when it came out right right right right so like you can still you can still appreciate it but Like sometimes you're like, oh, oh, we stopped doing this 20 years ago for a reason. Like, I can feel that one of the biggest accomplishments at the time was,

what if instead of just fighting and beating enemies, you had a system where there were different ways to take them down? And you could use the environment to be involved in that process. Or you could choose to, you know, temporarily put them down. But if you don't eat their souls, then they come back. You know, like, it's more well thought out than other games 3D. action games at the time would bother to do. So it's like, okay, you're playing with systems there that are interesting, for

sure. And then the whole, like, what if there are two realms that you come back and forth between, you know, life and death. But, yeah, like, it is, it is aging, it is aging aggressively. I'm enjoying it, though. It's fucking cool when it's

not making me barf. But I do find the there's the moments of like making it through new area and then going like, okay, let me find that fucking teleport door. Like, because that's your bonfire. That's your progress. You know the next time you turn this off. You're waiting back up at the beginning of the map. So you better open the door to the teleporter to get to otherwise your progress is actually not saved, you know.

Yeah, it's it's, it's, it's kind of goofy making it back through that. That's continuing. Coming up. Or I forget to say it. Mm-hmm. There's games that you held up really well. There's games that you can appreciate for what they were at the time. And then there's shit that was always trashed like Shenmu.

I saw somebody go, Shenmu 1. Like, no. No, people tricked themselves into having fun playing Shenmu 1 going, oh, it's so crazy a game can do this. It's the future. Are you having a good time? No, I'm miserable. Fuck.

But, oh, think about, think about, think about the future when a game like this could be fun. Oh my God Back in 2001 My heart wanted to believe that I was playing Akira World Tour mode Yeah I wanted to believe it

You could do the fucking elbow block And then you could practice doing it And then you could use it to fight a bunch of dudes In a beat him up mode Anyways Um This week This week, shit's going on.

So tomorrow I will be participating in the Twitch Rivals 2X-K-O showdown, tag throwdown, I think it's called. So tune in for that. I am going to be teaming up with Bricky. And we are going to... The goal is not necessarily... I mean, we'll see how far we get, but the goal is to make as many people as salty as we can and to be as a good goal.

And to be as disrespectful as possible. So we are entering to upset as many of the top players in that bracket as possible by any means necessary. Let's see how it goes. And that's going to be starting at 5 p.m. Eastern. I'm probably going to load up the stream a bit before that just to warm up. and, you know, get on the comments. Thank you very much. Yeah.

We're going to see how things go. And it is the night of Akali Eve. So it is the new build and she's going to be in it. And we'll see how that goes. So yeah, Twitch Rivals tomorrow. Please tune in for that. And then on Thursday, I will be starting the new LP, Ace Attorney 2, and Justice for all.

I keep saying and justice for all, but it's not and justice for all, it's just justice for all, right? Yes, that's right. Okay, well, I'm going to keep saying and justice for all because... Yeah, I know. I also make this similar mistake.

All right. So, hey, return of the objection. We are gonna... I announced that. I put it up on the schedule, and I saw someone say that, hey, Wully, in the time since you beat the first game

and now they've patched it to put Phoenix Wright's voice lines in in context where they're not supposed to be. So please either play an unpatched version or go play the original. And I'm like, No. Ah! No, just having to be fucking stupid. Like, I don't.

That sounds. What? I'm so happy that you're going to be able to play the chain of. of memories of the Ace Attorney series. Oh, no! Oh, man! I was waiting to say that to you until you locked it in. I thought they were going to learn and improve from where we left off.

They absolutely do. They do. Hmm. For gameplay reasons, reasons or for plot reasons. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, all right. I see, I see.

All right. The main thing to remember is that the final case of Ace Attorney 1 was made like decades after all the other cases were made. So it's that fifth case in AA1 is like orders of magnitude more extreme than anything else. I absolutely am aware that that was dual destiny shit. It was not at the time. And it feels immensely like it. For sure.

Yeah. So that's what we're doing. So come hang out for that as well. On Saturday, we are going to be checking out local duos into XCO as well. Since that's now a feature that has been released, you can finally play duos co-op on the couch with whoever.

Didn't they cancel it again? I thought it was done. What happened? Yeah. And, you know, pretty smarter them too is like, so you can't play ranked coach but you can do casual and you get double

experience points for playing with a buddy. That's awesome. Very smart, very smart. Time to plug in a second controller and hop on juggernaut. Oh, I thought you're going to like to grab back and forth and see what's up. Nah, man. Yeah, so that's, that's, that's cool that they're getting that of those features out and everything.

We're going to, um, yeah, that's it. And, uh, all of that over on woolly versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Um, all right, let's look a quick break. Yeah, dog's thumping, he hungy. BRB. There he goes. Caboos. Okay, quick word from our sponsors.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash superbeast. That's Shopify.com slash super beast. S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com slash superbeast. Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. All righty. So what's going on this week? A lot of things actually. I want to say almost just a little bit after we finished last week's podcast, which was, to be honest, less than a week ago because it's only been a couple days.

We did get an update to the Jojo Gate. We got the clarity of Netflix stepping in to explain just what is going on with the release schedule of Steel Ball run. I was so right to be fucking pissed. So after not knowing what was happening with the first episode dropping and then seeing a teaser for the second stage, we were like, so they did animate it. It's out there, but Netflix is not putting it out or what's happening? And somehow it's even more complicated now that we have the answers. What they're doing is releasing the show as a part core release. And what this basically means is each stage is going to be done and animated and be altogether. However, Netflix will do

weekly releases spaced out according to when each stage is completed. Therefore, split core is the way they're calling it.

And it means that you're going to have a few, you're going to have a gap. And then after the gap, Jojo will be back and it'll be weekly releases of the second stage.

And then after the second stage is done, it'll stop. And then there'll be another gap after that until the third stage is is there. So I don't know what the deal is or why it's happening like this, but according to their statement, this is part of our original release plan and reflects the wishes of our production committee. So I have a question. Yes, Pat. How many stages are there? How many stages are there? I don't know. You know, okay, I'll look at it. I thought I thought

you'd know of the top of my head no let's see there are nine stages okay stage second stage third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth and then some of those arcs get real fat um so what you're saying all right it's coming out in september the second stage will be coming out in fall 2026 okay so It's April, but it came out in March. Is this gap going to, going to consider, is the gap between one and two going to be the same for all parts? No. So there's going to be, like, let's use our, let's use our math in here.

Okay. So making one episode, sorry, two episodes, took forever. And making, what, three or four or five episodes will take. six months or five months, let's say five months. So a minimum five months after that, maybe up to six or seven months. And then after that, as the parts get longer, it could go up to a year in between. This is the shittiest. I was actually super right to be absolutely fucking pissed about the way this.

This is the worst possible version. of all events. It's kind of insane that we are now in the skongification situation where it would have been better if there was radio silence. And then after all this time, it was just released normally and then came out with Jojo Fridays episode week to week. And that was it. The fact that it started and then stopped is now creating anger where there was none.

There was already just, well, we hope it comes soon and we're waiting for it, but because you've popped the cork on it, you now get this frustration of the release schedule. Hey, guess what? I have a list. Not to mention. I have a list from somebody talking about this exact thing of how many chapters each stage takes up in the manga,

which we can now use our math to figure out how far each part's going to be. So, stage one is 11 chapters, stage two is 12 Sorry Stage 2 is 16 All right So

16 chapters Divided by Let's say five months So that's five times third It's 150 divided by 150 Is 0.10-ish So Oh that's a bad way to do that

16 chapters over five months No it'd be Five divided by 16. Point three. So it takes point three months. Whatever, I'll just use it. Okay, so stage three

is four chapters. Right? So it should only take one month. Stage four is seven chapters, so it should take two months. Stage five is eight chapters, so it should take two months. Stage six

is eight. It should take two months. Stage seven is four chapters. It should take one month. And then stage eight is 30 chapters. So it should take approximately 10 and a half months after stage seven for Jojo to come back. And then stage nine is six chapters. So it should take a month and a half. We're never going to get the honest story behind why this is happening.

It feels like it feels like you're not going to know what the reasons are. Um, so we're just left in the speculative place of, you know, like, because for you all, obviously, it's just like, again, who to blame? Why is it like this? It's going to be two and a half years. It's going to be two and a half years to get it. Starting now. So yeah. Um, eh, I, I, I, I just, I'm like, is this, you know, if it was, you kind of just want to, you want clarity in this type of thing to go like, is it the simplest, is it like the, the, the, the, the production is complicated. because it's hard with the horses, therefore it takes longer, therefore it's going to take all this time? Is it just that? Or is it, for whatever reason, Netflix? Is it, is it Warner Brothers? Is it like, what, what is the reason why this is happening like this? No fucking idea, but it's a hype deflator.

And yeah, it understandably sucks because people are like, now we just talked about two XCO. Isn't that thing dead or whatever, right? Like, this like, didn't it start or fin it? What happened to that? I forgot. I don't know. And attack on Titan kind of ended in this place, and they had like the production struggles to get to the final season and have the big breaks and stuff. Well, yes.

And we know that the reasons why we're because of like the one, the quality and then not crunching their employees and trying to do it in whatever way or et cetera, right? The fact that it took them a long time to do the good thing. but here you're starting immediately in that place without having the had the run up to it well actually that's not true

because you've had the previous parts but at least with this part it's starting right away on that foot and it's like man the not not being clear on why this is happening is making it worse as well so there's only one way

that I can actually make this make sense in my mind and that is that when part six of Jojo came out, Netflix got the data and saw that new subscribers before or during Jojo Part 6 watched Jojo Part 6 and then canceled their Netflix subscriptions and didn't watch anything else on the service. So the only way to make money off of this

is to split it out into seven or eight months of single month Netflix subscriptions. And I think I also, misremembered earlier with the attack on Titan, by the way. Not to say the not crunching, but there was a, there was a thing that came out about like why the production went off and took that long and why things worked out the way they did. And I remember kind of seeing that and being like, oh, it seems like you would have

had to compromise something way, way worse or, um, I, I remember the end result being like, to get this at the speed anyone would have wanted, you would have had to compromise in a way that we, that wasn't reasonable. No, I don't need it to go faster. I needed to come out one day in the future. Yeah, so, you know, I think, too, that, like, the whole thing being done is also not the way the previous parts worked. It was always, like, a rolling schedule of, like, you know, you hit a deadline and then you have the next one ready for the next air date. But in this instance, I don't think it would have been realistic to expect the show to hit completion before starting to air.

but just some semblance of normalcy. Some semblance of normalcy. The head start could have been not this. David Production did six seasons of TV in a row on rock solid schedules and deadlines. And five of those were weekly every single week for their entire runtime. I didn't see. I'm not an animator. I didn't see anything in Steel Ball

Run episode one that was so crazy that showed me that it had to have like fucking five to ten month breaks in between episodes. It feels a little silly in retrospect that like the biggest complaint

with part six was we had too much on our plates and that it killed the presentation of it because like that's the complete opposite. of what's happening now, you know, you're like, damn, you could have, like, brought this out, you know, part by part and kind of let it, let us all enjoy it together. You did it too, like, the batch sucks here. Don't do that. You spoiled the moment. And- Look, guys, we're doing nine batch

releases. And here you just get the complete opposite of like, oh, fuck, I don't know when, when this is going to happen next. And, you know, like the, the, like, the, the, Joejo, not even Jojo Fridays, the fucking Jojo surprise. It's out tomorrow like next couple of years feels dog shit, man. That sucks. That really, really sucks. I don't know why Netflix is making it

hard to fucking be a Jojo fan. It has to be like to try and keep people subscribe for longer. But like I'm not, listen, this could be, again, Almost like when we're talking about Sony and Bloodbord and all that type of shit. Like there's, I, I've said already in previous weeks, I know that I've seen David Pro handle their end of the deal for multiple seasons now. Yes.

But is there a possibility that it's simply like this is a difficult show to do and it's going to take them longer. And we're seeing the dominoes of that. It's possible. But I would, I just, I feel like it's weird that that wouldn't be communicated. And furthermore, in the interview that the day just did, the. other day. It's like that would have been the perfect place to explain that as opposed to saying, yeah, we don't know either. We want to see it where you kind of are left to infer that it's not up to them slash there are external forces that are holding it back, you know? I don't know, man,

because like they've clearly improved the quality of the episodes over time since Phantom Blood, but like the same people working on the same show with the same techniques are going to get like more efficient and better at it. Yeah, I know. I'm just, I'm just, uh, and I believe that. And I'm, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, it's way, it's way more reasonable to assume that the company that has fucked up releases of things consistently is the one responsible for the current fuck up as opposed to the one that's done a great job with it so far that's not, that, as being suddenly in charge of the fuck up, right? It's, you have the track record of Netflix versus the track record of David Pro to go off of, and I believe that. I'm also just aware of the

fact that anytime there's these moments happen and I know that I can have a bias towards things and I don't want to go back to how the days of me talking about platinum where people are like, Woolly will never talk shit about platinum or whatever and being too, I'm always aware of how things can be like, you're speculating, you don't know the situation, so you're just going to guess and you're going off of your vibes on this. And if you feel good about David production, you might be ignoring the part where they're responsible for this. In the same way that I'm saying, yeah, maybe the Bloodborne remake is a FromSoft decision and not a Sony one, even though you, it's easier to blame the people you are constantly blaming for being shitty about something

as opposed to... You're kind of flying away from me on this one. I'm... What? Okay. Sometimes when we discuss the... Sometimes, I can bring it all together. Sometimes when we discuss a production company that does a really good thing that we like, the developer of the thing, and then the people who are responsible for its distribution, and we have a long history of the distributors being dog shit, it's easy to fall back on that the whole time. And in many cases, it's a reliable thing. And every once in a while, it turns out that you're like,

oh, it turns out that the people making the thing, the developers actually were taking super long and there were the ones that were the bottleneck in the situation, not the production. So I'm bringing in... That's it. So I'm just bringing in the analog of that

and going, I'm going to keep that in mind because we don't know when we're speculating, but history tends to show me that Netflix, who have fucked around in the past and completely destroyed the release of things, are likely the culprits here. That's all I'm saying.

Because like I don't have any reason to believe it's David Productions at all. Right? I have no data to support that. I have plenty of data to support Netflix doing stupid fucking nonsense. I just, you know, I would love to get the fucking clarity behind it. Because yeah, sometimes shit takes long, but also this fucking statement saying that this was what it was supposed to be the whole time and this is what we're like, what is you? That's fucking nonsense. Yeah, shut the fuck up.

That's bullshit. You know? What I'm saying is I want transparency on what's happening because it's shitty to just kind of sit here and go, well, hype deflated and that's it. You know? The product that we're seeing that was put out so far was dope as fuck. They're going to release like 10 episodes for stage 8 and then have a month or multi-month wait for the things. and it'll be a 35 minute episode. It's like, it's the worst fucking way to watch something.

Like, you know what Netflix has done? Hold on a minute. Is it truly so unreasonable to say we don't know why these reasons are what they are and we're currently not being told the truth? So I want clarity on that. Is that like, does that seem so unreasonable? I don't think it's unreasonable, but it's also fundamentally pointless because you already have a bunch of data to blame one party

and you don't have any data to blame the other. Based on history, we likely know, but anyway, all right, all right. Yeah, no point of getting in a loop. Go on. Netflix has recreated the watch order experience of trying to get your spouse who's not really into it to watch a TV show with you where, okay I'll watch an episode tonight

oh now we gotta wait a couple of weeks until they feel it again oh okay we were in a really good movie we were able to watch five episodes in a row they're not going to feel up to watching the ending for a year and they've recreated that for single people

um they've recreated the Woolley versus legend of Cora watch order for the masses sure like oh fun

yeah um this is the only time in my life I can think of where a single property the same show

has had bipolar like examples of release of a release problem where you're yeah um the only thing I could think of that's close is attack on Titan

where we never got out that first season and that bopped and then they waited a long time and they put out the second season

and so on and so forth and then they got to that final season which was it seemed like it took three years for that final season to come out

um I can't think of well there never was too much attack on Titan coming out at once right like that's the this is like

Jojo is in a wholly unique way um this is the first time we've ever had a show or a thing come out like this where you're like, oh, dude, fuck, you're slow it down actually. You're doing too much right now. This, this format sucks for this, you know, and then to just completely go the other way on

it. Yeah. Anyway, um, there's not much else to say here. This clarif, this sucks and it should turn steel ball run into steel ball run Shepudin and just start making up bullshit in between episodes. Oh God, just add the filler in between. Yeah. And it's, and make it all like fucking storyboard quality at that.

Or skits between the voice actors. Yeah. Just sitting in a room reading, reading pages and just flipping through it as a table read. The only silver lining I can put on this is like, hey, you know what? At some point in the far future will be in a place where, hey, Silk Song came out and it was good and now it's in the past. you know, like the entire journey of skong, all the pain, all the, all the anti-hype, all the nonsense, all the lack of communication, etc. Well, where are we now? We're sitting in a world where it came out. We beat it. It was good. All right. Life moves on. Stories were not built to be told at random intervals. That is not a good way to enjoy a story.

That's not good. books aren't supposed to come out with random chapters, and they're definitely not supposed to come out with random decade-long jumps between books. Not when they're meant to be like, not appointment viewing. What's the word I'm looking for? Like cereal, right?

When, not when they're meant to be serial in how they're released. The original formatting of like sitcoms and bullshit on TV was actually random viewing because you don't know what happened between the last 15 episodes you didn't watch and now. You're tuning into friends and Ross and Rachel broke up. Oh shit. Okay. You know, but not for any... They should have just opened up every episode of Friends with Ross is a cuck. You're up to date. It's Ross's fault. Fuck Ross. Um, I would have taken that as well as a black people counter in the corner of the screen just to let me know. And it's like, oh, did it tick up to one or are we still

zero or how there is a song about this woolly have you heard the song i don't think i have no there is literally a song about black people in friends it's up to about 15 to 20 interesting i've never but it includes bit characters like the guy they ran into at the bus station and the waiter at the place okay there you go It also includes the family that Ross met after he had that tanning bed accident. Interesting. We're getting specific.

There's an episode in which Ross is so stupid. He accidentally gets sprayed eight times on the front in a tanning, an automatic tanning booth. and goes to a dinner with his new black girlfriend date slash and meets her mom and dad. Full body blackface. Okay. I'm not, you know what? I'm, I've missed out on the lore.

It seems I am not, I am not fully up to date on my friend's lore. Wow. I am going to send you a screenshot of this. Huh. Jumped into my mind. Interesting. Of David Swimmer in pseudo tan blackface.

Ha! With the credits rolling. So this is either at the beginning or end of the episode. That's the end of the episode. That's the stinger we're ending on. Damn. Yeah, here's a screenshot of him lifting up his shirt to show off that he, in fact, got sprayed eight times with the tan on the front. There you.

Okay. All right. Okay. It's the tan. The tan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Wow.

Well, anyways, the point remains that I can tune out a front. friends and then tune back in to catch some blackface and be like oh ross you know and not really pay attention because it was designed to not be consumed in sequential order in fact it was probably hoping you missed a bunch of that and then tuned back in randomly like a yeah no tv used to be run on on 26 episodes a season and it would fucking kick ass because only three episodes and that 26 had anything to do with shit star trek is the great greatest serialized TV show ever. Hey man, what's happening on this one?

Oh, the transporter again. Wow. Really? Again with the fucking transport? Is this a rerun? No, different transporter accident. Yeah. Again.

I have to say it really is the strangest thing about you guys talking about Star Trek and everything is how this in my brain was a show that was like an ignorable. you catch random episodes while it's on some time show. And then you guys turning it into, actually, you watch the whole thing and follow the story of it. It's like, I can break

this down for you. It's very similar to Cowboy Bop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your season premiere and your season finale always go into a larger meta plot. And character narratives are going to progress in a sequential serial. No, I completely get that, right? And the same thing for X-Files as well, right? But I just, it's just that I was young

enough at the time when these shows were happening, that they still fall into the old TV, like, categorization. Their peak old TV model. Exactly. Of like, it doesn't matter what you're tuning into. Is Star Trek on? Cool. I like Star Trek. And that's it. And that's the end of the thought. So years later being like, oh, people really followed them and knew the deal, right? Reboot was that too. I just care. You know? But reboot was absolutely designed for like, tune the fuck in.

Catch painted windows. Don't. I don't know. Star Trek and X-Files were really excellent examples of like a serialized TV show that had like, it had a core plot, right? There was things going on. But like the main thrust of it was telling a very talented writing team, do you want the freedom to write literally any fucking story you want?

want because the setting that you have for X-Files or Star Trek, you can do goddamn anything you fucking want. You have very little, very little constraints on what you want. You want a beach episode with Picard? Fuck it. You want a body snatcher nightmare thing? Fuck it. You want Wharf to turn into a fucking crab and do a slasher movie?

Yeah. Who gives a shit? Do the costume guys have the budget to make Worf look like a crab? Oh, only for a single shot in the entire episode? Yeah, we can manage. Were there ever any, like, old cartoon-style, like, guest characters who happened to show up because they had another show that was debuting soon or anything like that? In Star Trek, they only did that once. Someone's here because they're here to promote their shit.

No. what they did was for the season premiere of Deep Space 9, they had the Enterprise dock at Deep Space 9. Ah, cool, cool, cool, cool. Because Deep Space 9 started during season 4 or 5 of TNG. Yeah, okay. So they had, they had the moment of like, Data and Julian or chit-chatting about medicine, and Picard and Cisco have beef. Wait a minute. DS9 is not the sequel to TNG?

It is, but they aired concurrently. Whoa. So it goes TNG 1, 2, 3, 4, Deep Space 91, TNG 5, Deep Space 92, TNG 6, Deep Space 93, TNG 7, end.

Holy shit. And then DS9, 456. Is there something? And Voyager did the same thing? Voyager feet I'd have to check I believe so because Voyager Voyager's beginning storyline

takes elements from the fifth season of Deep Space 9 Okay but these are treated as like almost like Spinoff series as opposed to just like we locked down this one's time slot I thought that like Star Trek this season ended and then we started a new show

you know, like Jojo parts. So Voyager started in January of 95. But it makes more sense that TV would be like, this successful show is doing a spin-off and now we have two prime time slots. And Deep Space 9 started in 93. So it goes TNG in 89. Deep Space 9 and 93, Voyager in 95

as TNG was ending. So there was a period of time in which there was two new Star Trek shows on for like five, six years. Okay, okay. Yeah. I thought, yeah, I mean, it makes sense that if you can get the viewers tuning in for it, why not air Young Sheldon right afterwards and just lock down two hours of time for everybody? Bro, there was a period of my young life in the mid-90s where if I wanted to watch Star Trek,

there was not an hour of the day that I could not find some goddamn Star Trek on the TV. You had the original series running on fucking loop on like some sci-fi channels. And then you had TNG, Voyager, and DS9 all airing within each other. Yeah, if I came home and wanted to watch fucking Star Trek, I could just flip on and watch a random Star Trek episode. And that's why Trekkies slash Trekkers ended up watching so much fucking. Star Trek because they ended up watching it completely out of order in

random bits and syndication. So the only way to catch every episode was to just turn it the fuck on every time it was on, which was every single hour of the fucking day. It's so weird how nowadays, like at least, okay, well the equivalent of this

like turn on something random ass viewing experience doesn't really exist in anything that like I feel we watch. anymore and it is there for like essentially reality TV and that's the that's where all of that like it doesn't matter what episodes you're tuning into or what's going on you can pop on any one of those like current reality nonsense things and just catch it at any point in time and the sequence doesn't matter um but if you are watching uh in sequence then you're you're

getting the tea and at its at its at its peak temperature you know so One of the reasons why TNG got to succeed was because of the nature of this weird syndication thing. Because the first two seasons of TNG kind of suck ass. But the show got really popular in the third season. But you'd turn on TNG and you would be presented with a coin flip. Is this shit or one of the best episodes of television that you've ever seen? And it was a coin flip like every day for multiple years. And then once you were like, oh, I want to watch the episodes when they come out.

Now you're in season four and all the episodes are good. I feel so like that, I don't care what I'm turning on. It's just, it's on and you can watch it in any order thing. Like that before, because obviously now we have streaming and that fully just replaces all of that and so on. Yeah, I think shows like like cops and first 48 and shit like that was also like, like, or, you know, um, what did you call it? 24 hours of impractical Joker's marathon

on true TV or whatever is like, those are your direct replacements for this style of old television. That just doesn't really exist anymore. Um, anyways, I, uh, where, I don't even, how did we, oh yeah, we were talking about steel ball,

run. It's the best. Imagine turning on random episodes of random parts of Jojo at all times of the day and just catching like the end of fucking battle tendency and then like midway through Shigecchio's arc. There should be two anime channels. Oh. And it should be battle anime and other. And you turn it on and it's just a fucking episode from fucking something. I mean, Tunaami kind of does that, right? Like, they do a block of just, like, here's some random parts of random anime that's airing.

And while I was in a hotel room, I saw they played, they were playing some battle tendency, actually. And then right after it was dubbed, and then right after that, they went into, like, Dr. Stone. And I think they just kind of run random episodes of that over and over again until, you know, the next thing takes the slot. Anyways, all right, we're lost in the weeds because Star Trek came up. We found ourselves out here. But moving on. Star Trek all day. Well, how about?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, what if you could experience that via the Mass Effect television program? It's the same thing, right? I have a final thing to say about Star Trek. and it actually ties in to our Star Ocean discussion. There's a Star Trek series

that Star Oceaned itself. And everybody hates that shit too. Oh, yeah, I think I know that. I know the one. Yeah, the pile of fucking shit. It sucks ass. I heard about that. So the Mass Effect TV show

has to go in for full-scale rewrites. Top to bottom, everything that's been written and built so far, start the fuck over. Because it needs to be made more appealing to non-gamers. Do you know why it needs to be made more appealing than non-gamers? No.

Because the Mass Effect TV show has been pitched as the interstitial connective tissue between Mass Effect 3 and the new Mass Effect. And the new one that's coming out. Oh, my God. Instead of, I don't know, adapting Mass Effect. they need to have a story that links a very complicated series of events

to a new thing but also can't really matter or change the status quo fuck it's canon it's mandatory canon the game that's being made oh my god this actually matters and is going to have to explain things

but it can't matter too much Woolie. Oh, this is the worst possible decision they could have made. That's insane. That's so insane that they made it apart. I was talking to Paige about this a couple days ago, and I was sitting there and she was looking at me, and I was

getting mad. I was getting fucking mad. And as, and I explained to her, just all explained to chat, and you're in the same boat. We've played a very fairly high amount of Mass Effect. I replayed Mass Effect in one and two like six times.

Like I got my fucking whole Fussey up in Mass Effect, okay? And I could give you like 10 ideas off the top of my fucking head

of times and places you could put a Mass Effect TV show that would be more interesting than the in between right off the top of my head. How about the first contact war? The most important part of the setting that's never been explored in any way. Why not a set of stories in the Attican traverse? A place that doesn't affect the main story but has shit going on all over. You could do a fucking film noir bullshit

thing on the sedent... Expanding on anything cool that was mentioned in the lore. You could cover the Ractnye Wars and the rise of the Krogan. You, like, there's everything, everything. First contact would also probably be like affordable and reasonable on the cost because you can use like more human. Like the first contact war is so perfect

because they could show humans meeting a Hanar for the first time. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's a jellyfish and that sets up the fucking god damn it. Man, man, that's not what they're doing. They're doing a fucking 3.5 So they have to continue into 3.5 while simultaneously explaining the entire setting in a large-scale galactic war.

And you know they're just looking at like Last of Us and all these other TV shows and going like, oh, but we can dominate the zeitgeist of the conversation, you know? Like we got a guy in chat. This first contact war would be 90% humans. Yeah, you could do fucking five episodes of the first contact war. And then they capture a Turian. And it's the only fucking time you see a Turian on screen. And they make the Turian a practical effect. And he's injured.

And he looks amazing because he's made out of rocks and bone and goo. Fucking Mass Effect chain of memories, bro. I don't think Kingdom Hearts fans expecting us to use chain of memories as a long form pejorative for interstitial. No. Oh, no, it's happening. This is the worst piece of news you could have told me. Yeah, no, that thing is cooked. Also, like, let's all be very blunt.

What have we seen of Mass Effect 4? Nothing. Trailer. Not, nah. Teaser, kind of teaser. EA and BioWare, every fucking month, I'm like, is this the a month that BioWare goes under and they get folded out. So you're not just making an interstitial TV show in between one game and the next.

The fucking game that's coming may not come out. Or it may get delayed multiple years. I guess the thought is like, well, Andromeda already exists and we're going to ignore that. So it can't hurt to just throw. it's not like we're preserving anything pristine here, you know. There's no... Andromeda is the biggest air ball of any clean break of all time. But that's what I'm saying.

It's like, if this were like, no, the integrity of the numbered franchise must be kept pristine. It's like, bitch, nah, you already fucked this up. So maybe the... I can't get over. We went to a whole new galaxy and encountered one new alien. you know, so maybe their willingness to just force this show onto it for better and for worse is like, yeah, because who cares? You know, and if anything, it'll just lead to increased sales because all these new fans that don't care, these all these non-gamerers we're going to write for are going to be like, oh, wow, where could I see the continuing adventures of Shepard and everybody in the story that I just watched? Ah, well, tune in over here in the new mad.

for a per perproped up. So as somebody who's a massive Star Trek dork, Wully. Oh, the fucking marketing horseshit, dude. It's extra nuts because Mass Effect is based off Star Trek. Like, it's a very obvious

one-to-one inspiration. That means the blueprint for how to make a Mass Effect TV show exists. It's literally right there. And you wouldn't make it like TNG because you'd probably want to have a mass effect TV show take place in something

where you'd be able to encounter lots of different aliens. So instead, you would put out, and it would be called Mass Effect Citadel. And it would be about people who live on the Citadel or CSEC on the Citadel. And it would be Star Trek. And the politics of the Citadel and the various races. And you could do a whole fucking see, you could do five seasons of TV just. just between fucking people in the Citadel. You have an Elkhore who runs the bar, but it has terrible service because he's a fucking Elkhore. Star Trek?

Yeah. Star Trek with even more alien boning. Let's run it. I'm going to stop you right there. Not quite. There's a lot of alien boning on Star Trek. I know. There's like,

I mean, the beginning and end of fucking, Kirk is all about that, but I'm saying even more, though. No, you don't. You don't understand. And how, it's not even that much on camera, is it? Because I mean... No, there's fades and... Yeah, there's, you know, I'm like, in this case, you're fucking...

Only, Deanna Troy gets impregnated by a spot of light. Sure. What, wait, what? Oh, God damn it. Oh, fuck. All right Season 2 Yeah, all right

Okay, Willie Okay, I'm gonna stop you right here Because I've described Star Trek As a franchise That you can write any story that you want, right? And you're saying you could have more sex In Mass Effect than you have in Well, because there are fucking cameras panning up

Asari crevices and shit, you know? There is an episode of TNG and I believe it's the final season in which Dr. Beverly Crusher, attractive, older lady Redhead, goes to her grandmother's funeral. She finds her grandmother's magic,

hold with me, magic candle, and her grandma's diary. She starts to read her grandma's diary in which her grandma describes that she met a much younger man and he just fucked her shit up for months before she died.

And Beverly's like drinking tea and just reading her grandma's smut journal, lights the magic candle, turns out that younger man, ghost. Beverly then falls into a passionate ghost love affair with him until she becomes crazy and possessed. And it's up for Data and Jordy

to go down to the planet and dig up her grandma, who attacks them before they figure out how to banish the sex ghost from Beverly. Yeah, okay, Commander Shepard could never. All right. Fair enough.

Game recognized game. That is episode sub-Rosa, 165. Thank you for... 14th episode of the seventh season. Seventh season is when they're like, we can do anything? Fuck it. We're going to do one.

whatever. We're going to have shit like Subrosa and fucking masks where the ship gets taken over by Aztec masks. And it builds a little pyramid in the engineering bay. Oh my fucking God, it's the craziest show. Um, yeah, man, the greed to just fuck this up and, and, and it, there's, it has no chance. There's no chance. It's crazy. So, yeah, you're given, you're given a, a TV show that the setting by default and its inspiration, says, hey, you know what you can do with your sci-fi TV show? Anything. You could do anything you want. And they chose the one thing that would lock them into a tiny little writing box.

And it's, and whatever happens is going to matter or at the very least definitely be of consequence to whatever's coming next. Like that first pre, the episode that they wrote first that got canceled probably spent most. of like an hour expositoryly explaining the first three Mass Effect games so that people would be caught up with the setting.

Man, well, whatever. Anyway, I just, I'm like, when you have, you have, there's different ways to approach it. You can do your Star Trek approach or your Star Wars approach of like, here's a bunch of side things and like, this one sucks, this one sucks. Oh, that one was good.

Okay, that one's cool. And you get your, you get your fucking chakutory board of stories being told but for a dead franchise resurrecting and then just like hard committing like this to whatever the results are,

you better fucking pray. Do a fucking season of TV where you follow Nialis around on a bunch of Spector missions and then the final episode ends out with like, hey, Nialis, you got a call to go down to Eden Prime. I mean, look,

and then goes Nialis's adventures will be continued in Mass Effect. If the gamble works and and somehow it is good, then, you know, it'll pay off for them in spades. However, when you're getting a new story like the one I was starting with, which is we're rewriting everything to be able to appeal to non-gamers, aka then we're writing for no one. Like, okay, so that doesn't bode well for whatever the end result will be.

Because, for example, if you were to tell me that, you know, there was going to be an alien team. TV show, I'd be like, oh boy, that probably sounds like it's going to be bad. And I have heard from people that alien Earth is actually quite good. I don't know how it ended, but at the very least when that started, people were getting pretty hype on it saying that like, hey, they actually figured something out here and it worked as a show. I don't know if that continued to be the case. Did it fall the fuck off? Okay. It's actually quite bad. Well, never mind then. That's unfortunate. I heard good things when it first started, but oh well.

Um, problem. Some of the other Star Trek's also started to fall off too. Yeah. Voyager started to fall off, um, on episode one. Well, if we're going by batting averages, then I guess Mass Effect is comfortable fucking hitting below par, isn't it? Yes, it is. it will never beat that fucking Elkhore room. It's so stupid that we're stuck. It's crazy how every single person you see talk about this conversation. So I saw people mention about this and going, I just want a fucking TV show where you hang out in the dude's office and have you

bitch about their bureaucracy. We keep getting dragged back here. And Asana, I'm sorry. I know you're flipping your keyboard as we speak. but just we're stuck here again. We're stuck here again, man. Ooi, oy, o'y. All right.

Well, the Elkhore and Volus, like, office is the Shenmu of Mass Effect, where you're like, oh, my God, this could be anything. What? And it'll never be this again. Actually, it'll never be as good as this moment. Pat, could you imagine if they announced the Mass Effect show was going to be. a single shot Elkhore room series

and the whole show takes place in that one room it's just the comings and goings of the Citadel and what's happening with the fucking with alien race relations

today Elcore office drama you know Volus looking at the camera going. Yeah. All right. Anyway.

Yeah, no, but seriously, like, Deep Space Nine is like the exact template for like a mass effect television show. Yeah, sure. And then every other. It's right there. And then every other sci-fi TV show series that has come out and people liked that has come and gone, you know. The good Battlestar Galactica stuff, I suppose.

Until. The, the, I mean, hey man, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I can say fire or fly and, and, you know, maybe you, never watch it again to find out if I can confirm how I feel about it and leave it at that. I bet that thing aged like shit. I think it's probably fine and I'm happy never finding out. Moving on. Uh, all right, what happens? So we got that going on as well. speaking of

Oh, Orville's great, by the way. Sure, sure. Speaking of, I guess, shit that lives on the cutting room floor or ought to. I don't know, I just thought it was kind of cool. The recently Lance McDonald pulled out Eldon Ring cut content and got a little, a little,

cutscene of McKella planting the halog tree. That's cool. Was going to be in the original game with a little bit of dialogue and showing the details of his blood kind of going into it and stuff. And I wonder why it was cut

because it's like, I guess the idea was to just kind of go like all McKella content should be left for the DLC. Let's not even show or hint at anything until that point. but it yeah the the I'm surprised that it took it was this long to like pull this out considering how much this this game has been data farmed in data mine they had I think the voice lines already before this but they didn't have the actual data for the cutscene it's one of those things it's like it's a cool detail but it's like fundamentally unimportant yeah it's just showing that this got planted at some point in the timeline that is convoluted. and you have to infer how and when this would have grown and how this works into when you show up versus when the shadow of the earth tree shit's going down. So, yeah, in any case, beyond that, so we got the World Tour trailer for Ingrid.

Fucking boo. I think if you're going to take the character that is emblematic, of everything I have fucking hated for years and do the Street Fighter 6, which is glowing them up, right? Giving everyone to glow up. How do you save Ingrid? How do you make this character work? You make her a fucking weirdo alien with a catamari head that's talking past John

World Tour to the camera, looking at you, the player, and just commit to it. And sure, she's a super weirdo. She's having her own monologues about reality. she speaks like an old lady in the Japanese dub at that. So commit to it. I find, A, that's more interesting than,

I guess, just the kind of, you know, sailor girl that was doing the things from before that just stood around and kind of flicked her head around. She's like Athena or so. She continues to be that,

but we know and we're making her, we're keeping the weirdness on point. And second, and most importantly, she opens a door and from that door you know what you know what you know what that you know what that you know what's standing behind that door fucking morrigan is standing behind that door

anything from anyone anywhere is standing behind that door not that you need the excuse because you had terry get on a bus and walk into you don't you know but if you need it to you have now created a device and character to make any future DLC of any kind happen because we've pulled the band-aid off and guests are a thing

and now time and reality contrivances are also a thing. You don't need that though it's a fucking fighting game. You don't but you have it because it is at the very least you're like okay Akuma is chilling over here in Take Tekkenland

and Terry walked over here from the bus stop but those are happening in modern day parallel whereas if you wanted to cross time and other dimensions, then you can have a... Doesn't matter.

In Soul Calibur, you have Garrett literally fall through a fucking portal. In Monster Hunter, you have Garrett fall through a fucking portal. Regardless of... Characters in Street Fighter are already magic. Sure. But here's a character

showing doors to portals, so I bet they're going to use that in the future to make some explanation for someone walking in. It seems likely that's what they're going to do. I bet you that's just going to be some of her gameplay things like she'll have a teleport and she'll have like a like a gargose disconnected normal kind of thing

I feel I think that like making her the last piece of this season and then make and just kind of going like we're recommitting to having a god of this universe and whatever stuff like they seem to they seem to care about their lore more than they ever have and are committing to that they're committing to whatever they're writing here and they really, really, are,

they're putting it through more scrutiny than they ever have. Hmm. So I think that in this weird world where suddenly street fighter story matters more than it has to any other street fighter game, of course doesn't, but because they care, you have a character that has reality warping shit and going on

and you're making that a part of her. they easily could have just made her like yep she's the pandora fucking lady from street fighter cross tecken that is um still just tossing out fireballs and doing the same shit as before but here's a improved version of it but i feel like them going out of their way to have this whole cracking glass thing and stuff means that they're trying to they're probably going to use that in some way or at least giving themselves the the thread to pull on i think you're crazy we'll see i think like we're talking about fighting games Well, is Hacchi alive? I'm not saying it matters, Pat, and I'm not saying it's good, and I'm not saying you need to care about it, and I'm not saying that it's something that is going to suddenly become good. I bet you the reason why they did that is so that they can do this after. It doesn't have to be good or matter. Is that somebody on the team likes Ingrid. Yeah, spitballing.

That's much more likely. I'm just spitballing what we got there. also to what you said earlier is like if you're going to do ingrid at least they can try and save it by this they can try and save ingrid by turning her into a character that's named and not ingrid and not having her in the game uh i i'm looking at what they're doing here and you know they hey just like all they gave dj the glow up they gave alx the glow up everyone got their glow up um if they commit to ingrid being maximum weirdo and just not and everyone on the cast being super creeped out by her I'm interested in seeing where that goes and what's going on

because it's something as opposed to nothing right what she was before was nothing and now there's something so let's go let's lean into it you know I'll take that awareness and although the silliness it'll bring over over any

the shit from before. I see a comment saying that a couple months ago I said I don't actually care about hitting Ingrid calm down. No, I've always been Ingrid's most intense hater. That's not true. I've hated Ingrid since the day I saw her. She's fucking trash, dude.

Also, her new design looks like shit. Her old design wasn't anything to write home about. Her new design with the fucking head boobs looks like trash. The king of all cause. most ass headgear. I don't mind. I don't mind it. I don't mind it. I think it's fine. I just, yeah, I'm looking at this character and going, what was there in the past was so nothing that it is absolutely hateable.

And in addition to feeling out of place in many weird ways in this case. And not even like, not even so much out of place because the game is so full of freaks and nonsense anyways. but just like lame I'm gonna stop saying out of place and I'm gonna start just saying lame it felt like it sucked you know and it doesn't have to be aggressive

or hard hitting or super duper agro for me to think it's cool entirely it's not about that it just it was lame but yeah I believe I believe in the glow up I've got an eyebrow raised

and I'm curious to see what they're going to do with it. Not to mention, of course, as a move set, a character that, because she also had like a basic Shoto thing going on. I foresee her being a completely different character. Yeah, if part of her moves involves like the reality of the stage glass

cracking around her and, you know what I mean? Like all kinds of like distortion god shit happening and her floating and doing moves and wait, like then, okay, we got something interesting going. Like, if she's defying reality as she fights you in a lot of different ways, uh, cool.

I, I, so, always think it's fun when you have a character like Slayer or Oro or someone who's like way out of, like, out of your league that's like playing along, you know, and like how you reflect that on them being like taking damage or getting hit or being knocked down or things like that.

So, uh, they could do that here. So here's where I'm at. Um, I look at J.P. and go, this character should not exist in

Street Fighter 6. I still, like, we're multiple years in, I'm still like JP is a fucking Blazbleu character that snuck in. Moveset wise. Yeah. And for Ingrid to come

along and be like, by the way, here comes another magic nonsense piece of shit. Oh, goody. I'm playing Street Fighter. I'm not playing fucking blaze blue or guilty gear. Yeah, I, I mean, for JP, like, it is massively annoying, but I like that his character is built around that hole.

I don't want to actually fight you. I hate this shit, get away from me, you know? I think that works lore-wise with what they got going for him, with this old man that's like fighting his, beneath me. So let's see what they do here. That's where I'm at on it. Anyway, anyone in the chat say Rose and Manat exist.

I would be so happy if Rose or Monat was here instead of fucking Ingrid. Yeah, I fucking love Binat. I think Manat's super cool. Yeah. Anyway, the, that's just a World Tour trailer. So there's nothing to really look at for now. We'll see what happens when the next gameplay thing drops. I really wish they would just put out the whole trailer.

I don't care about the world. No, no, no, but yeah. Because I already know the who the character is. Yes, it's the marketing rollout. They know you want to see gameplay. Most of us do. But they're like, we got this other mode here and we still got people working on it and we can get you talking about it without actually showing off the stuff.

And yeah, it's just, you know, it's a marketing thing, the tease before the tease. So introducing the idea. idea of the character and the voice and so on, talking about all this shit, and then next time you can talk about her frame data. You know, anyway, what's going on as well? So not much to get into it because it's all super in-depth gameplay shit here, but Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 has a bunch of information dropping as well. I mean, there's balance changes and system changes and things that are not really for conversation here to get into the nitty-gritty of it. but if you want some overall fun highlights, Happy Chaos, the Gunman, has been shot and completely reworked into a different style of annoying character.

Oh, good. And it seems like there's a chance that either they're going, Happy Chaos will now either be less annoying to fight or you've designed a different kind of beast entirely. And there seems to be discussion around whether the changes they've made are going to, create a completely different kind of problem or actually fix the issues. But like, yeah, they've made it so that he can't be as, he can't just sit there across the screen

and shoot you nonstop as much as he could before. It's harder for him to do that in so many words. Looking at it, they showed off as well. They've made it, it seems like it's harder to now use Aska, the card guy. And, you know, a bunch of other stuff is going on as well. I see some cool new things where Nagoruuki. fucking got a blue blood rage mode thing going for a second. And the game, it looks like it's properly different.

And hey, what's nice too? Finally, accessories and things like that. Like, we're not seeing full costume sort of looks yet, but you see Soul using the junkyard dog, Mark I, for example, the big fucking meat slab that Holy Order Saul was using back in the day as like one of the cosmetic weapons. So it's like there's finally going to be some cool like That's a cool detail.

Cosmetics you can use for the characters. Yeah. Or like take off Jacko's like pumpkin head thing and stuff like that. So that's dope. Beyond that, um, only a couple other stories. Over at take two,

they have laid off their head of AI as well as an undisclosed number of employees who are working on leveraging AI at the company. So it seems like Take 2 has reversed course and changed their mind on... Shame about the folks who got fired, but... It's interesting because most of the time you are... Yeah, these stories are often about like, you know, people are getting fired and replaced with AI. And in this instance, the energy is changing and the hiring up of an AI team is actually getting let go here. So yeah, whatever their thoughts are on this seems like they're, they don't longer believe in it.

You know? Good. Do they know something that we don't know? Or do they know exactly what we know and have been saying? I think they know exactly what we know. What we've been talking about it happened in front of them. In real time. Yeah.

Um, mm-hmm. It also, um, I imagine would be. considering how much I think GTA is going to clash up against AI when it does drop I wouldn't be surprised to see them distancing themselves as much as possible

in that same vein Nexon CEO came out and said that Arc Raiders was a Trojan horse to prove that controversial AI tools can build AAA hits with smaller teams. This is the funniest possible statement to come out after we covered, I think it was last

week, or maybe the week before, that Patrick Soderland was like, yeah, the AI wasn't very good and it didn't really help all that much and we're replacing it because it's not good. Like, like, the guy who made it was like, ah, wasn't, uh, uh, uh, and then his boss was like, See? See, I told you. I told you. It's like, well, like, so this, for, for what it's worth, like, this is coming off of a call that they did, you know, with investors and so on. And it's just weird that it's framed this way, but essentially they're getting at the idea that they used more AI. in development here then initially was let on.

And they used more procedural tools. They used more tools with content creation, et cetera, et cetera. And wanted to show that now that it's successful and everything's working out, that, ha ha, you can use it to make a successful game. And then you can do this. Yeah, nothing about that game success

has anything to do with the tools that were used. And, lots of bullet points here basically underlying the thing that I think I was saying some time ago that you know you're going to you're there's going to be stuff that's going to drop where you're going to start like you're going to like it and find out after the fact and it's going to continue to be the case and then there's going to be stuff after that where you just never find out because we're we live in that world now right yeah and that what's going to happen is that that's going to probably continue until shit like have you been keeping up with did i talk about this last

week the claude subprime ai uh issue no so claude is anthropics ai right and it's apparently one of the smarter ones to do work on and last monday morning i think was last monday um at like 9.30 a.m. Twitter and Blue Sky got flooded with all these professionals going, hey, what the fuck? I'm on the $200 subscription plan to Claude AI, and I've blown through my entire token allowance for the entire week. How am I supposed to get any work done?

Because they need to start charging for AI use because it's very expensive. These things are like when you pull down from the server, it's expensive. So what they did was, instead of charging people more, they took people on their, like, plans and then just massively decreased their allowance. The value of the tokens. And so people were going, well, I use this shit all day, every day.

What do you mean I'd have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to do that? What the fuck? This isn't saving me any money at all. Oh, right. Because it was never cost effective. It also has a problem of, let's say, you use chatGBT for whatever, and it actually can throw down a fairly useful amount of work for you, right? The problem is that you don't know if you're going to get that on the first try.

So what you've done is turn your workday into a fucking slot machine. And every pull of the lever costs money. Is this email going to be properly formatted? No. is this email going to be proff? Ah, fuck. I'm going to just write it myself. I'm out of tokens. Well, I was about to say they made the most important step right off the bat, which is you've turned your cash into tokens. You've already created your game currency, and the value of

that currency can change according to whatever the fucking market is doing. So, like, the whole game industry that's using these AI tools is using them at like massively, at loss leader prices. Onboarding prices. Because everyone's trying to become the AI that rules them all. But when they start charging it, hey, guess what? You know what's actually going to be cheaper? Having a fucking staffed, salaried professional, just fucking do it.

What was the exact wording? I think I saw a phrase this week that it was something to the effect of creatives have had a monopoly. on output. And now it's in everyone's hands or something like something to that effect. And it was like, it was so insane because the idea was like people who sat and thought about things and then did those things had a monopoly on the ability to convert their ideas into reality. but now those ideas are no longer being gate kept by, you know, learning how to do the thing and doing it. You know, Wally, you know what all this reminds me of? I moved to British Columbia in 2022 at the tail end of what I would call the pandemic bursts, end of lockdown, end of the mask era, etc.

and I introduced myself to my new neighbors as a guy wearing a trogdor or fucking video game shirt and said, oh, what do you do? Oh, I have a podcast. And I saw my neighbor's fucking face go, and I went, no, no, a real podcast. It's like my profession. Right? and when you said creatives had a monopoly on output, what happened during the podcast? Well, a bunch of very, very bored white guys who thought they were more entertaining than they were,

said, you know what? I have the time. I'm not going to write to the Great American novel, because that seems hard. I'm going to start a podcast. I bet I could do a really good podcast with me, Jimmy, no interesting stories. And they did so. And there was a glut of the shittiest fucking garbage you've ever heard. Because everyone knows how to speak. Speaking is a natural skill that you all have at a basic level. Art, writing, etc. is not.

But now we have the robot. The robot can give you would-be shit-ass podcaster. the ability to make shit-ass art. The tyranny of the skilled is over. Oh, wait, it's not. Nope, far from. Your neighbor's face was correct.

Oh, dude. As soon as I said it, I was like, and they were right to feel that way. Yeah. Oh, boy. Well, in any case, while the CEO was talking, the Nexon man said that this whole Trojan horse setup thing that they're describing, the process was experimented on and the outcome was two games, Ark Raiders and the finals. Both of those games were built with significantly fewer people at a fraction of the cost you'd expect for AAA, and our success was not an accident. It was deliberate, and now we're thinking of bringing that to the rest of Nexon. Um, yeah, it was all a financial presentation and the whole point of it was essentially to just go,

ha ha, we tricked everybody and, and, and, and we used more AI than, than anyone thought. And look how good it was. So you are right. Please give us more money. Gives, gives, gives, gives, gives, gives before the bubble pops. Yeah, this is nonsense. Patrick Soderland used to be the CEO of fucking dice. The guy used to work on fucking battlefield. Like, uh, the person giving, like the team that they have over there knows how to fucking make video games. The CEO in question here was Zheng Hun Li, is who was doing this. Anyway, good stuff, good stuff. And, and, you know, complimentary to this, lastly, Lucas Pope, dude that made the Oberdin and Papers, please.

smart person. Yeah. Basically saying, I don't want to talk about my new projects online anymore because I feel like they're going to get slurped up by AI before they actually come out. Sure. I've just got a feeling about that. Now Blizzard is everywhere. It's the goddamn Fortnite slash Blizzard system.

Those of you who are unaware, one of the reasons, one of the keys to World of Warcraft success is that they had such a good dev pipe. Lyman. They had so much staff and so much money that they would see features announced for other MMOs and be able to integrate them into Wow before those games even came out. But to be fair, Fortnite replaced that in modern memory. And that's, and hence the apex stealth launch, you know, which they still manage to throw in a ping system and everything after the fact within two weeks, I want to say. Yeah, Oviddin, man. You're a smart guy. You make smart guy games. you keep that close to the chest

it is I am realizing that with our current industry release cycle we will start to see things that are well I mean this already happens where like someone will a trailer will let it be announced for something and then a fucking

asset flip ass piece of shit will get thrown up on on Steam for whatever can cash in on that idea right or you might just get your skull girl's deadly airport style Skull Girl's Two Deadly Airport style release on the App Store.

But there's going to be games where a trailer comes out and as the trailer is wrapping up people are throwing prompts in to get some shit uploaded online and if it's a higher profile game or something of note from somebody

who's got a lot of eyeballs on it there's going to be a real problem with how much information is put out about something interesting before it comes out because the it's more hostile than ever with the slop

going up on on steam you know rip-offs used to be so charming you can finally try playing the great genius co-jumbo everyone knows co-jumbo genius yeah like fucking you know the AI is not going to come up with deadly airport

You know, that shit needs to come from the heart, man. It needs to come from someone who doesn't understand what the fuck they're looking at, but approximating what they think people who like this game might want to see. It sucks. What was robbed from us? That they were robbing from other people. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com. Oh, you know what? I have a letter. Something I forgot to talk about. I did, I'm starting my practical driving lessons. I really only have one thing to say. Everyone's crazy. Everyone on the road has completely lost their fucking mind.

I can't believe it. I can't fucking believe it. I can't fucking believe how bad it is. this is welcome to driving sir yeah no it's like it's so much it's so much worse than even my passive like view has seen like in my i'm in the i'm in a marked driving instructor car you know like the logo of a driving school on it got caught off like a dozen times had a guy destroy his car backing up into a fucking telephone pole directly in front of me Mm-hmm.

Everyone's crazy. Everyone's crazy. Well, yes, because it's an extension of your ego on wheels surrounding you. You are crashing into other people's stance. It's unbelievable. It is the manifestation of their views on life and their self-importance and what they feel they're owed on the road with you moving at lethal speeds. Correct. How badly do you need those groceries, bro?

I need them. I need you. eat food. All right. Let's take one over here from, uh, all right. No name given.

Dear Wimmy and Pimmy. Last podcast, you talked about Capcom patching the story for Alex, and it reminded me of another instance of a story getting patched. In River City Girls, you play as Kyoko and Misako, trying to rescue their boyfriends, Ricky and Kunio,

who were kidnapped. Uh, I guess, spoilers for River City Girls. There's a secret boss where it's revealed that Ricky and Kunio aren't even your boyfriends anymore and that Kyoko and Misako are delusional stalker exes. This is later reinforced when you meet Ricky and Kunio who weren't even kidnapped. They were just having a spa day and they try to get away calling you those crazy girls

before they go in search of Mammy and Hasebe, their current girlfriends and the secret boss of the game. This ending, although funny, felt like I played the whole game along with the secret boss and got nothing to show for it. So either due to public outrage or sequel purposes, this was later patched. In the patched ending, everything plays out the same, but when you meet Ricky and Coonio,

they don't try to run away. They're just hungry and ask if you want to join them for burgers, with the final shot implying that they get back together. Yeah, it's a way shittier end. My question is, if you could patch any other game story, what would it be and what would you patch it to? That sucks.

Street Fighter 6 to not have Ingrid in it. Um, if I may, but who cares? Fuck the question for a second here. That sucks. That's garbage. I hate it. It's really bad. It's a bad change.

The level of cowardice on display has never been higher. I am aghast at the level of bitch in this game's heart. This is, that is ridiculously shitty. Wow. It's awful. Wow, that sucks. You're too afraid to commit to them being. the fucking nutty stalkers.

So this is, oh my God. Lame, dude. Oh. Wait a fuck. Oh my God. And that's the ending they carry forward into the sequel, apparently. So it's just shit all around. That's so stupid, man.

Uh, anyway. Yeah, I don't know. I guess the one that already happened, where they made it so that DMC2 was not the end of the timeline. And that was a good one. They just fucking changed the order from 3142, you know, and then just fucking to 3124.5. You know, it's funny because when I think about like changing story elements and games,

like I usually just think of removing entire games from Canon. And like I don't think about like, I wish so and so would have done this. I just go, I wish this entire sequence of events just didn't occur at all. Sure. Um, I mean, it's even easier because for that game, you can just take Dante's disc away and leave the Lucia one and then just say that happened. Yeah, that happened to Lucia. Yeah, yeah. You can just, you don't even have to destroy the game.

You can just take away one disc. Um, and we'll take one over here. Uh, D. Hello, marriage fighting racism and marriage fighting heightism. Uh, The Alex drama reminded me of the most questionable writing and gameplay mechanics I've encountered in a major game series. To capitalize on Fire Emblem Awakening Success by including marriage plus child mechanics. Oh my God.

I've seen a lot of, okay, so to be, side note, I've seen a lot of people make reference to Fire Emblem crazy shit in the middle of this Alex nonsense. And I didn't look at any of it. So I have to assume that like this is what that's about. Because I have, I've wondered, because people have been talking. talking a bunch about it. So, Nintendo's Fire Emblem Fates doubles down on the marriage dating symbicatics while also including the thinly veiled self-insert OC content of the developer's fetishes. For example, some of the strongest child units are created by marrying the player's avatar with either their step-siblings, blood-related siblings, that are revealed to not be blood

later when the player commits to marriage. Oh. Yeah, but you thought they were blood, right? Oh, Schrodinger's siblings. and or the other royalty unit that has revealed months later in the DLC to be first cousins with the player's character. Now retroactively turning tons of players, cleaner saves into the most incense. I've got to inbreed the strongest units, man. Besides this, there's also a large exposed feat of the main character and pills being slipped into the people's foods, the groomer dimension, and exploding clothes to do more damage. Has a game ever tricked you into doing morally questionable actions?

You really skipped over the frame. Groomer dimension. What is that? I, you know, I mean, when we're talking, so far, it sounds like the game changes the results according to your choices. So to me, I'm going to guess that you choose the one that is the most heinous sounding, and then the game automatically changes the result to then make it so that it's safe on the other side of your choice, even though it knows what you wanted to go for.

Right? It's like, no, in the end, what you did was okay. And or what, it was, you weren't blood related, but you, you, I know, we know you want it. We know what you weren't. But it was fine. Because video games can do that. Yeah. I'm guessing that with each heinous choice, you just have the fucking story just snap into place on the other side.

Um, yes. Uh, question. actions that make you feel like the devs should be investigated. I mean, wow, at the Fire Emblem on that one. I didn't, I didn't know. Whatever anime or manga, that original, okay, there was a meme image of Alex's face stapled onto a guy holding a baby going stay away from the woman.

Whatever that's from, fucking check that dude's hard drive. Sure. Sure. Yep, that's a freebie. That's seven. Oh, that's why! It's Seven Deadly Sins! That's why every time there's a Seven Deadly Sins trailer

during like some kind of show, everyone goes, oh, it's that Petto game. Oh, yeah, okay. Um, they're the one I saw was the timeline of, uh, or the, um, uh, the family tree. And then like, it's like one dude across multiple games connecting to, every single dot on this family tree. Whatever series

or franchise that is, I have no idea, but that was also brought up during fucking Alex gate. Fucking family tree isn't supposed to look like a mangrove system, man. Okay? I mean, it's just, yeah. We like take a screenshot out of a Mugetics timeline

and just put street fighter characters on it. Uh, anyway. Um, yeah, fucking fire emblem. I didn't realize that's how it worked. That's crazy. That shit's wild. Uh, but, but I, there's something, again, the moxie to make it so that you, you, you choose, once you, once you confirm marrying your sister or whatever, she then turns out to not be related by blood.

It is. Uh, shit. Yep. Schrodinger's incest. straight up. If you never, if you never put a ring on it, she stays blood related. That, that's wrong. Because that implies that as long, you can do whatever with your blood relations as long as it's not before God. Don't, don't do that. Don't make an honest woman out of your sister. Ah, uh, or don't, or do. Don't say that. Because then.

Reality will correct itself and your sins will be remembered by everyone who knows what you've done actually. Oh man, fire emblem, huh? Well, here's the thing about Fire Emblem. What's going on in those games, y'all? The mechanic was like, hey, do you want to make a bunch of eugenic child warriors? It was already like, ooh, oh, this is not good. Like the idea of like knocking up your girlfriend and then like Chris Pratt the Forever War time traveling your baby from the future to die on the field is morose Fucking three houses more like fire emblem one house