Get Played - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 + AA Games

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Heather, Nick & Matt discuss what they are playing: Clair Obscur Expedition 33! They talk about their impressions of the early game and then discuss AA games in general. Check out our brand new merch at kinshipgoods.com/getplayed Follow us on social media @getplayedpod Music by Ben Prunty benpruntymusic.com Art by Duck Brigade duckbrigade.com For ad-free main feed episodes, our complete back catalogue including How Did This Get Played? and our Premium DLC episodes and our exclusive show Get Anime'd where we're starting AniMAYhem all month long Igo to patreon.com/getplayed Join us on our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/getplayed Wanna leave us a voicemail? Call 616-2-PLAYED (616-275-2933) or write us an email at [e-mail] Advertise on Get Played via Gumball.fm All of our links can be found at linktree.com/getplayedpodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Oh man, I'm really excited to start this week's episode. I really enjoy the game we're going to talk about. I am so into Claire Obscure. I love this game. I'm very, very excited to dig in in depth. Do you know where Matt is? Like why he's late?

I don't. He's usually on, you know, he should be here, yeah. Oh, soccer blue, sorry I'm late everybody. Notice anything different about moi? Yeah, actually, your wardrobe looks a little different than usual, you changing up your look? Just a simple striped shirt.

Yeah, I noticed you got the striped shirt with a little red handkerchief in the pocket. Yeah, a little red handkerchief. Yeah, yeah a little red handkerchief I might tie it around my neck later. You know I'm also wearing a matching I think a beret uh Uh-huh yeah, I'm sorry. Did you mean beret or is that a you have a brett and a beret no I mean a beret Yeah, I got it. Yeah, you know it's a Haven't really said a lot of the words. The words, are you?

I'm French now. This is gonna ask, are you French now, is that what's going on? Are you French now? Yeah, I'm French now. I've decided that I'm gonna be French. Normally, I would expect that to come sort of packaged with an accent. It seems you're a very aggressive American sounding French person

You know, I just kind of feel like we're not supposed to do accents anymore. Oh, I'm not gonna do that one Oh, okay. Okay. Sure. Sure. I don't know that anybody I mean, it's not racist to do a friend I just can't be sure. Okay, you didn't hear how I was doing it. Whoa! No, I don't want to hear. If there's any question, I don't want it on the show. Sorry, I just noticed this yeti mug you brought in here. Is there a layer of Gouillere over the top of it? Yeah, so... You got fucking French onion soup in this, son?

I got some hot soup. I just call it onion soup. Oh, right, of course, naturally. It's informal to you. Yeah, so there is some French onion soup in there. The Yeti keeps it hot. Yeah. The Yeti. I also noticed that you brought in an order of McDonald's, but you've crossed out the word French on the fries?

Yeah, that one's not that crazy, because a lot of people do just call them fries. I guess that's true. Yeah, that is true. A lot of people just call them fries Yeah, that is true. and omit the French. Matt, I gotta ask What the fuck is going on? What are you doing? I just kind of, you know, the game

Because the game is from a French developer and is very French in terms of tone and aesthetic and you love the game So and I love the game So I just kind of was like I kind of want to kind of want to see what that's like and I just I try It on for size and it's pretty good. I feel like this is a great way to dress. I love cigarettes now. Oh. Yeah, I was just noticing there's kind of like a nicotine cloud that followed you into the studio.

Yeah. And what I thought was a water bottle is just a wine bottle that you brought in. Just a wine bottle, yeah. I got it from Nick's car. What? What? Stop digging around in my car. Also, I learned a new trick.

Check this out. Yeah. Okay, it looks like you're kind of caught in a glass box here. Wait, you're doing the French art of mime. Oh, wait, he's choking. He's choking to death. I can't breathe. There's no air in the box. Okay, well, this is a solvable problem.

Here, let me just open this door for you. Nick, you know how to open the glass box, the invisible box. Are you French too? You know what they say, if you can't beat them, join them. Oui oui. This is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen. I don't want it on the show. I don't want this to be the way we start the show! Hahahaha!

We turn pictos into lumina and are French as we discuss surprise hit JRPG Claire Obscure Expedition 33 and our favorite AA games this week on Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played. I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Tiger Weiger. That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Apodaca. Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere of Video Game Podcast, where this week we are talking about Claire Obscure Expedition 33. Is that how you say it? Oh, yes. That is the title of the... Wee Wee. Oh that how you say it? Well, yes. That is the title of the-

Wee Wee. Oh boy. Oh, Très Bien. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha a raw deal over the centuries. They're all right. Stand down and stand by. We salute you. Sorry we made so much fun about all the stupid shit you guys do and how you are and all that. I love France. I love it.

I've never been, it seems great. And I know, look, I know it has a reputation from Americans that they seem to be rude, but have we considered? That they hate us. That they hate us and everything we do sucks shit. And we're bad. Yeah.

We're gonna be talking about Claire Obscure Expedition 33 and Double A Games at large in the meat of today's episode. The fucking, the Empire people being like, man, people in the booth suck. They are so rude. We go marching in and our fucking stormtrooper outfits. We're going around. We're going over there. Oh, wow. Hey, I want to acknowledge someone else in the studio. Of course, our producer, Rachelle Chen, Ranch, who just celebrated a birthday.

Happy birthday, Ranch. Happy birthday, Ranch. Wow, HBDR. Happy birthday, Ranch. Thank you. HBDR. Couldn't have said it better myself. And speaking of things to say,

you know, the Switch 2 is coming out next month as part of the Switch 2's release. As the release of this episode, it will be one month away. It will be one month away. As part of the whole Switch 2 pre-release hullabaloo, the three of us, the Triforce of Friendship had a friendly bet, which was when will the Switch 2 release and whoever comes closest gets to pick a game that we are all going to cover on the podcast. Heather won and as such, picked the game Mother 3 and we can announce we're going to be doing

a WePlay YouPlay to pay that off on Mother 3 on June 2nd. That's right. So basically the first, pretty much a month away, the first Monday in June, in advance of the Switch 2 release, we're gonna pay off the Switch 2 release date bet and do a full deep dive into Mother 3. Now the way that you, the audience, can play this is via fan translation.

It is widely available online. There are, of course, sort of gray market carts that have been flashed with Mother 3 if you want to have a tangible cart and play it on a Game Boy Advance. But yeah, it was never officially released in the West but was very lovingly translated. And that's the cartridge copies that the boys have and myself as well. And if anyone from Nintendo is listening,

I'm lying, none of that happened. This is parody, fair you. We're just making it up. We're just making it up. We're having a little fun. If you listen to the show, you know that we're just a bunch of dumb idiots who've never actually played any video game.

That's true, and also, just give us a Switch 2. Wouldn't mind having a Switch 2 for free. Nintendo, if you're listening, we won't play Mother 3 if you give us a switch to wouldn't mind having a switch to for free Nintendo if you're listening we won't play mother 3 Listen here and listen good You ever want to see toad again? What oh so we have toad and we won't we won't release toad Wow, you've crossed a line. I guess we're just all all in now I guess all in we have toad. We're just all in. We have to.

There's like prisoners who are just like, oh, Jesus Christ. Well, okay. Also, I'm just kidding. Yeah, we're just having fun. We're just having a little fun. I had a little bit too much Coke Zero before we started. I'll tell you what.

Toads standing in a puddle in a basement. It's no big deal. It's just no big deal. It's just fine. Just don't even think about it that much. Don't think about what kind of liquid that puddle is. Hey, uh, look, we're having fun here. Matt's caffeinated. We're ready to go.

Jacked up. We're ready to go here on the podcast. And the question we like to ask on the first part of every episode is about video games we're playing now. The question is, what are you playing? What are you playing? It's ask me the Resident Evil Merchant and I'm gonna ask my friends what they're playing.

And I think I know the answer. Resident Evil Merchant usually don't come in as confident that you know what we're gonna be covering in this segment. But you seem pretty cocky here. There was a leak. Oh, there was pretty cocky here. There was a leak. Oh, there was a leak? Yeah, there's a leak. You guys gotta get your iCloud and your Gmail's

on lockdown, because one of the four of you, I guessed a password. Oh, so it wasn't a leak, It was that you, you guessed the password. You breached security. Yeah, I breached with a little human hacking, a little bit of- A little social engineering. Yeah, I figured it out. Wow.

I got a question for you. Why'd you do that? Yeah, why did you do that? That's not nice. We would have just given you the information you were looking for. Yeah, but I was worried about you. Oh. Well, that doesn't really excuse the behavior, but I guess that's understandable.

I needed to check. I needed to make—I hadn't seen you in for such a long time. We see you every week. Yeah, it's every single week. You know how long that is? Seven days. Unless you have a different sense of time. I don't know how you're— Imagine if you hadn't heard from Nick for six days. Ah, music to my ears.

Wait a minute. A thrill to always be hearing from my friends. It's a blessing. Yeah, and imagine if you texted him for six days and he didn't reply. I'd be pretty alarmed. Yeah, so I hacked an email. Okay, so it's now, it's my email that you hacked.

Yeah, it was Nick's email. I texted him all weekend and he didn't text back. I'm not getting these texts. I don't know what number you have, but I'm not getting them. You got the number you gave me. Oh, right, I gave you a fake number, right. So that's partly on me.

I gave you the number of a Sabaro franchise. I've never seen an email so clean. There was only one email and I was watching, it was rather than deleted. Yeah, I keep an inbox zero. I'm archiving everything. It's pretty clean in there. Yeah.

Let's see, what do I have in my inbox right now? Let me pull up my inbox real quick. I have one, two, three, four, five emails in my inbox. Yeah, so I'm pretty on top of things. So you're maybe like, this was standard operating procedure for me. You maybe caught me on a normal day. I have three.

Oh wow, okay. But I keep it lean as well, unread if I need to get to it and I'm not gonna get to it right now. Yeah. Mine's maxed out. Wow. So you cannot receive any more emails. They bounce. They bounce. Return to sender. Yeah. Google has a case file. Like, I don't have time to interrogate that. Well,

I wish you hadn't violated my privacy by hacking into my email. Well, I'm glad you're safe, buddy. I'm glad it gave you peace of mind. Please just don't do that. But also I know you're playing, you're doing Claire Obscure Expedition 33. That's right. We are discussing that Resident Evil merch. And that's what you've been playing. That's right. Hey, and I guess this can just kind of turn into a group discussion here because we've all been playing the game of the moment, the game that is in the zeitgeist Claire Obscure Expedition 33, which was developed and published by French company Sandfall Interactive, a studio founded by Guillaume Brosche, associate producer and narrative lead formerly at Ubisoft,

now went on to establish this independent company and what they've crafted is quite a fucking video game. Man, I am loving this thing. It's, I feel like I am loving this thing. I feel like I have to address something. Okay. There's been some chatter. Last week we talked about Blueprints. We did a Blueprints, we did a We Play, You Play

of Blueprints last week. Contra the general consensus from the gaming press, we were pretty lukewarm on it. And everybody reacted to that normally. Yeah. But so then the thing I want to address is, I saw a few people. Yeah.

And by a few people, I mean, truly not that many. Okay. Probably, generously, a handful of people. Okay. All right, so one choice is to not publicly acknowledge them, but go on. One choice. A handful of folks.

Wait, wait, wait. You saw, oh, okay, you saw, oh okay, I think I understand what you're saying. A handful of folks started spreading this rumor. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Then they kept saying stuff like, kinda bummed out that Matt bounced off of Claire's Gear Expedition 33, it's really good,

I think he'd really like it. Aw man, sucks that Matt tried it out and didn't decide to keep playing it. I didn't say, I didn't fucking say that. I didn't say- Where did that come from? Did you mention it last week's episode? I mentioned that I had played it the day it came out, but then had decided to go forth

and play Kingdom Hearts 3. Yeah. Guys, do you even listen to the fucking show? The answer is no. I can speak on behalf of podcast listeners who comment on episodes. No, we do not listen to podcasts. And then they try to-

We post and- I'm not an antagonist towards our listeners. I think- I am, I don't like you. Well, no, and then that's parody, of course, because I wish they didn't say stuff like that. But look, this is the other thing. Then they try to, and I know that this wasn't good fun.

I know that this wasn't good fun. Yeah. For some reason, Discord was showing that I was playing it on my Xbox. My Xbox was like linked to my Discord, which then I promptly removed. Yeah. No, you got to turn all that shit off. I turned that off. I didn't know.

Wait. Now I can play games in private. On Discord, they can tell what you're playing? There's a lot of default settings default privacy settings You just got to police on basically every app because a lot of them, you know Cross-pollinate and talk to each other. Yeah, if you don't you aren't turning these things off then yes a lot of your what you're playing What your activity is?

Yeah, so they saw that I was playing it and they're like look look, we convinced Matt to get back in there. I was like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. I know that that wasn't good fun, but no, you did not. I've been playing it since it came out. I just needed something more in depth to talk about. I spent more time last week with Kingdom Hearts 3. And yeah, maybe this wasn't worth bringing up at all, but I will say, none of you,

none of you ever convinced me to do anything and you never will. I really like our listeners and I'm really grateful that they are involved enough in the podcast to talk about the show at all because... It is very nice. It's a good community otherwise. I love television shows. I'm not on a discord for television shows. No. I would not talk to other people about television shows, but I love them very much.

So I'm grateful for the community. I also... I mixed up a little bit in the Avatar Way of Water discord, but we don't need to get into that. Did you really? Wait, but I love them very much. So I'm grateful for the community. I also- I mixed it up a little bit in the Avatar way of water discord, but we don't need to get into that. Did you really? A little bit. Yes!

You? That's a good community. Here's my impression of Nick in the discord, in that discord. I really like the movie. Yeah, pretty much. I also, I do watch TV, and I'm not in any discords for TV shows,

but I certainly wouldn't join one and tell them what I don't like do watch TV, I'm not in any discords for TV shows, but I certainly wouldn't join one and tell them what I don't like about the TV show. That's none of my business. That's none of their business. I will say, Nick, you'll be proud to know that, again, on a certain game that shall not be named until the strike is over, they did release Jake Sully and the lady.

Na'etiri? Naetiri skins. And if I were to be playing that game, that shall not be named, I would have been nonstop maining Jake Sully the entire season. The whole thing that, my Jake, the whole thing with those is,

I like, I get why they have to scale everything. But the whole thing of being a Navi is being big. Like being big as shit. And you can't be fucking big and be in that game you're not gonna talk about because everyone's gotta have the same hit boxes. So it's like I'm walking around and whether I'm the towering Neytiri from Avatar

or whether I'm the diminutive Levi from Attack on Titan, I'm the same fucking height. Doesn't make any fucking sense. Well, but it does weirdly work if you look at them on their own. Sure. Like, he looks really tall, and I've had lengthy discussions with my fellow squad mates

about how they achieve him looking tall when he's the same size as everybody else, because there's something they've done that make him look tall. My mom and my brother were just in Disney World, both avatar skeptics. Yeah. Not really that interested in the movies.

They went to the animal kingdom where they have the Pandora area and it knocked their fucking socks off. I've never been, but I've heard it's awesome. Yeah, they were like, I gotta go. Let's go. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, let's go. That's the three that's who would go the three of us

and ranch. Four. Well that's what I spent my Nintendo points on was sweepstakes to get four flight or four tickets to Orlando. Yeah all right you know what? Nintendo if you're listening I'll accept that in in exchange for not playing Mother 3. Wow. That's right. These are our demands. These are our demands. gift that keeps on giving and that's an Aura frame. Aura frame folks, A-U-R-A. Aura frames come with a Vivid HD display, unlimited storage and the ability to preload the frame with photos and videos of your family. Yeah, mom's gonna really like that one.

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They can't get mad at that because it's photos of you. So they can't be like, I don't like this gift. Cause at the end of the day. Cause it's saying, I don't like you. And that's messed up to say on mother's day. Exactly. I would never, why would they do that? Yeah.

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Use promo code PHOTO, terms and conditions apply. PHOTO, folks, don't forget it. Thank you, Aura. Thanks. Guys, I did not start Clare Obscure until we assigned it for the show. Yes. Yeah. What we should say by assigned it, I think we're just kind of like, hey, this is a thing

we could talk about and like Matt and I were playing it anyway, so you're like, I'll play it too. Yeah, that's a good thing to point out. I was already playing. Yeah. But that's also not how, that's not how this podcast works. Typically, no. Also, not how that's not how this podcast works. We know you guys say why don't we cover this and then I? grumbling Lee

Pull it up and start playing look as the busiest one Is it hard to slot a game in your in your life as an aside? I texted you guys this this week. I had a nightmare about blueprints. Yeah nightmare I had a dream that I was starting a run I had a dream that I was starting a run, getting the star update for the day, and then ending the run. And I was just doing it over and over and over again until I had like 150 stars,

so that I could just build the observatory and get tons of keys and gems. I woke up furious. I was like, how dare this game be in my dream space, which is the only chance I would have to say, fly or jump far or be in a field. Like kind of a bummer to see a two dimensional screen in your dreams.

I asked my wife a question this morning because I was having a dream and I was still just waking up and she was like, what are you talking about? I was asking her a question about something that happened in my dream And the question was I'll reveal it here. It was extremely cute. What was on Bonnie my cat? What was on Bonnie's t-shirt? That's pretty good. She's wearing a little t-shirt Pretty good. So anyway, I picked up a little t-shirt in the dream and I want to see what the shirt is. Pretty good. Pretty good. So anyway, I picked up a Claire Obscure Expedition 33. Do we think that Claire Obscure is going to be a franchise where it's Claire Obscure,

nether fight of the realisists or whatever the fuck the next one will be? I also don't know where the story is going because Expedition 33 is like, that's key to the narrative. That's what you're on. And I don't know if that's going to, we're gonna have further expeditions or if that whole arc will be resolved

by the end of the game. We'll see where that ends up taking us. Does Claire Obscure come in as words that you've heard so far in your playthroughs? It's a more of a descriptive sort of, it's more of a conceptual thing referring to the aesthetic. It's a, it's, yeah, it references a chiaroscuro, which is like dramatic light and shadow. And you do see that reflected in the art direction. Sure. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's,

it's one of those things of just like, look, it's, it's, it's so many video games have unnecessary subtitles. you could probably say that in a vacuum, Claire obscure Expedition 33 is maybe kind of an ungepatschke title, they probably could just call it Claire obscure. But that said, what a fucking video game. I think it's so great that I don't like like I'm that this game is succeeding despite having kind of a mouthful of of a title just speaks to its quality. This is an Unreal Engine 5 game. It is on PC, PS5, and Xbox, and is day one on Game Pass. Something I will say is, from what I've heard,

this company was about 33 people. It's a pretty small team that was able to put this game together. And maybe that speaks to the tools that are available in Unreal Engine 5. I haven't messed around with Unreal Engine 5. I've messed around some with Unity just to see what the environment is like.

I kind of just want to download UE5 and see what it's like to build something in it because another game that came out earlier this year, Wander Stop, is another game that was an Unreal Engine 5 game that has pretty impressive art direction. It feels like the quality of of graphical fidelity feels like a like a last gen platformer like it's like this is pretty impressive. It also came from a pretty small

team. And I wonder how much of that is just baked into the tool set and baked into the engine that's that that that you we five is anyway, this is a JRPG style game I say JRPG style because obviously it's not Japanese in origin. It is from a French firm where you lead a party of adventurers in a dark fantasy world dominated by the villainous, Pantress, who each year wipes out every one of a certain age that age has been steadily declining and now you're part of the titular Expedition 33.

So you're in your final year of life before the paintress commits a, you know, just wipes everyone off the map. And what you're doing is this sort of crusade to see if you can kind of end this cycle of demolition. I love this game. I feel like I need to make one of those YouTube videos that's like, you know, like Claire Obscure has no business being this good.

You know what I mean? They all have like these, by algorithmic necessity, they have a title like that. Like, yeah, and he had a face like that, like, oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. What the fuck?

This game's so fucking good, oh. Someone's in physical pain from how much they're enjoying this game. Oh. But also, also the whites of your eyes have been photoshopped to pure perfect brightness. I was following this guy who was just like a, like he was just a, this dude was in my, I subscribed to his channel on YouTube and he was just like a doctor, like an MD who was talking about like, you know nutrition

And he just is very even tempered in his in his disposition Just like you know when you want your plate to be mostly greens if you if you kind of divide it You'll have one half that's greens and one half That is fats and proteins and then he became more popular on YouTube and then he just started doing those thumbnails I think just because he'd had to and so this guy, he was like, his delivery is all like this, but then it'll be like, like, sweet potatoes, secret to eternal life, and be like, oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. This poor, poor guy. Why diet coke's bad. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Guy went to medical school, and this is how he has to degrade himself. Anyway, this game, it's another of those things. We talk about it, I'm probably talking about it too much, but like every year there are games that just come out of nowhere that's on nobody's radar. I love it, but I also feel like this was on a radar. Do you think this was on a radar? I feel like we mentioned this at some point last year as like a game that was interesting to look forward to. Interesting, could have been. If so, I don't recall it. To me, like it's mentally in the

same sort of bucket of last year's Bellatro and Animal Well and Metaphor Re-Fantasio that were games that were like, oh wow, okay, look at this thing just kind of coming out and making this immense impact and everything. Obviously, we already talked about Blueprints, which inarguably still had an impact on the gaming zeitgeist. But this for me is night and day in terms of my reaction to it versus Blueprints. Whereas Blueprints, I was just kind of like, okay, I see the artistry here, we don't need to rehash it,

but I was like, I see the artistry here, but I'm kind of just getting worn down through the process of playing it. Versus this one, I find like I'm immediately so engaged, so hooked, and I just think it's so playable and aesthetically appealing. Do you know why it's playable? Why's that?

I know the secret. Yeah, go for it. It's because you can fucking move fast. And you can zoom. You can zoom. You can zoom. You can zoom. There are three speeds of locomotion in this game.

There is walking, there is jogging like a regular person, and then there is full blown dash without a dash meter. There's nothing that you exhaust by moving fast. And for me, discovering that, I was like, oh, thank God. Thank God, like these fields where you're battling all of these creatures are large fields. And when you can see where you have to go, I shouldn't be punished with the time it takes to get there.

And this game rewards us with a speedy, zip around locomotion. Yeah, the sprint you can do, you can really, really book it. Oh, there's another game that I was, you know, it was another JRPG, and I can't pull the name right now, that had a similar thing. It was like, man, the walk cycle is just so fast,

and it's just so, it's a great quality of life thing. It's just like, yeah, there's a lot of just negative space here that just exists to make the environment feel like a big environment, a real environment, a lived in environment, but if I can move through it quickly, I don't feel like I'm kind of getting bored. And in town, I walk, because I don't want to miss anything, because it's a dense area.

There's a lot of stuff going on. I want to look at faces. I want to look at art direction. But when I'm out on the fucking field, let me go as fast as Sonic. The thing that I... It's awesome. So I think I've probably put the most time into this game so far.

That's not possible, because you took like a huge break. I fell off of it immediately. Which you played Kingdom Hearts 3. I've been playing it pretty steadily like through this past week and over the weekend. And I even downloaded, look, I downloaded an app. See if Star Wars was a game I was trying to remember. You just keep going. I downloaded an app for my Steam Deck so that I can remote play my Xbox

while my wife is watching the TV and I can still play my game. The app is called XB Play. It was $7 in Steam and I didn't have to do anything crazy. And I love this fucking app. It rocks. It's just made, I mean, I wish I could, I heard it doesn't run great on Steam Deck

The game otherwise would have bought it on Steam, so I was like oh, it's on game pass I'll you know I'll just remote play to my my Steam Deck and it's a Flawless experience, it's been really really great, but I've been also playing it on the TV and the thing that I just really love about it is that I Feel like there is a shared language in a lot of JRPG design. And I feel like within the first couple of hours of this game, I've seen a handful of things I've just never seen in a game before, I feel like.

Have you guys gotten to the water area? I have not gotten that far. There's a part of the map that's early on enough where one of the other sections of the map that you essentially already have is this water area and you go into this cave, but it's like you're underwater. But you're walking around still. And I was just like, this is gorgeous. This is amazing. I love this

That's cool. I just I'm I'm really really loving the game Yeah, you know I think the the thing is and we're gonna be talking about double-a games And I think a lot of people have described this as a double-a game Which I think is fair the art direction is really nice the the models are you know They're not going for photorealism as they as't be. I mean, there's some stylization here. But the models are less detailed than a AAA game, but I don't need to see veins and pores

on the characters' faces. That's the stuff that you're losing, but you're still getting personality and characterization through the way they're realized visually. Also, we've hit a place now where this is a double A game, right? This is a magnitude of gorgeousness that two generations ago, if this was a PS3 game, it would be like the triple A game of the PS3 generation. Yeah, certainly, like Trump's something like,

the crown jewel of the PS3 era probably would have been like a Naughty Dog game, right? Yeah, The Last of Us. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's not as breathtaking as The Last of Us, but nobody in their right mind would have seen this as a PS3 game and been like, this is a AA game. You would have been like, wow, this is spectacular.

And I think that we are chasing something in realism in triple A games that maybe we don't need to be chasing. Like, I'm not sure who it's rewarding. Yeah, I think good art direction is just overall, to me, more interesting than like realistic Yeah, like art direction 100% we should describe actually playing this some bitch So the combat is so fun and so sad as I you talked about things that you've never seen before I will say that we've had turn-based combat with time button presses since the 16-bit era

Like that's a thing that's been a staple of the genre that we tried a bunch of different ways But this feels like such an evolution of that. Basically you have timed button presses that you can use to do additional damage for your attacks, which is one element of it. But the main thing is how you use it for defense. And you basically have one button that you can use to dodge enemy attacks and another you can use to parry and

sometimes counter enemy attacks. There's some really and it's very satisfying like when you when you dodge something effectively, when you figure out the timing of it, it's really satisfying when you get a perfect dodge, it's great. And there's an elegant sort of tutorialization in terms of how a perfect dodge lines up with the timing for a parry. So dodges are easier, there's a larger window parries, there's a tighter window, but a perfect

dodge is the same window as a parry. So if you are consistently getting perfect dodges for an attack, then you can you can take the risk to be like, I'm just going to parry this thing. And when you parry it, you get some action points back that you can use to do some of your special abilities. There's also things like, there will be certain attacks that will attack your entire party. And if you parry those with all of your party members

consistently, you can do like a more innate counter attack. All of these things sort of add up in a way where it never feels like you're just pressing buttons through a menu. It always feels like you're engaged through every second of each combat encounter. It also forces you to watch the animation on the enemies because it's like generally on a JRPG,

there's all of this loving attention put into the animation in the battle sequences of the attacks of your monsters, your enemies on screen, but you don't have to pay attention to those things. Yeah, they're non-interactive. You can kind of be staring at the fucking menu the entire time. This forces you to be like,

oh wow, this monster, before he attacks, he conjures his weapons into his hands, he pulls them back. If you can forecast what it is that the monster is going to do when it attacks you on the first strike, not only is that extremely good luck, but it's awesome feeling. Yes.

It's great, I also can't remember what is they call the, what are the monsters called? Nevros, what are they called? I can't remember. I can't remember, they got some made up word for it. Neuriums? Nevrons. To quote the great Steve Martin,

those French got a different word for it. Uriums? To quote the great Steve Martin, those French got a different word for everything. It's the difference, Heather, between like a Final Fantasy Summon is a classic thing of like, hey, once I see this the first time, great, but then it reaches a certain point of like, I don't need to see the knights of the round all show up again. And yeah, a lot of times combat, if you're just watching some big attack, then you don't have anything to do as the player. Or the same thing with the Mortal Kombat fatality. It's like once I learned how to execute this, hey, this is pretty cool that I can pull this off,

but I reach a certain point of like, I don't need to see this every time, versus it's more like playing a fighting game or something, you're playing a rhythm game where you're just kind of like perpetually engage with it. And it's so much so that like, even in JRPGs, I like there are ones where it's like, I man, if I can turn down the combat encounter ratio,

or if I can just avoid combat entirely, I will do it. I don't find myself avoiding combat. I find myself pursuing combat because it's both a way to grind to improve your characters, and then also it is just so, each individual combat is just very, very fun to play. I will attack a monster, and if I can't get Perfect Parries all the way through it,

I'll go back to the save flag. Save so that they respawn and I won't progress until I can perfect each monster as I'm going. That's a very Heather way to play this game. But what you just mentioned, so the flags that you have, the little camp stations, and also you can camp in this game and the overall, just don't think, oh man, I love camping. It's fun to get. I do like, I love camping. There's a mechanic that I haven't quite there's like a little record player I guess it's not a record player

but yeah what were you you were trying to look for phonograph yeah I think it was like more of a phonograph because it seems old to me yeah it's a phonograph but you need you need a record for it and I haven't found one yet, and I can't wait to find one. So anyway, you go to one of these points, effectively it's like a campfire in a Souls game. It is a place where you can rest, you can restore your charges, which this is another thing I really like

about this game's design. The thing you end up, when you're playing any RPG, you end up with this inventory just crammed with consumables, and you're stockpiling them, end up with this inventory just crammed with consumables and you're stockpiling them and you don't know exactly when to use them and you know, whatever at some point, I've got 99 high potions in my inventory and I don't know when to deploy them. Or you know, like you end up at least a hoarding here, it's more of a

soul system. It's more like a like a flask where you've got like a limited number of charges you can use to restore your party's health or revive party members or heal everyone outside of combat. Those restore when you get to one of these campsites and it also respawns the monsters in an area. So again, it's another way if you wanna grind a little bit you have that opportunity. Can I talk a little bit

about a ludonarrative dissonance stuff happening in the game though? So you have a character who's just witnessed the death of somebody he loves. And that's in the cold open. I don't think that's a spoiler. That's like your first 30 minutes of the game. Yeah.

That would fuck me up by the way. Yeah. I think I'd handle it in stride. You think so? No. Watching your ex turn to ash and rose petals in front of you, you think you'd be alright with that? Yeah, it'd be a fucking nightmare.

Yeah. Yeah. And then shortly after that, I guess, I don't even know where spoiler country in a light- We're still talking very early game, so we should be fine. You see so many people get murked. Like so many fucking people.

And then you're finding piles of bodies. Yeah. While this is happening, your character is like visibly anguished. In cut scenes, he's like, I wanna fucking kill myself. Yeah. But then when you find a consumable on the map,

he goes, wow, I could use this. Like, I wish that that had become, that was scaled in a little bit more gradually because it's funny to have a guy looking at corpses and then pick up what I think is money and be like, wow, excellent. Yeah, no, there's a bit of that where there's like, you know, like, there's not that many alt lines for that too.

So like, the more people you have in your party, it's just kind of like vacillating between who's saying, you know, oh, great, that's gonna be useful type of thing. There's also in the settings menu when you're starting the game, and also when you're, like, you could pause and see this menu at any time.

You can turn off You can you can customize how your character looks basically right but not that much But like you give them a different haircut or a hat yeah You find some of these things and I did I will say that I was enjoying this game I'm playing on game pass, but I enjoyed this game enough where I was like I'm just gonna buy the deluxe edition upgrade so have a bunch more of those. Oh nice I should I should do that as well because I am really enjoying it and and and will continue to play it because I have been playing it Wait, I thought you bounced off of no. No, no contrary to popular belief. I did not bounce off of this thing

Okay, the discord get you playing again. That's nice of them It's all in good fun, Discorders. I appreciate you guys. We love the Getscord. Here's what I was gonna say. In the menu, there's a thing where you can turn off your character customization in cut scenes so it doesn't break the illusion of what it is. And I think that's funny, but I've left it on because to your point, it's a very bleak story so far and everybody's having a miserable time,

but I found a mime outfit for my character. Yeah. And he has a baguette strapped to his fucking back. And it's extremely funny. But the note in the description of the option menu, it turns this off for outfits that don't look right, parentheses, but it is fun. And I'm like, yeah, it is fun, you're right.

It's really good, because yeah, it kind of just really cuts the tension quite a bit when your guy is like, talking about wanting to kill himself and he's wearing sunglasses, a beret, a striped shirt, and has a baguette on his back. The Souls comparisons are also like, in terms how the weapons scale and to your stats. I mean, I again, I like that system. I like it.

I like how it works in Souls games. And I think that it's funny here when you're leveling up in a traditional sort of sense and you can kind of figure out, okay, I'm going to target agility or whatever stat to try to improve my weapons damage. But also, like the Pictos is another element that goes into it, which is the... It's essentially like... What exactly is it?

Kind of accessories that you're kind of equipping on each character and they give you like additional... They enhance existing abilities or give you additional abilities or give you additional damage They're basically like what I like is that you're finding a bunch of them And then you can reach a certain point where you can upgrade them where you're getting the ability without even equipping it, right? Or you can have it be shared amongst different party members And I again I just like that that that those are leveling up your your weapons are leveling up your characters are leveling up There's all these things that you're steadily approving so and like improving so each combat feels consequential. I like don't

Understand pick those like I you just explained it really well, but I find them all the time I just need to really like hunker down and like figure out like this is the thing I always have a hard time with games like like this. Cause I love games like this. I like crafting a build for a character or whatever, but I often am like, am I even doing the right stuff? I often will be like, cause there's so much things you have to read, or I'm like, I just wanna get in there and I wanna play.

So I'll be like adding stuff, and I'm like, I'm just adding, I know I'm just adding the wrong stuff. I gotta be a little more careful and precise. Yeah, but also I, at least playing this game, I'm playing on the standard difficulty. It doesn't feel like this is a game that necessitates min-maxing. Maybe it reaches a point where you have to do that,

but I kind of am just sort of like figuring out, I was like, okay, this Picto gives some sort of additional ability if you stack burn on an enemy, burn is like a status effect, this character has some spells that cast burn that feels like a natural fit, I don't know, we'll see how this goes. I'm just kind of riffing here and it's the same sort of thing with like, you don't need to get through every encounter by perfect parrying. Like it's like, that's not like a necessity.

You just kind of dodge your way through it, you know, it's like, it's not like a necessity. You can just kind of dodge your way through it. You know, it's like, you're going to be okay. You have to do it. It feels great. It does feel great to hit a perfect parry. I really- Because then you get a counter and it's just like super duper satisfying.

It's really rewarding. This is also, this game also checks a specific box for me where all the enemies are fucking freaks. Yeah, I love all the freak enemies. Just like freaky and weird and very, very fun. Like the mime ones that I was talking about earlier, they look like mimes, but they're like big, sort of like wooden puppets with like big heads.

And they're kind of scary. Yeah. But they, and they're very, those mime ones are I think optional and they're like and they're very, those mime ones are, I think, optional, and they're like, they're very, very challenging. And... The enemies move fast. They move fast.

If you aggro them, they'll chase you all over the place. Yes, very frightening. I do like that the game is sort of, versus like, something like Assassin's Creed, or whatever, where it's like very open. The game is more focused and tunnels you to where you need to go. It's really linear, but that's a thing I like about it.

I like a linear game. I don't need this vast open world. I haven't been lost one time, I'll tell you that. And there's no HUD, right? I guess there's a little compass or whatever. But there's not like a, oh, go, you know but there's not like a like, oh go, there's not like a, what is that, an icon on a map somewhere that's like this.

No, there's not like a mini map. You're just sort of like, but it's pretty clear where to go. Yeah, it's kind of the, I had someone describe this to me once where it's just like these environments are essentially in a linear 3D game like this. You're essentially running just down half pipes, right?

Like it's just like not going from side to side, but it's just like one half pipe that like extends into infinity. Man, if this game had half pipes, it'd be like, hell yeah, dog, you're stuck in the rocks. And there's changes in elevation and such, obviously, and then they find ways to vary that, but it's pretty straightforward in terms of progressing.

I will say that one of the downsides of this very ambitious double A game is that the environments that you've just described as half pipes do lend themselves to getting broken very quickly. Like within the first hour and a half, I got stuck in an environment and had to reset. Oh wow, I haven't had that happen yet.

Well, I'm also trying to jam my way past trees that look unscalable. Because I'm like, maybe you have to jump at this the right way in order to get something behind it. I had one sort of thing like that where it was after winning a fight, I got stuck sort of in like a first person mode and I don't know how or why and I had to just like reset it. I got stuck sort of in like a first person mode,

and I don't know how or why, and I had to just like reset it, but it was not a problem. The loot that I got was still there, so it was like, it was still great. And also this game auto saves a ton. Like I had a moment where I accidentally stumbled, like I just didn't realize there was about to be a,

I was gonna step on a trigger, and it was going to start a cinematic that was going to lead to a boss fight, and I just like didn't I just didn't realize there was about to be a I was gonna step on a trigger and it was going to start at a Cinematic that was going to lead to a boss fight and I just like hadn't healed anything and you know I'd taken some damage and and I was like oh man. I'm second this thing. I guess here we go I guess if I if I don't fuck up one time I'll probably I'll be okay in this combat and and I got a party wipe, but and I was like ah shit I'm gonna have to do start up the old campsite is like oh no it started the last time I picked something up so it's like I lost like less ah shit, I'm gonna have to do, start up the old campsite. I was like, oh no, it started the last time I picked something up. So I was like, I lost like, less than five minutes

of progress. So I was like, oh, that's nice that the game is being charitable. And that like, still challenging, but like, it's not making me redo a bunch of shit. Very forgiving, for sure. Very forgiving, yeah. The music is, the Lorian Testard is the composer

and it's lush and it's beautiful. Yeah, when the singing pops up, I love the music singing. Great singing. Are they singing in French or Japanese? What are they singing in? They must be singing in French. It doesn't sound like French to me. I don't know.

I don't know. And too bad we can't listen to it on this podcast because we don't want to get flagged for copyright infringement. No, no, because there's too much heat on us. Nintendo's listening. We can't have this French studio on our ass too I don't know really anything about our art history

But I read that it's like an art nouveau aesthetic, which is like a 19th century French movement It's very appealing But it's also it's got that kind of married with steampunky sort of character designs and environments. And I don't know, I think it's all really cool looking, sounds great. Art Nouveau was a form of decorative art that happened in the 1920s. It was in parallel to art deco here in the United States.

Art Nouveau is typified by sort of like floral motifs, stained glass, like bronze, that sort of thing. Oh. Yeah. Oh, should have just asked you. Did I say soccer blue? I learned that from my dad this week. Wow. Because he was like talking to me about light fixtures.

My father is, how do I say this without it being, hmm, it doesn't matter. He's a smart guy. Yeah, he's a very smart guy, but he will also talk about something like a number for a long time. Oh, sure. And so, yeah.

And so he will talk about- You should've said, like me. Like you? He's a bit of a wiger. My dad's a bit of a wiger? Ew. You? Yeah. He's a bit of a wiger. My dad's a bit of a wiger? Uh, ew. Yeah, nobody wins. But he talks about, he was talking to me about lamps

for 45 minutes this week. And telling me about the difference between Arnavo and Art Deco. That's great. Yeah. Can I say another thing? Yes. Which is that-

What if we were like, no actually- It's a podcast. I don't know. Say words. I feel like I've been talking a lot. No, you've been doing great. Yeah, you're doing a good job. I like playing a JRPG where the characters

are adults approaching middle age. Is it kind of nice where it's just like, basically every JRPG I've ever played, the characters are literally 17 years old. Yeah. It's like, isn't it kind of nice to play like a 33 year old? I was kind of concerned.

But just playing an adult, how about that? I was concerned for myself because based on what's going on in the story, I got wiped in the last expedition. Just like in the previous one. We won't be starting expeditions in this country pretty soon. I'm cooked.

But I like, that sort of then brings me to this other point than I was gonna make that. Now I can safely make. These are some of the hottest characters I've ever seen. They're very hot. Very attractive characters. One of the characters you get pretty early on,

one of the party members can kind of fly when she's doing her sprint. Yes. Anyone else? She doesn't like wearing shoes. She let the dogs out. I like that you can switch between who you're looking at as a party member by just pressing the fucking controller.

That is amazing to me as well. It is cool. Because it does it just on the fly. There's not a second of loading. It's just you just cycle through your party character. You know, even all the party, just like whoever you have in the group. So you can be, your avatar on screen

can be anybody you choose it to be and it doesn't affect the story or the playing. No, and they all, yeah, they all move differently. Some of them aren't wearing shoes. And that's fine. It's fine. I didn't say it wasn't fine. No, no, no, we're just like saying that like it's okay.

And the thing about, I like that there are so many characters but it is also just so like, the voice acting is so great. I do want to point out there is the main, well not the main character, but the guy you start with, Gustav. Gustav. A lot of people say he looks like Robert Pattinson,

and he kind of does. He does look like Robert Pattinson. He looks so much like him that it's crazy that it's not him. I think that this game takes a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy XV in the costuming and the look of the characters. He looks like a cross between Robert Pattinson

and Old Noctis. Because you play as Old Noctis at one point in Final Fantasy XV. Nice. I know that Charlie Cox's, Daredevil is his voice in the game. It's a great performance. A lot of great performances. Jennifer English, who is Shadowheart, is a character in the game. Yeah, I'll star cast a voiceover artist.

Yeah, it's top to bottom. I'm loving it. It rocks. Yeah, it's pretty great. It's pretty great. You guys haven't gotten to the... You guys are not where I'm rocks. Yeah, it's pretty great. It's pretty great. You guys haven't gotten to the you guys are not where I'm at. Yeah. I'm not I'm still in act one. I'm like toward the end of act one, I believe. Okay. I've unlocked a big guy. There's a big guy that you need to like get he helps traverse the world map. Also, I love the world map. Oh, the world map is great. The world map is fucking awesome. It's like tilt shifted. So there's a very shallow depth of field

when you're looking at the world map, which conveys that you are not the correct size on the world map in the sort of like 16 bit era JRPG or 32 bit era JRPG tropes, where it's not the actual landscape that you're crossing, but you're sort of like a stylized version of the landscape and a stylized version of yourself. Fucking loved it. Are they called gestrels?

Gestrel sounds right. Gestrel. I think they're novariums. I think it's an N. But gestrels might be a thing. There's a character type in the game called gesturals. We love the world map. There's a guy that you can unlock that his name is Esky. And he's like a big guy.

But he's like a big tick looking, almost oogie boogie looking guy. Now here's the thing I know about you, Matt. I know you love a little guy, but you got nothing against a big guy. The big guys are good too. Hey look, I'll take him as they come, big or small. I'm a fan.

You just don't want a regular guy. No, no, get those regular guys out of here. But he's a big guy and he's got a big kind of dumb voice. Oh no. He's really fun. He's a really guy. You can get on him to traverse the world map. And there's breakables on the world map

and you can like smash them. Yeah, so I haven't encountered that. I'm looking forward to riding this big guy around. You gotta get, you'll get him. Is he a human being? No, no, no, no, no. Oh, I was like, you ride a human man? No, he's like a thing.

I think he's a gestural. Cause I think the ones that are sort of look more like, they have like brush heads and stuff, I think those are gestural. Yeah, there's different types of these. That's the thing that the little kids in the opening area. He's a big one. Oh, he's a big one.

Yeah, he's, and let me tell you something, he's big, he's a big guy. I'm enjoying this game enough, Liz. So I did, I've talked in the past about my specific monitor situation, which is a really hyper specific use case. And a lot of times games like this don't really support it. I've got this absurdly ultra wide monitor that's 5120 by 1440 resolution. This game does support it, but it doesn't play great in it because all the UX elements

are at the far edges of the screen. So it's like, it's a little bit awkward. And then also the framing of some of the cinematics is like, I can just tell this is off because you're, you're, you're staging this for 16 by nine. And again, this isn't your fault. There's no way you can account for this. Why would you QA for this, this type of, of, of resolution that 0.1% of the user base has. So I hooked my PC up to my TV.

I got a big long HDMI table. I'm playing this as a couch game. And I'm glad I did it because it feels, I mean, it feels appropriate for that. It feels like a couch RPG. I'm playing on PS5 Pro and it says enhanced for PS5 Pro. Generally that means that both the quality and performance buttons can be pushed simultaneously because you get like super high frame rate and super

high graphics. It doesn't look any different than the PS5 version to my eyes at all because I have a PS5 in one side of the house and a PS5 Pro on the other side of the house. And yeah, it looks identical. This game is good enough where I'm, because I'm gonna be on the road for work later this month and I'm just asking myself, do I get a Steam Deck so I can play this on the road?

Oh, wow. I might have to do it, which sounds like a stupid thing to do when the Switch 2 is almost out to buy another handheld, but I'm just like- For a one week use case. For a one week, and I'm just also like, probably there will be a Switch 2 port at some point, right?

It feels like this game is- It seems based on- Popular enough? It's popularity and it doesn't seem like it's that, I mean, it looks gorgeous, but it can't be that like resource intensive that, I bet you could run on the Switch 2, no problem. Yeah, I mean, it looks gorgeous, but it can't be that like resource intensive that I bet you could run on the Switch 2, no problem. Yeah, I wonder.

Do you have a PS5? Yeah, I do. Do you wanna borrow my portal? Well, I don't need to borrow your portal. Well, I'm not using it right now, and then you could use it on the road to play this game. I don't have to be on Wi-Fi? Yeah, that's kind of the whole thing.

That's not hard to find. I don't mean to dismiss if you're incredibly kind offered. That's really nice, but yeah, I don't think I can. You just can't help it when he's talking about the portal. He hates the damn thing. I didn't realize you were talking about being on an airplane because I thought you didn't fly anywhere. I thought you took trains.

No, I have no choice. I have to go to the East Coast. So yeah, look forward to my obituary. Jesus Christ! What the fuck? I'll be fine. That sounds like you're planning something. What? You're going to DC?

Yeah, I am actually. Oh no! It's alright. I'm sure I won't immolate midair. The plane won't land upside down or something. I'm sure it'll be great. Seems like flying is better than something. I'm sure it'll be great. It seems like flying is better than ever. And more comfortable. Don't watch First Reform on the plane with that haircut.

Love this game. I'm really, really glad that this was, I mean, I just, I admire the creativity and the gumption to make a game like this. And I'm so glad that people are responding to it. And I'm really glad it exists. And a game of the year so far for me. Well, I kind of think so too. It's fucking, it's just so fun.

Holy shit. And that's the, I think that's kind of the main, obviously these are two different games. Between last week's game and this week's game, this game's really fun. Yeah, I would say this is a fun video game to play. And it's different stories of different folks, of course. I know that this one is fun.

What's come out this year? I can't even think of games that came out. Assassin's Creed. Yeah, I mean, look, we could go through the list. It's very, very early in 2025. As we know, the video game release calendar is tends to be, you know, backloaded, it tends to go towards the holiday season, it's still skewed like like the toy industry. But yeah, Assassin's Creed shadows a big release of this year. We met we mentioned blueprints, I mentioned

Wander Stop earlier. You know, the Drive Forever was a game, an indie game that I played that I was enjoying. There have been a few releases, but there's not been a giant cavalcade yet. How weird is it that we live in a time when systems have been out for as long as they have and they are getting more expensive? Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

It sucks, it fucking sucks. As of today's record, Microsoft announced that they were going to increase the price of the X and the S by 100 bucks each, and they also were going to increase the price of their games. That has never happened. No. I know that that is not the first time this generation that that has happened, that a system has become more expensive, but it is wild to be like, it used to be that, oh, you

get the Nintendo when it first comes out and it's going to be like, it used to be that like, oh, you get the Nintendo when it first comes out and it's gonna be like $400. And then like a couple of years later, it's 250. I mean, it might go up. I mean, the Switch might go up this year. Yeah. Wouldn't be shocked. It's gonna be crazy.

You never get rewarded by buying a thing on day one. And this generation, you're being rewarded for buying it on day one. Also, I'm personally thinking about like, how much shit could I put in my bag when I go to Japan the next time? I know. I thought you were gonna say when I flee the country.

No. Heather doesn't run. I don't run. Hey, hey, hey, hey, this is a big one. I cower. I'm looking at that, I mean, obviously I got myself playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth because the PC port came out. But Heather, a big one for you.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which I know you put a bunch of time into earlier this year, is another release. Civilization 7 I still haven't played because of all the negative fan response. But I'll mess around with it at some point. Like a Dragon Pirate, yeah, it was in Hawaii. There have been some games.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is another double A game, which I feel like could cue up maybe a larger conversation we've been thinking about having. And I'll be honest, here's what I realized about myself this week when we were, I asked what was a double A game? And you were like, this is double A game. This is double A game. This is double A game.

And I was like, do I like double A games more than triple A games? It's possible, a lot of your favorite games seem to be double A games. I mean, I do like a triple A game. I like The Last of Us parts one and two. Assassin's Creed, I believe, are triple A games. Yeah.

Like, I like a big budget, big release, Final Fantasy games, those are AAA. But then I like actually look at my library and I see games like Katamari Damacy, and I see like Disco Elysium, and I see like the huge majority of the games that are actually in my collection are not AAA games. Well, let's talk about it.

So we're talking AA games this week. AA games basically bigger in scope and budget than indie games, but not as expensive. Well, let's talk about it. So we're talking AA games this week. AA games, basically bigger in scope and budget than indie games, but not as expensive, ambitious, and polished, if you want to use that word, as AAA games. The term really came to usage in the 2010s as budget for games by Take Two and EA and Ubisoft and the like bloated into the nine figures.

Team sizes became thousands of people across a bunch of different studios in different countries. And I was trying to find the first usage of the term AA and I did not succeed, but I did find a Eurogamer article from 2012 by Christian Donlin entitled, Will Games Woes Kill Off AA Titles? Talking about the struggling UK chain of video game stores, GAME.

They're just called G game there, I guess. I mean, that's a good name for a store. That's pretty good. A good name for a store. Every store should just be called what is sold there. Yeah, yeah. Food for groceries. Yeah, I'd shop at food.

I'll read a little from this article. Quote, what's really sad, I think, is that AA games, the very games that are in real trouble right now, are actually most like the games I grew up playing in the first place. Double Dragon, which was a big deal in my school playground, feels like a classic double A fair, for example, and the double A's I love, I love because they actually seem more honestly old school than a lot of the other stuff out there. They have to be, I guess.

They have to drown you in UI clutter, combos, finishers, wall springs, and collectibles because they don't have the money to throw on the set pieces and turn themselves into something a little weirder and more slickly rollercoastery like Uncharted, and they don't have the financial setup to take risks like the Indies can. Thankfully, you know, this doom saying did not come to pass, and it actually seems like we're in something

of a double A renaissance thanks in part to Steam and Game Pass. I feel like we're seeing a lot of double A games coming out these days, and at least more of appreciation for these sorts of games. I gotta take issue with Double Dragon not being a triple A game for its time. I mean, this is the whole thing about double A games,

is because I honestly don't even know if the double A label makes sense for anything in the 2D era, maybe even in the 32-bit era, because there just was not the same, like it's like you would not have hey, we're gonna make Super Mario Brothers 3 We need to get a team of a thousand people to make this game they're just it's just there was not the the same level of Staffing required to make something like that like it just just games were even the more ambitious designs something like that. Like it's just games where even the more ambitious designs

were not ones that demanded team size that we see these days or budgets that we see these days because of the hardware limitations. And so I think it's really a term that makes more sense in our modern framework. Wasn't Final Fantasy VII the most expensive game ever made upon its release? That sounds right, but I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know either. And this isn't a journalism podcast. It's a fuck around podcast. We're just goofing off. upon its release. That sounds right, but I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Yeah. And this isn't a journalism podcast. Yes. It's a fuck around podcast. We're just goofing off. We're just goofing off. We're just three idiots.

Here's the thing, I was trying to, yes, duh, duh, and the like. Oh no, my hand's stuck in a pickle jar. I was trying to think of double A games. That's a shoe. Yeah. Oh, it looks tasty. Yeah, who put this pickle in here?

I was thinking back on double A games and like when was the first time I kind of felt a sense of it? And for me, I think it was the first serious Sam game, this FPS franchise, they made a few of them, but the first one was like, it was coming in an era when we kind of had a bunch of different, you know, Quake likes and Doom likes a bunch of different FPS games that we're all trying to go for like, like,

hey, we're going to have the most realistic version and the most, the highest level of graphical, you know, fidelity we are going to go for. We're trying to one-up quake with Unreal. We're trying to Unreal the game before the engine. Like we're trying to just see how far we can push things. And Serious Sam was just like, hey, this game just exists to be a fun game where you shoot things and there's a bad guy that is a headless guy running at you holding two bombs.

And that's fun, isn't it? That's pretty fun. It's like, I was like, oh yeah, this is just embracing what we're doing in the first place, which is just like, I don't know, having some sort of silly thing to mess around with. I feel like the first time I became aware of what would become the double A game

is the Nintendo 64 era. Because it felt like the only time that anybody was capable of actually producing a great game for that system was first party Nintendo games or Raresoft, right? When they make like GoldenEye, rare games. Benji Kazooie. Yeah, and the rest of the games on that system were so oftentimes medium, like real medium titles, right?

And like even Turok the Dinosaur Hunter, it was like, this is not great. It's not terrible, but it's not great. And it doesn't showcase the power of the system as well as Super Mario 64. So much of this is like a taxonomical exercise because you're saying that as like, oh yeah, Turok kind of feels like it was a double A game.

That actually feels right. But it's also like, I don't know, we kind of feels like it was a double A game. That actually feels right. But it's also like, I don't know, we don't have a strict definition of what that is. I don't know. I have no idea what Turok's budget was and what it was relative to other games of the era. But I think back on playing that game and I think on how, yeah, it stacks up relative to these other games that are aspiring to be the best game on the system, aspiring to

be critically acclaimed and aspiring to be commercially successful. And that game was just kind of like, I don't know, you run around shooting dinosaurs. That's fun, right? You know? Yeah, that's... But like part of it is like, what is this game trying to do? Right. And I'm sort of thinking about like, I'm thinking about this term in the modern context, but

I'm trying to think about like what games in my past would have been considered double A games. And I'm just thinking any game that was based on a movie could have been potentially been a double-a game Would you as somebody who worked in that would you say that those budgets were? Comparable to stuff that wasn't like a licensed game. So I mean I worked on the Their rebooting fantastic four yet again. I worked on the they're they're rebooting fantastic for yet again I worked on two fantastic four licensed games I worked on a Shrek licensed game and I worked on a Pirates of the Caribbean license Wait, which Shrek game did you work on? Shrek?

Like just like Shrek. Yeah, it was just a Shrek game because The Shrek 2 game. Yeah is pretty good. Yeah, that's that's not the one I worked on Yeah is pretty good. Yeah, that's that's not the one I worked on The Shrek 2 game is good. I'll give up Some of these games end up working But the thing is I think and it's interesting that you bring this up Yeah, because a couple of mine were going to be IP comic booky games That I think are kind of like walk the line of of are these quite like I think these these are double-a games But you can make an argument otherwise

But like the rocksteady games are really when we start to feel like oh They're gonna try to make these licensed games feel like triple-a games, right? It's like prior to that what was going on with the fantastic four games Which I can speak to most because those were games I worked on for years as opposed to Popping in for a few months on some of these other projects Those games were not budgeted like a game that was going to exist just to be a game. They were budgeted like, we can spend a little bit money

on production because we can have a little bit of a smaller team size because we're spending our money on the license. And we're spending our money on getting the actors from the movie to do voiceover in the game. That's where we're gonna allocate our resources. So as such, you were a little bit, it's partly why these games a lot of times didn't end up succeeding,

because it's like, man, they're unrealistic expectations for what they want. We don't have the time or the technology to deliver this. And so we're gonna do our best to try to make this thing work. But ultimately, all they care about is that this game is ready at the same time that the toys are on shelves. Because again, it's just part of the marketing campaign for the movie.

And all their sales, they expect to come from, it's tie into the IP, not from the quality of the game itself. They honestly don't even care about that. I'm talking about the publishers, not the developers who are working on it. Because I'm thinking about the other games that I would play, and I would imagine, I mean, there's no way I could, I guess I could look this up,

we could have looked this up, but we're not journalists. The budget for something like Jak 2 is in the team size for something like Jak 2, is probably smaller than the team size and budget for like the first God of War, even though they came out like around the same time. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, who can say?

It's like budgets are like a really, that's not a thing that they're necessarily going to be, it's not like movie budgets where you can just kind of find these numbers posted. A lot of times it's completely hidden, it's only guesstimated. Yeah. But yeah, I mean like this,

one of the artists I work with on the fantastic four games was an animator on the fantastic four games and he worked on Aquaman. I don't know if you remember the Aquaman game, the first Aquaman game. This was like an infamous like one of the worst games ever made. Like Superman 64. Yeah, it was like that level of superhero game, just like absolute fucking debacle. Less of a reputation than Superman 64,

because a bunch of people bought Superman 64. But this game was similarly just broken and unplayable. And I finally just talked to him once. I was like, hey man, what happened with that? And he was like, well, it was like, it was a little tough, because you know, like I was the only person on my team. I was like, oh, wow, you were the only animator

on this game? He's like, no, I was the only artist on the game. Oh my God. Yeah, the team size was three. It was three people trying to make a 3D game in the PlayStation 2, Xbox era. And he's like, we had one programmer, we had me doing all of the art and animation,

and then we had one designer, and the designer refused to work. So that's like. Oh my God. Holy shit. That's gonna really hinder things with a team that size. But you end up with something that's like, it's a miracle that they shipped anything.

But like, of course that wasn't going to work. And then the license holder or whoever, they probably just don't even care because they're not even looking they're they're they don't even like I also worked on the I don't want to just go down this road and just talk about that me working on bad license games. But the I worked on the Sopranos game Sopranos road is respect. I didn't actually work very long on that game.

I'm not saying it to defer any responsibility. It's just like I was only on that for a few months before I got moved on to the Pirates of the Caribbean game. What we realized working with HBO on that game, it originally had sort of a design that was going to be more akin to a telltale game. And so that was going to be like, hey, I think this could actually be interesting.

We could kind of approximate what we like about the show, which is that it's driven by conversations. It's driven by, you know, what you know about the other characters and how they react to each other. it's driven by lies and inferences and we sort of had that and then they were just sort of like, just make it Grand Theft Auto but with the Sopranos. So they like completely threw all those ideas out the window and were like, okay, let's just try to make this a beat-em-up with the Sopranos license and we'll get the voice actors

like, okay. But then at a certain point, they brought one an outside writer to help write the game script and that outside writer was his other project at the time Was writing the Sopranos cookbook as like so this guy like they just don't they think these things are the same They think the Sopranos cookbook and the Sopranos video game are in the exact same level like they don't care Yeah, just to to tie in products for their IP. What if that guy did too and he was like, here's my new character spaghetti. Yeah. Yeah.

Has anyone tried anything from that cookbook? I bet cookbooks sounds pretty good. I bet you it's probably good. Grandma's lasagna. It's all video game tips and you're like, wait a minute. Yeah, you also wrote the strategy guide. No, I mean, like, but I think that sometimes happens with licensed games.

We went on a long tangent there. But like, double A games can sometimes be licensed games. Another game that I was thinking of that was a comic book game of this era was The Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction, which to me, and that's one reason I'm excited for Donkey Kong Bonanza, is because it looks like that game where it's just like, you're just the Hulk running around

breaking stuff, it's pretty fun. I'm in my fucking Limp Bizkit era, I'm gonna break stuff, baby Let's do it But it also feels like it's like you know that game was That's what that game was you could run up a building and you can and you can bust through a wall and you can beat The shit out of somebody there was another game to like Obviously like the spider-man movie ones, but there was a there was an ultimate spider-man video game that was based more on the

the comics right well the MTV like Which was fucking awesome it was really really good and it had a sort of cell shaded like look and I sort of I think of that as like a As a double-a game, but anybody this is us assigning this new term to games of the past where I do agree with you, Nick, that it probably didn't become more of a thing until like the 360 PS3 era.

Well, that sort of comes into use in the 2010s, but I do think there are games, and I think Heather was saying this earlier, I think there are games that are a little bit earlier that still kind of fit into these categories, you know what I mean? Yeah. You mentioned one game, Heather,

and I've seen this game called a double A game. And I guess it's like, I guess I can't really argue with it, but obviously the re-release version that was fully voiced had a lot more polish to it, but the original version, just a handful of characters that was fully voiced had a lot more polish to it. But the original version, just a handful of characters were voiced, a lot more of it was just driven by text. But a game that's on all of our top, I think all time top 10 list, Disco Elysium,

a game that we all love. But yeah, I guess it is just a double A game. It doesn't have a bunch of sleek animated cut scenes, everything is happening from the same isometric perspective. Yeah. There are a limited number of animations that are used. I love the art direction. I think it's really good, but it's pretty spare. It also, that game, I think, is a testament to how much work,

how much heavy lifting writing can do in a video game. Right. When there isn't much else happening. Because like a lot of the time you're just listening to the most incredible prose ever spoken in a fucking video game. And that's carrying you through the stagnant, like if you told me that my favorite game of all time,

maybe my favorite game of all time was going to be a static screen most of the time while I was taking information in or looking at a menu. I'd be like, that does not sound like me, but it's the writing of that game that makes it seem like a triple A game that is stuffed inside of a double A game. Games that I was thinking about are like Katamari Damacy.

I think you could argue that Shadow of the Colossus is a double A game. That's an interesting one. I wonder. I think maybe. I mean, like, like, cause Team Ico, that's their other game. I mean, maybe Ico more so than their first game.

And then maybe they have a little bit more of the budget to make Shadow of the Colossus, which is a little bit more ambitious, but it is also like, it's pretty limited. It's like a 10 hour experience, you know? And it's also, it was not like, like Shadow of the Colossus didn't have an enormous advertising budget.

It didn't, it wasn't like a game that everybody in the PlayStation era was looking forward to, and a lot of people skipped it because it didn't have like that giant push from Sony, even though it ends up becoming a classic and influencing a ton of other games. But Shadow of the Colossus was like, hey, have you heard of this game? Yeah. And I feel like that's also a defining characteristic of these games is when it's not something that is pumped into every square inch of your browser when you are looking at Kotaku.com.

It is something that you have to find out about later, not unlike Expedition 33, where it's like, maybe we mentioned it last year, and it was like, oh, this kind of looks interesting. There's like a French JRPG, but beyond that, it's not on bus stops. Right. It's interesting, the word of mouth

in this era of social media just seems to spread so much more rapidly. Because I think, I was seeing that Clare Obscura is already passing 500k units, maybe a million units by the time this episode is released. It's done enormously well, but it's also, yes, you're right, that is coming through just a groundswell of enthusiasm for this game,

but that's just easier and more rapid to circulateate one of the games that I talk about on this podcast as something that I would Love us all to play God hand. That's a double a game Fucking I think another thing another facet of these games is because they are in this middle budget area They have enough of a polish to present you with systems that are Finalized but they don't have the risk ratio that forbids them from being a little weird. Yeah, that's part of what I like about it. That's part of what's on, I mean, again, Serious Sam, that was the whole thing, this game's just like kind of,

kind of fucking weird and specific. But also I think part of that is just like they are also the freedom to be a little dumb Yeah, which is which is I think the case with a lot of these stellar blades a double-a game Hmm. Hmm. You can speak to that Matt. You put a hundred hours into that I saw a joke that I don't know if I want to say okay well I think it's more of a double D game Matt's microphone stopped working for a second I said I it's more of a double D you know I was thinking of was Darksiders 2. And that's the only, the Darksiders games I played. I think it might've just shown up for free on,

I don't remember what it was, what it would've been at the time, because that was like an Xbox 360 game, right? Killer 7, No More Heroes. Like there was like a whole era of games where I feel like the only games that I was playing were double A games. Darksiders 2 is great, it's fun,

it's also really fucking stupid. You're just death, you ride around on a horse, your horse is called like plague or something. It's just like, it's not subtle at all. You just run into hacking and slashing, that's pretty much all it is. It's just a run around fight thing. I've never played Darksiders,

I should mess around with that. Yeah, the most recent one, I didn't play the most recent one. I was the most recent one, three or four, I don't remember, yeah. I think so, three. And then there are triple A games that feel like double-A games like cyberpunk 2077 on pawn release Final Fantasy stranger in paradise. I think that's a double-A. Yeah, that's a double-A. Yeah, sure. That's a double-A game It looks feels and is one It looks, feels, and is one. Yeah.

Like, don't you want to fight chaos? I don't care, who the fuck are you? Fuck chaos. Well, so that's another thing that you'll see is that a game that has a big license, and, but it's not like, it's like a little guidon, or it's like not a mainline entry will sometimes meet the criteria. Crystal Chronicles.

Yeah, Crystal Chronicles. Yeah, Crystal Chronicles. But I was thinking like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is one or the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance slash the Champions of Norrath, which was the EverQuest when they rebranded it for EverQuest. Those are just like top down, like isometric hack and slash games. They're just dungeon crawlers, but they were super fun. And it's just like, again,

this game just exists to be a video game. You just run around as a dwarf with an axe, just like chopping up gelatinous cubes or whatever the fuck and collecting loot, but it's a very fun gameplay cycle. And I like that there isn't a moment where we have this big richly animated cut scene that's going to take, you know, four minutes of real time to watch. Fortnite is a weird version of this because it I think started as a double A

game and then became a triple A game because like the early, if you look at the early assets, the animation, the lack of an ability to run, the lack of modes, like it was, it was a pretty stripped down experience. Could you imagine if you started playing it when you couldn't run, you would never want to play it. I would never have played it. But like the locomotion in the early builds of that game are super slow, and it's also like flat shaded,

like you can't drive a car in it, you can't like, the houses, like everything about it is very double A. And it has over time, through sucking money out of everybody's pockets, has become a massive, partially owned by Disney, triple A game. Yeah, I mean, you could certainly speak with more authority on that specifically. Like I don't really know how to classify, you know, a live service game because a lot

of these are like they kind of start smaller and they iterate and they become these big sprawling you know, much more ambitious designs and yeah, maybe that is it. Maybe they started as AA and turned into AAA. One thing I was thinking, I was just looking for other people's assessments of what qualifies as a AA game and this was one that was, just because we recently did an episode on these games with Mike Drucker. But I was reading someone saying the Two Point games are kind of double-A games.

I was like, I can kind of see that. Two Point Museum, Two Point Hospital, which we discussed on here, Two Point Campus, it's like, yeah, I mean, this is, but there's also an element of like, it kind of feels like an indie game too, you know? And that's where these definitions get nebulous. And there's also like, how helpful is that?

Cause also a lot of times I think when we're talking about a double A game, what we really mean is a game that fits into one of the categories of triple A games. And a lot of times those are character action games or open world RPGs, but just has a more limited design. When you told me that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was a double A game, it blew my mind.

I saw some people classify the Kingdom Come games as double A games and I think that might just again be because of it's coming from an independent studio and it's a smaller team size but I know that the level of detail in Kingdom Come Home Deliverance 2, which I haven't played, is, you know, it seems pretty impressive from the clips I've seen. Yeah.

A definition of AA that I saw is, people were classifying it in this way, was like AAA and looks only, kind of, where like you could sort of get away with like like like Claire scared looks like a triple a game plays like a triple a game, but it's a Sort of mid-budget mid price point Probably a smaller team made this thing

but like something like Kingdom come deliverance looks like a triple a game because of how You know Kingdom Come Deliverance looks like a AAA game because of how you know What's the word? Big it is how big it is how vast its scope is What I was looking for big I couldn't think of the word big my pickles of my show again My shoes and that my other shoes in the jar Some games for me that come to mind are more from recent years though. Sifu is a great double A game. I didn't play Sifu but I heard it was it was Oroshaved. Sifu fucking rules.

It is so great. I haven't finished it. I would like to get back to it at some point. That studio has another game coming out that is nothing like Sifu at all. It's a soccer game and it's just soccer. I'm interested, it's called, I can't remember what it's called, it's called like Rebound or something.

Plain Soccer. It looks cool, it's sort of like an action soccer game. Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks did, they had other big evil within, I think is their other big games, which are AAA games. And then they do Hi-Fi Rush, which is the sort of rhythm action game.

Yeah, you mentioning Hi-Fi Rush made me think of Neon White, but I was like, I guess Neon White is more of just like an indie game, but it does kind of have that sort of feel of a AA game. Yeah, I agree. Was Mirror is more of just like an indie game, but it does kind of have that sort of feel of a double A game. Yeah, I agree. Was Mirror's Edge a double A or a triple A game? Wow, great question.

Cause that was a game that had a lot of hype, but then kind of landed softly. But it was, yeah, and it undersold, but it was a really cool design. The idea of, and man, no one's really, I actually, Neon White is probably the closest it's come to feeling like one's really, actually Neon White is probably the closest it's come to feeling like Mirror's Edge, even though that game does have some,

you know, some weaponry. It's like just the idea of basing a game around first person platforming is, and also just like, again, a sense of speed in first person. Like that was a really cool thing. Yeah, I don't know, maybe that might be a double A game. When I was thinking through this, my big maybe that might be a double A game. When I was thinking through this, my big swing on what is a double A game,

and I wonder how this will land in the room, was the first Demon's Souls for PS3 kind of a double A game? You son of a bitch! No, I kind of just like, you look at the game, and it's pretty limited in terms of what it's trying to do. It is, yeah, but it's an enormously successful design, and then they're able to parlay that into the Dark Souls series, which is much more ambitious.

So the world might be mended. What about these types of games? Because there are games that are, like, unchartered, and the Sony Spider-Man games are hugely AAA, but then they have other games. They have, like, The Lost Legacy comes out, and is, like, would we say that's a double A game? I don't know, because they're still just like,

this is their first party games with enormous budgets for their, I think they're still all kind of in the triple A, but I don't fucking know. I can think of a double A game that was packaged inside of a triple A game, which is Factions for The Last of Us. So you've got like your main triple A experience

and then you have kind of a well thought out but not exceedingly deep online mode where you can like battle other people which is not the focus of the game and wasn't even repackaged upon re-releases. You can't play factions unless you play the original game. So that feels like a double A game that's inside a triple A game.

Have you messed around with No Return? No. I messed around with it pretty recently. It sort of undercuts the entire message of the game. It's like an endless killing mode, basically. No. But it fucking rocks. It's really good.

But it probably wouldn't scratch the, it's a roguelike, it wouldn't scratch the factions, it's because you're not playing against another human being. Yeah, it's what I need. Yes. Try to get my blood boiling. I don't know if this applies to Psychonauts 2, but I feel like Psychonauts 1 was kind of a double A game.

Like it just, I don't know, it feels like that had that same sort of, you know, it wasn't a great game. It wasn't like the kind of a release with a sort of fanfare of like a first party mascot platformer of the era. Right, right. I think that the majority of my game collection

is double-A games because when a triple-A game comes out, everybody plays it, everybody basically likes it if it's your kind of game, right? But when you find a double-A game that you really connect with, it becomes something very special to you and a little bit more of a, I don't know, like a smaller audience that you can communicate with

about that game online. Like there are plenty of people who have enjoyed Katamari Damacy, sure, great. But is it going to be the game that people list first when they're thinking about the PlayStation 2? Probably not. And so you're already self-selecting like the games that you connect with and the audience

that you connect with. Whereas if you say to somebody, oh, I really liked Call of Duty Modern Warfare, like, that's going to be a much larger net that you cast. Right? So it feels more specialized. It feels more personal. And it feels more, I don't know, kind of like a secret that you have,

even though these are huge, multi-million selling games. I think I got something. All right. Red Dead Revolver, double A. Red Dead Redemption, triple A. So sometimes we have the proof of concept that leads to a, you know, or the glorified tech demo that leads to the actual product in the next iteration.

Bully, double A. Sure, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. Okay, so that's interesting, because yeah, the Rockstar obviously was making at the same time, you know, the Grand Theft Auto franchise, but yeah, they have a little, they're like, oh, let's make this Bully game,

let's see what's going on here. And I feel like the same thing, I wonder how to classify the Yakuza franchise slash like a dragon franchise, but it does kind of feel like when they make a game like came out earlier this year, like a dragon pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, that feels like they're taking,

that's not a mainline entry, but they're kind of doing like a little bit more of a AA. They're reusing some of the existing content, some of the existing mini games and putting them into different contexts. That feels like they're kind of doing a double-A riff on this existing franchise, which happens sometimes. That Prince of Persia Lost Crown is double-A to me. Also, it was a smaller studio that Ubisoft had and then they were like, this game didn't, it sold pretty well.

Like, and then they shut the whole thing down. I can think of a game that started as AAA and became AA. Oh. Which is the Sonic franchise. Sonic's AA. Sonic Frontiers is- Yeah, that's a, that feels like a AA game.

It's a AA game. Yeah, playing it, but I mean, it rocks. Yeah, it fucking rules. But like your initial Sonic games, I mean, not that 16, because we've already said that the criteria for these triple A games is not that they really, really apply to the 16 bit era,

but your first Sonic games and certainly Sonic Adventure, it was everything that they had, like throwing everything at that game. And by the time you get to Frontiers, after you've had Sonic turn into a werewolf and you've had Shadow holding a gun, then it's a double-A game. Sonic kissing a human lady.

That was maybe their last attempt at making it a triple-A game. I also think that there are double-A games that are inside of franchises for triple-A games. So there's like Final Fantasy Dirge of Cerberus, which is like a double-A Final Fantasy VII spin-off. Yeah, Crisis Corps.

Crisis Corps, or fucking, First Soldier was a double-A online experience. Yeah. There's no, I mean. I was just thinking about The Bouncer, which I guess is a, it was a double-A game, I guess? Yeah, for sure, yeah. I thought about The Bouncer, remember.

Oh my God, the bouncer. What about something like Gunn? Yes, double A. I never played Gunn, but I remember Gunn. I mean, it feels like it, I don't fucking know. Or what was that game that was, oh, it's just Roman numerals 13. They just remastered it in the last couple years or something.

I think that's just a section of Kingdom Hearts that you like. Oh wait. I'm thinking of Organization XIII. A couple more I wrote down here. I don't know if this really qualifies, but I mentioned the Rocksteady games and I mentioned obviously Arkham City, Arkham Knight, those are like AAA games. But I don't remember playing the original Arkham Asylum, which is just so, and I mean, I'll be honest, I still think my favorite of that franchise

is it has such a soft spot for that game and just how great the combat felt at the time and what a novelty it was to just be Batman, just like fucking guys up. But it's like, that game is so confined, you know? It's so limited and it's just like, I don't know, this kinda has a double A feel to it. Not to make my list too heavy on superhero games.

But my other big swing I was gonna throw out here, I know it's absurd to say, because this is one of the greatest games ever made and it came from Valve, but doesn't Portal One kinda feel like a double A game? Or does that feel more like an indie game? I mean, it feels like a AA game. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so singular, it's kind of hard to classify, but. I mean, it's not an indie game in the traditional sense. So I would say that it has to be a AA game because it certainly wasn't a AAA title. Like it wasn't like Have you heard? Portal is coming it was kind of like hey here's this check out this thing

Yeah, I'll made you know it's fun We got some you know it got some students from DigiPen and kind of made it They let them make a new version of their get their design It's kind of a just like a major flex like yeah. Yeah, here's just here's just yeah this little game. That's one of the greatest games ever made ever made. Here you go. It's like a five hour experience. Wrench, did you finish your Portal playthrough? I did.

I did in one sitting. What's your overall assessment of that game? I really loved it. Are you gonna play Portal 2 or did you play Portal 2? I've not played it yet, but it is on my list. Okay, well there you go. Let us know when you get to it. Portal 1, double A.

Portal 2, triple A. Yeah, I think that escalation often seems to happen. I could just do that for an hour. Give me two games. I think you have. I think that's what we- This one, but then this one. I'm not saying that it is the budget of a double A game,

Is, I'm not saying that it is the budget of a double A game, but I'm saying within the context of the larger franchise, is Super Mario Sunshine the double A Super Mario game to the rest of the franchise's triple A's? Interesting. I don't know, cause I still feel like they were trying to, they wanted that one to basically be, you know, on the same level of 64 and galaxy, whatever.

It was just kind of a misfire. But what I think I maybe would land is I feel like maybe Super Mario Wonder is more like that because it's just like, again, it's a kind of a, I don't know, it's so refined, it's so polished. It's kind of hard to say anything about AAA. It's so fucking good. It's so fucking good, but it but it also is just like it's it's not as ambitious as like a Super Mario Yeah, you know I don't know I

Probably anything first-party Nintendo should probably make like one big Mario game per generation I was just thinking that same thing right now is like it's kind of I mean obviously Look Mario's huge. We all know Mario. Yeah. I think there's just not that many 3D Mario games where you really stop and think about it. For how popular a character is, there's 64, Sunshine,

Galaxy One and Two. I'm sure I'm missing one. No, I'm not. 3D World? 3D Land and 3D World. 3D Land and 3D World. And like, that's kind of it. And Odyssey? Oh, in Odyssey, I'm missing one. No, I'm not 3d land and 3d world 3d land in 3d world and like that's kind of an Odyssey In Odyssey, I forgot seven. I guess are we missing any it's a lot the paper Mario games are like a different thing Yeah, yeah, no advice as far as mainline mainline 3d entries. I guess that is it's only seven

Yeah, and you could argue that even though it is an extraordinary game Super Mario Galaxy 2 is kind of like a DLC. It's like a huge expansion on the first one, but it is more of those kinds of levels. It was so fucking weird to have a Nintendo GameCube and then Super Mario Sunshine comes out, and you're like, hey man, you play New Mario? It sucks.

Like, if there was a New Mario game and it was bad, I don't know what to do with myself. I've sat here on this very show, and I've said Super Mario Sunshine is bad, and then from both of you have told me, no it's not, don't say that. Wait, I've said that? I think.

I don't think I've ever been like, Super Mario Sunshine is great. Maybe if there's a clip of me saying it you don't remember You know I remember that it's that I don't like Super Mario 64 that much Yeah, you're fucking mine. I only played the DS one. I did like it on the DS, but I don't play the original It's great. It's great. It does good It is a little clumsy to play these days, but it's still just incredible when I get my fucking game room set up, dude You're gonna come over and you're gonna play it as meant to be played and I think you're gonna find it beautiful Okay, you're much Mario up fall into the lava. He's burned his butt

More characters in video games should be able to burn their little butt So weird More characters in video games should be able to burn their little butts. These are so weird. It should happen. It's like I'm on the same page with you and I'm like communicating and then suddenly you become totally different creatures. You don't think it's funny when he burns his little butt? That's very funny. I think it's not. No, I guess I don't.

Wren, do you like it when Mario burns his little butt? Yeah. It'd be great if that was... that was in like a God of War. If Kratos goes, oh! Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha We did a Mario Sunshine episode and I didn't beat Mario Sunshine back in the day and I finally beat Super Mario Sunshine when we covered it here. And it still ultimately just doesn't really work as a game. I don't know why we went on this tangent exactly. But it's like, it's- I said, cause is Sunshine the AA of a AAA franchise?

And I think it's like the worst of them, but it's still, I don't know if it quite qualifies just because it certainly had aspirations to be like a AAA game, you know? Yeah. And also AAA game doesn't mean good, so I guess we should clarify that. It was trying very hard to be that sort of game.

It didn't ultimately work. Right, because like- How do you wanna classify it? That Sony game that was out for like a week was like a huge AAA game. Concord, yeah. Yeah, Concord was like a massive AAA game. Yeah, and I think that's like, you know, however all the Assassin's Creed's have been received, they've all been AAA games.

They've all had that level of, that scale of budget applied to them. Is Helldivers 2 AA? I was thinking about this, and again, I just don't know quite how to classify live service, level of that scale of budget applied to them. Is Helldivers II AA? I was thinking about this, and again, I just don't know quite how to classify live service games. Yeah. I'm thinking of these, mostly when I'm thinking of these,

I'm thinking of single player experiences, but it certainly has that feel. It certainly has that vibe. I mean, it has that aesthetic, and it's a great sounding game, but it's like, it kind of has that sense of fun of a AA game. Yeah, it's just like so gloriously dumb it rocks It's really really fun super earth is like the best joke in a game last year

I've been thinking it might be the best joke in a game in the last like 10 Jokes and games are not fucking funny dare you I'm trying to think of the last time I played a game, and I laughed out loud. I know it was recently I'm laughing all the time. This guy's always chuckling. I think a lot of games have really good writing. Yeah, there was something we played recently that I was like, that was so funny.

I can't remember now what it was. It's gone. It's gone. I don't know. I mean, I think this is, I like what you were saying, Heather. It's just like, I maybe just generally like these games more than I like AAA games.

Because the thing about AAA games is like, I know what I'm in for. I know I'm not going to, basically the first 90 minutes, I'm not going to play this game for one second. You know what I mean? Like I maybe have a minute where I get to run around a little tutorial combat section, but the rest of this is going to just be like

lore dumps and lengthy cut scenes. And it's just like, it's kind of tedious to get into these games. And then I'm committed to 120 hour experience and I'm just like, it's kind of tedious to get into these games. Yeah. And then I'm committed to 120 hour experience and I'm just like, all right. Is Death Stranding an indie game? I was just about to say this affectionately.

I can't wait to be playing Death Stranding and then get to a part where I have to watch an entire movie before I can play again. I can't wait. Look, this is the, I feel like when Henry Hill is beating the shit out of Karen's boss and good fellas, Hideo Kojima can do whatever the fuck he wants. I don't care.

He has different rules. Absolutely, no, he, yeah. If you can do it at the level that he does it at, then yeah, go for it. But if you can't compete on the same level as him, don't enter the slam dunk contest. No, but also there's like, it's not even that because I think a lot of times this is more coming

top down from like, you know, publishers or it's just like, hey, this is the expectation of the marketplace that this is a thing that's going to be front loaded with a lot of cinematics or they're just going to have a ton of cinematics throughout the run of it. It is going to be sequences of gameplay where you earn a movie you get to watch.

And I just kind of feel like that's, we're all kind of tired of that. We're all kind of tired of a thing we always talk about, but like a mini map that's dotted with a bunch of different punctuation marks and endless series of side quests that all feel very samey. All the collectibles. I mean, like a lot of these games,

a lot of these open world, you know, 3D character action games or RPGs, just they all feel very samey. And it's nice to have a breath of fresh air like a Claire Obscure that is just like, hey, this is a narrower focus. This is a much more linear experience, this has a clear point of view behind it.

We have drilled down on what makes these games fun and compelling, and you just get to enjoy that for its own sake. Yeah, I am very tired of the open world, every game is like an open world thing now. And I say that and I know that I'm gonna play like three more, maybe more this year. Hey, shall we do a segment?

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, I've got some dudes from video games and we'll see if our producer, Ranch, knows who they are. It's another edition of Dude Ranch. And hey, in honor of Ranch's birthday, these are all dudes from games that are celebrating a birthday.

These are all games that turned 20 years old this year. Wow. So I'll be saying dudes from games released in 2005. Okay. This is good. This is good. All right, and let me keep score here as we're going. And these are all older than Ranch, right?

Then, if it's from 2005. Yeah, I think Ranch is celebrating her 19th birthday. Okay. Okay, so first up, this one should be a gimme. Does Ranch know Leon Kennedy? I'm gonna say yes. Matt says yes. I'm gonna say yes. Two yeses. Ranch, who is Leon Kennedy. I'm gonna say yes. Matt says yes. I'm gonna say yes.

Two yeses. Ranch, who is Leon Kennedy? Leon Kennedy is from Resident Evil. There we go. Yeah, that's right. Resident Evil 4 specifically. All right, you both get a point here. Next up, Kratos.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. It's, who'd be a funny guy for ranch to know I think I'm gonna I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna say yes to yeses ranch who is Kratos. I know what he looks like He's bald okay, and he's from a Viking game hmm. I'm gonna give I'm gonna give it to you I'm gonna give it to you. God of War. She got it, she got it, she got it.

Is God of War a Viking game? There is a version of it that is. Two of them are, yeah. All right, next up, the original though, the one that came out in 2005, God of War, that was the first game and that was more in Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, yeah.

All right, next up, the Prince of Persia. What? Is it so funny? Is it so funny? Is it so funny? Is it so funny? Is it so funny? Is itia. Why is it so funny? Is it because we're considering if she doesn't know them? It'd be kind of, I mean, I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say no also. All right, two nos.

Ranch, who is the Prince of Persia? Is he from a Disney game? I think you both get it. It's a fair guess, because of the movie. He's from the, no, but he's from the Prince of Persia franchise. And the specific game was Prince of Persia, the Two Thrones came out in 2005. And so far- was Prince of Persia, the two thrones came out in 2005.

You both get a point, you both tied at three. This list is an attack on me because usually the information that these games are 20 years old rips you guys to your core. What I'm dealing with right now, these are my games. All right, next up, Wander or Wanda. Oh, I don't even think I know who that is. You do know who this is. No, no.

You do know who this is. Wait, no, I do, I do, I do. No, she doesn't know. No, she doesn't know. She doesn't know. Two nos. Ranch, who is Wander slash Wanda? I don't even have a guess.

You both get a point. Wander is from Shadow of the Colossus. That's right, yes. Yeah. 20 years old. Have you ever seen the Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle film Rain Over Me about grieving his family's loss in 9-11? No.

Shadow of the Colossus is featured in that game. Heavily. Do we know if the movie was the movie and then they were like, he needs to be playing a video game and it just so happened to be Shadow of the Colossus. We talked about that on the episode is the whole thing was it came from the editor. Like one of the editors,

one of the people working on post production, you know, that like talk at length about how like, yeah, they need a video game. And he had the suggestion of like, hey, this is thematically about grieving loss and about, you know, trying to reclaim something, a love you cannot have anymore. And like, this feels like it can kind of tie in. about grieving loss and about trying to reclaim something, a love you cannot have anymore.

And like, this feels like it can kind of tie in. An enormous thing's collapsing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it all worked out. It was a smart decision. Yeah. All right, next up, Sly Cooper. Yeah.

Does Ranch know who Sly Cooper is? No. Heather says no, hard no. I think I'm gonna say yes on this one. So this is where we'll diverge. Ranch, who is Sly Cooper? Sly Cooper is a character in the Sonic games. All right, Heather gets a point,

Matt doesn't get a point. Ranch, what the? What's going on? Sorry. Sly III, Honor Among Thieves, 20 years old this year, Matt. The third one, that's alarming information. Sly Cooper is star of Sly Cooper. He's from the Sly Cooper franchise

and the Thievius Raccoonus, a raccoon, a burglar. And he's kinda hot. What? What? Yeah, I think he maybe is kinda hot. He's kinda hot in the same way that the animated Robin kind of hot. What? What? Yeah, I think he maybe is kind of hot. He's kind of hot in the same way that like the animated Robin Hood is hot. I don't, you know, I've never really thought of Sly Cooper with any sort of...

He's got Riz. Yeah, with any sort of like a lustful desires, but he is a good looking guy. I guess animated Robin Hood is hot. Everybody thinks that animated Robin Hood is hot. Yeah, he's fucking hot as shit. Huh. No, he looks good.

Yeah, Sly Cooper, you know what? Sly Cooper's pretty hot. Look at him. That's a handsome, and he's kinda jacked. Yuck, no. No. I'm with Heather. What the hell, okay.

He's looking good. All right, next up. I like to be so wrong. Joanna Dark. Nope. Heather says no. This is a, yeah, this is a Yeah. Joanna Dark. Nope. Heather says no. This is a, yeah, this is a no. Two nos.

Ranch, who is Joanna Dark? Joanna Dark is from Dust Stranding. No, Joanna Dark is from- That's a bad name. That sounds like a bad name. That does kind of sound like a Kojima name. No, from Perfect Dark Zero, which turns 20 years old. You both get a point.

I wanna do a quick shout out here on the podcast to somebody who doesn't listen to the podcast. The guy that I used to play Perfect Dark with when it came out, like my number one buddy, who we would play and play and play, he lived above me, got nominated for a Tony today. Oh, wow. That's amazing. That's pretty fucking cool.

That's awesome. Wow. Congrats. Yeah, shout out to Marco Paguia for the orchestrations of Buena Vista Social Club. Oh, wow. That's amazing. That's pretty fucking cool. That's awesome. Wow. Congrats. Yeah, shout out to Marco Paguia for the orchestrations of Buena Vista Social Club. Wow. How cool. It's pretty fucking cool. Shall I do the next name?

You really want to, so let's do it. Dry Bones. God damn it. No. I'm going to say yes. No. Heather says no. Matt says yes. There is a split here.

Ranch, who's Dry Bones? Dry Bones is one of the little guys in Mario Kart. He's a skeleton. Hey. Wow. Yes, Matt gets a point. It is all knotted up. Yes, you are correct. Dry Bones made his debut.

The skeletal Koopa made his debut in Mario Kart DS, which is 20 years old. I love Dry Bones made his debut, the skeletal Koopa made his debut in Mario Kart DS, which is 20 years old. Wow. I love Dry Bones. Yeah, Dry Bones is my guy. What makes it funny is the seriousness with which Nick is saying the names. That's what's funny. But also there's like a sort of like- Dry Bones.

We're so familiar with the names. Yeah. So the idea that somebody could not know like who Dry Bones is We're so familiar with the names. Yeah. So the idea that somebody could not know, like, who Dry Bones is, is funny to us because we're so innately familiar with who they are. It's like a movie, you're doing a movie podcast and you're asking if the producer knows who Indiana Jones is. Have you ever heard of the movie Jaws? But I think another aspect which our audio listeners can't perceive is that every time

I say one of these names, Ranch is covering her face with both hands. All right, final one. And this could be the deciding. This will determine it. John Madden. Nick, I have to say it. You're a fool for this one. Oh no.

I'm going to say no. Heather says no. I'm going say no. Heather says no. I'm going to say yes because one of us has to win. Wow. Ranch, who is John Madden? John Madden is the guy from Madden 2K. Hey, Madden 2K. You know what? I think you both win.

I was really hoping that Ranch wasn't going to say one of the guys from Good Charlotte. Quick bonus question for the two of you. Which Madden game is it the 20th anniversary of? Bit of a trick question. 05. I'm gonna say- No, it's 04. Wait, no, it can't be 06. You guessed three times before I had their guess once.

I'm gonna say it was a reboot that was just called Madden. That's a good guess, but no, it was actually Madden 06 because sports games are always the the next year of their like car They're like car years. They're they're always the next chronological year when they released Hey, that's this week's get played our producers Rachel Chen ranch yard underscore underscore start ranch you back up streaming yet Just got my PC back. Hey, nice. I will be awesome. What are you planning on streaming? I gotta finish Everything go okay with the PC? Yeah, I had to get my motherboard fixed and my CPU fixed and then a cooler replaced.

Oh wow. Hopefully you weren't out of there for there wasn't too much damage financially. But glad you're back up and running again yard underscore underscore sard to check out Ranch's stream. Our music is by Ben Prenty, benprentymusic.com. Our art is by Duck Brigade Design, duckbrigade.com. And and hey get played merch is available at kinship goods calm you find the link the show description also check out get animated sister show over on Patreon. Matt what's up this week. all month long on the Get Animated feed. We're gonna be watching a random anime that the listeners have suggested, and we're gonna use the ranch number generator to decide which random anime we'll be watching that week.

It's gonna be fucking chaos. I've heard that there are more than a thousand entries. Wow. We'll see what gets picked. We are going in blind with a randomly selected first episode of an anime, of a random anime series, and we will see how that all plays out

over at patreon.com slash get played. And you know what? Something got played this week. Double A games. You can't say that like that. Yeah, it was fine. Like you could have said it like a normal man. Oh, the pickle fell out of my shoe.

I like this pickle guy. He's just like me for real. That was a HateGum podcast. Hey, I'm Tony Hale. I'm Matt Oberg. And I'm Kristin Schall. And we're going to be hosting the new podcast, The Extraordinarians, where we are going to be interviewing extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, things that we have

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