Get Played - The Game Was Better: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Heather, Nick and Matt discuss the Sega document leak, Dave the Diver and some more light Final Fantasy XVI impressions before diving into the 2001 CGI box office bomb Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. This month's We Play, You Play: Final Fantasy XVI! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @getplayedpod. Check out our premium series Get Anime'd on patreon.com/getplayed or on Stitcher Premium. 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] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This is such an exciting opportunity. You know, we're huge fans of the game. And just to bring that to the big screen. Yeah. Coming off of Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9. This is going to be ginormous. Yeah. And I think, you know, we'll touch on these, like, major, major hallmarks of the genre, hallmarks of the games.

We'll pack this movie full of the things that the fans love about Final Fantasy. And it'll also work as a gateway to introduce new people, like cinema audiences, to the worlds and concepts and tropes of Final Fantasy games. I'm not a gamer. I don't really know the world Final Fantasy games. And I'm just, I'm not a gamer, right? I don't really know the world of video games. I'm just an executive, right? So why don't you guys tell me what things you want in the movie from the game? Cool. And, you know, I'll see what we can make happen.

Cool. I think of Final Fantasy, I think of one word, airship. We got to have an airship in this bad boy. Okay. Okay. Uh, fair, fair. Uh,

you know, like you to change, you got to bend some rules. You got to break some rules in order to, okay. How about, um, one of the hallmarks of final fantasy is these,

uh, birds that people ride called chocobos. And I think that if we have our characters riding chocobos in this movie, then we're guaranteed box office success. No. Okay, well, hey, here's a smaller thing. A healing item that's always in these games is a potion. So, you know, we could have a character

just swigging a potion. Kind of a little... Okay. All right, how uh if you take magic systems right no they have this uh well okay but like it could be a magic system that's has some technological basis like materia you know no okay what about what okay what if you what if there's like degrees of magic system like blizzara blizzaga like you like you increasing magic systems like that that show off like power levels of the characters

no okay um i changed my mind about chocobos you can put it on you can put it on t-shirt oh okay oh hey and hey if we're open to chocos, maybe we're open to the other iconic character that is present in all these games, the Moogle. What about, I mean, most of the games have swords. No. How about at least, you know, one thing I think we have to have in this movie is the music, the iconic score of Nobuo Uematsu. I mean, that just adds so much texture to the film.

And then that's just like such a key part of the property. It's like John Williams' score in Star Wars. It's locked in with Final Fantasy. We got to get, we're going to have Uematsu for sure. No. All right. Can we at least take a picture of our main character in like a sexy bikini and put it in like a near porno meg? Well, yeah. You could absolutely do that absolutely that's a no-brainer we should be doing that for every film

as far as i'm concerned all right then how about a character named sid all right i'll give you one i'll give you one all right so sid c, C-I-D. Sid. No. We shoot invisible phantoms and maintain the same facial expressions as we discuss 2001 box office bomb Final Fantasy The Spirits Within this week on Get Played. Welcome Welcome to 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, Nick Weiger. Oh, you know that's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaca.

Oh, you know that's me, Nick Weiger. And I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaca. Oh, you know that's me. And hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to Get Played, the premier video game podcast where we're talking about all sorts of video game and video game adjacent stuff right here on the show that you chose to listen to with your own human ears. Humans only. I don't want any other beings listening to this dang thing.

All right. No aliens, no cryptids of any kind, and particularly no phantoms. Calm down, Ashley from Mass Effect. Famously xenophobic. I disagree. If you're an alien, if you're an alien, go ahead and listen.

Because I would be terrified if you heard that and you were like, well, time to invade. They might listen to this and be like, you know what? We got to end this

human race. Well, hopefully they don't end it before this month's We Play, You Play, where we talk about one game at length. That game is going to be Final Fantasy 16, and that episode is coming out on Monday, July 31st. So if you want to play along with us, we are going to talk about it extensively, and maybe you already are playing along.

We'll hear your thoughts then as well. That's right. Oh, boy. They're going to hear some thoughts. They sure are. We got them. We got some chunky thoughts. I got a couple little marbles rattling around in this old noggin of mine.

I got to put some serious time into that game in the next couple of weeks. I think you can do it. I've been pretty thin. I've been playing. I've been playing, but I've been a little thin on how much time I'm truly dedicating to it and I think I just gotta hunker down

on a rainy day here in Amsterdam and play the fuck out of Final Fantasy 16 I think I think you can I think you can do it

I just need it to be a rainy day weather uncharacteristically sunny here in amsterdam and it has been uh a a little it's been a little weird i came here i came here thinking for it it would be rainy i understand that it's always sunny in philadelphia i didn't know the same applied to amsterdam well you know especially because sh Shirley Manson was going to vacation there.

Oh, boy. And so she's probably beside herself. Thank you very much. This has been Get Played. You can follow us online at Get Played Pod or... I see an alien outside my window pointing a gun at me. Not even an alien gun a human gun that's a really funny like if this was like 1998 and you wanted to do like a parody movie like one of those little grays coming into your room and then pulling a regular gun on you is pretty funny like yeah if we can find a way to go back and put that in scary movie too

yeah yeah you could do like an x-files parody and in like 1998 yeah and that could be the thing that happens to like you know what would they call fox molder they'd probably call him like dog holder yeah that's really good that's really good and he's he's like he's played by like um like well charlie sheen's in those movies so that's like not that funny it could still be charlie sheen yeah he'll be dog holder and uh and his partner will be scully but she'll just be bones she'll be a skeleton um man it's good what what is the topic the topic this week if you're if you're like tuning in for the show and you're like what are they going to talk about? We've got a chunky talk today.

It's true. A real crunchy talk about one of history's most interesting cinematic bombs. We'll be talking about Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. But before we talk about that, we always talk about other shit. But before we talk about that, we always talk about other shit. And sometimes we do it like this, where we're just like chit-chatting, and we're doing like a little bit-bopping, and we talk about little here's and there's.

We're just riffing. We're just riffing. Telling stories about the road. Talking about great sets we've done. Yeah. There's been interesting video game news. There was. Are we going to talk about the Sega thing?

I think we should a little bit. Yeah, this may be, you know, this will be probably about a week old when this episode comes out, but I'll read the headline

from Xputer.com. A huge classified 272-page Sega document leaks online revealing a gold mine of details. And basically, it just quietly showed up on the site Sega Retro

as just a PDF called Sega FYI 1997 Brand Review US.PDF. And within it, it's just like, you know, it's just got so many like diagrams and breakdowns of budgets and, you know, just like just technical details about just the Mega Drive and then the upcoming Saturn launch. There's like there's like storyboards for a Saturn commercial that I don't know if that ever aired, you know, things like that. It's just it's really interesting.

you know things like that it's it's just it's it's really interesting what what's part of what's interesting about it is learning that sega was losing losing money on all of their hardware and that the margin for retail was so thin six percent thin there were there were the retail So thin. Six percent. So thin. The retailers made $15 per unit of Saturn hardware sold. So basically, it is a financial burden on the parent company. And then there's very little financial incentive for the retailer to push Sega systems. Right? Which is kind of maintained, I feel like. It's why when you go to GameStop or when you pre-order a console, they want to bundle it with a bunch of software and accessories because the actual margins of the hardware are pretty

thin. Yes. I remember when I worked at Electronics Boutique back in my childhood. It's really funny to think that I was working at it like I was a child laborer. Sure. Right. Working at a retail shop, selling video games at electronics boutique. And yeah, that was they they when they would have these like onboardings, they'd be like, systems are great, but selling systems hurts us. So you have to try and sell games with those systems. Even better, try and sell that two-year insurance policy.

Nobody ever cashes it in. And it just helps increase the margins on selling these systems, are which are damaging and you would get people who'd come in and it was almost like they knew because they'd come in and they'd be like yeah i want a system and you'd be like okay um would you be interested in a game for that because it doesn't come with a packed in game and they'd be like no and you'd be like okay well you know sometimes systems break and what if you you you don't want to buy a whole new one so what why don't you get an insurance policy for that uh it's only 15 no what about a magazine yeah like magazines no you'd be like you're just buying a raw system it's like somebody going into a wiener schnitzel and being like, I want a hot dog on a

plate. Hey, again, talking about chain restaurants, that's why they want you to buy the combo. The sandwich or the whatever the main is, is the least profitable item. They make a lot more money on the sides and especially the drinks. This is a quote that was from this article that Exputer pulled. I like this one because of the hubris. This is from the CEO of Sega of America, Tom Kalinske. Quote, we are killing Sony. In every store, Saturn hardware is sold out and there are stacks of PlayStation. The retailers commented that they can't compare the true sales rate because Saturn sells out before they can measure accurately. Wish I could get all our staff, salespeople, retailers, analysts, media, et cetera, to

see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually. Well, what's crazy about that quote, right, is that it's true. In Japan, the Saturn fucking ruled. It took a long time for the PlayStation brand to become established. And like also 2D games, which were a forte of the Saturn, were still very largely popular in Japan at the time. Also, it had that six button controller for fighting games. It was it was it was the system to beat.

Sega was an established brand. it was the system to beat. Sega was an established brand. So if you went to Japan and were like, holy shit, the Saturn is fucking ruling here. Yeah. Of course you'd come back to the States and be like, why aren't people buying more copies of Bug?

It has the best version of Castlevania Symphony of the Night. I don't get it. I think that, yes, but also if you're the CEO of Sega of America you should have some understanding that these are different markets yeah with different with different needs uh and uh so yeah I don't know that that's from that standpoint it's it's a very Trumpian sort of quote but it's a I mean, look, I didn't have a Saturn. It was a one system that generation I didn't have, but I did, it was a cool piece of hardware in retrospect. It's, I wish, and I wish 2D gaming hadn't like kind of had its era where it just kind of disappeared.

Did you guys get to the part in the document where it said that Dr. Eggman was responsible for Yuji Naka's crimes and he's just a fall guy? They were really looking ahead there. I think one of the most confound, because I flipped through this giant documents huge and I didn't get through to the end. So you didn't see that part? No, I did not. There is a screenshot of a file that is labeled brand strategy and or a photo of this file labeled brand strategy and there's a

post-it note on this file from somebody who worked at sega and the post-it note reads screw technology what is a bootleg and like that is incredible to me that's like okay so somebody in this meeting or something was like we have a bootleg problem and somebody took a note that was what is bootleg i did scroll to i by the way just you talked about you didn't get to the end of it i did scroll all the way to the bottom of the document just to see and actually what ends with the document ends with a whole string of emails uh including some of the that from from tom kolinsky himself this one is this is the final thing on the final page and this is just interesting string of emails, including some of the that from from Tom Kalinske himself. This one is this is the final thing on the final page.

And this is just interesting as a timestamp. This is from Bradford Carey to Kalinske, Tom, C.C., Yamamoto, Utaka. Subject Internet online service dated Sunday, March 17th, 1996. I received your memo asking when we would be able to offer access to online services from the Saturn internet browser. According to both CompuServe and AOL, we could not access their conventional proprietary content

services without significant changes to their technology. As such, they don't see a solution to offering their existing content through the Saturn. The articles you attached that discuss the AOL and CompuServe agreements with Microsoft and Netscape refer to AOL and CIS willingness to give their subscribers

the option to view through the MS or Netscape browsers instead of the proprietary browsers AOL and CIS have created. My understanding is that these deals do not provide a new interface to the AOL or CIS content. Let me know if you have

additional questions. So Sega was the first, like they were like very much the sort of pathfinding, you know, trailblazing internet company from a console standpoint. Like the Dreamcast was like really far ahead of its time in terms of internet hardware. Yeah. And they had, what was their service you could stream games on? Their Genesis service or Mega Drive era service. You remember that?

What was it called? What was it called? Oh, no, I should know this. Oh, no, I don't know it. It was something like Sega Remote Arcade, but it wasn't that. But it was like they had a service like that, too. But it just like they were so far ahead that no one was ready for it. It was like fucking Steve Jobs with the original Macintosh.

It was just like, you know, that the it wasn't quite scalable and the market wasn't quite ready for it. But it is interesting to see in the mid 90s. They were already talking about getting browsers on the consoles. Yeah. I also like there's a there's a document that lists um strategy for for like pushing saturn and like pushing the brand and it's like drive saturn in this software strategies 96 97 there's a document that says drive saturn saturn hardware with exclusive arcade and sega character titles parentheses knights sonic fighting vipers, Virtual On and Virtual Cop 2.

Now, when I look at that list, I'm like, holy fuck, like Saturn hanging its necktie on Knights, which was like an unproven, very weird title. Right. And then Fighting Vipers, which I played the fuck out of but i don't think i i can't imagine nick that you even know what fighting vipers is no i remember fighting vipers oh well look at that but it wasn't like it wasn't like a top tier like you know it wasn't like virtual fighter virtual on was not top tier no that was a cool those are cool cabinets though yeah and then it also lists sonic which famously, did not come out on the Saturn.

Right. They must have had plans for it at some point. Yeah. And then we're just like, yeah, it's they had like a, you know, they never they were they were they were thinking ahead of they were ahead of the game in some ways, but then like hopelessly behind the times in other ways. First off, like you're saying, Heather, committing more to 2D and kind of throwing, I was like,

oh yeah, we should have some 3D hardware in here as well. And then also leaning so heavily on arcade ports at a time and fighting games at a time when both were kind of falling out of fashion. Interesting. Fascinating company. Super interesting. Super bizarre. Can I also share the Saturn 1997 marketing calendar

and their brand partnerships? Please. Okay. Foot Locker. Mm-hmm. Coke and NASCAR partnerships? Please. Okay. Foot Locker. Mm-hmm. Coke and NASCAR slash Daytona. You know, for Daytona. Mm-hmm.

Cherry Coke. Lollapalooza. Arena Interactive. The All-Star Game. Knights Wheaties, which... Was there a fucking Wheaties box with Knights on it? Did that come out? The collector's item. Foot Locker,

Fox TV, Taco Bell, the Macy's Day Balloon, and then KFC slash Bug. Bug. I really thought Bug was going to be a big game. KFC slash bug. Because bug. I really thought bug was going to be a big game. It's not a good game. Also, that's like,

I don't think you want the word bug on your fast food brand. No. Man, so many of them list Sonic 3D or 3D Sonic or big sonic games coming up and none of that shit ever materialized yeah i mean what what must that like because none of that conversation is in this document and there must have been like a fucking panic when they were like oh no sonic extreme isn't happening it's not working what's gonna happen we're not gonna have sonic yeah i wonder because also at what point in the life cycle life cycle did they really know they were cooked yeah what at what point did they know they were coming in third

and they're like oh well sonic's not gonna save It's wild. I wonder if they came in third, all territories included. I guess we should have looked that up. I guess we could look that up. Should we look that up? I mean, we could. International system video. I mean, this is a weird podcast. Why would anybody listen to me Google?

No, no, no. Look it up. People love that shit. Oof. This looks bad. This is bad. Oof. All right.

PlayStation, 102 million. N64, 32.9 million. Sega Saturn, 9.9 million. Sega Saturn. 9.26 million. Jesus. Not ideal. Really, really not ideal. Oof.

I'm trying to remember who developed their sports games of the era. Because obviously in the Dreamcast, once they got 2K, the 2K sports line was one of the few because obviously in the dreamcast once they got team they had 2k you know the 2k sports line was one of the few things that like at all gave a gave a life vest to the uh to the to the dreamcast but this predated that so i can't remember who made their what their nfl and nba series were back then the okay their nfl series was just called nfl uh and then the year so nfl 97 and it was the it was a sega game it was it was it was a sega first party game and it followed up the the the joe montana football series which was the license for the the sega genesis slash mega drive i guess just the Genesis. It probably didn't release in other territories. Why would it?

Oh, man. Tom Hamm elaborated in GameSpot about NFL 97. For example, it's hard to distinguish who the receiver is, and the quarterback takes too long to hand the ball off. Even executing a kickoff was painful. With so many serious flaws, the game's just no fun to play. It hurts to play NFL 97. It hurts!

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That was, what, 26 years ago? Get over it. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it. And let's talk about, what are you playing? What are you playing? Surprise! Wow.

Oh, he's back. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Blindsided by the Resident Evil merchant. What are you playing? A jump scare i like to i like to think of my life as a series of jump scares oh my god how are you man oh it's been oh it's been a minute yeah it's been a minute uh yeah i've got a i've got a job Uh, yeah, I've got a, I've got a job.

Nice. And, uh, I've, I've got a small apartment in Pasadena. Oh, lovely part of town. I love Pasadena. Great, great neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live above a movie theater. Oh, cool. You know, that, that sounds convenient if you like to go to the cinema.

I imagine sometimes with that bassist rumbling, it could be a little bit tricky with the last ratings. Loud. Loud. Yeah. There's a John Wick movie in theaters. You're probably having a tough night's sleep. Yeah. Man, that guy can shoot.

Yeah. What? What? Yeah. He can shoot really well. One of his many skills. What do you think of LeBron James? I don't play basketball despite my height yeah you are sneaky tall i am i'm so tall do you know the doctor found one of

my one of my legs has two knees bizarre like the brachiosaurus has a heart in its neck. Yeah. And a heart in its chest. In the same way, one of my legs has two knees. I mean, look, that's the sort of thing that would put you on an old-time freak show back in the day. But thankfully, we're past those times. You're like a marionette puppet. Yeah, yeah. How have you guys been? I'm doing okay.

Yeah. You know, I feel like I've been getting over an illness for a while now, but beyond that, I'm doing all right. Me too. La Plaga. Well, hopefully it's not La Plaga in my case. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I think it's just a viral infection, but. If I got you sick when we were in the booth together, lawyers have said i'm fine you can't do anything about it you're okay i mean i guess you can't probably prosecute someone for getting somebody for getting you sick unless it's done intentionally and it seems like you're saying it would have been inadvertent yeah yeah okay but i mean if you have if you if we're ever back in the studio i know we're doing remote these days but if we're ever back in the studio uh and you have la plaga uh please just don't come in yeah we can zoom you in yeah you don't have to surprise us with la plaga yeah i found i found a way to get over la plaga is to hotbox yourself with your own

virus i mean this sounds like an ivermectin sort of thing like this probably isn't supported is to hotbox yourself with your own virus. I mean, this sounds like an ivermectin sort of thing. Yeah. This probably isn't supported by medical science. It's just your own... You're just scatting up your own theory. How could a small dose of the disease be the cure? You know what I mean? There you go.

Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, how about you, Matt? Eh, you know. It's a general state of ennui, but otherwise, all right. Of course. Well, Matt. Matt, how about I ask you a question? What are you paying?

Oh, fuck. That's... It feels good. That's why we pay him. That's why we keep him on staff. Yeah. Oh, fuck. That's... It feels good. That's why we pay him. That's why we keep him on staff. Yeah. For those of you that don't know, the Resident Evil 4 merchant is on retainer, baby.

He's on salary. Whether he shows up or not, we're paying him. So, it's great that he's here. That was a contract problem that we had like eight months ago. Yeah, yeah. Sort of locked up. It's low-key Y Stitcher premium shutdown. Yeah. Yeah, they were like, guys, this is going to be the end of us.

And we're like, do it. Do it. You don't understand what you're getting with this guy. He can pop up in any show. Right. It's sort of in the, yeah, he can pop up. You want him for Office Ladies. He'll show up.

He'll be on Office Ladies. He might be on Comedy Bang Bang. He might do, you the, yeah, he could pop up. You want him for Office Ladies, he'll show up. He'll be on Office Ladies. He might be on Comedy Bang Bang. He might do, you know, hey, there's no guests on Threedom. He might do a Threedom. We don't know what they're going to do. I'll always do a Threesome. Oh, okay. Well, I'm a little uncomfortable just noting how many people you're speaking to.

But I'll say what I'm playing. Can't stop thinking about that double knee thing. Yeah, I have two turned on is why i'm scared um i've got two knees in my penis also okay god one would be concerning uh didn't have to be two. Jesus Christ. Yeah. A dick knee. Come on.

Yikes. I thought we were off track when we were talking about the Saturn for 20 minutes. We Googled. We did Googling. We Googled. Anyway, I'll say what I'm'm playing i have a couple of updates one i've crossed i in many ways i feel like i've reached uh i've i've reached a zenith i've reached a uh a new not a zenith because that's like a height that you can't uh surpass anymore i've reached a certain point with within my play of final fantasy 16 where i know

last week i said i don't know what's happened to me now i'm sort of on the outside looking in and i don't know who i've become anymore um i i have gone so far the other way into final fantasy 16 uh that i've admitted out loud i think I'm addicted to this video game. Nice. I've played it for 40 hours. Holy shit. Holy shit. Wow.

I've doubled my play time since last we spoke five days ago. I've just had nothing but time to play this game. And I'm not even just I'm like 58 58 done with the story

right like because on playstation it tells you what percentage you've completed the game uh but it only tells you for the main story it doesn't tell you like all of it um so i know that i'm i'm on you know i'm not like near the end necessarily, but I'm at the halfway point where, you know, I'm getting closer to completing the game. I'm also doing every single side quest that pops up because they're not long. Every side quest is relatively pretty short. You can kind of blast through them. What I'm experiencing is i could finish this game i probably will finish

this game for the we play you play yeah unless i keep doing all the other everything that the game tells me to do uh i've never felt like this with the final fantasy game and like i've finished very few of them yes so this is being a full-on completionist is usually pretty daunting with one of these yes and i don't think like i don't think i'm going for the platinum or the 100 like i that's not something i generally do um but i i because i know that there's things i'm probably missing too like items or whatever like uh you know finding certain things but uh it's gonna be it's gonna get to a point where push is gonna come to shove and i'm gonna just have to knock out the main story because i don't think i can how i'm playing is uh sustainable um but i'm playing that i'm still playing final fantasy 3 i think i'm almost done

with that uh i'm really loving that uh it's it's so fun i just i'm playing the pixel remaster pixel remaster yeah and it's uh it's just such a nice contrast to um 16 it's because they're just very different it's like it's just a very nice like easier sort of they're both you know they're not incredibly difficult games um but i will say yeah i was i was talking to our friend of the show, Jordan Morris, about Final Fantasy 16, and I had the same sort of thing. It feels like they consciously nerfed the difficulty. Like, it's not like a devil may cry hard. Yeah. You know, I think on the default difficulty, it's made pretty easy, even without any of the charms or anything, because they know that a lot of the Final Fantasy audience isn't necessarily used to an action-based game.

Yeah. That is, I think, the reason the game... I mean, I'm loving it. Loving it. But it's not... When I play it, I'll play it for a couple hours and then I stop playing it to play Fortnite so that I have a challenge.

Because I'm looking for that dopamine hit, that adrenaline rush, and I'm looking for that, like, dopamine hit, that, like, adrenaline rush, and I'm not getting it from Final Fantasy, which is a little bit like... It's like a really good soup. It's a really, really good stew, even. But it's not like a Hot Wings challenge. So you want your, like, your meals to be, like, difficult? Is. So you want your like your meals to be like difficult.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, is that not a thing? I do like something. So I yeah, there there is something to the gaming side of it. Yeah. I like I like spicy food. Look at him.

Look at him. Look at him go. Bit of a heat seeker. Yes! Let's fucking go! Crossover! Crossover! The, you know, there is something there.

I get exactly what you're saying. When you go, when there's struggle, it's more satisfying. I understand that aspect of what you're saying. Is there a more difficult setting you can, or is there just a default difficulty on 60? Well, there's action oriented. And then you, once you beat the game, you can do like a new game plus,

which has a difficulty, a harder difficulty. Final Fantasy. But on your initial playthrough, you can't like go on hard mode. No, there is not, unfortunately. You can pick bad icons, that's probably like uh map the controls in a really confusing way yeah uh but that's basically for me i did have a um a friend of mine my pal connor mccabe uh great guy had a uh had a party at his house that was like a fighting game party and there was

different stations there was one that was just super smash brothers melee off to the side there was one he had a dreamcast room where there was like a fighting game going on in the dreamcast room was probably marvel versus capcom 2 if i had to guess maybe some other games as well uh but the main event on the big tv was street fighter 6 with fight sticks, and I hadn't played it with the fight stick yet. And I won like five or six matches, and I immediately was like, I got to get a fight stick. It was incredible. I felt amazing.

It was so much fun. Anyone wants to hit us up with some fight stick and hitbox recs? Because I've been thinking about that as well. Hit us up with some fight stick and hit box racks because I've been thinking about that as well you know there's a hit us up on the on our discord I was playing with someone's uh fight stick mini and it's about it's about this

big right like it's like you know I'm holding up my hands uh the width of my head by the size of like a like a jersey mic sub yeah it was it was actually this thing was actually kind of this was Mike's way too. It was fucking soaked. Covered with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

It was very hard to play. But it was a good size. I felt like the buttons had good, you know, what is it called? They felt good. Tactility? Yeah, tactility, good buttons. And the stick was very, like, it didn't feel too insane. So I liked that quite a bit.

And I saw that that one's only 50 bucks. So I might be investing in that little guy. But that's it for me. That's like the mini, right? The mini, that's right. Yeah, okay. That's it for me. Who wants to go next?

Wow, very cool. I mean, Heather, you were talking about Final Fantasy XVI some. Yeah, I've been playing, My gaming has been light this week just because I've got a lot of stuff that I've been taking care of here in the city. But I've been playing a little Final Fantasy 16. One of my favorite things to do in a game of 16's caliber

and environmental design is to just, and I mean visual not like not like like a video game level design which is different yeah i get what you mean um is i will try in any particular arena to run into every corner of that area so that I make sure I can see everything. And that has made my progress kind of slow. Like I'll be like, you can't enter this house, but I want to see it from all sides. I want to like make sure that I look at the roof. I want to make sure I haven't missed any details because somebody really, really struggled to create the thing.

really struggled to create the thing so when you're just like running past it with clive you might you might miss some of the artistry of it it's uh the same thing i try and do in like an art museum is that there's like a statistic that like you know these people paint these fucking paintings for years and years and years of their life and then the average person looks at it for 15 seconds and like i i want to try and ingest more of it than that so i've been really making my way through it slowly um and then also i've been playing of course fortnight but not as much uh in part because my hours are weird for our our robust and incredible community on discord they get played battle bus but there have been a couple of people who have been kind enough to show up at strange hours for them in order to squad up so the last couple of times I've played, it's been with a full squad and that has been just so fucking heartwarming.

It feels, I know it's strange because like Fortnite's the same no matter where I am, but it feels like playing a little bit of home. Like it feels somehow like a home feeling to hear familiar voices from the battle bus uh coming in through my playstation pulse 3d headphones um so yeah uh i i don't i don't have any particular players to shout out because i don't want to forget anybody and i I feel like if I, if I shouted out somebody that somebody else might be like,

Hey, I was also in that squad. So I just want to say thank you to all the different squads I've played with over the last few weeks. Really means a lot to me. They guys keep showing up at strange times. Also we set, we set our servers on the East coast of america so everybody is at a disadvantage

um but yeah it's it's super fun and um that's i mean that's what i've been playing how about you nick uh speaking of fortnite sorry i just put meme. Someone put in the Discord in the chat. Yes, I've seen this fantastic meme. It's a Jeffrey Epstein. Jumping to Jeffrey's limited time island event with a new Epstein skin. Yeah. This is diabolical. It's well yeah it's well it's well executed i wonder if i i maybe this has already happened i wonder if there was a uh skin released in fortnight that then

became representative of something extremely problematic if they would pull the skin. I think they probably would. If you like, if it was a celebrity who got, you know, to got canceled or something like that, I think they probably would take it out of rotation. Interesting. But I guess I guess what you're saying, like if somebody already purchased it with their V bucks, would they refund their V bucks and make it so they couldn't use that anymore? I mean, they already probably discontinue things because of licensing agreements, right? Yep.

Or are they all there in perpetuity? They're in there in perpetuity. So if you get like Aaron from Attack on Titan, like you'll still be able to play that like 10 years from now. Yes. Theoretically. Yes. Okay.

I've also been playing Final Fantasy 16. The bulk of my gaming time has been dedicated to this game. I won't talk about it in any depth, really. I do really. But Heather, you mentioned about just just taking in the environment. And I do think the from an artistic standpoint, the environmental design is is really great. Like, it's just like these are the I think these are just gorgeous exteriors and interiors. It's just like these are just gorgeous exteriors and interiors.

But I'll save my thoughts in any depth for our WePlay, YouPlay. And instead, I'm going to talk about a game that is my current frontrunner for Game of the Year that I discovered on Steam. It was on sale during the Steam Summer Sale, and it had a lot of positive feedback and it's a game from a Korean developer called Mitt Rocket called Dave the Diver. I took a flyer on Dave the Diver. I cannot emphasize enough

how fucking much this game rules. It's so fucking good. It released 1.0 on June 28th. It was an early access for a little bit, believe it has this incredible gameplay loop where you are this amateur diver who has a

scuba suit and you jump into the ocean which they call and this is like typical of the game sense of humor which is another part of its strong points the ocean is called the blue hole so you jump into the blue hole and you dive around with just absolutely phenomenal like echo the dolphin tier underwater physics in terms of moon maneuvering this your player character round uh and then you you use

an arsenal of weaponry to catch fish which then you do that in the morning and the afternoon. And then in the evening, the island where you live has a sushi restaurant where you work as a server and you serve and you manage the restaurant and you serve the fish that you have caught prepared to sushi. And it is just such a satisfying way. And then you use that extra money to upgrade your arsenal for when you go back into the blue hole. It is so fucking fun. They have just absolutely figured out how

this gameplay loop ties in with your character's progression where every run feels consequential where the stuff that you take from your run goes to, you know, the,

the, the more sim aspect of the game, uh, and enhances that. And then that gives you more, uh, for your, your subsequent,

uh, roguelite runs. And, uh, the, the, the combat that underwater is really fun. Like a lot of times the underwater aspect of any sort of game is kind of like,

oh, this is like a weaker part. You know, there, there's rare exceptions. Uh, this game, I think being entirely focused on underwater, they really drilled down how to make that like super fun uh

and uh and and easy to navigate but a big part of it i've talked about sense of humor is also like the main character for this game i should just i just share my screen so you can see this uh the main character for this game dave is so delightful he is a big uh it's a big dude he is uh kind of like a loser like he's like he's like a loser but like other characters you can see him right here in the corner of this icon it's this big dude who's kind of slovenly with a goatee and then like other characters npcs in the game like make fun of him and it's just such a it's such a it's like they're not like like in an aggressive way like they're not like insulting him but they're just kind of like like uh that guy who served me at the restaurant was weird like it just kind of things like that and then meanwhile all the other npcs are like cool and interesting so it's just like such a

such a like i don't feel like i've experienced this specifically in a game where it's like hey the character that we're going to give you to play is super low status this is like i guess kind of a luigi is the same sort of thing here's this sort of low status guy uh who you know is is who is trying his best, but is just having trouble fitting into this reality. But I don't know. He's awesome, and he animates so well. That's the other thing. I could rave about every aspect of this game, because I think the characters are rendered in sort of this more pixely style,

but it's a 3D engine, and a lot of the objects and the ocean life is more polygonal. And then it's also got this just really serene soundtrack for this really chill vibe for the actual ocean exploring. I'm all over the place because I love every aspect of this game. It's also got great cinematics that don't get tiresome when they replay. It's got like a, a really great phone system. Like,

you know, a lot of games have phones these days and this, but the way this one integrates with the gameplay, it's like really effective. They just, they just seem to have iterated on this over and over again in development to get it, to get everything in sync and everything informing and enhancing the,

the, the, the core gameplay. and as such it's just like a fucking home run so yeah dave the diver it's on steam i don't know if it's on other platforms right now i did would be a great one to come to game pass eventually but right now support the developer you can uh hopefully get it on sale if not it's it's 1999 full price uh and absolutely worth every penny fucking Fucking love this game. Matt, you would love this game so much. This would be extremely your shit.

I already have it wishlisted here now after talking about it. I guess I should get it. Heather, I think you would like this game. I think the sim aspect of the restaurant might rub against you a little bit. You might not be as into that. But the actual combat aspect of it, I mean, it feels like a classic sort of 2D action platformer with some combat elements. So I think you'd at least respond to that or at least be able to appreciate it. But anyone who's into this sort

of game, absolutely check it out. It's pure fun. Well, Dave the Diver, that's the game. All right. I did a bad job there but I was I was just excited no way yeah everybody's a ram I just ranting like and then there's also like and then you get

the sushi and then you bet you can upgrade the sushi feel like an excited kid talking about a toy can we go back to the Sega Saturn for a second for a second. Hey, everyone.

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We can't, Matt, because we have to instead jump ahead a few years from 1997 to 2001 when Final Fantasy The Spirits Within hit theaters. This is The Game Was Better, our regular video game movie slash TV show segment and we're going to talk about because Final Fantasy 16 is the zeitgeist we're going to talk about 2001's Final Fantasy the spirits within directed and produced by Hironobu Sagakuchi who created the whole Final Fantasy franchise I want to set

some some tone I'm going to set some tone I want to set some, some tone. I'm going to set some, some tone for this, some time, some place in time, right? It's the year 2001 summer when this movie comes out. So the world has just seen the Matrix. They've just seen the Phantom Menace. seen the matrix they've just seen the phantom menace the the the launch of final fantasy 10 is due any day uh and square has just come off of a massively successful multi-hit game run. Like, from 7 to 8 to 9, and the trailers for 10 are out, and it's just like,

holy shit, this company can do no fucking wrong. They're cooking with gas, yeah. And Sakaguchi's like, I want to direct a movie. And Square Enix is like, fuck yeah, let's do it. And they build a studio for him in honolulu that the studio to build it

costs 45 million dollars yes insane so their their initial investment into this movie is to create a warner brothers like a full-blown fucking studio with 200 jobs, 200 animators working on this fucking this thing. I had somewhere the this movie took 90 minutes to render. Each fucking frame. This is also at a time when Shrek and Toy Story were like the pinnacle of CG movies. were like the pinnacle of CG movies. So Square being like, we're not just going to swing for the fences.

We're going to swing for the stars. We're going to create photorealistic humans to be in our movie. And we're going to announce that those actors will be in other movies. Like Aki, the main character was an actress theoretically who would then go on to be in other movies if this movie succeeded i was simone if you will i was so fucking hype for this fucking movie yeah me too. I have rarely been more hyped for a movie. I've just put into the chat this watch that came out from Seiko as a tie-in. Oh, yeah, I remember this. And it was sort of a modern day, 2001 modern day version of the watch that uh that aki wears in the film

and i was like someday i'm going to make enough fucking money that i'm gonna be able to buy this watch no matter what i'm gonna i'm gonna fucking buy this watch i never bought the watch my friend uh who i will not name was uh so excited for my excitement that this um this mischievous character stole a bus stop poster of final fantasy the spirits within for me which i have to this day one of those heavy vinyl backlit bus stop posters and then i was invited to the la premiere of final fantasy spirits within wow so i was in the first fucking audience to see this movie and about 10 minutes into it i started feeling sick i was like oh no oh no it was already enough of a of a strange blow that the guy who wrote all the music for all the final fantasy games did not write the movie movie music and his no yes 100 nobuo uematsu not included and that's

like one of the main things you think about when you think about the final fantasy franchise is uematsu scores so you were like okay and then uh and then you know just coming off of seven eight and nine you were like i kind of understand what a modern Final Fantasy movie is going to be like. And this movie was nothing like those things. I have rarely been more disappointed than I was walking out of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. And you saw the Phantom Menace. Yeah, but I wasn't a Star Wars fan. So I saw the Phantom Menace and I was like, yeah, this is fucking weird, guys. I don't understand why everybody likes Star Wars. My experience of Phantom Menace was going into the theater and then leaving and being like, this is what you guys like?

But yeah, Spirits Within was my Phantom Menace experience. And it was heartbreaking. So going into this viewing, I really expected to have just those bittersweet memories come back. Like, oh, fuck. Okay. Well, what a bummer. But the truth is, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed this movie this time. Interesting. I'll just just to step back in time a little bit. I don't have as elaborate of a journey as yours. I didn't go to the L.A. premiere, but I did see this movie opening weekend, I think actually opening night with my

friend who also was we both got Final Fantasy eightIII on launch day. We were both that level of Final Fantasy. And IX was already out by that point, too. But I remember when VIII was out, we were in separate rooms playing the game at the same time, just trying to get and trying to see who could finish it first because we didn't want to... Or trying to get ahead of spoilers because we were worried the other person was going to spoil something. So like we were both like that level of hype. And yeah,

it was, I would say, crushing to watch this movie. I thought it absolutely fucking sucked. And my reaction watching it the first time was that looked great, but it was god awful. but it was god awful and my reaction to watching it this time is kind of the opposite like it looks good for its time but obviously you compare it to something like the avatar the way of water like you know 20 years of progress and i and i know that's the highest height of this style of you know effectively a fully animated film but it's like there there's been so much progress technologically and artistically in terms of of computer animation uh in the in the 20 years since this since its release uh but i didn't find i wasn't because i didn't have the expectations of like here's the final fantasy movie yeah in the same like it, it's like similar, like the Super Mario Brothers movies.

Like, here's the Super Mario Brothers movie. And then you watch the Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo thing where they're going to, you know, like it's where they're in some like surreal, like, you know, HR Giger reality. It's like, what the fuck am I watching? It's the same sort of thing. It's like, what the fuck am I watching? It's the same sort of thing. It's like,

here's the final fantasy movie and expect the, the Uematsu score. I, we, I probably didn't even know going in that it wasn't going to be the final fit. We weren't going to hear the prologue at any point. I probably like expected like,

oh, well we'll start with the prologue and we'll, we'll hear, here's some of the main themes and there'll be a new Uematsu score or whatever. Instead, it's scored by a well-regarded composer. Who's you know, the composer is, if I just had his name, Elliot Goldenthal, a well-regarded composer who's worked on a lot of, you know, well-known properties, well-known films, but is just like not necessarily a great fit for this. And then also it's completely just

pretty much just sci-fi like there's none of the yeah there's there's some more that's some more spiritual you know metaphysical elements but it's it has none of the sort of fantasy trappings which even something that was more sci-fi like final fantasy 8 as hard as sci-fi as that went it's still hard not hard sci-fi obviously as sci-fi as that one went it's still hard, not hard sci-fi, obviously, as sci-fi as that one went, it still had shit like the gun blade and like magic. You know what I mean? Like it still was fucking weird. And none of that existed. So I remember being super disappointed with this movie and thinking it sucked and resenting it for years and revisiting it it's bad but fine it's but it's more it's what what else is compelling and interesting about it is at the time i was like this isn't final fantasy and now 20

years later i'm like i'm surprised how final fantasy this movie is like what has expanded because also there's only been in the last 20 years there were there were Final Fantasy 7 8 and 9 all come out within like and 10 all come out within like four or five years of each other right it's it's an insane run I just I just brought up the chronology and then I might have just closed the window. Okay, so yes, Seven comes out in 1997, Eight in 99, Nine in 2000, Ten in 2001, and then Eleven in 2002. So yeah, within six years, within five years, they released five mainline entries in the franchise. Right, and this movie.

And then in the 20 years since Final Fantasy Spirits Within, the 22 years since, we've gotten four mainline Final Fantasy games. Mm hmm. But. How did they fucking do that? How did they make it? I mean, they must have become just different teams, but how they made eight and nine a year apart is just staggering because they're both also, they're not like, neither of them feels rushed. Well, you know, there was an interview done with, I think, Tetsuo Nomura, the guy who designed Cloud and Squall and then ended up being the director on Kingdom Hearts. Cloud and Squall and then ended up being the director on Kingdom Hearts. And he talks about how once because this movie comes, this movie is an enormous budget. And I've read, though I cannot find the sources on the the actual budget for the movie is obfuscated because it was much higher. disfuscated because it was much higher. Like it wasn't just that that was the $45 million to build the studio and the budget for the film, that it was actually a huge amount of money

pulled out of Square's coffers in order to create this film because they were like, Sakaguchi can't do fucking anything wrong. This dude is gold, right? But the movie is such a bomb and they have to close, they do one Animatrix movie, like one Animatrix short and then shut down the Honolulu studio. Yeah.

Sakaguchi steps off of the board and then resigns from Square Enix in 2003. And then the people at Square are told, don't communicate with that dude. And there's like a 15, 20 year hiatus on anybody even talking to him from his old team, like all the mentorships that he started when he worked at Square. And Tetsuo Nomura in an interview was like, after he left, there wasn't any driving singular focus, singular vision at the company anymore. And I think that that's part of why you went from back to back to back bangers to this

20 years of only four games. Because that makes sense. And then you also combine that with just like it's so much more labor intensive to produce a AAA game now in the PS2 and more advanced eras. I know that that's true. know the ps2 uh and and more advanced eras i i know that's true but also how much more labor intensive is it than this movie was right i'm saying just combining those factors yeah yeah sakaguchi's absence and then and then yeah those two things probably work together yeah because that's that was a permanent severance right he's never gone back to Square. He's just been at Mistwalker the whole time. Yeah. I think so.

Yeah. He created Fantasian for Apple Arcade. It's a two-part RPG that he has said might be his last. And he made it because he went back and played six and was like, man, I really miss these games. I'm going to make one more good classic RPG. I would like to read Roger Ebert's review of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. I love that.

The Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. Three and a half stars. Also, I want to say, for a guy who famously thought video games weren't art. Yeah, I think he would have come around if he'd lived longer. Because he was a guy who was, you know, kind of generally ahead of the curve with technologies and things. But yeah, go on. All right. Should I read the whole thing?

I mean, sure. It's a podcast. Who cares? Other movies have been made entirely on computers, but Final Fantasy The Spirits Within is the first to attempt realistic human characters. Not Shrek with his trumpet ears, but the space soldier Gray Edwards, who looks so much like Ben Affleck that I wonder if royalties were involved. The movie, named after a famous series of video games, creates Planet Earth circa 2065,

where humans huddle beneath energy shields and wraith-like aliens prowl the globe. The film tells a story that would have seemed traditional in the golden age of Asimov, Van Vogt, and Heinlein. I don't know how to say those fucking names. But science fiction fans of that era would have wept with joy at the visuals, and they grabbed me too. I have a love of astonishing sights, of films that show me landscapes and cityscapes that exist only in the imagination, and Final Fantasy creates a world that is neither live action nor animation, but some parallel cyber universe. The characters live in that cyberspace too. Not for an instant do we believe that Dr. Aki Ross, the heroine, is a real human,

but we concede that she is lifelike, which is the whole point. She is an eerie presence that is once subtly unreal and yet convincing. Her movements, which mirror the actions of real actors, feel about right, and her hair blows convincingly in the wind the first close-up of her face and eyes is startling because the filmmakers are not afraid to give us a good long look they dare us not to admire their craft if aki is not as real as a human actress she is about as real as a playmate who has been retouched to a glossy perfection i'm a pause there because it's really interesting to me that aki did appear in maxim yes and this is the weirdest fucking thing about this in hindsight because you know a character that was named after sakaguchi's

recently deceased mother and they were marketing as they're like check out this sci-fi bikini babe yeah like it like in men's magazines it was so fucking weird because also her character is not really sexualized at all in the film no but they they were like i don't know how do we sell this thing i don't know if i can make her a pinup and it's interesting considering the um the conversations happening right now in the entertainment industry about like ai and like things like that and like the idea that this character was or not this character but like this this uh you know this 3d model of a person uh yeah was going to appear in other movies um is is wild and like it that i i would imagine that actors at the time

were um maybe afraid of that uh i saw a a quote here in the imdb trivia uh from tom hanks when talking about final fantasy and its digital characters tom hanks said i'm very troubled by it but it's coming down man it's going to happen and I'm not sure what actors can do about it tell you what he can do fucking conduct the polar express yeah he ended up doing it kind of like a media yeah whatever I'll just do it oh I didn't know I could do it I'll do it I

can be Santa oh fuck yeah let's go I want to read the um the final two paragraphs from this review because I think that they are extremely prescient. Is there a future for this kind of expensive filmmaking? Parentheses 140 million, I've heard. I hope so, because I want to see more movies like this, and I want to see how much further they can push the technology. Maybe someday I'll actually be fooled by a computer-generated actor, but I

doubt it. The point, anyway, is not to replace actors and the real world, but to transcend them, to penetrate new into a new creative space based primarily on images and ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if the Star Wars series mutated in this direction. George Lucas's actors who complain that they spend all their time standing in front of blue screens will be which will be later filled with locations and effects, would be replaced by computerized avatars scarcely less realistic. In reviewing a movie like this, I'm torn between its craft elements and its story. The story is nuts and bolts space opera without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's A.I. But the look of the film is revolutionary.

Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3D movies. You want to see it whether you care about aliens or space cannons. It exists in its category of its own, the first citizen of a new world of cyber film. Yeah, it's, you know, he points at the, and I know he also liked The Phantom Menace. I remember Ebert was, I can't remember his review of Attack of the Clones, but I know he did.

He was very bullish on Phantom Menace for the same sort of reason of like he just like appreciated the beauty of the filmmaking. Like he just like, oh, this is all sorts of cool shit to look at. So then this film, as far as being a progenitor of where we are today, it was more the Star Wars prequels that ended up informing how movies are made in this day and age of just like, hey, we're still photographing movie stars. We're still photographing human actors, but just on stages. And then we're painting everything around them. We did not actually go to the point where hey these are these are not real people these are rendered you know cg creations uh and these are character models that don't actually exist because i think there's just so much cachet in people like fandom there's so much just like people wanting to have an actual person that they can see on

screen well counterpoint most of spider-man no way home or iron man you're sure hearing at a cg character like for they're effectively animated movies yeah you know like and it's only because those dudes are in masks that you aren't like, well, what the fuck is this? Because sometimes when you do see CG characters like in Rogue One, you're like, oh, what the fuck is this? Yeah. Because even Disney and Lucasfilm with their infinite treasure chest cannot make it really human. But also, I think it's key what they're doing in those Star Wars movies.

And also, more recently, did you ever see the new Indiana Jones? Not yet. Not yet. I'd rather re-watch Final Fantasy The Spirits. But they do the same thing in Indiana Jones. There's a lot of de-aged Indian jones there's a lot of de-aged indian there there's a lot of de-aged harrison ford they they're they're using the technology to to depict real people like real individuals and they they weren't doing that here they were like

we're creating new character models from whole cloth that are like fictional, you know, like actors. And we're going to be able to use them. There just isn't like it's like the VTuber thing. It's like there isn't quite enough of an audience for that yet. And and so I yeah, you're it's a great point that something like Deadpool or or Spider-Man No Way Home is effectively so largely an animated movie. But it's it's we still have, you know, Ryan Reynolds or, you know, Tobey Maguire. We still have an actual actor that you can look at and be like, that's the guy.

That's Tom Holland. I know that that real person that I'm a fan of. And that's a key part of the film's marketing. So I don't know if we're ever going to progress to the point where it's, you know, there's there's no real world, you know, person that we're latching on to i don't know man like there's like four more avatar movies that are going to come out and i can't i can't see the ones in the future having too many people in them hey you know what avatar is maybe a good a good example but these aren't like these aren't people here these are like you know. These are like, you know what I mean? Like those are,

those are Navi. Yeah. It's its own thing. So I think if we get to the point where, Hey, you know what? Spider from avatar. And so that's not a,

we're not, there isn't an actor or watching anymore. That's a, there isn't even a, a character that's modeled off of an actor. Yeah. There's just like a, like if there's equivalent of that,

there's humans that we're seeing that are meant to be photorealistic that are not played by actors or not based off of real existing actors. I think that's what Final Fantasy The Spirits Within was predicting, and we aren't there yet. I don't know when we'll get there. I think we're getting close. I think Planet of the Apes. I think Avatar. I think Snoke in The Last Jedi. I think we're close. We're real

close, man. I still don't. I'm skeptical. I feel like so much of fandom involves latching onto real people. Why do people listen to a podcast? Because they have like they want to listen to, you know, they engage with the hosts on a personal level. I think the same thing

happens with the creation of music, the creation of art, the creation of cinema, not to get spicy, but I don't think that the actors matter to a new fandom. I think that the least, I think the least important part is to, to, uh,

to modern fans is the actor. And the most important part is like, what's going to happen next? Like what what's gonna happen is spider-man you know maybe maybe marvel movies are have crested and that's like not the greatest example but like i feel like fandom is more about the the the stories than it is about the actors and i think that those actors could even be swapped out and people would still be like, fuck, I got to know what happens to Spider-Man.

I don't know. Hey, that's what happens in comic books. So, so who knows? I want, can we talk about, I could do what we're doing tangents.

Can I talk about something else that, that final fantasy, the spirits within makes me think of. Yeah. And it was a really interesting era in video game adaptations. First off, that they didn't know what the,

they didn't know how the fuck to market one of these things. They were kind of running away from it being a video game. Yeah. They wanted to change everything that made it interesting and appealing to its core fan base.

Whereas now we're in such a fan service era where they're like, ah, throw in absolutely everything you can. Pack it in, jam pack it in. We'd have to make sure that the original fans are on board. I feel like so much of that was the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy

where they're like, this succeeded because it hewed closely the source material. We have to do that with everything now. And that's obviously a big part of the MCU and so on. There was another movie that came out of this era uh that where they also gave full creative control and the director like made the director uh the creator of the video game franchise final fantasy the spirits within directed and produced by hironobu sakaguchi wing commander uh directed by chris roberts who made the also co-wrote the screenplay

made the wing commander series which was a very successful pc game uh space flight sim series uh obviously heavily inspired by star wars and they released that movie in 1999 which i also saw in theaters and is complete dog shit totally sucks have either of you ever seen it no but i i just unwatchably bad yeah 10 unwatchably bad starring freddie prince jr who i'm a fan of and matthew lillard uh and it just uh but it's just completely an ineptly made film and it's kind of amazing that that you know these game creators had this much cachet where they're like you know what you know we should direct this? The person who made the video game. Any directing experience?

No? Ah, fuck it. You know, take a shot at it, you know? That aspect of it, I'm just really surprised by it because I don't think it happens today. Yeah, that's such a tough, like, I don't know. I don't think a studio now would be like, let's give somebody who's never done this before a shot like it's like it's interesting because like you want people to

have shots probably right like if a studio was like wanting like hideo kojima maybe this is a bad example uh to direct a movie yeah this is a movie. Give him a movie. This is a bad example. Yeah, because we want that. Very bad example. We want it. Well, okay. So I guess the modern counter to that is like Neil Druckmann and directing some of the Last of Us TV show. But there it's also like the context of prestige TV. And then there's also a showrunner who's involved who has a lot of TV experience.

So it's kind of a different thing. Yeah. Versus like just giving the reins of a theatrical film to a novice director. Man, we we've been talking about this first. Wing Commander fucking sucks. Sorry. Final Fantasy experience has been so much better. We've been talking about this for so long and we haven't even really talked about the movie itself.

Yeah. I have a bunch of notes here that i want to just read out real quick so if you if you're listening to this podcast this it's a movie about uh the the world is fucking ended right uh like a meteor came and decimated the earth and there's like aliens that uh have infected every corner of the planet. You can't see them unless you like shoot a fireworks gun at them that will that will turn their translucent bodies visible. There is a lady, Dr. Aki Ross,

who is hunting for these like biological totems called spirits. and if she can collect all of them then she can create a waveform that hopefully will undo the uh destructive effects of these phantom like aliens called phantoms yeah um yes and she's in direct conflict with General Hine, who has made a big gun called the Zeus. And he wants to instead fire it at the Earth and destroy the aliens from space, which Dr. Aki Ross and her team says you could damage the Earth because the Earth has a spirit called Gaia. And if you damage Gaia, then you're going to end up fucking up the Earth even more than these aliens. And that's the main conflict is the race against time

while she's trying to find all these spirits of living creatures and also sort of the discovery of what the true nature of the Phantoms are, which it's a 20-something year old movie.

I don't know if we need to enter spoiler country, but here we are entering spoiler country. Yeehaw. Yeehaw. It is that these aliens come from a planet where they were in a war, and they destroyed themselves and blew up their planet,

and then a hunk of it fell to Earth, and on that hunk of their planet, and then a hunk of it fell to Earth. And on that hunk of their planet were ghosts of those aliens. And those ghosts are basically haunting the Earth, which when I fucking deconstruct this concept, that's hype as shit. That is an awesome fucking concept. It's a cool idea. I don't think any of it is well conveyed and i think as a result it just ends up being kind of a a confusing mush okay for the audience okay sure i yeah i think it's an incredibly well-crafted anime like i'm like i can follow this from moment

to moment i abadaka i had never so i never seen this right and i've not played a lot of final fantasy games so i sort of have the least amount of uh context i but i understand um the vibe of final fantasy right like i sort of know what to expect uh from game to game. Even though tonally they might be different from each other, but there are certain things that cross over, right? Like crystals and magic and things like that.

So I'm watching this and I'm like, where the fuck's my crystals? Where's my magic? We can't throw one fucking chocobo in this movie? Give me something. There is a chocobo.

No Moogle. There's a fucking chocobo. Where's the chocobo? Where the fuck is the chocobo? It's on Aki's shirt. One of the spirits is a chocobo? No, it's on Aki's shirt. That's not enough.

Not on the... She wears a t-shirt at one point. She's got a chocobo on it. Hold on. Let me find this. It's just not enough. I agree. i'm sort of thinking about this while i'm watching it too if this was a final fantasy game this would be the

worst one like i don't think it would be like you know they're wearing t-shirts that was something kind of jarring too i was like oh like there's i know that in final fantasy 15 that's sort of a little bit there's like a car in that one or something right like there's I know that in Final Fantasy 15, that's sort of a little bit. There's like a car in that one or something. Right. Like there's like it's it's it's modern. It's more modern than the other games tend to be. No, it being set in space and all that shit. Like none of that rubs me the wrong way.

All that is like this is completely consistent with what a Final Fantasy could be. It's it's totally fine for us to be more science fiction than fantasy. But and I guess of the fantasy elements are like the spirit you know that's supposed to be the element but it's it's just not enough like to to to feel like an actual final fantasy property but also again it's like how how titles were used at the time it was like this is like based on the game series final fantasy which i think is how it said is just like it's not it's not necessarily meant to have any connection it's just for the fans it feels like a letdown and so you mentioned

earlier the live-action Super Mario Brothers movie yeah and I'm not I'm not throwing shots oh here comes a shot I think that movie is more of a Mario movie than this movie is a

Final Fantasy movie. Because it at least has like, yeah, they fuck up all of it. Right? Like, they fuck up how Bowser looks. Yoshi's a fucking dinosaur. Toad's a guy with weird hair. They're like, you know, they're wearing the overalls like at the end. None of it looks good,

but, but at least it's in the movie. At least it's not in there. No, no, no. You've got a Sid. You've got a Hein.

You got a Sid. Yes. Uh, cause Hein was, I think the bad guy in three, right? Uh, you've got Gaia,

which is in final fantasy seven. You have Chocobo shows up on her shirt i'm gonna give it i'm gonna give it to her yeah yeah and i would say that one of the most uh the one of the largest hallmarks of the final fantasy series is pushing the boundaries of the physical technology of the time it's created sure so final fantasy 7 is like oh my god oh my god that's because i got that like moving characters on the cg holy shit like this this is no different i think you're doing a lot of work on behalf of the movie oh yeah i am a film that a film that doesn't need that doesn't need a champion. Wow. Because it kind of is what it is. Fucking. I think that it's. Hold on.

Hold on. I would love to rewatch this and been like, you know what? It's time for a reclamation project because this film is actually great. One second. I completely disagree with that. Give me one second. Okay, go ahead. I watched this movie with Mary Laws.

Uh-huh. Mary's so cool. She turns to me. Love Mary. She turns to me 45 minutes into it and goes, this is good. I've never disagreed with Mary before. I don't even think it's bad. It's a thing.

She still made fun of it. There were still tons of things to make fun of, but she enjoyed the whole thing. This is a glorified Easter egg. Aki's, the chocopo that looks like a stain. It looks like a dark stain on her pajamas. I put it in the chat. Heather, is this your king?

Yeah. It is so rare that I'm on this side of this. Like I'm always the one who's like, no, this sucks. You can't fucking, the combat sucks. I hate this. I'm always the one who's like now this sucks you can't fucking the combat sucks i hate this i'm so grumpy yeah to be the champion of something it feels great guys i think it's great i think part of why i'm this upset about it i'm not even upset this is for humor i think

while i was watching this yesterday all i could think of was, I wish I was playing Final Fantasy XVI instead of watching this. 100%. Would have rather spent two hours doing it. It's also funny how I think Final Fantasy XVI looks better. Like, it looks better. Right? 100%.

I was actually thinking, my point of reference for this was because it's kind of similar tonally, is Returnal. I was like, Returnal looks better my point of reference for this was because it's, it's kind of similar tonally is returnal. I was like, returnal looks better than final fantasy. The spirits within this game that you can control in real time. And that's just that, that like the way of water is just like,

it's staggering how, but how, how much technology has advanced in 20 years, but the, but there are, I think you can see different teams working on different shots in this movie because there are some shots that absolutely fucking hold up there are shots like she's walking down a hallway and everything in the hallway is lit immaculately and you're like that could be

great lighting that could be a full that could be a fully modern cg shot in a fucking movie there there's like a there's a couple shots where she's... There's one where she's laying on the ground and the fabric of her outfit is perfect and the rubble is perfect and the fire is perfect. And I'm like, whoever this A-team is who's on

some of these shots, they're fucking killing it. And then there are other shots where it doesn't even look like they, they animated Steve Buscemi's character's face for his jokes. Like it looks like telling jokes through a mask. And then there are, that's a big issue.

Then there are shots where like the, there's a shot of like Heinz assistant and, and that guy looks real. Like he fully bypasses the uncanny valley in like one shot. And I was like, what is there's part of what what's weird about it is it swings really wildly from working and not working visually. Like there are shots that I'm like, did you finish this? Because you're the faces are so static and mannequin-esque. And then there are shots where it's like, fuck, this looks incredible.

The woodenness of the expressions on the characters is a huge issue with this movie. Most of them are just really vacant. And more than anything, that makes it feel really dated. I don't think motion capture was used for this movie. I don't, I could be wrong. I think Ebert's review says it is. It is.

Okay. But, but it wasn't, it certainly wasn't what we have now where it's like Benedict Cumberbatch is playing, you know, Smaug and, and we're seeing where his performance is mapped onto like,

like, like, so we're not getting his performance is mapped on to like like like. So we're not getting a lot of the granular detail of like an actor's motions. Not that you necessarily need need to do that. There are also like animated movies that are that that are super expressive that don't use motion capture. But like this, it's played. It's it's too wooden or too subtle, whatever it is, like it just doesn't come across in terms of the expressiveness of the of the characters. I have a I have a paper from MIT that describes the. OK, in this in this culturally liminal space, the diverse production staff painstakingly constructed the movie using the following process. So this is this is a breakdown of how they actually made

it. First, frame-by-frame storyboards were scanned into a slideshow Avid system while the voice actors recorded the script. Using a program called Alias or Wavefront Maya, the scenes were blocked and shot with virtual cameras, which moved like real cameras to provide the necessary cinematic look. Storyboards and layouts were then sent to the animation and motion capture departments. The former held the subtext and character emotions for the story, while the latter contained camera moves and character blocking synchronized with the voices of the actors. According to animation director Andy Jones, animators debated on what made a character more human, the way it

moved or the way it looked, and finally decided to focus on its look, particularly the face and fingers. Also due perhaps to Sakaguchi's penchant for elaborate storyboarding, the crew paid more attention to conveying the emotional state of the characters through appearance rather than through dialogue um motion capture accounted for 90 of the body movements that were used in the film got it but it looks like the uh in addition to large movements motion capture was used to get the bodily nuances of the performers when they were still nuances that were difficult to animate, but easy to record through a 16 camera optical motion capture system and the tracking software from motion analysis. So it looks like it was a real merger between hand animating some of these facial changes

and then like major structural motion capture for bodies. I will say that the facial expressions are often very wooden and they're not aided by the voice performances for most of the cast, most of which are just like, you know, Ming-Na is talked about like was in total isolation. And I think her performance is good and is one of the the, you know, things that anchors this film. But like, you know, all the actors were working on themselves in the booth. I don't know if they were directed by Sakaguchi or by the voice director.

I mean, Sakaguchi does speak English, so I imagine he was at least involved. But but like, you know, so that performance is pretty good and i think dr sid donald sutherland is is pretty good beyond that most of the cast is just so lifeless i mean you mentioned buscemi and it's weird like buscemi seems so flat throughout this again it could be how he was directed it could be the takes that were pulled but but it's just like he's like supposed to be like the wisecracking guy and And so much, so many of his lines have so little energy. And then, you know,

Perry Gilpin, I think is pretty good. You can kind of see an alternate career path for her. Roz from Frazier, where she maybe was like kind of a Michelle Rodriguez sort of, you know, type in action movies. I think she's actually good at kind of playing the, the,

the bad-ass Marine here, but like James Woods and Alec Baldwin, not good guys, but like James Woods and Alec Baldwin, uh, not good guys, uh, but generally good character actors, but they're so fucking flat in this movie. It's awful.

It's the worst he's ever been. It's, it's, it's remarkably bad. What did he think he was doing? Like, I wonder if he just had no context for what the movie was or maybe he just read none of the script and he just did all his lines in isolation james woods has a line where he's like just accidentally released aliens into the like

sanctuary city of new york in order to like do a false flag attack and create the need for him to use his big gun and he fucks it up and the aliens get loose and he just goes what have I done hey James you want to do another one

can we get just a run of those I gotta get out of here I gotta got to Capri Sun to finish. If I do one more, I'll have to tell you something I think about politically. Yeah, they were particularly bad. And not just because they're bad guys. Truly awful. It had the vibe of, and I'm not denigrating all of these types of performances, but it felt like early voice acting in video games.

It felt like Final Fantasy X or something. It felt like 90s video game tier voice acting. And especially for James Woods' character. His character design is very Anna. He's like this gloved, coat wearing mustache. Not that he doesn't have a mustache, but he might as well have a mustache type of villain. Arched eyebrows, like

slicked hair. He looks like a fucking Nazi. It feels like a performance where you can't go too big. He also does like the most anime thing I've ever seen in a major motion picture, which is when he's contemplating what he's done to New York City, he takes out a gun and puts it to his own head. Yeah.

That was insane. That actually rules. That's actually great. I forgot about that until you just said it. But also, James Woods was in Hercules. And he was. Oh, he's fantastic. He was Hades.

And he was great in that. He's voice acted before he's fucking great in Kingdom Hearts yeah he reprises Hercules in Kingdom Hearts and he's really good

but it's interesting maybe he didn't care about what he was doing in this one I yeah it makes me wonder maybe they were just like limited in time

or just like the actors didn't have a lot of context or just maybe it was how they were directed I have no idea but it's I'd like to believe that the direction

was more realistic it's going to be really'd like to believe that the direction was more realistic. It's going to be really realistic. Could be that, yeah. More realistic. Play it smaller. Maybe that was it. Yeah. I want to point out a couple other things from this movie that I loved. One is very early in the movie, Dr. Sid takes out a journal and he

says, he opens it and shows it to Aki. And Aki's like, what is this this and she reads it and it's like perhaps there are spirits within every living thing and uh and those spirits could uh you know help heal the planet and he takes this diary and he's like yeah i wrote that 40 years ago and then he throws it in an incinerator and she's like, why are you doing this? And he's like, because Galileo was punished for his views. But the truth is this dude has had that journal

for 40 years until that, like he's never burned it previously. But I do still like that moment because it kind of sets the stakes of like what the, like there's things like that that work. I really like the tech design in this movie. I think a lot of it looks great. Very, very fucking Midgar esque.

And I also really like the jelly drops, which like when these dudes when these soldiers leap out of planes, they do it without parachutes and they fire jelly at the ground and then hit the jelly and slow into like a regular landing. And I was like, that's fucking awesome. That's a cool idea. But we could have used more of that because a lot of it does feel kind of generic. I also say like just on the mechanical design sense, the actual Zeus cannon is really well rendered. And that moment when that thing comes to full power then later on it when it's fucking destroyed all that shit looks i like the phantoms look i like the

phantoms i think phantoms are cool there's some firing there's some good artists firing a fireworks gun in order to see them fucking great like wherever those particles fall which is also a great way of like saying hey we need a a weapon that has a lot of particle effects because that's going to really show off how good our cg is um i really liked uh so new york is surrounded by this like bubble this like energy bubble that keeps out the phantoms. And you're like, that's a great concept. Okay, cool. And then they, they say,

if that's true, then what else is true later by creating a mini submersible submersible that has the bubble technology, like that bubble shield constantly being refreshed around the outside of it. And I was like, fuck yeah, guys,

because if you had that tech and you needed to go somewhere else where there might be phantoms you would totally use that tech then i was like but why don't they why don't they just surround the soldiers with that shit like why aren't why aren't the soldiers and essentially sure if this is true what else is true only goes so far you know like you can only think about so many things they should be in like hamster bubbles like hamster wheels and like running around in the in big bubbles. And the gun, the bullets should be that. Mary really laughed at.

There's a moment where over the course of the movie, these this like party builds up and you got like essentially Vasquez from Aliens. Yes. Like you've got this like little squad of dudes. And one of them gets impaled. Bing Rames' character. Yeah, Bing Rames gets impaled. And then he's like, leave me here.

And they're like, no, we won't. And he's like, no, leave me here. Just give me a gun. And they're like, okay, do what he says. And they give him a gun. And he's like now go and they turn around and just walk away like without any sense of urgency they just yes he's got it i'm just gonna watch walk slowly away which is really funny um it's that struck me as

like maybe that was just a you know the production workflow of like they did the, if they, you know, maybe they motion captured it earlier with them walking. And then when they were animating it, they're like, well, fuck, this doesn't work. But we already did the motion capture section. So we're locked in. If you speed it up, it's going to look weird. So then the final thing I want to shout out about this. Masterpiece. Did the movie reignite my interest in having this Final Fantasy Seiko watch?

Yes. Have I looked at my own wrist and thought, can I wear an Apple watch and the Seiko Final Fantasy watch at the same time? Yes, I've had that thought. Then I was like, is there a, why isn't there a cyberpunk-y, like, Apple Watch face? Like, why are they all so, I mean, it's Apple. So, you know, just they want it to look friendly, not like mean and terrifying.

But the final thing I want to shout out about this movie is there's a beautiful Sp uh spirits within credits song that plays which that song is great yeah it's a great song but the second the second song that plays during the credits is by uh by then superstars lark and seal these were the guys who uh did the opening theme for animes like full metal alchemist and uh great teacher onizuka right big big like there's a big they played madison square garden like these are big fucking j-rock stars and it felt surprising to hear their voices start screaming out the spirits within second theme which i assume was the first theme in other territories but i'm not sure uh so let's play a little bit of larkin seals uh spirits within song then song. Awake from a nightmare now. And the day it haunts me.

It slowly turns me apart. My dreams are... It's so jarring when this hits mid-credits. It's so disorienting. This fucking sucks. Yeah, it's... It really is just late 90s butt rock that hits after a very like, you know, plaintive and beautiful song that precedes it. I really think a big part of it is just context because it's, it's so rubs against everything that happens in the movie.

And again, the previous song, but maybe if I heard that song in a different con, a different situation, I might not bother. It might not bother me as much. The, the ending like set piece was sort of like the,

the first part in the movie to me that I was sort of like, I guess this is kind of like final fantasy first part in the movie to me that i was sort of like i guess this is kind of like final fantasy stuff like this like really big the big phantom the was the the gaia phantom i think it's called uh like having like all those like tentacles and stuff like that i was like that's like you'd see something like that in a game like this. And then at the end when you know when Aki is like looking out

into what has happened after you know the resolution of the film the world beyond that looks what I would think a Final Fantasy world looks like at the very least. Yep. Because the very least. Yeah. Because the rest of it, the rest of the movie is all, like, brown or gray.

Yeah. And it's not really, like, fun to look at. At least there's, like, a big splash of color. You know, not a lot of color. It's, like, blue and white and, like, maybe some trees. But I thought that was the most final fantasy at the very end and then you see an eagle or a bird of some kind flying and then the music starts and then it's over you know it's oh you know it's a lot like oh god i just i had an answer to an earlier question that i found uh and i wanted to answer that earlier question anim Animator Matthew Hackett, this is from Wikipedia, but, you know, sources, the making of Final

Fantasy, the spirits within Blu-ray featurette from 2007. Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes, in others, animators still had to use or make all their movements manually. Hand and facial movements were all done manually so yeah holy shit yeah yeah that's really labor intensive it explains why a lot of the dialogue is done with characters wearing helmets that cover their faces because they don't have to worry about lip flap uh but it but it also it does make it all feel kind of lifeless i would that that made me think that like you know it kind of resembles in terms of the absence of emotion

from the characters it's like the the quote-unquote live action lion king remake yeah how just like all these animals that are meant to be based off of photorealistic ones they just they they can't convey any sort of expressiveness and as as such, it maybe even makes the voice performances themselves feel a little flatter. What I was going to say is that what you were talking about, Matt, is I think this was that era where they were with adaptations of nerdy shit. They were just still running away from the source. I mean, the X-Men franchise was obviously a lot more successful. But that was another thing where it's like everything has to be cool and sleek and black. Like we can't if we're going to reference the X-Men, we can say, you know, they can they certainly can't be.

We'll have like a joke about them wearing yellow spandex. We certainly aren't going to like lean into what people like about the comic book. And that's the same sort of thing. It felt like they ran away from everything, including removing, you know, getting rid of Uematsu and getting a more conventional film composer. It's funny how much work Marvel has done for the Marvel Cinematic Universe has done to change that. Destroy cinema. With those eyebrows. It's Marty.

eyebrows it's marty like by the time you know you're you're watching like thor and spider-man and captain america like all of them in their bright colors for sure like you're like they had to do so much lifting to because i honestly i think that the reason the x-men are wearing all black leather in the early 2000s is because they were afraid that people would say, this is gay. Like literally that. Yeah. Like it would have been like, oh, I don't like this. It's not hard enough. And all of the work that Marvel has done to like, arc us out of that so that when you see Captain America, you're not like that guy looks gay. When you see Captain America, you're not like that guy looks gay. And instead are like, hmm, these movies are have less and less return value here.

I think the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, too. Yeah. Was a we're a big part of that. Even just embracing what was cool about the Spider-Man is is like his costume is toned down like he. Oh, yeah. It was like a middle ground. Yeah. For sure. I would like to read, as we near the end of this podcast, or at least this segment of

the podcast, I would like to read a quote from the official US PlayStation magazine issue 47 from August 2001, which, of course, comes out a couple of months earlier. So it predates the release of Vinyl Fantasy The Spirits Within. After seeing the technical achievements of The Spirits Within, the future seems very bright for Sakaguchi. But the future also seems bright for one other star, Sakaguchi's virtual heroine, Aki. It would seem that she has a strong career ahead of her in future games and certainly in movies. I definitely want to make Aki our main digital actress, says Sakaguchi. As any real actress, we'd like to see her in other features such as commercials or even comedy movies.

And in an industry based around image, Aki may have a one-up on the rest of Hollywood. Because Aki is a CG character, he says, we have the advantage of showing her at any age. We can even have her come back as a 16-year-old girl. That alone is sure to spark plenty of jealous looks from all the rest of the girls in Tinseltown. If you made a movie today and you just like we're like yeah we we've got a it's ryan gosling and emma stone uh and aki ross is one of the principal characters it's her third lead she's back i don't know it would be kind of interesting to figure out how to get aki ross into something now i think we're the ones to do it i have one thing i do want to touch on which

is be just because this was a thing that i was talked about so much i think it's been talked about so much in subsequent years i remember talking about with my friend at the time the final line of this movie is donald sutherland's character dr sid saying all of you know gaia is like gaia is real the gaia spirit is coming out and it's coming out of the earth and it's it seems to be the salvation of this this ruined apocalyptic planet uh you know and dr sid is observing this he's he's observing his life's work come to fruition. And he says. It's warm. That's. There's no more dialogue in the movie after that.

It's Donald Sutherland saying. It's warm. And that's it. It's a bizarre choice. Like to bookend this fucking movie. We're going to close the book on all of the ideas. That are presented here by having this guy say. It's warm.

It's warm. It's warm. It's warm. It's warm. It's warm. What a film. I don't hate it. It's interesting to rewatch. I think if you're like me

and you saw it many years ago and thought this sucks and are thinking about revisiting it, put it on. It's not boring. No. It moves. It's well-paced. It's like an hour 40.

It's an interesting watch. I don't think it's good. I won't go as far as Heather did, but I was happy to revisit it. All right. Well, maybe you were wrong. Maybe you were wrong. You guys ready for a little segment? It's time for the Question Block.

All right. This is a, oops, all voicemails edition of the Question Block. We got a couple of voicemails here. Why don't I just fucking let them rip? What do you say? Let's hear it. style of Telltale's The Walking Dead series. This got me thinking, what are some games that you would like to see deviate from their original genre? Thanks again for all the hours of free entertainment.

Edge. Wow, hell yeah. Love that. Nice. Edge. Nice. Right back at you, buddy. Yeah, that was the original.

I have an additional design credit on Sopranos Road to Respect, and that was the original design concept for it. It was more of akin to a Tell telltale game I think I've talked about it before in the podcast number of times so yeah we're talking about like genre shifting something into that format or is it more general than that it's just genre

shifting something else oh yeah yeah any genre shift like a like a you know if a Final Fantasy it's kind of the same thing Final Fantasy telltale game it doesn't same thing final fantasy telltale game it doesn't have to be a telltale game it could be yeah and how uh final fantasy 16 is more of an action game than it is an rpg right you know what makes me think of is metroid the metroid series made such a great transition from 2d to 3d like probably the most successful version of that going from the 2D Metroidvania genre

to being an FPS. And it would be interesting if they would try the reverse with Halo. If they were like, you know what? We're going to make like a 2D, a 2D, 2.5D Metroidvania in the Halo universe, we're going to make like a 2D, a 2D, two and a half D Metroidvania in the Halo universe. We're going to use that world. We're going to use Master Chief or another character.

And we're going to you're going to control them through that environment. Like that to me would be an interesting subversion of that IP. I wouldn't mind trying something like that. Seeing something like that, seeing something like that. I think that, so when you see combat in first-person games, like physical combat,

the camera is all over the fucking place to try and make you feel movement. But the truth is, when you are fighting somebody in like real life or even in VR, you're not swinging your head around wildly. You're kind of locked on them.

Yeah. And they they stay visually in the dead center of your conceptual space while your fists and shit like fly at their face, their heads. their heads. I would love to see a first person Street Fighter game where like, I don't even know how you would do it. I know that there was like some genre shifty stuff in I think the 3DS Street Fighter game, but I don't remember what that was. I don't think it was a first-person street fighter. I think that there is an opportunity for a first-person action game where you are punching and kicking and doing special moves on the people instead of using guns.

Apodaca, what's your take? Probably a Tony Hawk text adventure. Honestly, if there was a kingdom hearts text adventure game i would play it um that's sort of different enough uh i think that that'd be probably top of my list uh even on metal gear uh is it there is a metal gear tactics game i think right i don't know if there's like a there's like an x-com with metal yeah i don't think so either i think i don't like metal gear acid is like a card battler that's yeah that's a metal gear x-com would be good that's an interesting i that yeah unless unless we're forgetting a game yeah if they because they did that with the gears of war they had a gears of war tactics there was

actually pretty good i think there's you know that's like, I don't know, me coming up with this right now, it's probably the best idea I've ever heard in my life. Let's listen to another voicemail. Hey, what's up guys? My name's Brandon. I'm from Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas. Huge fan. So I got a question.

The last month, I decided to finally check out the Resident Evil series. Within the last month, I've beaten RE2 remake, RE7, RE8, and I'm about 10 hours into RE4 remake.

It's been fantastic. Really awesome to be able to kind of run through them all in a row. RE8, definitely my favorite by far, but all of them are great. So my question to you all is, has there ever been a game series that you never really interacted with, that you came to later in life and kind of blew your mind? Anyway, love the show. Love you guys. Thanks for doing it. Bye. Thanks, love the show. Love you guys.

Thanks for doing it. Bye. Thanks, Brandon. That's a great question. I mean, I'll start things off, and just because this is something I've mentioned before on the podcast, and so I'll say this,

and then maybe we can all think of one, and maybe I'll have something better to say, but I will lead off with the Mass Effect franchise. I discovered, like, I was always on my radar, never got around to playing it. And then when they released the Legendary Edition, I just had an absolute blast playing it and thought it was such a great piece of science fiction in any medium. And so that's definitely one that I came to, you know, years after its release and was was excited to play and excited to talk about it uh it goes without saying right now final fantasy is that for me but um when i got my xbox uh my series s i first game i played all the way through was the was gears 5 uh and i i loved it i

never went back to finish or play the other Gears games, but I loved Gears 5 so much. I thought that was such an incredible game. And I also played through some Halo games, and I loved Halo Reach quite a bit. I thought that game was absolutely incredible. I had never played any of the Halo games before, and I went straight through that one and played some of one and two.

I guess my answer is Fortnite. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, I had avoided it for years and then became insanely addicted to it. So Fortnite. Yeah. An unsurprising answer from Heather Ann Campbell here on. Here's another voicemail. Hi, y'all. This is Corinne from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And I was calling with a question about your favorite like sick day or like burnt out crispy games to play like for some strange reason whenever I am stressed out I have to go to slay the spire because I've been stressed out for like two months now all I have played is slay the spire for two months so I was just curious if there were other games that you all had that are sort of like the equivalent of like an after dinner drink or a chicken noodle soup to soothe your soul. I guess that's what it is. All right. Thank you for considering this question that I stumbled through. Thanks, Corinne.

Thanks, Corinne. And hey, I hope you're feeling better. Thanks, Grant. I hope you're feeling better. You know, my answer for the longest time was the Diablo franchise, and then Hades comes along, and it was Hades for a bit. But I will say I was super sick recently. And I talked about on the podcast when Gabrus was on, that's when I was binging a lot of Diablo 4,

and that was honestly great because just the hours melt away. So a Diablo game or a Civilization game is the other one that just makes me kind of time travel. You're going to get lost in it and that's a big part of making being sick so endurable. But you know what? From this point

on, maybe it's going to be Dave the Diver because that game is fucking rich. Wow, he loves Dave the Diver. You gotta play Dave the Diver, that game is fucking rich Dave the Diver you gotta play Dave the Diver Dave the Diver you've been down too long in the midnight sea so my my immediate answer in my head was

for that noodle soup feeling Sega CD games, which have enough like sound and like like Snatcher, right? It's got enough going on that it's not boring, but it is also not demanding anything of you. Like you can move real, really slow at your own pace through those games without, without like, yeah, without putting too much effort in. And so,

yeah, I think, I think Sega CD games are, are my, my chicken noodle soup. How about you Alpadaka? Well, I have two answers,

right? So like, because sick and stressed are different modes for me, right? Sure. I mean, honestly, if I'm sick, I'm probably not going to be playing a video game. But like, if I'm like a little bit sick,

like I have like a little cold or something, I'm just like, I want to play a game, but it's going to be low input. Like a low input type of game, like where I only have to press a couple of buttons. I don't have to be like the master of the controller, right? So that to me is going to be something like,

something I've replayed a lot in my life, which is like Pokemon, like a Pokemon game. Like there's not a lot of interactivity. You're just pressing A and walking around. That's kind of it if i'm stressed out which i think i am right now because of this podcast well uh no no um no uh you know just everything yeah just uh this doing this i could do this all day with you guys uh i need something where I can just fucking win

like I need to fucking I need to be Kratos I need to be Clive Rosenfeld is that his name Rosenfield Clive it's Clive Rossfield I need to be someone that can just fuck shit up

uh and just get in there and and take out hordes and hordes of enemies i need to be leon kennedy right like i that's that's where i'm going if i'm stressed i want to i want to fight i want to i want to win i want to destroy uh this next one um i don't actually know who sent this one. Hello. I'm just a mouse. I'm a tiny little mouse. My name is Andy. Andrew.

Andrew. The mouse. Andrew. Andrew. The mouse. I guess I wanted to call in and just say how much I love the podcast, but I

had a suggestion, which is you guys should review the popular 90s video game, Biker Mice from Mars. I hear it's Heather's wife Mary's favorite game from her childhood. Yeah, I don't know. Bring back Mary and

let's review Biker Mice, her favorite game. If you love Heather, you'll do this. Okay, bye. This is Andrew now. Bye for now. If you love Heather, you'll do this. Okay, bye. This is Andrew Mouse. Bye for now. Bye.

Oh, man. Wow, thanks, Andrew. Yeah, so that was a real mouse you called. Let's get that mouse on. Yeah, I think we should have the mouse on. I have lots of questions. I feel like this breaks the fourth wall of the podcast, but I want to say something to my wife who's in the room. of the podcast, but I want to say something to my wife who's in the room.

Which is that we just listened to your voicemail. Oh, the mouse who wants... I want to see your face. She reiterates that she would like to, oh, I think she's going to come a surprise guest on the podcast right here. Hello, I'm just a little mouse.

And maybe you should play a video game about my people. But you're mice from Mars. And have merry laws on the podcast. Bye. Incredible.

Incredible. That was adorable. I love it. I think we should, we should do it. Here's the thing. We should too. We're just like,

it's like fine. It's final fantasy time, baby. Yeah. Well, we will, we will. Yeah.

We'll make it happen. We'll finish out Final Fantasy Month. And then I think I think we have a game request. And I know just the way to do it. But we'll talk about that later. We'll figure it out. All right. And we'll definitely talk about Biker Mice for Mars for longer than we talked about Final Fantasy.

I don't know. Episode. Well over two hours. I have to eat dinner. I have to go eat dinner yeah Mary's in the same room as you because

she's tapping her watch and her foot well that was the question block and that's this week's Get Played our engineering is by Alex Gonzalez

dead air Alex G on Twitter and Instagram and also we got Get Animated you got you get played here but you want to get animated check out our paywalled show which you can find Twitter and Instagram. And also, we got Get Animated. You get played here, but you want to get animated? Check out our paywalled show, which you can find only now at patreon.com slash get played.

Heather, what are we watching this week? This podcast was longer than the movie itself. That's making content, baby. We are watching the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya mid-2000s mega hit. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,-2000s mega hit, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, where we are in the final stretch with the final two episodes of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is in broadcast order.

So those are episodes five and six. Five and six this week on Get Animated, which you can find at patreon.com slash getplayed. I know it's confusing, but we're getplayed, so. We're getplayed. Patreon.com slash getplayed to get animated. Yeah. And-

Past guest John Gabrus texted me. Nick, you got to play Dave the Diver. He texted you right now? I replied. Oh. No, this was while I was playing yesterday. I was like, dude, I was just playing. It's fantastic.

You gotta play Dave the Diver. I gotta eat dinner. Okay, sorry. More of a play episode. So yeah, this has been a great record of here listening to us talk about one of the best movies ever made, Final Fantasy The Spirits Within and if you disagree then

you got played it's warm