The Besties - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Helldivers 2 are Battling for Our Time

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

The streak of hot new releases for 2024 continues! This week, we're talking about the opening hours of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and the many hours we've spent squishing bugs 'n' bots in Helldivers 2. Good hours, all!Also discussed: The Devil's Plan, Clubhouse Games, Deep Rock Survivor, The Floor Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I got a question for y'all. Yeah. When is the right time to take down your Christmas tree? December 26th? Is that where we're having fun? Or are we asking a question? No, I'm asking you a question. Are you a February Christmas person or a March Christmas person?

Baby, Jan 2. Jan 2. Jan 2. Jan 2 is good. Jan 2, everyone out. Jan 2. Jan 2. Jan 2 is good. Jan 2, everyone out. Jan 2, secular household. Jan 2. That's when it goes down in my house.

I get so excited about not having a bunch of stuff up for Jesus and Santa and everybody, and they are welcome to join us again in November, but Jan 2, their invite is expired. Don't get me wrong. I take down like everything else but the Christmas tree. But you're telling me that you want to go through all of the winter doldrums without a little bit of holiday cheer? Just a little bit? It's like looking at a corpse of a holiday.

It's gone. It's done. It's over. It's in the past. What's funny is that you have been looking at the corpse the whole time because it is a tree that was cut down and is just sitting there. That is true. I will say this. When Chris and I were neighbors,

it was a great service that you provided to me because I could swing by your house in the middle of March and get a little shot in the arm. This is not a joke. This is genuinely true. It's the same way that like i don't want to have a dog but you guys have a dog and so we could go over to your house and see the dog and get a little christmas spirit and it was like a nice little a nice little you have a christmas tree in your house for a a quarter of the entire year i don't need you to do math on me i need you

to help me decide maybe even a third if you're putting it up in December. Are you saying it's up, Chris? Of course it's up. It's February. Of course it's still up. Is it up? The question is, should I take it down? When to take it down? The question is, should I take it down after February Christmas or after March Christmas?

Should I take it down on February 26th or March 26th? I have never heard anyone call the 25th a Christmas. Every month has a Christmas. Sure. You gotta take it down. Easter falls on March 31st this year. You gotta get that shit down by then. Oh.

Because you can't have the Easter bunny roll up in your house. You all are acting like I'm some sort of freak. I didn't say April Christmas. I said February or March Christmas. Right. I'm some sort of freak. I didn't say April Christmas. I said February or March Christmas. I'm not one of those people. When they say Jesus wept, they mean he saw the tree still, and that's when he wept. You're like a Christian hobbit.

We could second Christmas. No, the problem is our family is Jewish. Yeah, I guess that is the one. We should have actually, Russ, so a Christmas tree around November or so. Around like Hanukkah time, you mean? Yes. Somewhere around there. Us in the heaven bound get together and we cut down trees to celebrate the Yule.

And God likes this when you cut the trees down. He loves it. He loves it. He loves it so much he gives us his kid. What I'm hearing is February Christmas is probably the appropriate time this year. Yes, I think we've all... I'll make sure to take some pictures and send them to you so you can... Thank you so much.

And I'd love a newspaper in there, if you could. Today's date, I have a sports event in the background. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know two fantastic games of the week. My name is Russ Froschig, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.

It is a video game club, and just by listening, my friend, you are a member. We've got two, count them, two big games for you this week. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Helldivers 2. Chris Plant, what the heck are those? Forget what the heck are those. What the hell is wrong with us? There's nothing coming out after a certain point this year, and we're burning two of the best games right now you know we keep saying such as

and yet more games keep on coming okay well very quick final fantasy 7 rebirth is the sequel to the remake to the reboot of final fantasy 7 it beloved uh rpg from the 90s and Helldivers 2 is a sequel that changes the genre of the Helldivers series, which if you've never heard of Helldivers before this, hey, I get it. Helldivers 2, though, it's your identity now. It's not a different genre.

I mean, it's a third-person shooter. It's not a top-down. It's just a change of perspective. It's the same genre. Okay. When I play genre top down perspective it's the same genre okay yeah yeah that's when i play when i play uh asteroids i love to go what a great fps what a great fps drag his ass chris get it get him okay so let's take a quick break and we'll talk about both those games okay before we get into the two games we're talking about which again fucking baller week well done us for making these games i don't know but uh i want to thank everyone and there are many of you who supported us at patreon.com slash the besties uh it's so it was let me just say

extremely scary i know it seems like it shouldn't be but extremely scary to do something that new and that different from anything we've done before uh and just uh people have been really cool uh and it's really great great to see i also wanted to mention uh people did vote for the bracket episode the besties battle bracket episode uh we will be doing an episode on the best first level and that episode is coming on March 5th so that will be a spicy bracket battle coming at you for patrons on March 5th

thank you for voting please keep voting I don't think we set a timer if you're a patron you can vote please keep voting because we're going to use that same list to determine our April bracket episode will it just keep rolling like like that i don't think forever but at least for the short term uh we'll use that for april as well so cool okay business over okay final fantasy 7 revert can i take a swing at this yeah if you can recap the first game that

would be great yeah easy sure final fantasy 7ake is basically the Midgar portion of Final Fantasy VII. Most of disc one of Final Fantasy VII, a PlayStation 1 title, takes place in the giant, steamy city of Midgar, and that is all that you get in Remake. And what happened there? What happened in Midgar? Cloud Strife is an ex-soldier, and he teams up with Avalanche,

a plucky group of eco-terrorists, with Barret and Tifa and Aerith, and Red XIII shows up at the end. So you get out of Midgar, and in the original game, then all of a sudden you're plonked down into the world, and it's kind of a cool moment, because it's like, oh shit, I didn't know there was an overworld map in this game. A sky, let alone.

One city for 20 hours. Yeah. And so Rebirth is essentially it picks up right where Remake left off. out in a sort of extended flashback sequence while you and your teammates post up in the city of Calm to kind of regroup after a big climactic Sephiroth encounter that was very unexpected because that did not happen in the original Final Fantasy VII. And then just as sort of the original game opened up the world to you and you can go in a few different directions and explore different things, now this is an open world kind of game uh and and so yeah if you have played the original final fantasy 7 you're you you are going to see some familiar beats and you know

familiar stuff but now this game has the trappings of an open world game which final fantasy 7 remake did not have um otherwise it's all the same you know you got the action part action part sort of uh turn-based uh combat where you charge up your active time battle meter which lets you execute you know special commands while you're doing your usual combat stuff um and uh i was surprised at how much it i don't know there there is a option you can pick from the main menu that's like i want to recap the story of the first game and it's like four minutes they did a really good job bravo square i did not think you had it in you to get through that at a clip which is great because and you must watch that yeah yeah i feel you can't it really drops you right right the fuck

back into it i think the important thing for people to know is the big key moment again spoilers for remake if you haven't played it is that the events of the end of remake basically determined that everything that happens after remake could be different slash dramatically different from what happened in the original game they like yes severed fate or whatever the fuck yeah so yes while while you are going through sort of the critical path of final fantasy 7 you are there is constant stuff that you are seeing uh that is that that just wasn't in the original game which is very very exciting i love final fantasy 7 so much i've beaten it more times than i can count it is one of my favorite games period of all time and it is cool as it was cool to play like remake and see like oh shit it's the sector 7 slums and oh seventh

seventh heaven and all that jazz i love that tv show um then you know you get that here too but something is different something is wrong and trying to kind of unravel what that is while seeing all this familiar stuff is like incredibly compelling uh for me yeah and what is different is this time there's a card game in the card there is a very good very is so good this is this is the one thing that i asked just what his opinion was. I don't know. Justin, did you end up playing it or you didn't get a chance? No, no, no. I mean, I got to.

No, I meant the card game specifically. Yes, I'm saying I started to face like third tier people. But like I did all of the duels like leading up to it. It's really, it's very good. It's harder than it, it's simpler, but harder than it's very good it's it's harder than it it's simpler but harder than it seems like the actual mechanics of it are pretty simple and but the tactical way you would like build a deck together and stuff is it's honestly a bit more math than i am capable of of doing frankly i have to you have to kind of three in four dimensions, and it was a bit past my skill set. I had a moment where I could either spend Gil

on a new piece of armor to increase my materia slots, or I could buy a booster pack of Queen's Blood cards. Yo, I want that fat Chocobo card. I'm going to drop what I need for that. I think I should do that. I've just been playing with the base cards and swapping in. I don't think you can win with the base cards is my impression. If I could say something about the – just to build off what Griff said.

Yeah. I played through Final Fantasy VII and I – On PlayStation, you mean? Yeah, the original. And then I really dug – what was the last one called? Yeah, Remake. Remake. original and then i i really dug um what was what was last called yeah remake remake um i really dug remake because i i got to see a lot of the stuff that you know i sort of remember honestly like i haven't returned to it i'm sorry you guys are returned to the game since i played it

initially so a lot of this section of it was a lot of stuff that I barely sort of remember. I'm in the same boat. But it's very much, it's very much in conversation with that. And I think to its detriment a little bit, because I kept wondering if there were things that I should be understanding that I wasn't necessarily getting or differences that I wasn't getting that I would know if I was like a little bit more familiar with.

It's interesting. With seven. And I do want a little bit more familiar with. It's interesting with, with seven. And I do want to mention before you keep going, Justin, the only, we're only going to be talking about like the first five or 10 hours. We're not going to be getting deep into the spoilers of it. So if you're worried about spoilers,

we're not really going to go that far. Go ahead. Characters are introduced in a way that it's like, there they are. And that really hit for the first game. Cause I know all those characters because it's the characters that are main characters that are kind of iconic.

And that's not as much here in this game, but it's very much still assumed, I feel like, that you have a really good handle on the original game. I can speak as somebody who I feel very confident that I have a very good handle on the original game. It's pretty faithful. Like a lot, you know,

when you meet a character while exploring, you know, the, the mithril mines, like that, that, that character that's in the game, that's,

that's EA sports is in the game. Uh, and a lot of the beats, again, we're not going to get into spoilers that sort of follow this, this section of the game that comes after Midgar are, are basically, uh, you know, one, one for for one what i really like about rebirth so far is aside from the flashback sequence which is about

sort of the uh the the niebelheim incident uh where you sort of learn about sephiroth and clouds uh origin uh antifa's up in there too that's very like dramatic and very i mean final fantasy 7 like iconic shit sephiroth walking through the flames like you know pretty pretty iconic stuff and then after that it gets pretty silly pretty fast yeah there's a there's an outrageous number of mini games that you get to play through uh just as you sort of uh well i guess we're not talking so much about like junon and i can talk about the first area there's a mini game where you walk up to a tree stump and a moogle pops out and it's like welcome to our world and then you go into the moogle world and you roll around trying to nudge moogles into their like nest yeah which i i don't know it seems in con like out of step with the tone

of final fantasy 7 but if you think about final fantasy 7 that game was just constant like here's a mini game where you have a slap fight with a lady on top of a cannon here's a mini game where you are running away from enemies on a motorcycle and here's one where you're jumping around on a dolphin like all that shit is is pretty well represented here in a way that i very much enjoy i need that stuff because if it's dead serious the whole time there's no way it's going to keep my attention i need like pace breaking stuff so i appreciate how fucking goofy it gets speaking of pace uh i i really the cinematics in this game are, they're gorgeous to look at. I feel like the pacing is really slow.

And I don't know if that's coming from like, from Infinite Wealth, where I thought those were all so well written and acted and directed. This feels not as sharp to me. And a lot of times I found myself skipping through dialogue because it's like okay it's just so languoriously paced are you talking about like the the like actiony like for not pre-rendered but effectively pre-rendered cut scenes are you talking about like dialogue sequences yes both specifically the dialogue sequences i feel like they go on for a really long time and you are what i what kind of sucks is, a lot of times you're forced into like section, okay, like you're turning in one of the chapters to an end and like everybody's in their rooms, right?

And then you have to go up to bed, but everybody's got a little icon above their head that they've got something to say. So it's like, okay, this is the moment where if you want to have these conversations, you have to kind of stop what you're doing and go and have all these conversations with people. And it's very much like the tempo of it is being dictated to you in a way that like

felt very start stop to me like i wanted to be playing video game a lot more than i was i do agree that uh infinite wealth did a version of this better which it also has a giant open world and throughout that there are little icons that when you just happen to be walking in that area, you can trigger. And as you continue to walk and go about your business, a conversation happens between you and one of the characters. And I found that to be, like, a really great way to just gradually learn more and, like, bond with the party. That said, for me, I didn't really notice the pacing issue that you're talking about mostly because i went way too hard on the open world i played so much i was like yeah let's let's pivot let's let's talk about the open world stuff because it is it is you know aside from the you

know who are these who are all these hooded figures that weren't in the original game it is it is the biggest departure and i think it makes i think it makes some sense like i understand why they did it the way that they did it because i was i i i was skeptical a bit of rebirth because i know because the midgar stuff is so self-contained right like when they were like remake is going to be the midgar sequence of the game it's like great that is a pretty linear pretty like straightforward thing i can understand how you can do that in this this format for rebirth it's like okay well now that is a pretty linear, pretty straightforward thing. I can understand how you can do that in this format. For Rebirth, it's like, okay, well, now all of a sudden we're leaving the city.

We're heading to Calm. We're heading to Junon. We're heading to Cosmo Canyon. It's like all of that stuff was much more open in the original game. So they can't do what they did for Remake, which is a linear trajectory through the story of Final Fantasy VII. It just doesn't like final fantasy 7 didn't work like that so to to sort of change that up just imagine all of the times where you are on the overworld of the final fantasy 7 map it is it is open and you are running around it and

there are little there are lots of activities that you can do as you are exploring it. Not just running. You're also riding. You are also chocobo riding. Yes. I want to hear from Chris about his thoughts on the open world stuff. Yes, please. Yeah, I mean, I'm a sucker for this stuff most of the time. And I, at first, I was like really into it because the open world here is beautiful.

Yeah, it is. It reminded me a little bit of was it xenogears that we played last year i think that's a very good comparison yeah like xeno xeno blade on xenogears yes thank you if you um if you did that and took advantage of the ps5 rather than the limitations of the nintendo switch you would get this and there are multiple times in in this game where i was just kind of like out and about and suddenly i'm like have this vista of like the mountains and the sea and it's like it's genuinely stunning um unfortunately the what you actually do in the

open world can be like pretty hit or miss almost all of it is what i is ubisoft content and by that i mean like go to a tower and like turn it on or go to uh an area and like continue a kind of a minor side quest there's three chests in this area find them go find them yeah i i didn't mind it again because i enjoyed the world itself so much that if if there had just been a little bit less, I became kind of, you know, you get into that zone where you just like can't stop yourself. And I definitely was at a certain point I was catching myself wondering why I hadn't moved on. There's one good thing I do want to say about how they did the open world, even if it is. Is it Chadley? Well, I mean, I chadley but i love

chadley is chadley is kind of the main character of the game now which we can get to um but they're the way that they do these these kind of like random missions that appear is not actually that random and you will find that as you are doing getting the three chest or going and fighting uh some random goons that that'll unlock little bits of like minor story like suddenly you're fighting a giant bird uh that's like a side boss and then by doing that you are unlocking an item that uh ends up completing a side quest that you had kind of forgotten about from the very beginning of all this so there is it's not just that that open world thing where hey you beat all this and you walk away from it with like you know a few extra pieces of like

health material there is some some story stuff and some of them overlap too which is kind of interesting like you can't complete one side quest until you do this other thing and you'll just kind of find the location of this i mean i gotta the the open world stuff was killing me i mean it is the this is go feeds into the pacing right like you have these towers and you see a tower and when you see a tower you know a few things there's going to be a button that you have to press and there's going to be a little sequence while you press the button it's going to take like 30 seconds and then you're going to be a little sequence while you press the button. It's going to take like 30 seconds. And then you're going to see it go boo, boo, boo and shoot the energy out so you see everything that's around it. And then always there are going to be ladders that you are going to slowly clamber up.

And up at the top of the ladders, there's going to be a couple boxes. You're going to hit them. There's going to be Moogle medals. And then you can slide down. This is every tower is exactly like this. And then, oh, excuse me, Griffin. You got to just heap a bunch of praise. You can slide down. This is every tower is exactly like this. And then, Oh,

excuse me, Griffin, you got to just heap a bunch of praise. I got to tell people what they're actually in for. They're repeated stealth sequences that are insane. The fact that they're in the game is absolutely unforgivable. The other open world quote unquote activities are like, they have battles that you want.

They want you to complete in a specific way. There's capturing a chocobo, which is so boring. And the, the, it's so slow. It gets a little worse too. And all this stuff is like, it's,

it's, it's still the pacing where like climbing up a ladder is slow. You get these, the, a chocobo ability to, to the, there are certain chocobo that can scale walls and in exact specific places. And it's so slow and the whole

thing is just like please i know what i'm going to isn't going to be that interesting please don't make it take so and then furthering the pacing problems the stuff they have in the open world a lot of the times if i see a tower and i'm going to that tower because i gotta go do that tower and then the chocobo like sniff something and chocobo sniffing something means I'm supposed to hold a button so it can sniff better. And then we're going to go over and dig a little bit. And it's probably going to be an ether onion. And it's like the pace of it is like,

it's destroyed again. Like it makes it not even fun to run around the world. Cause there's always little doodads that they want you to interact with. And none of them are that fun. Here's my talk about the quick time event, sort of repeated quick time. If there's two different types of activities that are basically just like just like the same quick time event and it's not it's nothing it's a nothing burger it's it is it is shocking to me how much love and care and attention went into the

reimagining and recreation of the final fantasy seven stuff and the complete sort of creative bankruptcy of the of the open world and it's not a lot this is not like thrown in there like if you want to mess around the open world at one point i didn't do much open world stuff and fucking chadley who's a doctor of final fantasy basically little boy he if you don't do stuff for a while, he's like, hey, listen, I don't want to make it weird, but I feel like you haven't been doing many of the challenges. Did you guys get this?

I didn't, no. I feel like you haven't been really doing many of the challenges. And it's fine. But if you can, it would really be great. I'm not even exaggerating the tone. I'm not just mad. I'm disappointed. it really is like i know a big tough guy like you wouldn't leave a job unfinished so uh do what you need to do i would say it seems like they have incredible confidence and their ability to make a very strong combat engine which they obviously made mostly in remake, an incredibly powerful narrative

through the main storyline and the cut scenes and the fucking music, which goes so fucking hard in this game. So good. It's so good. The way that they take field themes from the first game and turn them into dynamic battle themes as you encounter enemies is genuinely awe--inspiring so the stuff that they did

well in the first game i think they continue to fucking crush and do a great job in yeah it just seems like again none of us have beaten the game none of us are super super far but what we've seen is whenever they try to take swings outside of what they were doing in the first game it does not seem to necessarily be landing unless you're rolling around with moogles which i fucking loved that's what's great the moogle shit is the best open world activity because it's the only one that is like i don't know weird and and thoughtful and kind of and kind of entertaining i do like like there are side quote plant was sort of alluding to this there are are side quests, so it's important to distinguish.

There's activities that are just like, show up at this thing and do a quick time event. And there are side quests that do have narrative beats that, unfortunately, what you're doing in these side quests tends to be very similar to the activities. Like, go to this point and collect this item. And some of them you need to do the activities to complete. That's what I was alluding to. I had at least one that I had to do open world stuff yeah which is a drag but i do like when there are narrative beats i get enjoyment out of them but you do have to do a lot of drudgery to like do that stuff i and it's not and it's not as simple as like just skip it because in in a well-functioning open world game

it is supposed to be the carrot that is pulling you through the world and helping you to experience it right and so if you're not driven to do those things then it's like i mean you can mainline it right but like what am i missing that's not how it's intended obviously yeah so i listen chadley i'm playing on easy yeah and this is related to that because i got to the point where if i played on normal difficulty it would require that i found and managed all of my potions from sniffing the air as a chocobo and digging for stuff and i realized okay i'm not going to do every single side thing in here even though i traditionally was a completionist i got shit to do so i'm going to keep moving on and the only

way i was able to keep pace with the story without doing every side thing was to dial down the difficulty, which I kind of recommend. If you're low on time, fucking do that because you'll have a much better time. It's already so complex. The battle system, there's a lot to keep track of. One other big thing that I want to talk about before we move on because we do have an entire other big game to talk about. The stuff in this game that is more linear and more traditional final fantasy feeling i think is fantastic i think i love the opening of this game the entire nibbleheim incident and recreation i found so compelling and i say that as somebody who was not a huge

final fantasy fan and i talked to um ollie welsh who works with us at polygon um and he was very much unfamiliar with the story and both of us were shocked how well that that scene works as an entry point to this so if you've never played final fantasy if you've never played remake surprisingly you can kind of start here yeah um i don't know if i would recommend that because i think remake is really good and i i think you should go play it midgar is basically like an introduction to the gang as it were so you won't have as much of a connection to the gang but in terms of the sephiroth narrative it more or less starts here though ironically it is an introduction to that core gang this game itself this part of final fantasy 7 is the seven samurai building the larger group

so like you're you're still gonna get that kick either way right um justin oh i was just gonna say they also do a lot of really smart and it's subtle, but tying cinematics in with this is when you're not in the open world, when you're on the like main line. They do a lot of smart, like turning things that would have been cinematics into interactive sequences. Like there's one moment where you're going to an inn and there's some trouble and you're like pulled out of the menu and are running to where the trouble is. And it's not like a cut. It's not a sequence. It's like something you're playing pulled out of the menu and are running to where the trouble is and it's not like a cut it's not a sequence it's like something you're playing in the game they have a smart that that stuff is all pretty smart and well and well directed i genuinely think i i would i am dividing this game up in my mind between the great shit that they did in remake of reimagining this this world gorgeously with like incredible attention

to detail making it fun to play and while also adding in this broader mystery for people like me who who know ff7 like backwards and forwards and like i'm i'm going to keep playing the game because of that stuff and then there's this open world element of it that is just shockingly not very good uh that i am hoping against hope i am not going to be sort of forced into engaging with because you know i fall behind the difficulty curve or because they make more of it mandatory as we go on i i have not it seems i'm optimistic that i will be able to play the game that way yeah um and and that's that is that's sort of where I'm at. Yeah, I kind of hope that it's just there

for the people that are so obsessed with Final Fantasy that they just want to spend more time in the world. Maybe. Man, it really is designed. To be clear, I mean, I don't think it's that much less engaging than a lot of Ubisoft stuff from like three or four years ago like i can see

where they thought well if we just pull some of these things in this is like the biggest franchise in this yeah like genre we'll just pull some of this stuff in and it's not like terrible it's just like so flat um and it doesn't feel like anything you want to keep returning to i literally i got the the mountain climbing chocobo and i i went for one waypoint that required me to climb like three different walls so isn't it wild at the speed of smell no joke gang so slow and i was like the game patch don't want to do this the game patch this morning and i literally went back to see if maybe i did it again because i thought that was a six gig patch certainly they made certainly one of the one of the little bits and bobs they fixed.

It's wild. Yeah. Okay. Cool. We will return to this. Yes. Yeah. I'm going to keep playing it.

I want to keep talking about it. I'll see if I can, man. I don't know. I really liked that last one. And I know this one's going to do some crazy stuff. Right. I want to see that stuff. I mean, I'm already in chapter four. one's gonna do some crazy stuff right i want to see that stuff i mean it's or i'm already in chapter four it's already doing some crazy stuff but yeah i would

like to not have to do a lot of the random ass side stuff yeah we didn't chapter four is beyond the scope of what we originally planned to talk about but the whole junon sequence if you are a final fantasy 7 fan is so there's stuff in there i just have no memory and i'm like is it possible this was in the first fucking game it's so weird yeah it's so weird it's so good uh all right let's take a quick break and then we'll be back to talk about helldivers 2 as well i mean okay helldivers 2 i'm gonna say it and i'm gonna mean it with every fiber of my being is the best new multiplayer experience I've had in probably the last five years. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, it's up there. It's certainly up there for me. I can't think of a more engaging, more immediately fun multiplayer game than this game in the last five years. Set it up. Give people some context, because Helldivers is a game that is very near and dear to my heart that not a lot of people played, is wild because fucking everybody is playing hell divers too yeah so the original divers was a top-down uh twin stick shooter where you fought

uh basically bugs and and monsters and it was made by the people who made magica magica most notably was you played a bunch of wizards but the the hook of it was you would constantly accidentally team kill people because you'd call down spells and they'd kill everyone or you'd accidentally like shoot other people and it was just like goofy fun and helldivers the original had a little bit of that but i think the oh it had a lot of that that was the main draw of helldivers one is you would drop a you know support pod and it would land on one of your teammates. But as someone who played this with Griffin, like right when I moved to Austin, I can tell you, I don't know if I would say it was a lot of the fun as the person who had the things dropped on his face. But yeah, I was there. But I do think the perspective, to some extent, held Helldivers, the the original back from being as fucking goofy as it could be.

And that's what Helldivers 2 is doing. And it's doing it so fucking well that I'm like over the moon about it. from the sky and you're these like uh starship troopers soldiers fighting a variety of either bugs or robots and maybe future races to come and how you're doing that is you're calling in airstrikes you're using you know flamethrowers and shotguns and you're very powerful from the beginning you are this is not like a slowly build up with a pistol yeah you are instantly powerful and actually that's a good point because if you are a person that's been playing for 15 hours, and someone, your buddy just joined and has only played for two matches, whatever, you both can play together and have a great fucking experience.

Because there's not like, oh, there is progression. It's not like mandatory progression. The progression is, can I talk about the progression real quick? Yeah, sure. It's interesting. It does the usual stuff of like, there's in-game currencies currencies that you earn and you use those to unlock more stratagems which is like the main sort of thing the main gimmick of this game i will say is the stratagems those are the you know orbital strikes you call down or the you know you can summon down like a big powerful weapon

or a drone that flies around with you you unlock those with in-game currency and then there's like a kind of battle pass system where as you play through the matches you are in a different kind of currency where you buy things off of a page and if you spend enough of that currency on one page it unlocks the next one very much like a a fortnight battle pass yeah i believe that there is a free sort of book of of these upgrades that you can unlock and then there's like a premium one. Yeah, so the way it works is everyone gets the free pass. The free pass is like eight pages. It's probably like 30 hours of gameplay

to like play through and unlock all of it. And then you can pay for a totally different battle pass that has some cosmetics, some weapons, stuff like that. There have been complaints of people saying, hey, this is pay to win because oh you don't get the weapons that are in the premium battle pass the general consensus and this might change in the future but for right now the general consensus is the free battle pass

has all the best shit so if you want the good stuff just do the free battle pass don't worry about the premium one maybe when you finish the free battle pass you're like oh i want to play more i'll get the premium one but it is not at all mandatory for making progress or feeling strong in this game i haven't spent a dime we the version of the game that that uh we got access to came with the premium battle pass i have not dropped a single point in there because there is so much good stuff in the free one yeah um so yeah that um the game is not free though it is i think 40 hours at its base level for what it's worth but you i've just gotten so much fucking value out of it it's it's such a blast um i i yeah i have loved my time with it

i think i've i'm up to like level eight or nine maybe i've played like over a i don't know a lot of missions at this point i'm really enjoying it the servers have been a mess uh which is a real shame i had one night where I was playing a bunch of matches and then I realized, uh-oh, I'm not actually getting anything, like any currency or any unlocks or anything from that. I completed a quest that was supposed to give me like a shit ton of those medals that you can use to unlock stuff in the battle pass,

but it gave me zero, and that really put a pretty bad taste in my mouth. And then like half the time when I try to play it at night there's like well the servers are full um which is you know understandable there's a billion people playing this game right now but it has it's not understandable i mean people paid money that's fair it has tempered my excitement for it it has kept me from uh doing some some late night sessions that i otherwise probably would dip into i agree that is not well i would i would disagree i think it is understandable and here's why the peak concurrence for helldivers one on steam was about 6 000 players at its peak uh last i checked we were around 450 000 for this game so even though i don't think it's an excuse because people paid

money and they deserve to play the game that they paid for, I think it's understandable to expect that the small studio who made this game was not expecting the fucking explosive success that they've seen out like we are working on it we need to fucking sleep we need to go to sleep for eight hours so that our bodies don't die so that we can then come back and fix this fucking problem i i sorry i i don't develop video games so i'm not in any way trying to make it sound like i know better than the people making the game what i am saying though is that i don't think as people who are advocates for the consumer primarily and the player primarily i don't think that we should just say like well that's the cost of doing business in 2024 sometimes you can't play the thing you paid for yeah i i think i think i think what what everybody is getting at here is there's a difference between um battlefield which comes out you know or call of duty which comes out every year um and they have a general estimate of like what servers they're going to need and they actually have it funded already and they

probably and it still doesn't work half the time yes it still doesn't work half the time versus this game that um that like broke steam records and they they have to actually spin up servers so they can yeah you know before launch they can only guess at a certain level of popularity they're going to have. I don't think – that's not to make an excuse for it. I think it still sucks for the consumer. And I think there's probably a lot of people who did the refund option, which is understandable. Until the game works, refund it and then go buy it again. But yeah, I think it's just – I think it's kind of like a lose-lose situation.

It's published by PlayStation. Sony published it. So like, what are we, what indie are we like apologizing for, guys? PlayStation did it. We're in the weeds a little bit. I do want to say this because it's actually relevant to the fact that the servers aren't working uh deep rock galactic is obviously i don't know who inspired who whether hell divers inspired deep rock or vice versa

but i know there wasn't a battle pass in the first hell divers but deep rock sort of added one and the one that's in deep rock is like the most consumer friendly battle pass imaginable where there's no fomo like once a battle pass ends everything kind of gets added to the general pool and very similar here none of the battle passes in the game will expire you basically have forever and you're deciding which one you're going to start building into so the fact that the servers are fucked up right now means that you're not necessarily missing out on anything i i wanted to say because i i think that i i haven't said positive stuff about it i just wanted to mention like the the playing of it it's it does this thing that i'm trying to think of another good if you're in a multiplayer thing even if you don't have like the skill set to you know make the big plays it is

still a hundred percent possible to make a big difference in a match with like almost no awareness of what's happening like for example in like the we streamed a match where i got killed like twice because i was just absolutely not doing anything appropriate. And then when my respawn pod came down, it just happened to be coming down where the big boss of the level was. And I managed to redirect my respawn pod so it'll crash into the guy we were trying to kill ending the level. It's like, wow, that was a big moment for me. And it took almost no awareness of the game's mechanics.

There's also an incredible, every level ends with you having to to extract which means heading to an extraction point and holding it down for two minutes while you wait for like pickup and that sequence is almost always very good because it's just you and your three teammates unnecessary heroics like i'm not leaving without you like that kind of garbage is great uh it yeah i mean it's thrilling there there's so much about this game that that that works so so well uh and they also walk the very funny line of the tone of the game which is obviously again inspired by starship troopers so it's all like fascist propaganda but like in a very goofy satirical way yeah yeah we're like you can name your ship and and uh in like yeah but it's from like propagandist terms like father of patriotism yeah or the guardian of family values

uh it's very good it's also like it is a good ass action game yeah like it feels when you are you know firing a machine gun into a big horde of bugs and watching them just shatter into pieces, the gunplay in the game feels pretty amazing. Yeah, they actually make really good use of the haptics on the PS5 controller if you're playing on PS5 or, I guess, connecting to your Steam via PS5 controller. The vibration feels fucking perfect for the gun you're firing. It's amazing it is so dope to have a year where like there have already been a lot of sort of surprises that have come out and this is maybe the biggest one so far because i i uh i've put a lot of time into it i just want to say one more thing about hell divers which this is not the first starship troopers game or starship Troopers inspired game that we've seen. In fact, we've seen some that are literally Starship Troopers IP licensed games.

Right. What I think this game gets right and that I was skeptical about when I saw the first trailer is the silliness is cooked into the actual play. That it's not just, oh, here's a funny cut cut scene but now we go and it's just another military shooter where you shoot bugs right that the actual you know you you create a character and you go into battle and then you die and then you just get a random new character that replaces you because it turns out all the characters are completely meaningless and by doing that one it's funny and it fits like the vibe of the game and what they're saying about fascism also um but two it kind of gives you

permission for y'all to start killing each other's characters and deciding if that is actually a strategy there were a number of times we're like oh yeah i was left in a city that needed to be bombed out and fresh it called in that airstrike and in some games that would make me really mad i've been pretty mad but in this game i was like that was a hundred percent the right call yeah i that was a disposable character and now i'm gonna drop in and we're ready to go and i think bringing that sense of like silliness one is just true to well i don't know if they would say it's a source text but the source text but two it makes a game in which you are playing with friends and you're going to have a ton of friendly fire fun rather than really frustrating it also has a fucking physics based dive and the fact that more games

don't have this is crazy to me, because you double-tap the crouch button, and you send your body flying in a direction, and, like, whatever happens, happens. It's like basically the Max Payne dive, but without the grace, and it feels so fucking good to just launch yourself. Especially when you don't need to.

Yeah. It's very easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, doing it off cliffs and stuff like that it's hilarious it's so fucking good you can pop a stim to uh to make sure that you have damage immunity so that like a giant fall doesn't kill you and you just go tumbling head over feet it's ah spectacular this game rules cool yeah that is hell divers this game freaking rules i absolutely love it if you're worried about the servers not working and you buying it and not being able to play it,

just wait a couple of weeks. Again, no FOMO. You're not going to miss any content. You're not going to miss the moment. I do think this game is going to be popular at least for a few months, depending on how they funnel in new content. I could see myself playing this game genuinely

for like off and on for years. It's that much fun. Yeah, it's great. Good job, everyone. Yay. Good job, guys. We did it. We got some mail.

I wanted to sum up for a lot of the mail is obviously talking about the Patreon launch, which again has been like we massively appreciate the support and I'm so, so happy about it. One note that we did get that was I wanted to address. and I'm so, so happy about it. One note that we did get that I wanted to address, there were some concerns about smaller games being kind of put behind the paywall, if you will, within Resties episodes. Obviously on Resties,

we tend to talk about the smaller releases. I did want to note a few things. For one thing, obviously we will continue to talk about small games on the main show we've already done that a couple times this year honestly held i kind of expected hell divers to be a small game it ended up not being that but uh that is not going to keep us from bringing those like grab bag episodes that i know you guys really enjoy listening to thing two whenever we talk about games on resties, we will always kind of tease it on the main show and talk about what we're talking about on Resties and give you a little like a little sense of what the game is. So if you feel like you're totally missing out, at least you'll know what games we're playing and how we at least a little bit of how we feel about them. And maybe that's a reason for you to go check it out and play it.

and maybe that's a reason for you to go check it out and play it. Um, so I did want to address that. Um, there have been a lot of other comments. We really appreciate all your feedback and everything, but broadly speaking, just really, really greatly appreciate the support.

Um, if you are interested in becoming a patron, you can go to patrion.com slash the besties, and that'll get you access to, uh, two episodes of resties each month, as well as a bonus bracket battle episode with all of us fighting it over. The first episode for the bracket battle was on the best final boss, and that's already live right now.

Anybody been playing anything else? Honorable mentions, yeah. Do it. I've been playing Mario vs. donkey kong on the nintendo switch it's a very strange game to play now i played this game originally on the game boy and i remember it being totally mind-blowing because from a control standpoint i don't think i remember anything feeling like this fluid on the Game Boy when it came out. It just felt like kind of the next evolution of what a Mario game could be.

And I don't necessarily think that it's that mind-blowing now, because it essentially is very unchanged from where it was in the original. They updated the graphics, obviously, but the core gameplay is very similar to the original. So I'm getting like a big big nostalgia kick off of it but i think if you don't necessarily have that connection to the original game you're probably better off playing something like wonder and other titles like that that are i think more modern but i really like it just again nostalgically speaking i've really enjoyed it uh yeah i i i've never played the original on Game Boy Advance

just because it didn't seem particularly exciting. It's like more of a puzzle game. It's like a puzzle Mario game. It's extremely a puzzle game. It's like for people that like Captain Toad. I feel like the original source of Captain Toad was Mario vs. Donkey Kong. That makes sense.

Rachel and I finished watching The Devil's Plan on Netflix, a Korean competition reality show about games where people play a series of diabolical games. It's exceptional. It's very, very good. I remain sort of chronically impressed with the like caliber of, uh, reality competition shows that are, is coming out of Korea. Um, and it has inspired me to get back into clubhouse games on the Nintendo

switch, uh, because there is a lot of like obscure, uh, sort of board games that I watched them play in the show and then thought like, I actually, I want to get,

I want to try my hand at nine, nine men's Morris, please. I'll, I'll take a swing at go Moku and then thought like, I actually, I want to get, I want to try my hand at nine, nine men's Morris. Please. I'll, I'll take a swing at go Moku, please. Uh, I,

I can't recommend that show enough. It, it absolutely kicks ass. It's a bit of a slow starter, but, uh, once it gets going, it is,

uh, it is a treat. Uh, yeah, I just wanted to say, um, a big, a big shout out to the floor,

which, uh which airs on one of the streaming services I think Hulu's or I'm watching it probably I think it's a Fox show so The Floor so you get this 10x10 grid and it's 100 squares and each square is a different area of trivia

okay I think it's a 9x9 grid thank you it's a 9x9 grid and i think thank you thank you griffin it's a nine by nine thank you very important it's a nine by nine grid and each one is a different square trivia a randomly uh there's a randomly selected person one of the people who are who are on the grid randomly selected and they can choose one of the four cardinal directions to to challenge and they're physically standing on the grid they're physically standing on the grid and so for example the person standing on the grid. They're physically standing on the grid. And so, for example,

the person standing on the snacks square may be adjacent to famous animals, candy, Oscar winners, or sports, or whatever. Country music, whatever it is. And then that person chooses which of those

people to challenge. If that person wins their challenge, they claim the territory, right? And the other person leaves the show? And the other person leaves the show. And that topic is done. Each topic gets one shot. So if I'm in the cereal square and I challenge snacks, then I have a two-square big territory that is cereal. I have a two square big territory that is cereal.

So the nation of cereal continues to challenge these other areas and take their land for itself. So as you become bigger, you have more territory. You become a bigger threat because if someone hits you and beats you in a duel, they take your territory. So there's no impetus really to get big except for at the end of every episode there's X number of duels at the end of every episode whoever has the biggest territory gets $20,000 and whoever is the last person standing gets $250,000

so it's this question of like do I want to get 20 G's tonight or do I want to keep flying under the radar and you can decide to stay if you win a duel you can decide to stay. If you win a duel, you can decide to stay on stage and just keep claiming more territory for yourself. Or you can decide to go back and just wait defensively for someone to challenge you. I guess I don't.

So does the board extend, like the state of the board carry over to the next episode? Yes, it is persistent. Wow. That's the other thing. It is the same people. So the same people that you start to love and hate and whatever, and you can kind of predict,

people get stuck with categories that aren't their initial category because of, so they inherit a category. So this old dude will get Simpsons. And it's like, everybody has to kind of gauge like how much does this dude like simpsons and the host who is of course rob lowe will say hey how much do you like simpsons and then you get to see this old dog like oh simpsons don't even get me started on this yellow family i love them i feel bad for anybody that shall and of course the first thing

is like milhoose like no you're out get out of of course the first thing is like, Milhoose? Like, no, you're out. Go home. Get out of here. And the other thing that's great is that Roblo has the exact tenor for this. He is in love with the floor. And he is telling you things about this game as if it is not being invented before his very eyes.

We're seeing how important strategy is in this game. You mean the game you made up just now, Roblo? I told Sidney as we were going to bed last night, I said, Sid, how often do you think Roblo interrupts conversations with loved ones and says, hold on, I just had a great idea for the floor. I have to go write it down. It is it's absolute perfect like background, but it is surprisingly compelling because they do have the persistent like people and the persistent and uh very easy to guess along because the the the duels or whatever are are timed for you know speed so you can play along at home pretty the same as the the contestants and see if you know you would fare

better um which is a great recipe for success with game shows i think and this is not the first time that rob low has hosted a high concept board uh probably not in recent memory rob low's on tv pretty much all the time legally so it would not surprise me if he did another i think there was a robot one where there's like an arm that like moved people around tell me more this sounds great this sounds great man i think you made it up completely from whole cloth but i think there is a robot Rob Lowe game show. Tell me fucking everything about it, Russ, because it doesn't exist and I need to scrape all the details out of your mind.

All right. What did we talk about this week, Russ? Well, we talked about Mental Samurai, which is the name of that game show I was talking about. Oh my God. You're right. was talking about. Oh, my God. You're right. You're right. Yeah, I don't even know how to recap it,

but there's Towers of Knowledge, and I think there's a robot. Okay, we talked about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. We will continue talking about it, so keep an eye out for that in the future. We also talked about Helldivers 2. We about mario versus donkey kong on the switch we talked about clubhouse games on the switch we talked about korean reality show the devil's plan and the game show the floor hosted by the very own rob low based on a dutch game show the same name by the way i suspect it therefore i just confirm that uh cool i want to thank we're going to change it up a little bit i want to thank the following

people for subscribing to the patreon these are our patrons including the very first ever patron your good buddy brandon thank you you were the very first person to ever uh subscribe to the patreon and uh we greatly appreciate it we also have lloyd orr arnold paul mickaliff mccalliff is probably how you pronounce that and morally ambiguous wizard thank you so much to subscribing to the patreon uh you can find it at patreon.com slash the besties. Okay. What's up next week? Next week, we are going to be talking about Deep Rock Survivor,

a game that I think has more or less taken over our chat. People seem very... I haven't played it yet. I'm very excited. I have not either. You haven't played it? Oh. I do seem very excited about it. Are you playing on Steam Deck?

Yeah. I've played it a lot on Steam Deck on that aeroplane of mine. Now, this is not Deep Rock Galactic. This is a spinoff of that. And I'm super excited about it. I think we'll probably talk a little bit more about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as well. Maybe get a little further into the game. I don't know.

Chapter 5, somewhere on there? That seems reasonable. Cool. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us for this week on The Besties. Be sure to join us again next time for The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!