The Besties - The Ghost with the Most of Tsushima

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

The gang reviews Ghost of Tsushima, the recently released open world action-adventure game set in 13th century feudal Japan. Topics include the Samurai code of honor, the sometimes glacial story pacing, the design of the "Kurosawa mode" and the lackluster mini games. Early copies of Ghost of Tsushima were provided by Sony. 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!

Russ, are you saying to me that... Hold on. Are you saying to me that throughout the week you come up with some pretty good ideas for some off-the-cuff jokes you could make and then you write them in a Google Doc for yourself so you don't forget some of the good jokes you could make later off the cuff?

They're not jokes, per se. They're just like... Exactly, that's you're making it worse. Yes, exactly. They're idea starters. You're right. They're idea starters. Okay. Conversation worse. Yes, you're right. They're idea starters. You're right. They're idea starters. Okay, conversation starters.

Yes. I've never seen one of these conversation starters. I know, I haven't discussed it. Do you delete them from the rundown before we look at it? No, it's not in today's rundown, but when I use them, then I get rid of them. You just guys haven't been paying attention to the rundown, clearly. But I don't call them out specifically in the rundown but i use them uh when i use them then i get rid of them you just got you just guys haven't been paying attention to the rundown clearly but i don't call them out specifically in the rundown so you have good joke you have a notebook called good joke ideas and as you use

each joke and it's not a joke again it's a casual conversation beat that you would like to have and you're like that's good thank you're like, that's good. Thank you, brain. And then you write it down. Yeah, so like a few weeks ago, I wrote in, I have too much juice. Yeah, yeah. And if you'll recall, we discussed it. That was fucking classic, Doc.

That was so good. Hey, Siri, take a note. Hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. Take a note. Add to my jokes folder Siri add too much juice my name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Frosch, and I know the best game of the year. Wow. We had to change it. And it's not this game. Yo, it's not this game yo it's uh welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment uh we take a look at the new games sometimes the old games usually the new games and give you our unvarnished thoughts to see if they are indeed the best game of the year. This week we are talking about the latest from Sucker Punch,

which is not Naughty Dog. A lot of people, it's very strange to have those two. I get those two conflated a lot. I don't know. I mean, they're both PlayStation exclusive studios, so that's not really fun. I was thinking like Sly Cooper, part of the family,

the Crash Bandicoot. That's probably where. They both made mascot games and then they transitioned into like series. Yeah. Okay. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Them and Insomniac.

They formed this triad of. Yeah, that's a good one actually. PlayStation mascot makers. Yeah. No more stuff for kids. I actually really am a fan of Sucker Punch. that's a good one actually station mascot makers yeah no more stuff for kids i actually uh really am a fan of sucker punch i think they make uh very fun games and i was like a huge fan of the infamous title specifically one and two and then what was the festival of blood was that the the

vampire new orleans one that one was really really really cool. Yeah, I reviewed those games, I remember, I think back at Joystick. And if you didn't play those, I think most people are probably familiar with them because of Sly, just because they've made so many of those. But Infamous was like an open world superhero game that had a lot of the like Spider-Man, the movie to the game DNA in it that I was just wild about. And it's interesting to see Ghost of Tsushima, which is a decidedly different open world thing. It has been six years since the last Sucker Punch game.

What was that, Second Son? No, Second Son was 2014. First Light was, I guess, also 2014, in August of 2014. That was like not a full game, I think, First Light. It was like kind of a quasi-expansion pack. Yeah, quasi-expansion to Second Son. Yeah. I wasn't wild about, for whatever reason, I fell off on Second Son.

But the other Infamous games I thought were pretty fun. I mean, either way, it has been six years since the last time Sucker Punch released a game, which for a studio like that is a long time. Quite a long time. It's quite a long time. And what they have

ginned up for us is Ghost of Tsushima. I will describe this game in 100% perfect clarity, inarguable perfect. Are you ready? Yes, I can't wait. If Ubisoft

ever made the Assassin's Creed Samurai game set in this era in Japan, it would be 100% this game, note for note, B for B. No. It's hundred percent that a game exactly it is exactly the game they would make i would say uh but it would look a lot nicer and it would have more going on i and oh no that's not that's not fair to ghost of shima and in certain ways because

there are there are certainly moments where it looks good um but ubisoft uh the difference between this and the ubisoft game is ubisoft uh the difference between this and the ubisoft game is ubisoft is consistency right like every sip of coca-cola tastes the same and when you when you dive into an assassin's creed game minute for a minute you're getting some real good seven out of ten and i i love it like that's not a disc i i live for for diving into an assassin's creed game where i just know never going to get better, but never going to get worse. Ghost of Tsushima is very much the opposite where it's like, you know, sometimes you're eating the middle of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sometimes you are eating the crust. That is fair.

Okay. You know, I was thinking like, this is exactly what you would make that game. Because the central emotional conflict of Ghost of Tsushima, especially early on, very brief overview, Mongols are attacking Japan. They kidnap your uncle. You want to rescue your uncle and defend your home from the the the mongol army the invading mongols the central like sort of conflict in this game especially early on is whether or not it is appropriate for a samurai to adopt stealth assassination techniques

as an ends to a goal. And I think we can all agree that is a moral contrary that we can all relate to. Yeah. I know it's applicable to my life. The different, it's not about the murder. We're interestingly, it would be like if The Last of Us

was constantly preoccupied, like Ellie just kept weighing the toll that making sweet-ass headshots had taken on her soul, and not the choking or the stabbing, but sweet headshots. Is it worth it to me? But that is the central conflict. To make the comparison, it would be that Ellie had no problem with running in and stabbing a person in the face. But if she shot someone from very far away, she would feel very, very guilty about it. The game really does lean on that so hard to the point where you have, in this attempt to rescue your uncle,

you enroll a team of other sort of you know legendary warriors or whatever uh each of whom have sort of opposing views on this exact subject of you know fighting with honor versus fighting you know for survival and i i was playing yesterday i'm i'm about uh well i won't get into spoilers of where I'm at in the game, but I did a stealth assassination, jumped off a roof and time stopped as I like buried my knife in this dude.

And it showed me a flashback to my uncle, like you must fight with honor. And it was so fucking wild. And it really kind of does an interesting thing where in Last of Us and a lot of games like this um you treat stealth as like the thing you're supposed to do until you get caught and now it's time to fight and this game is almost like disincentivizing that a bit because it's almost like making you think like oh but it's better if you just fucking run on in there

and start slicing and dicing and fight with honor. I don't know if I read the story right, but I read it as similar to Red Faction Guerrilla, where it's like actually just pro-indoctrination of guerrilla warfare, where it's like, yes, your honor is a great thing to have, except for you'll be dead and it will be useless. Like the message of the story is like

honor schmoner if you want if you want success you're gonna have to start you know sniping some headshots yeah i think the character himself might feel guilty but i don't think they intended for the player to feel guilty using these tactics and i think the idea is i haven't finished the game yet but i think the idea is that over time he sort of realizes that there's a greater good concept at hand here. Did you say character? Is there a character in this game? I must have missed that. Hey, that's not fair.

The side characters in this game are interesting. The main character is just... I feel the exact opposite. I feel like the main character is interesting because you see kind of different facets with him. When he's talking to his uncle. He's very like sewed up. But then when he's talking to his road dog

with the straw hats, like you see him loosen up a little bit. I like that shit. I wanted to point out one last thing. I think it's because he's a cipher that just does whatever he is needed to do in a scene. He has no actual core character. It's just whatever he needs to be in the moment.

There's a mechanical thing with this like division between fighting with honor versus fighting with stealth that I think is kind of interesting. And it's a mechanic that I couldn't really wrap my mind around. This game has a fucking lot of mechanics. It has a lot of shit that you can do. And one of those things that you learn about early on is called the standoff. Yes. early on is called the standoff yes so whenever you approach like a group of enemies or a fort or whatever you can sneak in and jump up you know over the wall grappling hook onto a roof jump down chain a bunch of assassinations together or in following this like griffin made that seem more

fun than it is go ahead uh in following this like idea of you know fighting with honor like you can just roll up kick open the door and say like hey come out and fight me and like then it like flashes to almost like a red dead redemption style duel thing although it is much much easier than that you hold in the triangle button until you see them move and then you let it go and you kill them instantly and you get resolved which is like the energy that you spend on healing and other things uh and you can like upgrade that there's a lot of upgrades and stuff so that you can like chain those standoffs together i thought that i don't think that works as a mechanic i think it's kind of goofy as shit but i also think it's kind of interesting to have like what is essentially for the first time that i can think of in a game like the opposite

of the stealth sneak in and murder that has been literally every open world game has that but no open world game i can think of has the anti-stealth of like hey come fight me idiots yeah that i mean that for me is this game in a nutshell i i want to be clear to everybody i think we're uh not as warm on this there are a lot of people who love this game it is dopamine hit the video game. If you're just looking for a thing that is going to let you collect items in a big, relatively attractive open world, hey, it exists. It is this game. You don't need to worry about the criticism.

I have warmed on it. Yeah? I have too. Just FYI. Okay. Let me talk a little bit about how I came to that point. And as we go through that, if there are places that resonate with you all or you disagree, let me know. Sucker Punch, all the Infamous games, and Sly Cooper to a certain extent, were very much about fluidity.

They were about making movement fun. Movement's very fun in that you ride on, like, in the Infamous games, you figure, like, ride on power lines and grind on the side of buildings and super-duper jumps and everything. It made the locomotion fun. In this game, you have a horse. And for me, although I enjoyed the combat, I found getting around the world an absolute momentum killer. And it's very, very common that at the beginning of a mission you go to where the mission has to be and then the mission person's like follow me on your horse for five minutes like that red dead redemption thing of like let me show you where the mission is come on this way let's ride with me or even worse like a weird inexplicable and nearly constant like

detective mode of just like oh there's tracks in the ground let's follow those oh there's blood on the ground let's follow those in a way that is like so repetitive and not challenging weirdly at all that's a lot of things in the open world which was my other big problem with this like very again the combat is cool and i'd like to spend a little time drilling down on it but almost every activity you undertake in the open world there's like you find a fox den you can follow the fox to a thing that lets you equip new charms on your weapons there's hot springs you can find and bathe in to increase your health there's like you come upon um shrines to climb on and you can get you know bonuses from those whatever there's a fucking dope bamboo cutting game i love the bamboo it's literally oh. There's a fucking dope bamboo cutting game. I love the bamboo.

It's literally, oh man, it's a wild, like press these buttons on, these pieces of bamboo show up and they have literal ass DualShock button prompts like on them and you have to press them very, very quickly. It is so like PS2 era, like God of War minigame. But I also- A lot of them are very dull.

I mean, the things in the open world are not fun and like not it was we're not encouraging me to keep going and there's like just the pacing of the thing is like it feel it felt glacial to me especially like story scenes you can't skip anything like you have to sit and listen to every word well that was the that was the issue that i had specifically with the open world like you're exploring the open world and i was kind of digging on like hey there's a little bird i'm gonna follow this bird i'll find something and i was fine anytime there was a moment where i could like talk to someone i was like hesitant because none of those cut scenes are skippable and they tend to be very dry and wooden some of them are good but most of them are like hey we need medicine for this

character i'm gonna go get medicine for you. Okay, I brought some medicine. None of that can be skipped. And honestly, the thing that clicked for me was like, I'm going to play this like crackdown in Japan and just like explore the world and like cause havoc. But you can't play that way because the game constantly throttles your pace to these cut scenes, to these moments. When you find a hot spring, you need to stare at a butt for like 30 seconds there's no way around staring at that butt there's a there's a haiku composing thing where you just sit and think about what you're going to reflect on you press the right

buttons to decide what you're going to write your haiku about it's like artsy it's adorable it's not super fun sorry can we can we pause for just a second? Because I think this is relevant to what you're talking about, Justin. The most damning bit of this pacing issue is the very beginning, which I say this is a word of warning for people who I do think will enjoy this game quite a bit more.

The first hour and a half of this game is one of the worst intros I've played this generation, maybe last generation. It is wild this generation maybe last generation it is wild like how how much of a mess it is it's effectively three different intros in a row you get like an action sequence intro where it's like that thing where it's like we just throw you into the spectacle and you hit buttons and like you'll kind of instinctively learn how to play you're like okay i did it but then it like stops and it goes okay now we're gonna do the in fiction intro where we like time warp and a character literally explains how to do

the exact same stuff all over again and we're gonna have button prompts on screen and you're like okay i already did this but sure and then it throws you back into the action and then it's like okay just to make sure now we're gonna to do that old school PS1 style intro where you're going to be moving through the world and then the action will freeze and giant button prompts will come on screen and you'll learn how to do it. And at that point I was like, this is maddening. And also this opening just looks really bad.

Like there's a sequence where you're like chasing or running through, I don't't know what to call it so it's i guess a valley between between two like kind of craggy hills and it looks like god of war 2 i mean it is everything about it felt like and i would say this with a lot of the issues in the game felt like man this game needed another year like i did they really feel like they had to get this out on ps4 before ps5 came out and i hate to speculate like that but there are so many times where you'll have something that's really thoughtful like um to find out which direction you should be going you uh tap the touch pad

and the wind like gusts in the direction that you need to go it's like wow that's that's a really interesting idea and then the next moment literally literally, it looks like it's the icon that just comes pre-installed on the PS4 of the X button appears giant on the screen. So it's like you know to hit the X button and it doesn't look like it's in fiction whatsoever. And it's like that, it's so small, that's not gonna ruin anybody's gaming experience,

but it's certainly jarring. I don't know if it's more time and development or if it's just that an editor, like to me, it feels like if resources have been, if, and this is what I, again, we are absolutely talking our asses,

but it feels like with this long development, it feels like maybe they were going in some different directions and then just got to a point where it's like, let's close this off and we have to finish it. Because there's a lot of different elements where like, why did you spend time on this and not time on this other thing? Like condense all this into like a really good package

rather than expansive. The voice acting is a perfect example of that. Oh, I think the voice acting is pretty good. No, the voice acting is a perfect example of that so no no the voice acting itself is great but so there's an english track and a japanese language track they they mapped the animation on the characters to the english language track right so if you if you listen to it in japanese it does not line up with their the way their mouths move um it looks very strange then they added a thing called kurosawa mode that was supposed to be this big thing you know It does not line up with the way their mouths move. It looks very strange. Then they added a thing called Kurosawa mode that was supposed to be this big thing,

you know, respecting the films of Kurosawa. And they're like, well, you know, it forces the Japanese language track and it has this custom black and white filter. And the sound is really tinny and stereo. So it sounds old fashioned. You put it on and the voices don't line up and it's like immediately you're like well this feels way off like this does not feel good and the the whole

thing that i kept thinking was like why wasn't it not done the other way around why was it not why was the the facial animation not mapped to the japanese language track that that would have made this so much easier yeah man subs not d subs, not dubs. Go on, Chris. There's another little like, there's little stuff like this but they really do add up. For me, the one that stood out to me was there's this mission where it's a

stealth mission where a bunch of Mongols are going to attack your village or the village that you're in. And you have to put incense into these burners and you're gonna light the incense with fire arrows and it'll make smoke and then you'll use that to assassinate you have to put incense in six burners and you run up to a burner and press the button and then i didn't notice it until the third one i did but it goes to like the shortest blackout ever. And then you walk away from the incense burner.

And it was like, again, again, again, they don't have an animation for putting incense into burner. So instead there's a black, a literal blackout where you're like, well,

I guess he put incense in the burner. You didn't show it. And it's like, why is that? Of all the things, like there's so much in this game like so many missions and side paths and storylines and stuff like it could it just felt like the sense that it could have been condensed and sped up in a way that would have been very very satisfying and addictive uh was was really hard for me to escape but what i will say is that the more time i spent with it the more that the things

that really really work about this game really really got their claws into me there are some moments that it builds to helped by an absolutely exceptional score oh fuck yeah that build to like really exciting tons of things on the screen climactic fights um the big moments like really really land it's helped by the fact that the combat uh specifically the sword play is really cool there are four different stances that you switch to on the fly one deals with people with shields one with spears one is for swordsmen and you're like swapping stances like as you're fighting people and it feels very good to always have this like set of skills that's perfectly matched to the person that you're fighting it's like that's the kind of like fluidity and speed and fun that i wish was like elsewhere in the game represented in the combat

because i always look forward to it but between those two things and when i sort of set my expectations it started to like i got into a groove with it where like i saw definitely where it could be much more but i i still want to keep playing it yeah i mean the thing that stood out to me uh was the i think it does like pick picturesque horizons like specific like there are moments where you like open into a field and it's there's like falling orange leaves and it's fucking gorgeous and there's like a very intricate photo mode which i think they nail and that's really the thing like the stuff that feels lacking feels like triage stuff where it's like we know this is not right

but at this point we really just need to like get the game out with you know and so like the thing that jumped out to me was like um there's a bamboo forest like very close to the beginning of the game that you essentially have to walk through to get to one of the early missions and you it's like bamboo like trees in the forest and you can clip through every single tree there's no tree yeah you just literally walk through them like they are ghost trees and and they definitely knew it was there like i guarantee they have a qa team that definitely saw that that was there but at a certain point they were like well are we going to animate around these trees or do we have to come up with a solve that's like, okay, we're just going to have people just walk through them and it is what it is. We need to get this game

out. And that's consistently what it sort of rings true throughout this. There are a number of instances where it's like, well, we could have people skip cutscenes, but that's going to mess maybe our loading times or whatever. We can't do that. There's little buggy things throughout

there. I think we all experienced weird i had two different times where a um person i'm supposed to talk to fail like got locked in some situation that they weren't supposed to be in and i had to basically like whack them with the side of my katana yeah until they're like oh you know what i'm gonna go over there and sit by the fire and come talk to me there i've had the game for two weeks now and this morning i booted it up to like check on something before we talked about the game and it started downloading uh update 1.04 it's fourth update since i've had the game for the last two weeks so like i get the sense that they are very quickly trying to like fix a lot of these things but they have i think a long road to hoe uh oh talk about the tent griff the tent oh yeah

it's a hot pro tip i don't know if they fix this there's certain things like uh half the time if i I think a long road to ho in order. Oh, talk about the tent, Griff. The tent. Oh, yeah. It's a hot pro tip. I don't know if they fixed this. There's certain things like half the time if I was on a horse and ran into a group of enemies, they would alert and start a fight with me but not take swings at me. So I could just sit on my horse and shoot them all in the head methodically with a bow and arrow while they didn't move, which was cool. That hasn't happened anymore. I don't know if they fixed this thing, though though which is tents break your line of sight and enemies instantly forget you're there so i could run into a big group of enemies and stealth assassinate one and then run into this tent and then either

they would forget i was there and i could just like pop out of the tent and keep killing people that way or they would forget i was there and walk into the tent and i could just build a little boy pile right there in the middle of the tent. That, I don't know, I am... That's kind of a stealth game problem. I feel like people have done that in Hitman too. No, I mean, the instant you go into the tent, you were never there and they're still on the edge

and you can see them through the walls, P.S. So it's like, I'll just kill that guy through the tin flap. No big deal. Over and over and over again. My bigger thing, I think you guys have all highlighted a lot of the issues with this game. I was starting to lean towards Just Inside. I think it is a pleasant enough game to play.

I found myself getting into following the birds to find the hot spring or the incredible bamboo cutting mini game. My bigger issue is that there is too much from a progression standpoint to a point where it dilutes the satisfaction of any of it. And to make the comparison again, Infamous 2, Justin mentioned the locomotion stuff.

Every power you unlock in infamous was like added to the fun or added to your ability to do something like uh it wasn't just most of the time at least it wasn't like oh my main spark shooting power just got stronger it was like now i can jump in the air and shoot lightning out of my hand and fly right but each step you take feels good right this game falls prey to the thing and i pray to god that it is not like maybe it's a an idea that developers can move past in the next generation or whatever this idea of i'm gonna go around and pick up supplies off of every dead body i find and if i find 500 of them, then my sword damage meter

is gonna go from this big to this big. And it's like, I don't know what the fuck that means. I don't know what that, like, yes, okay, it means my sword has gotten stronger, but that doesn't, you have contextualized that not at all. For the listener, Griffin raised his thumb and index finger and it was a small amount and then it went to a slightly larger amount it's but that's like everything right you have these different ghost items that you can upgrade you can upgrade uh the

different armor that you can equip in the game you can do all these things some of the armor upgrades are like i ended up wearing the starting armor that you get because it helps you uncover the map easier and it's like now you'll uncover the map easier and it's like now you uncover the map 50 easier it's like okay i understand what that means but like i you have to grind out i'm sorry like a lot of these resources to upgrade the things that you want to upgrade i just like looked at what would be required for the next sword upgrade and saw the few centimeters of damage meter increase and i was like i don't know what that means like picking up supplies feels so empty and meaningless and but then like extrapolate that to like the first time i found all those hot springs it's like your health increased by a fucking pixel

and it's like i don't know what like is that and the picking up of the picking up of of items is like it's absolutely there's so much and it's infuriating because i mean i spent what was probably like two hours of picking up supplies in the game not seeking them out but just like the supplies which is basically money that i picked up in two hours of the game i spent upgrading my uh armor and then immediately got a different set of armor that i wish i had upgraded instead and i'm just like well i guess i'm just out of luck i guess and it's not fun none of the picking up stuff like none of that is is enjoyable or pleasure i'm not saying you can't do that in a game right like that's the the basis of like most

progression based games right but don't give me fucking like a thousand levels of sword upgrade because like that makes each one feel less thing just like give me one or two and like have it mean something and that's like the my big problem sort of condensed with this game is that like instead of giving you a a handful of polished satisfying feeling things it it throws like everything in the kitchen sink at you and like none of it it just is it feels so diluted i'll go one step further than that and and i think the issue that i had with this game is like that this game needed to exist and and by what by that what i mean is i think we've reached the end of this generation and triple a games have become so

comically bloated especially the triple a exclusive that this feels like a game heavily influenced by Bushido Blade. It is a game that one, it knew it wanted to reference Kurosawa. It knew it wanted blades to actually be like immediately lethal and dangerous. Um, and it knew it wanted to tell the story of like, you know, honorable fighting versus dishonorable, but you know, successful fighting. And all of those ideas work better in bushido blade because bushido blade is a one-on-one fighting game where a a fight can be all these shifting between uh stances before you even take a single stab and then that one stab can be lethal and then it's meaningful because it's one death all those ideas work really well

in a fighting game those ideas do not inherently work well in yet another open world game where you go around just slaughtering as many people, collecting as many things as possible. And I think the problem that we're running into right now, especially with Sony games, is it's the same problem that we've talked about before of one size fits all. We're going to make this type of game and even though we know we want to tell this sort of story and have accomplished these sorts of ideas we're still stuck forcing it on to the big open world triple a game and the positive i'll say like that what i'm looking forward to here is i think microsoft is in weirdly a good position with the next generation and how they're approaching things with game pass which is you know what we're not going to make four or five hundred million two hundred million dollar

games uh over and over and over again we're actually going to get 20 or 30 studios and we're going to let them do ideas that you know normally would be done by a indie team for like a couple million and we're going to give them sizable quote triple a budgets so you're going to get a nicer version of of these smaller ideas we're not going to force every game to be so high stakes um and there's like if this feels like the end of a generation it certainly like captures that it it it captures the intention of this particular generation which just got so out of control with the expectations of what a triple-A game needed to be. Let's take a break, and we'll come right back with some more discussion of video games. We ran long for the last couple in our discussions of Last of Us and Plant, you salvaged some of that communique on that one

and thought it would be some good discussion fodder. Yeah, I think the two things that we got a lot of comments on were the things that happened, I guess, behind the scenes at Naughty Dog while making the game. The first one is from Stephanie. What is your opinion on the increasing queer representation in The Last of Us 2 and video games coming out? I have a now former friend that is very upset about the amount of queer representation in the game.

Apparently there is only one trans person allowed in one group of people. So we actually, after the last episode, shared some links from people who we think are far better equipped to tackle this topic but what I can say from my experience of it is Lev is the is a trans character in the game I believe the only one and I think it's handled fine like I think the best pieces that i've read uh about representation and last of us is that we are seeing um that one game doesn't have to be everything for everybody that there are people who really dislike how love is handled they dislike um the fact that uh it the game focuses on a queer relationship that those women are ultimately just brutalized um and there are people who do you think the representation in any form is exceptional

and that like this is the beginning of a change that should have been happening in in mainstream games a lot longer it has been happening in indie games way way way longer so it certainly is not new to video games so yeah i i do y'all have any other thoughts on that i i i uh adored love as a character and i also found it like uh i felt like okay the the bar for like a uh a trans character in a video game like a trans character in a video game, like a major AAA character in a video game, in my mind is, the low end of the bar, I mean, is Mass Effect Andromeda, where it's like,

I forget who the character was or what the context was, but I remember seeing there was a character who literally is just like, hello, I am trans. And it's like, yo, that's not it. And I think that they, you know, Naughty Dog does a better job than that

with Lev, but like, this is a game about suffering and about brutality, and it is very difficult, you know, to hear a trans character be dead named by the people who want to kill him, which is not great. But the bigger issue that i found kind of like i don't know again i liked lev as a character but uh the whole arc for lev is about how people want to kill him because he is trans and like you don't you you get a little bit more the the the scenes where you like hear lev talking about his faith and how like it helps him overcome fear and like that stuff's really really cool but like it's kind of hard to argue against the fact that like the bulk of Lev's character and the things that you know about Lev's character are the fact that he is trans

and people want to kill him for it. And like, that's, that is not like, I don't know. I fully, fully understand why it is not like, you know universally well well received i'm also kind of conflicted about it but i am a you know cis het straight white dude so no i i'd agree with that assessment i think i think they try to do a lot of things in that game and um it is very difficult not impossible they certainly might have been able to pull it off but it's very difficult to treat every single thing with the utmost level of respect that it deserves and i think i could sense them really earnestly trying and whether they nailed it 100 maybe not but i could tell that they were earnestly trying uh the next question and i apologize if i get this name uh

incorrect auden wrote uh hi any thoughts on the choice not to talk about Naughty Dog's bad case of crunch in respects to The Last of Us 2 on the Besties pod? Love the show, but felt that there was lots of praise for attention to every minute detail, but no reflection on what human cost lay behind. I'm glad someone asked this question. It applies to not just Last of Us 2, but literally every video game that is made within this industry right now. And not all of them are made under crunch situations, but certainly triple a lot of AAA games, if not the majority are. I kind of alluded to it. I remember in the first episode of the Last of Us 2 episode where I was

talking about a very intricate, like somebody was gut shot scene that like lasts for like 45 seconds and someone clearly spent a good chunk of a year making sure that scene was like the most viscerally horrible possible thing um and that's fine i understand that level of effort but i do think and the issue we've talked about repeatedly about last of us it there's a there's a scale and a length issue here where so much time and effort and man hours like literal time was spent making this giant giant game that kind of just didn't need to be quite so giant giant and i think there is an element to which studios need to be more mindful of the human cost and the trade-off of that might be they can't put 60 hours on the box that might be the trade-off

yeah and that gets the thing that we were just saying with tsushima is like this might actually lead to more games that actually hit whatever the intentions of the developer are like if if developers are um given a marketplace or a system in which they are rewarded for making games that are smaller, then we won't see games that are little. I mean, part of the popularity of the open world genre is it just allows for more hours. That it's a huge upfront investment that allows for gobs of DLC or other things that pay off that investment. So yeah, I'm hoping that we see that shift. I don't necessarily think, though,

that that has a place in a critical discussion of a game. Like, I don't think that you are going, at least if it was up to me purely, I probably still wouldn't want to factor that into the discussion of the success or failures of a game in the context of like a podcast like ours. I think it's worth adding the as a background content. Like, I don't think every time we talk about a game, we need to speculate what the work

hours were like for the people that made that game. Because, Justin, you're right. Like, you know, we're looking at the final product. That's the goal. But I do think when you think about, well let's look at hollywood for a second hollywood has similarly insane hours like the hours that they work when they're filming a movie or a tv show whatever are comically insane but they have protections in place to ensure that the people working those hours are being paid for that extra time and effort so i think there is

it's worth people listening that there is there are ways there are methods to grow this industry in a healthy way that aren't exclusively well just work people until they're completely destroyed yeah for clarity's sake i'm in no way no i mean like yeah obviously there's huge ethical problems with the way video games are made i'm just just saying we wouldn't bring it up in a critical discussion because it gets into this weird thing of like, well, maybe if we just talked about our complaints with Ghost of Tsushima, maybe if they had crunched, it would have been fixed. It's like you can't factor that into the discussion

because everything becomes us weighing the value of the work invested in the game versus the quality of the final product. And we have zero, I mean, we have less than than uh you know very minute amount of i i think i think it's important especially in very public cases around huge games just to provide the context without again without influencing the criticism the point where i do think that context is necessary and eventually can impact the criticism is right now ubisoft is on fire um because of uh multiple hit after hit oh yeah that multiple allegations of of uh sexual harassment and uh it sounds like discrimination in the workplace i i mean it's hard almost to follow because so many allegations are

coming out so quickly and you compare that to their games which every game is about you know the progressive cause that is you know down with the man and the evil empire and it's very hard not to if i if we were talking about a watchdogs right now to not factor that into the criticism because there there is an inherent friction between the problems in that workplace and the stories that they choose to tell and really what that publisher chooses to make money off of, right? The causes that it is profiteering off of are in direct conflict with the way it appears to be running its business.

And that's a bigger thing. But again, that is not every game. That is a very unique uh scenario anyway i i want to make sure that we keep moving um this is from ben uh and millie ben wrote uh does a game have to innovate to be good obviously we're talking about ghost of tsushima now and millie wrote uh reviews seem to say the game is typical open world formula and doesn't invent anything much new about it. We'd love to hear the best of your thoughts on if there's enough value in doing a known thing well for a AAA game to stand out, or should they be expected to break the mold?

Obviously, a game does not have to innovate to be good, right? I think there are certain genres where that is more applicable than not, like platformers, fighting games. than than not like uh platformers uh fighting games like there are certain there are certain genres in my mind where like if you nail the feel of it in a way that is like incredibly satisfying and there's like meat on that bone still then i think it's okay just to like make an incredibly competent like satisfying version of that game i just think that's hard as hell to do with the open world game or really any game that like asks you to invest a bunch of time into it right like i think a games as service game absolutely has to innovate in order for me to play it like because that is that is an enormous sort of uh

time investment uh i think the problem with ghost of tsushima isn't that it doesn't innovate it's that like it doesn't necessarily it doesn't like uh do the things that assassin's creed has done better than or really as well as a lot of the assassin's creed games the problem with ghost of tsushima is not the lack of innovation it's the lack of refinement if ghost of tsushima had refined i think that it would be a much different discussion. But it feels like a lot of the rough edges that even other games before them have figured out. The good comparison there is, oh my gosh,

the robot dinosaur is Horizon Zero Dawn. That to me is the perfect example of a game that I don't think innovated much at all but refined the hell out of the genre uh that is a you could even argue that uh breath of the wild right like breath of the wild was like uh and oh i i the reason that i have strong feelings about this is like i don't like open world games anymore which is why like my adoration of breath of the wild is kind of mystifying because I don't think it adds a lot to the genre.

It just does it all incredibly, incredibly well. And that is why it stands the test of time. I think it is a dramatic innovation for the open world genre, specifically Breath of the Wild, just because if you think about like, hey, you can climb any wall. Hey, you can use physics to do anything you want like those are two i guess that's fair yeah things

i do think there are examples though of a game that i think yeah i think dishonored one one year for uh our game of the year and that is an example of a game like there had been thief games before there had been plenty of stealth games before that That is like a perfect, perfect refinement of a genre. And so, yes, I think you can absolutely succeed without necessarily reinventing the wheel. Y'all, we have at least one more game that we need to talk about. And it's called Desperados 3.

And Freshick and I are in love with it. Everybody needs to play this game. Fresh, tell the people how desperados 3 works okay so desperados 3 is uh for the old people listening uh there was a series called commandos on the pc that was basically like an isometric stealth game where you command it you controlled like a squad of three or four guys and you sneak in and kill a bunch of Nazis and it was very satisfying. Desperados 3 is made with that very much same idea in mind. The idea is

you're up against this massive, overwhelming force, let's say 60 guys and you've got three guys against them, but you're given so much knowledge about the scene of where everyone's looking with vision cones and all the different abilities you have that you can easily make, well not easily, it's different abilities you have that you can easily like make

well not easily it's a challenging game but you could basically work your way through a very large scene filled with enemies and methodically pick one and each one off to accomplish your mission it's just kind of this very uh yeah methodical like planned out thoughtful game that looks like a strategy game but is really really, I don't know, it's something else. Yeah. And it takes something that I hate called save scumming and makes it a core part of the game and somehow fun. And save scumming is where and challenging games like stealth games, you would, you know, pause the game, hit save every, you know, few seconds. And then if you died, you would have to load it and wait for the load this game

knows that you're going to do that so it effectively has you hotkey both the save and loading and when you hit load it is instantaneous uh so you i mean the way i did is i mapped both to my mouse and before i did pretty much anything i was just pop and save and then if i got annoyed by something i would hit load and i would flash back and it it felt it didn't feel like i was um cheating it didn't feel like i was like you know using the system's menu to like have an unfair advantage it felt like i was playing almost like a time warp game yeah like i mean they could have if prince of persia yeah kind of like that almost that vibe as a tactics game instead of a platform yeah yeah justin i know i know that you played it and it wasn't quite clicking with you,

so I wanted to make sure that we got to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah, I think that it's just a lot of times I didn't have a good idea of how to approach a situation. I also, I mean, I basically was on like the second level where you're going around with a dude, the friend of yours, who has three people he wants to kill before he can leave this town you know and there was one that was like in a uh den of iniquity that i had to break into and kill a woman who had wronged my friend um and it was just

really hard yeah and like that it was very specific and i think i was also kind of irritated by the fact that like timing is a bigger part of it than i'm used to with tactics games like knowing the right windows to like make your move um i i also started playing on a laptop which was not the right feel like you need i feel like you really it looks like a game that should look work with a laptop but you really need the mouse that fit that level of fidelity i've enjoyed it more since i switched um i don't know i'll keep plugging away at it i just i felt like the save scumming to me was like i had so little of an idea of how to approach each encounter like uh that i was completely relying on the save scumming it's almost like trial and error and i think i just wanted a little bit more feeling of like self-determination there are a few moments and that one was one for me too that

that that sequence that you spoke about that it effectively feels like it keeps throwing you in the deep end of like okay you just have to figure out how this works to move forward and once i got past those hurdles i felt like a ninja like i felt like i could just do the impossible in the game and and i ran into those a few other times where i was just like this is impossible there's no way to do this and then i would really like another point that came up is there is a a big town that you're in and you get to the um very end it's not even a train it's like a train station with a giant bridge and the map is just huge and i got through all of it and at the very end i had to get on board this train but the court like the trade loading area had i don't know like 15 people

on it it's like how do i possibly pull this off without triggering an alarm and getting killed and i i realized like oh i i don't stealth this like i'm going to create a a perfect little um second of just mayhem where everything's going to happen all at once everybody i mean you can pause there's like a pause mode where you can set a rate to do everything exactly as you need it. And like, okay, I'm going to use this character who can be in public to lure some people over to this spot. I'm going to use this character to throw a coin, which pulls some of them also into a cone that is perfect. I'm going to use this character to set a trap. And then I'm going to have the guy who has the shotgun go out and just literally like mow down 15 people all at once. And then I did it and it felt like i it felt like i was the smartest

human on the planet one other thing that i was kind of struggling with is um when you trigger an alarm do you all consider that a fail state uh i reload you can keep playing but i almost always reload okay that's what it feels like it wants you to do that but it doesn't end the game like more guards show up effectively but yeah i think the game is sort of encouraging you there's even a timer on the screen that's like it's been a minute since you've saved save your shit uh which really tells you that's what the developers want you to be doing griffin you have a game that you want to tell us about wait just one last thing the last desperado's game uh came in 2007. It was called Helderado. That's pretty good. Didn't want to let that go.

Helderado. You've missed the point. Two quick shout outs. Crosscode just came out on consoles. Russ and I were talking about it. I really want to play that game. I've been interested in it for a while. It's like an action RPG about this fictional Mmo that takes place on a moon somewhere so it has

like a physical it's like a fucking rad idea for a game but the switch port is like really sluggish and doesn't feel very good uh which apparently they're trying to patch uh there's some comparisons with uh bloodstain there that like you know that game also ran like shit but i also love uh and also soda dungeon 2 just dropped on the on the iphone yeah bud oh my god there he goes podcast over uh so i've started to dip into that it's good i want to talk about and i've tricked you guys because i wrote ruinous effigy here in the rundown i know what that means that's a destiny 2 thing destiny 2 is popping the fuck off right now because they are doing a bunch of dumb shit with it and like sort of like not being precious about it at all and that is evidenced by this new exotic they

just added called ruinous effigy that i'm not joking has completely reinvented the game it's a laser beam that dissolves enemies and turns them into little balls that you can then pick up and use it as a shield or bash enemies with it or just fucking slam dunk it into the ground to blow up everything nearby and that one thing has been enough to revitalize the entire Destiny community. Every time I get on to do my chores to get my power level up or whatever, like, oh, I'm gonna run a dungeon,

everybody's using this fucking laser, and it's just like everything I do in the game now is just a big match of slam ball. And it is so fucking funny and fun and doesn't feel like Destiny necessarily but it is like a complete blast. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah Destiny 2

is real good right now. Y'all next week we'll be talking about Paper Mario the Origami King. I hope you join us for that. After that we will have something special. Oh, boy. Wait till you hear about it.

I know about it. It is real good. Chris knows about it. I know about it. We all know about it. All four of us know about it, but it's like, whoo. It's really good. And, Justin, do you want to take us home?

Yes. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Remember, you can follow and listen for free on Spotify. We ask that you share the show with a friend this week. Besties.fan is the link where you can find us. I want to mention that we are the number three technology podcast on Spotify right now. Quick, somebody say something about cloud computing. Some new printers are good.

3D printer? We talked about 3D printers the other day. That counts, right? USB 2.0, it's coming back, baby. How do I plug it in? That is going to do it for us this week, but 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.

The best seats. It's a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Bush. Besties!