The Besties - The Pirate Yakuza Game Has Something for Everyone – Even Newcomers

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Ahoy, besties! This week, the crew sets sails with Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, a video game that’s as silly as its name suggests. Unlike its predecessor — our best game of 2024 — this entry features a new(ish) protagonist, old-school action combat, and a potpourri of new min-games that borrow from a wide range of Besties favorites, including Cooking Mama and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.Note from Plante: Last week’s description said Obsidian, the developer of Avowed, had previously made Fallout 76. It should have said Fallout: New Vegas. Sometimes I only have a chance to write the description/newsletter late, late, late in the night before we publish an episode — not an excuse, just an explanation. Needless to say, the mistake was human error and not the result of my co-hosts replacing me with a Content Bot. 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!

So it's cold and flu season, and I got an important question for you guys. Sure. Where are you putting those sneezes? Um, explain. Well, it took me about 27 years to realize that you, you know, to do the elbow sneeze. Crook of your arm. The crook of your arm sneeze, which is now generally considered to be the healthiest place to sneeze. Yeah.

Apart from, I guess, the tissue. But then it's in the crook of your arm, so where are you putting that sneeze? Oh, well, you kind of zip past the thing that you're probably ashamed of. What? Come on. What you would do back when we worked together like 10 years ago. Griffin, do you remember this? That Fresh would carry around a Ziploc bag and sneeze into it every time.

That's a very good way to do it. He called it his nasty sack. Yeah. He would carry it around and he would, it was so big that he couldn't like put it in his pocket. So he always just had his nasty sack sort of like bundled up. And it was a biohazard. So he would just staple them to his bedroom wall across the season

until we did a big nasty sack emptying. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean that certainly, I would hate for you to go to fall back into your old ways, Russ. Yeah. The new guidance I've seen coming out of RFK is to get real low down to the ground

like you're doing a pushup and just blast it down onto the ground because your sneeze particles settle. So his point, and I disagree with this clown on a lot of ways, but he says get real low to the ground and just sneeze right on the ground and then it'll stay on the ground. A push-up sneeze.

A push-up sneeze, yeah. And what he says is really great about that is also you're doing a push-up. So you're getting marginally stronger every time you sneeze. And that guy has a game. It's like a catchy song that they're using to promote this, right? Yeah, he goes, push it up, push it up, push it up,

get down on the ground and sneeze, you clown. And I don't know why it makes fun of you at the end of it. Well, he wrote it, you know. But I mean, he's so fucking built. He is. He is so built. So in one specific area and nowhere else. He has a lot of what I call external physical health

and that's gotta count for something, right? Yeah. ["Skyfall 3D World of Warcraft III Remake"] My name is Griffin McRoy, I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Fruschick, I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the Best Seasons show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive inter-game-ment. It's a game of the year club, And just by listening, you, my friend,

are a member this week, very excited, Justin is on the toilet, this week, very excited. It should be noted actually, so last week I made a mistake and said that Griffin died. He didn't die, he's here, he's recording with us. Justin died. That was my mistake. I frequently confuse the two.

I was having trouble getting over a respiratory thing until I did my push-up sneezes and now I'm all better. Yeah. This week we are talking about Like a Dragon Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Okay, that one doesn't, it's not as hard to say actually as I thought it was going to. It covers so many bases. It also takes care of my job because it says exactly what the game is. Literally exactly what it is.

A Like a Dragon game where you would play as a pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. In Hawaii, it covers genre, it covers location, it covers character, everything you need to know. They, Ryogaga Toku has done it again, and we're gonna talk more about it after this. So who wants to bring me up to speed on what old Gora's been up to? Okay, I don't know this man,

aside from his appearances in Yakuza Like a Dragon and Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. I believe, maybe it's Yakuza Zero. I don't know where Goro made his first appearance. Oh, he's in all of them. He is the kind of canonical other guy. Kind of an antagonist, kind of becomes more of a friend along the way, fast and the furious.

Sort of a mad dog, sort of wild and crazy guy, unhinged Yakuza type, but in this one, he's the protagonist, and he's an amnesiac for a little bit. He's kind of an amnesiac through a lot of it and he washes up on an island and he adopts somebody's son basically. He adopts someone who definitely already has a dad and says, I'm your dad now.

Come with me, Jason. You're gonna be my dad. Well, and then adopts the dad as well. Kind of, Jason. You're gonna be- Well, and then I'll adopt the dad as well. Yeah. He does kind of adopt the dad, and then he steals it by rich ship. Can I ask, so in, because as we know, I didn't finish Infinite Wealth,

does he like crash on a boat in Infinite Wealth? Do we see what happened before this game? I don't believe we see, I don't believe we see him crash on a ship. I assume we will find out at some point. And is like the tiger seen in Infinite Wealth? No, the tiger, the whole boy family, they are not characters in Like a Dragon.

So we don't have a preamble for where the tiger came from. No, this game does take place after the events of Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. You learn about Palamaku Island, I believe, which is sort of a big story crux of Infinite Wealth. You learn about Palemaku Island, I believe, which is sort of a big story crux of Infinite Wealth. Yeah, story-wise, basically, in Infinite Wealth, the main story is about you as Kazuma Kiryu, the rival of the character in this game, uncovering- And Ichiban Kazuko, please. Huh? Ichiban.

Ichiban Kazuko is also- Thank you, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, oh, sorry each one and Casima Yeah You are uncovering the mystery of this kind of religious cult that you discover spoilers for the next one minute is Using a island that is nearly impossible to find in a specific ocean to house former Yakuza to do basically like maintenance work on a giant warehouse full of nuclear waste. And all the nations across the world are sending their nuclear waste here to be taken care of and quote disposed of, which it of course isn't.

It doesn't matter. It matters. The story. It matters. It matters. Listen, we're putting like 120 hours into this. If I don't get to pretend it matters, then why do I even do this? Oh no no no, it matters to me a great deal. Infinite Wealth is one of my favorite games ever made.

This game's connection to it is tangential at best so far, I will say. It matters in the sense that this takes place after all of those events. Yes. You are going to see a lot of what happened to that religious cult and the fallout of this game. You're also going to meet basically all of the same characters. And they're going to do a lot of the same missions

and jokes, and part of the gag of this game is, hey, remember when you met this mascot character who asked you to pick up religious pamphlets? Not religious pamphlets, just various pamphlets, fortunes? You're gonna do that exact thing all over again. It is very siloed off, this game, in that it is, I mean, it's insane. You lose perspective on it

the longer you spend in Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. That it is fucking bonkers that you are this character from this series who's an amnesiac and in the absence of knowledge that he possesses, he fills it with pirate garbage. And he becomes an actual pirate and enlists a pirate crew and goes on pirate adventures for treasure and shit like that.

And then also at one point, you do roll up on Honolulu and just do all the same shit that Kazuma Kiryu did in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. All this, most of the mini games, nothing, I haven't hit Dondoko Island, it feels insane for there not to be some. I've met some characters that I met on Dondoko Island, but I wanna manage another modern Animal Crossing style

city island, please. But like a lot, a lot, a lot of the like side quests and like big beats from Infinite Wealth you will see in the side quests. Once you do finally get to Honolulu, it takes you quite some time to get there. I, yeah, so because I didn't finish Infinite Wealth, I thought I would be lost in this game,

not really be able to follow it, but it turns out this has been like maybe the most pleasurable Yakuza experience I've ever had. Gosh, I'm so glad to hear that, Russ. It's really quite enjoyable because there's very little, the preamble is like an hour. You spend an hour on this island,

kind of getting your feet wet and meeting the little boy and the tiger and his dad, et cetera. And then once you're on the boat, the pace dramatically increases and you're doing fights and you're taking over islands filled with pirates that have treasure on them and doing mini missions, and it's all so fucking buck wild silly. Yeah.

I'll give you an example. The title credits, which again, happened like an hour in, it's a full on pirate musical. Yeah. With singing and dancing, and Matt Mercer does the English voice of Chora. Really going as fucking goes for it. As I've ever heard him go.

And that is saying something. Yeah, no part of this game is holding back. And as much as I appreciate the slow character-driven build that is a normal Yakuza game, I have no patience for it or time. So this like light speed, Fast and the Furious style pacing, even though it doesn't necessarily earn the character connections that make you love this game. And not at all.

And it doesn't earn that stuff. That's fine for me. I'm having an enjoyable time and the gameplay is fun and like, it just feels like a romp. Yeah. It is, I think maybe like 20 to 25 hours, not a hundred percenting it. You can play this game very, very fast compared to the other Yakuza games. And it's not surprising for the reason that you're talking about, because it's almost like somewhere between a, you know, weekend tour and a parody of a Yakuza

game and that's, I'm still not sure where I land on this oops all berries nature of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Because love the main character, love all the silliness, it's why I play the Yakuza games, but I also love, you know, salt and sugar, but I don't want that to be my whole meal. And there is a little bit of that when I was playing this where I did wish it slowed down a little bit so that I could get just a little grounded before it did the thing that it does in every Yakuza game where suddenly the silly mission turns like really serious when you realize

that someone's dad's, you know, terminally sick. I mean, yes, the, yes, the game's characters are Wofferthin, I will say, pretty much across the board. Their main motivations usually boil down to, I used to be a pirate and now I'm not anymore, but this amnesiac Yakuza here has inspired me to get back out on those big, beautiful ocean waters. And that is, I mean, not anything that I am finding

particularly compelling, whereas I think- I mean, that's not that plot of Infinite Wealth where he's convincing all these former Yakuza's to like have a purpose in life. Absolutely not, no. I mean, it handles that subject matter with a lot more nuance, I would say, dealing with the sort of like reality of stigma

of being a formerly sort of incarcerated individual and all of the baggage. No one more incarcerated than pirates throughout history. I don't think so. I think they got caught, they pretty much got killed. I don't think there was a lot of jail time suffered by pirates. So like, I don't know, it is, I love the RPGs. We haven't even talked about the action combat in this game,

but I like Infinite Wealth and Like a Dragon so much because the characters, especially in Infinite Wealth, are so well written and so thoughtful and so well developed, and you go on these little side missions with them that really, really make them compelling characters. And also just sort of like the broad storyline of the game, starting in Like a Dragon where you are a betrayed

Yakuza member having to literally rebuild his life from scratch, like that's really good stuff. And it goes hand in hand with like the RPG mechanics of being a powerless hero growing to this like demigod by the end of the game. Like all that stuff goes hand in hand really, really well together. And it's just as I'm like seven and eight hours in so far,

I haven't gotten literally a morsel of that from this game. But it's still fun. It's still very, very fun. And I do, I am enjoying the beat them up sort of combat a lot more than, I still definitely prefer the turn-based stuff, especially the kind of hybridized stuff they did in Infinite Wealth. But I, I don't know, I thought I would get bored with the combat after my first few encounters,

but they definitely do add some stuff that makes, makes it a lot more, I don't know, interesting. It's quite rich, and it's very fast. It feels different than a lot of things that we've had in other Yakuza games. Even ones when you can play as this character. It most closely resembles the, uh, the spy Yakuza game. Man with no name. Yeah, whatever that.

Yeah. I played it. It, it, it has a little bit of that, but even still it's much faster than that. And there's a lot of different unlocks that you can do and add all these new move sets and stuff. You can also switch on an auto combo feature, which, Fresh, I know that you use. If you're the type of person who wants to unlock the cool stuff but doesn't want to have to memorize XXXY, Y-PauseY. I think you mean XXXY-PauseYB. Oh, sorry, yes, yeah, Yeah. That was what I was meaning. Um, but what I think is really useful about this game.

And I think it's telling that you got into it fresh is it's a great instruction manual for the Yakuza series. And in the past Yakuza zero was the one I recommended for that. Yeah. I think this might be even better because it is so fast and it actually has a clear UI. The Yakuza games, like a Dragon games, have I think struggled with this for a long time. Even Yakuza's yearly game I love. You have a double whammy of the UI doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first

and you don't really have an excuse to use it for hours and hours and hours and the way that this game just guides you through all of the kind of fundamental pieces of a Yakuza game You play this and I think you can be sent off to any other part of the series and the pace will be different But the overall like how to play it you'll have. And I think that's important with all sorts of games that we've seen, from Dark Souls to Persona, half the battle is just learning how to experience the game. So, Pete, I'm gonna get letters over what I'm gonna say.

But there's another aspect that makes this one of the best onboarding for Yakuza games... uh, that I've played. Oh, no. It does not star Kazuma Kiryu. I fucking knew it. No, I mean, hey, no, for sure. I have played a lot of these games because of Chris Plant,

probably four or five of them. Yeah. And every time I play one that stars Kazuma Kiryu, I stopped playing because you know what isn't fun is spending three hours with a sad, sad man. And that is Kazuma. He has a sad past and he loves to talk about it. But that's the pleasure that it's, you know.

But you have to, and that's the thing, is like if you have the patience to power through the sadness to get to, oh, he's now hugging a bear and doing a dance and that's really funny, great. But I don't and I haven't. So here I'm playing as a fucking goofy ass pirate with tons of tattoos, that's really funny. Great, but I don't and I haven't. So here I'm playing as a fucking goofy-ass pirate with tons of tattoos that's a total badass but also silly and loves musicals.

I'm in. And this could potentially be the thing that allows me to play the other games. I mean, look, I enjoyed what I played of Infinite Wealth. I just didn't have the patience to see it through, but I played 15 hours of that game. And then Cosuma showed up. He's like, man, I'm sad and also I've got health issues and I'm like, I'm good. It is hilarious that they did design a game specifically for you and that they're like, so how many hours did you play?

15. Got it. And what do you want? Oop, salt, berries? Okay, got it. Oh, and new combat? Okay, got it. This game? Is this the one you want? We haven't talked about the combat, but I do want to talk about it briefly. It is fully real-time, as we've sort of addressed. It is a beat-em-up, which is the style of the original Yakuza game from the fourth Switch to Turn-based. And...

Switch to Turn-based is also kind of a weird way... Like, I feel like the... Like, Yakuza Like a Dragon, which was the first RPG, and Infinite Wealth, are their own thing. And they are hugely outnumbered by games that do not have turn-based RPG combat. But don't you think, like, my understanding is, like,

the mainline Yakuza, or, like, like a Dragon games are now that? I mean, yeah. Yes, that's true. But again, it's even complicated in that the combat here feels so different than the early Yakuza games. I mean, you're fighting crowds of like 20 people. You can't jump in any of the other Yakuza games

as far as I know. And so like the ability to air juggle in this game gives uh, gives it a, like, uh, you know, Devil May Cry Platinum-esque flair that I am finding a very, very, very fun. There are stages in this game, you drop into an island, you're like, oh, yeah, I need to go kill off some pirates, and then suddenly a number pops up on the screen and it just starts counting down.

80 pirates are gonna come at you. And then they start dropping from the sky, rapid fire, just dozens of pirates. Yeah, once you get into big ship battles. Okay, so there's a part of this game that is also naval combat, right? You have a ship. So good.

It's like as arcady, I think, as they possibly could have made it, you have like a boost button and you can drift in your pirate ship very easily. And there's like rings all over the ocean that you go through to get turbo boosts. And then you have like a cannon button on both sides and a machine gun that fires forward.

So like Sea of Thieves, it ain't. You've forgotten one aspect. One other feature. Oh, right, sure. You can at any point shift back into the boat in the middle of all this. So you're like something just walking around the boat. And while you're on the boat, you can just pull out a rocket launcher.

Yes. Because why not? Why would you not wanna do that? Cause it kinda sucks. It's like hard to actually land shots with that thing. So like, but then sometimes after you finish like knocking out the ship of a big battle, there's also a thing called the Pirate Coliseum,

which is like these big featured one-on-one battles. After you knock out someone's ship, you have to board with your boarding party, which you customize fully. Like you can unlock new crew members, you can customize the different parts of your ship quite a bit. You can give them bouquets.

You can give them bouquets to level them up, which is an insane mechanic. And then all of a sudden, the game turns into fucking Dynasty Warriors, and you are doing this big 20 on 20 battle on the deck of the enemy ship. Here's the thing about mainline Yakuza games that I played. If I have 20 minutes,

I am not guaranteed to have a good time in those 20 minutes in the mainline ones. Sure. In this, for sure I'm gonna have a good time. Yes, even if it is the cut scenes, the cut scenes are so fucking goofy. I just met, you go to Madlantis, which is a place sort of referenced in Infinite Wealth.

It's where the bad guys from Dundoko Island came from, I believe. And in this game you meet the Queen Michelle, which is great, that's wild, and also the pirate king of Madlantis who is just played by Samoa Joe. There's just Samoa, I was just watching this cutscene and then all of a sudden getting kudos

from actual Samoa Joe, like what the fuck? Where did he come? It's so goofy and so weird. It's just like the silly cut scenes, the silly side quest cut scenes usually from the RPG Yakuza games is the vibe of the main story in this game. Which is like, you know, double edged sword, it is not hooking me in terms of like,

I actually care about these characters, but it is like, man, it's like popcorn, man. It's just enjoyable to pick it up and play a little bit of it. I'm really enjoying it. I'm glad you are on board with it, Russ. I know that you have not been. No, it's clicking for me.

I'm also just impressed from a logistical standpoint like how they converted a lot of the like assets and content creation that they made for Infinite Wealth into another format, obviously so quickly. I'm sure obviously a ton of the development was happening while Infinite Wealth was happening. Right, but. Converted into something that feels like very, very different, but also uses a lot of the same stuff. Yeah.

Is just like pretty like impressive. I will say, so I, after, I don't know, a few hours of the game, you reach Honolulu and then you get basically access to the big, wide open world part of Honolulu from Infinite Wealth. And I ran around, I did like a dozen side quests and unlocked a bunch of crewmates and like played a bunch of the mini games and stuff.

And now that I've like done that and moved on to like other parts of the story, I don't feel particularly compelled to go back and do a bunch of the other stuff that is there because it is sort of the same stuff that I was doing in Infinite Wealth and I played the shit out of that game and so the idea of going back and replaying

all of this stuff that I already spent dozens of hours doing is slightly less compelling to me. I think. Do you get the sense that it's gonna make you? No, I don't get the sense that it's gonna make me. So I guess that's the thing, right? I probably will be one to finish this game fairly quickly, just because I'm enjoying it,

I am not loving it to the degree where I loved the RPGs where I feel like, well, I gotta fucking unlock every class and I gotta do the photo rallies and I gotta do, I gotta do all of the- I gotta catch some perverts and make them battle each other and then max out my Animal Crossing Island. Like, it is a little bit less meaty than all that. And a lot of the meat that is there is meat that I've already eaten in Infinite Wealth.

I also will say, like, I was shocked to find that Infinite Wealth does not have a difficulty setting when I played it originally because I wanted to speed up the process. This does, you can play on easy and we mentioned earlier, there's an assisted combo thing. And because of that, it allows you to not do every single little thing and still keep pace with the game's difficulty,

which has been great. I've really enjoyed that option as well. It just allows it to fit into my life better. I do think that there's a lot of upgrades and progression and stuff that it definitely hits harder if you are playing without the assisted combos and on a higher difficulty. Like, God, there's so many systems.

There's like rings. You have 10 rings you can equip at any time. Every finger has a ring. Yeah, and then you have to be pretty thoughtful about how you spend your money. Money is how you unlock stat boosts, basically, for Goro, and so you have to be very thoughtful about that stuff, but also you can just blow

right through that shit if you don't care about it, which I do appreciate. Yeah, I like it. Honestly, more than anything, this game continues to drive home my just unrepentant adoration for this whole series and what they have done with it. It is leaning into the best instincts and my favorite shit about this franchise and what this developer does. And there's just no analog for the tone, for the way it's played, for the visual,

there's no analog to this anywhere else in the video game industry. No, there's nothing this, I don't know. A game that is this funny and light-hearted usually doesn't have a ton of other stuff going on for it. It also doesn't have the sincerity too. That's the magic sauce, right? Yeah. For me. That it's very funny and goofy and it then like,

surprises you with an uppercut of, hey, you know, as you get older, it's harder to make friends and you really should put in the effort or else you'll just be lonely forever. And it's like, what the fuck? Occasionally there's some dissonance, which I had to overcome.

I sent a video clip. One of the earliest characters you meet is like a chef aboard the pirate ship. And you predictably have to fight the chef until he becomes friends with you. And using my assisted combo thing, I, at one point, like, kind of accidentally activated a finishing move where I snap his neck. And... It does look like he is dead. His eyes are open when he falls to the ground.

It's really actually pretty easy to execute that move if you like dodge step out of the way, like it gives you a prompt to do a heat action to snap the person you're fighting's neck. And sometimes if you do it right in a boss fight, you'll do that four or five times to the same guy. And it's gotta be like after the third one, just lay down, man, just stop.

I'm hurting you. I hope it's more just like a chiropractic adjustment. One last thing before we head out of this section. The series is known for reusing parts of other games that you visit the same location over and over and over across the Yakuza series. And with slight modifications or sometimes substantial. How do y'all feel about this as a practice,

especially something as big as Hawaii? I'm a fan of it, to be clear, but I'm curious what y'all are thinking about it. It's tough. If I had not spent, infinite wealth, if Infinite Wealth, if the genre of that game and the construction of that game was not sort of, did not lend itself to spending over a hundred hours on it,

then I might feel a little bit differently. It is not, when you first roll up to Hawaii in Infinite Wealth, it is such an insane, humongous playground with all of this just exotic stuff and stories to find and little side quests that you do. And when you discover like, holy shit, there's like a whole crazy taxi game in here and there's all of these different little side things

you can do, it's so thrilling, it's genuinely thrilling, and you can lose dozens of hours right there, just to, like, I wanna see everything that there is to see, and that does not hit remotely as hard this time around. It's still fun to mess around in that, right? But for me, the fun is, the enjoyment I'm getting is weirdly like nostalgia for a game I played last year. And not like, I don't know,

like the excitement of discovery or whatever. My MO on this stuff is if you're reusing assets, make sure that for people that saw them the first time, spent a lot of time with them the first time, that there's either something new, like dramatically new there, or make them optional. Don't force people to do the same shit over and over and over again,

just because you have the assets lying around. That being said, I have attacked a lot of islands with a lot of pirates that look all basically identical, and I'm kind of fine with it. The islands and the pirates look identical. I'm kind of fine with it. So islands and the pirates look identical. Yeah, the- I'm kind of fine with it. So that doesn't bother me because they're so short and goofy and just beat them up areas.

Yeah. I dig it. And I think the thing that they understand is it can't be the whole game. So in a lot of Yakuza games, yeah, you'll go back to Kamurocho, but you'll also go to new places here. The main island from the previous game

isn't the only place you go. No. I do think they're clever in the conversation that they're having with the previous game. So for example, near where you start in the previous game, there's a bar that you go to over and over and over again. Right next door is this big open lot. And as you progress with the game, you have to get more powerful to go fight the enemies in that lot and go get the treasure. Well that's just not how this game works but you know in your head well there's always treasure in this huge open lot so you run over in this game you find a whole bunch of enemies that you can beat the living shit out of but you also find all these seeds everywhere in it that you can use to fill out your garden which is a new

mini game in this game. So it's rewarding you. That's being quite generous to say what the garden is. Yeah, garden, thank you. But it is, it's rewarding you for being a previous player. And if you hadn't played the game before this, whatever, you don't need to know that. You don't need to know to go discover that. You'll probably find it on your own.

I think that is all very clever. I also just think this is something Sega and Atlas also are like trying to figure out, I think with how do you fund video games? But we see this with Persona 2 of these games cost so much to make. Right. We almost expect to double dip. And we're thinking about that, I assume, from the beginning. We're thinking of how can we design spaces that serve multiple purposes that way we can justify these increasingly absurd costs.

And it's like, the way they have done it is so laudable. I cannot think of another example of a studio doing what this game does, which is we're gonna use a lot of the same assets from the last game, but make them its own sort of like standalone thing. And handling that with like, we're going to justify that by making the tone absolutely insane.

And let you do stuff that is so wild and so out of step with the rest of the series that it feels novel and it feels earned and it feels sort of like justified. It doesn't feel like a half-baked cash grab. Like it is a fully formed idea that is bizarre, but that's kind of what is so pleasurable about it. You know what it reminds me of is Tears of the Kingdom. Ah, I don't know if it's-

Honestly, if you think, when you first heard it's gonna be the same map as Breath of the Wild, there was a part of you that was like, oh really, oh, that's kind of a letdown. And the fact that they were able to not only have the same map, but also make it feel completely different because of the things you were able to do.

Granted, not as silly, the tone is very consistent across both games, but from a revamping existing content in a way that felt really new and different. Yeah. I guess the comparison doesn't work for me because I think of Tears of the Kingdom as it's, I mean, I think of Tears of the Kingdom as maybe the best game ever made,

but this definitely has the feel of a side quest. This has the feel of an offshoot. And that to me usually is a red flag. That usually to me spells, and honestly, there were times where I was playing this game where I kind of wished I was playing just Infinite Wealth again, but it would be insane to go back to that game already.

But it also like, it stands apart and it, even though it is very much on its face, a side quest or a spin-off or whatever, like it is, it's a really good one. And I'm so happy that it exists. Yakuza Zero splits its time between Kazuma Kiryu and this character. And there is a version of Infinite Wealth

that feels like it could do that with this game. The reason they can't do that is because Infinite Wealth already has two full games in it so like adding a third just would start to feel like... God how good would a RPG with split characters with Ichiban, Kasuga and Goromachiba. That's the two. And when you played as Goro, it would be a beat-em-up. It would be a pirate beat-em-up. And then when you played as Ichiban,

it would be a Dragon Quest style RPG. I'm fucking in, bring it. Yes, yes. As long as Kiryu's dead, I'm great. He'll never die. His health issues have been, I think, dramatically overblown by the press. Hey, let's take a quick break and then maybe talk

a little bit about those little critters from Japan that we all love so much called Pokemon. Okay, we are back with the big news of the week. Pokemon Go and the games division of Niantic, that's the developer of Pokemon Go, are reportedly being sold to Saudi Arabia owned Scopely Inc. This is based off a report from Bloomberg and it is going to cost Scopely a lot of money, 3.5 billion dollars. Now they're getting the entire Nantik games division, sure, but like that at this point pretty much is Pokemon Go. And I thought what we would do is talk about how the hell did we get here? Because you know, almost a decade ago, it's 2016, Pokemon Go is the biggest

video game on the planet. One of the biggest video game releases of all time. The year it came out, 500 million downloads. That is just a staggering number. It's half a billion, half a billion, don't it? Half a billion. And it did so well for so long, Nantix seemed to be on track. They have games, or they had games with Harry Potter. They have currently a Monster Hunter game. They have done other partnerships with Nintendo. They have been

funded by Google and Nintendo and the Pokemon company. You think they would be doing great. And yet here we are. What happened? I mean, let's be real. They are doing great. I mean, last year, their revenue was $500 million. That's true. You don't get sold for $3.2 billion if you're not doing OPA. Yeah, it's not a punishment to be sold for that much fucking money. But I think there's a version of this where Niantic would prefer to just be a super successful company that doesn't have to sell its game division, you would think. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, internally, it's hard to say whether the people that have made these final calls really just want to be done with it. I think the important thing to remember is it's not just the fact that they're making $500 million a year. They also have a cache of pretty staggering data regarding the comings and goings and movements of basically every player that's ever played Pokemon Go. This is the part that I am so confused about and how this deal is going to happen.

Obviously, we live in a very different country now, but where everybody was freaked out about TikTok, I can't imagine how people feel about an app that literally has players scanning the world around them and creating that data to serve a giant database. Yeah, I mean, I think we've learned, if anything, over the last, like, six weeks that people's interest in giving a shit about the breaches of privacy and data security is sort of selective, I will say. It is sort of context sensitive. And maybe some folks don't give much of a shit about this

as you might expect. Which also might be why Niantic is okay with finally selling its game division. Do you all know the history of this company, how it came to be? I did at some point, but I've definitely replaced that information in my brain with other stuff at this time understandably a quick recap John hanky is the founder basically of Niantic but before that

Way back in like 2001 he founded a company. I believe called keyhole way back in like 2001 he founded a company I believe called Keyhole that would get bought up by Google and would set up Google Maps and Google Earth. Needless to say he was very successful and could kind of do whatever he wanted and at Google he goes hey I want to make augmented reality video games and they're like sure John whatever you made the for us, go off and tinker with it. He makes a game with his team called Ingress, which did have like, I think, seven, eight million players. Yeah.

It was a mild success, um, for what it was. And with that success, Google funds them branching off, that's like team branching off and becoming Niantic. So, this company in theory is meant to be a video game studio from the beginning. But what's so weird about this is I have seen him talk at conferences. I've actually done a Q&A with him at a conference and he doesn't talk much about games. He talks a lot about augmented reality, mapping, and data collection. And the kind of, I think, larger selling point has

always been that if you have 500 million people across the world capturing literal data of the world around them using increasingly improved augmented reality focused phones, you are learning a lot. Well, not just the augmented reality, but also the GPS data that is being collected. Sure, the GPS data, but I mean specifically, if you have people using it in their house, you're finding out how many people in the country

have uneven foundations because you're getting an idea of the gap between their ceiling and their floor, which is not theoretical. Yeah, there's always been a really big disconnect for me. I've played quite a bit of Pokemon Go. It was like a big way that I got Henry interested in like exploring DC when we moved here a few years ago, was that you

know unlike living in Austin in you know not downtown there's just fucking nothing you can really do because it's not walkable and there's not a bunch of poke stops everywhere and here there was and it was like an exciting way to go around also the AR thing you switch off literally the the first couple minutes you play the game and you never turn it back on again because it makes it harder to actually play the game and catch the Pokemon. So there's always been this weird disconnect

between like the technology and sort of maybe original artistic intention of Pokemon Go versus the reality of like what people have wanted when they actually play it. And the speed with which they have tried to rectify that gap has been so cartoonishly sluggish and still not something that they stick the landing on fucking 20% of the time.

It's always been a weird thing for me where it's like you guys have a Mondo hit on your hands and also you do not know what your players want out of it a lot of the time. I think they also expected the technology to move much, much faster than it did. And I do think, I'm talking about all this data, I don't want to be like so crass as to say there wasn't an alignment between collect data and make the game they want to make because the big goal for the company was to be able to create basically situations where you could have an augmented reality experience in Austin, Texas, and one in Washington, DC, and one in Orange County, California. And all of us would be out in our parks, but we would be having a shared experience in

augmented reality. So if we want to have a Pokemon battle out in a park, we could all plot our phones and all these different places and create like shared augmented spaces. That very cool. A wild. Yeah. It's just not what people want. I can't even fucking trade Pikachu to Griffin if I wanted to.

Cause he's in far away. Yes. The other problem is you couldn't even have a shared space in the same park with the degree of believability that you would want. Like it would be great to go to a park and have Pokemon and be able to have a Pokemon battle that actually looks like a Pokemon battle in front of you in augmented reality. That is not like what we got. Yeah.

They will, I assume be fine on top of the $3.2 billion, uh, assuming the sale goes through. They also have started feeding all of that data into what they're calling, I believe, a large geospatial model. Will you be surprised to hear that they're using, uh, AI tools to basically create an AI version of mapping? No, of course not. So I think that is probably why they got the juice from the orange and now they can pass on the rind.

Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, it's weird. It wasn't on my bingo card for this year's news. No, but if you still have a bingo card for the news, you're the hubris, your exhibit is frankly unhinged. I did have last year, Robbie Williams makes a movie where he hired a monkey entirely as a monkey, and I nailed it. You did have that, that's so fucking weird.

But he thought it was going to be a big success in the US. I did. I really thought it would hit. We have a good piece of reader mail. This comes from Jonah. There's a question. Love the idea of an FPS first person snapper. This was in the context of talking about photograph games.

Are there more slash others that people know of? And Jakey responded with a few other suggestions. Some good photography games, Toem, Umarangi Generation, Paparazzi, ones I haven't played, but I heard they're good, might fit the description, Season, did you play Season? I thought you did, maybe not. I don't know if I remember that one.

A Letter to the Future and Toripan. I believe Season, A Letter to the Future is the full title. Oh, that game, yeah, I really liked that game, yes. You ride around on a bike and take photos of a world that is basically doomed and create a scrapbook that you put into like a fallout shelter more or less for future generations to look over.

It is. Fun. It has like a nice vibe. Yeah, sure. Jakey also mentions the Fatal Frame games if you wanna get scared. Wait, did anybody say Panko Park? Did Jakey say it?

No. There was a lot of great games. Panko Park, we've talked about this on, I believe, the Resties. But if you've ever wanted kind of like an Edward Gorey Pokemon Snap, Panko Park rules. Strongly recommend it. And it is a true Pokemon Snap type.

Love it. Bianca Neville true Pokemon Snap type. Love it. Beyond Good and Evil is like an oversight, not being featured on this list, it feels like. How dare you, Jakey. That game's sort of approach to photojournalism is fucking rad. It's very, very, very good. Doesn't age well. You don't think so? I played it for the first time like ten years after the game came out and it was not,

it felt like very dinosaur in terms of just the age. Well, Beyond Good and Evil 2 when it comes out, I'm sure it's gonna be really good. Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be great. That's gonna be real good, real good, real good. Should we do some honorable mentions? Yeah, do you have any honorable? I got a big one.

Oh boy. In the, my house has become a den of plague and it has since like mid-January. So I have had a lot of time on the couch playing Steam Deck as everyone kind of convalesces. And I got hugely, deeply into Grounded, a game that I played a bit of. I know that, I think we all sort of played together,

had like a server or something. This is the Honey I Shrunk the Kids game. This is the Honey I Shrunk the Kids game from Obsidian. I forgot they made it. And it was a survival craft sort of game where you are in this yard and you have to find resources to build armor and weapons and you can build a fort

and you're trying to figure out the mystery of where you are and how to get big. The game is fully feature complete now in what they call fully yoked edition. Is that a joke, like an egg joke? I don't know, it's like a part of this in game fiction TV show. I don't know.

The game has like, made for tea, like Saturday morning cartoon sort of vibes a little bit. Sure. So I'm not like 100% sure what is different in the game now compared to when I first originally played it. But it feels just really, really, really good to play that game. There is so much quality of life stuff that makes every element of the game

like really fun and meaningful. So like basic stuff, like when you're building a base, there's like a single button that you press to immediately like dispense everything in your inventory into nearby boxes that you might have that is very like smart and context sensitive. And then when you're crafting something, it automatically pulls stuff from you,

like your nearby inventory stuff. And the building system is so rich and so, you know, there's so many practical uses for all of these things that I ended up like, there's a big tree in the middle of the yard and so I built a ramp up to like halfway up that tree. And then I built a little tree house in that. And then I built a walkway that went all the way

around the circumference of the tree so I could run zip lines from that walkway. Cause there's no fast travel in the game. You have to build these little zip lines that go. So by the end of the game, I had this spider web of zip lines going all across the yard. Sounds like someone's ready to play Death Strand again.

I was gonna say. Man, I don't know. That's what it sounds like. It sounds like it. It's also just like discovering stuff in that game is so exciting because it is hard. Like the world is turned against you. You are a, it constantly drives home this feeling

of you are a little guy. And if you come across the wrong bug while you're out there, you're gonna get fucking smoked. And so when you find a new armor set or you find a new weapon schematic, it really feels super, super meaningful. Did they tone down the hunger stuff? Because that was something that I kind of-

So the game's different systems are customizable. There's definitely ways like turning off that stuff if you do not like it. I forget what setting I played on, I think mild maybe where like that system is in the game, but it's very easy. Like you can build a dew catcher in your base that then basically like you never have to worry about. I don't want to catch dew, gross.

DEW dew, the sweet clear stuff. I think it's astounding. I think it is a fantastic game. Are you mostly playing solo? I played entirely solo, I finished the game. I genuinely start to finish, really explored the shit out of the yard because again, I had a ton of time to kill

while I was sick. Were you playing on Steam Deck? Played it all on Steam Deck, runs perfectly. I think it is probably better multiplayer. Like there's... Well, we played multiplayer a little bit. It was pretty fun. We did, yeah. But it was early.

I really, really enjoy the base building stuff. And I think like having buddies to like do that stuff with and like feel a sense of like ownership over the backyard. That's the main thing that this game does is it gives you this feeling of mastery over the wilds. And I think that that's like the intention behind a lot of, I mean, the whole survival craft, open world survival craft, I believe is the full title of that genre.

And I think this game does it better than any anything else. And I just, man, I really loved the shit out of my time with this game. That's cool. So if you did not play Grounded, it is in a really, really good spot right now. That rules. I played Mario's Picross, which is a Game Boy game.

All right, okay. It's just a Picross game. It might be the first Picross game that Nintendo has sold. It obviously came out many moons ago. But it's a great introduction to Picross as a genre and like just learning the rules of Picross. And if you get into it, there are a million like mobile versions of it and things like that that you can get into.

But I just really find it very soothing and it's kind of like a, it's like Sudoku, but at the end of it you get a cute little picture of a cat. And that's great. I do like that, yeah. I think I had this game and I didn't understand how it worked. Yeah, you can probably handle it now, Gryphon, I believe in you.

Is it scratching the itch in the what, like I played the like 3DS1 like a ton. So people, yeah, they evolved into like more Was it Scratch in the Itch, and the what? I played the 3DS1 a ton. Yeah, they evolved into more 3D Picross games, which I haven't played, but I know a lot of people get obsessed with them. It feels like my guess is once you evolve into that, it's kind of hard to go back the other way,

because it'd be so simple. But there are 3D, they're called nonograms. There are 3D nonogram games on iOS that I, if I had played any of them, would recommend to you right now, but maybe people in the comments will recommend some good ones. You're recommending the Game Boy one or the Super Nintendo one? I haven't played the Super Nintendo one, I only played the Game Boy one. I think the Super Nintendo one is, it was released exclusively in Japan, but I think they released it on the Switch. Yeah, I think it came out on Switch Online in September 2020.

So if you sub to that and it's on Super Nintendo, so you probably don't need the Ultra Edition, you can play that. That sounds like fun. Nice. What about you guys? Nonograms. I've been watching this show called Severance. Oh.

We don't know what to talk about it. I finally decided to watch the show. I'm not gonna say any spoilers or anything, I'm just gonna say it's a pretty good show. Okay. That's it, watched. Just shining a light on an unheralded piece of media. Good, I'm glad that Ben Stiller's getting his flowers.

Fine. Yeah, it's fucking astonishing. Every episode of this show feels like the season finale of the show, which is a really remarkable achievement. Which is funny, because that's how I felt about Parks and Recreation too, that every four episodes,

because they thought they were gonna get canceled, they were like, yeah, here's another season finale, and oh, we're not canceled? We're gonna keep making more episodes? Great. Adam Scott, man, I could just look at that guy's face forever. He's simply insane. Yeah, and he has two faces in this show,

which is crazy. He has his weathered outy face and his fresh any face. It's impressive. How do you do that? How do you do that with your fucking face? It's like listening to people talk about Bellatro if you haven't played Bellatro. It's just like a fever dream. You should about Bellatro if you haven't played Bellatro.

It's just like a fever dream. You should play Bellatro and you should watch Severus. I don't know. It's the best shit out there now. I know, I know, I know. Do you not watch? Have you not seen it? I know.

You're watching the first season though, right? Nope, haven't watched it. I want to. It's really hard because I mean, I've mentioned it before, I'm in a movie club and we have to watch movies and I have to watch, I'm halfway through, three colors blue, which I'm sure Grant is like a huge fan of.

Mm. No? It's complicated. Anyway, I have homework outside of the besties and outside of normal work and outside of raising my child. I have movie homework. Dude, this show is already homework. It's fucked up that you have built more homework

into your life. It's fun, this show's fun homework and I love to do it, but you can't have many sources of assigned media consumption. Too much homework. Well here I am, this is where I'm stuck. I'm not saying walk away from besties, I'm saying walk away from your movie.

Friends, obviously. Thank you so much for listening to the Besties. We got some friends who are members. Oh yeah, we got some Patreon friends, let me call them out. Thank you to new subscribers, we have Oliver, we have Miles, we have Mike Chuck, and we have Orville. Thank you for being patrons of the Besties,

you can go on over to patreon.com slash the besties. What did we talk about this week, Chris? Oh man, so much stuff. Oh my gosh, what did we talk about? We talked about so much stuff, we talked about Like a Dragon, Pir Oh man, so much stuff. Oh my gosh, what did we talk about? We talked about so much stuff. We talked about Like a Dragon, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. We talked about Panko Park in Grounded and Beyond Good and Evil, Mario Picross, Super Mario Picross, Toem, Umarange Generation, Paparazzi, Seasonal Letter to the Future,

Toripon, the Fatal Frame series, and the TV show, Severance, plus Pokemon Go. You can find a list of all of those things and more over at the newsletter, including a Mia Culper from me, because last week I was a little sleepy, and I wrote that Obsidian made Fallout 76. You fool. Obviously they didn't. I know it.

I don't need any conspiracy theories about how I've turned into some like AI robot Who doesn't know my video games from my whatsapps? I got it. Go read the newsletter. It's fantastic And if you want to become a patron patreon.com slash the besties Next week monster hunter wilds. Oh, man. There's a big one out They're gonna kill a guy's gonna be the game that gets people into Monster Hunter. This one. This one's the one, for sure.

I mean, it is. Every installment becomes a little more easy to get into. But we'll. I like Worlds better than Rise, but we'll see how this one treats us. Okay. We're gonna talk all about it next week, so join us then.

Till next time, join us for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games? Besties!