The Ringer-Verse - Are 'Marathon' and 'Pokémon Pokopia' What Sony and Nintendo Needed? | Button Mash

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

Gotta ’cast ’em all! First, Ben, Matt James, and Steve Ahlman form a fireteam to discuss Bungie’s long-awaited extraction shooter ‘Marathon.’ They forecast whether it’ll fare more like hit ‘ARC Raiders’ or flop ‘Highguard,’ examine the stakes for Sony’s big bets on Bungie and live-service games, and react to a possible revival of the PlayStation/Xbox console wars, followed by a “Rage Quit” rant about the backlash to promotional photos for video game adaptations such as ‘God of War.’ Then Ben brings on Charles Pulliam-Moore from The Verge to discuss the delights of Pokémon life-sim spinoff ‘Pokopia,’ its significance for Switch 2, and the Pokémon franchise’s 30th anniversary, evolution, and future, plus a second “Rage Quit” about the Trump administration coopting video games like ‘Pokopia’ to make memes. Email us at [e-mail]! Intro (0:00) ‘Marathon’ first impressions (3:35) Live service games discussion (39:11) Are the PlayStation/Xbox console wars back? (43:56) Rage quit! (48:32 ) First thoughts on 'Pokémon Pokopia’ (57:08) Switch 2 discussion (1:19:25) The future of Pokémon (1:22:16) Rage quit vs. Trump (1:35:12) Outro (1:46:23) Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Matt James, Steve Ahlman, and Charles Pulliam-Moore Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight. Which streamer is on the brink of collapse? And which executive is on the hot seat? Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again?

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And today, ButtonMash becomes a marathon, not a sprint. As we discuss, Sony's big new live service bet on bungee, the long-awaited and initially much-maligned online shooter marathon. We'll share our impressions of the game. We'll discuss how it fits into the ever-shifting live-service landscape. RIP High Guard, we hardly knew you. And we'll examine whether there's actually a little life left in the console worse. All of which will be a prelude to a Pokemon conversation. As Charles Pulliam Moore from the Verge joins me to discuss Pokemon Pocopia

and the 30th anniversary and future of the franchise. But before I welcome a second Charles to the Ringiverse, let's head to Taos Eighty-four and welcome our runners for this first segment. In Marathon, you spend a lot of time in trios, and so we will today. Backing me up and potentially turning on me to take my loot. Are the ringers deputy art lead Matt, Jigglypuff, James. Hello, Matt. I would never turn on you, Ben, and I humbly accept the title of Jigleypuff.

You are cute and cuddly. also spawning in his senior audio producer and Midnight Boys sactivist Steve Archaeus, Alman, hello Steve. I'm unfamiliar with that Pokemon, but I will be saying my name constantly throughout this podcast. So I could be excellent. Fellas, this is a momentous time, hot on the heels of Resident Evil Requiem, which has deservedly sold five million copies in one week. We had Marathon and Pocopia drop on the same day.

And that wasn't all. move over Mugenics. There's a new king of Steam roguelikes, and it's Slay the Spire 2. We don't always cover early access releases with Hades 2, for instance. We waited for the full PC and Switch release, but more than 400,000 people are playing Slay the Spire 2 as we speak. So we may have to adjust that policy at some point. Anyway, with those three plus smaller games that are quite intriguing, like Esoteric Eb and Planet of Lana 2 and Scott Pilgrim EX. March is coming in hot, not to mention all the intriguing trailers and demos out of Steam Next Best

and an enticing Nintendo Indy World Showcase, Matt, mini-shoot adventures. The 2024 game I felt worst about not playing at the time has finally come to consoles, and I will rectify that oversight, belatedly. So I wish we could catch them all, and maybe we will eventually, but we have accepted a different contract for today.

We have been waiting quite a while for Marathon. Not the 1994 bungee shooter, but the brand new one, which is a player versus player versus environment, online multiplayer first-person shooter. This one was announced about three years ago, originally slated to release last year, until the game got flamed in a closed alpha test

and delayed indefinitely, or until it turns out this week. So hundreds of thousands of people played it concurrently in a server slam that wrapped up a few days before the full debut. And now it's here on PS5, Windows, and Xbox series with full cross-play and cross-progression support. Guys, big game, big studio, big stakes for Sony,

considering the company's live service struggles, the decline of Destiny 2 since Sony acquired Bungy, the general skepticism about live service shooters in the wake of Concord and High Guard, and the bad buzz about Marathon, last year, this is not a free-to-play shooter like High Guard. It's 40 bucks for the standard edition, 60 for Deluxe. So more of the Hell Divers 2 model or the Concord model for that matter. So based on what we've seen and played so far, is Marathon a good game? Will it be the hit

Sony needs? Or is it destined to end up on the live service scrap heap? What say you, Steve? I barely know any of those answers. But it also, it makes me feel comforting to know that even Sony didn't know that even making this game. Is it a good game? Yes. Is it going to last? Lord, I do not know. Is it going to be a hit?

That's actually going to be remaining to be seen. And I think that it's actually probably best measured in the short term, because we only have to go by the short term now. With the high guards of the world being less than about a month's worth in its lifespan, I think Mungy, really needs to be paying the most attention to this game at the beginning and addressing every single thing that it could possibly do moment to moment. And from what I've played and what I've enjoyed, it seems to be doing that. Do I know if this game is for me? Actually, probably

not. But I've enjoyed what I've had. And it's mainly just a mental exercise. Matt, am I crazy? Or is this kind of just going to be something that we that we acts at the end of the year? Yeah, it's hard to say so far, but I think that based on the debut, there were some posts going around about how the current Steam users were about dead even for Slate Aspire 2 and Marathon at launch, which is not where you'd want ideally Marathon to debut, I think, given the budget and the time it's taken to make this. But ultimately, you know, with High Guard, which came out the gate as a free-to-play, so it is not exactly apples to apples here, big numbers at the start, fast drop off. We're going to have to see in the next few days what those player accounts look like with Marathon. Again, we talked about this on the pod. I feel like the $40 entry point for an online shooter, if you're dropping $40 to play Marathon,

you're not going to give it up the next day, right? You're at least going to put some time into this purchase you've made. So that should at least help keep the player count going for a good amount of time. I feel like this game plays very well. My problem with it is that I simply don't like extraction shooters. And everything about this game, aside from that, I'm into. It feels great to play. I do like the art style quite a lot.

I actually really like the world that they've created here and the lore that they sprinkle throughout. And I'm going to keep putting some time into this, even though I'm not really into extraction shooters, because I think that the loop of the game is quite good, the way you're given missions, and you complete the missions, and you unlock new levels of gear. and I'm finding it definitely something I want to come back to, which is not something I could say at the launch of High Guard. How about you, Ben? Yeah, I think we're hedging because it's so hard to predict whether a game will be a success,

a game that's built to be a long-term success. It's very difficult to say in the early days whether it will prove to have staying power. However, you can sometimes predict whether it will be an enormous flop. Yes, as you can. At least, I think Marathon has appointed that fate thus far. Concord and High Guard are different stories, as you said.

One is free to play. They were sprints and not marathon. Yes, it's true. I mean, I don't know that you could call Concord a sprint at any point either, really. It was sort of, you know, shuffling from the starting gate, essentially. But the difference there, because of the pricing, is that really nobody ever played Concord, like the peak concurrent user. It was laughable, right? the count, whereas plenty of people played high guards, thanks in part to the blessing and a

curse publicity that it got at the Game Awards. But almost immediately everyone deserted it, right? But one way or another, if no one plays your game or a lot of people try it out and decide they don't like it, well, that's going to be a death now for you. And it's very tough to come back from that. And it seemed last year like Marathon might end up in that boat because there was such a backlash to the gameplay, the art, to everything, really, a bad. out the closed beta. And I think to Sony's credit, to Bungee's credit, they went back to the drawing board of it.

It's not a completely different game, but I think they took that feedback, something that High Guard was lacking, right? Because Highguard did not do broad public testing in that way, didn't get that kind of feedback. And Marathon did incorporate it while still sort of keeping what makes Marathon distinct. And given the fairly warm reception to the server slam, even though it had to over overcome that initial resistance just based on last year and the taste that was still lingering in a lot of gamers' mouths. That and the initial sales figures and player accounts seem fairly strong. You know, it's tracking behind our graders, which obviously has been a huge hit and has only picked up Steam, no pun intended, over time. So no shame in being a bit behind our graders, which was a ton of hype for that too and a long runway leading up to it. But there's enough of a player base here and enough of a, a warm response that I think it's going to have some legs, but whether it's going to be the huge hit

that Sony and Bungee need, that is very much still up in the air. And you mentioned you're just not an extraction shooter guy, Matt. For anyone who has not played extraction shooters before, can you just kind of summarize the core gameplay loop here? What is it like to play a round of marathon? Yeah, you drop in and you're looking around for loop and you're trying to complete missions and at some point if you're looking to get to an extraction point, activate that extraction point, and wait the amount of time necessary for you to be extracted. And at that point, you get to retain all of the items that you have gathered during that particular rent. And if at any point you die before extraction, you drop absolutely everything that you're carrying. So,

I don't love that as someone who was frustrated by merely weapon durability in Breath of the Wild. Yeah. Big boo. I like to have a thing and keep it. And with extraction shooters, for me personally, is there any joy really in getting a good weapon knowing that at some point you're going to lose it? Right? Because you're not going to stay alive forever. Look, isn't that what makes all things in life precious?

That it's, our time on this earth is finite. We must appreciate every moment and every weapon drop. Look, I already have to deal with, you know, my t-shirts slowly fading over time in real life. Let me go into a video game and keep something. Wow. Yeah. You know? That's your.

So I propose this. This is the thought process of childless men right here. We're worried about our T-shirts. I'm worried about my T-shirts. Hey, I have a child. I'm worried about my T-shirts, too. Sorry, of the two childless men on this call right now. It's a good reflection of mortality.

You can just track it by how your t-shirt fits over time. We all look great. We all look as great as we ever did. But our T-shirts are three-s shirt on the screen. Yeah. But I think if extraction shooters had the format where, like, if you extract once, you get to keep any gear that you've extracted once with, right? So let's say you die, you just drop the stuff that you've gathered in that run.

that would that would be enough to get me in that's there's still stakes there i still don't want to die because i want to keep my new loot but at the same time i don't have to worry about like dropping my most prize possessions on the ground that would work for me but plenty of people really enjoy the extraction shooters as they are i wouldn't say it's a majority of people it's definitely a niche within the shooter genre and i i have long thought it odd for Bungy to be taking their incredibly high profile project into a niche within the shooting community. But, you know, it's working for art graders. Yeah. In that case, at least it can be a big niche. Now, the question I guess is, well, is that niche filled now? Is the need for an extraction

shooter that's a little more streamlined than, say, escape from Tarkov that's a little easier to adopt? Is that now filled with arc graders, can you convince people to switch? The interesting thing is that from the data I've seen, yes, there's some overlap between players of marathon and arc graders, but it's actually a bigger overlap between players of Destiny 2 and Arc Raiders, which makes sense, obviously,

if you're a Bungy loyalist and you've stuck with Destiny all these years, then you're going to check out the new game from the same studio. But that's a very different kind of game. And it's a very different kind of gameplay loop and onboarding process. And so to you, if you're expecting more Bungy, more Destiny,

maybe if you're stuck with Destiny all these years, you might not necessarily want exactly more destiny. It might be time for something new. But will that be a shock to the system? And will it be a good shock or will it be a bad shock? I think that also remains to be seen. I commend all of that. And I certainly think that this game can have projected success

amongst the people that really become loyalist to it because this, again, is a big swing for the likes of Bungy because if they demand a success, If Sony desperately needs a success after the Concord Blunder and the very, very waning free-to-pay and public service games space, this needed to be something that is both accessible, cheap, and coming at a premium experience. Extraction shooters are very hard to sell that as.

And in all of this entirety of this podcast, we have not said the word menus yet. And that is a core part of what you are going to, be looking at for the majority of this time. The gunplay is wonderful. I really have a hard time with the art style, but the thing that you are going to be learning the most is how to manage

and value your runs and your inventory and your time on those runs. That to me has been the biggest thing to adapt to, not just for this game, but extraction shooters in general, but to its credit, this game actually taught me how to think

properly for an extraction shooter. Because I love rogue likes. I love things that kind of like progress incrementally and sort of like runs and sort of incremental gameplay moments where you're spending 20 minutes at a time on a run or you're spending small parts of your game just setting things up, going as quickly and efficiently as you can just to stop and reset and reassess at the end of those things. Instead of thinking about, okay, I'm. I'm going to gather all of this loot that's very high risk.

I am likely to die or be killed by a real-life player or an AI that is no joke and quite hard in this game. But instead, getting sort of like free loadouts, prioritizing quests, and whatever you get at the end of that finish line is just something that you keep. And then start over from zero again and see what else you can like scrap along with it. That loop is good. I think what is going to come down to long-term success for this game is probably making sure that that is reflected in the end game. Making end-game objectives and things that can broaden your actual character load-out optimization is going to be big for keeping people on this.

And I don't know what a $40 premium package long-term looks like for this. Yes, and I think that's part of why we have to hedge here is that we haven't actually seen the end game. We know there's a roadmap. We know there are seasons. et cetera, and it's not going to be the Destiny 2 model of paid expansions, but we don't know exactly what that's going to look like, and can they keep up the cadence, and can that keep the people coming back?

I was going to joke, Matt, that you should just get good if you don't want to lose your loot, but this is a pretty unforgiving game, even by the standards of extraction shooters. I mean, even compared to our creators, which is not for the fate of heart always, but this game, I think it's faster pace. more of an emphasis on PVP because the maps are smaller.

And so it does funnel you into firefights a bit more. And I do think that it's more challenging. And there's a little less sort of social cooperation, at least so far. Again, we'll see how this all evolves. And it plays very differently if you're playing with friends, with people you know, everyone's on mic, you're all cooperating, different experience than you're just dropping solo with some strangers, obviously. But I do think that it is kind of harder core even than Arc Raiders, which is another reason why I wonder whether people will be put off by it if they're coming from another Bungy game.

Because in a lot of respects, of course, it feels very much like a Bungy game just in all the good ways, right? Like the shooting is perfect. I mean, Bungy always nails the feel of shooting with Halo back in the day with Destiny and Destiny 2. Shooting is always fun. the catch, I guess, the paradox here is that you actually shouldn't shoot that much, right? Like, it's actually kind of bad to be shooting a lot, which there is a conflict there because that's what I want to do, because it's just so inherently appealing and feels so familiar as someone who's sunk however many hours into Halo and Destiny over the years. But you actually shouldn't be running and gunning.

You should be sneaking, right? You should be saving your ammo because there's not a lot of. of it. And you're not a bullet sponge here, you know? And there are also some restrictions on movement, for instance. I think the movement feels fine, but it can be finicky by design in some ways where if you sprint a lot, well, it is a marathon, not a sprint, right? Because you quickly, you overheat. And then you're just kind of moving sluggishly for a while. And if you slide wrong. It's like the inverse of a traditional stamina bar. Yeah. And instead of draining, it fills up. slide at the wrong time, then you're just sort of hopelessly exposed. There's a lot of fall damage,

which is weird. Oh my God. You fall like 10 feet and your health bar is like at half. Yeah, you are not a super soldier here. You are not Master Chief. I mean, of course, there's some fall damage there too, but I feel like we've trended away from fall damage mostly. And this is like a really punishing kind of fall damage. I've just gotten hurt and wondered like, did someone hit me? What happened? No, gravity. So yeah, there's a lot of like, it feels. It feels. superficially like a bungee game. And there is that kind of core bungee gameplay shooting appeal. And yet it is not at all like the bungee games that you've played before. I think there's a steep learning curve as well, as you both were sort of alluding to in different

ways. I found that most of my deaths in this game early on were like me leaning over some loot trying to make sense of what visually was coming into my eyes. Yes. Because it's not at the jump entirely apparent like, okay, I know I'm supposed to get loot, but like, what's good? And you quickly learn, okay, they've color-coded stuff in terms of rarity. But you also have like a whole bunch of slots in your build-out to fill up. And it's not super obvious at first what fits where and for which classes and what's better than what. And which resources am I going to need to level what up and how much of that do I need?

And my inventory is not super big, so I can't just kind of grab everything. And meanwhile, ammo scarcity, as you mentioned, really is a thing in this game. Yeah, the onboarding is, it's a problem, right? The tutorial is entirely too short. It does not hold your hand. Yeah. No.

So I do worry that, like, you know, Marathon could, in theory, ramp up over time, But I also have concerned that by the time new people jump into this, the people who are going to be fully adjusted to this game and understand all the mechanics are going to be in a position to absolutely wipe newcomers at a later point. And I worry that it's only going to get harder and harder for people to jump into as time goes on.

Yes, the first match I jumped into after the tutorial, which is very brief, as you said, Steve. One guy was kind of carrying me and another noob, but was also kind of being a bit mean to us, you know? He was just like, what are you guys doing? You're just running around. It's like, this is my first match. You know, they didn't tell me what to do.

I don't know how to equip my... The game's like two days old. Yeah, give me a break here, buddy. But yeah, that is a bit of an issue. And it's hard for me not to just loot everything, you know. I just want to take it all, which I do in Pokemon, Pocopia. but it's not as easy in Marathon, unfortunately. Now, I will give the game this.

It's distinctive, I think, for better and worse, probably, which was the issue or one of the issues with Concord. It's like, this is not a bad game, but it doesn't stand out in any way. It feels like a million other hero type shooters that you've seen before. People said the same about High Guard. Right, yeah. And so you want to stand out, and Marathon does stand out.

It feels like something that you haven't played before, both in terms of the gameplay, but especially the aesthetics, the style, the menus, the fonts, the many, many fonts. So many fonts. And I saw people have been referring to this as font slop, which, look, we're calling everything slop at this point. In fact, I saw a commenter on the marathon subreddit wrote, someone referred to good games as quality slop a few weeks back. Okay. I need to use for this. We need to require slop. I'm done. I'm out on stuff. That made me laugh. Good games are quality slop. Yeah.

But look, it's wacky. You know, there's just all kinds of colors and different menus and, like, the ways that you interact with them is not entirely clear. And I have to confess something. This is kind of embarrassing. But I got stuck on the software license agreement. I did too. I was like, I can't get past the license agreement.

Right. Like, I couldn't scroll and, like, it didn't populate because I feel like, it might need to be like a server connection as to see whether or not you actually read it and then it has to render the approve button. I know. It's skill issue, I guess,

but what you guys were playing on PC, I was playing on PS5, and the weird thing was that like, you couldn't just accept, you couldn't just use like the D pad to go to accept and then press X or whatever. Like it wouldn't accept. You had to move the joystick

and like manually put it on, put the cursor on the accept and then hold it down. It was like, didn't even occur to me to do that. I actually, I quit the game. Like, I went back to the home screen thinking that it was some sort of bug or something. I was like, this is an inauspicious starts to my playing experience. I can't get past the license agreement. This has never happened to me before. But that was kind of indicative. And in my defense, I did go to the Reddit just to see if anyone else was having this issue. Like, am I uniquely incapable of proceeding past the license agreement?

And I did see some other threads, including one that was like, am I the only one who can't accept the limited software license? And no, you are not, sir or ma'am, because I am with you and we're all together. So there was some nice bonding in that thread, very supportive. But, yeah, that's kind of indicative of the menu experience when it's just like the basic interactions, but also just like knowing what to do and what goes where and how to do my load out. And the first time I played a mission, I hadn't. accepted a contract, which was another thing that the guy was giving me grief for.

He's like, why don't you guys have contract? What's a contract? It didn't tell me about a contract. So it's great. Your tutorial bullies you. Is a guy just bullying you, Ben? That was actually more helpful than the actual tutorial because it shamed me into figuring out what was going on in this game.

But yeah, there's a lot of that, right? And, you know, maybe that's just an hour or two and then you get your sea legs under you and you know what you're doing. But there are a lot of people who, if you don't actually ease them into the the game, they're just going to go elsewhere. Now, maybe not as quickly as they did with Highguard because they're invested. Some cost, I put 40 bucks in this thing. I'm going to give it a shot. But it is an obstacle because, as we always say, crowded marketplace, people play the same games every year. You have to do something special to convince them to try something new.

Yeah. The contract thing is kind of, I know you got bullied for not having a contract at the time, which, by the way, these are just missions that you accept for your will employee load out. But I've also found a little bit of an issue where the three people on your team just have entirely different contracts. And then it's sort of like a power struggle at the jump of like, you know, if you're not playing with people you came in with who you can talk things out with, you might just have a scenario where like all three people want to go in completely different directions at the start. And that kind of sucks. and then you're completing one mission for someone, and then maybe they don't really have any interest in helping you get your contract. It's just very common.

This is why you play with friends, ideally, rather than Randos. You don't have to deal with the general pitfalls of Randos who will fail to resume. It feels a little more adversarial or less cooperative. And the thing that Arc Raiders has going for it is because it's been such a hit and its community has actually been a rather friendly one and a very like sort of, okay, we're just killing

the arcs, we're just getting our loot. And from my perspective, the online community has been more favoring on the cooperation aspect of that game rather than an adversarial, I take your stuff, I see you, I kill you. But the problem to me with Marathon is that you can never trust the community,

that just came from destiny to be cooperative. And you certainly can't trust randoms that you get on a certain quest that don't even share your same objectives to be cooperative. And so if that's the thing that Bungee is not going to focus on in the build of this game,

it has to be with either solo runs or hard requirement. You just got to play with people that you know and trust. And that was what was so refreshing initially about helldivers is that this is player versus environment. We're all in the same boat. We're pulling together.

We are trying to preserve super earth and the baddies are the robots and bugs. And the player character is at least powerful enough to go off on their own to do something, depending on your difficulty, which again is selected for you, by you, in the beginning of that. So that's very different. And I think that the main thing that I think that this game is going to struggle with is keeping console players versus PC players because again my biggest complaint about this

I played the server slam on PS5 and then I played the retail game on PC. The server slam was very interesting on console because I've hated when Bungee has done this and that's the incorporation of cursors in console games. It never

ever works and in a game where you are navigating menus 30% of the time that is horrendous. It works in Destiny because all you need to do is equip gun, equip shield, equip this. You are moving and clicking and dragging things all over the place. And that really only works on PC. And that to me is probably the biggest thing that this game has going against it for

long term because I will not continue this on console. I have to play this on PC. Matt, I'm assuming you're the same. Well, anytime you have a PC and console crossplay situation, I think it is a bad idea because a mouse is inherently easier to target someone with than a controller on average.

So yeah, the cursor thing is definitely annoying and there have been other games like Borderlands 4 recently that have sort of incorporated that cursor thing rather than building it for a console. They just kind of adapt the PC interface and that is quite awkward. So yeah, I'm not going to play played this on PS5 for those two reasons.

But also, I just want to really quickly touch on something you guys mentioned about it being, you know, more confrontational than Arc Raiders. I think part of the reason for that is that when you drop into Marathon, I don't think it is clear enough to the players which entities are NPCs and which are actual other players. Outside of like literally just standing in place, waiting for you to shoot them, then they will activate. Yeah, I think visually it's not inherently clear to new players. And so I think everyone just sort of starts playing the game as I'm going to shoot anything.

That's not my guys. Yeah, I do think it's almost like an inversion of the destiny experience where you join at first. And it does kind of hold your hand. There's a lot of loot. You know, you're spoiled with loot early on. And then later, the higher levels and the end game and the game and the, the raids, it gets more complex, and it feels like this game starts that way and then maybe gets a little more explicable over time. But it is intense and it's anxiety-inducing. And it's

faster and scarier, I think, than Arc Raiders, which can be unnerving in its own right. So it's exciting. Like, I definitely had moments. I mean, maybe the highlight of any extraction shooter is that moment when you're just desperately trying to survive until the extraction goes through, right? And you know, you're downed and you're crawling around and there's not enough time to be revived and you're just watching that clock tick down and hoping, hoping against hope that you will actually survive long enough to be able to keep your loot so that that entire time was not wasted, right? So when that works, it's extremely exciting. And there's enough here to make me think that the bones are solid. There's also, there's more lore than in Arc Raiders,

which has kind of a tantalizing setting, but very little meat on those bones at this stage or in the early days, just very little plot. Whereas in this game, there's actually a surprising amount of plot that's kind of parceled out as you go. Not as much as I like. They put out a pretty impressive cinematic trailer

that just whetted my appetite for, gosh, I'd kind of like to see more about this world and the story. Granted, I immediately just was lost by Destiny 2's lore, And of course, the more complicated it got and the more expansions there were and the earlier ones were gated so you couldn't play them anymore, I had no idea what was happening. But this setting and this universe compelling enough to me that, I mean, I can't help but hope that there would be perhaps a single player campaign at some point that we might go from a Titanfall to a Titanfall to type things. But maybe that's just old single player attached gamer in me just pining for what we used to have.

and what we still have, but, you know, this is not that kind of game, and that's okay. There are many types of games. It's fascinating. There's actually a pretty good and solid list of voice actors in this game that are doing great work for the amounts of, like, lore for the different types of contracts and companies and corporations that you can occupy. And the narrative is a wild sort of trippy thing to know that you, the player, are this uploaded consciousness that can infiltrate and use.

different sorts of robots basically to land on your behalf and control with your uploaded brain and that's why you can be infinitely disposable and redisposable. The lore to me is something that actually

helped me kind of divorce myself from the moment to moment. I need to collect all loot and kind of worry about every single thing that I'm preserving. And I started to play this not like a looter shooter, but like a immersive sin. where I'm taking my time,

I'm kind of being a lot more stealthy, I'm being a bit more pragmatic into where I'm going, and every room that I'm inside I'm looking at and I'm trying to discern what happened in this room, what does this room mean, and what the loot placed in this place means. But to the contrary of that, I am completely unimmersed and unimpressed,

not unimpressed, because it's a very interesting feat of art direction. but the world is completely unappealing to me from an artistic standpoint because of the fact that, like, I just see this place and it looks like it's made of Legos. It's made of colorful, shiny, blocky little spheres. And I'm not really comfortable or immersed in something that I'm engaged with. I think that like a single player or a more in-depth lore drop

could make more sense with this. But again, it just kind of feels like, a little sloppy. It feels like a lot is just being thrown at me for the sake of looking unique. And I don't want to seem too pessimistic about that because there's a lot of work that went into stealing this art. I'm sorry, making this art. And to know that, I'm sorry, the artist that was like accredited and like threatened to litigation against them is now credited in the game as an art consultant. So it's good to know that that's been both settled and I hope that they got their money. But to me, this is a wild swing for a game that has to look unique and has to stand out.

And if it does not grab you, people are going to immediately discard this. And this to me is probably the wildest swing that this game has. Matt, would you agree? I actually disagree a little bit in terms of the art style. I think we both agree that it is distinct. I, however, enjoy it. Okay. I just like looking at the disdemeanor.

decisions they've made with this artistically. A lot of people have trouble with the menus looking a certain way. I just really appreciate the entire visual style being presented here. But I will say to your point, though, I think some of the upgrades, like you can unlock weapon skins, which is something that's usually I look forward to in a game. But in a game where you're kind of overwhelmed by a lot of colors and visuals, like you get a new skin and you're like, no one's going to notice this. There's like, it's like...

And how often am I going to be holding that gun anyway because I've got to pick up 40 guns and decide which one is the best one? Yeah, so every 20th run, you may pick up this gun that you've got a weapon skin for, that no one will notice that the weapon skin is different because the visual noise around

each weapon is extreme. So there are definitely drawbacks to this art style. No one's ever going to. They have those little charms you can attach to, like, your gun, and they're so tiny and, like, stickers you can put on. And it's just like, no one has time to process this information visually, like, ever. And so that does make a lot of the upgrades feel pretty underwhelming.

And it's interesting, like, I get that player skins are still somewhat appealing, but anything beyond that is just kind of a moot point for me in this. game. Well, at least no one says that wizard came from the moon. So that's maybe an improvement. But I do think, look, there's something here. And I hope that this game gets a runway and gets a long leash and gets to evolve and find its people. And that's always the concern, really. I think that it's divisive enough and not for everyone enough that I do have some doubts about it being the enormous hit that everyone is still seemingly banking on when they make a game like this. And every now and then, that happens if you have the IP and your Marvel rivals or if you're art graders. But can you keep doing that?

And we just know, I mean, these games are dropping like flies and you have to be extremely lucky, even with all the advantages of Sony marketing and bungee's reputation and built-in player base and everything to compel people. And it's divisive enough, polarizing enough that I think that a lot of people will like it and continue to play it as long as it's supported, but will it be enough people to get Sony to keep the lights on, to justify the investment that they made in Bungie? And I wish that we could just talk about the game as a game without talking about it as a business story. That's the downside of live service games because every game, look, it's art and commerce and everyone who makes any game is trying to make some sort of money and

manage to keep making games and stay employed. But with live service, games because you are banking on and aiming for that large audience, then we end up hyper fixating on SteamDB and everyone is looking in real time as the player counts drop. And meanwhile, you have Slay the Spire 2 just handing Marathons ass to it and everyone is loving Pocopia. And so there's already a lot of anxiety and there's a lot of dumerism about, oh, here we go again. We just almost assume that a live service game will flop now and we're pleasantly surprised if it doesn't. Some people are bracing with sort of an eager anticipation because they don't like like service games and they don't want companies to keep pushing them on us. And so they're almost rooting for the

failure, if not necessarily rooting for the developers to be laid off. Other people are hoping that the game will be good and successful. But either way, we're all just sitting there on the edges of our seeds, wringing our hands, hoping that it's not another Concord or it's not another high guard. And I really feel for high guard developers, right? The remaining developers, the ones who weren't laid off, just crunched to push out a big final update that not many people will play because the game is shutting down next Thursday, March 12th,

fewer than 50 days after launch, though it did at least last a good deal longer than Concord. And what's tragic with these games is that when they fail, they're just gone. They're just wiped away from the internet, unless you can maybe keep them online on a private server or something. From a game preservation standpoint,

it's not great. And just from appreciating these people's work and the labor that went into years of these things, a disappointing single player game at least lives on. You can continue to purchase it. It will just sit on Steam, not selling many copies, but you can find it as long as you'd like to. Whereas here, it feels like the cycle has become so quick, you know, because in High Guard's case, Tencent was reportedly funding it and reportedly pulled out when it became clear very quickly that this was not very viable and 10 cents now being pressured by the government to divest its U.S. assets, et cetera. So there's no time for a rebound. You know,

there's no time for a real fix or narrative change a la cyberpunk or No Man Sky or even Fallout 76 where something launches in a disappointing state, but then is eventually able to write the ship. Now, maybe Sony and Bungee, they will actually have that funding and there's been a big enough investment that they will give this game a very long chance to find its audience and build its audience. And I hope that that's the case. But that's why, you know, on day one, everyone is just looking through their steepled fingers at the player accounts. And I wish that we did not have to greet these games this way. It's very clear that this format of games is wildly over-invested in. And I never want to root for the downfall of any game because that's starting to play with

people's livelihoods and it's getting more and more volatile as the years go by that these models are destined to fail and only is it a miracle that it will last and it's definitely something that I hope that didn't have to be the thing that we need to talk about every time a game comes out like this to know that Marathon is going to be the thing that you bet the farm on with Disney and Bungy because destiny didn't pan out, that doesn't encourage any confidence in the idea that the future of Bungy

could even rest remotely on this game because I'll never have that level of confidence in any game to come out like that. I certainly hope that this game is A, successful, and B, can be taken as a lesson to know that there's a marginal investment in games like this that can happen as long as you

are not embattling, with a community that wants to keep it that way. The reason that like the Fallout 76s of the world and even the Elder Scrolls online of the world, both Bethesda games, are very reliant and engaged enough with their communities because they encourage the modding scene or because they want to make sure that that player base

isn't pissed off at least enough to want to keep coming. And they want to put in the work to, even at a loss, to come back to all of them. that because that's both an active business and faith for that community. And I hope that while Marathon is, I hope, destined to last for quite a long time, that sentiment is going to be trumping the corporate boards and bottom lines for any sort of something on the Dow exchange market. Or, you know, like the numbers are numbering too hard. And this might be a short term pile up problem because these games aren't going to get greenlit as easily now, now that.

people have seen just the wreckage, right? And so it's development cycles. Yes, exactly. It takes so long for these things to play out, right? It's, you know, Barack Obama's analogy of just like turning the aircraft carrier. That's kind of the way that it works with game development. And, you know, I think this will find a dedicated audience, even if it's not an enormous one. I don't think it's going to be a dead game or a ghost town anytime soon. The last point to make about this, I think, is, are we reviving the console wars suddenly like we, might revive a down teammate in Marathon because Sony seems content

to keep putting live service games like Helldivers and Marathon on all platforms. But according to various reports, including one at Bloomberg from our buddy Jason Schreier, Sony is pulling back on bringing first-party single-player games like Ghost of Yote and Saros to PC. Partly because PC releases haven't sold

super well for them lately, maybe because the timelines have been kind of inconsistent, the messaging around when and whether these games will be available, but also because of some concerns about undercutting exclusivity, right? Which we just go from one extreme to another, right, where we're not putting anything on any other system and then suddenly it's in vogue to put everything everywhere

because you want to reach more people. And then it turns out, well, waits, maybe if we put it everywhere, then they won't buy our thing. Who possibly could have seen that coming, right? So perhaps not coincidentally, Xbox just reaffirmed its plans for future Xbox hardware, which is code-named Project Helix. And this is, of course, before the inevitably incredibly confusing actual name is revealed. But it will, according to new CEO, Asha Sharma, lead in performance and play your Xbox

and PC games. Does this, and also the Steam Machine, which will be coming sometime this year, does this maybe put a scare into Sony and say, well, actually, we don't want people to play our most prized single-player experiences on our rivals. And maybe they are still rivals and shouldn't be written off. So here we go again. Maybe we declared the end of this conflict too soon. Yeah, Sony woke up and realized,

hey, maybe we shouldn't be copying what Xbox is doing. In fact, do the opposite, and it's probably a good metric for success. Yeah, you know, just follow Nintendo's lead. And don't let anyone play any of your stuff on any other system ever, just about. And litigate the absolute life out of people. That too, yes. And it's interesting because Capcom, which we hailed for its decisions last week, and which was once more identified with console releases, just announced at an investor Q&A that it's thriving on PC that about half of Capcom sales these days are on PC. They project that percentage to grow. Requiem had a huge series record, Steam concurrent player count.

But of course, that's a developer and publisher. It's in their interest to get their software everywhere. But if you are still a hardware manufacturer and Microsoft still insist that it is, then you do want to sell those systems. And why are people going to purchase those systems? It's because they can't get what you're offering anywhere else. I think Sony's making a good decision here for themselves. It's obviously not ideal for gamers.

But I think that you do need to make sure that the PlayStation brand continues to be associated with exclusives as PC gaming gets more and more popular. you need people to associate PlayStation with the next Insomniac game that's coming out. That is primarily where people are going to be playing the next GTA since that's not coming to PC at launch. It's a good decision for them.

And I also think that Xbox, making their next platform essentially a PC with backwards compatibility is also a good choice. They are indeed going to commit to another hardware generation, rather than taking all that money and throwing it into various AI

footholds, which I thought was a possibility. But as we've talked about on this spot before, I just really want to see Xbox. What they need to do is just create an operating system for their next Xbox that somehow makes PC gaming viable on a TV screen without a mouse and keyboard on your lap.

And that continues to be a huge hurdle that the makers of Windows should be capable of, but again, have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they are unlikely to be able to accomplish. I, for one, plan on leveraging AI to improve this podcast. I don't know about you, Matt. Don't even say it, Steve. I don't.

I won't. I didn't mean anything that I just said. Anyway, we will talk about Pokemon Pocopia. I want to get to that to segue to, that segment. I just want to debut a new mini segment that we're calling rage quit. Because you know that if you think of rage, you think of Ben Lindbergh. And I'm constantly simmering and smoldering with that rage. And today, I have a very brief rant for you, not that we haven't ranted before on button mash, but now we have a Ben, fucking Lindberg. Yeah, here I come. Here I come. We need to chill out about

first stills that are released about game adaptations. Is this the God of War? People need to chill out. People need to relax. Instead of leaping to conclusions about a single, still promotional image, fans are freaking out about this one little glimpse that Amazon put out of the God of War adaptation. And this is not the first time, but it is maybe the most egregious time.

All this is is a picture of Cretus and Atreus, just like in a forest, just stand in there while Atrius is trying to shoot his bow, and Cretos is standing there with his hands on his knees, watching his boy shoot the bow. That's it. You wouldn't think that this would provoke a particularly strong reaction either way, but legions of people, and I'm aware that on the internet, the most vocal voices get amplified,

and it might just be a minority, a subset of people who are pissed about things, but they're the loudest, and then that gets aggregated, and we do posts everywhere that are like, the internet is mad about whatever. And then you embed five tweets or something, as if that's representative of what everyone thinks. But it does seem like people are for some reason upset

about the way that this image looked. And I don't get it. Did it look great? No, I guess. Did it change my expectations for this series in any way? No, because it is a single still image. I don't know what people were expecting. I guess they don't think that Ryan Hurst looks like.

the Kratos they remember, which he isn't because he's a human being and not an animated character. And so it's just, I guess people upset that the thing that we're getting the briefest glimpse of doesn't look exactly like the thing that they remember seeing on screen. So we get Kalam Vinson as Atreus and Ryan Hirsch as Kratos, and I guess people think it looks like Kratos cosplay or something. I mean, that's what a movie adaptation is or a TV adaptation is, right? Like it's the thing that we're familiar with from video games, except people are dressing up as that character. That's the way that it works. So I don't think you can tell anything about the production value. I mean, if you've seen most prime video shows fall out, whatever it is,

like looking low budget is not the issue. You know, Lord of the Rings, I mean, that's not the problem, right? So this is not concerning to me. It is not encouraging to me. It could not possibly move the needle in one direction or another because it is a single image of of what will become moving images in a television show. And I'm sick of this because it keeps happening over and over and over again. Every time we get a game adaptation, right, when we see Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, there's this big backlash. Now, there's always a big backlash to whoever's playing Lara Croft, right?

And I just write that off as people are pissed that she doesn't have pointy pixelated boobs in real life or whatever, right? It's probably some of that. I don't know what else you could conclude from this. We saw the same thing. It's not purely a sexist thing because we're. We saw the same sort of backlash when Henry Cavill showed up as Gerald, when Pedro Pascal showed up as Joel initially, characters who become beloved, actors who are hailed for their portrayals of these characters. The first glimpse we get of them, it's like, oh, this does not look like my Joel or my Gerald or my Lara or whatever it is.

And people are just beside themselves. It's not solely a video game phenomenon. Remember the backlash to Superman when Superman was like tying his shoes and there were aliens in the back. background and stuff. And everyone was like, this movie is going to be garbage because I don't know, whatever. It doesn't look like Superman's supposed to look. The only time you're, I think, allowed to do this is when it's Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic looks weird. Then I'll allow it because that's an animated character. That's an animated movie. Like Ryan Hurst looks like Ryan Hurst. I don't know what you want him to look like. You know, like he put out kind of a cryptic statement in response to this backlash where he was just like, don't believe. everything you see on the internet kids, probably just saying, don't like jump to conclusions about what the series is going to be based on a single image. But some people interpreted that as like, oh, they're going to Sonic it somehow. Like they're going to just CGI him to look more like Cretos or like, this was AI or something. And they're going to fix it.

And he won't like. Like that's what the man looks like. I don't know what else he could possibly look like. Sonic all out. Because Sonic was an animated character and just did. and look like Sonic and also looked weird. And I think the fans were vindicated for revolting in that case because that turned into a very popular movie and franchise.

So, okay, got to give it to you on that one, have to hand it to you for the Sonic backlash. But if we're talking live action characters and actors looking like actors instead of animated characters, relax, everyone. Play some Pocopi. I disagree. What?

I disagree. Soft disagree. Here's why, Ben. Okay. The fault here. is on the people who are deciding to release these images. If you don't want people to be joking about how your new show looks like cosplay, maybe don't get the actors, put them in costumes,

shoot them in a studio with even lighting, flat lighting, and say, here's what it's going to look like. It's not like they don't know what cosplayers look like. It's not like they haven't seen it. Wait until you have a still from, that you've extracted from the motion, from the actual show or movie, that a cinematographer

has decided what the look of this is going to, like, why give us these studio cosplay shoots this early? Like, and why are people continuing to make this mistake? Fair. There's plenty of blame to go around. Freitos, releasing Tomb Raider. I don't need a still promotional image, period. It could be the greatest.

looking image and I couldn't care less. But you're right, maybe they want the backlash. Maybe they want the online controversy. Maybe they did want me to be ranting about God of War on Buttmash because I'm talking about God of War on a podcast and promoting the series, even if it's about how people think it looks like crap. But yeah, maybe it's just, you know, there's no such thing as bad PR. All news is good news.

But I don't know if that worked so well for Highgart. I think it's just out of touch, like studio exec being like, this looks like the video game. To me, I'm going to show everyone how it looks like the video game. And then all those video game people will be way into it. And it's like, maybe, maybe, but this is, it's James Gunn. It's the people making the last of us. Like, it's people who know of what they speak and they're still doing this. And I just feel like people are primed to be upset about whatever it is because it doesn't match their mental image of that thing.

I think you're, I think you're more or less on the nose because it doesn't, it doesn't prove the product. this is a show with dialogue and characters and a story that we have to evaluate, not a picture that a press release has to come out with. Wait until your thing looks good before you show it to me. It turned into a double rant. Do away. And if you don't, get ready. And also, if they put out a promotional still, don't get upset because it doesn't

actually reflect anything that we're going to be seeing in the series. Yeah, so down with all of this. Down with promotion. It's all bad. Down with the lies. Down with it all. Just have this pop up on Amazon one day that we didn't know about and we never will know about. And then we'll complain about it all in one fell swoop.

All right. Plenty of rage to go around. You two will rejoin me in less than two weeks when we discuss and hopefully don't rage about the tantalizing, open world, wondrous enigma that is Crimson Desert. But for now, we're ready to extract. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Ben. No fall. damage in Pocopia, by the way. That's true. You do fall from some high heights sometimes,

but yeah, the stakes are a little lower. Let's take a quick break, and I will be back with Charles Pulliam More to talk, Pokemon, Pocopia. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and make it a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer, unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner, or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. This episode is brought to you by Nass Energy. Every ounce

of dirt, sweat, and gears, every checkered flag and trophy raised, every lap, every race, every hard-fought place. They're all jammed inside every can of Nass Energy, high-performance energy for burning the Midnight oil in the garage and pedal to the metal human horsepower for the streets. Go ahead, crack open a can of Nas energy and get after it. This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've

already read twice. Off campus, L. Every year after, The Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Well, we just discussed Marathon. Now it's time to talk about a game that lends itself to marathon play sessions.

Pokemon, Pocopia. And wait, what's this? I see a mysterious rustling in some hydrated tall grass. I approach and I press A to inspect and who should appear on the podcast. But Charles Pulliam Moore, who covered. film, TV, and most importantly, Pokemon for The Verge. Charles, I choose you. Well, thank you so much.

I'd love to be chosen. What is your preferred habitat? How can I make you more comfortable on this podcast? Can I collect anything for you? I've been thinking about this, actually. I truly was thinking about this. What would my ideal habitat be? Some hydrated tall grass.

We don't like the dry stuff. And some CDs, some CDs, and a book. boombox, right? Really into the physical media. So if you want me to like hang out in your area, show me that you've got like a nice little library of things for me to consume without having to use a device, like a modern device. Sounds so nice. It's not just LPs. CDs are coming back. Cassettes coming back. And Pokemon, well, Pokemon never left. So it can't really come back. It's been a constant for 30 years, which we will discuss. You wrote for many other outlets, Splinter and I.09 and elsewhere before joining the Verge a few years.

ago, but it's kind of like in Field of Dreams when Terrence tells Ray, the one constant through all the years has been baseball. For you, the one constant has been Pokemon. You have had bylines about Pokemon wherever you've gone, most recently your review of Pocopia for The Verge. And you're, I think, maybe more of a Pokemon than I am. But I've had Pocopia circled for some time because Pokemon plus Animal Crossing plus Minecraft with some Viva Pignata

and Stardu seasoning on the side. This seems like cooked up in a lab to take over our lives. This is such a potent pitch and mix of gameplay styles and surprise, the game is good

and has one of the highest metacritic scores in series history, which you contributed to at The verge. It's true. It's true. I'm doing my part. And to your point about it, like, it feeling like it was cooked up in a lab, yeah, when I first heard about vocopia, I was sort of first teased, I wasn't super gung-ho about it. Life Sims have never, I've always been a Pokemon person. They've got like the promotional VHS they sent out to teach kids what it was. Another outmoded physical media format. Oh, yeah. But like, live Sims have never really been my stees. Just, just. because, you know, isn't it fun to do fake labor in your free time? It's like not, not particularly.

Yeah, yeah. But there is something about when you put a little Pokemon Sheen on certain things, right? It can open your mind up to the possibility of you being interested in something that wasn't necessarily on your radar at first. So, yeah, I was, you know, I was keeping an eye on it from afar and being like, oh, this is cute. Oh, it's a ditto. I think one of the funniest things about Bocopia is that it seems very much like, at some point, point in the development process, before the game necessarily came into full form, there were talks about, like, hey, so we've got this bit in the detective Pikachu movie where a creepy ditto shows up

and it reveals that it's been pretending to be humans this whole time. We can turn that into a cutesy game, which sounds wild and like it shouldn't work, especially given that it's got, it's borrowing so so many elements from other games. But when you sit down to play it, it's like, oh, no, this is, this makes perfect sense and feels like something that is releasing at just the right time. Yeah, I made it sound like, well, how could this not have hit because you're putting together all these other successful things? But that can go wrong. It can end up feeling like some Frankenstein vivisected island of Dr. Moreau kind of creature

where none of those elements fit together. Or it could feel something like Pow World, for instance, which obviously was a mega success by blending together all these. different genres, but kind of felt derivative, or perhaps Nintendo might even argue, infringing on copyrights. Yeah, derivative and like lacking in vision, right? Like I sort of, I think, I guess one of my initial concerns about Bocopia was, like, is this just going to be Animal Crossing but with Pokemon, right? Which is something that I had dreamed about before, but the idea, had the game just been that, I can easily imagine myself feeling frustrated at the idea of, like,

I've already sunk so many hours into Animal Crossing, and now I just have to do it all over again, you know, just to find my favorite Pokemon. You know, a game like this could easily veer into TDM territory, you know? You have to do, you have to find ways to make this kind of gameplay interesting and compelling outside of the IP, right? The core mechanics do have to have some sort of sticky quality to them that makes you think about them as soon as you wake up and, like,

want to keep coming back to it. And what's really impressive about the title is it doesn't try to, to investigate the fact that it is borrowing from Dragon Quest builders, right? Like, this is another game that's developed by Coatechmo, and they're like, look, we've done this before. Like, we know what this world can look and feel like, how can we sort of evolve it, right? Take it into a slightly different direction that feels familiar but new at the same time and new enough to really sort of continuously give you that surprise and delight cycle.

That sort of is key to, I think, what become like games that become hits. You know, a game's ability to perpetually charm you as you get deeper and deeper into it. That's the thing that makes you want to talk to other people about it and, like, post memes about it and whatnot. Yeah. And I have had that feeling like, what am I doing with my life while playing this game? And similar games, it almost feels like I'm morphing into my parents because when I was a kid, they would see me playing video games. And they're like, what are you accomplishing here? What's the purpose of this? And it's like, well, fun. Fun is the purpose. and also exploration and discovery and puzzle solving and all these great things.

And there are times in a life sim and even Pocopia where I'm just endlessly watering dry plots of land. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What am I doing with my life exactly? Why, maybe I should go out and do this in an actual park and improve the actual environment, or maybe I should dedicate myself to self-improvement or something. And then I look up and three hours have passed. And it's like, but I made all this dry ground humans now. This is this is great.

What can all these Pokemon who moved in? They're so happy. I totally understand what you're talking about. I have these thoughts myself. But something that I've come to sort of, is something that I try to like keep the forefront of my mind is that like completion of the game is not sort of the goal. Or rather, the thing that's sort of feels most worthwhile about life sims

is like the exercise and patience and taking your time through something. thing. One of the downsides of a game becoming like a cultural moment that everybody wants to participate in, right, is that desire to sort of like finish first and like tell everybody all the cool things that you found and like show off how like how complete your thing is. But with a game like Pocopia that is so, I say this with love, it can be a little not quite circuitous, but it's like if you want to get to this next like level of progression, you do have to take some time and like go wander around and, you know, cultivate a relationship. And I think that in that practice of having to take time, it's been good for me just like as an exercise.

And that's not quite meditation. But it is sort of like a, hey man, you're doing this for fun. So paste yourself. Pace yourself is sort of like take some time to smell the flowers and appreciate the fine details and stuff. Yeah. It's like the slow food of video games or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is there's kind of a tension, I guess, between the progression and just the chill hangout vibes of this game. And tension is maybe overstating it because the selling point of this game is that there is next to no tension. And actually, it's a great contrast with Marathon or with Resident Evil Requiem for that matter, which we talked about last week, video games contain multitudes. And if you need just something that's going to lower your heart rate and bring things

down a bit after one of those more high adrenaline games than Pocopia is the game for you. And I was going to say like Pocopia is crack for me, kind of, because I can't put it down, but it's not as if there's a high exactly. Like it should be some sort of controlled substance, I think, just because it is like dangerously a time-waster. And yet it's not a moment-to-moment, heart-pounding kind of game. And in fact, it very much encourages you to slow down. You know, it tells you there's constant messaging that's just like, hey, relax, no rush. You can pursue the progression and there are some main story quests, but you don't need to worry about that.

You can just go around and beautify the area and make Pokemon happy. There are even some time-gated construction, unless you want to trick your switch. If you're building a house or something, it's going to take a certain amount of time. And so you put your Pokemon on it. There's almost a little bit of pickman in this too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can kind of control your Pokemon. They'll follow your round. You can tell them to do things. I kept expecting a day to end, and I'd have to go back to my spaceship or something, but that doesn't happen. I can play all night, both in real life and in Pocopia world. And yet there is actually a hook here, and there is a plot, and there is a story and lore, which I actually appreciate because I think if it leaned too much into the LifeSim element and there wasn't something that I was building toward or working toward, I think it might not have hooked.

me as much. Yeah, the story element is definitely, it's like, it is the bait that sort of like kept me going because it's like not just bait, but it's really compelling also. You mentioned Pickman earlier and about like, oh, the day is coming to an end one, but I don't have to leave. Something that I love about the game is that if you're playing at night, like once nine o'clock rolls around, the Pokemon just start going to sleep. They're going to sleep. And you can wake them up and be like, hey, we're doing construction. I'll be like, oh, my God. You know, we can just rest right now. It's non-union labor, evidently. They'll just get up whatever hour.

I have found myself being like, oh, oops, I knocked down your house. What if we built someone else's house right now? Yeah. It's like you're the bat. You're the Tom Nook of this world. You're just sort of the exploiting free Pokemon labor, basically. You are very much the Tom Nook, but part of what, you know, alleviates the guilt of it all to bring it back to the story is how compelling the story is,

right? Like, Pokemon has always sort of, not even dabbled in, but, you know, explored heavy topics, right? Heavy topics that seem like the kind of subject matter you wouldn't expect in an RPG aimed at children. But Bacobia is very sort of upfront about like, hey man, humanity has disappeared. The world is in ruins. Most Pokemon have disappeared for reasons that they don't understand, which is very much like it's bigger, yeah, just in terms of its implications and its weirdness, compared to a lot of the other kind of like heavy stories that the Pokemon franchise has done before.

And just like it beat that, that concept being so intriguing is part of what makes me and I feel like a lot of other people want to keep like pushing through it. And then sort of like the beauty of the game is like, no matter how hard you push, because there is just so much involved in that pushing, it's like collect these resources, find these Pokemon, pull them all together.

You do get, I get tired. And I'm just kind of like, all right, you guys like, I've written down what I want to do, and I'm like 30% there. I'm going to close the game for a little bit and come back later. That exhaustion just like naturally comes to me. And also just like one of the other clever little tricks of the game is if you power your switch down for too long, especially like if the day passes, when you hire it back up, you won't just be where you were before. You're at home.

And the game is like, okay, you went home and you slept. Yes. You can get back to the work if you want to. But we're not just going to drop you back into it because you're not supposed to be mainlining this. he was supposed to be savoring the adventure. And it does encourage you, like, Animal Crossing, to log in every day. There are little bonuses and incentives. But again, it's not putting too much pressure on you.

And, yeah, because the game just came out, we won't give away too many story specifics. But without spoiling anything that you won't glean very early in your playthrough, it's kind of a, it's utopia for Pokemon, or at least you're trying to make it into one. But it's apparently post-apocalyptic for people. There are no people. It's kind of Pokemon meets Horizon Zero Dawn, essentially. And I don't know if this counts as canon. Obviously, canon in the world of Pokemon can be kind of nebulous, but this would have some serious implications.

And we've seen a lot of experimentation, I guess, with the timeline and the lore. And for example, Pokemon legends, Archaeus going back in time and Pokemon are really, like, monsters. They're, you know, out there in the wild. They can kill you. And then it's like, well, are people the baddies? Are we the baddies? Is this something we should be doing? And here it kind of raises similar questions. Like the Pokemon are pining for people, but maybe they're better off without us. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up RCA's because it does very much like sort of posit like Pokemon are wild animals. They don't mess with humans. They will kill you if you get too close. Proceed with caution. And when that game first came out, it was so different than anything else that we'd seen from the franchise. And it did. it seemed sort of like those thoughts, those train of thoughts might just be limited to the Legends brand, which are, again, they are, they are canon, but they are sort of so far flung from the main storylines. There's all kinds of like multiple timelines and like the core Pokemon games.

It was easy to sort of put RCS into a box. But what was really interesting about Legends EA was that you saw a lot of those same ideas being explored in a contemporary setting, right? It's set in the present day, and it is bringing sort of like that tension that exists between humans and Pokemon closer to the stories that we recognize from the core games, right? Legend ZA picks up on the story from X and Y, right? The city is in a period of rebuilding after, you know, a cataclysmic event. And as the city is being built back together, people are having serious conversations like, hey, man, I love living in Pokey Paris, but there are these huge. huge monsters that breathe fire and have psychic powers that keep knocking me out. Thank goodness we

have free health care. But can we do something about all of the violence that we are sort of inviting into our lives by dente of living amongst these creatures? RCS Legend Z8 and Pocopia, they're not necessarily, they're not a trilogy kind of series of games, but they are sort of, I think, encouraging Pokemon fans to think a little bit more deeply about, you know, the relationship between, between monsters and people in a way that the fandom has always kind of like joked about, you know, growing up, we would all joke like, you know, yeah, Pikachu's your best friend, but he lives in a tiny person and he does, and he does what you want him to do. Are you truly partners the way that the official branding says, or is this something more nefarious?

And for a while, it seemed like Nintendo did necessarily want to get into all of that. But it's been really interesting to see the franchise really kind of be like, no, let's talk about it. What does it mean for, what does it mean for Pokemon to live by themselves and to be able to rebuild a society on their own and be really chill? Yeah. Yeah, it's Station 11 all over again, to the monsters, where the monsters, or to the pocket monsters, where the monsters, maybe in this case. But I'm impressed just by the systems in this game because historically, crafting is a tough time for me. And the more complex the crafting and the more time I have to spend. in my inventory and browsing through menus, the more likely I am to bounce off of something.

And there's just no bouncing off of Pocopia, I don't think. It's just so low friction. Everything is intuitive. Everything is streamlined. Everything is explained to you. If you're ever at a loss for what to do, which rarely happens, you can just go to your kind of guide in this area. and he'll just point you to whatever is up, whoever wants to talk to you, whatever you can do for them. So there's never really a moment of not knowing what to do next or how you can just pick up the game

for a short play session even and feel like you accomplish something. And yeah, there are moments where you have to lead a Pokemon around and maybe the Bulbosaur AI is not quite complying with your desire to water some seeds or something. And that can occasionally be frustrating. But for the most part, this game just, it kind of helps you out.

It leads you around without feeling like it's playing the game for you. Yeah. It's just a really nice mix and some quality of life stuff, you know, fast travel and sucking up loot. You know, you don't have to press a button to pick up every individual thing if you're breaking a bunch of blocks. And if you do the game, we'll be like, hey, don't do that. Just like pick it all up at once. There is a better way. Yeah.

Or if you're laying down a lot of items, you can do. sort of like this strafing maneuver where you can just rapid fire stuff out. So I appreciate all of that. That's like that all of that stuff is great. I have sort of found myself bristling at certain friction points. Like your pocket, this is, and I think this is just a perennial issue with all life sim games. It's the same thing that really kind of freshered me about Animal Crossing. Your pockets just get full. Yes, it's true. You have all these grand visions of like, ooh, I'm going to rebuild this city. And it's going to be so gorgeous. And I need, I need these bricks. And I need this kind of grass and these flowers. And you're like, great, let's go. And then you're, you're like, great, let's go. And then you're

The pocket's like, uh-uh, no, no, no, no. You need to go put some things down. And part of the beauty of the game is you can just build storage and leave it anywhere, right? The danger is you can just lose things. And then it becomes an exercise and like, oh, wait, I do have to slow down a little bit and be a little bit judicious about how I move through the game. I've lost a doll that I really want somewhere in the game. Yeah, it's true.

You misplace things. It's like you're Grace Ashcroft in Requiem, and you have only so many inventory slots except Grace, like wherever there's a box she can put stuff in. She can retrieve that from wherever. But in Pocopia, you just have empty boxes scattered across the landscape and there's different stuff in each of them. And so you have to do sort of a scavenger hunt to remember where you stored that one thing that you're looking for. And part of me feels like that's by design. Like it very much is a way for the game to encourage you to slow down. and be like, ah, you want to, you're trying to mid-max this,

uh-uh-uh, uh-uh, uh, be a little bit more measured and thoughtful about how you're spending your time here. It's ended up being worth it for me once I sort of like started setting more realistic goals for myself where it's like, hey, let's focus on this 40 by 40 chunk of one biome and spend some time like beautifying it a little bit, right? I've been building myself little bases on each of the island. because you do it initially just so that you have fast travel points. But now I'm like, all right, when I go to an island,

I actually want some cool little digs that speak to me on an aesthetic level. So I just been like scouting out locations and figuring like, oh, I want to live in this cave or I want to live at the top of this mountain. And spending like an hour, you know, setting the house down, picturing where it's going to be, figuring out what kind of a kutra mall you want to have around it. Watching all of that come together is so, that's so satisfying. I've realized that like hitting those like small,

goals gives me more of like a dopamine boost as opposed to plowing through the story. And when you clow through the story, you end up being introduced to so many tangents that it's easy to lose track of what it is that you might want to be. Like obviously your goal is to like get to the end. But you know, you meet this character and they want to go do this stuff. And it takes you into this place. And it can be really easy to get sidetracked. And so I've just gotten comfortable being like small bites, small bites, the big picture will reveal itself in due time and you'll have a much, you'll come out on the other side of the process, feeling much better about it because you'll be able to look back and there'll be, you know, things that are

actually completed as opposed to. There's like, there's like one biome that I was not moving through that way and it is a mess. There's just holes everywhere, stuff all over the ground, and I'm dreading going back there to put it all together. Yeah, there's just a lot here. Tangents, tan growths, everything is here for you in Pocopia. And this is a full price, $70 game, but if any game is worth $70, Pocopia is worth it, because there is a cornucopia of content in Pocopia. I think a lot of the pushback, you know, outside of just people balking at the price for Switch 2 games.

I think there was a lot of sort of questioning like, hey, man, like if this is just Animal Crossing Pokemon Horizons, and you're not giving us a new Animal Crossing for the Switch 2, is this worth my money? And I think that, you know, back to the point that we were talking about, about it, feeling sort of, so much like more than the sum of its, you know, parts. I think once you really like get into the game, it definitely feels like a full-fledged game, right? It doesn't necessarily feel like something that

is so far off the beaten path for adventure players that they won't have a good time. It doesn't feel like it's trying to downplay the life's and aspects so much so that, you know, Animal Crossing lovers won't have fun. It is just surprisingly, it's just surprising how much it is firing on all cylinders. Yeah. And I think it arrives at a pretty pivotal time for the switch to, This is a Switch 2 exclusive. And I don't know if it's the system seller everyone's been waiting for, but it's going to sell a lot of copies, that's for sure, and it should. And this is at a time when the sales momentum of the Switch 2,

at least in the West, has slowed as there's been a lack of first-party flagship Nintendo releases. And sure, until we get 3D Mario, until we get the next Zelda, whatever it is, there will still be people pining for those things. but I think, you know, and yeah, there was Z to A, et cetera. But if you've been out here thinking, all right, well, Bonanza was great, but what else you got for me, Nintendo? I think this is an answer to that and a pretty compelling answer. Yeah, I've heard about this a couple of months ago back when, you know,

the conversation Azure was like, where all the Switch 2 games? And my piece is basically like, they're coming, right? Like, they did not release a console just to release no games for it. we're talking so much about patience. Patience has sort of been the virtue here. The Switch 2 is their new flagship console. It is safe to assume that, you know, the titles were coming. And now, you know, Pocopia is here.

And I think that Nintendo's strategy has been like, not necessarily we're going to drop one big system selling, right? Obviously, I think every publisher wants for any of its titles to be like that game that dominates the cultural conversation and starts moving units for the game itself and for consoles. But there's also value in having, you know, smaller moments that, like, capture segments of your target audience that get people to jump on to the console. I've seen a lot of people joking, right? You can never be sure how serious people are, but people joking like, uh, I think I'm going to have to buy a switch too for this.

And I think going for, we are going to try to have lots of moments like this where we're going to try to get, you know, a few tens of thousands of people to buy a copy. or rather buy a new console just because this new game is coming on, as opposed to every game has to be Breath of the Wild, right? Obviously, I'm sure Nintendo wants another Breath of the Wild, but it is hard, it is hard, don't be on. But it's hard to conjure those up, right? It's an imprecise science, and, no, I don't get in conversations about, you know,

video game development budgets, but it's kind of like, look, you have to be, you have to be careful and smart about how you try to achieve those goals. And I think that playing it cautious this way and going for lots of small wins as opposed to a handful of huge ones is a very Nintendo way about going about this kind of process. Yeah, and console generations last longer than ever,

especially because there's no available RAM left anywhere on the planet. So settle in. This is early days for the Switch 2. So let's pull back a bit briefly here and just talk about the significance for the franchise and just where we find Pokemon at its 30th anniversary, which was last Friday, which was celebrated by a Pokemon Day,

Pokemon Presents live stream, in which we got an announcement about the next mainline, 10th generation Pokemon Games, wind and waves, which are coming in 2027, and this will have been, I think,

the longest ever gap between Pokemon generations, which maybe is not surprising given just how long development cycles are these days, but there's just been this steady stream of spin-offs. And Pocopia and Legends, these are not the only ones, of course, because there's no battling in Pocopia,

but there will be nothing but battling in the next spinoff in the series Pokemon Champions, which comes out next month on mobile and Switch. So our cup runneth over here, and even 30 years, I don't know whether you can say

Pokemon is peaking in terms of popularity. It was so popular to begin with. It's just the most lucrative multimedia franchise. ever. But you look at the pace at which they're releasing games, the way the most recent releases have been received, just the way that, I mean, the trading card game is just how much did Logan Paul auction off a card for? You know, the headlines are just, I don't even want to think about it, but training card, but it's, it's, it's, I know I'm getting old. Because I remember, I remember

the first wave of like Pokemon card craze. This was, you know, In the 90s, right when the games and right when the franchise first made its big public debut, and you just, like, could not find product anywhere. Obviously, there was a different kind of, like, valence to everything back then. It wasn't quite so rooted in, like, hustle bro investment culture. It was much more sort of like, my kids want this really bad. They just really want it. I got to get it. But it is fascinating to see a lot of that same energy resurfacing now in a slightly new form, 30 years out, you know, to your question about like, is Pokemon peaking? No, no, but there are just new kids, I don't know if you know this. There's just new kids being born all the time.

You know, Nintendo also just re-released fire at leaf green. And it has been, you know, it's made my hair grow gray, seeing people talk about like, this was my first game. It's like, wow, okay, all right, sure. Yeah. That is sort of the, the power of the franchise, right? There are always new people coming to it for the first time who their onboarding point isn't necessarily someone else's, right? And particularly right now in this moment of younger people being fascinated with video games that, you know, predate their existence. It's been so interesting watching kids play Fire Red, Leave Green and express all the frustrations with, like, mechanics that have left the franchise, like, EXP Share. Like once upon a time, you really had to just. just you had to grind.

If you wanted to beat the Elite 4, you were putting hours into this game because you were a child. And it was the 90s, and you were in the back of your mom's car, and what else are you going to do, right? But now there are people who are just accustomed to, oh, all Pokemon level up at the same time

when you do battles, because that makes sense, and it helps you get through it faster. But I think that my point is, Nintendo understands that there is a way in which it can kind of coast on the brand's prominence, right? and its legacy, and that those two things are always going to be appealing to newcomers to the franchise, because it just gives them so many different ways to find their ways into it and sort of find what lights them up about it. Yeah, and even though the original Ash and Pikachu featuring anime wrapped up a few years ago after a 25-year run,

there's always something new and just every medium. And so it's hard to identify what is the essence of Pokemon? What's the core of Pokemon? What's the sort of beating heart of this franchise? Because it has its tentacles in absolutely everything, right? So Pokemon is merch and its anime and its movies and its games. But it does, and it's trading cards, it does still feel like the games, which originated, it still kind of drive it in a sense.

And maybe that's just my biased gamer perspective. But, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot more anniversaries and celebrations, the 30th anniversary of the 30th anniversary of. the trading card game is later this year. The 10th anniversary of Pokemon Go is coming up, right? And it just, it feels like, though, that they have maybe kind of turned a corner when it comes to the games that there was a certain degree of stagnation. And maybe this can befall any franchise at a certain point. You know, there were complaints about Zelda pre- Breath of the Wilds, right?

Yeah. It's falling into a rut. It's just a, it's formulaic. We love the formula. We're fond of the formula, but maybe it needs to. break out of that mold a little bit. Right. And so when Powell World was such a huge success, people attributed that not just to the attributes

of Pal World, but also to Game Freak seemingly leaving an opening by not really innovating, having just pretty woeful performance on the original switch. And so now it seems like, and I don't know whether it has anything to do with Powerworld's, you know, Charmander style lighting a fire. under the franchise, but you do have Game Freak and Omega Force here combining on Copopia and trying to do something different, right? And something that's been pretty well received. But I think the key is that they are actually trying to do something different. And that is welcome after all these years. Yeah, I think with a lot of Nintendo games, and I say this as, you know, someone who's been playing them

since I was a child, while I was growing up, a lot of the appeal of getting, you know, the new Zelda, Pokemon, the new Mario, really was tied to jumps in graphics, right? A new kind of aesthetic. That was sort of the novelty that made the familiarity of it all not so much of a downside, right? This is especially true, Pokemon as it, you know, moves from the Game Boy up to the 3DS. The world is just being presented in a variety of new and sort of, like, exciting ways. And it's kind of like, yeah, I'm, you know, choosing between a grasswater and fire starter, and I'm going to be the Jim leaders and then the elite four, but whatever, look at it, it's so pretty. I think part of what, there's that and also the Pokemon franchise, not sure quite when gimmicks first started,

but that sort of became one of like the main, like, there's a new way to battle. Yeah. They can evolve a little bit more or they can put a sparkly hat on because that's fun. But I do think that recently, particularly with scarlet and violet or, yeah, with scarlet and violet and maybe, maybe even sword and shield, the returns on the graphical jump investment started to diminish a little bit, right? We're going to present this to you in a way that looks different. Wasn't really enough to keep the core fan base excited. Part of that is just a function of people growing up and growing out of it in some instances, right? And then newcomers are coming into it at a time when there are other games that are more visually impressive

that feature gameplay mechanics that are just more. more compelling to them, right? And between, let's say, from sword and shield up until scarlet and violet, pogrom's in a bit of a weird space, right? If you love it, the things that you've always loved about it are still there in some shape or form, but in terms of what new is being brought to the table, it definitely felt like things slowed down in a way that was not helped by the technical roadblocks that came into play when it came to Scarlet and Violet. Yeah. I think part of what was so exciting about wind and waves, was that that trailer felt like Game Freak managed,

the trailer made it look like Game Freak managed to accomplish part of the vision that was present in Scarlet and Violet, but just not executed on as strongly. When you play through Scarlet and Violet, you can see that it is meant to be an explorable open world that you want to spend time in. You want to climb the mountains and see the rivers and stuff, but it's just very empty.

It's very empty and at least when it first launched on the original switch, it just ran horribly in a way that was kind of shocking, right? Nintendo has never been a, we are the graphics powerhouse company, right? But their strength has always been, we work within our technological limitations to make something that is exciting and sort of fun and imaginative. Scarlet and Violet just really kind of felt like a lot of things went wrong. A lot of things went wrong. And that didn't stop people from playing it.

But internally, I'm sure Nintendo took a lot of that feedback to heart. We can't fumble our flagship this way, right? We, people cannot like our games for a variety of reasons, but we should not be so clearly at fault for delivering something that doesn't live up to the, like, live up to people's expectations. And I think that's why the wind and waves trailer puts so much emphasis on environments. It's like, look at this water, look at this under, look at this underground area, look at all this foliage such as moving independently.

Yeah. People have voiced their concerns about how, like, the Pokemon still look like cartoons, but the world is going for kind of realism. But it's like, hey, man, Pokemon are inspired by animals. They are magical creatures. I get with it. Yeah, just admire our frame rates. Check out how smoothly this runs Marvel at that.

Yeah, and there's something for everyone. It feels like Pokemon can kind of be anything at this point. It can be an experiment like this latest spinoff, or it can be a back-to-basics. Hey, you want to fight and throw pokey balls. It can be more of a real-time battle system, the way that Z-2-A was. It can be champions, which is more of a Pokemon Stadium-style turn-based strategy game. Straight battling, yeah. Yeah.

So it can kind of encompass whatever anyone wants in theory. And, you know, trying to be all things to all people, that can get you in trouble. but if you actually nail each of those different delivery systems, then you have expanded your audience even more, if that's even possible with Pokemon at this point. And I do think that Pocopia fits into this latest generation of Nintendo games where the trend, I think, is toward empowering players and encouraging experimentation.

You know, with great results sometimes, with less great results, other times, sometimes that's just about opening the world up and having a less prescribed path through the game. And sometimes, though, it's about the mechanical experimentation that we see with Breath of the Wild or especially Tears of the Kingdom or echoes of wisdom for that matter. Or the interactivity of Bonanza, just reshaping the world. That's something that Nintendo is very into now. And you need a certain level of processing power to make that work without just totally slowing the system to a standstill. But if you can, if you can combine that kind of Nintendo polish and that animal processing.

feel with that sense of you can actually reshape the world as you can see fit and you can play this the way that you want to. That's a pretty powerful mix, and that's something that Nintendo has largely nailed lately and its development partners. Yeah, part of what's so fascinating about Pocopia is that it does very much feel like it has been informed by a lot of Nintendo's past, or like past recent successes with other franchises where they're like, no, no, no, no. So the physics engine that we developed for Tears of the Kingdom, let's get that into our life's in builder game. That's also taking notes from Animal Crossing and Dragon Quest Builders. Not to spoil any details about Bocopia, but you do get to missions where it's like,

build this and then connect it to that so that it does this so that you can accomplish that, which is just far and away from anything that you end up doing an animal crossing, but it does sort of give you this wild thrill because you don't expect it from a game that looks like this from a game that is so ostensibly like cute and soft and like relaxing. It's like, oh, you're doing, you're actually doing some civil engineering in this, in this town. And that's just very unexpected and very cool to see from a Pokemon game like this. Yeah. Well, this has been largely positive. I do have a brief rant to take us home here. My second rant of the episode, I guess I'm I'm filled with rage today.

This one is about the meming that has lately intersected with Pokemon. So this is topical. The Trump administration has just been a rampant recycler of gaming memes, gaming imagery, iconography. On social media, on its sort of extremely online channels, the White House official account, the DHS and ICE accounts, et cetera, has constantly reprimed. purposed gaming imagery, gaming tunes, whatever it is in service of its agenda. And we've seen this multiple times with Halo, multiple times with Call of Duty. We've seen it with Star Dood Valley.

We have also seen it multiple times with Pokemon. And I don't want to anoint Nintendo as some sort of hashtag resistance hero here because I don't think that that quite fits. But I think that Nintendo has actually been sort of the only brand to stand up and say, actually, we don't want you to use our IP to further your aims. And I've been disappointed, though not surprised, that almost no one else has publicly objected to that. And, you know, it's been a decade now since you blogged about a new Pokemon in Sun and Moon, young goose who kind of looked like Donald Trump.

How young we were. What a decade it's been since then. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but Trump is still intersecting with this franchise in weird ways or his people. I doubt that he was personally engineering this latest meme. Donald Trump has no idea what's going on with the Pokemon franchise. I think that's right. Yes. But people were meming with the Pocopia kind of logo and text, right? And so the Trump administration put out its version, which was just kind of make America great again in the imagery of Pocopia. And mostly when this has happened, the companies involved have been utterly silent. But Nintendo is the one exception, or I suppose the Pokemon company. And they put out a statement here about this latest post and said,

we are aware of recent social content that includes imagery associated with our brand. We were not involved in its creation or distribution, and no permission was granted for the use of our intellectual property. Our mission is to bring the world together, and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda. So again, it's this not an explicit endorsement of anything. In fact, they're going out of their way

to say that we don't endorse anything and we don't want the implication that we do. I guess bringing the world together could be some kind of veiled criticism, but probably actually isn't because we're talking about Nintendo and the Pokemon Company here. you know, regardless of really what your political affiliation is, I think a lot of these memes

have been just quite distasteful. They're super distasteful. That's putting it charitably. I think that part of the reason that the Pokemon company felt the need to respond to this is because there's been so much positive sentiment about this game. Yeah. It's at a time in the franchise when there seems to be ubiquity in terms of people's excitement for it in a way that the company definitely wants after Scarlett and Violet.

I feel like part of the reason that people were down on ZA is because they still had sort of like residual resentment for her for the way that's Carlin Violet played. So for Bacopia to be, you know, before the game is even out, people are excited about it. And then for the White House to sort of come in and try to ride that moment's coattails, the company was very much like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. And what I mean by the distastefulness, which again is kind of putting it generously. But, but, you know, the use of memes, like the latest call of duty one was basically, you know, using a kill streak meme from Call of Duty and superimposing it on the Iran War and bombing. And, you know, people are dying. Innocent people are dying, right?

And so even if you say support that intervention, just glorifying in the violence and the killing is something that I would hope that most people wouldn't endorse. And this happened before when DHS used a video that had got to catch him all, right? over footage of ICE agents, just rounding people up, right? And they were riffing on the opening theme song of Pokemon. And at the time, the Pokemon company put out a statement and said the same thing, right? And our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property, right? This is not a strong statement, right?

But it's a statement, which has been sorely lacking in just about every other case. Not the strongest statement, but all of this, you know, all of, all of, all of the various pieces of IP that the Trump administration has sort of tried to co-opt for means online, right? The important thing to bear in mind is all of that is entertainment, right? Video games are forms of entertainment. And what the Trump administration has gotten into the habit of doing is trying to seemingly joke around and make light of what it's doing, right, in a way that I think that is sort of the core of the distastefulness that you're getting at, right? When we are talking about people being rounded up on the streets, when we are talking

about carpet bombing countries, that's not something to take lightly and not something to make jokes about for lulls online, right? It speaks to a lack of maturity and just sort of like a fundamental, this would be just my own feeling of like a fundamental ugliness that's coming out of our government right now and it makes all the sense in the world

that the companies would want to come out and be like, hey man, that's you, right? We have nothing to do with that. Yes. Why are more of them doing it? There are all kinds of reasons as to why a company doesn't want to put out a full-throated statement condemning this kind of stuff. But I think if we keep seeing more and more of this, there is going to be a tipping point where, you know, your Activisions, your Microsofts, you know, all of these

companies, if it keeps going and it keeps being ugly like this, the point will come where it's like, hey, let's go to court. Yeah. I mean, and you know Nintendo will take anyone to court at any time. And that's the core value of the company, right? You can't use our stuff. Only we are allowed to use our stuff. So that's the thing that we'll get Nintendo's hackles up. And, you know, we have seen other companies be silent.

I think it's not surprising because we've seen all kinds of corporate entities just kind of, you know, bend the knee or not resist or couch the things they're doing in different language, et cetera, in deference to the administration because they don't want to be the next one to end up as the target. And so Nintendo, not that it's not in any way subject to Trump administration decisions, tariffs, et cetera, but it's a Japanese company. It's not a U.S.-based company, though there is obviously Nintendo of America. But that's why it doesn't surprise me so much that, say, Microsoft Activisions are not really raising their hands and saying, excuse me, sir, could you not actually use our stuff? But, you know, we have seen individual artists like Sabrina Carpenter did, right? You know, basically put out a, a statement on social media when a song of hers was used with an ice video and said, this video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda. So not really pulling punches.

They're not mincing words. That's not what you're going to get out of a corporation or at a Nintendo. And that's something where, you know, Sabrina Carpenter's audience perhaps is pretty receptive to that message, right? And so perhaps it plays well for her just from a financial perspective as well as reflecting her actual beliefs. But yeah, you would like to see just some sort of. And, you know, Nintendo, it's an equal opportunity cease and desist sender because to bring it back to Animal Crossing, I remember when Joe Biden, this was in 2020, right? When, you know, mid-pandemic and we're all

playing Animal Crossing stuck inside. I mean, some of us are inside most of the time. But back then, it was not necessarily by choice. That's my natural habitat. Speaking of Pokemon habitats, But when Joe Biden had an Animal Crossing Island where you could go and see signs for Joe Biden and interact with a virtual digital Joe Biden and everything, Nintendo was like, actually, you can't use this game for political purposes. So, you know, Nintendo both sidesing, right? But at least they have not gone completely quiet at this moment. And I wish that some others would eventually stand up.

And not even because it represents their beliefs or their scruples or they have some strong moral stance, but just because from a brand management perspective. You just don't want that. You don't want that. Yeah. A lot of these policies are unpopular and even the ones that have some support just meaming about them in that way. You know, yes, for the audience that is consuming those things on Twitter, sure, I'm sure that plenty of people along with Elon Musk are probably just defauling at that stuff. right, but it's definitely a turnoff for some. And this is why we all have to get off Twitter.

Yes, well, that's... The website that we all still refer to as Twitter, stop using it. Yes, well, that rebrand will never work in my mind. Even if we all quit it, we will still refer to it that way. All right. So that concludes my second rant and also this whole episode. This was a great pleasure.

Charles, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I wish you and DJ Rotom many happy hours and years together. Oh, he is living in my house right now, and I could not be happier about it. I'm just a great roommate. All right, well, DJ Rotom is not in my house, but he is living rent-free in my head with many of his friends from Pocopia. And hey, guess what? Immediately after Charles and I finished speaking, the news broke that Nintendo is suing the United States Treasury Department, Homeland Security, and the customs and border protection to recoup the money that the Trump regime collected as part of what the Supreme Court deemed illegal tariffs.

If Nintendo succeeds, I doubt it will distribute refunds to consumers for the costs that were passed along to them, but still, some semblance of a backbone. So if you're making a Nintendo fan mod, quick while their lawyers and PR people are distracted by suing Trump, this is your chance to sneak something by them. And hey, if you want me to be mad about something in a bipartisan way, the Republicans and Democrats are still trafficking in the violent games-caused gun violence narrative, which is especially rich when the administration is glorifying that video game violence online. But the Attorney General of my very state, New York, is suing Valve for loot boxes, but also asserted that Vowl's promotion of games that glorify violence and guns helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence, particularly among young gamers who can become numbed to grave violence before their brains are fully developed. Show me the science that supports that. Have we not debunked this for decades? It is 2026, and politicians are still out here sounding like Jack Thompson, ranting about GTA3. Anyway, before I worked myself up into completing a rage question, It trilogy and inadvertently make it look like gaming does make people violent. Let us actually quit this episode.

Thank you to Devin Romano for producing this podcast and also suggesting the Rage Quit idea. Thanks to our Juneer Ramgapal for his senior podcast management. You can contact ButtonMash and I hope you will by emailing ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. We'll be back a little later this month to discuss Crimson Desert and who knows what else. For now, Team Button Mash blast off at the speed of light. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But real doesn't start on a label. It starts at the source.

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