The Ringer-Verse - 'Like a Dragon: Yakuza' and a Recent Release Roundup | Button Mash

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

From 'Like a Dragon' to 'Dragon Age,' settle in for a supersized ‘Button Mash’ blowout! First, Ben, Brian Phillips, and Matt James discuss which games they would stream to enhance their appeal if they were running for office. Then, they break down Prime Video's latest TV adaptation of a video game franchise, 'Like a Dragon: Yakuza' (14:00), before Ben and Matt recommend several recent releases that are easy to consume, including the latest 'Call of Duty' and a 'Pokémon' mobile sensation (52:00). Then Ben and Joshua Rivera discuss 'Mario & Luigi: Brothership,' comedic Mario, weird Nintendo, the swan song of the Switch, whether 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard' is BioWare's big comeback, and the pros and cons of the industry's franchise reliance (1:20:00. Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Brian Phillips, Matt James, and Joshua Rivera Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody. Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and the mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week every Tuesday and Friday right here on the mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league. Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get you. your podcast. And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's at Ringer NBA and check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting right on

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Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Bellenberg, senior editor of The Ringer and dungeon master of Button Mash, joined by a couple of compatriots today. First, a familiar voice. Ringer Deputy Art Lead Matt James, whose hands are out of frame in our Zoom window, which means he may be playing Pokemon TGC Pocket even as we speak. In fact, let's find out, Matt, as Woody from Toy Story says when you pull his string, reach for the sky. Here it is. I'm playing it. I'm playing it. You literally had it open. I've got it right here. Was that open before I started that intro?

It doesn't close, Ben. It stays open. Happy to be here. Thanks for. Okay. Well, you never come empty-handed to the show. You always bring a wealth of gaming knowledge. And this time, your hands are full of phone. So we'll see if you can put that Pokemon pocket in your pocket for the duration of this episode.

Also with us is a true man of culture who's decided to slum it with us today as he makes his button mash and ringerverse debut. This is someone who lives with Whippets among the most dignified of dogs, a person who has published a best-selling book of essays who frequents the books channel on ringer slack and whose author photo features tortoise shell glasses. In fact, his face features them right now. That's the level of intellect and erudition we're dealing with. And yet, this eminent man of letters has also devoted a substantial portion of his life to playing like a dragon games, which is why he's here today. I'm referring, of course, to Ringer Senior Staff Writer and host of the 22 Goals podcast as well as the brand new In Progress Truthless podcast, Brian Phillips. Hello, Brian.

Hello, Ben. I appreciate that intro. I want to say today, the only thing I have in my hand is a very sharp knife. And if I say anything stupid, anything that discredits our clan, I want you to tell me, and I will take off a finger in true yakuza fashion. Remember to cut it on the joint. Oh, yes. Yes. Okay. Well, as you've no doubt noticed, if you look at the length of the podcast before you press play. We've got a super-sized episode in store for you today. Some are calling it the biggest button mash ever. It's the valve orange box of button mashes because it's really multiple pods crammed into one. Our initial plan was to put an episode out during Halloween week. I was going to do my intro to button mash to the tune of the monster mash. So you all missed out

on that. Certain circumstances, including Brian's immune system, conspired against us. So instead, we are smushing together two episodes worth of podcast content in one. First, Brian and Matt and I will discuss the latest but not greatest game adaptation. Prime videos like a dragon yakuza series released in late October. And then Matt and I will recommend a few recent releases apiece that can be played in 10 hours or less. He just previewed one of them because he's holding it in his hand, though 10 hours or less is probably optimistic given how much you've been playing. In theory, it can be played for a few. fewer than 10 hours. In practice, perhaps not. After that, these guys will get out of here

and I'll talk to ringer contributor Joshua Rivera about Mario and Luigi Brothership, the history of comedic Mario games. Mario games, my bad. Mario. Regional pronunciation coming out, as always. We'll talk about Mario's comedy chops, Nintendo's string of strange announcements of late, and BioWare's big comeback attempt, Dragon Age, the Veil Guard. And maybe it's a good thing that we had to postpone the previous pod because some of you in the U.S. are probably in need of distractions this week. And if you're trying to forget your troubles and tune out national affairs, we will help with that, I promise, right after this brief bit of banter. Guys, I don't know about you, but I was struck in the lead up to election day. By the way, that the presidential candidates, most notably the Democratic

candidates, were catering to gamers. We're trying to get out the gamer vote. seemingly unsuccessfully in the Democrats case. But this was sort of the sequel to Pokemon Go to the polls. It's not Pokemon TGC pockets to the polls. But it was sort of... I mean, for some of us it was. For you, for you it was. I'm sure you brought that to your polling place.

But this was a little more of an elaborate appeal to gamers trying to meet us on our turf and hopefully not get too cringe about it and to how do you do fellow kids about it. though there was certainly an aspect of that. So we had Bernie Sanders streaming with Pokemon, the streamer, not the game franchise. That is how it's pronounced. What a meeting of minds, what a crossing of streams, literally. We had a Tim Walls rally being streamed in World of Warcraft as a streamer offered commentary

in real time. We had Walls and AOC, who has streamed before, streaming Madden and Crazy Tax. And maybe most notably, we had the debut of Freedom Town USA, which was a dedicated Fortnite Island that was all about the policies of Kamala Harris and Tim Walls and getting small business tax credits and constructing those various items. And this Freedom Town USA was not a huge hit. It peaked at around the same number of players that Concord had before it was shut down and memory hold forever.

So perhaps that should have been a sign about how the election was going to go. It seemed like these efforts were an effort to drum up support among young male voters, who, of course, had been polling particularly pro-Trump. And that is how things turned out. So these efforts were seemingly pretty fruitless. And we could probably devote a whole episode to the reasons for that and GamerGate and right-wing leaning Gen Z males and gamers, et cetera. But we'll leave that for another day, maybe where we're.

more in the mood for that kind of conversation. What I wanted to ask you to, though, is if you are ever in this position, if you find yourself running for office and you attempt to relate to the voters, to, you know, appear approachable to the electorate by streaming a video game online, I want to know what you would stream. Brian, is there anything from your gaming history that you would play publicly in order to present the image of yourself that you would want voters to see? Yeah, it's a hard question because the only game that I can really think about today is Hades, because it feels as though we navigated a perilous dungeon, defeated the big boss at the end, and then discovered we had to start over and do it all again.

But yeah, I think if I were trying to shore up the Brian Phillips base, which I think of as just kind of like, you know, grad students and sensitive poets and drug addicts. I would go all the way back, I think, to Harvest Moon 64, which was one of my favorite games of all time. It was kind of like, it's a very peaceful little farming game kind of predecessor of Star Do Valley. Yes. AOC was actually streaming Star Doe Valley before Walls joined. So there's recent precedent here. See, I like I liked it before it was cool because I was playing, I was playing Harvest Moon 64 in like the late 90s. And it was a very similar vibe to Star Do Valley.

It's a good game to play right now because it feels like you're going to a very bucolic and peaceful and escapist. A little, little fantasy farming kingdom. That's a great pick. I think it would not win over the demographic of right-leaning young men, but it probably wouldn't do worse than Freedom Town USA. day. That's setting a fairly low bar, but yes, you're right. Matt, what about you?

I've got a few things I think I would do. You know, I'm trying to court as much of the vote as I can. So I think a fun thing to do as a political candidate would be to play grand theft auto and obey all the laws. Yeah. You'd be like one of those role-playing streamers who's stopping for red lights. Sure, I'm playing grand theft auto. But, you know, we're walking up the down escalators and we're just not doing anything that I shouldn't be doing. Yeah, not a single star in your wanted level.

Not a single star, not a model citizen of sand. Just taking in the views. Yep. Okay. But outside of that, like NBA Street Volume 2, Pro Skater 1 and 2 remake, Wind Waker, just guaranteed absolute banger titles that have some nostalgia to them and also are universally revered. I think that would be a good idea. Nothing that you could drive a cyber truck through like this Fortnite excursion. Yeah, you'd be building a broad coalition there, I think.

I would be worried about potentially pissing off parents with the Grand Theft Auto, but then again, yeah, if you're playing it the way it was not intended to be played. That would get headlines. It would. Yeah, I think that's smart. Well, among the reasons why I voted for Harrison while is not the foremost reason, but if I were a single issue voter, it might be just being in favor of all things Sega Dreamcast. And so that crazy taxi stream really did feel catered specifically to me. And so I'd like to keep that tradition alive. And I was thinking I'd get my Dreamcast out. I still have it here. And I'd play something even weirder. Just the weird Dreamcast, just lean into the odd corners of that console. But I think that would probably not be playing to any sort of base that I wouldn't need to drive out. If I were to play jet set radio or C-Man or something, like that might establish my gamer cred, which would be helped. It might make me seem sincere and authentic, but I don't think it would do much for me otherwise. And then I was thinking,

you know, something else or like a Katamari Damasi, you know, just to really express the joy. But then I'm thinking maybe I'd break out the original Xbox, you know, American manufactured console the first time in decades that we had designed a console on our shores, right? So I could tie that into a message about American manufacturing. And I think that would play pretty well. I'd have to be careful not to use the original Xbox controller, you know, the Duke, the gigantic one, because it would make my hands look tiny. And that's right. Donald Trump hates when people say his hands look tiny. This would actually, so I'd have to use the controller S, I think. But I would break out the original Xbox and I would do a double dip. I'd play some Cotor. So I'd kind of cater to

my nerd base and, you know, one of my specialties, an absolute classic show my RPG side. And then I would break out MVP baseball 2005. Probably the best baseball game ever made. Still holds up well today. What could be more American than baseball, even though I think it was developed by EA Canada. But they have professional baseball in Canada, too. you know, just align myself with all that is American. Yes, I'm kind of pandering, but what is politics, if not pandering? I would just do it well. So double-barreled MVP baseball 2005 and Cotor. And what do I know better than baseball and Star Wars really? So this would play to my strengths. So that's that's my platform, basically, those two games. I don't know how much you're

pandering featuring Xbox on your stream, the clear loser of the current concert. old generation war. Yes. I want to maybe PlayStation it up and give those vibes. I don't know. Yeah, but it's the original Xbox, you know, the Halcyon days. Actually, there was a GOP strategist who said that Donald Trump's real opponent was the Xbox in this election because the Xbox could potentially keep those young men who would be voting

for Trump in their houses playing Xbox, but perhaps not updated for the fact that the current generation of the Xbox not doing so hot. And evidently, that didn't stop him. So that's what we would play. Let us know what you would want to see, what you think would play best to the American electorate. But that's our little thought exercise for today. And now we will move on from all things election related for the rest of this episode, mercifully, unless metaphor refentazio comes up, in which case we will metaphor refentazio to the polls. I do think this kind of campaigning will become more common as we get more candidates who aren't boomers or members of the silent generation.

it may be a bit more natural for them to do outreach this way, and so many people play games. Bipartisan support. Reaching across the aisle. Candidates are pivoting to alternative media. Let's hope democracy endures long enough for someone to stream GTA6 in 2028, even though Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser said in 2018 that he was thankful that GTA6 wouldn't come out during a Donald Trump presidency because that would be so tough

to satirize. Oops. For now, we will put that out of our minds and talk about a game franchise that can get pretty political. Like a Dragon, Yakuza. Amazon has heavily invested in video games and video game adaptations, and some of them, such as God of War, have stalled and restarted. Others like Tomb Raider are still a ways away. We'll be talking about the anthology series Secret Level on But MASH next month.

But earlier this year, Fallout was a huge hit, one of the most popular shows of the year. So it was big news back in June when Prime Video announced Like a Dragon Yakuza TV adaptation of Sega's long-running series. So this is pairing Prime Video and Sega, makers of Sonic, hugely successful adaptations. Would this be the next big hit, the next fallout? All indications thus far, the exit polls are seemingly saying, no. I think people have not particularly watched or cared for Yakuza like a dragon, but we have watched it, at least, and we will talk about whether we cared for it. This is a six-episode season released in two batches late last month.

And I wanted to talk to you guys because you are experts in the franchise that this is based on. And Brian, I have not yet been invited on to Truthless, which I can only assume is because of my reputation for honesty. It's like George Washington with the cherry tree, Ben Lindberg, he cannot tell a lie. So in the spirit of truth telling, I will admit this, I have not played a single second of any like a dragon game, which is a somewhat embarrassing thing for the host of a video game podcast to admit, given that there have been almost 25 releases in this series so far, there's no shortage of Like a Dragon gaming out there. And yet, I've just missed this one.

I have just missed this entirely. But you guys have not. So I want to hear from each of you about your experience with this series. Brian, tell me a little bit about how you came to Like a Dragon. I don't remember how I came to this series originally. I felt like the good news for me with respect to the Amazon series was that the one I've played most recently and the one I remember the best is Yakuza Kawami.

It's like a 2016 kind of remaster slash remake of the very first Yakuza game. Yes. And I think tonally, it's quite different from a lot of the rest of the series. Some of the negative critical reaction that I saw toward the series was kind of based on the idea that the series didn't really kill.

capture the tone of the games. And I think that's true if you look at some, if you look at, you know, infinite wealth or some of the more, more recent titles, which are a little zanier. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii coming next year. Exactly. It'd be a good show. Yakuza Kawami is a really, it's a pretty self-serious and pretty melodramatic production.

I mean, it's got 40 hours of cutscenes. I think it has more cutscene footage than the series it's, I was kind of watching it thinking, well, this is actually pretty faithful to the vibe of the game. And then when I realized what some of the later games were like, I went back on that idea. But I felt I felt fortunate to have that in my mind as I was watching the new show. Also because it just made the plot a little easier to follow. It's a complicated narrative for a six episode. Yes.

Yes, it is. Yes. So it's loosely based on that original game and its remake. And yeah, there was a lot of consternation when the trailer came out and it seemed pretty serious. One might even say self-serious if one were to be negative about it. And there was no karaoke in this season. And I think for that, that was a red flag for the fan base. No karaoke.

What are we doing? Is this even like a dragon? But as you're saying, yeah, perhaps the perception of the series has shifted as it's gone on for almost two decades and double-digit releases here. Matt, how did you come to Yakuza? I came to Yakuza back in the PlayStation 2 days originally. I think I got like a demo disc that had a demo of either Yakuza or Yakuza 2 on it. And I played through the whole thing. It was like, oh, yeah, I think I'll get this.

And then I never did. And then years and years later, when 2020 came around and Yakuza like a dragon came out, I thought, let me see what's going on here because it seems, There's a lot of buzz around this. Picked it up, put so many hours into it. Just so many. And then played Like a Dragon, Eishon, and then Infinite Wealth. And then I started going back and looking at Yakuza Zero.

And I never did get around to Yakuza Kualami. But as Brian, you said, that was attempted to be just kind of like a remake of the original. And it is primarily what this series focuses on that plot. So I've had a good amount of Lake of Dragon experience. Unlike Brian, most of my hours have been in the more recent ones. So I experienced a different tone in those games than perhaps we see in this show. Yeah. And I guess that's how I just whiffed on this franchise.

It wasn't super popular in the West initially. right, when Yakaza first came out, which is maybe one reason why Kiwami was made to capitalize on the crossover success of Yaka's Zero when the series kind of caught on on Western shores and everyone sort of discovered the series and then that was an entry point for it potentially. But I felt like by that point I'd already missed the boat. Like there have been five of these things already. It's just like too late for me to get on board. Would you guys suggest that one can join this series mid-stream? or is it too late for me? Or where would you suggest starting if someone wanted to?

That's a great question. I think you can kind of duck in anywhere with these games, especially if you really get into the mini-game aspect of the games where the later games are these huge open worlds and you can kind of check out of the main plot almost completely and spend 100 hours just like running a hostess bar or becoming the greatest pinball player in Tokyo or whatever you want to do.

I think there's enough going on that you don't necessarily need to worry about the complexities of the past plot. You can definitely be a completist and, you know, catch like every reference to older games. But I don't know. To me, it's a pretty welcoming, welcoming series. What do you think that? I think first and foremost, you have to make sure that people like the series and have fun before they're willing to commit to playing hundreds of hours across several games. So I would recommend the path that I took,

which was diving into Yakuza like a dragon, a recent game came out in 2020, still looks and plays great. I think that game, while it has a different protagonist than the series that we're talking about today and Kuami and most of the Yakuza games before it, I do think you still get a good sense of the tone of the series

while having more of that modern zaniness that is what, really drew me in to this series. Just a kind of dramatic Yakuza story I could have enjoyed, I think, but the recent games have this incredible balance of drama that, for the most part, is successful and engaging,

mixed with absolutely bad shit insane humor that is so bizarre and so weird, and so enjoyably unpredictable that those two things in one game, this is why it was always going to be a tough series to put to a TV adaptation because if you go too far in one direction, you're going to make people upset,

and it's just a really fine line to toe. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the suitability to adaptation just on the spectrum of, say, something like The Last of Us, which is essentially tailor-made to be an HBO prestige drama, as is in its original form, to something less linear or, I don't know, a fighting game series, right? Some of the adaptations that have struggled

because there's not really much plot there or there's not really kind of a canonical plot. Where do you think this falls in terms of the ease of adaptation? Because, you know, sometimes you get a video game series that's based on movies, more or less, right? something like Uncharted, where it's basically Indiana Jones in video game form. And then when you adapt what is essentially an adaptation, then you get this kind of refracted carbon copy thing that is based on a thing that is based on a thing. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

So when you have something like a dragon or yakuza that's based on these mob movies, essentially, these gangster tales, one could think that that would work well, that that would map easily onto the video game medium, but then there's just so much side quest here that is kind of crucial to the appeal of the franchise. Brian, when you saw that this was happening, did you have a feeling of foreboding that there are so many ways this could go wrong? Are you thinking, yeah, this could work? I think the Yakuza series and more broadly kind of crime-based games in general have to be one of the most difficult fields for adaptation in the entire gaming universe. And I think that's because most crime games to succeed have to do two really contradictory things at the same time.

Actually, the show helped me reach this thought. I have kind of a grand unified theory of crime games based on watching six hours of like a dragon, Yakuza. So if you look at the history of yakuza movies in Japan, there are two completely separate genres of them, like just different kinds of movies completely with almost nothing in common. In one of those genres,

the yakuza are kind of noble outsiders. You know, they're the inheritors of the samurai tradition and they're motivated by honor and loyalty. They're criminals, but they have a code. Yeah. And in the other genre, which is personally my favorite,

they're totally a more street thugs operating with no loyalty or honor or code whatsoever, just double-crossing and murdering each other right and left. My favorite yakuza movies are this series called Battles Without Honor or Humanity. It's very descriptive title. From the 70s, it's also just the coolest title of all time. But so you have, you have like one type of yakuza movie where the criminals are noble and one type of yakuza movie where they're as far from noble as you can get.

And I realized watching this show, the show is very much in that first camp. Like, it's very much like good, slightly misunderstood outsiders behaving, you know, in an honorable way outside the law. But what I realized watching the show was that almost every crime game I've ever played, certainly Grand Theft Auto is this way, is trying to be both of those genres at once. You typically have a main story where the protagonist, is acting out of like basically good motives. Like you're loyal to someone you did business with in the past or you have a family or a friend or, you know, it's always an understandable and basically moral motive

causing you to go be a criminal and spread mayhem around the world. But then what's actually appealing to the game to most gamers, appealing about the game to most gamers, is that you just get to get in in and do all kinds of, you know, terrible stuff. if you can't do in real life. You get to pull people out of cars. Yes.

And just beat up whoever you want. So I think that like to adapt a Yakuza movie into a U.S., you know, a kind of U.S. focused TV show would be easy enough. But to adapt a crime game that is really pulling in two different directions at once is really tough. And I think you see that with Yakuza because you have, as Matt said, like typically fairly dramatic main stories. and then just like anarchy in the sense of humor and the subplots and the mini-games.

And I think that this show did kind of the only thing that it could have done, which was to just go all in on one side of that. And it's just a melodrama, basically. It's just like a noble soap opera about a young man trying to become the greatest fighter while being true to his orphaned siblings. And he protects a child.

You know, he doesn't do a single bad thing in the whole course of the show. They went all in on that front, but you lose happy energy when you do it that way. And it got a little, maybe a little slow as a result. Yeah. I think it's good probably to have a mix of backgrounds and levels of familiarity with the franchise when you're talking about an adaptation because you guys have played and I haven't. So I'm coming to this fresh with no preconceived notions.

Obviously, I know something about the reputation of the series, but not so much the plot points. I'm not really anchored to any particular telling of this story. I'm not going to get mad when they deviate from the original plot. But on the other hand, I probably had a harder time following this than you guys did because the series does not necessarily hold your hand and does not tell its story in the most straightforward way. What are there three timelines? At least. So it primarily takes place in 1995 and 2005, but then there are excursions, diversions to other times.

periods too. But you're jumping back and forth. And really, it could work. You could get kind of a godfather style decade-spanning gangster epic where you're watching the corruption of these innocents and they're becoming these hard-hearted criminals and they have this bond at the beginning. And then ultimately they betray each other and they lose touch and you can kind of see their evolution as characters. And there is some of that happening here. And sometimes that satisfying. A lot of times it is quite confusing the way that this tale is told, at least in my mind, I had to re-watch the first episode just to kind of get it all straight in my mind, or at least a little less tangled. And eventually I got there, but there are major elements of the story

that are introduced, say, halfway through, or maybe more than halfway through. And then you're forced to reevaluate what this is about and what the emotional stakes are and what are the relationships between these characters. Probably three episodes in, I could not quite have told you how these characters really related to each other or what their connections actually were. These things became clear to me eventually. But Matt, how did you feel about the series overall? I think Brian was a bit higher on it than you were, Matt, and I was probably somewhere in the middle, maybe, or maybe closer to you, Matt, but what was your overall take? It's fine.

I don't regret watching it, but would I watch more of it if it happened? Yeah, I definitely would watch more of it because they kind of put one of the most interesting characters in the entire series into, I think, the last episode for an amount of screen time that equates to, like, the meme of Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen. And you're like, oh, there's four Omajima.

And then he's gone. And you're like, I'd like to see more of him. I thought that series, you know, like we've been talking about, the drama in the series, the video game series, is quite good and can be a little bit tough to follow at times. But when you're playing the game and there's something that doesn't quite add up from the narrative, there's a lot of other things going on. You know, you have thugs to beat up in the street and bowls of udon to eat and some darts to play.

When the narrative doesn't quite strike a perfect tone or when all the things don't line up in this TV show, man, you really notice it since it's just a TV show. It's complex. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't really tell how good all of the performances were because I, don't natively, you know, I don't speak Japanese. It felt like some of the performances were great and felt like others weren't. It was hard to completely tell, but. Yeah. I watched with subs, not dubs.

I dabbled in both. I was going to ask everybody this because I don't know, Ben, how would you describe the subtitles? Because to me, they felt fairly perfunctory. It felt like somebody was kind of looking at their phone while they wrote the subtitles. Yeah, it's, it's. It's not the worst subtitling of an Asian language series that I've seen. And obviously, I'm not a Japanese speaker either, so I can't speak to the quality of the

interpretation here. It was mostly grammatical, but also pretty perfunctory at times. So hard for me to gauge how much nuance was left out here. But I did go with the authenticity of the subs because the dubs. I tried it at first, and it just wasn't working for me. I just knew that the story is going to be complicated. enough that I need to read what's happening while I'm watching.

And that proved to be true. Like, you know, reading the character names over and over again helped me be like, okay, that is that person. Because it is very complicated. And there's a character called Kazama and a character called Kazuma. And if you're doing dubs,

I don't know that you're always going to keep those two guys straight, but when you can see the difference between a U and an A, it at least helps you out. Yes. So your series is centered on this main character from the games as well, Kiryu, right, Kazima Kiryu. And he is part of this friend group that is also sort of a family, a found family that is growing up in this orphanage. And you've got Yumi and you've got Nishiki. And you also have Nishiki's sister, who I did not really realize was Nishiki's sister until roughly episode four at which point.

She becomes very important because the motivation for many of the actions is the desire to get her a kidney transplant, which I was not aware that she needed prior to that point. And that sort of drives all the action. And there just hadn't really been a lot of interaction between her and her brother to that point. And then suddenly that becomes the most important element of this story. But Kyrieu is interested in joining the yakuza. And again, his motivations here, it seems like because he, you imprinted basically like a duckling on the dragon of Dojima, who is this brawler in this underground brawling scene who has a cool dragon tattoo on his back. And that's about all we know about why Curiu wants to be essentially the reincarnation, the second coming of the dragon of Dojima. He just saw this guy fighting once and thought it was really cool. That seems to be the extents of the detail that we get here. So I would have appreciated a little bit more about why he wants to do this and why he is driven to join the yakuza. And so they all orchestrate this heist, which it turns out seemingly was just a way for Curiu to kind of initiate himself and ingratiate himself with the yakuza to prove that he could

rob this arcade and getting good with the yakuza while still owing them many millions of yen and having to work off and fight off that debt. So the initial scene is kind of this over-the-top heist of them robbing this arcade and tonally, well, it sets a sort of different tone than much of the series. It's, you know, kind of like arcady, I guess, so to speak. And then it becomes more somber later on. But it's all about these people, you know, getting indoctrinated into the Akaza way of life, the sacrifices they have to make as they become killers or have to work off their debt and have various interpersonal troubles. There is Curiu takes the blame for a murder.

He goes to prison. And so he is getting out of prison in this first episode and sort of reacclimating himself to society and taking vengeance on various people. And again, there are just a lot of elements that kind of come in and out, which I guess is faithful to the series, that there would be sort of side quests and subplots. But there are some that just don't really. lead anywhere and just seem sort of like distractions from the main thread. And I guess my main complaint is that I just would have liked to have a little more of a feel for the relationships

among the main four or really five kids when the series start, because it all hangs on that. It all hangs on, do you buy that these people really care for each other and there's some love loss now. And their evolution, that's the spine of the series. And I just didn't feel like there was enough effort devoted to fleshing that out where, you know, we're late in the season and I'm still trying to piece together, how do these people interact with each other? What's their history here? Did you have that feeling, Brian? Yeah, when you need kidney transplant ex machina to come in and provide a plot point that kind of clarifies even basic sibling relationships, like this is literally my sister. We've been on screen for 11 seconds before now together. The rest of my

life will be devoted to getting her to this kidney. Yeah, it does. It did feel a little bit like someone took the basic elements of the plot and got, you know, kind of palm them in their hand and then just like scattered them on the ground. That was how the timeline worked out. I thought the actors did a pretty good job of investing these pretty sketchy relationships with a sense of emotional significance.

And I was willing to follow them to a degree. Like, you know, if, if it's two kind of beautiful 25-year-olds are. or standing in the rain, like, looking like no one has ever made a joke in the history of humanity and, like, boring out their feelings to one another or not, just kind of exchanging, like, glances in which all their feelings are, like, subliminated. Yeah. Like, I'll follow that. Like, whatever.

But, yeah, it did seem like, to some extent, the script and to some extent, the translation of the scripts just kind of left out a lot of meat that would have helped us to really latch on to this story. Even to the point of like this, the translation, you know, you don't know at the beginning why Kiri has been in prison. You don't find that out till like way later in the series. Right. And all of the yakuza keep calling him by this, by this name. Like he's, he is the, I can't remember what the word is. I'm sorry, but he is the that. Like he is this. There's no gloss on what that means. And you don't know if you, the American English speaking idiot viewer, You don't know if you're supposed to know what that is or if they're keeping it back from you on purpose.

You know, it's a real ambiguity about how much you're even supposed to be able to figure out. That turned me off a bit for sure. Yes, I had that experience too where I googled that term. And I was like, oh, I guess he killed his father, but which one? But there's no actual explanation of that until later in the season. How did you feel about the fighting, Matt? Because that's a big part of this series. and as we've seen in the acolyte, et cetera,

sometimes good combat. That can forgive a lot of sins and paper over a lot of flaws. They're surprisingly little fighting, I would say, in this series based on my understanding of the games. And some of it is very over the top and people's heads being smacked against walls and so forth and cool curved blades, et cetera.

But there's a little less of it than I would have expected. What did you think? Well, yeah, in the game, you know, if you were to walk four blocks in the game, you would probably encounter three groups of two to four men who, for no discernible reason, decide it's time to fight you. I thought the action in the series was pretty good. I think so much hinges on that main protagonist.

These are games that are, like, so driven by the main protagonist, by Curiu and this. But I didn't think the actor really, looked like it didn't have the same physical cadence as the Kyrieu in the games. I think there was there were some people online who felt that he didn't really fit the casting of Kiriou. And I think that was to a degree something that I couldn't fully shake even though they kept to the story and the plot beats fairly well. I just I didn't think that he had that like unden-endomely. reliable charisma that the role kind of needs, even though I thought that he did a pretty good job.

And I think that was actually one of the things that detracted from this series. But the fighting and his fighting, very enjoyable to me. Physically, there was a little bit of a Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher thing going on, where he's just, he's a little slighter than the character in the games. Yes. Yes, he's a little spindly. Wiry. Willowy.

But yeah, clearly he has the technique down. But when he's fighting the final boss of the brawling scene, essentially, and this guy looks like he's roughly twice as jacked as Curiu. It seemed like a mismatch. But then again, you know, he's no holds barred. He will spit blood in your face. He doesn't fight on your terms. The term that we were reaching for, Brian, was Oyagoroshi, I believe.

Yeah. And I thought the actor, Riyoma Takeuchi, I thought he was. was quite good. And I also appreciated the fact that all the actors really kind of conveyed the passage of time and, you know, the things that their characters have seen in this 10-year time gap because they're kind of happy go lucky in the 1995 timeframe. And then we get to 2005 and suddenly their hair is slicked back and they're wearing suits and they never smile. Right. So I thought that was, you know, it can be disorienting. It can be jarring in kind of a House of the Dragon season. in one way when we're constantly skipping across timelines and people are looking different,

even if they're not played by different actors. And I thought this cast did a decent job, again, given the material they were given to work with, which wasn't rich. But they did what they could to sell it and to kind of convey what was happening here. I do think, though, I've written about this before. I think the six-episode season, it's often a pitfall of televised storytelling where you just kind of get caught in between. I did sort of a statistical analysis of six episode seasons prompted by the most recent season of True Detective that determined that they are actually worse in some ways

because you either want them to be shorter or longer, right? Often it's like this middle ground where you think this could have been a movie or you should have just gone whole hog and this could have been at least an eight episode, if not a 10 episode season, like Truthless, for instance, no fewer than 10. episodes is what it takes to talk about people's lies. And actually, this started its life as a movie. This was initially announced back in 2020 as a live action film. And it evolved. And on the whole,

I think that has been a good evolution that we've seen game adaptations move more toward TV, just because it's a better map, I think, to, you know, sort of transfer gameplay onto TV. It's more episodic, right? and have more time to build the world. A movie just doesn't allow you enough time to do that. And yet, I think this still sort of has the bones of a movie, maybe. You can kind of see the seams. You can tell that this maybe started life as something else and was reverse engineered into its final form.

And it's just not exactly a seamless way of telling this story. So I don't know that this has done well enough to get a second season. As you said, there are teases for potential. points, there's a big twist at the end of the finale, which yeah, maybe gives you some fodder for a second season. As we speak, there are about a thousand IMDB reviews of this show, which is an indication that not a whole lot of people have watched it. So that doesn't bode well. But if they were to sort of start from scratch with this as a TV series, with more meat on the bone, having worked out some of the kinks, I could see. yet maybe working a bit better, having gotten the growing pains out of the way.

So it sounds like we're tentatively on board for a second season if they were to make one. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I actually would watch another season is because they're just getting to the point where the most intriguing villain shows up in the series when the first season ends. You know, so like I think the best is, potentially yet to come if they make a second season. You know, how many TV shows have we seen where the first season is a bit rough? And then it kind of finds its own after they come back and make a second season. So I would be optimistic.

I'm not going to be upset if we don't get a second season. But certainly if they make one, I think I'll come back and see if we got in there. Yeah. That's another potential pitfall. that some game adaptations have run into where you have a Halo show and you don't get to Halo until midway through the second season

or something. I had kind of fallen out by that point. Or, you know, you have twisted metal. Now, I really like that show, actually, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and there is a second season on the way, but you don't actually get twisted metal the tournament until the second season. And sometimes that can serve it well.

The reason of Mortal Kombat movie? Exactly, right. You don't get Mortal Kombat. that. Now, sometimes it works because you want to actually get to know who these characters are before you pit them against each other. And maybe it's easier to establish the lore before they're just fighting for most of the screen time. But then again, I think it's kind of incumbent on you to actually put the most compelling characters in the show, which was maybe one of the many stumbling blocks of the Borderlands movie, for instance, where you just don't have handsome

Jack anywhere in that, right? Or the things that people love. And again, I applaud trying to deviate from the games and tell an original story or a stand-blown story or at least a different one so that it's not just what we've already seen and played. But I think sometimes you can stray too far from that where you're leaving out the thing that initially attracted you to this IP. So I think there were a bunch of problems here. And to invoke the Borderlands movie, I wouldn't mention those in the same breadth quality-wise. I think like a dragon kind of falls into that mediocre bucket, which is, you know, more or less where most of the video game adaptations or, you know, video game adaptation adjacent adaptations like Grand Turismo, for instance, it seemed like we had passed the point where these

things would be truly abysmal until Borderlands arrived and proved that, no, we actually haven't entirely left that era in the past. But for the most part, we've achieved a minimum level of confidence where you say, this is watchable. We could pass the time. This is okay. This feels like an actual professionally made show. Although I'd say if you were expecting sort of prime video Amazon level budgets being deployed here, I would say temper your expectations.

It's not quite rings of power in the production values. Exactly. Maybe they had to cut from the Yakuza budget to fund rings of power. And you know what? Maybe that was worth it. But definitely some of the sets here, you know, when you go to 1995,

you're sort of in the same square where you see a poster for Apollo 3 every time and you're like, oh, scene setting. I see. This is where we are in time. The little counter on the screen that flips back from 2005 to 1995 was not enough of itself. But yeah, there's a little bit of a not low budget, but mid-budget aesthetic happening here.

But maybe that's sort of true to the series too. It really does look like Yakuza Kawami, the game. Like, Camaro Cho, the district where it's all set, like really, really feels like like that neighborhood in that game and some of the specific locations like the Serena bar some of the places like that really like almost feel like

they were just ported out of the game and dropped on screen. I could have used more of those locations. Honestly, I feel like there were four or five locations that were kind of constantly used and one of the joys of the series is getting out into Camarocho

and exploring and finding so many new interesting locations and people and characters. And I could have used more of that kind of exploration. I agree, it looked and felt like that city from the series. Yeah, that is one of the aspects of the series that makes me most regret missing out on it is that Shenmu side of Like a Dragon, right? Just the kind of, you know, plying your trade and doing odd jobs for people on the streets.

That's what I like. And I know that Shenmoo and Like a Dragon, Yakuza at that point, were often comped and compared to each other in the early days, right? So there's a lot of that bloodline here as well. And that's what you can play on your dream cast to win the voters over. Shenzhou and Shenmoo too. Yeah, I guess I could play it on my Xbox too since I have my American-made console ready. Any closing thoughts on Yakuza like a dragon or your appetite for future pirate-themed games in this series?

Yeah, make another season, but just let someone. of the comedy in. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't all have to be so deathly serious. It's a, it's a, it's a fun series. And I think what, what won people over about it is that it's, it's fun. You know, I can understand why they did it from a dramatic perspective, but it was just kind of a curious choice to, to fence yourself off from all of the real appeal of the games in, uh, in, in, in being so melodramatic. I would totally watch a second season. I want to know what happens. And, and, and, and Mujima shows up at the very end, as you said, yeah. At the very end. And he's like, like, see him across the way.

I literally thought I had missed an episode because I was like, wait, when did, they kind of just dropped him in like, you know who he is and he's been around for a long time. They're like, wait, when did he get here? What? Yeah. You mean the villain that everyone loves so much that like literally years and years later in the storyline, like this new pirate game that's coming out, like it stars him because he's the iconic villain. Yeah.

It's like a Batman show where like right at the. end, you're like, you see a peak of the Joker. He just kind of waves from across the crowd. Yeah, he's kind of like, hi, it's me and no more. Yeah, there were definitely some moments like that where I felt a little out of my depth, like, oh, this is probably meaningful to Matt and Brian, and this is lost on me, and yet I realize that I'm missing something. So I'm just, I'm not in the club here.

But maybe someday I will be. Look, we all have gaming blind spots. There are so many genres. There are so many franchises. that each of us probably has some series that we're almost ashamed to admit that we have never dipped into. So maybe this will be my gateway drug. Maybe this will be my entry into like a dragon. And next time we talk about it, I'll be a veteran and I'll know what I'm talking about. Brian, you can go now. We will dismiss you. Matt, you can stick around. I'm glad you could

join us and kind of come out publicly as a gamer in this forum because this is a side of you that people don't get to see so often. Well, I'm delighted to be here. I am delighted to still have all 10 fingers, although I will probably not read the comments on Reddit. And thanks so much for having me. Listen to Truthless, everyone. Episode 5 out now.

All right, Brian has departed. Matt remains. And what we wanted to do here is just give people some recent recommendations, a little recommendation roundup, sort of a ringerverse recommends style little list of things that we've been playing recently, but things that are bite size

or a couple of mouseful size. These are things that you can consume in 10 hours or fewer if you wanted to, if you don't get hooked, which you might to some of these things. But you can take down like a dragon, yakuza in five or six hours, and that's kind of the time frame

that we were looking at here with some of these recent releases that we haven't had a chance to devote a full episode to, but still seemed worthy of mention. So we have a few apiece, and we will just trade off. And Matt, I'll let you lead off because we have already teased one of your recent obsessions, which you are holding in your hands.

Okay, tell us about the new craze sweeping the nation, not Pokemon Go, but the new Pokemon trading game for Android and iOS. It's the Pokemon card game. They simplified it. They brought it to your phone. I hate phone games, Ben. I hate them so much. Yeah.

They're always trying to trickle money out of you. They feel gross. And those things are kind of in this game, and it doesn't even matter to me because I'm having so much fun with it. Collecting Pokemon cards, playing battles with either the computer or online. This game is really well designed, whether you are coming at it from the perspective of wanting to collect Pokemon cards or wanting to battle with the Pokemon cards. they're each very much in service of each other. And it ends up being a really well-integrated experience that has the right amount of depth

and not a bit more than that. And it's just really fun here. I'm opening a pack live on the air, opening the Mutu-themed pack. And I've got a Poregon. Okay. A wheedle. Yeah.

It's a bad pack bin. It happens all the time. It's not good. We got to get Mesh on video to make this more compelling, but I can see it. It's great. Everyone who might have, even the Sleds interest, should give it a shot. It's free until it hooks you. Until, yeah.

What's the level of predatory gotcha game style mechanics we're talking about here? You don't have to put any money into it. You really don't. Okay. That's good. And I never put money into things. Neither do I. When I'm playing NBA 2K, which I don't anymore, because it's,

It's so grossly demanding your money. I never put any here. I'm not going to lie, I put 20 bucks into it. Okay. All right. So it got its tentacles into you, but it's sort of Marvel Snap-esque, right? And it's, you know, as these things go

by the standards of phone games, it won't bankrupt you, hopefully, probably. And also, I guess the matches are longer, right? I mean, that's part of the appeal of Marvel Snap is that you can bang them out. But this, are we talking like 20 minutes? No, no, no, much less. than that. I think we're talking like five to seven. Okay. Maybe four to seven. They can be pretty quick.

That's short enough to be dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. But that's good because you can, you know, bring it out. You can whip out your phone while I'm doing a podcast intro and play a game potentially. Yeah. I don't even have to go outside. Like Pokemon Go? I don't have to walk anywhere. It's a revelation, Ben. I recommend it very strongly. Okay. I will recommend a game called Nava, which we mentioned on an episode of couple of weeks ago. I know you've played this one too because you've played everything. You have found time in your Pokemon busy life for this one as well. But this is a short one. This is just a few hours. It's an indie game. It is made by the Makers of Greece, the game that came out in 2018, acclaimed indie title. This was published by one of the indie Luminary Publishers Devolver Digital. And, you know, initially, so this is for all platforms. And it is one of those sort of artsy indie games, you know, just it looks like kind of the platonic ideal of an indie game. And initially, I feared that it was going to be one of those minimally interactive indie games,

which are just, you know, all about the vibes and the story. And I'm not knocking that. That can be very satisfying. For instance, remember the artful escape, which was a game that you really loved. It was published by Anna Perna, the other acclaimed prestigious indie publisher, or at least it was before it just sort of self-destructed. But that's another story. But the Artful Escape, like, good game, good story, good characters,

but like basically barely a game in terms of interactivity. It's just one of these games where you kind of press the thumbstick to one side and maybe jump every now and then. And initially, that's what it seems like NAVA's going to be, but it's not that. And I was relieved that it wasn't that because I wanted it to be a little more fully featured. And it was. It's a platformer.

There's combat. it's not the best combat or the most sort of finely tuned combat, but some pretty satisfying boss fights, I'd say. Some of the combat's a little challenging at times. Yeah, oh, yeah. And cool mechanics. So you play as this woman who has this dog companion, NAVA, and there's no dialogue other than you saying NAVA.

And your voice, when you say NAVA comes out of the dual sense speaker, I will caution everyone that when... Not if I turn that off. Well, I would warn everyone that they might want to, because as much as you might miss out on calling Neva, you will also miss out on the just death rattles when your character dies. There's kind of like this gasping, choking sound

that emanates from your dual sense speaker and startled me every time. So it probably would be better turned off, but it's a beautiful game. It looks great. It has a distinctive style. It sounds great. It's got good music too.

I would compare it sometimes sort of to eco in the sense that, you know, part of the puzzling and the platforming is helping your dog get around to obstacles and enemies, but then also you team up. And as you get older and as the seasons pass, it's broken up into four chapters each corresponds to a season. And NAVA gets bigger and grows and gains abilities that you can use in combat and to get places. And it has a vibe. It's very like Princess Mononoke kind of looking. It reminds me very much of Scavenger's Rain. the excellent sci-fi series on Max and Netflix, which is, there's kind of like almost a body

horror aspect to it. It's like this world that is in decline and being corrupted, and there are these evil amorphous monsters. And so it's got this really cool look. And story-wise, narratively, there's like a dark tower aspect. I can't say how exactly, because I'd probably spoil both the dark tower and Nela, but it's got a lot of things going for it. And it's over in maybe three or four hours, depending on whether you go for the collectibles, which I did, and yet I can't tell what I actually got out of that, but I did it just for completion's sake because it's not a long game. And it's pretty emotional, even if the story is, it's sort of nebulous.

It's what you make of it. It's open to interpretation. But I think it's a lot about parenthood and aging and maturation and mortality and all of these deep, profound themes coming together in this very pretty package. So I would recommend NAVA, which you can play anywhere. And I know you would recommend it as well. And I believe you said your wife shed tears while playing this game. That is very understandable.

And that wasn't even just me harassing her with the controller that says, NAVA. Yeah. Yeah, the charm wears off. Yeah, that part of the charm at least. Now, I want to hear from you about the polar opposite of NAVA, which is call of duty Blackop Six. I don't know that there's any further we can go on the production and tone spectrum than Black Op 6. And I got to say, I was kind of out on Call of Duty just in general. And after last

year's installment, which we talked about on Button Mash and had this much maligned short campaign. And to their credit, they really buckled down and said, no, we're going to have a legitimate campaign for you here in addition to all the usual multiplayer call of duty goodness. And there was a lot at stake because, of course, for Microsoft, one of the big purchases, you get Activision Blizzard. That means you get Call of Duty. And no, it's not exclusive. That was a big sticking point in the antitrust talks.

But it is on GamePass day one. And that was a big bet. How many people are you going to get to sign up for GamePass to play Blackop Six? We don't know numbers exactly, but clearly it's been a big launch, by the perennially massive standards of this franchise. And it helps that evidently the game is good. So tell me a little bit about Blackop Six. Well, as you know, I don't play online games where teenagers can yell at me.

But I do check out campaign modes in these games whenever possible. You know, it's sort of the same vibe as going to the movies to see the latest superhero movie that you don't particularly have a lot of faith in. But, you know, you'll give it a shot. It's probably fun, right? Yep. This campaign, I thought, was outstanding. I thought it was absolutely outstanding.

It has so many different inspirations from so many games that you wouldn't sort of suspect. Like there's a little bit of control and remedy games kind of stuff going on in here. There's segments that feel like Hitman. It's a really varied campaign from a gameplay perspective. And everything they try works. the plot you can actually follow for the most part. And it feels like a very blockbuster, expensive theme park ride of a campaign that's over in, I think, 10-ish hours. And man, it was fun from the start to the finish.

I thought it was outstanding. Yeah, that's something I'm still a sucker for. And that's why I was disappointed by previous call of duty. but that sort of thrill ride where there's just like no time to put down the controller because one set piece just flows seamlessly into the next. That's what I want from Call of Duty because I just, I don't play that. There's even puzzle solving in it. Yeah, like for me, like that's what you get to the safe house and I was just walking around

for 45 minutes solving all the puzzles before continuing with the game because that's me, but you don't have to solve those puzzles if you just want to go shoot some more stuff. Yeah. And if you do want to be harassed by all of the teens who were not in Freedomtown USA, you can do that. And all the multiplayer goodness and badness is back and zombies is back, et cetera. Right. So it's giving you all of that, but it's giving you that classic call of duty campaign. And that's enough to make me want to check this out, even though I've been out on this franchise for a while.

My next pick is a pretty exciting one, I think. I played a VR game, Matt. It's been a while. I'm excited to hear about this. Yeah, I have acquired a MetaQuest 3, and there is a new game just came out in late October called Arkham Shadow. This is a new Batman game in sort of the Arkham continuity, which has come out exclusively for MetaQuest 3 and 3S, so I realize immediately I am limiting the audience for this

recommendation here. It's bundled with the quest, so if you do lay out for a quest and splurge on one, you get this game for free, it runs on it natively so you don't have to hook up your headset to steam, which means there are some compromises. It's not exactly going to look like Half-Life Alex or something, but it looks quite good, and it looks certainly as good as the Batman games from a couple generations ago that this is sort of a spiritual successor to. So this is essentially a sequel to a prequel. It's a sequel to Arkham Origins, which was itself a prequel, and it takes place between Origins and Arkham Asylum.

And it's developed by camouflage, the makers of a pretty acclaimed VR game from a few years ago, Ironman VR. So there's good pedigree here. People who have made a superhero game work in VR. It's not made by Rocksteady Studios, but there are some former members of Rocksteady who worked on this game. So if you were saddened by Suicide Squad and you want to get back to what made those games in that studio good, this is going to give you a better case. of that than certainly Suicide Squad did.

And it's an attempt to port that beloved classic genre-defining best-in-class superhero gameplay of the Arkham Games to VR. And I got to say, it works quite well. There are some sacrifices, of course, here, but the combat works really well. It's just kind of this free-flowing, you know, you actually punch with your arms. By the way, yes, you will look ridiculous while you're playing this game. and you're grabbing and raising your arms to glide around on your invisible bat cape that no one in the room can see. You just have to either play it by yourself or be willing to humiliate yourself somewhat as you play this game.

That just goes with VR, comes with the territory, institutional hazard, but it's worth it. There is a lot of exploration. You know, you get to kind of do your detective work and also your stealth stuff and your Batman predator takedowns and also just your bare-knuckle brawling, where you're surrounded by a bunch of guys, Batman and Yakuza style, and they're coming at you, and you're doing like no-look Michael Keaton-style

blocks of punches off-screen. And it's all pretty intuitive. And the harder you punch, the more damage your punches do. And it just works pretty well. And, you know, you can kind of like leap forward with the punching and the combat. It's not like quite as in depth

as where you're memorizing elaborate, combos in the Arkham games, but it's a pretty good substitute. And they're collectibles and their mysteries and there's a lot of Batman lore. And if you're not getting enough Carmine Falcone in the penguin, there's much more Carmine Falcone here. Yeah, how's the plot? Is there, is the plot capable? Yeah, it's not bad.

Like, there are aspects of it that are a little derivative. And yeah, in any Batman game, you're going to get like a Joker hallucination sequence. So this is not committing what you said, the Cardinal sin of, you know, a Batman game where the Joker barely comes. You know, all the bad guys and the nemeses are here. But you have an original villain, the Rat King, not to be confused with the rat catcher, and you're telling sort of a standalone story that is related to the Arkham games, but, you know, kind of does its own thing and has a lot of a love for the lore and everything.

So aside from the fact that yet made me feel slightly queasy, which is another risk that goes along with VR, so I was playing it in fairly short burst. but it is also maybe a 10-hour-ish game. So, you know, play it for an hour, two at a time. Whenever, you know, the quest starts to become burdensome and hurt your nose or you start to get a little sick to your stomach, which can happen. But this is not the worst motion sickness that I've experienced in VR. And I think it's worth the risk.

Yeah. If you're someone who doesn't hurl immediately when you put on a headset, which I understand some people do, you know, I'm bad with that in real life. I've been better with that in VR, like playing, you know, squadrons, Star Wars squadrons. I was okay doing dogfighting, but the motion in this, it made me a little like, I don't know if I'm going to be okay here, but I'll just, I'll take a break and I'll be fine and I'll regroup. But yeah, this is like a legitimate Batman game with pretty impressive production values. And all you need is a pretty expensive headset, but not the most expensive headset. So there's that.

What is the price of a MetaQuest3? Like half a PS5 Pro? Yeah. It's less than that. Yeah. It's less than that, I think, and a lot less gated, obviously. And, you know, you can play games without as many hurdles from other platforms. So, yeah, I haven't had it long.

This was sort of my first experience really getting into it. But I'm still a true believer about VR eventually someday when it gets more comfortable and more affordable. I just, you know, we'll get there by PSBR 8. Yeah, one of these decades or centuries, but you can sort of see the promise if you play this game. All right.

I want to hear from you about a horror game that you've played, which would have been more timely and topical if we had, in fact, recorded last week, but perhaps people are still in the spooky season mood. So tell me about Fear the Spotlight. Fear the Spotlight. This game's great. And it is short as well.

this looks like a PlayStation 1 survival horror game. That is instantly the vibe and the nostalgia. And it is pretty true to some of the survival horror PlayStation 1 kind of aspects that you'd be familiar with. It's a story of two friends who sneak into their school library at night and try and do this sort of seance with a Ouija board. and apparently there was some horrible accident that happened at the school where a bunch of students died 20 years ago or something. And they're in the school and they get kind of a weird reaction. And they're separated and they're trying to find each other in a surreal setting.

There is no combat in this game, but the vibes are good. You're sneaking around, you're finding items to let you get into. locked areas or places you can't get into until you have this item. A lot of just familiar gameplay aspects that are all really well implemented while you're piecing together the story of what happened in this school 20 years ago or whatever. And it's told really well. And there's some nice surprises in there, especially at the end, probably two, three sittings of a video game.

If you have that nostalgia trigger, this is definitely where it's, checking out. Yeah. And it seems like it's part of a trend, like a retro lo-fi PS1 era, much like Crow Country, which I know you also played and Steve Allman recommended on a Ringaverse recommends. That is very much like combat heavy PS1 survival, whereas this is, again, no combat, but good story and same item-driven mechanics. Yeah, I like that. I like the horror game that's a little, you know, not combat forward. It's like you've got your flashlight or your spotlight for a head, you know, your Alan Wake flashlight or like the game within a game in the excellent Apple show,

Mythic Quest, Dark, Quiet, Death, where you have just a flashlight and you scare away the monsters so you can't kill that kind of thing. That works for me. I'm really surrealist, interesting choices in this game. And this is the first game published by Blumhouse, by the way. So that's important, too. obviously the renowned horror filmmaker getting into games, many more in the pipeline. And this is the first example from Cozy Game Pals.

And it sounds like it's a successful crossover. Absolutely. Many more to come. Okay. My last little recommendation here, maybe the shortest of all, because it's not actually a game, though it is very game-based. And it is a documentary that is available on Netflix now, just came out. And it's called the Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

And, you know, World of Warcraft, it's just celebrating its 20th anniversary, huge milestone. And this is a documentary about the kind of impact that Wow has had on people's lives. So this documentary tells the story of a young man named Mastin, who is, unfortunately, someone who passed away about a decade ago and was someone who dealt with a muscular degenerative. disease that eventually led to him using a wheelchair and being mostly immobilized. And when his disease progressed to that point, video games and specifically World of Warcraft were his escape. And he spent a lot of his waking hours in this game playing and role-playing as this character, Ebelin, in a guild called Starlight, and making these incredible connections with people who did not know about his condition in real life.

And so people in real life didn't really know what he was doing in the game and vice versa. So he was very private. And after he died, he had a blog late in his life where he would document what it was like to live his lifestyle. And he connected with people through there. When he died, his parents posted a message about his passing on the site, not knowing that anyone was reading or that anyone had paid attention to him and their great regret was that he hadn't gotten to do so many things. You know, he didn't have a lot of friends in high school. He wasn't able to go to social events. He didn't experience love. He didn't change other people's lives or so they thought until he passed away.

And suddenly they got message upon message upon message from all of his guildmates who talked about what an incredible person was. He was what a difference he had made in their lives, real tangible differences, ways that he had improved their real lives, not just their lives in World Warcraft. And they had this vast log of everything he had said in the game, chatting dialogue, everywhere he had been. And these vast archives got reconstructed in this document essentially animated to look like it's World Warcraft. So part of the story is, you know, home footage of,

of Mats and his family, and then part of it takes place in what looks like World of Warcraft, with World of Warcraft character models essentially reliving the interactions that he had with these people who were then also on camera talking about how meaningful that was for them. And I did not cry playing Nava. Takes a lot to be a tearjerker for me, but this was that. I was weeping while watching this movie. it is really, really sweet and bitter sweet and sad and joyous and just a great tribute to and testament to the role that video games can play in people's lives

and just how meaningful these virtual worlds can be. And I'm going to talk about Nintendo later on this episode. Nintendo's always cracking down on any sort of properties that are using Nintendo IP. and Blizzard has not done that historically. It has let people sort of play in their sandbox that they've created, thinking that it's a good advertisement for their games. And they basically made this entire movie, this almost two-hour documentary without Blizzard's knowledge,

and then went to Blizzard and was like, can we do this? Can we release this fully animated thing with all these World Warcraft character models? And Blizzard said, yeah, because they saw the movie. It was screened for them. They were as touched by it as I was. and they gave their wholehearted permission to do that.

So it's sort of this movie within a movie about Mox's and Ibelin's World Warcraft Adventures as well as his real life. And it's just a great gaming doc and something that is accessible to anyone. You don't have to have played wow or any games, frankly. I think this would tug on the heartstrings of just about anyone who would watch it. So check it out on Netflix. Yeah, I'm definitely going to check that out. That sounds incredible.

All right. So we have each recommended a few things apiece. I know you had more because you always have more because you play everything. I know you have played the latest Alan Wake DLC. You've played other DLC. Is there a lightning round within a lightning round? Anything else you'd want to name check before we say for a while? I just want to talk super quick about the new Castlevania DLC for vampire survivors, which is a bit of a dream come true.

Yeah. It is the biggest DLC for vampire survivors and it's the best one. There's tons of new characters. There's one giant castle map. It's huge. And there are some incredible surprises in here

that if you have any connection to Castlevania over the years, you can really tell. They made this game as huge fans of Castlevania, vampire survivors, initially. And to see them get to point with this tiny game where the Castlevania IP is officially licensed within their game.

It's kind of a full circle moment for them. And there's just love and care pouring out of this thing. And man, it's just super fun. It can always be kind of a risky maneuver when you start doing the Fortnite style crossovers. I know hell divers to the devs recently said, like, we want to be careful. You know, we don't want to dilute the brand, basically. But sometimes it's just kind of a match made in heaven. It's just like, yeah, these things go together and it's a labor of love.

And this is like the Venn diagram of my gaming interests. This is made for me, Matt James. So I'm glad that you have found happiness here. And I wish you well in putting Pokemon down long enough to play it. Thank you very much, Matt, for coming on as always. Always happy to be here. All right, we're all alone now. Just you and me.

We've got the place to ourselves. I'll be joined by Joshua Rivera in just a moment to talk about Mario and Luigi Brothership, the history of comedic Mario, Nintendo's Direction, Dragon Age, the Vale Guard, the BioWare comeback, the perils and promise of modern game development, essentially a second episode in store for you. But what's in store beyond that episode elsewhere on our feeds? Let me tell you, it's time for the programming notes. Arcane returns to Netflix this weekend.

You may have heard me on Mint Edition with Stephen Jomey last weekend, Recapping Season 1 of the award-winning animated League of Legends adaptation, Mint Vember continues this Saturday, as the junior mince discussed the first of three acts of the second and final season of Arcane. On Sunday night, immediately after the penguin finale, the Midnight Boys, Pugh, Pugh, minus Charles, will give you their instant reactions to the episode. Mal and Joe will have their Penguin episodes five to seven deep dive over on House of R on Tuesday. At the end of the week, they'll be doing their best genre props exercise. And we've got some exciting stuff in store for But Mash.

In a couple of weeks, we will be celebrating the dual 20th birthday of Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. A momentous anniversary. Those two games incredibly came out about a week apart. In November of 2004, we'll be reflecting on their legacies, how they change the first-person shooter genre forever. We've got some more nostalgic stuff on tap. The 30th anniversary of the PlayStation 1 is coming up soon. So in a couple episodes, we'll do a PS1 30th anniversary draft. You can, of course, contact us, and by us, I mean me,

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The dead. Stir more easily than they should. Well, if you've read any websites that cover culture over the past 10 years, you have probably come across the work of Joshua Rivera because he's kind of contributed to all of them. He spent the past several years at Kataku and then Polygon, but for now, he's playing the freelance field as a citizen of the internet at large, which is why on Friday we had the pleasure of publishing a piece he wrote on the history of funny Mario games at the ringer.com. What a great website. Joshua, as a longtime reader, happy to have your byline and your button mash debut. Welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me and for the kind words and also to Mario for being funny, which, you know, I'm a lot. I suspect not one people know for some reason. I don't know. Do you think that's a thing people know about?

Well, they know now that we published your piece, so everyone's informed at this point. But I think maybe you're right that he's kind of underrated as a comedy legend. And we will get into that because I wanted to have you on to talk about two new games that have revived a couple of RPG series that had been dormant for almost a decade. Mario and Luigi Brothership for the Switch and Dragon Age the Veilgard for everything. except the Switch. Both have gotten reviews that Metacritic describes as generally favorable, though there's a wide range of opinion here and room for disagreement. And we know that Mario can be all things to all people in all games. He has a mustache. He has overalls. Beyond that, everything is pretty negotiable. So at various times, he's been a plumber and not been a plumber.

His last name has been Mario and his last name has not been Mario. He's had nipples. he has not had nipples. And also, he has been in games that weren't funny and a lot of games, surprisingly many games, that were funny. And that's why you wrote about that trend this week, because Brothership brings back the Mario RPG, which has always really leaned into the humor inherent in Mario. So let's talk a little bit about that. Give everyone the history of how Mario got funny and not just funny in the charming Nintendo

kind of kiddie sense, but funny as in poking fun at the conventions of gaming. Yeah, we were talking a little bit about how the shift kind of happens when Nintendo lets somebody else make a Mario game for the first time, you know, which is Square in like 96, right? They used to work with Nintendo a lot in this era making Final Fantasy games for the Super Nintendo and things of that nature. And then in 96, one of the last Mario games, the last Mario game to come out on the Super Nintendo was Super Mario RPG, which was sort of like a good introduction to what role-playing games are, which if you're not familiar, big on story and characters and managing, you know, statistics to a certain extent. Fights are like a board game kind of, you know,

you take turns, putting in, you know, commands and whatnot. And the way they decided to tell a story about Mario, which, you know, was mostly a guy that just like runs and jumps and occasionally chases apes, was just to make it really, really fun. There's a lot of, like, goofy sight gags. Mario sort of like doesn't talk, but he pantomimes, right? Which is something that you see a little bit more in the Mario and Luigi games where he does speak, but it's an Italian inflected gibberish. It's kind of wild that they still do that. Yeah, as you pointed out of your piece, it's the sort of thing where if Mario debuted today, people would be questioning we'd have

think pieces is Mario problematic. Yeah. We have that, I guess, only when Chris Pratt plays him and everything else is just we're used to it. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like, they settled on this idea that like, you know, maybe Mario is the ultimate straight man in the comedic sense, right? Where he takes everything as it comes and the world around him is kind of insane.

And like this very, you know, naturalistic way, right? So you've got like all sorts of running. gags like Bowser, like one of the things that they solve for is like, what do you do when you have to deal with the same guy, you know, as a villain of every game? And their idea was like, not make him so much of a villain, but someone who just like really, really does not understand how to get a woman to like him, you know? And he becomes kind of like less of a villain and more of a foil. And in a lot of these games, he ends up joining your team because it's just one of those things where it's like, well, I'm the only person allowed to be problematic here.

And if another villain is going to come around and be a jerk, well, we can't have that. You know, it establishes a lot of these, like, these goofy tropes and, like, overly serious reads of Mario's world, right? Then Square Nintendo sort of break up for a little while. They part their way. Square goes on to make a bunch of really cool games for a PlayStation. And then what Nintendo does is it takes, instead of making a sequel to a Super Mario RPG, They make two other series. One is the Mario and Luigi series, which has got a new game brotherhip. And the other one is Paper Mario.

They both have, like, different approaches to what a Mario RPG is. But they both decide that, yeah, Mario role-playing games are funny games. And, you know, they establish, like, their own running jokes. Like, one of my favorites is the Gumba's talking about it, like, their job as if it's just a nine to five. Does it sort of, like, stomp around the Mushroom Kingdom? And, you know, be annoying to Mario. There's a runner about, like, people being so. super impressed by Mario's jump because that's the one thing that he does and it's the thing that

he's famous for. So, like, you press the jump button, he jumps and then the character loses their goddamn mind. It's pretty endearing and, like, it can be surprisingly, you know, they're all ages games, but they can lean a little bit towards, like, you know, adult humor in the sense that, like, every female character in some of these games are just down bad for Mario. And everybody loves when you explain a joke to them and why a joke is funny. But the thing about these games is that they have this very sort of at the heart of them. They're kind of dedicated to poking fun at like the inherent silliness of being a video game

protagonist, right? And it's kind of funny to be the most important person in the world because you're not really, you know, like, or if you are, then, you know, what's interesting about it, you know? And the answer is just sort of like, well, actually everybody else is interesting, but their reaction to you can be very funny. Yeah. And you talked about how games have probably gotten funnier on the whole. It's kind of hard to quantify or qualify that.

But obviously, there are just a lot of great examples, like as the medium has gotten more sophisticated as the storytelling has improved, maybe as the talent devoting itself to crafting dialogue and characters in games has gotten deeper and richer. There are a lot of examples where the comedy can hold up to any other medium, even if the interactivity is sort of the selling point. It's not just funny for a game. It's legitimately funny. And whether that's going back to, you know, some of the more sophomoric or kind of crude humor that you would get in earlier eras to maybe the era that Portal inaugurated and others in that vein. And, you know, I don't know exactly where Mario fits into that pantheon, but it's impressive,

I think, that he's anywhere in it, really. And it's sort of a credit to Nintendo for, I guess, being hands-off enough to let people play in that Mushroom Kingdom sandbox and to put their own spin on the character because obviously this is like an invaluable corporate asset, right, to just boil it down to kind of dollars and cents. And if you're outsourcing your character, your most famous, just the character who's most identified with your brand to someone else, that's showing a lot of trust. And obviously, like, Nintendo works with only certain studios and often acquires those studios and they become kind of second party developers or Nintendo has a hand in the development, but it could go horribly wrong.

You look back at, say, those notorious Zelda games from the 90s, the Phillips CDI games that were just non-canon and are kind of like looked on as blasphemy to some extent and just not actual Zelda games. So you could imagine that it would have tarnished Mario's reputation that if they had farmed him out to a bunch of people just to kind of capitalize on the face and the name, that would have hurt Mario, but instead it's been just the opposite, where Mario's legacy would be secure if it were just Super Mario Brothers and just the platformers. But really, Mario just goes far beyond that. Now, it's not just Mario Card, Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, Mario paints, Dr. Mario, I mean, this is going back

decades at this point, but that's the strength of the character. He's just such a blank slate that he can kind of be anything. And now I'd say that's just as much a part of his legacy as kind of the core platformers that you think of with Mario. And so the Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Mario and Luigi, Trifecta, that's an important part of that. And as you noted in your piece, it seems like that has kind of been rekindled over the past year.

Brothership is the most recent example, but not the only one. Yeah. Earlier this year, Nintendo re-released, remade, actually. Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door, which is maybe the most beloved of those games. Last summer, they did a Super Mario RPG remake, which a lot of people didn't think could happen. Because even as Nintendo was re-releasing Super Nintendo games and games from, it's like 16-bit days and handheld days and making like mini consoles full of games, that game was always notoriously absent from the lineup, right?

And a lot of it probably had to do with, you know, the original characters in that game and who owned them and what could go on. Nintendo's a very opaque company. Nobody really knows quite why anything happens or does not happen. But this game got a remake and it's still good. It's still really, really, really good. And then those aforementioned efforts to have classic games on their online service also means the first Mario Malichi game, Superstar Saga, was recently added, I think, in the last year.

So you could play that too. That game's also really, really good. Even Wonder, which we talked about on Buttmash, it's one of the weirder mainline Super Mario Brothers games, right? A game where they just kind of threw everything at the wall, even if it was just like singing Piranha playing symphonies. Oh, yeah. Maybe that's just rubbing off on kind of the core Mario experience.

Yeah, you see it a little bit out in the Brothership, too, to talk about the new game. There's like a, I would say, you know, between Wonder and Brothership, Nintendo is getting a little more like looney tunes in how it animates Mario, right? He's becoming a more expressive cartoon character in subtle ways. And this is the sort of thing that I think only like real Nintendo nerds will notice, you know? But like this is what makes Nintendo so good, right? Which is like they work on, you know, endlessly on these little details that, you know, you don't register unless you're looking for them.

That all plays into like, you know, when something surprises or delights you or makes you laugh or, you know, makes you feel like you did something clever. I haven't found Brotherhood to be as funny as previous Mario Luigi games, but every once in a while, you know, like early on. It has a feature called Luigi Logic, which is like basically, basically the point behind it is that like, Luigi is a god of lateral thinking. And we'll come up with absolutely nonsensical ways of solving problems. and when he has an idea, you just let him go, and he'll make it work.

It's just really funny to have a button. It's like, oh, the Luigi Logic button. I can push that one and see what Mario's weird little brother is up to right now. Yeah, we didn't get this game early, so we have just dipped our toes into it. It's actually pretty deep waters. It's a long game. And brother ship, it's a play on words. There are brothers.

They're on a ship, sort of. It's an island, a floating island. island that moves around and you're trying to link together all of these different little hub worlds and connect them. And so you get shot out of a canon to journey to all of these different sort of a Mario-style hub world with individual levels that you journey to, kind of a classic thing. But it very much feels like the Mario and Luigi, I remember. I mean, it's the same sort of, you know, you walk around as both of the brothers and A is Mario and B is Luigi and you have your tandem jumping on people. So a lot of that feels very much like they didn't mess with the formula that much,

which is probably good, I guess, if you've been waiting now for the better part of a decade for another Mario Luigi game. Maybe you want them to shake up the formula a little bit, but you can kind of get yourself into trouble with that sometimes too. Sometimes you're just kind of throwing red meat to the people who want more of the thing that they loved before, even though Nintendo is justly celebrated, I think, for not wanting to be complacent like that and not wanting to rest on their heels and wanting to push their franchises forward with each new installment. Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's just like a solid game. It's also really pretty, you know? It has like a, like a cartoon-y style that's kind of just, like, lovely to look at. And they meet a bunch of characters that are designed after, like, power outlets. I don't really know why. Yeah, I guess it's premature possibly to say that this is sort of the end of the switch. I mean, maybe its demise has been exaggerated before and then Nintendo pulls a few new releases out of its sleeve somehow. But it's definitely the swan song, a long, slow swan song that is still ongoing here.

If you look at the upcoming releases, it's pretty light, right? especially if we're talking about non-remake, Nintendo developed or published titles. You obviously have Metroid Prime somewhere down the line theoretically next year, but it's hard for me to imagine that that will be a switch exclusive. You'd think that that might be a switch to launch title or cross-platform. Same deal maybe with the new Pokemon Legends game. And then there's like Professor Layton. But basically it seems like they've almost exhausted.

what they've got pegged for this system. And frankly, that's fine. It's okay for the Switch's watch to be ended at this point because it's served us well. It's sold a zillion pieces of hardware. It's been an amazing success financially and also creatively. And it's time, right? Even Brothership has some performance issues, even like the latest Zelda. You know, it's not just Nintendo published games anymore like a Pokemon Legends or something. It's also, Even Nintendo developed games where they tend to have some wizardry when it comes to just eking out every bit of processing power out of the system. And even they can't seem to get the latest titles to stop stuttering. So it's time, right?

But this is, you know, a pretty fitting farewell if it is one. There's just not a whole lot left on the horizon that we know about as of now. Yeah. It's definitely just sort of like, you know, like everybody wants Nintendo. to say the line, you know, which is Switch 2 or whatever that is. Yes. But it's almost admirable or amusing at the very least the way the company moves at its own pace and will not until they do.

You know, I don't know when this podcast goes up. Maybe they preempt us. That would be pretty annoying if they actually dropped the Switch 2 announcement after we recorded this episode. just to spite us. But I did want to bring up just like weird Nintendo has come back with a vengeance, not just through mainline Mario games and also these spin-off Mario games. I've been switching between Mario and Mario this entire episode, by the way.

That's just my New York coming out. But it's also just all of the weird side quests and odd projects that Nintendo has announced lately while everyone's been waiting for the Switch 2 announcement. So we got confirmation this week that the switch to whatever it is will be backward compatible. Okay, we all sort of sense that from the million leaks, but they did at least confirm that. And it just makes sense, obviously, when you have as huge an install base and catalog as the switch does. But meanwhile, while they've been biding their time to actually drop this big reveal, which is supposedly coming no later than next March, they've been busy rolling out all sorts of stuff that no one was asking for or expecting,

which is not to say that we don't want these things. It's actually kind of heartening to me that Nintendo, even as it becomes more and more Disney-fied and goes into blockbuster movies and theme parks is still also this experimental toy company on the side that's just trying shit. You know? So, like, in the past few weeks or months, we've gotten an announcement of an emrated visual novel, a reboot of Famicom Detective Club, which no one was clamoring for, as far as I'm aware. We've gotten a somewhat secretive, but soon open, secretive online playtest for some sort of Roblox-esque MMO, which I guess good for Nintendo, getting on board the World Wide Web. It's about time.

We also got a motion-sensing alarm clock that works better if you sleep alone than if you have company. And also a Nintendo music app just dropped by surprise on the Switch, which is kind of classic Nintendo in that it's cool. Okay, there's lots of great Nintendo soundtracks we all like to listen to, but it's sort of piecemeal in the way that the back catalog always is on Nintendo Switch online where it's like, okay, I can listen to this, but not that? When are you going to give me this, right? And meanwhile, if you, like, try to do anything with that music yourself, even if it's Nintendo not offering it, you will get a cease and desist before you even post it somehow, right? So I like that Nintendo is still doing this.

And I don't know what their hit rate is, but whether it's just, like, shipping boxes of cardboard, then you have to assemble stuff, like, whatever it is. no one else is as weird as Nintendo has been and continues to be. And I applaud that. Yeah. I mean, it's a company that's still like very much interested in how people play and the ways to extend that and maybe even integrated into like their regular lives. Occasionally when other game companies do this, it's usually like with a big expensive tech push like VR, right?

Yes. You know, when it comes down to, you know, outside of like those big expensive, like, of hardware pushes, most other game studios and publishers are fine with things as they are. You know, you've got your controller, you've got your TV, and you've got a certain, you know, a selection of genres where we mostly understand how things work, and we're just going to, you know, try and innovate within those lines. Nintendo was like, okay, but what if you could build your own peripheral out of cardboard, and that's like part of the game, you know?

And, you know, they published, what, like Pokemon Sleep, which you could use as a companion to Alarmo, which is their alarm clock. But, like, I also think it's not something to just, like, gawk at and be like, oh, Nintendo's so weird. It's also, like, if you engage with it, there are things to think about, I think, like with this music app that they just put out. It's basically like Nintendo branded Spotify, right? Where, like, you go through the games that you like and whatnot.

But I would encourage everyone to, you know, go open that app up and hit the Splatoon 3 section and you'll learn some stuff about Splatoon that you might have not known what's about Splatoon, which is like the fact that, you know, in the fiction of that game, there are DJs and artists, and they have albums, and those albums are in that app,

and you can listen to them. And Spatune is not as big of a franchise here as it is, you know, in Japan, but it's also a series that, like, is super interested in culture and building out a culture around it. It pays attention to the clothes its characters wear, and it makes them really cool. It's really centered on music.

And there's a certain, like, off-key hipness to it, right, that, like, a lot of other video games don't even try for. So, yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, there's a bit of a weird atonal out-of-stepness to a lot of what Nintendo does. But there also is, like, something that is unusually human about what they do, too. And I think that can get like lost in the sauce of it, you know? Yeah. It's very idiosyncratic.

It's just there's clearly a creative ethos at work here. It's not some sort of focus groups, you know, like mainstream tested. Like they are charting their own course even after all these years. And, you know, partly it's because they have this incredible continuity where no one ever leaves, right? It's like Hotel California or something. It's the same people developing games from the 80s. are still doing it with new blood and fresh perspectives, which is maybe the best of both worlds. So it's that.

And then it's also, I mean, yeah, you can get your fix of like the We Shop Channel of music. If you open up the Nintendo music app, like, that's there too. I didn't even mention, by the way, that Nintendo opened up a museum in Japan. So that happened. So there's all this like side stuff happening constantly with this company. And look, in some ways Nintendo is easy to love. it's probably the most beloved video game company. In other ways, it's extremely hard to love.

And it kind of keeps its fans and its community at arm's reach. And it doesn't support the smash community. And it doesn't credit artists, right? Like Nintendo music, at least initially, like just didn't say who made this music, right? It's just it's Nintendo. You don't need to know. Or when a game is coming out, they now just refuse to divulge who developed it until the game comes out. and we all have to scour the credits to figure out who made this game.

And it's why, why are you so stubborn in this way? And I guess it's partly just kind of that philosophy of Nintendo first. And it's not about the individual. It's kind of this collective effort, which is laudable in some ways, but also give people credit for doing the work that is leading to your company's success. And then, of course, just all the extreme litigiousness and, you know, constantly slapping people with C. synthesis or outright lawsuits in the case of Powell World and many other cases that seemed much more remote as possibilities for being sued.

I think when Powell World came out, people rightly or wrongly said, uh-oh, Nintendo's going to slap a banhammer down here somehow. But when fans are just publishing sheet music for games sounds that are not available elsewhere, why are you bothering with this? why are you doing this? People are advertising your product. Or if it's just kind of the inconsistent approach to online and why can I not play Wind Waker on my Switch after all these years, right? There's so much that's just mystifying.

And yet you have to hand it to them at a certain point because they keep pumping out good games and they've known forever that that's the secret to success. And meanwhile, of course, you know, you have ostensibly kind of console wars going on, but barely, right? Because all of these companies, the major manufacturers of consoles and games for those consoles, they're all sort of playing in different sandboxes and pursuing different strategies. And they are competing, but perhaps not as directly as they once did.

And so you have Sony chasing the live service dragon and putting out a PS5 pro whose advantages are almost indiscernible to anyone outside of digital foundry. And you have Microsoft gobbling up studios, but still delivering first-party hits more sporadically than expected, as it gives people fewer or more ways to play its games, but fewer reasons to buy an Xbox, right? And yet you still have Nintendo just kind of doing its thing and not worrying about having the most powerful system,

but just trying to deliver the best games and constantly subvert expectations. And as frustrating as the company can be at times, I'm glad that it exists and that it has refused all efforts to swallow it up or make it more conformist in some ways because I think it's helpful to have it out there doing its thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Like he said, it's kind of a miracle they still have fans given their hostile nature to them at times. I think a lot about like games as culture, right? like you, we were talking about, the fact that it's just kind of like following its own strategy that is opaque to me. It makes me more likely to engage with the game as, you know, an art object as opposed to, you know, the things where I'm more exposed to sort of abyss environments of like games made in the States, right, where we can transition to Dragon Age Velgaard this way, right? I know a lot of the development history of that game, right? So I can play that game and I can be like, oh. Too much, maybe.

I can play that game and I can be like, oh, this is probably, you know, a remnant from when they wanted to make this an online game that you played with other people. You know, they probably made this decision because of the reactions to this other game that was popular a few years ago. And I can see the combat system from like Mass Effect showing up there too. So yeah, like sometimes it's just like, you know, similar to never meet your heroes, you know, never learn too much about the development of a video game. Yeah. Well, Nintendo is ensuring that we don't up to and including who developed it, which is kind of core to that question. And yeah, it's not a love-hate relationship. It's more like a love-confused relationship.

But it's, you know, you can say that they don't ship games in broken states. They're almost always published in polished states. If we're talking about first-party Nintendo games, they're going to work. They're not going to be buggy and broken. They're not going to have to issue an apology and reboot games in a anthem-esque way, again, transitioning to BioWare here. And, you know, that's impressive when they are still ambitious enough to give you a Breath of the Wild or a Tears of the Kingdom, where either, even other developers marvel at how does this work? You're giving the player so much freedom, which is what they are doing now, particularly with the Zelda franchise. and yet it doesn't break for the most part,

which is just they're good at making games. That's what it boils down to. Now, BioWare was very good at making games for a long time, but not so much lately. So the 10 years since Dragon Age Inquisition have not been kind to this company. There was the cancellation of Shadow Realms, there was the disappointment of Mass Effect Andromeda, there was the flop of Anthem,

there's the exodus of key creatives. There's just not a lot to hang their hat on other than releasing Mass Effect again. And along comes the Vailgard, which has had about as troubled a development cycle as a game can have to the point where it got canceled and then uncanceled, just reanimated. It got respect multiple times where, as you said, it had online components. It was live servicey, and then they shifted away from that and kind of just went back to basics. They changed the name, RIP Dreadwolf, and there's really a lot at stake for bioware here. When it comes to this company's bottom line, its critical reputation, its reputation among fans, just is this the bioware that was so beloved? Now, I'm not that big a dragon-each-ege guy.

I am very much a Cotaur guy, a Mass Effect guy, a Jade Empire guy even. But Dragon Age, not so much. I've watched my wife play a lot of Dragon Age, but that's kind of the extent of my involvement with this franchise. So I'm relying on you here to give me your take on whether the mission was successful. Does it feel like a game that went through many incarnations? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? and does this restore the luster of this series and this studio? That's a lot to put on a game, but does it do it?

I think, yeah, I think the burden on this game is like just downright unfair. Yeah. You know, I feel for everybody making it who made it and contributed to it over the past decade, every Dragon Age game basically has had a terribly troubled development cycle, which is like a very unfortunate thing about this franchise. You know, even as someone who is not as up on it as some people, I think they did it. I think they pulled off a game that doesn't necessarily feel like it has had the journey that it has.

Like, I know about it. So, like, I have things that I can look for or things that I suspect that were, you know, like remnants of those things. It feels like a satisfying role-playing light action game that is like super invested in the idea of you getting invested. and your party members. I think it does not open very strongly because it's sort of like, for my personal taste, it's a little too polyanish, right?

Where it's just sort of like, you know, everybody is sort of like down for you. You know, let's hug it out. Everybody's like really well, suspiciously well adjusted. And, you know, just respectfully using the fair fighting rules to work through disagreements.

But it is a very long game as the game goes on, right? Like you meet people from different sides of the story with different opinions on things, and then, like, conflict slowly trickles its way in. Whether or not it trickles its way in fast enough for you, that's, you know, anybody's guess. Unlike a lot of these games, the buyware that maybe you're familiar with then is where it's pretty clear from the outset what the big conflict is, right? And the meat of the game is just sort of like convincing every other people to join you in that conflict, right? And in order to convince them to do that, you have to sort of immerse yourself in their internal separate conflicts, right?

And help some people and piss off other people and hope that's enough to face the big challenge at the end, right? This game is kind of holding its cards close to its chest, right? It starts off as resolving a conflict from the last game like 10 years ago where you're sort of like after this maybe evil dude who was part of your party last time. His name Solis, he's an ancient elf wizard. But it kind of immediately shunts that conflict to the side to introduce another conflict about like these elven gods that he was trying to actually keep at bay. He was actually trying to do something good but in a problematic way, you know? And what they're sort of like building to isn't going to be clear for a little while. And so it becomes all about just sort of like meeting people and having conversations with them.

And I guess the frustrating thing about it is like the, if you're someone who is a role player who is super into the sort of like nitty gritty of like getting to know characters in a world, right? You want to do that at your own pace and you want to indulge in your curiosity right away. The game kind of makes you do things when it says it's time to do those things. So it doesn't feel particularly expressive in that way, if that makes sense. Yeah. You know, so, like, there are a lot of, like, potential points of frustration here,

but I think they have made something remarkable, given the development history. And I don't know, something that's sort of like, it's like an interesting document in the evolution of the studio, right? And given the fact that, like, you know, so many people have left. or been let go. The question is kind of like, well, can they do it again even? You know, if this is something that, you know, like people enjoy, like, how is it, can we count on it happening again? Is the new mass effect going to take on this tenor?

Who knows, right? It's a game that, like, poses a lot of, like, bigger picture questions as you play it. Yeah. I guess it feels a little less of the moment than something like, say, metaphor of Fantasio, which, you know, kind of comments on. on our climate, on our present day, also starts sort of slow, but quickly ramps up. And maybe that's not what you want. Maybe at this time you want to tune out everything that reminds you of the real world and you don't want to see that reflected in your gaming world and you just want to escape into a fantasy setting.

And that's okay too. So something for everyone, but I do wonder whether just the timing leads to inevitable comparisons there or whether everyone will just hold up every subsequent. RPG to Baldur's Gate 3, at least everyone with like a fantasy setting and romancing and choices or the lack thereof. And that's kind of a high bar to clear and not everything needs to be Balders Gate 3. So that's okay too. It's interesting because sometimes you see this trend toward the action RPGification of formerly turn-based, more tactical RPGs.

And that's not new necessarily, but you saw it with something like Final Fantasy 16, right, where we talked about that too and everyone's questioning like, what is a Final Fantasy game? Is this even, has this lost the essence of Final Fantasy if it's more just real time kind of arcadey combat? And I guess, as you mentioned in your piece even, like Origami King kind of did that, right? In the Mario RPG world that we were talking about where, you know, it kind of, uh, went away from the turn base to Paper Mario traditional combat too. And, you know, I don't necessarily mind that if it's done well, but you do get kind of the purists, the traditionalists who say this is not my Final Fantasy, this is not my Dragon Age. Do you feel like it's a good compromise to kind of mass effectify Dragon Age to some extent? And, you know, some of that was present even in like proposition. I know. so it's not really brand new.

But that has kind of been a trend, even as you have something like Balders Gate, which becomes this critically acclaimed game of the year in a million different places, while being very much, you know, just your D&D trappings and just giving you an incredible amount of choice. Yeah, Dragon is an interesting series

to ask this question of because every game is really different, you know, like both in how they play and also in their art style, you know, like each of them, It's a slightly different art direction, sometimes radically different, right, if you're jumping from origins the first one to two. And so, like, the world does not feel aesthetically consistent. The gameplay is kind of like constantly changing, which makes it kind of remarkable that the fiction is as consistent as it is. The writers across the games have been very canny in, like, you know, setting up this big world and only showing you a part of it and leaving, you know, the team's and the next one to define the next part of the world.

So, like, if you play this game, in the Vildgard, you're in the part of the world where, like, magic has run amok. And so it is, like, Star Trek levels of Tolkien shit, right? Where, like, where you've got, like, stuff, like, floating in the air and, like, you know, like, magical infrastructure and things of that nature were previous games. You're set in, you know, parts of the world

where every mage kind of had, like, a TSA minder, you know? Like, it was, like, a big part. of the conflict, which is sort of like the church's regulation of mages, right? There's a lot of of conversation then about like the tone of the writing, right? Which is an interesting to parse compared to like metaphor, something like metaphor, right? Where like metaphor, extremely on the nose, it's a game called metaphor. But it does it with such conviction where it's just sort of like it's like it's like a good pop punk song where it's like, I just broke up, but I'm going to hit like these three chords, three chords in a scream,

like right up the middle with the fastball. You take some of like Dragon Age Velgar, which is also very openly interested in sort of like responding to an age of tyranny. But there are times where it feels like the game is talking to you through its characters. And that can feel a little artificial as opposed to something like metaphor, which sort of like, you know, I am this thing incarnate and I am going to, you know, and the will of the people, the electorate is represented in this sculpture in the sky that you can look up at. Right. It gets a lot of mileage out of these very, very, very thinned-veiled symbols. And Dragon Age doesn't quite have that.

You know, Dragon Age has, like, its fiction of, like, a world infected by this blight and this thin veil between the natural world and the spirit world and all this other stuff, but it still has to set up its struggles in terms that seem like they are speaking to the player as opposed to the characters speaking to each other. And like some people like that. Some people find their catharsis that way as opposed to the metaphor approach. I tend to prefer the metaphor approach of storytelling. That's a very long-winded way of answering that question.

Well, we're talking about bioware. It's appropriate to be long-winded, probably. So part of that, I mean, that's part of the promise and also the pitfall of bio-aware is the allure of telling a story that extends over many games and many hours and many years in real life that is crafted in such a way that it's supposed to reflect your personal experience with that story. And you're supposed to be able to import your character and import your save file and the world will reflect the choices that you made. And this is something that games can offer that other media can't, at least, to the same extent. And so that's something

that always gets you really excited, the idea that your personal way through this world is actually going to shape the experience. But of course, that complicates everything vastly from a development perspective if you really invest in that. And yeah, you might get up Alder's Gate, which is almost one of one in its ability to let you just break the rules and set the terms. But if you're telling this story over several installments, whether it's Mass Effect or Dragon Age or something like The Walking Dead's Tell Tell Games, right, where you want your personal. choices to really be reflected in the culmination of everything. And it almost always falls a little bit short or falls far short in certain cases. And so, of course, you have the backlash to Mass

Effect 3, which was sort of this like Pandora's box moment, just, you know, recognizing fans had a voice and could campaign and could be kind of toxic and could be get their way for better or worse. And maybe they had legitimate gripes, but maybe also they were in time. titled or subsequent fans have been empowered by that in a way that has sometimes not been helpful, right? We could do an entire episode on that. But Dragon Age, because there's been this big gap and there's been so much turnover and turmoil, they have largely set that aside in this game, right? Like, you can choose from a few options about, like, you know, major story meets from previous installments, right?

but it's fairly limited. And so I wonder whether you just accept that and say, look, it would be exponentially complicated to basically program a thousand different ways through this game. And it's just prohibitive. They could barely finish this game as it was. And we'll take what we get. Or do you feel kind of cheated of this overarching story and feel like this is not my Dragon Age? Because it doesn't really reflect the choices that I made in previous games.

I think, I don't know if this is intentional or not, but because of the nature of their release and their sort of like fragmented approach to continuity, right, where they're all set in slightly different eras and areas. The games take on this interesting sort of like subtextual way of being less about what the marketing says, which is like, you know, this is your impact on the world. and they become more about moving through history, right? And sort of like big inevitable crises arise in all of these games. And there's nothing you can do about it. Pearl Harbor is happening. You know, like the big sort of like terrible event is coming. So they become about responding to that and how you choose to respond to that.

And that allow, I think that's why people feel so strongly about the party members that you gather in these games. right? Because it becomes about getting to know them and deciding who you want closest to you in these big disastrous moments as opposed to sort of like, you know, Mass Effect, where it's just very much like you're building the myth of your Commander Shepherd, right? Where it's just sort of like, you know, that game is also about like a big looming disaster, right? Like that's the great trick of that game where it's just sort of like in the first one you have this big, you know, terrible, almost unstoppable threat and then you do it, you beat them.

And you're like, oh no, that's just the first of, many and they're coming. But because of the fact that they made this, they had such a greater continuity between games, your player character became sort of like much more easy to identify with as opposed to

Dragon Age where you're a different person every game. And that like subtle distinction goes a long way in, I think, into how people relate to these games and why, maybe some people prefer ones or the other because you know, that's sort of like building out the personal legend, that's fun. When characters return, you're like, oh,

my commander shepherd has a relationship with this character. He hates them or he really likes them or, you know, like they had a romantic night together and alas, we can't, that's never happening again, you know? As opposed to one of the weaknesses of Vildegard actually is when, you know, your character doesn't have a relationship with prior characters. And when they show up, it's sort of like, well, they should be, this should feel significant, but it doesn't because my, my character, Rook is the sort of like title that they, that they have. Rook doesn't know, or Rook has just sort of maybe heard of them.

The ways you can engage with these characters are extremely limited. They're kind of like walk-on roles, at least, you know, in like the first half of the game. Because again, this is a huge game I haven't gone to the end of yet. Yeah. Yeah, I've enjoyed it as sort of a spectator sport that I've dabbled in and dipped in and out of. And it is just hard to make time for multiple massive RPGs. coming out in quick succession, along with everything else that's just a constant stream of game releases, game adaptations, real life interfering more and more as you get older and other responsibilities crowd in. So it's one of those that's sort of a regret for me that I haven't really gotten into it.

Not the only one. I talked about yakuza like a dragon earlier on this episode. No one has time for every franchise, right? So it's just you're missing out. Yeah, whatever you do, you're going wrong somewhere. And it's just all about triage and your pile of shame, a concept that I've kind of gone away from and just accepted that the pile will always be there and embraced it and learn to love what I am able to play and just try to experience the things that I'm not able to play secondhand through the discourse, through let's plays, through the culture, through osmosis. But I think one thing that kind of bums me out a bit, I guess, about just a general trend in-game development that's reflected through BioWare. So this week, Thursday was N7 Day, the annual Mass Effect celebration.

And there wasn't that much to celebrate this year. No huge new announcements. They didn't want to take the spotlight off of Dragon Age. And so it was about armor set in Dragon Age or crossovers coming back in. in other games like No Man Sky. And there was confirmation that, yes, Amazon is still making that TV show based on Mass Effect and their actual details and creators attached to that. But it just boiled down to me that BioWare, as far as we know from a public perspective,

is basically those two franchises at this point. It's what's going on with Mass Effect and what's going on with Dragon Age. And this is not unique to BioWare. we're coming up on a decade since the debut of blizzards last new IP. Insomniac mostly makes Marvel games now. Those games are great. I enjoy them. It's not as if there's any shortage of new games across the industry, quite the contrary.

As I was just saying, there's not enough time to play everything you want to play. But the length and expense of the development cycles are such now that if you have a hit game, you're tied to that forever, essentially, right? and you're going to ride or die based on whether you can ship a new installment of Mass Effect and Dragon Age and whether you can make it good. And as soon as one is out, you're maybe releasing new content for that one, but you're also just working on the next one, right? And do you actually have time to create anything new? Now, if you do, maybe it backfires. Maybe it's Anthem and it doesn't catch on and, hey, at least you tried.

And it's sort of sad and deflating, but entirely understandable because, many people's livelihoods are at stake here. And we've seen so many layoffs in the industry, something that Nintendo has largely avoided, unlike Sony, unlike Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, unlike everyone else, essentially. And Nintendo is maybe almost uniquely diversified in just the breadth of its portfolio, where if there's not a new Zelda game, maybe there's a new Mario game, maybe there's a new Metroid game, maybe there's a new Pikmin game, maybe there's a new Splatoon. There are just so many franchises that that assembly line never stops, whereas some of these just venerable, storied, revered studios are kind of clinging to these franchises, these few franchises

that mint money that people love, that they want the constant sequels, but that's just such a staple of our culture now, right, across the culture, not just in gaming. And maybe it's okay, because you have indie developers just constantly coming up with new ideas. And so maybe that's not what we need AAA quote unquote development for anymore. And yet it does sort of make me sad when I see a Blizzard or a BioWare or an insomniac where you know that there's probably something in there. There's probably something being incubated somewhere with a small team inside that studio that may or may not ever see the light of day because inevitably when they have to crunch

or hopefully not crunch terribly, but get a game out the door, everyone's going to get moved to the team that needs to ship the Mass Effect or the Dragon AIDS. It's just inevitable. It's the way these things work, right? And yet there's something in me that lamented that and wishes that it were a little more

like maybe it was in the early days of those studios where it was just like, let's try stuff. Yeah. I mean, you're not wrong to think that too, right? Like you mentioned Insomniac and Sunset Overdrive, right? Which was like their big exclusive game for Xbox One. before, you know, Xbox One's Momentum completely petered out. Like, that's the game that got them the job to make Spider-Man.

They came up with a fun way of making an action game that was about moving through like an urban landscape and, you know, had a lot of character. That's the bones of Spider-Man. They're Spider-Man games. And so if these studios do not have the room to sort of like experiment with their, you know, with their own, you know, intellectual property

because companies are not necessarily open to letting people experiment with their prize in IP. Yes, exactly. We're going to run out of exciting new directions to take the big IP. Fortunately, we do have a vibrant indie scene. It's overwhelming and incredibly difficult environment to succeed in, but there are ideas being pushed around there and noticed. And like, it's got to come from somewhere, you know. But I do think there's some stuff that can only be done with like these kind of like big resources.

And, you know, people talk about the nemesis system and the Middle Earth games all the time, right? Where it's just sort of like that's something that like, you know, could benefit from the scale of a big AAA studio. Right. And it's just sort of like, oh, when are we going to, when are we going to see people mess around with gameplay on that level again? And I don't, I don't know. Yeah. Well, I guess you can't. it's patent-int, right?

Yeah, exactly. Beyond that, I mean, that doesn't encourage creativity either, right? But not to gas up Nintendo again, which is in the midst of its own patent dispute here with Powell World, but that's why it is, I think, almost singular that Nintendo says, yeah, we are just going to keep pumping out Mario games and Zelda games, et cetera, but they are actually going to be meaningfully different from the ones that came before, right? And so going from a Twilight princess or, you know, that era of games to Breath of the Wild, okay, this is still recognizably Zelda, but this is just a total paradigm shift.

This is maybe what the franchise was always meant to be and the technology didn't allow it until now. And that's tough to do. Maybe you can do it if you're Nintendo and you're sitting on a nest egg and you have a lot of fan loyalty and you're printing money and you have room to experiment. Whereas if your studio has sort of fallen on hard times and you're just like, we got to get a Dragon Age out there. We got to get a new mass effect to erase the stain of Andromeda. Then the pressure's on. You have hundreds, thousands of people depending on you to remain employed. And so how much can you really break the mold as opposed to just serving people what you already know works and what they like?

And there's something to be said for that, right? It's hard to make any game, even if it's just a carbon copy of what came before. It's just almost miraculous that any game is ever released. But it would be nice if they could be that, but also something completely different, which it's a tall order. I understand that. Easy for us to say here sitting behind our microphones. But it's, you know, and like as much as we would like, say, rock steady to keep churning out. single-player Batman games and then, you know, they're forced to make suicide squad and it sort of

sucks, even though like the bones of a quality experience are there, just sort of vivisected into this thing that it was never really meant to be in a vain attempt to make money. At least they tried, I guess. Like, you don't want to force a studio into doing something it has no aptitude for or desire to do or experience in doing because then it can. can just completely go wrong and fail like that game did. But then is the alternative, let's just make more and more and more Batman games. As long as they're good, I'd keep playing them, but also you do want some innovation. So it's a really hard balance to strike.

And Nintendo has done it well, and I hope that BioWare has the opportunity to keep trying to do it. The stakes are just too high, unfortunately, in the current environment, right? Like, one of the things I, worth, like, looking at is Ubisoft right now, which is not doing particularly well. But, like, they also are coming off one of the most experimental arrows of, of, I've seen any big publisher do, right? You have these two Prince of Persia games that they've, that they sort of, like, one that they had in house, which was a Mesoivania, the lost crown, flopped hard, unfortunately. And then they gave it to the great game. Yeah, incredible game. But, yes.

And the rogue Prince of Persia. which was given to the Dead Cells team, I think. I think that's still an early access, so it's not officially done yet, but that's an exciting experiment. They have two collaborations with Nintendo, the Mario Rabbids games. Those are phenomenal strategy games. Even their big games, like Star Wars, the Star Wars Outlaws, which came out this year, a complete reworking of how they make their games.

Unfortunately, you know, it didn't get enough attention. Of course, they're experimenting in less admirable ways because they just put out an NFT web 3 experience that was immediately exploited and inoperable the weekend of release. But, you know, this is a big company that can only take so many hits and now they're already circling the acquisition bandwagon, right? Like, that's a, it's just, the stakes are too damn high. Yeah, right. And it's like a, it's not a too big to fail situation because we've seen plenty of failure,

but it's like a too big to flail situation, I guess. Maybe that's strained. But I want to see you just like experiment, even if it's messy, you know, just like try stuff, explore the studio space. But again, lots of difficulties that go along with that. So I don't think we have solved the challenges facing the video game industry and the difficulties of development today. But we have at least hopefully, hopefully summed them up. and it's always a pleasure to read you and even greater pleasure to talk to you. You're just a really interesting thinker and writer and speaker about video games.

And glad to have you in the Ringer orbit. And I'd encourage everyone to go read Joshua's piece at the Ringer.com about Mario's comedy chops and everything else he writes everywhere he writes it. Thanks so much, Joshua. Thank you, then. All right, that we'll do it for today. Thank you for listening. You could have played Nava in the time it took you, to listen to this episode.

Maybe you did. Podcasts make good gaming companions. Watch out House of Arr. We're topping two hours over here. Coming for your corner. Not really. Thanks to Brian and Matt and Joshua for joining me today. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing this episode.

And to our Juno Remigapal for saying, hey, why not make it a double episode? You can contact Buttonmash at Ringiversegaming at gmail.com. Stay tuned for coverage of Arcane and the Penguin on the Ringaverse and Howse Bar. Butmash will be back to talk about Halo 2, Half Life 2, PS1, and more. As Daisaku Kusei said, Yakusa Zero, the man who gets beat down isn't the loser. The guy who can't tough it out till the end, he's the one who loses. If you're hearing this, you toughed it out to the end,

which means you must have won. From like a dragon to dragon age, thanks for listening along. We're grateful for your brother ship slash sister ship, and we'll talk to you next time. Events are weaving together quickly. The fate of the world shall be decided soon. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But real doesn't start on a label. It starts at the source. Like Real California Milk from California Farm Families, it's real dairy delivering high-quality, complete protein with all nine essential amino acids to help build muscle,

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