Triple Click - Triple Play: Suikoden II (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk get themselves a castle, go on missions abroad, and finally face down the vicious Luca Blight. In the second part of this Suikoden II playthrough, the gang talks about how their feelings have changed since the first chunk of the game, how the game's awful localization impacts the story, and how that epic fight played out.One More Thing: Kirk: D&D - Eberron: Rising from the Last WarMaddy: HeartstopperJason: The G-Word with Adam ConoverLinks:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy a Triple Click t-shirt: https://topatoco.com/collections/maximum-fun/products/maxf-tc-tclogo-shJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

To end this war, that's a fairy tale, a foolish child's dream. And it'll take at least another 12 hours of JRPG battles. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we return to Sucodon 2. We've played through about 30 hours now, so we've got a castle and a heck of a lot more reasons to hate Luca Blight. That freaking guy, I tell you. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier, and I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

Hello. It's us. It sure is. It's us. Here we are. Back for another week. You're to talk about my favorite thing, video games. Yeah.

Your favorite thing, sweet code into. Even if they're a JRP. Even if they're a JRP still love it, still love video games. As hard as I've tried to take that away from you, Madder. Yeah, Jason has been trying to get me to stop liking video games, but even Jason can't achieve that because it's impossible. And speaking of other things that can't be taken away from me, because I love them. too much maximum fun it's a cool podcast network i've been listening to them for a thousand years and now our podcast is on their network and that's so cool to me every single day and if you also like

that and you like our podcast and you're listening to this right now you could support the show by going to maximum fund dot org slash join and like let's say you did that let's say you open up the old wallet entered in your card number whatever your personal information. Don't send that to us, of course. Just enter it into that URL. And then what's your, what's your throwing five bucks on the pile every month? You would get a bonus episode. And this month, you would get one about Eldon Ring, which we've never talked about before. No, never. One new game for all of us. So this would be very excited to finally talk about Eldon Ring. We're going to finally get into it. This is of course, in addition to like an archive of like almost

30 or 40 awesome. Yes, that sounded a little like maybe people only get one. bonus episode. Right. Like this is the only thing you were going to get. You will get many many, many bonus episodes. You will get a lot of cool stuff. So definitely worth the price of admission. You'd get Horizon Forbidden West. Last month, you'd

get a diehard episode. We made Jason watch diehard. Some movies. Some TV shows. Yeah, all kinds of stuff. Yellow jackets. Who knows? Who knows what we've done? That's as far back as I can remember. But there's a lot of episodes in there. And, And maximum fun.org slash join is the URL to go to if that sounds appealing to you. But if it doesn't, that's okay too.

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Hey, so this week we played a video game. We're going to do a triple play. So, as longtime listeners may recall, we have a bet every single year where we all make predictions and whoever gets the most predictions correct gets to pick a game and we do a book club play through of that game over the course of the year. This year I have won the bet and so our book club play through game is called Suikoden 2. Part one of our play through of this game was a couple months ago. You should go check that out and part two will be today. Part three will be a big spoiler cast that will be our bonus episode for June, right? Did we say that? Yeah, next

month. Yeah. We're really planning ahead. We'll be our part three and final episode in this series. But for today, we are going to be talking about the game all the way up until the Luca Blight sequence. So if you have not played, if you're still playing, or you don't want to be spoiled, whatever reason, now is it time to hit pause because we will be spoiling the game up until that point. All right. Kirk, Maddie, I've made you both play something like 30 hours of a turn-based JRP now. for one of you, I guess that is a little more painful than the other.

But first of all, before we start digging into this next chunk of Sweetodin, too, I want to hear how whether your impressions of this part of the game have kind of changed it in your mind. Have your thoughts changed since the last time we talked about this game? Maddie, why don't you start? Why don't have to start? I was screwing up my face into so many expressions trying to imagine what I was going to say. Okay, I'm starting. I'm doing it.

I'm rolling down the hill. It's happening. Here you go. We believe in you. My opinion has not changed at all. I am still, I, you know, it's interesting because with Final Fantasy 6, the only other JRP have ever played and ever will play, kidding. But am I?

I really felt like the second part was really different. And I was like, you know, there's a lot less combat in this part, way more story. I think that's why I liked it more. I was starting to get to know the characters a lot better. It's an ensemble cast. really liked a lot of the members of the ensemble. Sweet one too, very different vibe. I guess I would say it's an ensemble cast,

but it's such a massive ensemble that I feel like I have only scarcely just gotten to know each character or sort of set of characters or maybe like a trio of characters you recruit. And then just as I've gotten to know them, their story ends, and they get folded into the massive rolodex of all of Rio and Nanami's best friends,

the many members of their army that they're recruiting. And of course, you know, I can add them to my battle. I can still get to know them a little bit more. But it's each of the individual stories is so short and minimalist than that it's kind of hard for me to feel like I'm really absorbed into this world fully. And I get that that's just part of the structure of this game. But it means that the individual moments that I enjoy, there aren't that much of them, or they don't last very long. And then it's on to something else that I might not like, but there were some parts I liked, but I, but I wouldn't say there were way more parts I liked in this section than in the first section. It was kind of more of the same,

but that's also not a bad thing because it wasn't worse. So in a way, that's a win. Okay. That's a win. I like that I have a castle now. I don't know. I could get it, I could go more in depth on. No, I just wanted, I just wanted broader impressions. It's more of the same I do feel like I've gotten better at the combat and better at like general game organization and knowing when and if to use fast forward. And that has improved my experience. But that's a me thing, not a game change thing. So I would say I'm a stronger person because I've been playing Sweet Kodin too.

I'm improved by it. And as an academic exercise, I do feel like I'm learning a lot about, you know, a historical game that matters to a lot of people, even if it's not to my taste. So I do like that I'm learning. Kirk, how of your thoughts changed? If at all. I mean, I don't know. Like, I was kind of a mix, but having a good enough time with this game the first time

through that first act that we played through and talked about a couple months ago. And I think, let me think. So I think the game is at its strongest at this point, the point that we've been playing through. So I've enjoyed this the most just structurally. I think the non-linear structure, the fact that you're given so much more freedom, you kind of just have this open remit to go and recruit people, and then you can do story quests whenever you want, where the first part of the game is this kind of breathless, relentless,

you know, almost chase sequences as you're being chased by the Highland Army from place to place to place. I thought that was effective in a way, narratively, in the first act, that feeling of constantly being under pressure, constantly being attacked, and thought it worked well enough, even though it was a little bit of a just kind of stressful relentless experience, where it's much more relaxed now because you have a castle, you have a base

of operations, you can kind of play at your own pace, which I enjoyed. And that ties in with the way that I played this part of the game, which I also found to be more enjoyable. I tried really hard in that first chunk not to hold the way that I played the game against it. By that I mean, I kind of marathoned through it at the last minute because I put it off because I was playing all this other stuff, and then we were going to talk about it. It was right in, February, kind of at the start of the glut of all those three huge games that came out. And so I was like, God, I'm just playing more Sweet Code, and I'm trying to crank through it over the weekend so we can talk about it.

And I was aware that that was not an ideal way to play a game like this. So I was going to pains to kind of not be grumpy at the game just because of that. So this time, I really paced it out. I'm playing it on Steam Deck now, which is a much more, you know, kind of appealing way to play a game like this that's sort of repetitive and doesn't need a lot of, you know, visual support from the system. So it's nice to plan a handheld. And I kind of just played like an hour or two, you know,

while I'd have coffee in the morning or on the weekends or something over the last several weeks and kind of just gradually worked my way through it. And that was a much nicer way to play. So I had a better experience, I think, due to the structure and due to the way that I played it, even though my overall take is pretty similar. Like, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, Maddie, like that it's, there's a kind of a shallowness to this game because of the design. where you just don't really get to know people that well.

So you have to kind of really unfocus your eyes to start to see the story and the political intrigue and the machinations of this world. There's a lot of unfocusing that happens that I'm sure we'll get into where the less I focus and the more I think about it

is this just big thing, this kind of amorphous narrative gameplay object, the more I'm like, this is cool. I get the appeal here. And then the more I focus my eyes on any given particular of it, the less impressed or the less I enjoy it. Interesting.

Okay, a couple of thoughts. So, yes, as you guys both pointed out, the rhythm of the game has changed quite a bit. At first, you're on the run. The first act that we played through, you're really on the run. And moving from place to place and really getting to know the world. And now you've settled down. You're in a castle. And the game, the part that we just played is essentially five different missions.

So it's like castle, mission, castle mission, castle mission. So I think that like playing this in 2022 after not having played it for a while and having first played it in 1998 or whenever it came out, I think that it's kind of playing it today does it a disservice for a couple different reasons. First of all, because when you play, if you played it as a kid the way that I did and you played it kind of on its own pace and on its own terms, you're having a very different experience because instead of just like, following a walkthrough the way you guys did and just kind of going through to hit plot points, you were taking a lot more time to just like explore and look for recruits and like, oh, hey, I'm going to go back to this city because I can definitely imagine that being. I used to have this rhythm when I played this growing up. Every time I played a new secreting game growing up, whenever you get the castle, I would go on a mission and then as soon as the mission, when the mission ended, instead of just like

heading right to the war room for the next mission, I would circle the entire castle, talk to everybody, play some mini-games, do the cooking competition, which, like, in between each mission, there's, like, a new cooking competition that you can do, and that's its own ongoing story. Then I would head over to, like, South Window and say, oh, hey, look, this guy is here now. This guy in red has popped up here. What's his deal? And there was something super exciting about just kind of organically discovering these things. And oftentimes, what these games are very good at doing is, like, sticking characters in places

that you wouldn't think to revisit, or, like, you would have to, you would have to, you would have to go revisit to go find them, like going all the way back to the mercenaries fortress to find the character Templeton and stuff like that. That I always found super compelling. But today, when the three of us are professional adults in our 30s and 40s who don't have a lot of time to play games the way that that kind of rhythm calls for, I don't think it's quite as enjoyable an experience. And I can see why it hasn't gripped you guys quite. as hard as it once grew up to me. I tried to simulate that experience just because, you know, I do have a walkthrough that is

very helpful just because I can't even imagine how long this game would take me if I didn't have it. So I use it quite a bit. It's very, very useful at Game Facts, one of those all-text walkthroughs we talked about a couple weeks ago. But there were a few times where I just sort of let myself go and was like, I'm just going to wander around and try to recruit some people because I now know that I'm at the point of the game where I'm not going to miss people.

don't have to worry too much. There were only a few things I found stressful. Maybe talk about a little bit. But, you know, mostly I was like, ah, it's fine. I can just walk around. If I find somebody and recruit him, cool, then I can do that. And that was cool because I could imagine that experience you're talking about where it's like, let's just go to South Window and see what's going on. And you go to South Window and, oh, hey, there's a character I didn't see there before. There's, you know, Clyde and he's in his cloak and he's kind of hidden. And if I go and talk to him, I can recruit him. And whoa, now I have Clyde in my party. And so, you know, I can definitely imagine how that works, even though right it was practically impossible for me

to recreate that experience for the entirety of the time playing it. And then there are two other things here that I think are important kind of innovations for the time that maybe aren't as much as easy to appreciate now. One is that there had been nothing like this before where you had your own base of operations. Like nowadays we see it in a lot of games. You see it in Horizon Forbidden West. You see it in Dragon Age. You see it in Mass Effect.

This had not happened before. I have to mention Assassin's Creed 3, just in case Stephen Totelo is listening. Assassin's Creed 3. The Homestead Mission. Well, Fire Emblem 3 Houses is my point of comparison. For sure. It's a game that does it really well. We talk to everybody at your base.

And the fact that your base is constantly evolving and growing, there are different levels of it. And you walk through and you'll see rooms under construction that then turned into actual rooms. Like all this stuff was mind blowing at the time. The second thing, and this is going to make you guys both grown, but it is what it is, part of the appeal of this game and this series, and this is again, something that is only really clicking for me now, is that you have to play all of them. And so because there weren't a lot of games, and there still aren't a lot of games, where the series are all interconnected, all set in the same world, all have constantly

recurring characters and recurring references and recurring countries and plot points. And so part of what was so cool about playing the security games back in the day was that in addition to just being able to stumble upon characters randomly, you would also stumble upon characters who were from the previous game and you would be like oh man like I get to go visit this person see how this person's doing now or this person who used to be like a random NPC who had one line uh sheena is now a key character who's part of the plot who has like his own personality and then there's a character i won't get super spoilery but like there's a character who has a semi minor role like a little bit more than a minor role in suikodon 2 who becomes the

secret plot twist villain of Sweenoden 3. And the giant, all the like the kind of red string connections are another thing that is really appealing about these games that I think you have to just really commit yourself unfortunately to appreciate. And again, that's something that would have been easier to do if we were all 12 years old right now. Well, sure. But it's also, you know, you can look at something like Mass Effect and be like, oh, well, not only do you have a base of operations, but there are these characters that carry over. And if you do every quest, then you save all of them and that's certainly very sweet code and feeling and there are many things about that in Mass Effect that are also somewhat irritating to me but which are part of how that game works

and allow you to carry over and I it is cool to play the game academically even if I don't enjoy it moment to moment the part of it that I then do enjoy is the academic part where I'm like well I can see why the structure of this game was so influential and what's so impressive about it even though it's from 20 years ago and it's not actually fun for me. I still, it doesn't mean I don't think it's good. I know that's a weird way to phrase that, but it is still something, it's doing something very impressive. And I'm certainly willing to recognize that. It's just not, I mean, it's like a combination of the genre not being to my personal taste. And then also it's an old game that has a lot of things about it that

make it harder to play. Like, I never beat persona five either because I just don't think I ever will. but it's incredible. So like if you were like, Maddie, you've got to beat it, I wouldn't be complaining in the same way. But this is like the double whammy of both being a JRP that's long and is old and doesn't have as many quality of life additions as something like Persona 5 has, for example. But hey, it's great. And I love it.

Yeah, there's an interesting question here about continuity and how much a game should stand on its own. Because I think that's something that is increasingly, I mean, it's very right. relevant today. It became increasingly relevant over the last 20 years because this is, you know, it's not unique to Sweet Kodon. I mean, like you said, Maddie Mass Effect, that's a great example, or Dragon Age. There are all kinds of series where you get a little extra something if you play all of them and you can make those connections and be like, oh, cool, this kind of character, who is a minor character in the most recent one now gets to be a whole, full party member in the new sequel and we get to really know them. And I mean, that is now just a very established thing. And this is also,

you know, true of so many cinematic universes that we engage with all the time in movies. Yeah. Or in TV shows. I mean, we've been talking about Better Call Saul quite a bit over the last few weeks. And a big part of Better Call Saul and a big part of our discussion of Better Call Saul has been this discussion of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and how you can appreciate a lot of little cool things in Better Call Saul if you've seen Breaking Bad. But, Patty, you were saying, well, I didn't really watch Breaking Bad and yet. I'm still really enjoying it. This week's episode of Better Call Saul?

Holy shit. I'm not caught up, so no spoilers. So this is like an ongoing concern, right? And I think with Suikodin, too, my sense is, you know, with characters like Humphrey and Futch, for example, who I know were in Suuco, an earlier game, like I think they're carryover characters. Like, I can tell there's something there that I'm missing, and this is kind of like a person who sticks around for the post-credit sequence of a Marvel movie and doesn't really know what it means. It doesn't really take away from the game for me to not see that.

But it sounds like, and I want to see what you're really saying here, Jason, And do you think it's like a really significant improvement if you've played Sweetodon 1, playing Sweet Kodon 2, because it significantly enriches the world? Or is it more like this is just an extra dimension on these all, they're fairly thin characters, but they do get an extra dimension sometimes because you know them. No, I think it's more just having the entire series in your brain holistically. If you're into them in the first place, makes you appreciate them all more as a result in the same way that like, I don't know, if you just watch the first season of Game of Thrones. you might think, oh, cool, this is a fun standalone thing, but you watch more and more seasons and you grow to appreciate the whole thing more,

and then if you watch the final season, it ruins the entire show for you. Well, no, but to complete the thought, really, what you're kind of saying is you watch the first season of Game of Thrones and you're like, well, that was fun, then you keep watching the show, then at season two, you get into the books, you read the books, you watch all of the show,

and then you go back and you re-watch season one, and it's a much more interesting experience. Having it all in your head, yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to give me another example, there's a character, you guys haven't met him yet, this totally random NPC you meet. It's a guy named George Prime. And he just, you just go and recruit him and he says a couple of things and he turns out to be this super powerful fighter. And he's, does it as meaningless and he's going to do essentially.

But if you go to Richmond, the private investigator, and have him investigate him and you read through which, I don't know if you guys have been doing that, but that's super fun to investigate your party members. He's a funny character too. You investigate George. at some point Richmond will be like, I heard a rumor that he killed a queen, which might seem like a throwaway thing. And then the entire plot of Sweecoden 5 is based on that one rumor. Remember you mentioned this? Right. Yeah. Just kind of finding all of those ties and references and mentions, it's just like enhances your overall experience. But I don't think, I want to focus on Suikodon, too, because I don't think that that is really an important part of it. And I think there's so many moments that like even you to cynics will have to admit we're pretty cool in Sukegoon. and two, which are the little vignettes. And I think what the game is trying to say in each of these vignettes, whether it's like the people ganging together, the different races ganging together in Two River, or like

the Matilda, the knights all throwing their medals down in solidarity. I think there's some cool stuff in this game and playing this today. I still think a lot of that stuff holds up pretty well. I mean, some of it's pretty cliched. I agree that the way that's... C cliched for 2022. No, cliched for 1998. I do have some examples of parts that I think did really work for me emotionally.

So I've been thinking a lot about why Jowie, I guess this is pronounced Joey, but I just can't get my brain to do that. I've been thinking about why Jowie betrays the main character, because of course that's really the crux of the entire game. And now that we've completed the Lucca Blight boss battle, Jawi is again the big bad. And like they both have these two shields,

these two mystical runes attached to them that make them fade to fight one another. Yes, you're right, of course. Mine is a shield because I'm good and pure and light, and Jawi is destined to fight. You defend people. Joey hurts people. Right. But see, that's what's interesting about it, is that Jowie doesn't seem like that kind of guy. Like he has this attachment to Pillica, who's this traumatized girl who can't speak seemingly,

but she does have the ability to speak when she sees Jowie, and they have this. certain weird relationship where he's like, I just want to protect her. So I had picked up on all of that, but not all the other nuances. And I read a whole bunch of game facts, forum threads by people years ago arguing about why Jowie betrays Riyu. And they're actually really fun. Wait, why are you? So you're spoiling the entire story for yourself.

But it's helping me, Jason. This is like how I enjoy things. You have to just go with this. But that's explained a lot more like later in the game. No, it's not. Because a lot of the arguments that people make about why he does it are contradictory or like can never fully be answered. Because one of the many arguments that people make is about the extent to which these ruins influence Ryu and Jawi and the fact that there's that old past story of the two previous guys who were also attached to the ruins and they decide night to fight one another. And the parallels between that story and Jawi's story.

And to what extent is this sort of magical ruin playing a role? and does Jawi just want to unite all of these city-states simply because he believes that military rule is the best way to go? I mean, clearly Ryu doesn't think that. And the fact that people were able to come up with so many interpretations was fascinating to me, and it's also only possible because the characterizations are thin. And I mean that in a positive way.

Like these characters are allowed to be these huge archetypes that then a 12-year-old playing it can insert and then extrapolate all of this actual political intrigue from it that's actually quite deep because there's so little there that it allows you to make those extrapolations that can be pretty fascinating on your own. I know that sounds like I'm insulting it by saying that it's thin, but I am really not.

I actually think it's very cleverly done. And like the few dribs and drabs of Jawi's characterization that you do get are just powerful and mysterious enough that at the very least it had me, Googling why does Jowie behave like this and reading multiple multi-page game facts threads of people debating this and still not having the answer. And that was like some of the most fun I've had interfacing with this game was reading all that analysis. The actual game, again, I could take or leave. But like thinking about the political intrigue and the question of it, that's the good shit, right?

Like that's the Game of Thrones shit of it all. That's the part of Sweet Kodin 2 that I think people really like. And I can see why. Yeah. I mean, it's the less is more approach to fantasy writing. We're about about Eldon Ring, and I've been taking all of these notes. But so much of that game is just filling in the spaces between bits of information. Obviously, there's a lot more going on there.

But it's a similar idea. How is there? I mean, I can see the similarities, honestly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm comparing them. Yeah, I'm saying they're very similar. Like, it's similar to what you're talking about, that a lot of the fun is in asking questions and in figuring out what you think happened, which is, you know, not unique to video.

video games or these two video games, like it's a lot of great storytelling works this way. So I don't think that sounds to me, at least, like you're insulting the game. Because there's something that you talked about last time, Maddie, about literacy and JRP literacy and how we were specifically talking about the sort of the abysmal localization of this game, which continues to be true of this part that we played. There's just a lot of just pretty bad writing or pretty bad localization. So a lot of exclamation points. They really like exclamation points.

Yeah, they also like the stuff. the eh, eh, eh, what? Like, there's a lot of that. But, you know, but even that kind of stuff, like, there's this sort of literacy that your brain develops over the course of playing this game, where the focusing and unfocusing I was talking about, you kind of, I find myself unfocusing on the dialogue. I move through it pretty quickly,

because I'm getting the gist of what's happening. I'm not reading over every sentence, which is kind of, you know, means that I'm skipping all the grammatical issues and all of the kind of weird nonsense, and I'm just getting the gist of what's going on. and then that's forming in my mind the story that is unfolding. And that's a cool story when you zoom out and get away from that stuff. And it's kind of similar where you're looking at, there are these particulars that we're being told.

But if you don't focus too much on the particulars and just focus on the spaces between them and you start to unfocus and those spaces go away and the points become these unfocused points that are kind of touching one another and soon you have fleshed out characters in a fleshed out world. And I do think that that's cool. I think that that could be said of a lot of JRPs of this era, but it's certainly true of this game because there's so many characters, because it's such a complicated world with so many moving parts, and they're all so, you know, these little points that when you unfocused,

you know, they become a lot bigger. And I even liked the scene where Luca Blight poisons the king or sort of allows Jowie to poison the king. I guess it's sort of debatable as to which of them is truly responsible for that moment, which is another thing that people debate quite a bit, by the way, which I also think is very fun. because that scene is so minimal. There's so little dialogue there.

It's also the most you ever learn about Luke of Blight as a person. He's just sort of depicted as this black and white evil guy who's always saying ha ha ha over and over again with a lot of explanation points. And, you know, it's hard for me to really care about a villain like that. But this one scene, he has this sort of mysterious line about what happened to him and his mother, which many people have extrapolated,

apparently based on the Japanese translation, as being a reference to his mother having been raped and his father running away in fear rather than preventing the rape of his mother and that rape leading to Gilia being born. That's her name, right? Princess Gilia.

And so then, in the end of that scene, the only way you could really piece that together as an English speaker is that Lucas says to Gilea, he's not really your father. Like, it's just one line that he says to her. And in the moment I was like, is that figurative? Like, I just assumed it was him

just saying like, oh, he hasn't really been a father to us. Why are you crying? He's not been a paternal figure in our lives. But it could also be literally true that she's just his half-sister. And like the fact that that's so minimal, I mean, I had heard just from, you know, reading all these threads because I don't care about spoilers, obviously, that there was going to be some type of rape backstory with Luca Blight and I was really dreading it.

But in practice, it's quite minimalist and you really have to dig for it. So I'm like, that's actually pretty impressive. Like, this is a game that a kid could play and certainly. be horrified by some of the violence in it. But an adult might look at that scene and be like, what are these mysterious lines between these characters? What exactly is going on here? And there's more to uncover.

And I thought that was cool too. I like the restraint there. It's so funny hearing you guys talk and kind of justify what is really the game's biggest flaw, which is just this incomprehensible translation. And like this game is not, like, this game would be far better if you didn't have to like skim lines and if you could actually just read dialogue. That scene would still be short though, even if it were written more clearly. I'm not talking about that specifically as much as just the game as a whole being like the writing being incomprehensible in this game in a lot of ways. I think that takes

away from it. Well, I'm not justifying the bad translation. I'm saying that the bad translation cannot disguise what is ultimately a well put together story. I'm saying that the story works despite the translation. And the unfocusing that I'm talking about is something that I'm doing in order to see the story instead of the translation to see the forest for the trees. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, no, I know. It's just, it's funny to view that as an artistic interpretation when it's like actually just a fuck up. No, I mean, it's not an artistic interpretation.

It's a way of seeing the story beneath the translation. Yeah, we're seeing through it somehow. My artistic interpretation is just pretty limited to that story because my artistic interpretation of the translation is, it's bad. That's not that interesting. Yeah. Also, Jason, I agree with you. The part where the soldiers all throw their badges down and they join you is pretty badass, even if it is cliche. We talked about this some when talking about the first half, but this remains true that just the technological capabilities of the PlayStation 1 make it possible for there to be a lot of really cool, bespoke animations like, you know.

unique sequences where people do things you know the blood the king is killed the throwing these unique animations they're really cool and like Nami throwing you into the into the wall and like or like Mugablite's entire death sequence the arrows flying down and killing the men around him

like all of that I mean it's it is really striking looking game quite a bit there's a lot of cool stuff and the context here remember is that this is when a lot of 3D games are coming out most games most JRPs and RPG most PlayStation games were 3D this is one of the rare 2D ones which is one of the reasons it didn't sell so well, but it looks way better today than Final Fantasy 7 or Final Fantasy 8.

Like it looks incredible compared to those games. Yeah, it's like the hand-drawn versus early CGI. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that Ghost Wolf was all practical effects. That was really staged in use. It was just all puppet. Yeah. So have you guys been playing around with different character combinations and

unite attacks and ruins and stuff like that? I have a ton. I don't know. looks like Kirk has. Having a ton. I've played with a ton of different characters. But part of that is because I'll kind of get attached to people after I recruit them. And I'll be like, well, I want to keep hanging out with this person a little bit.

I feel like I just finally got to know them. And then I'll hang out with them for a little while. And then I'll be like, well, I didn't really get to know them that well, just fighting with them. And then I'm disappointed. But then I get to know somebody else. And I'm like, but they seem cool. I'll fight with them for a little while.

So I've been doing a lot of that. And then also discovering that some of the characters, are not very good in battle, which I don't know. There's so many characters that some of them definitely are stronger than others or have their own strengths and weaknesses and so on. It's funny. It's actually, you can, because of the ruin system and the weapon sharpening system, like you can make everybody pretty powerful, but yes, definitely somewhere better than others.

That's for sure. I always liked using high yo and smacking people around with the chef's fan. Maddie, to your point, that's always been one of the reasons that no other game or series has done with Suikon and does, where you recruit 100. plus characters is because it's impossible to give everybody depth when you have that kind of breath, when you have that kind of like, when you have those numbers. And I'm very curious to see, like, it's in a modern game, you would go around in the castle and you would talk to people and they would always be saying different things. Or like they would all have their own side quests and

you would get to know each of them. I'm very curious to see how Aedin Chronicles, which is going to be the spiritual successor to this game by Yoshitaka Miriama, the director who created it, the greatest who could in I'm very curious to see how that what kind of approach that takes because it feels like a very not modern thing to have all these characters who some of whom just have zero personality

or traits other than just like I am a cobalt dude who speaks like a baby there's been a shift you know toward I don't want to say quality over quantity well depth over breadth depth over breath there you go with you know biore games and games of that structure but I don't know I mean if there's no voice acting in motion capture and the game looks like Sweet Hoden,

I could actually picture a modern game where there's just significantly more writing, and the writing is significantly better executed, and you really do just get a fleshed out story for 108 characters. Like, there's that much writing in something like Disco Elysium. It doesn't have that many characters,

but I could totally see it. It doesn't need to be, you know, hours and hours of stuff. It just needs to be like a nice little short story for each character. That's a lot of writing, but you can hire people to do that. And that would be cool. I mean, I could see that really, making a game feel distinct.

It could also be exhausting. It could also be pretty tiring. I don't know. Depending on how you take it in, I suppose. Yeah, I feel like Fire Emblem Three Houses is still my go-to for this. When I first started playing that, I was like, God, there's so many characters. How am I going to keep them all straight? I don't even know what house to join.

And there's like a thousand people in everywhere I go. But of course, by the end of the game, you know every single person in and out, and you can't believe it if they die and you're freaking out because you know them all. And of course, that's fewer characters. But I think something like that is possible. You could at least have like 30 or so characters that are really fleshed out in that way.

And then the additional, I don't know, 80 or however many that are maybe lesser and sort of affiliated with the previous 30 to the point where you kind of get the gist. And then it doesn't feel like something like a cross between FF6 and Pokemon where like FF6 has a really big ensemble cast, but you get to know them all. And Pokemon and purposefully is created such that the math is the most fun of it all and the tactics. and not really so much the characterization beyond the cute little pictures. And Sweet Conan 2 is in this weird spot where it's struggling to be something closer to a JRP that has all that characterization. I think Fire Emblem 3 House is a great comparison point because really, I mean, there are so many characters in that game.

And part of the magic of that game is that there are more characters than you can meet in your first playthrough than you could have in your party. Like, you know, straight up there are some members of houses that won't leave their house and join your house. And also you just don't really have time to develop that many characters. And that is actually a cool feeling, too, of just knowing, well, there's also all those other characters. And there are some that maybe seemed boring and I didn't care, but there were some that I was kind of intrigued by. And that makes you want to play it again and play as a different house and get to know them more.

And it turns the game into this really rich text, just this super dense experience full of characters, which I could completely see working in a game that structure just a little bit differently like Suicod. And even though the structure of those two games is very similar than more than I think about it. glad you mentioned that, Maddie, because they're very similar games. So you're saying you're not going to replay this to see what would happen if you pick Kasumi instead of Aliyah? That's all I can think about. Well, what would happen? I mean, it's going to be a completely different game, I think.

I definitely didn't Google it in a panic trying to find out whether or not it would matter. Who's better, Valeria or Cassini? So, yeah, I mean, I think to one of the initial points you made, Maddie, things, I've bounced off a few, I've run into definitely some obstacles on this play-through, one of which being just repeating the same friggin forest areas over and over again, especially in Greenhill where you have to go through that one passenger like four times. That is really a bummer. I find the combat, I still think it's fast enough that it doesn't really bother me,

but I can see why it might have bothered you, especially when I'm holding fast forward. The bosses sometimes take a little too long, so I can see why some of these kind of like turn-based J-R-BG things bother you a little bit. But I find that the unites and the ruins and experimenting with new characters, all that stuff kind of makes it enjoyable, at least for me, to be fighting some of these random encounters as repetitive as they can be sometimes. I think I'd be having more fun if I was varying my party more, but I just find it to be a pain to deal with equipment and to deal with ruins. The fact that you have to go de-equip runes and re-equip runes. I'm using double-beat a lot, which is a great ruin, but you have to farm to get it.

so I only have one. So then I have to take it off of Shiro and put it on Humphrey. And then if I want to take Humphrey out of my party and go just out with the squirrel guy to get the squirrels, I'm like, well, do I need to take double beat off? And that means I need to go to the ruin vendor. And it's just a lot of that kind of, you know, the time wasting quality of life stuff from late-night use GRP's that holds me back. Yeah, same. I mean, it's also just JRP combat.

It's just not my thing. But I can certainly recognize the parts of it that are fun. I always like it when I just so happen to discover a new United Attack because of the characters that I've put together, even if it's not a very good one. I'm just like, oh, sick, a new United Attack. I mean, that's exciting in and of itself. Or like, oh, the Rune Cellar has a new type of Rune. How is that going to look? Is that going to have a cool animation? And then I watch it one time and I fast forwarded it from every point onwards because I don't need to see it more than once ever in my life. But it's exciting for that one millisecond. Maddie, use the Bluegate

ruin if you haven't already. All right. I'll check it out. That has some sick animations. A thing that I've found, so I'm replaying Persona 5, and that game, I think, has fantastic turn-based combat. Prisna 5's was pretty good, but Royal has really just up the ante on the turn-based combat. It's super, super good. And a big part of what makes it so fun is that enemy vulnerabilities are really highlighted, and it becomes this game of can you hit weak spots on enemies, which has always been persona combat. You're really incentivized to hit those weak spots, so you want to decode the enemy, find the

weak spot, figure out how to arrange your party's attack so that you're hitting the weak spots in order, getting these like domino, these really satisfying domino sequences, and that works super well. It's like my favorite turn-based combat that I've done since I can remember in this style, not in like a tactics, fire emblem style, sort of a different thing, or XCOM or whatever. And playing this game, I think that a lot of that stuff is in Sweet Kodin 2, the same weaknesses, those same strategies, but they're not quite foregrounded in a way where like the interface is telling me when I'm really pulling off the right move, so I can't really tell. and a lot of times I'm just over-leveled,

and I'm kind of steamrolling enemies. So I don't have that moment-to-moment kind of friction with the game where I'm feeling like I'm really involved in the combat. So it kind of just skates by me and I don't really notice it, both because it's not telling me what's going on and because it just sort of goes so quickly a lot of the time. All right, before we go, there's one more thing we have to discuss, and I'm going to read you guys a couple of quotes.

Great. It took hundreds to kill me, but I killed humans by the thousands. look at me, I am sublime, I am the true face of evil. Luca Blight, our man, we've defeated him, and only took three parties and, like, an pair army battle, and also a shitload of arrows, and then a shitload more, a bunch of arrows, and then a one-on-one duel for a good measure, which I think is a pretty incredible way of showing the power of this guy.

What did you guys make of that whole epic night sequence fighting against Luke of Light? I thought the opening cutscene was really cool. I know we already mentioned it, but I was genuinely surprised by it because I had no expectations going in. I just was like, okay, I had to make those three parties. I don't even understand why, but I just chose my strongest guys, sure, whatever.

Like, I didn't know what was going to happen because, of course, they can't really tell you that. They sort of explain the tactic, but you don't know what it's going to look like when it plays out. And then I was really impressed by it. It was cool, like seeing all my guys having to go up against Luca Blight one by one. And well,

and there are three little parties that I'd made. And then, of course, the grand finale where it's just me, me and Luca facing off. I don't know. I dug it. I don't think I've ever played

a JRP battle like that before. It's kind of annoying. I did have to leave and go sharpen my weapons in order to defeat him, but it's all good. I did that and I came back. Everybody was all sharpened up

and they were ready to go. And I got him on the second time. But yeah, it was a cool cut scene. Yeah, I liked the structure, the sort of tiered structure, the fact that it really is emphasizing just how hard this guy is to kill, how he's like this total dick to the end, and you finally kill him, and this is very satisfying. I think kind of highlights an overall issue that I've got with this game, which is that there are sequences, there are a lot of sequences that feel as though they're scripted, and that I'm supposed to be playing through them, but I'm not really supposed to be playing through them, and I find myself sort of questioning how interactive they are. This is an issue that I have with the map battles, which we haven't really talked about, but I think are just, I don't really understand them and I don't get why they're in the game because I've yet to play one that feels like I'm actually engaging with the tactics because it's every single one. Some scripted event happens in the middle and people retreat and you're supposed to win, you're supposed to lose.

And it's really just me stressing out about someone dying. So this felt kind of similar to that in that I was not sure what I was supposed to be doing. I wasn't even sure if the first two parties mattered. They only kind of do because they can lower his health a little bit. but my third party was my hitter party with Humphrey who can just like solo Luca Blight. So that party was all that really mattered. So then I looked back on it and it was kind of the same question of, well, I did a lot of work putting these parties together and played through this whole sequence.

But really, this was kind of just a foregone conclusion. So it's like, it's cool in its presentation. It's well put together. But it does kind of emphasize an issue that I have with just how the set pieces are designed in this game where they don't quite feel interactive enough to me a lot of the time. Well, no, I mean, what's happening there behind the scenes is that your guys are softening him and the damage you do to him in the first two battles carries over to the last. Yeah, that's what I said.

But my first two parties, I didn't even care. I just sort of let them get wiped and it didn't matter because my third party was so strong. I mean, I know that that's how it works, but it didn't really make a difference to me. But in theory, if you don't have an overpowered third party, it might actually make a difference if you're doing enough damage in the first two parties. That's the idea of it. Right, but the end of the battle is a foregone. conclusion, it's just going to be these three fights. You know what I'm saying? It's like, it's similar

to the map battles. And there's just, we're all being funneled toward this thing. The two parties are probably going to lose. They're going to lose no matter what, eventually. And then the third party is the only one that can beat him. Like, there's a lot of like sort of walls put up. You can't beat him in the first phase. You know, you can't, like you have to get all the way through the whole thing because they want you to have the set piece experience, which I get, but also leaves it feeling a little bit like I've been railroaded yet again when the game has already been doing that a lot through every set piece basically up till now. Well, then you've got to get to your epic one-on-one duel where you finally get on top of the dude.

Very satisfying. There aren't a lot of, I've noticed that 101 duels are kind of a thing throughout all of Sweet-O-Den. Every game has that mechanic. There aren't a lot of them in this game. I think there are more in other Sweet-Coding games, but this is the Luca one, I think, is maybe like the third or the second, and it's usually more common. There's optional ones with recruiting, I guess. Yeah, the Amado one, yeah, you can do. And then the Army battles. Army battles are also featured in Sweet Conan, except they're different in every single game.

This is very much, yes, they are terrible in Suicotan too. This is very much them just trying to figure out what these are going to look like. They get better and better as the series goes on up to like five where they're actually pretty fun and really strategic. It feels like they're leaving a thing on the table. Like this would be a cool aspect of a game. Yeah. It's just not. It's really not handled very well, unfortunately. But yeah, the Luke Blight Battle I thought was awesome. Yeah, I don't know. Final thoughts before we get going. Did you guys, I know you guys have kind of mixed feelings about this game. Any kind of lasting, lasting thoughts that you haven't mentioned yet? No, I think it's going to be interesting. I'm looking forward to finishing and talking about it. Yeah, me too. I'm kind of psyched that the last chunk of the game is going to be me facing off with Jawi

because I feel like that's a more interesting face-off than Luca ever could have been. Yeah, well, I'm curious, Maddie. and try not to Google anymore, but I'm curious as to like I do what I want, man. No, it's fine. I think that could totally enrich the experience. It helps me. Because the game's different. Well, because I feel like

your question actually is going to get answered. So I'm very curious. We'll talk about this on the Bean Scots because I feel like the question of Joey's motives, if I remember correctly, I haven't played this game a long time. So we'll discuss once we've all finished it. But I remember it being answered pretty definitively by the game pretty

soon after the Leukovite. actually. So we shall see. We'll get back to it. So that's two. Thank you guys for playing along for following catering to my whims and playing this video game. Very curious to hear what you guys think of the last third because that's where the real emotional like powerhouse stuff is coming out. That's where it gets good. That's where Ryu and Jowie decide to put down their swords and start dating. Finally. That's how it ends. Fingers crossed. You're not too far off from the truth. Hey, I'm sure there's a lot of stuff on AO3 about that. If I could only resist Googling it.

We will be, so we will be back at the end of June to talk about the entire game and spoil the entire story. But for now, we're going to take a quick break and then be back with one more thing. You're in a theater. The lights go down. You're about to get swept up by the characters and all their little details and interpersonal dramas. You look at them and think, that person is so obviously in love with their best friend. Wait, am I in love with my best friend? That character's mom is so overbearing. Why doesn't she just stand up to her?

Oh, God, do I need to stand up to my own mother? If you've ever recognized yourself in a movie, then join me, Jordan Cruciola, for the podcast, Feeling Scene. We've talked to author Susan Orlean on realizing her own marriage was falling apart after watching Adaptation, an Adaptation of her own work, and comedian Hari Kondabolu, on why Harold and Kumar was a depressingly important movie for Southeast Asians. So join me every Thursday for the Feast Asian. So join me every Thursday for the Feeling Scene podcast here on Maximum Fun.

And we are back. Kirk, Maddie, it is time for one more thing. Maddie, kick us off. Sure. So my One More Thing is a TV show that's on Netflix. It's called Heart Stopper. It is so adorable. It's kind of painful. Like it's poignant and it makes you feel so intense about what it was like to be a teenager. It's about teenagers. The key art for this show is poignant. And they insisted on casting teenagers. And it just, it just like fills you with both the cringe and also the like intense sympathy that you would have for teenagers.

So the main plot, there's a bunch of different teenage characters and they're like love story shenanigans. But the main plot is between this sort of diminutive kind of nerdy guy who is gay and he's already out at school and has been teased constantly for it. But he's already out. Everybody knows. And he falls in love with this jock guy who he's pretty sure is straight. And that's like sort of the overarching plot line is that the two of them become like best friends. And this gay guy is like dealing with the fact that he has a crush on his friend. And like, is that okay or not?

And there's so, I just, it's such a simple plot. Like really if I were to go over the actual plot of the show, nothing happens really. It's not twists and turns. It's not Game of Thrones. Like almost nothing happens in each episode. and yet it is such a nail biter because there's so many awkward or just incredibly poignant moments that are super relatable. I think whether you're straight or gay or whatever,

it's like just it takes you back there. You're like, oh my God, like remember pining after someone and not being able to say anything to them? And like it just takes over your entire life and it's all you can think about. That's the show. And it's just, it's super, super well done. I liked it a lot more than I even thought I would. It's nice.

But it's also. extremely painful because you're like, ah, oh my God, stop! It's the best. It's the best. Yeah, it looks good. It's called Heartstopper. Heartstopper.

It's so cute. Amazing soundtrack, too. So many great, like, indie pop hits. And it's British, so they all have cute little accents, too. That makes it even more poignant when they're rich. I know. I know. I'm charmed by it as a silly American who just thinks British accents are charming.

Kirk, what's your one more thing? My one more thing is Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically, Dungeons and Dragons Eberon rising from the last war at the setting because I have been playing a recurring D&D game with a group of friends over the last few months. We've been meeting once a month and getting a D&D game going.

So we're in the early stages. In person or on Zoom? In person. I'm jealous. It's been really, really cool. So my friend Sam is, our dungeon master, it's his first time being a DM. And I've just been playing as a member of this party.

and it's been really cool. I mean, we're early enough that I can't get into the particulars even of our story because there's like stuff about my character that the other characters don't know and I don't want to talk about it yet, but my character's so cool that eventually I'll talk about it.

Do they listen to this podcast or other... They might. I don't want to risk it. You have a mysterious ruin that makes it so that you have to fight one of the other players by the end, but you're not going to let them know until like a third of the way through. That's not that far from what's happened?

Are you plagiarizing speakers? go to two. Kurt. Basically, yeah, I'm basically plagiarizing a lot of things. It's a lot of familiar character beats that are in my character. Well, that's the D&D is. It's an excuse to plagiarize your favorite things. Yes.

But it's been so much fun. And I just, I wanted to sort of mention it and mention that I've been doing it. So Eberon is a setting. You know how D&D has these settings that you can buy. And I've been reading through the Eberon book. We've played a couple of sessions and I had, you know, I'd read a little bit, I knew a little bit. Now I'm like, okay, I need to actually learn what the hell is going on in this world

because I need to embody a character who lives there. And that alone has proved to be a very interesting challenge because I can't just sort of roll through it and make decisions the way you do in a video game and then read the codex if I want to because my character needs to be making decisions based on politics and commerce and what's happening in the city of Sharn.

And I'm like, okay, well, I kind of know Sharn because Sam showed us this map at the beginning of the session, but I need to go and actually look at the map and figure out where I live and make all of these decisions that will then inform what I'm doing in the moment. So that's just been cool to sort of read a bunch of lore with purpose because the lore exists to just give you a starting point. It's just a really different thing than a video game, even though it's functionally so similar.

It's like a backdrop for the action to be set. You need to actually know it in order to make the decisions your character makes. So that's been really cool. And just the collaborative storytelling process has been extremely fun. It's been really fun to watch my friend Sam come into his own as a storyteller and just embrace. he's being a great DM. He's putting a lot of work into it. And the way he tells stories, the images he paints, the language he uses.

He's a good writer. And it's just been fun because I've never read any of his writing before. And having that experience is really cool. And then just recently this week, he and I met to do a little one-on-one backstory session about my character to, like, establish some more stuff about, like, you know, my character has some memory issues and doesn't remember some things. So some of my backstory is actually being written by him. So he's telling me

the first memories that I have since I lost my memory and we're working through that and it's just, that was really cool to just sit down together and collaboratively kind of come up with this stuff. We did a little bit of role playing but it was also just storytelling.

And it's, I mean, it's just been such a cool experience. It's also just fun to roll dice. Kirk, it's gonna turn out your sith lord. So watch out. Wow. Nothing you can do about it. There is some, yeah, there's some cool sort of unknowns about my character

that I will get to live. learn. But then, of course, I also get to make a lot of decisions about who he is. And yeah, I'm having a great time. And just, it's such a fun thing to do. If anyone out there, of course, I know Jason, you've talked about D&D quite a bit, at least a while ago and sort of encouraged people to do it. Yeah, I mean, coincidentally, before I had my child, I talked about D&D quite a bit. It's a time commitment. Though actually Sam and his wife just, they had a baby not lagging, and they're fine in time. So it's possible. But anyways, it's been really cool. And I just wanted to that's cool and I'll probably give some updates

over the course of the year as we keep going. We're going kind of slow, but yeah, I'm really into it. Very happy for you. Yeah, you should give us an update when you do your sociopathic reveal of whatever you're really planning in classic Kirk Hamilton style. Yeah, tell us what this true story is. I will. Once I've fully revealed everything about my character to the party, I'll tell you all what my character is like.

Great. Can't wait to be shocked and appalled. My one more thing is also a Netflix show. It's called The G Word with Adam Conover. So full disclosure, Adam Conover, who's the start of the show, as a friend of mine. So take that, take all of my recommendations here with a great show, I would say. Friend of the show, yes. But he's about your mind. All that said, I really enjoyed this show.

So this is a sixth episode miniseries. It would be funny if you were like, I hated this show. And I hated this. It's about the government. So a lot of people know Adam from his old show, Adam ruins everything with Shared in True TV. We actually had him on split screen back in the day. to talk about Adam Prince Everything and the process of making that show, which was really cool. But that show was kind of like, it's him explaining things and interviewing experts and doing

comedic recreations of stuff that kind of helps answer questions about day-to-day life, one thing or another, from like science to food to whatever. Adam just ruins kind of popular misconceptions. This is sort of like that. It's kind of like a spiritual successor to that in that it's still him going around and interviewing experts and doing comedic recreations and stuff like that, except each episode is about a different aspect of our government. And so the show, it's loosely based on the fifth risk by Michael Lewis, that book that came out a few years ago that kind of delves into different unknown parts of our

government. It's also produced by the Obamas and the Obama production company. Oh, and that production deal they did with Netflix. Yes. So our man, Barack is actually in the show, and he talks a little bit about government, too, and some funny and enjoyable ways. and also Adam presses him with some hard questions, which is also very, very fun to watch. Tell us about the drones, Barack. Yeah, actually, I don't know if that comes up specifically, but he does push him on some stuff.

And drones are mentioned in the show. And so the show is like, it's like equal parts looks at like these parts of government that are inspiring and amazing and make you think, wow, like really, there's some cool stuff going on here that I didn't know about. And also failures and horrifying things that our government just like lets us down on a day-to-day basis. So like it might be one episode is about food. And like there's some really interesting looks at like the way food safety works.

Another episode looks at like how our weather is tracked and GPS. I thought you're going to say how the weather is decided by the government. Yeah, yeah, yeah, how it's controlled by weather satellites. How it's controlled by the Jews. And how it's actually. When I said the government, that was implicit. That is what you meant. Yeah, it's actually me wearing, wearing my yarmaca and my beard and my fingers clasped together. With your weather lovers.

And then there's some really cool stuff in there. And then it's like going after like FEMA and how shitty they are or like going after the government's response to COVID. And so I thought I was worried when I started watching this that it was just going to be me angry. But I would say it's mostly entertaining and just like a fraction of it is angry. also he has some actors who play these different parts throughout each episode who are like doing the comic recreations and one of them is this guy James Austin Johnson who I think is on SNL now but you guys might remember as that guy who had the the super accurate like Trump impressions back in the day oh man yeah I do remember that guy he is incredibly talented he's super good in this and like plays some amazing parts not Trump Trump is like barely mentioned which is a good thing for this show show. The show is more about lower levels of government and how that's, how that's, Netflix has taught us one thing that's that maybe we don't need to give all Trump impersonators their own show. No, no, no, no. Well, this guy is, trust me, this guy is super talented beyond.

No, I know. I believe you. Beyond the Trump. That's just how we went viral. It's like doing super good. And even his, the reason that his Trump impersonations were so good was because he wasn't actually going, he was saying the most of an ancient, like Trump talking about like Mario and stuff. Yeah. Like, like Trump complaining. Yeah. I was talking about the one lady who had the show. Yeah, no, I knew we were talking about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, the G word with Adam Conover, I highly recommend it.

Again, I'm friends with Adam, so take this with a grain of salt, but I really enjoyed watching it. It's on Netflix. So you say you're friends with a famous Adam Conover. Is that when we're getting, Jason? Yeah, I mean, I'm also friends with the famous Kirk Hamilton, but I don't brag about it to everybody. That's true.

You have to disclose every time you recommend what I like shit. Yeah, every time I recommend strong songs. Full disclosure. Every time we talk about Strongstock, I'd be like, well, now I'm friends with Kirk so who can say if it's good or not?

The important thing here, Jason Schreier, friends with Adam Conover. Well, actually, I forgot to mention I'm friends with Barack Obama. Right, friends with Barack Obama.

So take this recommendation with the grain of salt. And you control the weather. We're learning so much. It's wild. It's a wild show. When we were talking about Sweetin and two,

I forgot to mention, I'm friends with Luke Blight, but I don't know about against me. It's one reason I might like this game. But it didn't work out. for reasons that we can't get into, it didn't work out. Yes, yes. Also friends with Margot in Eldon Ring.

But I'll mention that when we record our Beanscast. Not friends with Margot. Just Margot. Just Margot. That seems really hard for a few reasons that, again, we'll get into on the Beanscast about Elton Ring. All right. I think we've gone off the rails.

Time to stop this chain. While we still can, Kurt Kumani. I'll see you guys next week. Yep, see you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ.

Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at TripleClick. pod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned. Audience, audience supported.