The "Something Old, Something New" Week in Gaming

This week, The Besties host a double feature! First, we’ve got the Hades-like Windblown, the new game from the creators of Dead Cells. Then, Griffin and Plante celebrate the ultra-cozy Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake. And yes, we spend a little time on Mario & Luigi: Brothership — for better or worse.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Russ Frushtick?

  How do I make my son not afraid of Bowser?

• 0:02Griffin McElroy?

  Golly, that's the question.

• 0:06Speaker 02

  Why is your son afraid of Bowser?

• 0:07Chris Plante?

  Right? You gotta put him up in like, something like cute. Like, you know, you gotta maybe like have him coming out of a birthday cake. Um, I think that's probably good.

• 0:16Griffin McElroy?

  That would scare the shit out of a-

• 0:18Chris Plante?

  Kind of like sharpen his teeth, maybe.

• 0:20Russ Frushtick?

  Sorry, are we talking about my son or are we talking about Bowser?

• 0:22Chris Plante?

  Cover him in tomato sauce.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  You have to make your son better prepared to fight Bowser. Give your son the tools. If your son fears Bowser, there's some, there's a weakness in him, Russ. You need to replace it with strength.

• 0:37Griffin McElroy?

  If your child, or really anyone's child, came upon Bowser in the wild, maybe it's a good thing for them to be scared of Bowser. He's a horrible dragon man.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:50Griffin McElroy?

  Who wants to burn you with fire, crush you with his stomp.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  The only reason-

• 0:54Griffin McElroy?

  Instill you on his spikes.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. The little plumber is allowed to talk shit because he knows where there's stars that can give him an incredible boost at any moment. You don't have that. Bowser would rip you-

• 1:07Griffin McElroy?

  Rip your body in half.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Rip you in half.

• 1:10Griffin McElroy?

  And these fucking-

• 1:11Speaker 02

  He would probably consume you.

• 1:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Like-

• 1:15Griffin McElroy?

  It would be, you would be living Bowser's inside story, but not in like a fun, frivolous way. You would be, you would be devouring-

• 1:22Speaker 02

  No, in a way that you would merge with his amino acids.

• 1:25Griffin McElroy?

  You would be fucking killed. You would become more Bowser and it, guys, I'm sick of all these Mario RPGs trying to make him seem like a clumsy. The fucking movie is bullshit for so many reasons.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Non-canon.

• 1:38Griffin McElroy?

  To make him seem like a little, like a fucking oaf and not a killer dragon man, I think is irresponsible.

• 1:47Chris Plante?

  Honestly, I think they've made us so focused on being Bowser's inside story.

• 1:54Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Chris Plante?

  Because they don't want us to think about what happens when you become Bowser's outside story.

• 1:59Griffin McElroy?

  That's really good, Chris. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  It doesn't make any sense. Not even, no, not even with a sort of M.C. Escher-esque Lewis Carrollian sort of like jumps of logic. Like even if the caterpillar had been like, "Sometimes in Minion Max, you go inside the Mario."

• 2:21Griffin McElroy?

  My son is afraid of Doug Bowser.

• 2:23Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, reasonable. Yeah.

• 2:25Griffin McElroy?

  My kid's afraid of Bowser from Sha La La.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.

• 2:50Griffin McElroy?

  My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.

• 2:53Chris Plante?

  My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week.

• 2:57Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Russ Russ, I know the best game of the week.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Welcome, friends, to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club, and just by listening, you, my friend, have become a member. On this week's episode, we have a twofer.

• 3:16Russ Frushtick?

  We have a bit of a curveball.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  A bit of a pivot.

• 3:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, a bit of a pivot, because we kind of told people.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  What we got?

• 3:22Russ Frushtick?

  We were gonna do Mario Brothership, Mario and Luigi Brothership. I played some of it. Griffin, did you play it all?

• 3:29Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, no. No.

• 3:31Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I, in my experience, I don't think it would have been made for the best conversation, so we kind of pivoted a little bit.

• 3:38Griffin McElroy?

  IGN, five out of 10.

• 3:42Russ Frushtick?

  IGN, give it a five, which I think is a little harsh, based on what I played, but they did play the whole game, so maybe I don't know. But I just wanted to give you some background.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Hey, Russ, can I just say, brief timeout. It's so, you've been in this business for literally, I mean, 15, 20 years, right?

• 3:57Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  The idea that you would still, at this point, as a man and a father, who's been in this industry so long, the fact that you would still do a side swipe, like, five out of 10 for the new Mario Brothership, that seems a little low. Anyway, like, the fact that you would still do that, you're a grown-up, old man. You're like, I didn't play much, but anyway, five out of 10 seems low. Maybe on the doll from Nintendo? Maybe Tobias is in?

• 4:24Griffin McElroy?

  You didn't kick the hornet's nest as much as you walked up to it and looked at it and took a bite out of it.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  So fucking good, dude.

• 4:31Griffin McElroy?

  For no reason.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  You're also a professional in the same field as him.

• 4:35Russ Frushtick?

  You're right. I rescind my dumb note.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Don't, don't. I love you. Don't.

• 4:41Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, who am I to fucking say, uh, me who played several hours, but not 40 hours.

• 4:46Griffin McElroy?

  I jeans on the Sega payroll clearly. So what are we doing this week instead?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't actually get to the intro yet.

• 4:53Russ Frushtick?

  Okay. So, uh, yeah, we're, we're mixing it up. What are we doing, Juice?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  This week, we're going to talk about, uh, Windblown, uh, which is the new one from the Dead Cells, folks. And I would still like to know something about Brothership. Like I would, I would like to.

• 5:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I'll speak about it in the honorable mention section.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  All right, good. I would love to hear about that. And then, uh, we got a, a quest, a quest of a different stripe, featuring the dragons, uh, that everybody loves. And Griffin was excited about Dragon Quest 3 coming back. And I, and I really don't understand why. I'm really looking.

• 5:27Griffin McElroy?

  Dragon Quest 3 HD 2D remake. It drips off the tongue.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  I am so.

• 5:32Griffin McElroy?

  Drizzle.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Very validated in my flippants.

• 5:35Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, you are, you are valid. Let's go to a break and then talk about some shit. Okay, we're gonna start with Windblown.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:44Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, this is a game that is in early access. It is made by the folks who made Dead Cells. And, uh, it is a, uh, isometric rogue-like in the style of Hades.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Okay, do we need at this point?

• 5:58Russ Frushtick?

  Define what that is?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Is, is, well, no, it's, it's the structure of this is so regimented. I'm almost starting to feel like it's a genre unto itself. Right? This idea of like the isometric run-based, uh, like the, the layering of powers. So you're like building a power set that.

• 6:16Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, with a meta upgrade thing.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, meta upgrade that can kind of, well, not just a meta upgrade, but like the run is like a layered, like, the pace of powers is like layering on top of, and you're like building a build as you go.

• 6:31Russ Frushtick?

  Right.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And it's like, not just about managing health, but like managing all these different like currencies and upgrades.

• 6:37Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, the problem is that's rogue.

• 6:40Griffin McElroy?

  That's rogue.

• 6:41Russ Frushtick?

  That's a rogue game.

• 6:42Griffin McElroy?

  So it's like, it's, it's a hack and slash rogue-like. I think.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, you're right. No, no, no, I understand. Yes.

• 6:49Russ Frushtick?

  No, I, I, I get the instinct because it is so similar to Hades and you almost want to divide that from like traditional rogue and those rules.

• 6:59Russ Frushtick?

  I guess Rogue Light, right? That's what they call it.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  To me, there's a difference between the, uh, okay, to me, there is a lot less of a, with the kind of game I'm thinking about with the Hades. It's a lot more dependent on like, good roles.

• 7:15Russ Frushtick?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Giving you a, a build that is dominant, rather than a skill-based thing where you're getting good with all these kinds of different weapons, which I would argue what Dead Cells was.

• 7:24Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Was like, learning how the weapons work. And it was a lot more about that versus like, I got these different upgrades that all sort of complement each other.

• 7:32Russ Frushtick?

  You do get, I mean, there are roles in Dead Cells. Anyway, I think it's an interesting distinction.

• 7:38Griffin McElroy?

  Let's set up like what the game, what the game actually is before.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do this, Russ.

• 7:43Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, fine. It's an isometric Rogue Light. Um, you're like, oh God, there's, there is a story, but I really didn't grok it. You're like an animal person. There's a bunch of animal people on like a floating island and you have to something.

• 7:59Griffin McElroy?

  It's early access.

• 8:00Russ Frushtick?

  You're fighting a bunch of guys. Don't, don't worry about the narrative. You're fighting a bunch of guys in arenas that again, are pretty similar to Hades, if you played Hades. And honestly, the core of the game to me feels like, it feels like Hades merged with Dead Cells. Like you have very similar kind of weapon slots and ability slots like you did in Dead Cells. But obviously the combat being isometric and arena-based.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  There's definitely an idea of like, the two, your two main weapons like complementing each other and how they, how you're switching between those two main forms of combat, which was a big part of Dead Cells. And I think it's not as, not as mu, it's not that like main special distinction from a Hades. It's kind of like a dual.

• 8:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Wielding.

• 8:49Russ Frushtick?

  Right. And you've also got these two abilities that are on cooldown. So you might have like a bomb that you can activate every 30 seconds. And then you'll get passive perks that'll like decrease cooldowns or increase damage. Again, very Dead Cells, but in a Hades format.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. Yes. Do you get to date monsters?

• 9:08Russ Frushtick?

  Not yet.

• 9:08Griffin McElroy?

  I have to, it's in early access.

• 9:09Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think so.

• 9:10Griffin McElroy?

  I have to imagine you get to date monsters.

• 9:11Russ Frushtick?

  It seems more kid friendly than either Dead Cells or Hades.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:16Griffin McElroy?

  Is love not for kids?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  The way it's structured right now, I would say that they are really not intending for you to linger in the hub world currently. They are very much sort of like, you get the base currency, which in this game is gears. You spend the gears that you managed to bring back from your last run and you, you know, move on. And there's a couple more like dalliances there, but they're really not trying to weigh you down with story. They really want you to hop back up and, and go start a run again.

• 9:46Griffin McElroy?

  Does, does it do the Dead Cells-y thing where you unlock sort of more, uh, you know, tools and weapons and stuff?

• 9:54Russ Frushtick?

  Blueprints, yes.

• 9:55Griffin McElroy?

  Blueprints that appear out in the wild that you?

• 9:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that is, that is in there as well.

• 9:58Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, cool.

• 9:59Chris Plante?

  So my big bummer with a game like Dead Cells and this entire kind of like area.

• 10:05Russ Frushtick?

  I'm so excited. Go ahead, because this is perfect setup for segment B. Go ahead.

• 10:10Chris Plante?

  Okay. Um, oh, don't worry. I'm, I'm, I'm aware of the problems with the game I'm bringing. Don't worry. You have to play so much to unlock the various things that are the actual game.

• 10:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 10:26Chris Plante?

  And well, and here's where it is different than segment B in a RPG. Yes, I get it. RPG is you have to play too long before it gets fun. Weirdly, this one's gonna be the opposite. Uh, but here where it's like, oh, if you just wanna see the game, which it's happened in another game I played recently, which is like the like, there was a Vampire Survivors game, I think is like guilty of this, that entire genre.

• 10:50Chris Plante?

  I guess I'm saying is like, how long do I have to play this before it actually feels like the game?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So I, I will, if I could address this with Wind Blown, I think the issue right now with Wind Blown is actually more about it being in early access. And what it decide, how it decides to meter at information, because my frustration, I think, is it was teaching me the things that I already know. Because I know the genre and it spends early stuff teaching you those sorts of ideas, which you, if you have fluency, you already know them, right? So you're not like, it's not that engaging. And I played the first like, really only like 20, 30 minutes. And I'm like, I don't really get what's special about this because it just feels like the other games, but that's because they're teaching me the stuff that I already know.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  That, once you get a little bit deeper in, legitimately like 30 minutes in, it's doing some cool stuff. I'll give you an example. We're talking about dual, like having two weapons you're switching between. You, it has this idea where if you string together enough attacks with one weapon, it incentivizes you to flip to the other weapon and you do a special, more powerful attack. So you're got a flow going there and you're incentivized to break what you're doing and switch to your other weapon and bring that into your flow of combat. So like finding good moments in the flow of combat to like switch weapons to keep this going.

• 12:15Russ Frushtick?

  And that is a very smart evolution of Dead Cells where oftentimes I'd be on a Dead Cells run and I just would forget that I had a secondary weapon.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Russ Frushtick?

  Cause my primary was so strong. So this encourages mixing things up.

• 12:27Chris Plante?

  I think I have a better way of asking what I was getting at, which is there's that threshold in a Dead Cells like game where you get to a boss and it's like, congratulations, you've made it to the boss. You're just going to have to play this section over five or six times. It's happened with that Prince of Persia game that we brought, that not the great one, but the one that was like good.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Rogue?

• 12:48Chris Plante?

  Yeah, Prince of Persia Rogue, where it's like, okay, it doesn't actually matter what my skill is. I have to grind it to get to that point.

• 12:57Russ Frushtick?

  No, I understand. So Justin and I have had a different experience with this.

• 13:00Chris Plante?

  Okay.

• 13:01Russ Frushtick?

  I played my very first run, I played through and I made it to the second boss of the second area and was doing pretty well. I know Justin being like worse at games overall.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Ah, sure.

• 13:16Chris Plante?

  Somebody who needs guides.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  It's legit. No, I'll say that I didn't, I was actually trying to rush the tempo too much. Like if you ranged is a pretty good option in this game and it's not something that I would normally think about. But it's actually really effective here and you kind of have to utilize it and I don't think I would be using enough. Because Russ and I last night or yesterday afternoon played together.

• 13:39Russ Frushtick?

  And that is the, this is the thing. That's the hook that you don't know. And honestly, the game is not very good at telling you that there's multiplayer in this game.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:48Griffin McElroy?

  But how does it, how does it work?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  It's cool as hell. Can I tell you how it works? It's really fucking cool.

• 13:53Griffin McElroy?

  Rad.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  You go in and you're just basically playing the game in tandem with each other and you get an upgrade. And I, I was a little unclear, Russ, on whether or not we were each getting upgrades or we were like sharing or splitting them.

• 14:05Russ Frushtick?

  It seems like they were instanced unless you drop something on the ground, in which case anyone can pick it up.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  But the, the, uh, this game is very fast moving, right? So it's very much like you have a very fast dash that you can use to not just get around fights, but get around the islands. The, the battles are like smaller, they're more condensed than a Hades, like they're more like drawn in.

• 14:28Russ Frushtick?

  Like six guys instead of Hades where you're fighting like 30.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So it's moving a lot faster, but the, I think the time to kill on yourself is fast too, right? So it's not like a run falls apart over several minutes. It's like, oh shit, I'm getting my ass kicked. Oh no, I'm dead. A little closer to Vampire Survivors in that feel a little bit, like you get overwhelmed fairly quickly. But in the multiplayer, when you're going through together, when one of the players dies, the other player has a kill counter above their head and they gotta get 10 kills.

• 15:01Griffin McElroy?

  To revive.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  To revive.

• 15:02Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, cool.

• 15:03Russ Frushtick?

  Well, and also you're in, you're in sudden death. So if you get hit once while in that mode, you're, it's the end of the run.

• 15:10Griffin McElroy?

  That's really good.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  So the other, so I, so that is like, it's. So smart in terms of how do you balance for two players who are unequally yoked, if you will, because I died and suddenly I was way into what was happening on the screen. Cause it's suddenly this intense thing where I'm watching a much better player have like a high stakes run all of a sudden that could bring me back into the game or not. And then, and so we're both like engaged with it, even though like our skill level is very different. It's like, it's really smart.

• 15:44Chris Plante?

  I, I loved it. As long as you are playing with somebody who isn't going to be mad if like, because it sounds like they, they die too effectively if.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You, what you meant to say is as long as you play with somebody who has learned over a decade, how to mask their anger with you, not just as a player, but as a human being.

• 16:06Chris Plante?

  And by a decade, you mean however old Russ is in years.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Well, how long Russ and I have known each other? Yes. Russ has got a really good.

• 16:14Chris Plante?

  I love that it doesn't have the, the multiplayer thing where it's like, oh great. I died and now I have to just watch and who knows how long I'm going to have to watch where I might have to watch.

• 16:23Russ Frushtick?

  Well, you do have to watch, but you're watching with purpose.

• 16:26Chris Plante?

  Five, 15 minutes you're watching for like a little chunk waiting.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  And you're not passively watching. You are biting your nails. Cause like the whole run is going to fall apart right here. If, if the other person can't, can't come through.

• 16:39Chris Plante?

  The flip side is for somebody who's not, not Russ, but somebody, you know, like Russ, as bad as that feeling of, oh no, I died because my partner died is the feeling of, I am such a great and generous God that I brought my friend back to life. Far, I suspect would far exceed it for a person like Russ, but not us.

• 17:02Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. If someone could just recreate the Sistine Chapel ceiling and me reaching out and just touch Justin's hand to bring him back to life.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  It feels, it's really, and also in addition to it being very tense, when you pull through, the other person comes back with like half health and the other person is usually back at full health because they haven't been dinged. And it's like, you're way back in it. Like you're absolutely, it's legitimate. Like the run is like absolutely back on if you can pull through the, the sudden death thing. Okay. So that being said, trying to go back to it after Russ and I did that. I found it a lot less engaging for me personally trying to play solo after it was that fun to play multiplayer like Yeah. I felt like it was not showing as well for me. And is it up to four players?

• 17:48Russ Frushtick?

  It's it's three. So it maxes out at three. I've played three with randoms for what it's worth. Um, and that worked totally fine. I didn't feel any lag when I was playing with Justin or with randoms. I think it was designed-

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Which is impressive because it's really fast.

• 18:00Russ Frushtick?

  Really fast. I mean, it was definitely designed from the ground up to, so there's probably some fudging going on to make sure you feel it feels good. Um, so it feels great. I think the multiplayer is the defining factor of why it sets itself apart. But I also think the minute to minute feels really strong because they've been making some variant of this game since Dead Cells launch, however, fucking years, eight years ago, whatever it was.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  The weapons feel cool too. They've already got some interesting ideas. There's a, uh, like a crossbow that you fire on a beat. And if you fire in, keep the rhythm going.

• 18:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, there's like a quick time circle. So if you're hitting the circle each time you do critical hits.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  And the music is fucking killer in this game.

• 18:40Russ Frushtick?

  Great music.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And if you're firing in with the beat, you keep a combo going, your damage is increasing, but if you roll out of it, then you lose it. So it's like this, like, how long are you going to stay stationary and stay on the beat? And that's just the one weapon. But the first time I got that, I was like, oh, wow. If they have a lot of different ones like this, because a lot of them have really, uh, cool ideas like that.

• 19:01Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. The, the other differentiating factor with Dead Cells is if you've ever played a lot of Dead Cells, you know, the feeling of like, I'm doing really great. I have a streak going, whatever. I haven't been hit for a while. And then I make like a dumb platforming move where I fall into acid. There's no pits. Oh, sorry. There are a ton of pits in this game, but there's no way to fall into them.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Wait, strike that. There's lots of pits.

• 19:24Russ Frushtick?

  But there's no way to fall into them. You've got this, the air dash basically, and you spend a lot of time between arenas. You're just air dashing automatically across from platform to platform. But it just like does all the work for you such that you literally can't fall into anything.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:39Russ Frushtick?

  So there's no, the only time you're ever going to get hit is by getting hit by an enemy. Um, so that kind of simplifies a lot of the exploration aspects, which are- Relatively simple compared to what they were in Dead Cells. But if you found that frustrating, the platforming stuff frustrating, there's essentially zero platforming in this.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  A bit of a behind the scenes question here, but this is early access. Do I need to play this game before we do the besties, like the final besties besties?

• 20:09Russ Frushtick?

  For this year?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:11Russ Frushtick?

  No, I don't, I don't think it's ready. I could see it being a contender next year for when it hits 1.0 or whatever.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I would say the biggest, and I always struggle with this because I know this comes down to taste, but I would say my biggest problem with it right now is that there it is so smooth with like easing you back into a run after a death that I feel like it doesn't feel chunky enough for me to where I really feel a loss or a gain. Like, I don't have that sense of like having to, like, I worry that it's not impactful enough to keep me engaged with it. It's like, it doesn't really frustrate me and I feel like that's going to keep me with a lot of these run based things. That's part of the magic for me. I think it's like, all right, I'm gonna go back and I don't feel as compelled to like, just one more run this.

• 21:00Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, there was that run where we dropped like 100 cogs on the ground after a death and that was pretty brutal.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Utterly demoralizing.

• 21:06Russ Frushtick?

  But I do think that there are, I agree with you because when you go to the store and you like, look at the potential upgrades, it doesn't feel as enticing as it probably should.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yes. And a lot of the upgrades in runs too are like 5% better damage, 10% better like money, whatever. Like, it's like not fun.

• 21:24Russ Frushtick?

  It's also not necessarily, and this is a totally personal thing. So look at screenshots and video to decide for yourself. Not necessarily my preferred aesthetic. I much prefer the like look and feel of Dead Cells.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Sure. Feels like a cancelled Moba.

• 21:40Russ Frushtick?

  That was Justin's note, which is.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  It looks like.

• 21:42Russ Frushtick?

  Pretty bad on and also very hard.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  It looks like a cancelled Moba that was spearheaded by a first person shooter designer.

• 21:50Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's very, I don't even know how to describe it.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Is, am I wrong?

• 21:56Chris Plante?

  No, I mean, you're not wrong, but you know, lots of things don't need to be said just because they're true.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  It's very funny, but it's me, it's pretty. It is mean, it is mean.

• 22:08Russ Frushtick?

  It looks like a game that could be called like Lucky's Crystal Adventure. Even though the gameplay itself is much more elevated than that.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hey, don't shit talk Lucky's Crystal Adventure. It's my favorite game of the year. It looks like a game that somehow South Korea pays you a dollar an hour to play. You don't exactly know how it works, but like, yeah, okay, fine.

• 22:29Russ Frushtick?

  But, but it's very like as a game, it's a lot of fun. So yeah, now that, I mean, I don't know how to address that problem. It's really just a taste thing, but maybe we're just old men and don't like that look and feel, but the feel of it.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  I haven't liked the way a game has looked for five years.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  No, you know what? Are you trying to think of a game you'd like the look of? Yeah, there was one game. What was the card game with Stotz? Fucking inscription? Inscription, that one's cool. I like the way that one's. The only game you've liked the look of in the last five, okay, man.

• 23:00Russ Frushtick?

  Take that Greg Kasavin and team.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  What? They rest, hey, listen, baby, they're resting on their laurels. Hades came out more than five years ago. Okay. And I like the way Hades looked. They didn't even finish this one before they put it out, Greg. Got his, got Greg's like paper towel and Sharpie drawings that he just like had laying around. Finish the game, Greg, before you let me play it. I'm just kidding, Greg. Please, please don't kick me out, man. I barely made it to Olympus.

• 23:29Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, man. Okay.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  I think this is cool. It really is. There's a lot of, there is a lot of like really smart ideas here that I think that like, and they're the kind of thing that feels like you want more of, like the early access is fun because you're getting to get these like new weapons that will be really fun and interesting.

• 23:48Russ Frushtick?

  It's also not rough for an early access game. It's incredibly well polished.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. What's there is very smooth.

• 23:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Chris Plante?

  Hey, um, Fresh, while he's been talking, has been sharpening knives, um, for the next section.

• 24:02Russ Frushtick?

  He's so excited.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  I don't know why, I don't know why. I'm so ignorant of this. I'm so thrilled.

• 24:09Chris Plante?

  I am so ready to talk about Dragon Quest III HD 2D remake right after this break.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  To begin, Dragon Quest was released as Dragon Warrior on the NES.

• 24:24Griffin McElroy?

  Good.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  And so if you don't understand what Dragon Quest is, you should know that it's the same as Dragon Warrior on the NES.

• 24:30Russ Frushtick?

  And do the numbers match up?

• 24:32Griffin McElroy?

  The numbers do match up unlike Final Fantasy, yes, which I is certainly a lot easier.

• 24:36Chris Plante?

  How many people do you think were listening and are like, oh, now I know.

• 24:39Griffin McElroy?

  Now I get it. Now I understand.

• 24:41Chris Plante?

  Dozens.

• 24:42Griffin McElroy?

  And we did have that one on NES, man. It's got so many fucking slimes. Came out on the NES. So Dragon Warrior 1 was pretty groundbreaking. It sort of proved you could do a big RPG like Wizardry, like Ultima on console as tiny as the NES. But it was just one guy, one character, and that was it. It was pretty straightforward. You didn't have a whole team. Dragon Quest 2 introduced like a couple of party members that rocked with you, but they were pretty static. And then Dragon Quest 3 came out and really almost completely destroyed the economy of the nation of Japan. Because of how deeply, deeply into it people got.

• 25:21Chris Plante?

  Like many people got arrested for truancy laws.

• 25:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, yes.

• 25:25Chris Plante?

  It was like, it was just bonkers.

• 25:28Griffin McElroy?

  And the reason why that is, is because it sort of, it adds a party creation sort of mechanic that was way, way, way, way, way ahead of its time. And sort of expanded the world in every direction. So you had more choice in where you explored. There were entire like side quests and areas that you wouldn't go through. Things that like, I feel like to talk about Dragon Quest 3, you have to be able to place it in its era and the context of like what it meant, because it truly was way ahead of its time. Now, if you don't like Dragon Quest games or JRPGs, is this the one for you? Fucking definitely not, because this is still a Dragon Quest-ass Dragon Quest game.

• 26:13Griffin McElroy?

  Although Chris, you might dissent to that, because it seems like you like this one more than you were expecting.

• 26:17Chris Plante?

  I feel like I've transcended, and I have great, probably you to thank the most for that.

• 26:21Russ Frushtick?

  You've been Griffin-pilled.

• 26:23Chris Plante?

  Yep, I have been Griffin-pilled. The past year especially of playing. Yakuza or sorry, like a dragon infinite wealth, which I think we've talked about that that combat kind of eased me into turn based and metaphor, which fully brought me in. I was just ready for this and I, I thought I wouldn't enjoy it because I played Dragon Quest 11 and overall liked it, but the combat was like slow and turn based, not really my thing. And the idea of going from Dragon Quest 11 Elder Way to three sounded terrifying, but the game looks good.

• 26:56Griffin McElroy?

  Looks and sounds great.

• 26:58Chris Plante?

  Go further. Can you explain like what's going on with the visuals?

• 27:00Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, yeah, it is Square Enix's sort of patented, um, Octopath Traveler, uh, you know, flat sprites on these gorgeous sort of three, 3D, uh, dynamically lit, uh, worlds.

• 27:14Russ Frushtick?

  And that's what that 2D, uh, Jason Troyer had to explain this to me because I didn't, I thought the title was insane.

• 27:20Griffin McElroy?

  It is insane. They're even explaining it. It's still insane.

• 27:23Russ Frushtick?

  2D, what is it? HD 2D?

• 27:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Russ Frushtick?

  That's how they're branding this look.

• 27:28Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Russ Frushtick?

  So 2D sprites in a 3D world with actual lighting is 2D, uh, HD 2D.

• 27:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Russ Frushtick?

  And so when you see that in a

• 27:37Griffin McElroy?

  Shift focus.

• 27:38Russ Frushtick?

  And a tilt shift. Yeah. Like lighting and stuff.

• 27:40Griffin McElroy?

  So I, I will say I am deeply into this game unsurprisingly. I had my own sort of voyage through the whole catalog of Dragon Quest games during COVID. Uh, that is how I decided to spend my, my quarantine time. Uh, but I didn't really ever get around to this one because I, I was excited for this game to come out. Uh, and I'm having a really good time with it. I think that the like party planning stuff is like, it's very satisfying to like make a team of heroes with different jobs, uh, and sort of like a feeling like that sort of experience is your own. Uh, and like other Dragon Quest games, you can really kind of interact with it as much as you want to, to wit, like this game has tactics where you can tell your party members what to do

• 28:25Griffin McElroy?

  and then you don't have to give them orders in combat. And then you can speed that combat up to a hysterical degree. Uh, it has difficulty settings and it has a lot of quality of life stuff like, uh, Stuff that's never been in Dragon Quest games before, like a map with waypoints on it. You can turn that on, turn it off at your leisure, so you can.

• 28:44Russ Frushtick?

  Waitpoints like fast travel waypoints?

• 28:45Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, the game does have fast travel. It's always had a spell that you can use, and now it's free. Like, they have really, truly, more than any other Dragon Quest game, smoothed off all the rough edges of the experience. So like, I don't know, if you've been interested in Dragon Quest, and you've liked some, like, say, like, Res, you started playing 11, but it didn't really click for you, maybe this might work, because it's like-

• 29:08Russ Frushtick?

  I actually, based, and I'm curious what you guys think. Do you think the narrative of this is like relatively light?

• 29:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yo, yes. Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 29:16Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so that's a good thing for me.

• 29:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 29:18Russ Frushtick?

  Because 11, what turned me off of 11 is, "I'm a very special boy, and I need to climb a hill, and I'm gonna spend six hours climbing a fucking mountain to get my very special magic power."

• 29:28Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 29:28Russ Frushtick?

  I would rather it be, throw me in like it's spelunky, and like, whatever, I get the gist. I'd rather fucking fight monsters immediately.

• 29:36Chris Plante?

  Hmm, maybe, well, maybe you might like it, because, yes, the narrative for the first five hours is like, go to tower.

• 29:44Griffin McElroy?

  Go to tower, get stone. Get stone from tower. Unlock gate for boat. It's like, very, very, very, very-

• 29:51Russ Frushtick?

  That's enticing.

• 29:53Chris Plante?

  Yes, the, I am absolutely smitten with the design of this, and everything that you talked about, Griffin, of making it accommodating for whatever you enjoy about the game. So, for me, I effectively just blast through combat, even randomized events. I preset my party for what I want them to do. I have it on ultra speed. And the second I go into a battle, I hit attack, and then I go back to watching TV. And then the fight ends, and then I've finished that grinding, and I move on a little further, and the same thing happens over and over again. I think, fresh, I messaged you that it's like a perfect podcast game. You kind of want to be doing something else during large parts of it, because it is a grind, but it's not unfun.

• 30:37Griffin McElroy?

  It is like doodling. It is, doodling is a really, really, really good way of descri- it is so lightweight. It is fun to watch the numbers go up. There's like cross-class mechanics that you eventually unlock to like further like, I've got a priest that I just made a martial artist so he can heal and do fighting stuff. Like, it's so simple. It's so, there's nothing truly revolutionary about most of the stuff that it does. It, now, that wasn't true back in 1993 or whatever, whenever the original game came out. Then it was pretty fucking revolutionary, but now it's just like-

• 31:12Chris Plante?

  That's the fun, is that because everything else is made so easy, as a kind of like a history lesson of like, hey, I've always wanted to go back and see what made these games so special. Because all of the annoying parts are completely out of my way, I, I'm just enjoying, like, seeing exactly what you're talking about, Griffin, where I'm like recruiting characters and using these items to change their jobs in all these absolutely strange ways. And the map is huge. The open, it's like an open world map and Griffin mentioned that, yes, you can get these kind of like goals on the map where you need, you know, head to X. But the system that I love the most is you are motivated to talk to all the characters

• 31:54Chris Plante?

  because characters are constantly dropping clues of where things might be. So you're talking to a random character and they're like, oh, well, I had heard something about this mysterious treasure that was dropped by these pirates in this part of the land. And then if you hit start on the Steam Deck, you can save that piece of dialogue into a like dialogue bank.

• 32:17Griffin McElroy?

  Hmm, I like that a lot.

• 32:19Chris Plante?

  In theory, you could play the whole game like you would with like a notebook, turn off or ignore the like waypointing and spend the entire time actually having an adventure. And that's where I like hit from, like, hit my head of like, no wonder this game was huge, because imagining playing this on the NES where you have this giant open world and like, characters are just kind of throwing little bits of dialogue at you and you can go anywhere you want to have your own adventure.

• 32:47Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, to some extent, it sounds like Zelda 1.

• 32:50Russ Frushtick?

  Where you have this very large space and you're getting like cryptic hints of like, hey, there might be a heart on a peninsula, wherever the fuck that is.

• 32:57Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's an apt comparison for specifically for Dragon Quest I, right? But I think Dragon Quest III, as a, as a pretty diehard fan of JRPGs with like a pretty, like, I think, strong familiarity with the lexicon of the whole genre, it is astonishing how much of that came from this game. And I, and I think that like, if you do enjoy JRPGs and you were like me a few years ago, having never really gotten into Dragon Quest, I think that this is actually a pretty quick way to like, learn what this whole series is about. Because it's also like, there is a charm to this series that is difficult to, to encapsulate.

• 33:42Griffin McElroy?

  It is, it like, every area of the map is like, sort of a microcosmic version of like, a real world, like, country or city. And so you're like, going on this weird world tour of like, now I'm in Italy, and now I'm in Egypt, and now I'm in, and all of the dialogue is-

• 33:59Russ Frushtick?

  But not racist, right?

• 34:00Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, I don't think I'm the right person to describe whether or not that is true.

• 34:05Chris Plante?

  It's got fictional accents that are like, not, nothing like wherever they're at.

• 34:10Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know, the Italian accents are, they sound pretty-

• 34:13Russ Frushtick?

  It has voiceover?

• 34:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, so there is some, some voiceover for like, during like, important scenes. I will say that they did change, there's a, a city in the sort of like, Egypt-inspired part of the land, that the original game was called ISIS. And they have gone ahead and changed that to Ibis. So they did change that one for-

• 34:35Russ Frushtick?

  Cool, cool, cool.

• 34:36Griffin McElroy?

  For a certain-

• 34:37Chris Plante?

  Giving a thumbs up that you can't see right now.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Before we close, what else would you like to say?

• 34:42Chris Plante?

  My only kind of, I guess, warning for people of my, who are not hardcore RPG people and are kind of just coming into it, is I did hit a wall around probably like seven hours or so, where you start to get into dungeons and you can fall off edges while you're navigating dungeons. And again, there are these like randomized battles, so you will get through a dungeon, you'll be doing really well, and then you'll just drop off a edge because you weren't paying attention because it's a chill out game. And suddenly you are of one, two, three lower levels.

• 35:21Griffin McElroy?

  It's very, it's quite de-oralizing, yeah. There's also like cursed items.

• 35:25Chris Plante?

  And at first it was like funny and then it was less funny each time it happened.

• 35:30Griffin McElroy?

  You don't really get much description for what the different items and pieces of equipment do, and some of them are secretly cursed, where if you equip them, like you're just kind of fucked. Like, there is lots of, there's lots of, there's lots of really classic kind of cruft to it. It is not going to be the game that changes your mind about Dragon Quest if you already know how you feel about the series, but I don't know, I think there's lots of people who are, who are really, really gonna enjoy it. I certainly am.

• 35:58Russ Frushtick?

  I guess I had a question. We've talked a lot about, in the past, about games with upgrades or items that don't feel very satisfying, like a 3% increase to damage. And every time that I've played a JRPG, it kind of makes me feel like every time I level up, it's meaningless, because even though the numbers do go up, it equates to essentially a 3% increase in damage. So how is that different from like God of War's issues where a piece of armor is doing the same thing?

• 36:31Chris Plante?

  So there are items in the game and pieces of equipment that just do very different things. So you can get like a boomerang in the game, and it will attack every enemy on screen, which as you get going later on is like eight characters versus having like a sword that does one, or you can have a whip that does a kind of a version of that. The other thing that you have is just like the different spells that you're getting with each of those upgrades. So yeah, your like points are going up, but you're getting different spells that change how your characters play and perform.

• 37:04Griffin McElroy?

  And you can also multi-class, once you get, once you get them to level 20, you can like multi-class. Like there are big breakpoints to like hunt down to like make the characters considerably stronger. Uh, and I think just having those kind of in front of you every time you get a new spell or ability for a character like it really, you're gonna use it, um, because there's not a ton of stuff you can do in this game. Uh, so like, I don't know, all of that stuff feels very tactile and very sort of meaningful and, uh, it, the combat is, is somewhat punishing if you're not like making steps towards getting stronger. Uh, and so it, I don't know, it feels necessary and rewarding to, to do that stuff.

• 37:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I, I am, I am enticed by it again, because it is that de-emphasis of narrative.

• 37:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Russ Frushtick?

  It bums me out because I know what the steps after this are, which is like more and more and more and more narrative, which doesn't appeal to me at all.

• 37:57Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know that that's gonna happen in Dragon Quest III, man. It really.

• 38:00Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, no, but I'm, I'm, I mean, in this game, this was like, kind of the end of this period of like relatively light narrative.

• 38:07Chris Plante?

  Dragon Quest games have more narrative than this, but not so much that, if you liked this, I would just say that I think like, oh, you found your RPG series. Dragon Quest in general is like it.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Before we close real quick, Russ, if you could open up the, the box art that I sent in the bestie slack, I would just love for, imagine everyone, the, the year is 1989 and you go into your local Funkland looking for a new game. And Russ is behind the counter and you're like, hey Russ, I am looking for a new NES game. I'm just a kid. And Russ is like, actually I have one that I'd love to recommend to you. And Russ, if you could just read this box.

• 38:46Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, sure. Um, Dragon Warrior, the epic beginning of a new era in video games.

• 38:53Griffin McElroy?

  Good, good so far.

• 38:55Russ Frushtick?

  Mere finger speed and sweat are no match for the challenges of this game. You will be required to use deductive reasoning, not a quick sword to defeat your enemies. All is darkness, the dragon Lloyd.

• 39:11Griffin McElroy?

  The dragon Lloyd.

• 39:14Griffin McElroy?

  Dragon Lloyd.

• 39:14Russ Frushtick?

  Has has captured Prince, the princess and stolen Erd Rick's powerful ball of light.

• 39:22Griffin McElroy?

  This chick's ass.

• 39:24Russ Frushtick?

  You are Erdrick's heir. It's now there's no space between.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was just Erdrick.

• 39:29Russ Frushtick?

  To you has fallen the most dangerous task.

• 39:31Griffin McElroy?

  Erdrick's dad.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Hardrick is my dad.

• 39:37Russ Frushtick?

  This is spectacular.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Okay, go ahead, please.

• 39:39Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, okay, sorry. You are Erdrick's heir. To you has fallen the most dangerous task to rescue the king's daughter and recover the mystic ball of light. Your mi- your mission is deadly, but it is your fate. Prophets have long foretold your coming. Three keepers await your journey, each ready to aid you with the mystic item of great power. Gather three objects. Scribes will record your deeds. Use cunning and wisdom to choose your commands. Gain experience, weapons and armor as you battle your way through the world. Rest if you must.

• 40:10Griffin McElroy?

  Rude. Judgey.

• 40:12Russ Frushtick?

  Search out the dragon lord's lair and face your destiny. The, in this role playing adventure, you are the dragon warrior.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  So I do think it's supposed to say dragon lord. I think in the second paragraph, I think that's what dragon Lloyd is, is they're trying to type dragon.

• 40:30Russ Frushtick?

  You're right.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  It's just a typo, I guess, on the back of dragon warrior.

• 40:33Russ Frushtick?

  And Erdrick is probably a typo too with the space between.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Amazing, but yeah.

• 40:37Griffin McElroy?

  I'll buy, I, I'll buy it. Thank you so much. I'll buy this.

• 40:40Russ Frushtick?

  This sounds dynamite.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  It sounds dynamite and the box art is just fuck ass.

• 40:44Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, that is so bad shit. I mean, this is for the first game. This is not for three.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  No, but that NES gap between box art here, the Mega Man gap is in full force here.

• 40:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Russ Frushtick?

  Cool.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Cool. Well, what else is, uh, what else going on, guys?

• 41:00Russ Frushtick?

  So, um, yeah, in our role mentions, I'm going to talk a little bit about, uh, Mary Louie G. Brothership, which again, I didn't play a ton of, but I played, I think, enough to at least have a short statement on it.

• 41:13Russ Frushtick?

  Here's the thing. I think Nintendo has learned the lesson that maybe reimagining the combat of a Mario RPG every single time they make a game is not the best idea. And I know they've struggled with like the crazy origami combat and the sticker star combat, whatever it is. This feels like a return to, okay, we're just gonna kind of master the combat that was in Super Mario RPG and the Mario and Luigi games, and we're just gonna like refine that to the point that it feels good. And you know what? It feels really good. I really, really like the combat in this game. What the issue is, is you're, it's just like pacing wise, it's incredibly

• 41:56Russ Frushtick?

  slow, which I know has been a complaint of others on this podcast regarding some of the Mario and Luigi games. And the characters you're meeting aren't very interesting. And it just doesn't necessarily draw you in. Again, I only played about four or five hours, but I was not in the heist to, you know, solve the problems of this world. And I think part of it is just they're so unwilling to tap into the Mushroom Kingdom like catalog of characters. So they keep having to reinvent these like standalone random ass like cloud people that no one cares about, rather than like, we were talking about a Thousand Year Door, where like, hey, this, this shy guy kind of sounds like he's dealing drugs.

• 42:40Russ Frushtick?

  That's pretty funny. And so they don't really, you don't get that level of like enjoyment out of it. It also doesn't run very well, which I think may be a consequence of it maybe being designed for the Switch 2. I don't know for sure, but it just doesn't run great. Which shouldn't necessarily be a problem, but there's like a lot of Twitch combat stuff where you're trying to like nail timing on a jump, and it just doesn't feel as good as it should. So I'm super bummed. I hope this doesn't like doom the future of the Brothership franchise. I actually heard that both remakes of the two RPG remakes that they put out in the last 12 months have sold better than this game at

• 43:20Russ Frushtick?

  launch. So I worry what this abodes for the future, but kind of a, kind of a letdown. I'm definitely disappointed, but yeah.

• 43:31Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, the other game I want to talk about is a game called Redacted, which I know that Justin played.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Ah, this is, this is a good one.

• 43:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  I would say inter- really cool ideas.

• 43:40Russ Frushtick?

  Interesting. Um, it is another, what did we decide?

• 43:44Speaker 02

  You're not allowed to call it a Hades-like because everybody shot me down and they're like, actually, Justin, it's an isometric rogue-like Hades.

• 43:51Russ Frushtick?

  We need something as clean as search action game. So if you could do some research, Justin, and come up with something.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  It's too specific of a genre, but yes, it is this Hades.

• 43:59Russ Frushtick?

  So it is in the style of Hades and, but this one, uh, you're kind of breaking out of a prison and, uh, the combat, it feels a little slower than Hades. Or certainly windblown, um, slightly and a little more tactical, I think.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  The competitive aspect is really what's inter- that, that was interesting about it.

• 44:18Russ Frushtick?

  Right. So as you're escaping from this prison, you're also racing against a handful of AI folks that are also trying to escape the prison. And the AI folks will drop like, uh, curses on you that'll make your runs harder. So for example, one of them will like drop a darkness curse. So now you can only see enemies within your flashlight cone of vision. Um, which makes things very interesting. And then eventually you, if you catch up to them, you'll have these mini boss fights against your rivals. That if you win those boss fights, you get like a huge boost in power. Um, and then you're obviously no longer chasing them because you've killed them.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  You are also able to create hazards for them in the same way. You can slow them down, uh, by choosing, you know, the, some sort of hazard.

• 45:06Griffin McElroy?

  Is there a multiplayer component to this?

• 45:09Russ Frushtick?

  No, it's just single player.

• 45:11Griffin McElroy?

  I was gonna say, that would be fucking rad.

• 45:12Russ Frushtick?

  But it's just.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  But there is, it's a, there is an idea of like you developing a rivalry. Think more like, um, the Lord of the Rings games where it's like, it, it's very clear who you're competing against. They remember you. There's a history there.

• 45:27Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  You're also, uh, unlocking, uh, upgrades that is like, and this is kind of what the, the redacted thing is about. You are gaining information about your competitors and one. Set information is unlocked, it manifests as like damage buffs to them.

• 45:45Chris Plante?

  Okay.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  So it's like, as you learn more about each of the competitors and lock unlock more of their story, you become it's easier to fight them because you know their weaknesses.

• 45:54Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. The game also has like a cool look to it. It's it's like very cell shaded, very comic book style. Which I can't think of any other Hades likes that look like this necessarily. Obviously Hades touches on this, but the whole gameplay has that like same kind of comic book art style. It's also set in the universe of Callisto Protocol. Did you know that, Justin?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  I didn't, and I don't know what that means.

• 46:23Chris Plante?

  They've really buried that. It feels like.

• 46:25Russ Frushtick?

  I know. I think intentionally. I think Kraft in the studio, uh, who's probably best known, I guess, for PUBG at this point. Is trying to like use some of the IP that they have to like launch stuff. And I think they've realized that the IP that they have doesn't necessarily carry a lot of cachet.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  G-Rust, do you think considering they called this game redacted, they don't have a lot of cachet. Literally no title is better than any title that they could come up with.

• 46:57Chris Plante?

  Callisto Protocol, for the people who have already forgotten, was the like Dead Spells spiritual successor.

• 47:03Russ Frushtick?

  Dead Space.

• 47:04Chris Plante?

  Sorry, thank you. You combined Dead Space and Dead Cells into Dead Spells, which sounds like a fucking cool game, Chris.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I'm so amped about Dead Spells. Fuck you, dude. That sounds kick ass. When's drop some info about Dead Spells. Don't just get me all worked up.

• 47:22Chris Plante?

  Dead Spells on Switch 2.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Bumper? Are spells on the bumper are the triggers? Just tell me that at least. Are the Dead Spells on the bumper to the triggers? I'm crazy about red-based, fit. It's a romanticy. You're telling me it's also.

• 47:38Chris Plante?

  Shit.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Fuck dude, there's angel romance in Dead Spells? Fuck, I love this game.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Mollinuser, what? He's bad baby. Mollinuser, it involves?

• 47:52Russ Frushtick?

  Every, every run you plant a tree.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  It's full motion.

• 47:57Russ Frushtick?

  It is on rails, though. We should mention that. It's on rails.

• 48:00Griffin McElroy?

  On Rails FMV Romancacy starring Peter Mollinuser.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Too bad. Fuck.

• 48:05Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I, I've been playing some good stuff. I've been playing Pokemon TCG Pocket, which dropped on Halloween. Uh, real quick, it is a game about opening booster packs of Pokemon cards. You get two a day and it's,

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Without the mess.

• 48:21Griffin McElroy?

  Without the mess, yes.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Without the mess.

• 48:24Griffin McElroy?

  When it's your time, every 12 hours, basically, you just open a booster pack.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  It's your time. The angel of death will come and say, how much time did you spend opening fake Pokemon cards?

• 48:33Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, and then you pick your pack and then you get to drag your finger across the screen and tear it open very satisfying. You get some cards out of it. Uh, and then there's like a bunch of missions and, uh, goals and quests and stuff to like, collect certain cards. There's like a lot of different ways to, to, to get cards and speed that timer up.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Are you buying them or is it just like?

• 48:50Griffin McElroy?

  So you can, right? Like if you don't, no, it's free. Two, two, two a day are free. Um, but then you get,

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Two packs?

• 48:57Griffin McElroy?

  Two packs of five cards each. Um, you, there are lots of ways to speed that timer up. Uh, and you can also pay money basically to, to speed that timer up if you want to. There's also a premium membership you can get that like, now there's a third pack a day and you get all access to all these different other quests to help speed it up. The cool thing about the game is that it also includes, uh, like a playable version of the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Um, and it is way streamlined. It's very, very, very streamlined, so much so that matches last like three to five minutes. Uh, and a lot of the,

• 49:35Russ Frushtick?

  So it's different rules from normal Pokemon?

• 49:38Griffin McElroy?

  So yes, uh, the biggest one is that there's no energy cards. You just get one energy per turn that you can assign to any Pokemon that you want, which really speeds things up considerably. Uh, and then like matches, uh, you only have to like knock out three Pokemon instead of, I think it's five in the main version of the game. Anyway, it goes so fast. It's so simple. I've been playing it with Henry. And it is the perfect, just like, open it up while you're sitting on the toilet, open a pack of cards, maybe do a match, hop in, hop out. It's not like amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but it is, I don't know, it's scratching that sort of like TCG itch for me. What I really want to talk about is

• 50:18Griffin McElroy?

  maybe my biggest surprise of the year of games. And it's that I picked UFO 50 back up when there was a brief lull in the, in the releases. And

• 50:30Speaker 02

  By which means he didn't like the new Dragon Age game?

• 50:32Griffin McElroy?

  By which I mean, I did not like the new Dragon Age game. And I was like, you know, there's a couple of games in here I really liked. I liked Party House. I liked Grimstone. I liked Pilot Quest. I'm just gonna like, just dip into those and see how far I get. And then I finished all those games and was like, well, I'll try another one. And then I'll try another one. And now I'm at 18 cherries, I think, out of 50. The fucking immense amount of satisfaction I get out of picking up a game in that collection and trying it and saying, okay, like, I'm not going to put this down until I get really good at it. And every game, it feels like that, that sort of arc is very achievable.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  I tried to do the 4X one that you recommended, Griff. Just speaking of the arc.

• 51:21Griffin McElroy?

  Avianos.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  That one was tough.

• 51:23Griffin McElroy?

  Avianos. I will say this too. Like, what's really cool, what I am really enjoying about UFO 50 is that the community around this game is quite small, but they are like, really involved in like, straight up schoolyard NES cheat codes level, like, helping people figure out what to do. So there's like certain strategies in Avianos that are more effective than others. And so, like, that's cool. I charried Avianos because I, I looked up like, what, what is, what am I missing here? What are some like, different strategies that work? Once you get your, you know, feel for that, that one, really, really, really got its teeth into me. The most satisfying one was Magic Garden, which is like the third game in the collection, I think. It's the one where you just run up, run around and you collect the little blobs and you have To cash them in and drops potions.

• 52:08Griffin McElroy?

  I played it and I fucking sucked at it so bad, but I was like, there's something cool happening here. And so for maybe like four or five hours, I just played it on flights. And while like chilling in a hotel room, getting better and better and better and better until finally on a flight home from a tour, I finally charried it and it was so fucking good.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  I hate the verb. If you could just not verb that again.

• 52:35Griffin McElroy?

  Cherry? What do you not like about? Is it?

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I don't like.

• 52:40Griffin McElroy?

  Sexual connotation to it that you don't?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  It's a very unpleasant sexual connotation.

• 52:44Russ Frushtick?

  To cherry something.

• 52:44Griffin McElroy?

  Well, I beat, I beat it as good as you could, as good as one can be.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Again, it's not sounding good to me to hear.

• 52:50Griffin McElroy?

  That's fair. That's fair. Yeah, man, I just, I, I, I wanna go back and do that episode over again because I feel like this game optimally like requires a, a, like a mental shift and a, uh, an amount of investment into, into the games. And if you are willing to do that, what is amazing about this collection is like all of the games are, are able to reward you for that. I fucking got the cherry on Moon Cat.

• 53:22Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, I love Moon Cat.

• 53:24Griffin McElroy?

  But it's also like a pretty obtuse game that I played for one minute and I was like, nope, not for me. This is crazy. Going into it.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  How do you decide which ones you're gonna do this with Griffin?

• 53:35Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, I think about which ones are easily, most easily doable, right? So for Moon Cat, like Moon Cat, if you die, it just starts you over on the same screen you're on. And in order to get the cherry on it, you just have to like beat it, beat the different routes that are on it.

• 53:50Russ Frushtick?

  You don't need a perfect run.

• 53:51Griffin McElroy?

  Don't need a perfect run. Very doable, right? Then there's onion, onion delivery, which fucking is brutal and I don't think I will ever cherry. I tried that. I was like, I don't like playing this. I'm not, this is too much. I'm, I'll never.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  So you do have to like, like it on some level or at least be like engaged with it enough. You're like, let me see what else is going on here.

• 54:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, right. And, and that's so interesting to me because like my first pass through it, I was like, I'm gonna look for the games that are of the genre. And are familiar to me in a way that I'm really going to get into. I don't like 4X strategy games, but I played Avianos and after a couple of rounds, I was like, there's something really cool here. And I bet if I put more time into it, I can understand it. And I did, and that's awesome. That's very, very, very, very cool.

• 54:34Russ Frushtick?

  There are a few games in there that are like aspirational games that I really want to do, but I know I would have to take extensive notes to be able to finish them.

• 54:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Russ Frushtick?

  One of them is Barbuda.

• 54:44Griffin McElroy?

  Barbuda.

• 54:45Russ Frushtick?

  I know I can beat Barbuda.

• 54:46Griffin McElroy?

  Got the cherry on Barbuda, no big deal.

• 54:48Russ Frushtick?

  Good work. But I know I would only be able to do it, and I would imagine this was the case for you if you like, really.

• 54:53Griffin McElroy?

  Had a lot of notes, yeah, sure.

• 54:55Russ Frushtick?

  And then the other one is Mortal 2.

• 54:57Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Russ Frushtick?

  Which is the open world version of Mortal.

• 55:00Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Russ Frushtick?

  That also seems like, design-wise, totally my shit, but requires like really precise routing.

• 55:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Russ Frushtick?

  Through it.

• 55:07Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, I'm, yes, that one I have not even attempted to, uh, to try and beat yet.

• 55:12Russ Frushtick?

  Mortal 1 rules, though. That's probably my favorite in the collection.

• 55:15Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, yeah, man, I could go on and on. I, I think it would be fun to do another UFO 50 episode if you, if you all would, uh, you know, ever think about getting back into it. Cause I, I do think there is a, there is a ton going on here. There's a ton to talk about. And a lot of what is amazing about the collection and the games inside of the collection, like, really require you to want to, like an archaeologist, like, dig into them and figure out, like, figure, figure them out. It feels like a conversation between you and the real developers and fictional developers of these games, and it is so, so satisfying once you can kind of let it get its, its hooks in you.

• 55:56Chris Plante?

  I, I think it could be a B segment on the line, but definitely it's going to show up in the game of the year conversation, right?

• 56:03Griffin McElroy?

  It has skyrocketed up my list considerably. It is way, way, way the fuck up there now for me. It's 50 whole games.

• 56:10Russ Frushtick?

  That's true. Barbuda is number one.

• 56:13Griffin McElroy?

  Can I?

• 56:14Russ Frushtick?

  Has anybody watched Stain Dusty Old Joints?

• 56:17Chris Plante?

  Hey, well, I know you're setting me up for Hangover Square.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  I'm trying to set you up for like an old, old classic, like not in a fun flick.

• 56:24Chris Plante?

  It's an old classic, Hangover Square. I just, I brought it here because I felt like we didn't really like do enough to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day this year.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 56:32Chris Plante?

  You know, and that's on us. And, you know, we were supposed to remember this day in November and we didn't.

• 56:38Russ Frushtick?

  We didn't even remember which day it was in November.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:41Chris Plante?

  Yeah, you know, I always forget which day in November to remember. But Hangover Square is a classic, just nasty ass noir, set during Guy Fawkes Day. And you got a dude who's like, he's just trying to write some music, he's trying to write some symphonies. But every time he hears a discordant noise, he goes into like a fugue state. And who knows what happens when he's, when he's heard a discordant noise, you know?

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I don't know. Tell me, because I haven't seen the movie.

• 57:15Chris Plante?

  It's getting trashy. I'm not going to tell you. But here's the other thing I wanted to bring up is, Fresh, can I spoil World of Goo 2 for our audience?

• 57:26Russ Frushtick?

  I guess so.

• 57:27Chris Plante?

  I think that's okay, right?

• 57:28Russ Frushtick?

  Heads up, we're going to spoil World of Goo 2 with this movie.

• 57:30Chris Plante?

  Speaking of games, to maybe go back to, Jacob Geller released a video of games that contain their own sequels. And I won't go into many of those games, but one we've talked about on this show is the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, which turns out to be a sequel to itself. Old, World of Goo 2 is mostly just more World of Goo levels at the beginning, which we talked about on this show, or one of these shows. But at a certain point, it time travels into the distant, distant future, like thousands of years. And suddenly World of Goo is now set on a train that is like, kind of Snowpiercer style, looping around the world endlessly.

• 58:15Chris Plante?

  And then it time travels again, and suddenly you are just getting effectively sequels to World of Goo, including a like golfing World of Goo, and ultimately a cyberpunk pixel noir adventure game.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 58:30Chris Plante?

  And it is-

• 58:33Chris Plante?

  Wild. I don't know if everybody needs to play this if they did not enjoy a world of goo too as much as they'd hoped like us. But this game is, I think it's like maybe like five or six hours long. You can watch a playthrough of it on YouTube and I strongly encourage it. And I can definitely watch Jacob Keller's most recent video. I'll put that in the newsletter too.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  And makes it even more frustrating that they structured it the way they did with like hitting you over the head with the, the perfect run stuff. If, if like forward progress was really what they wanted you to do.

• 59:07Chris Plante?

  Yeah, that's a good point of like.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember that number one complaint being that they hit that stuff so hard.

• 59:13Chris Plante?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, anybody got anything else?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just super duper quick. Uh, I finished Dragon Age Valgarde.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Uh, without getting too negative because I did like it enough to play the whole thing. I think it runs out of, um, good ideas before it runs out of content. There's a, there's a lot, a lot of just like content. And if you're loving it and you're deeply into the characters and everything and you're enjoying all that stuff, there's a lot of it there. But it's like not, if it gets less engaging, the difficulty and the powers and the abilities at all kind of like levels off at a certain point. And you can run down, it, it also does a very unpleasant thing, I think unpleasant. When you're about to start the last mission, it's like, hey, you're gonna start the last mission. And just so you know, here's how things are right now. If you start right now, a bunch of your people are gonna die and

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  most of the communities aren't gonna help you because you haven't done enough quests. And it's like, well, I'm 25 hours in now. So it's like, do you want to see the bad ending that we have for you at 25 hours? Or do you want to invest another 10 if you blaze through cutscenes to see the good ending? And it's like, well, gosh, guys, I don't love either of these. Actually, I don't love either of these options.

• 1:00:33Russ Frushtick?

  I guess it would have been like in Mass Effect 2, you like you go on the suicide mission and like literally everyone dies.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's like it's, and it's laying it out like you could finish it now, but like you wouldn't like it. If you want the good ending, you have to do all the stuff. And it's not like a your choices will be reflected, right? It's not like a you have to go see how all these things connect. It's you have to complete this if you want the happy version.

• 1:00:56Russ Frushtick?

  Did you get the sense that?

• 1:00:58Chris Plante?

  The good ending.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:01:00Chris Plante?

  For the game is what I paid for.

• 1:01:01Russ Frushtick?

  Did you get the sense that any of your choices were making like major changes to the story or not really?

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  It all makes major changes, but it all feels like it's constructed around those choices, but not in a cogent way, but in a way that's very interactive. It's like very responsive to you, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a cogent ending. It feels like a bunch of response. It's like how you could choose for any character to love you by choosing their love dialogue enough times. It's like, this isn't really interact. I mean, it's branching, but only in the sense that like I chose which one I was going to hit the heart button a lot on.

• 1:01:42Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I also just wanted to say very quickly, the Jackbox Survey Scramble is the new Jackbox product. And it, I had not heard about it and it's frigging great. And I'm thrilled because I love this kind of crap. Rather than doing creativity or trivia or anything like that, it is survey based questions, single word answers for the survey responses. And all the games are built around that core idea. So it's to give you an example, sign, words that you would see on a sign at Disneyland. Okay.

• 1:02:21Russ Frushtick?

  Bathroom.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Bathroom. That's really good, Russ. That's probably in the top 10, right? So in one of the games, High Low, it's everybody's on their phones. Everybody enters an answer that they think will be like at first you're trying to get the best. So highest possible answer, what's the best one? Everybody goes around the room, does their best guess. And then maybe later it'll be like, okay, now we want the lower end of the.

• 1:02:43Russ Frushtick?

  Cholera.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Cholera, danger, death, poison, right? Like, whatever it is, and then, so you're trying to get a lower one, and so you're shooting for worse answers.

• 1:02:54Russ Frushtick?

  That's great.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  There's a game where it's like a pong style thing, and you have a paddle here, and your paddle is on a spectrum from like one to 100. One being the best answers and 100 being the worst answers. So if you want to return service on this ball, you have to find a really good answer to the survey question or a really bad answer, depending on where you want the paddle to move to. There's also like a speed game where everybody's trying to enter as many guesses as they can. Um, for like, uh, one round we had for that was like grandma names. What's names of grandmas?

• 1:03:28Russ Frushtick?

  Ruth.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Ruth, Gertrude, Russ, I gotta say, man, this is now the third time, and it's not even a bit, you just can't help yourself, you have to. And it's really, I love that, like, I love the, the lack of pressure.

• 1:03:42Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  For just sitting around a room full of people. And, and it's easy for kids too, kids can stumble into like, you know, Mickey on Disneyland signs, oh, they're in the top three now, they crushed it. And the answers that you're inputting are folded into the data, which is evolving over time. So as you play and return to it, the answers, even if you got the same question again, the answers may not even be the same because it's folding in all of this survey data as you, as you play.

• 1:04:12Russ Frushtick?

  When it's like a low answer, do you, it needs to be something that was picked. So it can't be like gibberish, right? It needs to be like a rank one, right?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  But you are adding it just by putting it one, like, the one time you enter it for the first time, it won't be on the list.

• 1:04:29Russ Frushtick?

  Right.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  But the next time, the list is not a fixed number, right? There's 475 words that might be on Disneyland's side. I don't know how many votes something needs to get for it to get like traction as something that makes the list, but yeah.

• 1:04:44Russ Frushtick?

  No, that's so smart.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  It's really, really fun. I love Jackbox stuff, but I also hate like winning at party games or losing at party games, or people getting frustrated with, with games. And it's really like, you can't get, you can't feel dumb or frustrated because. A hundred people didn't think the same thing as you. You know what I mean? It's, it's, it's great.

• 1:05:05Chris Plante?

  Um, real quick, just because I mentioned it and kind of talked around it earlier. Uh, Karate Survivor, uh, is the Vampire Survivors like that I said earlier. It takes too long to get going, but I want to mention it because it is very interesting. It is a Vampire Survivors game, but set, uh, against like 1980s karate action movies. And it is very melee oriented. And the way that the combat works is there is a like string of, um, film frames at the bottom. Like, I think it's like six or seven individual frames. And you, as you get those upgrades that you do in survivors games, you add a piece of combat as one of those frames.

• 1:05:50Chris Plante?

  And those pieces of combat that you add, so it's like a punch or a roundhouse or like a jumping kick. Some of them complement each other. And if you pair them together, you can create these combos. And then the combat itself is melee based. So you have to really kind of get into the flood of enemies that are coming at you because you're delivering these different like karate combos. And as the game proceeds, you start to unlock the things that actually make it fun, which is like a great, especially Jackie Chan did a lot of this environmental combat. So any like dishes or a broomstick or a baseball bat or a vase that's lying around, you can

• 1:06:32Chris Plante?

  turn into a weapon or you can like roll over a table or slide under a piece of the environment. And it gets really, really good. The only issue is you really do have to kind of endure almost an hour of this game where key features just are not available, like the ability to like roll away from enemies. Um, so if you can get through that, there is something really special here. I think it will get patched. It seems like balancing this game is totally doable. And once that happens, it'll definitely be on my top kind of, if you like this game, you should try it out. Um, yep.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Cool. We talked about a lot of games this week.

• 1:07:16Chris Plante?

  We did.

• 1:07:18Russ Frushtick?

  Do it, play it.

• 1:07:19Chris Plante?

  Video games. Um, hey, speaking of, uh, what did we talk about this week? We talked about Windblown, we talked about Dragon Quest III HD 2D Remake, redacted Mario and Luigi Brothership, Karate Survivor, Pokemon the Card Game Pocket, UFO 50, Dragon Age The Veilguard, Jackbox Survey Scramble, and the film Hangover Square. You can find all of those and more on our newsletter at besties.fan, including that YouTube video by Jacob Geller that I mentioned.

• 1:07:52Russ Frushtick?

  I wanted to thank the following patrons. Uh, patrons, we have Kevin, we have Spencer, we have Cag, I think that's how you pronounce that, sorry, and we have Emily. Thank you for being patrons at patreon.com/thebesties. Thank you to everyone else who has supported it. Uh, we've got a new episode of The Resties up. We've got this month's episode of The Bracket Battles up. Uh, so that's very exciting. Uh, next week, we are talking about a game that I haven't fully discussed with everyone on this podcast, but I think it's going to be genuinely a game of the year contender. I am totally smitten by this game and it has the worst name maybe of the entire year.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Oh, you want to do a whole episode about this one?

• 1:08:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 1:08:35Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Russ Frushtick?

  I think it's gonna be good for a whole episode.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:08:39Chris Plante?

  What's it called?

• 1:08:39Russ Frushtick?

  The game is called Echo Point Nova.

• 1:08:43Chris Plante?

  That's a great video game title, actually, if you think about it.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  You think that now, but try to remember it in 90 minutes.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  I had to text Russ, twice.

• 1:08:52Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, yeah, so the game is called Echo Point Nova. It has pretty bad key art as well. Uh, so ignore that, um, but it rules and, uh,

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  It's crazy. It's a crazy game.

• 1:09:04Russ Frushtick?

  It's gonna be really good.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  It's wild that you're suggesting this quick bot. It's like, okay, we're gonna discuss it next week.

• 1:09:10Russ Frushtick?

  I'm really excited.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  All right. Uh, that is gonna be next week's episode. Uh, I hope you enjoy it. I hope you are ready for it. I hope you will join us again next time for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Besties!