Pod Insights The Besties The Pirate Yakuza Game Has Something for Everyone – Even Newcomers About this episode Ahoy, besties! This week, the crew sets sails with Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, a video game that’s as silly as its name suggests. Unlike its predecessor — our best game of 2024 — this entry features a new(ish) protagonist, old-school action combat, and a potpourri of new min-games that borrow from a wide range of Besties favorites, including Cooking Mama and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
Note from Plante: Last week’s description said Obsidian, the developer of Avowed, had previously made Fallout 76. It should have said Fallout: New Vegas. Sometimes I only have a chance to write the description/newsletter late, late, late in the night before we publish an episode — not an excuse, just an explanation. Needless to say, the mistake was human error and not the result of my co-hosts replacing me with a Content Bot.
Transcript 10,057 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Russ Frushtick? So it's cold and flu season, and I got an important question for you guys.
0:03 Griffin McElroy? Sure.
0:04 Russ Frushtick? Where are you putting those sneezes?
0:07 Griffin McElroy? Um, explain.
0:09 Russ Frushtick? Well, it took me about 27 years to realize that, you know, to do the elbow sneeze.
0:15 Griffin McElroy? Crook of your arm.
0:16 Russ Frushtick? The crook of your arm sneeze, which is now generally considered to be the healthiest place to sneeze.
0:20 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
0:22 Russ Frushtick? Apart from, I guess, the tissue. But then it's in the crook of your arm, so where are you putting that sneeze?
0:28 Chris Plante? Oh, well, you kind of zip past the thing that you're probably ashamed of, which you-
0:33 Russ Frushtick? What?
0:34 Chris Plante? Come on. What you would do back when we worked together like 10 years ago. Griffin, do you remember this? That Frush would carry around a Ziploc bag and sneeze into it every time.
0:44 Russ Frushtick? That's a very good way to do it.
0:46 Griffin McElroy? He called it his nasty sack.
0:48 Chris Plante? Yeah.
0:48 Griffin McElroy? He would carry it around and he would, it was so big that he couldn't like put it in his pockets. So he always just had his nasty sack sort of like bundled up.
0:56 Chris Plante? And it was a biohazard, so he would just staple them to his bedroom wall across the season until we did a big nasty sack emptying.
1:03 Griffin McElroy? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that certainly, I would hate for you to go to fall back into your old ways, Russ.
1:10 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
1:12 Griffin McElroy? The new guidance I've seen coming out of RFK is to get real low down to the ground like you're doing a push-up and just blast it down onto the ground because your sneeze particles settle. So his point, and I disagree with this clown on a lot of ways.
1:25 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
1:25 Griffin McElroy? But he says get real low to the ground and just sneeze right on the ground and then it'll stay on the ground. A push-up sneeze, yeah. And what he says is really great about that is also you're doing a push-up. So you're getting marginally stronger every time you sneeze.
1:37 Chris Plante? And that guy has gains. That they're using to promote this, right?
1:41 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, he goes, "Push it up, push it up, push it up. Get down on the ground and sneeze, you clown."
1:48 Russ Frushtick? Fuck.
1:49 Griffin McElroy? And I don't know why, like, it makes fun of you at the end of it.
1:52 Chris Plante? Well, he wrote it, you know.
1:54 Griffin McElroy? But I mean, he's so fucking built.
1:57 Russ Frushtick? He is.
1:57 Griffin McElroy? He's so built.
1:59 Russ Frushtick? Really in one specific area and nowhere else.
2:01 Griffin McElroy? He has a lot of what I call external physical health, and that's got to count for something, right?
2:26 Griffin McElroy? My name is Griffin McRae. I know the best game of the week.
2:29 Chris Plante? My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week.
2:33 Russ Frushtick? My name is Ross Frusci. I know the best game of the week.
2:37 Griffin McElroy? Welcome to the Best Sees Show, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive intergame meant. It's a game of the year club. And just by listening, you, my friend, are a member. This week, very excited. Justin is on the toilet. This week, very excited.
2:52 Russ Frushtick? It should be noted, actually. So last week, I made a mistake and said that Griffin died. He didn't die. He's here. He's recording with us. Justin died. So that was my mistake. I frequently confuse the two.
3:02 Griffin McElroy? I was having, having trouble getting over a respiratory thing until I did my pushups and this, and now I'm all better.
3:07 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
3:08 Griffin McElroy? This week, we are talking about Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Okay, that one doesn't, it's not as hard to say, actually, as I thought it was going to.
3:17 Russ Frushtick? It covers so many bases.
3:18 Chris Plante? It also takes care of my job, because it says exactly what the game is.
3:22 Griffin McElroy? Literally exactly what it is.
3:23 Chris Plante? A Like a Dragon game, where you would play as a pirate yakuza in Hawaii.
3:27 Griffin McElroy? In Hawaii. It covers genre. It covers location. It covers character. Everything you need to know. They, Ryogaga Toku has done, done it again. And we're going to talk more about it after this.
3:39 Russ Frushtick? So who wants to bring me up to speed on what old Goro's been up to?
3:44 Griffin McElroy? Okay, I don't know this man, aside from his appearances in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I believe, maybe it's Yakuza Zero. I don't know where Goro made his first appearance.
4:02 Chris Plante? Oh, he's in all of them. He is the kind of canonical other guy. Kind of an antagonist. Kind of becomes more of a friend along the way, Fast and the Furious.
4:13 Griffin McElroy? Sort of a mad dog, uh, sort of wild and crazy guy, unhinged yakuza type. But in this one, he's the, he's the protagonist and he's an amnesiac for a little bit. He's, uh, he's kind of an amnesiac through a lot of it and he washes up on an island and he adopts somebody's son, basically. He adopts someone who definitely already has a dad. It says, "I'm your dad now. Come with me, Jason."
4:43 Russ Frushtick? Well, no, no, adopts the dad as well.
4:45 Griffin McElroy? He does kind of adopt the dad, uh, and, and then he steals a pirate ship.
4:49 Russ Frushtick? Can I ask, uh, so in, because I, as we know, we didn't, I didn't finish Infinite Wealth. Does he like crash on a boat in Infinite Wealth? Do we see what happened before this game?
5:00 Griffin McElroy? I don't believe we see him, uh, crash on a ship. I assume we will find out at some point.
5:05 Russ Frushtick? And is like the tiger seen in Infinite Wealth?
5:08 Griffin McElroy? Uh, no, the tiger, the, the whole boy family, they are not characters in Like a Dragon.
5:14 Russ Frushtick? So we don't have a preamble for where the tiger came from?
5:16 Griffin McElroy? No. We, this game does take place after the events of Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. You learn about, uh, Palimaku Island, I believe, where, which is sort of a big, uh, story crux of Infinite Wealth.
5:29 Chris Plante? But yeah, story-wise, basically in Infinite Wealth, the main story is about you as Kazuma Kiryu, the rival of the character in this game.
5:38 Griffin McElroy? And Ichiban Kasuka, please.
5:40 Chris Plante? Huh?
5:41 Griffin McElroy? It's Ichiban.
5:41 Russ Frushtick? Ichiban Kasuka is awesome.
5:43 Chris Plante? Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh, oh, sorry, Ichiban and Kazuma, yeah. You, um, are uncovering the mystery of this, uh, kind of religious cult that you discover. Spoilers for the next one minute, uh, is using a island that is nearly impossible to find in a specific ocean to house former yakuza to do basically like maintenance work on a giant warehouse full of nuclear waste. And all the nations across the world are, are sending their nuclear waste here to be taken care of and quote disposed of, which it of course. Of course isn't.
6:20 Griffin McElroy? It doesn't matter.
6:22 Chris Plante? It matters. It matters. It matters. Listen, we put like 120 hours into this. If I don't get to pretend it matters, then why do I?
6:30 Griffin McElroy? Oh, no, no, no. It matters to me a great deal. I, Infinite Wealth is one of my favorite games ever made. It, this game's connection to it is tangential at best, so far, I will say.
6:42 Chris Plante? It matters in the sense that this takes place after all of those events.
6:46 Griffin McElroy? Yes.
6:46 Chris Plante? You are going to see a lot of what happened to that religious cult.
6:52 Griffin McElroy? Right.
6:52 Chris Plante? And the fallout of this game. You're also going to meet basically all of the same characters. And they're going to do a lot of the same missions and jokes. And part of the gag of this game.
7:03 Griffin McElroy? Okay.
7:04 Chris Plante? Is, hey, uh, remember when you met this mascot character who asked you to pick up, uh, religious pamphlets? Not religious pamphlets, uh, just various pamphlets.
7:13 Griffin McElroy? Fortunes.
7:14 Chris Plante? Uh, you're gonna do that exact.
7:15 Griffin McElroy? Exactly again.
7:16 Chris Plante? All over again.
7:17 Griffin McElroy? It is very siloed off this game in that it is.
7:20 Chris Plante? Yes.
7:20 Griffin McElroy? I mean, it's insane. It's, it's, it's patently, you lose perspective on it the longer you spend in Pirate Yakuza in the White. That it is fucking bonkers that you are this character from this series who's an amnesiac. And because in the absence of knowledge that he possesses, he fills it with pirate garbage. And he becomes an actual pirate and enlists a pirate crew and goes on pirate adventures for treasure and shit like that. And then also at one point, you do roll up on Honolulu and just do all the same shit. That, that Kazumakiri you did in, uh, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. All this, most of the mini games, nothing. I haven't hit Don Doco Island. It feels insane for there not to be some.
8:01 Griffin McElroy? I've met some characters that I met on Don Doco Island, but I want to manage another, uh, modern Animal Crossing style city island, please. Uh, but like a lot, a lot, a lot of the like side quests and like big beats from Infinite Wealth. You will see in the side quests, uh, once, once you do finally get to Honolulu, it takes you quite some time to get there.
8:23 Russ Frushtick? I, yeah, so because I didn't finish, uh, Infinite Wealth, I, I thought I would be lost in this game.
8:30 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
8:31 Russ Frushtick? Not really be able to follow it. But it turns out this has been like maybe the most pleasurable Yakuza's experience I've ever had.
8:37 Griffin McElroy? Gosh, I'm so glad to hear that, Russ.
8:39 Russ Frushtick? It's really quite enjoyable because.
8:43 Russ Frushtick? There's very little, the preamble is like an hour. You spend an hour like on this island, kind of getting your feet wet and meeting the little boy and the tiger and his dad, et cetera. And then, once you're on the boat, the pace dramatically increases.
8:57 Chris Plante? Yeah.
8:57 Russ Frushtick? And you're doing fights and you're doing, you're taking over like islands filled with pirates that have treasure on them and doing mini-missions. And it's all so fucking buck wild silly.
9:09 Chris Plante? Yeah.
9:09 Russ Frushtick? Um, I'll give you an example. The title credits, which again, happened like an hour in, it's a full-on pirate musical.
9:17 Chris Plante? Yeah.
9:17 Russ Frushtick? With singing and dancing and Matt Mercer does the English voice.
9:21 Chris Plante? Really going as ham as I've ever heard him go. And that is saying something.
9:27 Russ Frushtick? Uh, that, yeah. No part of this game is holding back. And as much as I appreciate the slow, uh, character-driven build that is a normal Yakuza game.
9:39 Chris Plante? Yeah.
9:39 Russ Frushtick? I have no patience for it or time.
9:41 Chris Plante? Okay.
9:41 Russ Frushtick? So this like light speed Fast and the Furious style pacing, even though it doesn't necessarily earn the character connections that make you love this game.
9:50 Chris Plante? Not at all.
9:51 Russ Frushtick? And it doesn't earn that stuff. That's fine. For me, I'm having an enjoyable time and the gameplay is fun. And like, it just feels like a romp.
10:00 Chris Plante? Yeah. It is, I think maybe like 20 to 25 hours, not 100%ing it. You can play this game very, very fast compared to the other Yakuza games. And it's not surprising for the reason that you're talking about because it's almost like somewhere between a, you know, weekend tour and a parody of a Yakuza game. And that's, I'm still not sure where I land on this, um, Oops All Berries nature of pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Because, love the main character, love all the silliness. It's why I play the Yakuza games. But I also love, you know, salt and sugar, but I don't want that to be my whole meal. And there is a little bit of that when I was playing this where.
10:43 Griffin McElroy? I did wish it slowed down a little bit so that I could get just a little grounded before it did the thing that it does in every Yakuza game where suddenly the silly mission turns like really serious when you realize that someone's dad's, you know, terminally sick. I mean, yes, the, yes, the game's characters are wafer thin, I will say, pretty much across the board. Their main motivations usually boil down to, I used to be a pirate and now I'm not anymore, but this, this amnesiac Yakuza here has inspired me to get back out on that, those big, beautiful ocean waters. And that is, I mean, not anything that I am finding particularly compelling, whereas I think-
11:27 Russ Frushtick? I mean, that's not the plot of Infinite Wealth where he's convincing all these former Yakuzas to like have a purpose in life.
11:33 Griffin McElroy? Absolutely not. No, it is, I mean, it handles that subject matter with a lot more nuance, I will say, dealing with the sort of like, reality of stigma of being a formerly sort of incarcerated individual and all of the baggage-
11:47 Russ Frushtick? No one more incarcerated than pirates throughout history.
11:50 Griffin McElroy? Uh, I don't think so. I think if they got caught- And pretty much got killed. I don't think there was a lot of jail time suffered by pirates. So like, I don't know, it is, I, I, I love the RPGs. We haven't even talked about the action combat in this game, but I like Infinite Wealth and Like a Dragon so much because the characters, especially in Infinite Wealth, are so well-written and so thoughtful and so like well-developed and you go on these little side missions with them that really, really make them compelling characters. And also just sort of like the broad storyline of the game, you know, starting in Like a Dragon where you are a betrayed, you know,
12:32 Griffin McElroy? Yakuza member, having to literally rebuild his life from scratch. Like, that's really good stuff. And it goes hand in hand with like the RPG mechanics of, you know, being a powerless hero growing to this like demi-god by the end of the game. Like, all that stuff goes hand in hand really, really well together. And it's just, as I'm like seven and eight hours in so far, it, I haven't gotten literally- A morsel of that from this game, but it's still fun. It's still very, very fun and I do, I am enjoying the beat them up sort of combat a lot more than, I, I still definitely prefer the turn-based stuff, especially the kind of hybridized stuff they did in Infinite Wealth. But I, I, I don't know, I thought I would get bored with the combat after my first few encounters,
13:16 Griffin McElroy? but they definitely do add some stuff that makes, makes it a lot more, I don't know, interesting.
13:22 Chris Plante? It's quite rich and it's very fast. It feels different than a lot of things that we've had in other Yakuza games, even ones where you can play as this character.
13:32 Chris Plante? Most closely resembles the, the Spy Yakuza game that came out.
13:37 Griffin McElroy? Now with no name.
13:38 Chris Plante? Yeah, whatever that, yeah.
13:39 Griffin McElroy? I played it.
13:40 Chris Plante? It, it has a little bit of that, but even still, it's much faster than that. And there's a lot of different unlocks that you can do and add all these new move sets and stuff. You can also switch on an auto combo feature, which Fresh, I know that you use. If you're the type of person who wants to unlock the cool stuff, but doesn't want to have to memorize XXXY. Why pause Y?
14:00 Griffin McElroy? I think you mean XXXY pause YB.
14:02 Chris Plante? Oh, sorry. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That was what I was meaning. But what I think is really useful about this game, and I think it's telling that you got into it, Fresh, is it's a great instruction manual for the Yakuza series. And in the past, Yakuza Zero was the one I recommended for that.
14:19 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
14:20 Chris Plante? I think this might be even better because it is so fast and it actually has a clear UI. The Yakuza games, like a Dragon games, have, I think, struggled with this for a long time. Even Yakuza Zero game, I love. You have a double whammy of the UI doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first, and you don't really have an excuse to use it for hours and hours and hours. And the way that this game just guides you through all of the kind of fundamental pieces of a Yakuza game. You play this, and I think you can be sent off to any other part of the series. And the pace will be different, but the overall like how to play it, you'll have learned.
15:04 Chris Plante? And I think that's important with all sorts of games that we've seen from Dark Souls to Persona. Half the battle is just learning how to experience the game.
15:12 Russ Frushtick? So Pete, I'm gonna get letters over what I'm gonna say. But there's another aspect that makes this one of the best onboarding for Yakuza games that I've played.
15:21 Chris Plante? Oh, no.
15:22 Russ Frushtick? It does not star Cosima Kiryu.
15:25 Chris Plante? I fucking knew it.
15:26 Russ Frushtick? No, I mean, hey, no, for sure. I have played a lot of these games because of Chris Plant, probably four or five of them.
15:34 Chris Plante? Yeah.
15:34 Russ Frushtick? And every time I play one that stars Cosima Kiryu, I stopped playing because you know what isn't fun? Is spending three hours with a sad, sad man. And that is Cosima. He has a sad past and he loves to talk about it.
15:50 Chris Plante? But that's the pleasure that's it's, you know.
15:52 Russ Frushtick? But you have to, and that's the thing is like, if you have the patience to power through the sadness to get to, oh, he's now hugging a bear and doing a dance and that's really funny. Great, but I don't and I haven't. So here I'm playing as a fucking goofy ass pirate with tons of tattoos. That's a total badass, but also salient loves musicals. I'm in.
16:13 Chris Plante? Yeah.
16:13 Russ Frushtick? And, and this could potentially be the thing that allows me to play the other games. I mean, look, I enjoyed what I played of Infinite Wealth. I just didn't have the patience to like, see it through, but I played 15 hours of that game. And then Cosima showed up, he's like, man, I'm sad and also I've got health issues. And I'm like, eh, I'm good.
16:31 Chris Plante? Yeah, it is hilarious that they did design a game specifically for you and that they're like, so how many hours did you play? 15, got it. And what do you want? Oops, all berries? Okay, got it. Oh, I need a new combat? Okay, got it. Uh, this game is this is the one you want?
16:46 Russ Frushtick? Um, uh, we haven't talked about the comment, but I do want to talk about it briefly. It is fully real time, as we've sort of addressed. It is a beat them up, uh, which is the style of the original, uh, Yakuza game for Switch to turn-based. Um, and
17:00 Griffin McElroy? Switch to turn-based is also kind of a weird way. Like, I feel like the, uh, like Yakuza Like a Dragon, which was the first RPG and Infinite Wealth are their own thing. And I, they are hugely outnumbered by games that do not have turn-based RPG combat.
17:16 Russ Frushtick? But don't you think like, my understanding is like the mainline Yakuza, uh, Like a Dragon games are now that?
17:23 Griffin McElroy? I mean, yeah.
17:24 Chris Plante? Yes, that, that's true. And it, but again, it's, it's even complicated in that the combat here feels so different than the early Yakuza games.
17:33 Russ Frushtick? I mean, yeah, I mean, you're fighting crowds of like 20 people.
17:36 Griffin McElroy? You can't ju-, you can't jump in any of the other Yakuza games, as far as I know. And so like the ability to air juggle in this game, uh, gives it a like, uh, you know, Devil May Cry Platinum-esque flair that I am finding a very, very, very fun.
17:52 Chris Plante? There are stages in this game, you drop into an island, you're like, oh yeah, I need to go kill off some pirates. And then suddenly a number pops up on the screen and just starts counting down. 80 pirates are gonna come at you. And then they start dropping from the sky, rapid fire, just dozens of pirates.
18:10 Griffin McElroy? Uh, yeah, once you get into big ship battles, that, okay. So there's a part of this game that is also naval combat, right? You have a ship.
18:17 Russ Frushtick? So good.
18:18 Griffin McElroy? It's, it's, it's like as, as arcadey, I think, as, as they possibly could have made it. You have like a boost button and you can drift in your pirate ship very easily. And there's like rings all over the ocean that you go through to get turbo boosts. And then you have like a cannon button on both sides and a machine gun that fires forward. So like Sea of Thieves, it ate.
18:43 Chris Plante? One, one other feature.
18:45 Griffin McElroy? Oh, right, sure.
18:46 Chris Plante? You can at any point shift back into the boat in the middle of all this. So you're like suddenly just walking around the boat. And while you're on the boat, you can just pull out. A rocket launcher.
18:56 Griffin McElroy? Yes.
18:56 Chris Plante? Because why not? Why would you not want to do that?
18:59 Griffin McElroy? Uh, cuz it kinda sucks. It's like hard to actually land shots with that thing. So like, and but then sometimes after you you finish like knocking out the ship of a big battle, there's also a thing called the Pirate Coliseum, which is like these big featured one-on-one battles. After you knock out someone's ship, you have to board with your boarding party, which you customize fully, like you unlock, you can unlock new crew members, you can customize the different parts of your ship quite a bit.
19:22 Russ Frushtick? You can give them bouquets.
19:23 Griffin McElroy? You can give them bouquets to level them up, which is an insane mechanic. Uh, and then all of a sudden, the game turns into fucking Dynasty Warriors and you are doing this big like, you know, 20 on 20 battle on the deck of the the enemy ship.
19:37 Russ Frushtick? Here's the thing about mainline Yakuza games that I've played. If I have 20 minutes, I am not guaranteed to have a good time in those 20 minutes in the mainline ones.
19:46 Griffin McElroy? Sure.
19:47 Russ Frushtick? In this, for sure, I'm gonna have a good time.
19:50 Griffin McElroy? Yes. Even if it is the cutscenes, the cutscenes are so fucking goofy. I just met, you go to Mad Atlantis, which is a a place sort of referenced in Infinite Wealth. It's where the bad guys from Dundoko Island came from, I believe. And in this game, you meet the Queen Michelle, which is great. That's that's wild. And also the Pirate King of Mad Atlantis, who is just played by Samoa Joe. There's just Samoa. I was just watching this cutscene and then all of a sudden getting kudos from actual Samoa Joe. Like, what the fuck? Where did he come? It's so goofy and so weird.
20:31 Griffin McElroy? It's it's just like the silly cutscenes, the silly side quest cutscenes usually from the RPG Yakuza games, is the vibe of the main story in this game. Which is like, you know, Double Edged Sword, it is not hooking me in terms of like, I actually care about these characters. But it is like, man, it's it's like popcorn, man. It's just enjoyable to pick it up and and and play a little bit of it. I'm really enjoying it. I'm glad you are on board with it, Russ. I know that you have not been.
21:01 Russ Frushtick? No, it's it's clicking for me. It does, uh, I'm also just impressed from a logistical standpoint, like how they converted a lot of the like assets and content creation that they made for Infinite Wealth.
21:14 Griffin McElroy? Yes.
21:15 Russ Frushtick? Into another format, obviously so quickly. I'm sure, obviously, a ton of the development was happening while Infinite Wealth was happening.
21:21 Griffin McElroy? Right.
21:21 Russ Frushtick? But. Converted into something that feels like very, very different, but also uses a lot of the same stuff.
21:27 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
21:28 Russ Frushtick? Is just like pretty like impressive.
21:30 Griffin McElroy? I, I will say, so I, uh, after, I don't know, a few hours of the game, you've, you reach Honolulu and then you, you get basically access to the big wide open world part of Honolulu from Infinite Wealth. And I ran around, I did like a dozen side quests and unlocked a bunch of crewmates and like played a bunch of the mini games and stuff. And now that I've like done that and moved on to like other parts of the story, I don't feel particularly compelled to go back and do a bunch of the other stuff that is there. Because it is sort of the same stuff that I was doing in Infinite Wealth and I played the shit out of that game.
22:08 Griffin McElroy? And so the, the, the idea of going back and replaying all of this stuff that I, you know, already spent dozens of hours doing is slightly less compelling to me.
22:19 Russ Frushtick? Do you get the sense that like it's gonna make you?
22:22 Griffin McElroy? Uh, no, I don't get the sense that it's gonna make me. So like, I guess that's the thing, right? Like I probably will be one to finish this game fairly, fairly quickly. Just because like I'm enjoying it. I don't, I am not loving it to the degree where like I loved the, the RPGs where I feel like, well, I gotta fucking unlock every class. Yeah. I gotta do the photo rallies and I gotta do, I gotta, uh, do all of the, I gotta catch some perverts and make them battle each other. And then max out my Animal Crossing Island. Like it is, it is a little bit less meaty than all that. And a lot of the meat that is there is meat that I've already eaten in, in Infinite Wealth. So.
23:00 Russ Frushtick? I also will say like, I was shocked to find that Infinite Wealth does not have a difficulty setting when I played it originally. Cause I wanted to like speed up the process. This does, you can play on easy and, and we mentioned earlier, there's like an assisted combo thing.
23:12 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
23:12 Russ Frushtick? And because of that, it allows you to like not do every single little thing and still keep pace with like the game's difficulty.
23:19 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
23:19 Russ Frushtick? Um, which has been great. Like I've really enjoyed that option as well. It just allows it to fit into my life.
23:26 Griffin McElroy? I, I do think that, uh, there's a lot of, uh, upgrades and progression and, and stuff that it definitely hits harder. If you are playing, you know, without the assisted combos and on a higher, higher difficulty like. Uh, God, there's so many systems. There's like rings. You have 10 rings you can equip.
23:44 Russ Frushtick? Every finger has a ring.
23:46 Griffin McElroy? Yeah. And then like, you have to be pretty like, you know, thoughtful about how you spend your money. Money is how you unlock like stat boosts, basically for Goro. And so you have to be very thoughtful about that stuff, but also you can just blow right through that shit. If you, if you don't care about it, which I, I do appreciate. Yeah, I like it. I just, it, it honestly, more than anything, this game continues to drive home my just unrepentant adoration for this whole series and what they have done with it. Like it's so, it is leaning into the best instincts and like my favorite shit about, about this franchise and what this developer does.
24:30 Russ Frushtick? And there's just not, no analog for the tone, for the way it's played, for like the visuals. There's no analog to this anywhere else in the video game industry.
24:38 Griffin McElroy? No, there's nothing this, this, I don't know. It, it, a game that is this like funny and lighthearted usually doesn't have like a ton of other stuff going on for it.
24:52 Chris Plante? It also doesn't have the sincerity too. That's the, that's the magic sauce, right? For me, that, that it's, it's very funny and goofy. And it then like surprises you with an uppercut of, hey, you know, as you get older, it's harder to make friends and you really should put in the effort or else you'll just be lonely forever. And it's like, what the fuck?
25:14 Russ Frushtick? Occasionally there's some dissonance, uh, which I had to overcome. I sent a, I sent a client a video clip. Uh, one of the earliest characters you meet is like a chef aboard the pirate ship. And you predictably have to fight the chef until he becomes friends with you. And using my assisted combo thing, I at one point like kind of accidentally activated a finishing move where I snap his neck. And It does look like he is dead. His eyes are open when he falls to the ground.
25:43 Griffin McElroy? It's really actually pretty easy to execute that move if you like dodge step out of the way like gives you a prompt to do a heat action to snap the person you're fighting's neck. And sometimes if you do it right in a boss fight, you'll do that four or five times to the same guy. And it's gotta be like at after the third one, just lay down, man, just stop. I'm hurting you.
26:04 Russ Frushtick? I hope it's more just like a chiropractic adjustment.
26:08 Chris Plante? One last thing before we head out of this section. The series is known for reusing parts of other games that, you know, you visit the same location over and over and over across the Yakuza series.
26:22 Griffin McElroy? Right.
26:23 Chris Plante? And with like slight modifications or sometimes substantial. How do y'all feel about this as like a practice, especially something as big as Hawaii? I'm a fan of it, to be clear, but I I'm curious what y'all are kind of thinking about it.
26:38 Griffin McElroy? It's tough. I I if I had not spent, if the if the if infinite wealth, if the genre of that game and the the construction of that game was not sort of did not lend itself to spending over 100 hours on it, then I might feel a little bit differently. It is not, uh, when when you first roll up to Hawaii in infinite wealth, it is such an insane humongous playground with all of this just exotic stuff and stories to find and little side quests that you do. And when you discover like, holy shit, there's like a whole crazy taxi game in here. And there's, uh, there's all of these different little little side things you can do.
27:23 Griffin McElroy? It's so like thrilling. It's genuinely thrilling and you can lose dozens of hours right there just to like, I want to see everything that there is to see. And that I didn't, I that does not hit remotely as hard this this time around. It's still fun to mess around in that, right? But for me, it's the fun is the enjoyment I'm getting is.
27:44 Chris Plante? Weirdly like nostalgia for a game I played last year. Not like, uh, I don't know, like the excitement of discovery or whatever.
27:52 Russ Frushtick? My MO on this stuff is if you're reusing assets, make sure that for people that saw them the first time, spent a lot of time with them the first time, that there's either something new, like dramatically new there, or make them optional. Don't force people to do the same shit over and over and over again, just because you have the assets lying around.
28:12 Chris Plante? Yeah.
28:13 Russ Frushtick? That being said, I have attacked a lot of islands with a lot of pirates that look all basically identical. And I'm kind of fine with it.
28:21 Chris Plante? The islands and the pirates look identical, yeah.
28:23 Russ Frushtick? I'm kind of fine with it, so that doesn't bother me because they're so short and goofy and like, just like beat them up areas.
28:30 Chris Plante? Yeah. I dig it. And I think the thing that they understand is it can't be the whole game. So in a lot of Yakuza games, yeah, you'll go back to Camaracho, but you'll also go to new places. Here, the main island from the previous game isn't the only place you go.
28:45 Russ Frushtick? No.
28:46 Chris Plante? I do think they're clever in the conversation that they're having with the previous game. So like, for example, near where you start in the previous game, there's a bar that you go to over and over and over again. Right next door is this big open lot. And as you progress through the game, you have to get more powerful to go fight the enemies in that lot and go get the treasure. Well, that's just not how this game works. But you know in your head, well, there's always treasure in this huge open lot. So you run over in this game, you find a whole bunch of enemies that you can beat the living shit out of. But you also find all these seeds everywhere in it that you can use to fill out your garden, which is a new mini game in this game. So it's rewarding you.
29:28 Russ Frushtick? That's being quite generous to say what the garden is.
29:30 Chris Plante? Yeah, garden, thank you. But it is, it's rewarding you for being a previous player. And if you hadn't played the game before this, whatever, you don't need to know that. You don't need to know to go discover that you'll probably find it on your own. I think that is all very clever. I also just think. This is something Sega and Atlas also are like trying to figure out, I think, with how do you fund video games? We see this with Persona 2 of these games cost so much to make.
30:01 Griffin McElroy? Right.
30:02 Chris Plante? We almost expect to double dip. And we're thinking about that, I assume, from the beginning. We were thinking of how can we design spaces that serve multiple purposes? That way, we can justify these like increasingly absurd costs.
30:16 Griffin McElroy? And it's like, the way they have done it is so laudable. Like, I cannot think of another example of a studio doing what this game does, which is, we're gonna use a lot of the same assets from the last game, but make them its own sort of like standalone thing. And handling that with like, we're going to justify that by making the tone absolutely insane.
30:37 Chris Plante? Yeah.
30:37 Griffin McElroy? And let you do stuff that is so wild and so out of, out of step with, with the rest of the series, that it feels, it feels novel and it feels earned and it feels sort of like justified. It doesn't feel like a, like a, you know, half-baked cash grab. Like, it is a fully formed idea that is bizarre, but like, that's kind of what is so pleasurable about it.
31:02 Russ Frushtick? You know what it reminds me of is Tears of the Kingdom.
31:06 Griffin McElroy? Ah, I don't know.
31:08 Russ Frushtick? Honestly, if you, if you think, when you first heard, it's gonna be the same map as Breath of the Wild.
31:14 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
31:14 Russ Frushtick? There was a part of you that was like, oh, really? Oh, that's kind of a letdown. And the fact that they were able to not only have the same map, but also make it feel completely different because of the things you were able to do. Granted, not as silly. The tone is very consistent across both games. But from a revamping existing content in a way that like felt really new and different.
31:34 Griffin McElroy? Yeah. I guess the comparison doesn't work for me because I think of Tears of the Kingdom as it's, uh, I mean, I think of Tears of the Kingdom as maybe the best game ever made. But this, this definitely has the feel of a side quest. This has the feel of an offshoot. And that, to me, usually is a red flag. That usually, to me, spells, and honestly, there were times where I was playing this game where I kind of wished I was playing just Infinite Wealth again, but I, it would be insane to go back to that game already. But it also like, it stands apart and it, even though it is very much on its face, a side quest or a spinoff or whatever, like, it is, it's a really good one. Uh, and, and I'm, I'm so happy that it exists.
32:17 Chris Plante? Yakuza Zero splits its time between Kazuma Kiryu and this character. And there's a version of Infinite Wealth that feels like it could do that with this game. The reason they can't do that is because Infinite Wealth already has two full games in it. So like adding a third just would start to feel absolutely absurd.
32:37 Griffin McElroy? God, how good would a RPG with split characters with Ichiban, Kasuga, and Gomorrah.
32:45 Chris Plante? Holy.
32:46 Griffin McElroy? As the two.
32:46 Chris Plante? I'm in.
32:47 Griffin McElroy? And when you played as Goro, it would be a beat'em up. It would be a pirate beat'em up. And then when you played as Ichiban, it would be a Dragon Quest style RPG.
32:53 Chris Plante? I'm fucking in, bring it.
32:54 Griffin McElroy? Yes, yes.
32:55 Chris Plante? As long as Kiryu's dead, I'm great.
32:56 Griffin McElroy? He'll never die. His health issues have been, I think, dramatically overblown by the press.
33:04 Griffin McElroy? Hey, let's take a quick break and then maybe talk a little bit about those little critters from Japan that we all love so much called Pokemon.
33:16 Chris Plante? Okay, we are back with the big news of the week. Pokemon Go and the games division of Niantic, that's the developer of Pokemon Go, are reportedly being sold to Saudi Arabia-owned Scopely Inc. This is based off a report from Bloomberg. And it is gonna cost Scopely a lot of money. $3.5 billion. Now, they're getting the entire Niantic games division sure. But like that, at this point, pretty much is Pokemon Go. And I thought what we would do is talk about how the hell did we get here?
33:56 Chris Plante? Because, you know, almost a decade ago, it's 2016, Pokemon Go is the biggest video game on the planet, one of the biggest video game releases of all time. The year it came out, 500 million downloads. That is just a staggering number.
34:13 Griffin McElroy? It's half a billion, half a billion downloads.
34:15 Chris Plante? Half a billion. And it did so well for so long. Niantic seemed to be on track. They have games, or they had games with Harry Potter. They have currently a Monster Hunter game. They have done other partnerships with Nintendo. They have been funded by Google and Nintendo and the Pokemon Company. You'd think they would be doing great. And yet, here we are. What happened?
34:41 Russ Frushtick? I mean, let's be real, they are doing great. I mean, last year, their revenue was $500 million.
34:48 Chris Plante? That's true. You don't get sold for $3.2 billion if you're not doing okay.
34:52 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, it's not a punishment to get sold for that much fucking money.
34:55 Chris Plante? But I think there's a version of this where Niantic would prefer to just be a super successful company that doesn't have to sell its game division. You would think.
35:04 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
35:04 Russ Frushtick? Yeah, I mean, internally, it's hard to say what, you know, whether the people that have make these final calls really just want to be done with it.
35:11 Griffin McElroy? Yeah.
35:12 Russ Frushtick? Um, I think the important thing to remember is it's not just the fact that they're making $500 million a year. They also have a cache of pretty staggering data.
35:22 Griffin McElroy? Right.
35:22 Russ Frushtick? Regarding the comings and goings and movements of basically every player that's ever played Pokemon Go.
35:29 Chris Plante? This is the part that I am so confused about and how this deal is going to happen. Obviously, we live in a very different country now, uh, but where everybody was freaked out about TikTok. I can't imagine how people feel about, uh, app that literally has players scanning the world around them and creating that data to serve a giant database.
35:53 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, I mean, I think we've learned, if anything, over the last, uh, like, six weeks that people's, uh, interest in giving a shit about
36:01 Chris Plante? That's true.
36:02 Griffin McElroy? the breaches of privacy and, uh, uh, data security is sort of selective, I will say. It is sort of context sensitive, uh, and, and maybe some folks don't give much of a shit about this, uh, as, as you might expect.
36:18 Chris Plante? Which also might be why Niantic is okay with finally selling its game division. Do you all know the history of this company, how it came to be?
36:25 Griffin McElroy? Uh, I did at some point, but I've definitely replaced that information in my brain with other stuff at this point.
36:32 Chris Plante? Understandably. A quick recap. John Hanke is the Founder, basically, of Niantic, but before that, way back in like 2001, he founded a company, I believe, called Keyhole, that would get bought up by Google and would set up Google Maps and Google Earth. Needless to say, he was very successful and could kind of do whatever he wanted. And at Google, he goes, "Hey, I want to make augmented reality video games." And they're like, "Sure, John, whatever. You made the thing for us. Go off and tinker with it." He makes a game with his team called Ingress, which did have, like, I think, seven, eight million players.
37:15 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
37:16 Chris Plante? It was a mild success for what it was. And with that success, Google funds them branching off, that, like, team branching off and becoming Niantic. So this company, in theory, is meant to be a video game studio from the beginning. But what's so weird about this is I have seen him talk at conferences. I've actually done a Q and A with him at a conference, and he doesn't talk much about games. He talks a lot about augmented reality, mapping, and data collection. And the kind of, I think, larger selling point has always
37:59 Chris Plante? been that if you have 500 million people across the world capturing literal aug- like, data of the world around them using increasingly improved augmented reality-focused phones, you are learning out-
38:13 Russ Frushtick? Well, not just the augmented reality, but also the GPS data that is being-
38:17 Chris Plante? Sure, the GPS data, but I mean, specifically, if you have people using it in their house, you're finding out how many people in the country have uneven foundations because-
38:26 Russ Frushtick? I guess so.
38:27 Chris Plante? You're getting an idea of the gap between their ceiling and their floor. Which is not theoretical.
38:32 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, there's always been a really big disconnect for for me. I've played quite a bit of Pokémon Go. It was like a big way that I got Henry interested in like exploring DC when we moved here a few years ago. Was that, you know, unlike living in Austin in, you know, not downtown, there's just fucking nothing you can really do because it's not walkable and there's not a bunch of poke stops everywhere. And here there was, and it was like an exciting way to go around. Also, the AR thing, you switch off literally the the first couple of minutes you play the game and you never turn it back on again because it makes it harder to actually play the game and catch the Pokémon. So there's always been this weird disconnect between like
39:12 Griffin McElroy? the technology and sort of maybe original artistic intention of Pokémon Go versus the reality of like what people have wanted when they actually play it. And they're they're the speed with which they have tried to rectify that gap has been so cartoonishly sluggish and still like not something that they stick the landing on fucking 20% of the time. It's always been a weird thing for me where it's like you guys have a mondo hit on your hands and also you are, you do not know what your players want out of it a lot of the time.
39:47 Chris Plante? I think they also expected the technology to move much, much faster than it did. And I do think, I'm talking about all this data. I don't want to be like so crass as to say there wasn't an alignment between collect data and make the game they want to make because the big goal for the company was to be able to create basically situations where you could have an augmented reality experience in Austin, Texas, and one in Washington DC, and one in Orange County, California. And all of us would be out in our parks, but we would be having a shared experience in augmented reality. So if we want to have a Pokémon battle out in a park, we could all pull out our phones in all these different places and create like shared augmented spaces.
40:31 Griffin McElroy? Very cool.
40:32 Chris Plante? A wild, yeah.
40:33 Griffin McElroy? It's just not what people want.
40:35 Russ Frushtick? I can't even fucking trade Pikachu to Griffin if I wanted to. Because he's in Far
40:40 Chris Plante? Yes, the other problem is you couldn't even have a shared space in the same park with the degree of believability that you would want. Like, it would be great to go to a park and have Pokemon and be able to have a Pokemon battle that actually looks like a Pokemon battle in front of you in augmented reality. That is not like what we got.
41:00 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
41:01 Chris Plante? They will, I assume, be fine. On top of the $3.2 billion, assuming the sale goes through, they also have started feeding all of that data into what they're calling, I believe, a large geospatial model. Will you be surprised to hear that they're using AI tools to basically create an AI version of mapping? No, of course not. So I think that is probably why they got the juice from the orange and now they can pass on the rind.
41:30 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
41:30 Chris Plante? But, yeah, it's weird. It wasn't on my bingo card for this year's news.
41:37 Griffin McElroy? No, but if you still have a bingo card for the news, you're, the hubris you are exhibiting is frankly unhinged.
41:45 Chris Plante? I did have last year Robbie Williams makes a movie where he's entirely as a monkey and I nailed it.
41:53 Griffin McElroy? You did have that. That's so fucking weird.
41:55 Russ Frushtick? Bud, he thought it was gonna be a big success in the US.
41:57 Chris Plante? I did.
42:00 Chris Plante? I really thought it would hit.
42:02 Russ Frushtick? We have a good piece of reader mail. This comes from Jonah. There's a question, "Love the idea of an FPS first-person snapper." This was in the context of talking about photograph games. "Are there more slash others that people know of?" And Jakey responded with a few other suggestions. Some good photography games: Toom, Umarangi Generation, Paparazzi. Ones I haven't played, but I heard they're good, might fit the description. Season, did you play Season?
42:30 Chris Plante? Hmm, I don't know if I remember that one.
42:32 Russ Frushtick? A Letter to the Future and Tori Pawn.
42:36 Griffin McElroy? I believe Season A Letter to the Future is the full.
42:38 Chris Plante? Oh, that game, yeah. I really liked that game. Yes. You, um, you ride around on a bike and take photos of a world that is basically doomed and create a scrapbook that you put into like a Fallout shelter, more or less, for future generations to look over. It is.
42:56 Griffin McElroy? Fun.
42:57 Chris Plante? It has like a nice vibe.
42:59 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, sure.
43:00 Russ Frushtick? Uh, Jakey also mentions the Fatal Frame games if you want to get scared.
43:04 Chris Plante? Uh, did, wait, did, did, did they, did anybody say Panko Park? Did Jakey say? There was a lot of great games there. We, Panko Park, we've talked about this on, I believe, the Resties, but if you've ever wanted kind of like an Edward Gorey Pokémon Snap, Panko Park rules. Strongly recommend it. And it is a true Pokémon Snap type.
43:24 Russ Frushtick? Love it.
43:25 Griffin McElroy? Beyond Good and Evil is like an oversight, not being featured on this list, it feels like.
43:30 Chris Plante? How dare you, Jakey.
43:31 Griffin McElroy? That game's sort of approach to, uh, photojournalism is fucking rad. It's very, very, very good.
43:38 Russ Frushtick? Doesn't age well.
43:39 Griffin McElroy? You don't think so?
43:40 Russ Frushtick? I played it for the first time like 10 years after the game came out and it was not, it felt like very dinosaur in terms of just the age of it.
43:49 Griffin McElroy? Well, Beyond Good and Evil 2 when it comes out, I'm sure it's gonna really.
43:51 Russ Frushtick? Yeah, that's gonna be great. That's gonna be real good. Real good, real good.
43:53 Griffin McElroy? Um, should we do some honorable mentions?
43:56 Russ Frushtick? Yeah.
43:56 Griffin McElroy? I have a, I got a big one.
43:58 Russ Frushtick? Oh, boy.
43:59 Griffin McElroy? In the, uh, my house has become a den of plague and it has, uh, since like mid-January. So I've had a lot of time on the couch playing Steam Deck, uh, as everyone kind of convalesces. And I got hugely, deeply into Grounded. Uh, a game that I played a bit of. I know that, I think we all sort of played together, had like a server or something.
44:27 Russ Frushtick? The Honey I Shrunk the Kids game.
44:28 Griffin McElroy? It's the Honey I Shrunk the Kids game from Obsidian. And it was a, you know, a survival craft sort of game where you are in this yard and you have to find resources to build armor and weapons and you can build a fort and, uh, you know, you're trying to figure out the mystery of where you are and how to, how to get big. The game is like fully feature complete now in what they call fully yoked edition. Uh, is that a joke? Like an egg joke? Uh, I don't know. It's, I, it's like a part of this like in-game, uh, fiction TV show. Uh, I don't know. The game has like made for, uh, like Saturday morning cartoon sort of vibes a little bit. Sure.
45:12 Griffin McElroy? Uh, but I, so I'm not like a hundred percent sure like what is different in the game now compared to when I first originally played it, but it feels just really, really, really good to play that game. There is so much quality of life stuff that makes every element of the game like really fun and meaningful. Uh, so like basic stuff, like when you're building a base, there's like a single button that you press to immediately like dispense everything in your inventory into nearby boxes that you might have that is very like smart and context sensitive. And then when you're crafting something, it automatically pulls stuff from you, like your nearby inventory stuff. And the building system is so rich
45:57 Griffin McElroy? and so, uh, you know, there's so many practical uses for all of these things that I ended up like, there's a big tree in the middle of the yard. And so I built a ramp up to like halfway up that tree. And then I built a little tree house in that. And then I built a walkway that went all the way around the circumference of the tree. So I could run zip lines from that walkway to, cause there's no fast travel in the game. You have to build these little zip lines that go, so by the end of the game, I had this spider web of zip lines going all across the yard. Sounds like someone's ready to play Death Strang again. I was gonna say. Man, I don't know. It's, That's what it sounds like. It sounds like it. It's also just like discovering stuff in that game is so exciting because it is hard. Like the world is turned against you. You are a,
46:40 Griffin McElroy? It constantly drives home this feeling of you are a little guy. And if you come across the wrong bug while you're out there, you're gonna get fucking smoked. And so when you find a new armor set or you find a new like weapon schematic that like, it really feels super, super meaningful. Did they tone down the hunger stuff? Because that was something that I kind of- So the game's like different systems are like customizable. There's like definitely ways of like turning off that stuff if you do not like it. Uh, I forget what setting I played on, I think mild maybe where like that system is in the game, but it's very easy. Like you can build a dew catcher uh in your base that then basically like you never have to worry about. Catch dew? Gross. Uh, D E W dew, the sweet, the sweet clear stuff.
47:26 Griffin McElroy? I ju- I, I think it's astounding. I think it is a fantastic game. Are you mostly playing solo? I played entirely solo. I finished the game. I like genuinely start, start, start to finish. Like really explore the shit out of the yard because again, like I had a ton of time to kill. Uh, while I was, while I was sick. Were you playing on Steam Deck? Played it all on Steam Deck, runs perfectly. I think it is, I think it is probably better multiplayer. Like there's uh- Well, we played multiplayer a little bit. It was pretty fun. Yeah, I, I really, really enjoyed the base building stuff. And I think like having buddies to like do that stuff with and like feel a sense of like ownership over, over the backyard. That's, that's the main thing that this game does is it gives you this feeling of mastery over the wilds.
48:10 Griffin McElroy? And I think that that's like the intention behind a lot of, I mean, the whole survival craft, open world survival craft, I believe is the full title uh of, of that genre. Uh, and I think this game does it better than any, anything else. Uh, and I just, man, I really loved the shit out of, out of my time with this game. That's cool. So, so if you did not play grounded, it is in a really, really good spot right now. That rules.
48:36 Russ Frushtick? I played Mario's Picross, which is a Game Boy game.
48:40 Chris Plante? All right.
48:41 Russ Frushtick? Okay. It's just a Picross game. It might be the first Picross game that Nintendo has sold. It obviously came out many moons ago. But it's a great introduction to Picross as a genre and like just learning the rules of Picross. And if you get into it, there are a million like mobile versions of it and things like that that you can get into. But I just really find it very soothing. And if it's kind of like a, it's like Sudoku, but at the end of it, you get a cute little picture of a cat. And that's great.
49:11 Chris Plante? I do like that. Yeah. I think I had this game and I didn't understand how it worked.
49:16 Russ Frushtick? Yeah, you can probably handle it now. Griffin, I believe in you.
49:19 Chris Plante? Is it scratching the itch? And what like I played the like 3DS one.
49:24 Russ Frushtick? So people, yeah, they evolved into like more 3D Picross games, uh, which I haven't played, but I know a lot of people get obsessed with them. It feels like my guess is once you evolve into that, it's kind of hard to go back the other way because it'd be so simple. But there are 3D, uh, they're called nonograms. There are 3D nonogram games on iOS that I, if I had played any of them, would recommend to you right now, but maybe people in the comments will recommend some good ones.
49:53 Chris Plante? You're recommending the Game Boy one or the Super Nintendo one?
49:56 Russ Frushtick? Well, I haven't played the Super Nintendo one. I only played the Game Boy one.
49:59 Chris Plante? I think the Super Nintendo one is it was released exclusively in Japan, but I think they released it on the Switch. Yeah, I think it, yeah, it came out on Switch Online in September 2020.
50:12 Russ Frushtick? So if you sub to that and it's on Super Nintendo, so you probably don't need the Ultra Edition. You can play that. That sounds like fun.
50:20 Chris Plante? Nice.
50:21 Russ Frushtick? Nonograms.
50:22 Chris Plante? Um, I've been watching this show called Severance.
50:27 Russ Frushtick? Oh, we're not allowed to talk about it.
50:29 Chris Plante? Show. I'm not, I'm not going to say any spoilers or anything. I'm just going to say it's a pretty good show.
50:34 Russ Frushtick? Okay.
50:35 Chris Plante? That's it.
50:35 Russ Frushtick? Watch just shining a light on an unheralded piece of media.
50:39 Chris Plante? Good. I'm glad that I'm glad Ben Stiller is getting his flowers.
50:45 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, it's fucking astonishing. Every episode of this show feels like the season finale of the show, uh, which is, uh, a really remarkable achievement.
50:54 Chris Plante? Which is funny, because that's how I felt about, uh, Parks and Recreation, too. That like every like four episodes, because they thought they were gonna get canceled, they were like, "Yeah, here's another season finale. And, oh, we're not canceled? We're gonna keep making more episodes? Great." Um, Adam Scott, man, I could just look at that guy's face forever.
51:11 Griffin McElroy? Uh, yeah, yeah, and he has two faces in this show, which is crazy. He has his, he has his weathered outie face and his fresh inny face.
51:19 Chris Plante? It's impressive. How do you do that?
51:20 Griffin McElroy? How do you do that with your fucking face?
51:22 Russ Frushtick? It's like listening to people talk about Bellatro, if you haven't played Bellatro. It's just like a fever dream.
51:27 Griffin McElroy? Um, you should play Bellatro and you should watch Severus. I don't know.
51:30 Russ Frushtick? I did the first one.
51:30 Griffin McElroy? It's the best shit out there now. Do you not watch? Have you not seen it?
51:35 Russ Frushtick? I know.
51:35 Griffin McElroy? You're watching the first season, though, right?
51:37 Russ Frushtick? Nope, haven't watched it. I want to. It's really hard, because I mean, I've mentioned it before, I'm in a movie club and we have to watch movies, and I have to watch, I'm halfway through Three Colors Blue, which I'm sure Plant is like a huge fan of.
51:51 Chris Plante? Hmm.
51:52 Russ Frushtick? No.
51:52 Chris Plante? It's complicated. That trilogy's complicated.
51:55 Russ Frushtick? Outside of The Besties and outside of normal work and outside of raising my child, I have movie homework.
51:59 Griffin McElroy? Dude, this show is already homework. It's fucked up that you have built more homework into your life. It's fun, this show's fun homework, and I love to do it, but you can't have many sources of assigned media consumption.
52:11 Chris Plante? Too much homework.
52:12 Russ Frushtick? Well, here I am. This is where, I'm stuck.
52:15 Griffin McElroy? I'm not saying walk away from Besties, I'm saying walk away from your movie.
52:18 Chris Plante? Friends, yeah.
52:21 Griffin McElroy? Thank you so much for listening to The Besties. Uh, we got some, we got some friends.
52:27 Russ Frushtick? Oh, yeah, we got some Patreon friends. Let me call them out. Uh, thank you to new subscribers. We have Oliver, we have Miles, we have Mike Chuck, and we have Orville. Thank you for being patrons of The Besties. You can go on all of it at patreon.com/thbesties.
52:39 Griffin McElroy? What did we talk about this week, Chris?
52:41 Russ Frushtick? Oh, man, so much stuff.
52:42 Chris Plante? Oh, my gosh, what did we talk about? We talked about so much stuff. We talked about Like a Dragon, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. We talked about Penko Park and Grounded and Beyond Good and Evil, Mario Picross, Super Mario Picross. To Em Umarani Generation Paparazzi Seasonal Letter to the Future Tori Pawn, The Fatal Frame series, and the TV show Severance, plus Pokémon Go. You can find a list of all of those things and more over at the newsletter, including a mea culpa from me, because last week I was a little sleepy and I wrote that Obsidian made Fallout 76.
53:18 Griffin McElroy? You fooled.
53:19 Chris Plante? Obviously, they didn't. I know it. I don't need any conspiracy theories about how I've turned into some like AI robot who doesn't know my video games from my WhatsApps. I got it. Go read the newsletter. It's fantastic.
53:32 Griffin McElroy? And if you want to become a patron, patreon.com/thebesties is the link that you can go to. Next week, Monster Hunter Wilds.
53:39 Russ Frushtick? Oh, man, this is a big one.
53:40 Griffin McElroy? Out there, gonna kill a jackie.
53:42 Russ Frushtick? This is gonna be the game that gets people into Monster Hunter.
53:45 Griffin McElroy? This one.
53:45 Russ Frushtick? Previous.
53:46 Griffin McElroy? Yeah, this one's the one, for sure.
53:48 Russ Frushtick? I actually do. I mean, it is. Every installment becomes a little more easy to get into, but...
53:53 Griffin McElroy? I like Worlds better than Rise, but we'll see how this one treats us.
53:57 Russ Frushtick? Okay.
53:58 Griffin McElroy? We're gonna talk all about it next week, so join us then. Till next time. Join us for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?
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