The Weekly Stuff #490 - Persona 3 Reload & Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Impressions & More! Transcript

Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

The Weekly Stuff #490 - Persona 3 Reload & Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Impressions & More!

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So mind your hope is, whatever like is, we go flow with it. Hey, hey, hey, feel like the fire with the burning desire every day. We're expires, but never expires. But we go chill today.
Let me rock the world tomorrow. Hello and welcome to the Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack. And Sean Chapman. We are here to talk about stuff this week on the show. We are truly talking about stuff in the sense of a cornucopia of things. We have some new video games to talk about and review, including first impressions on Persona 3 reload, Yakuza. No, what is it called?
Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. Or Yakuza 8, as I will probably just call it, because that's a lot easier to call that game.
Yes. So the eighth one in that series, whatever you choose to call it. Prince of Persia, The Lost Crown, I've been playing that. So we got lots of stuff to talk about there. We've got a little bit of news and some other fun things along the way. But it will be a jam-packed, busy episode, fun episode today. But Sean, how have you been?
Pretty good. It's, it's been a while since we recorded a podcast. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to even just remember what the, was the last podcast was our top 10 games of last year, right?
That was the last weekly stuff we recorded new. We've done some Japan animation stations since then that you guys haven't heard yet. We've done, last week we had our Persona 3, the Weird Masquerade episode that was mostly recycled because we believe in recycling here on the weekly stuff podcast.
We are pro-earth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, so the, you know, the semester, the spring semester has started. January, it felt incredibly long from a, like, job point of view. So it's like, it feels like it's been like two years since we recorded the Weekly Stuff podcast from my perspective because of, yeah, just like work stuff has been crazy.
It's been crazy for me, too, not necessarily in terms of work stuff. I'm actually on a fellowship this semester working on my dissertation, so I'm not having to teach. But it was crazy for me getting back to Iowa, where I live, because in the last full episode of this show, which was the top 10 games of 2023... I was in Colorado visiting my family. And when we recorded that, I was planning to leave and go back to Iowa pretty shortly after that. And I drove there. I drive back and forth.
It's about a 12-hour drive. And I couldn't leave because then we got the whole Arctic freeze that lasted for like two weeks all over the U.S. Was it, did you get anything down in Texas?
Yes, we actually had a day off. I still don't really know. Someone from Colorado, I don't know why. Because it's not like, it didn't snow, you know. It was just cold. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but yes, it was colder than normal down here. So I did get what you would normally call a snow day. I don't know what the fuck you call it if it doesn't actually snow.
God, all you little baby beta cucks down in Texas can't take the cold.
I thought you were the manly man down there. Yeah, we had a cold day, which was, you know, when it was below freezing temperatures, which to me, below freezing temperatures, that's where you start calling it cold. That's where the beginning of now it is cold is, is, oh, it's like 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Now you can start considering it being cold. But it was a little bit of colder than that for a while. So we had a cold day. But it was like, it was so funny because I would just look outside and be like, oh, this is a great. I went for a walk.
You know, I put a jacket on and went for a walk because it was beautiful. It was super sunny. I was just like, I felt like it felt like something wrong had happened. Like I felt like I was like. ditching my job or something because it so was not the feeling I've had of having had snow days in Colorado where you're like, yes, it is good that they had a snow day today or people would have died on their way to school. This was I don't, I literally don't actually understand the logic behind why they gave us that day off.
It's, that's amazing because I'm with you, and especially, I mean, I've lived in Iowa now five years, which is colder than your coldest place would be Colorado, right, where you've lived? And we had, I mean, here's the thing that, so I was very delayed getting back to Iowa because I was waiting for the temperature to go above zero between Colorado and Iowa. And we had over a week of like extreme sub-zero temperatures in Iowa where like literally there were like neighbors that I live next to were calling me, telling me not to come back.
because the snow was so bad and like the cold was so bad. So, and I mean, I, you know, was looking at the weather myself anyway. But when I finally went back, it was on a day when it had finally gone above freezing in Colorado and most of Nebraska. And the temperatures were going up that day in Iowa from below zero to like 14, which was like the best I could do. And so we drove back that day. My brother Thomas actually drove with me and then he took a train back home to Colorado. But...
it was really good for the first half of the day through like Colorado and half of Nebraska. And then like almost to the moment we hit the halfway point. It's about an 800 mile drive. We had 400 miles. Things got pretty bad. And I know they got bad because at one point, Thomas and I were driving. We're behind a big truck, which happens a lot. You know, you're driving on a two-lane highway. And I go to get around the truck, but then another truck goes and I see, oh, there's two trucks.
This one is going to get behind first. So I kind of back off, let the trucks do their thing. The truck on the right that is being passed starts to swerve a little. Go, what the? And it then goes like a Fast and Furious movie into a full flip. I saw this semi-truck. No, I saw the semi-truck do a full. It swerved, flipped all the way onto its side, slid down the highway, you know, hundreds of feet.
And the other truck hit its brakes as best it could, but it went plowing right through the middle of the truck, decoupled the entire truck part from the, you know, the car cabin part, and went through and it blocked the entire, it spanned the entire highway. You know, we stopped, we called, I mean, there were a bunch of people stopped. At that point. We were the first in line. We called 911. Someone else had gotten out to check if the drivers were okay. They seemed to be. And then we had to pull off onto the, you know, not the shoulder. The shoulder was messed up too.
We had to pull off onto like the dirt beside it to get around and keep going. And from that point on, I think we saw... at least a double-digit number of flipped semis in the, like, between the two sides of the street for the rest of the drive. Like just they were every 50 miles or so, we'd see another flipped semi. They were everywhere. It got pretty bad. We did finally get home. And I'm okay, but that's my adventure.
I have now seen the events of a Fast and Furious movie in real life, basically. The thing that surprised me most is it's not as loud as I thought it would be. I thought it would be deafening. And maybe I just was further than I thought I was from it or whatever. I don't know. But we didn't really, there wasn't a lot of sound to it. But it was quite a mess.
Yeah, that's insane. Yeah, I've never seen an accident of that degree that up close before. I don't think I've ever seen an accident involving a semi-truck before like that. That's pretty insane. Yeah, I mean, you know, that's, I mean, obviously that's pretty cold in some dangerous road conditions, but that's not as bad as it having been like 20 degrees in the morning in Texas, you know, where there was no precipitation whatsoever. We really needed to stay home on that one.
Yeah. You know, like, and I walk several times a day because I have my dog and we go out. And like, it got up past, you know, 20 degrees here in Iowa. And I'm like, this is pretty good. This is like, I can do this.
This is. Yeah, it's about 20 degrees. Let me slap some shorts on and some sandals. I can take a walk. It's, yeah. All my coworkers that live, that are like from Texas and have lived their whole life in Texas, whenever they see me coming into work from the parking lot in the morning and I don't have a jacket on, they always give me a weird look. Because I'm like, why don't you have a jacket? I'm like, because it's like 40 degrees. And all I'm doing is walking like for like 30 feet from my car into the building.
It's like, why do you need to gear up for for this weather? Like it's, yeah, it's very funny how people's tolerances change dramatically based on the environment in which they live.
Indeed. All right. Well, before we move on to some other stuff, a little bit of housekeeping. Just wanted to mention Japan Amation Station's Kyoto Vacation. We recently finished part three of that season where we were reviewing Keone, the classic slice of life musical comedy from Kyoto animation. We did three episodes on that for the two seasons and the movie. Just for people wondering... I posted about this on my site. I posted about it on YouTube. I posted about it on Twitter. So hopefully you got the message. But Japan Animation Station is on a brief hiatus.
We'll be back February 18th for part four of the season. And we've added a whole fifth part. We were originally planning on six parts to this season. There will now be at least seven. The schedule is up on jonathanlack.com. If you want to look at it and get all your anime homework in order for everything we're watching, we added five new shows to the schedule. Let me see if I can remember these, Sean. Okay. Because you picked them. So I have to see if I can remember them. It's love Chenebio and other delusions. Yes. Tomico Market. Just specifically season one of that show.
We're just going to do season one of that one. But I bought the Blu-ray with everything, so, you know, we'll see. Tomoko Market and the movie that goes along with that, Beyond the Boundary and the movies that go along with that, Myriad Colors Phantom World, and then the two seasons of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Made.
Yes, and so the first four of those are going to be a part that goes in between... Our Nisha Jo Hioka part, which will be the next thing that airs, and then sound euphonium and silent voice. So, like, because there was a big gap in the calendar because all these shows are kind of a grab bag of one-off little shows. And then I think we, we have had so much fun with Japan-Mation Station's Kyoto vacation. And I, specifically for me, in terms of the research stuff, have gone down such a weird, fucking intense rabbit hole.
that I realized that I was going to watch these shows regardless because I just needed to. And I realized, well, we might as well just do it on the podcast. And it fills in a very good, I think, necessary gap. And it's a good, like, grab bag of different kinds of shows. And then Kobayashi Sanchino May Dragon, that's going to come at the end of the season, basically, because that's one of the most recent things that they've made is season two of that show. Yes.
So I'm having a blast with this, too, Sean. I mean, there's a whole half a chapter of my dissertation that is about hierarchy now because of this season. So it's crazy. It's been a huge pleasure, and we're going to keep that going. I will say, I told my brother about this, and he texted back my brother, occasional Thomas, who shows up on the podcast now and then. Thomas, I don't think ever tries to like make jokes like this, but he can be so savagely funny when he wants to be. And this was, I don't think he even realized how deep this cut.
He said, boy, it sounds less like a Kyoto vacation than a Kyoto sabbatical at this point. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it is. It really is. Yes, it basically literally is. Yes. Yeah, so there you go. Thank you, Thomas, for that one. And, yeah, lots of good Japanimation station stuff coming your way. And then speaking of jonathanlack.com, which I just mentioned, which is the weekly stuff wordcast, where you can read all my writing, you should really, that's a substack, so it's a free newsletter. You can also just read it on the web as a website.
It's arranged like that as well. But you should sign up for the substack version because it is completely free, and then you get everything I write delivered to your email inbox, and that's a cool way to do it. And there are two new weekly series starting over there on the Wordcast. On Thursdays, there will be a weekly series of classic movie reviews. This is going to be a set of themed series with some reviews that I wrote for the book that I put out last year, 200 reviews. along with some other odds and ends.
And the first one we're doing, and I decided to start with this one in honor of Carl Weathers, who passed away last week. He played Apollo Creed in Rocky, among many other wonderful roles. But I decided to start with the Rocky movies. So we're going to be doing five weeks, and it's going to cover all nine Rocky and Creed movies. The first one going out this Thursday is about the first three Rocky movies. I kind of covered those together. And then we go on from there.
But if you haven't bought 200 reviews, and you haven't seen, I mean, these were exclusive to that book. So this will be a cool way to see those, and that'll be Thursdays. And on Wednesdays, for all you anime junkies, I am reviving a project that I did on Twitter several years ago that I have been meaning to save from the bowels of Elon Musk's Nazi platform before it completely breaks and falls into the sea. And that is my Yu-Gi-O kill-count project. I don't know if you remember this, Sean.
I did this several years ago where I was reading the Yu-Giomanga, and I started it as a joke, and I wound up going through the whole series this way, seeing how many people die in the Yu-Giomanga, which is much more violent than the anime, and how many people do the killing and keeping a scoreboard, and it wound up being very fun, and I've really have always meant to get that off of Twitter and publish it in a better place, because, like, it's such a long thread, and Twitter is so fucked at this point. It's very hard to read. But I did go through.
I saved all the, I have it all written the whole series ready to go. I got to finish making some of the images. But it's going to be a 12-part series, so it's going to go for a couple months here. And yeah, I've already got, like I said, the first month or so of those ready to go. They're going going. It's a director's cut version of the Yu-Gi-O Kill Count thread because I've expanded it quite a bit. The images are much nicer now.
I originally took all the photos just from, I was reading my physical copies of the books that I bought as a kid, and I just took photos with my cell phone and posted those. I've gone into the Viz Media app and taken actual screenshots that are nicer and cleaner of the manga based on what I had taken the first time around. So I think it's going to be fun if you want to go on the journey through Yugi again. Also, I think, as a little tribute to the late Kazuki Takahashi, the author of that manga who tragically died suddenly a couple of years ago, which was a pretty major blow.
But, yeah, that'll be the Wednesday series over on Jonathanlack.com for the next 12 weeks, starting this Wednesday.
I'm glad that we'll finally have a one-stop shop to look for to answer the brain question of who has killed the most people in Yu-Gi-O. Because we need that academic, you know, resource. Yes. Because it is, it's something we've all wondered. It's like, how many people has Yugi fucking murdered in his life? It's, you know, because it's got to be a lot.
Uh, it's, it's double digits for Yami Yugi, for the Pharaoh. Yeah. Uh, and even little Yugi has a couple. So, you know, there's some, there's some murder in this series, Sean. Sato Kaiba, you know, he goes off at certain points in that series, and he just does his shit, and that shit involves murder. So it's pretty good.
I want to see the, like... Yu-Gi-o series set after the events of the original series where Yugi is an adult, and he has a therapist, and he's just sort of like unpacking all this stuff. And it's like it's the people that his alter ego killed, but then also the people that he killed. And he's starting to realize, you know, like everything that he's done in his life. That's the show I need.
Be pretty great. All right. That's the housekeeping. As far as stuff, Sean, do you have, I think we're going to save any video game stuff we have for the end. So at the end of the day's show, in case people, we're not going to do spoilers for any of these things, but we're going to talk about persona 3 reload. We're going to talk about Prince of Persia. We're going to talk about. Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, all of that good stuff. But any other stuff before we get into that?
We can talk about some anime stuff. I've watched some anime stuff that's not Japan Nation Station. So I think you watch this as well because it's your favorite TV show ever created of all time. So I watched Spy Family Season 2. Is that what we call it? Is it just called Spy Family Season 2? That's what they called it. Yeah.
It's kind of weird because season one aired as a split core. So it's really the third core of spy family. But yeah, it's season two. And I actually did write a full review of this. It's up on Jonathanlack.com if you want to see my written thoughts on that season. But yeah.
Yes. So Span Family Season 2, I thought it was fantastic, obviously, as one would expect. It's interesting because there is more, like, kind of behind the scenes shifting in terms of staff than you usually get on a series like this. So the main director is different, and the writer is different. Ichido O'Kochi, who people would know from which for Mercury or Code Geis. And, yeah, but, like, so there's more behind the staff or behind the scenes churn than you normally see, but that hasn't sort of,
certainly did not negatively affect the production at all. So it was not something that I think unless you're in tune with this kind of stuff, you'd ever notice. But season two, I thought was quite fascinating with having a bit of a different structure, right? Because season one, I rewatched all of season one before watching these. And season one's an interesting beast because the first core is mostly... relatively serialized, right? I mean, each episode stands on its own, but it's the first core is introducing all the characters and the setup, going to the school, all that stuff.
So the, like, narrative in the first core is pretty tight. And then the second core, it's all basically just one-off stories until you get to the end with, like, the mini tennis arc. And so it's kind of like a, that first season is when you look back on it, I think, is like kind of a strange season in a way that I kind of have mixed feelings on looking back on it.
Yeah, it's even the first core is all full episodes, and the second core starts doing the thing where it's segments within episodes, which makes sense based on what the manga is, but I guess, and I know they skipped through some of the shorter chapters in the first core, and then they kind of saved those, and yeah, it's a strange beast of a season. There's nothing like bad in it, but I do think the structurally, I probably liked the first core more,
And I think the second core is the messier one just because it gets much more segment-based, which I think season two finds a good balance of those two impulses.
Yes, I agree. That's kind of my main impression was season two. And obviously, season two has this big storyline, which is kind of like the centerpiece of the season, which is a your-focused story, which I very appreciated because... Like, Yor is a character who's kind of, like, she's very present in the sense that there's a lot of material with her. But one thing that always kind of felt like the series, at least the anime form, I don't know how the manga feels in terms of pacing.
Something that's weird for the anime is it just kind of feels like Yor is technically an assassin. But outside of her introduction episode, you never see her do anything assassin like. And so it kind of felt like the show was using that as a joke of like, oh, she's an assassin. But it doesn't deal with anything with that side of her character at all.
And I really like where they kind of flip the script on the usual structure of the storylines, where the average structure of the storyline for the longer stories in Spy Family is that Lloyd is dealing with some sort of mission as a spy. Anya uses her mind-reading powers to learn about it, and she is trying to support him behind the scenes. And then this is a flip on that, where now it's yours is doing a thing as an assassin. It's really a bodyguard thing because I think they... They still are pulling their punches a little bit where they don't want to make you are unlikable in any way.
So they're not really getting her properly as an assassin. So she only ever kills bad people that are other assassins in the ark. But you have her doing that. And then Anya reads her mind and just trying to help her out on the boat. And all that stuff I really enjoyed and thought that was a good...
um sort of change of pace for the series because when i rewatched all of season one obviously it's still fantastic the characters are phenomenal it's outrageously funny the production is very very good but i think there's a there's a impulse at the core of the series that it kind of is trying to be two different shows at the same time it both wants to be at slightly more serialized narrative that is like about the characters growing and changing and developing.
And it also kind of wants to be a more old school show that's like an Udicey Yatsida or Ronma one half or something like that, which would be a show that would end up having 500 episodes that has like character continuity in some places, but generally it's just about one off little stories. And you don't get a lot of shows like that latter one anymore, I think largely because like the production considerations means you can't really make a show like that anymore. But it sort of felt like season one didn't know which one of those two things it wanted to be.
It feels like season two edged more back towards that. Like, let's have a little bit more narrative momentum. Let's have a stronger sense of character growth. And let's go back and like kind of go to that side of the series. And I enjoyed that.
Yeah, this was kind of the thesis of my written piece as well is that the show, Growing Pains is the wrong... phrase because it's a very good season. I wrote, stretches its legs, and it evolved. Like, because this is definitely a season that I think was trying some different things out. And I ultimately came down on liking the structure. Like, one of the smart things they do, and it's kind of funny, you went immediately to Ramma one half and Uruza Yatsura, because those are the two I went to as well, trying to describe that kind of that impulse of
of the show because it is it particularly there's parts of it remind me of Ronma one half in that it is like slightly surreal how weird Anya's world is and things like that you know um but like yeah I think one thing I liked about this season is that it starts and it ends with one off episodes and so it kind of foregrounds that It ends with that episode that's kind of about Bond specifically, the dog.
But it also, I think, ties into some central themes of the season around sort of the family and how, in spite of everyone, they're trying to do a job. They are becoming a family in spite of themselves, particularly Lloyd. And I think it does that very well. But I like that the show does not...
force itself into like big plot revelations as its final beat, that it's comfortable doing both, having the middle of the season be the bigger, longer plot stuff, but also being okay with its season finale, being pretty much a one-off episode. And I think that's, I think it's struck the right balance. The bigger, like... I don't know if I like it or dislike it or what, but the thing for me that I thought was a little off, the sheer, like, tonnage of violence in the middle of the show threw me for a little bit of a loop.
It's extraordinarily well done. Like, it's very well animated. It's very well choreographed, particularly for a show that, like, had had some really impressive sequences, but not like this. It had not had, like, big kill-tastic, you know, sequences that feel like they could have come out of a very different anime. And I think they're very good, and I think Yor is an awesome character, and Jaime Sauri is fantastic through all of that.
It is also a level of, like, blood spray and graphic kills that, like, season one of Spy Family is totally family-friendly. And then this one is, like... I'd be a little hesitant showing some of that to people of some ages. But, you know, so that was like my one discomfort where I'm, I don't know if that fully, like, blended for me, but everything else I did like. And I think, you know, the characters are so great. The performances are so good.
Particularly this season, I thought, like, the MVP was Takia Egachi, who plays Lloyd, where just, I thought, like, and he's always been great. But I love that he is so resolutely the straight man. He's never really given a joke in the sense of he does something silly, but he has to like make us laugh with just playing off of everyone else's ridiculousness.
And I thought during the cruise arc in particular, where none of like the central action is really on his shoulders, he was really, really funny just bouncing off everyone else. Because he's the one in that arc, and this is pretty different for Lloyd, he has the least amount of a clue what's going on. Your knows everything. Anya knows some things. Lloyd knows nothing, but winds up trying to diffuse the bomb and all this other stuff, and it's very funny.
Yeah, which again, that's like the, he's in the position that Yor has been in all the previous storylines where she doesn't know anything about the larger plot that's going on, but she ends up stumbling in and kicking the bad guy in the face or whatever. Yes. And kind of a misunderstanding of what's going on. Yeah, and I really thought it was fun having Lloyd be in that position. Yeah, and I see what you're saying with the violence of it's certainly from like an age rating point of view. It's certainly like it's in a different kind of bracket.
But there's something I, as someone who had been frustrated with the way that Yor was sort of dealt with where it felt like we want her to technically be an assassin, but we're not actually going to do anything with that plot device. I appreciated that they just like went full in with it and they didn't pull their punches. Like the only punch they pull again is that she's not technically really being an assassin here. She's being a bodyguard. But I think having...
it be violent feels like it makes the storyline actually like it sells the actual storyline it sells the point of like her realizing that maybe this is not the life that she wants to have and right that's part of like the arc is that she starts to sort of realize that there's maybe like other things she could do or other things she really cares about and she's starting to change um and i think having the sort of the starkness of the violence there is important to allow the
There to be like, because there has always been a kind of, I think, deeper undercurrent in the series, like a deeper kind of emotional point that it's making about violence and war and the consequences that it has. And that's always what Lloyd has kind of like come from that background. And you're being someone whose job is killing people. You know, you got to, you got to show it. And I'm glad that they actually like kind of committed to that bit.
Well, and with that in mind, there's also an episode in kind of the early stretch of the season called Mission and Family that's about Yuri, her brother. And this was the most shocking episode of the whole season to me because it's just this long, basically joke-free segment of Yuri trailing and then arresting a dissident for the state because he is one of the state secret police, basically. And it's like genuinely harrowing in parts. Like it implicates him in some really dark shit.
And it doesn't end on any kind of like absolution or anything other than he gets the guy in jail, but he agrees to help his family a little bit. But like, so you know Yuri has a heart somewhere in there, but it is buried pretty deep down. And I think there's just little hints of that here and there. And I do wonder how much of that is Ichero Okuchi. who, like, in his other works is so kind of politically conscious and I think aware of like world building and consequences and all of that stuff.
And it felt like some of that is here in this season of Spy Family.
Yeah, I agree that it's I think that that stuff to me is important to have like there is a, there is something underneath the surface of what Spy Family is doing where it's not just a gag show. And that was kind of the thing that the second half of season one on rewatching it, it kind of felt like that lost that current of that there's something more there that the first half of season one very much has and that season two very much has. And that episode is one of those that helps you sort of re-center like, right, this is.
Okay.
you know, with all the comedy and stuff, this is like a story that is a sort of a pastiche of the Cold War and is dealing with themes around using the Cold War as the sort of like fundamental setting. And it needs to grapple occasionally with the broader implications of what that is. Like I think it's wrong to have a character like Yuri technically be a member of the secret police and never deal with the implications of what that actually means. And so you have to occasionally sort of like re-center your perspective to allow the kind of the heart of the show to shine
But also it's a fucking funny show. Like that's the other thing not to forget here. There's the whole episode where Becky, who is Anya's weird rich friend from school, has decided she's in love with Lloyd and is going to try to break him up with your. That episode is just phenomenally funny. Bond, the dog, who is one of the best characters, gets two full episodes, his Bond strategy to stay a live episode, where he helps Lloyd on a mission so that Lloyd will buy him food so he doesn't have to eat yours cooking, which is great.
And then the whole finale, which is also Bond-centric. And I love the whole Bond-Loyd dynamic, which, like, kind of makes you realize they're weirdly similar people in well people slash dogs because they are both very logical and they're very they put in a lot of effort to their work um but they're also kind of weirdos under the surface i i love all of that and it's in a very very funny season also
Yes, absolutely. It's still an outrageously hilarious show. Like maybe my favorite part is the whole section when they're on the boat where Lloyd's with Anya and Anya is trying to keep him distracted. And he's, you know, his whole arc of him like not understanding why Anya's just sort of constantly sort of disgusted or frustrated or she's going through all these negative emotions because she's hearing all this shit going on with the assassin stuff. And Lloyd just keeps interpreting that as her hating him and hating what's happening. And he's trying to impress her.
And he goes into the changing room to become the like normal dad. And he comes out just, you know, a head to toe in like gift shop random do dads. It's it's very funny. His whole arc of trying to, trying to understand what it is to be a dad in misreading every single signal that Anya is putting out.
It's very, very good. And there's more spy family to come because there's a whole ass movie that came on in Japan in December that we don't have here yet. But I hope it comes soon because I want to see it very badly. It's also written by Okochi, directed by someone else, but obviously the whole same staff and everything. And I'm super excited for that.
Yes. I made the critical mistake of after I watched the season. I watched the trailer for that movie. I just shouldn't have done it because the movie's too far away from getting coming out over here. But the trailer is so fucking good. Like, God damn, I should have just waited. Why did I give myself that extra level of anticipation when it's going to be a while? I know that crudgy roll is going to distribute it, but it's still going to be a bit before it's out over here.
Also, the music of this show continues to be so good. It's no name doing the score. It is one of the great anime jazz scores in the vein of a cowboy bebop or Lupin the 3rd or something. And it's fantastic. And then the opening and ending this year, they went... So all out for it. They got Otto to do the opening Kura Kura and then the finale or the last song by Voundy and Corey Wong. I forget what that song is called, but I love it. But the animations for them, they got guest directors.
So it's fucking Masaki Yuasa did the opening and you can tell. And then it's a guy named Eugene Winter or Eugene as he goes online doing this like papercraft closing. And I love both of those. Particularly that ending animation is just so beautiful.
Yeah. Yeah. And the opening theme in particular is just ridiculously good. Obviously, like, Otto is basically in everything now because she is like a weird... When you hear her sing, like, I've never had this impression hearing a singer where I'm like, is she even a human? Like, is she an alien who is like come here because it's like her voice is so insanely powerful. But the other thing is that song Kudakuta, that's... composed by Yoko Kano with the seatbelts providing the instrumentation.
So it's like it's, that's a fucking power hour, you know, of just all-time great performers, composer, and then singer. So yeah, that song is.
Yeah, Yoko Kano, seatbelts, Otto, and Masuka Yuasa doing the animation. That is a all-star lineup. It's incredible.
Yeah, so that song is just ridiculously good. Yeah. So anyway, Spy Family, still awesome. Very, very awesome. I want to mention briefly, just as I'm thinking about something other anime I watch, a show that's less awesome. It's not a show that's terrible, but it's a show that I just want to talk about a little bit because I hit a breaking point with it where I was just frustrated. So there's the show, it got pretty good reviews that I think... oversell the show a lot. It's called The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten.
It's a pretty bog standard slice of life, but very much in the what you'd call Iashi K or like the like the soothing style show. That's a very light romance about a high school boy who lives on his own who ends up sort of interacting with this girl who lives next door that is also at his school. And he, the high school boy lives this sort of like very you know, messy life, let's say. And then she ends up, he helps her out in this certain way.
And so she ends up doing this favor of coming over to his place and cooking dinner for him. And they end up in the sort of weird scenario of where there's almost pseudo-cohabiting, even though they're not really, but they kind of do domestic chores and stuff for each other and so they develop this like relationship.
The thing I want to talk about with the show, though, is that it's this thing with, like, an Iashi-K or Slice of Lifestyle show where there's such a delicate balance of, like, how much drama do you need to put into the show to have it maintain interest and to have, like, a narrative momentum to it? And then, but how much can you need to pull back from that in order to not... spoil the vibes, right?
Part of these shows is that it's just the vibes of watching these characters have these sort of simple lives and have these kinds of, you know, very, you know, heartwarming sort of interactions. But the thing with The Angel Next Door spoils me rotten, is that at least for me, it...
desperately needs a little bit more story in there and i kept watching it because it got good reviews like there's a lot i got a lot of people that enjoyed the show and i was like well i should give it a bit more of a shot it's got a very kind of not great production also like the animation's not very good but that's whatever like i can watch a show with bad animation if i like the story and characters and the thing that kept me going is that there's this one little thing with the main character where it hints throughout the show You get the sense of something has happened to cause him to live on his own.
It's not an anime thing of like his parents just mysteriously don't exist. And so he, you just don't think about it. He lives on his own. It's part of the story that his, you know, he has a totally normal parents like that he doesn't have a bad relationship with. He should be able to live with them. But you get these little flashes of...
What is almost PTSD-esque of him when he interacts with certain other members of like students at the school, him seeing this image of these like middle school boys that strongly implies, ah, he must have been bullied and that caused all this stuff that has then forced him to move and want to live on his own because he doesn't want to go to the school. near his like family home where those boys would have gone to.
But when episode 10, which is the one where I just like, even though there's only two more episodes, I'm like, I just can't watch the show anymore. Episode 10 is where they finally reveal what it was because I was just like, Like, I want to see the drama. Like, I want to see this point of where the characters can grow together because he has helped her throughout this whole show with all of her family bullshit in the kind of romantic coupling thing. But then you need that reciprocal thing of he's obviously got some kind of trauma. We need to find out what that is so that she can help that. And that...
then is how you need to resolve the show. But you find out in episode 10, it is just the most like wet fart of a character reveal ever where you find out it's not really that he got bullied. It's more that his family is pretty well to do. And so there are some kids at the school that were sort of buddies with him, but they're mostly buddies with them because they wanted him to pay for stuff. And that's it. Like, that's it.
He overhears them one time being like, yeah, we don't really like him that much, but, you know, he buys us things. And that's the whole, like, that's why he moved fucking schools and has gone to live on his own, is that there are three guys he thought he was buddies with, but they were just using him because he had money. It's like, you know, it would be like if the plot reveal was when we were kids, it's like, oh, yeah, I mean, I only hang out with him because he's got a PlayStation. And, you know, and then we've gotten in 64.
Um, that's like, that's the level of bullying he's gone through. And as soon as that happened, I'm like, fuck this. Like, come on. You've got to give me something more than that. You've got to give me something to make me believe that this guy has some deep-seated trauma that is causing him to have a hard time making relationships with other people that then can get resolved by his relationship with this girl that lives next door. Like... But this is the weakest fucking character reveal.
And I just, I can't believe I suffered through this show on some recommendations because that's what the, that's what it is at the end. It's like, oh, your, your family's kind of rich. And some people sort of like exploited that so that you would buy them lunch. Like. It's like boo-hoo kid. Like, that's so... That's so bad. Like, I don't even know if I classify that as bullying. It doesn't even rise to the level. And so that's... The Angel Next Door spoils me rotten.
The show that disappointed me. That, you know, there's nothing... I just shouldn't have watched it. I just shouldn't have believed what I was told about it. Did you wind up finishing it? No. No, episode 10, you got that reveal. I'm like, well, what's the point then? Like, if there's no... You only had two episodes left. If I can't buy the emotional stakes of like this is, it's the most fundamental part of the storytelling.
At that point, if there's nothing more for the story to reveal, you know, if all it is is I'm going to get some more vibes between these two characters. I've had enough of that. Like, I don't need two more episodes of some vibes, but there's not going to be any more character development. It is also the show that has the most ridiculous amount of, these characters clearly are basically dating and that they are so, they are like very physically intimate, but they still refuse to recognize that they're like effectively just in a romantic relationship with each other.
Like they cuddle on the couch and shit and they're still doing like, oh, but it's not like that though. I'm like, but it is like that though. And yeah. It's a weird show. It's been a while since I watched something like that where I just had to, even when I was close to the finish line, I just had to bail because I just could not, I could not with that story anymore. Yeah.
The other anime I spent some time watching over the break. The other non-Japan Animation Station anime, I always have to say, because we're always watching something for Japan Animation Station. The other non-Japan Animation Station anime I was watching was One Piece. I was catching up on a bunch of the episodes from 2023, which is at the very end of the year they finished Wano, the big... Like, possibly the longest arc in anime history. I would have to look this up, but I do not know of another arc in anime history that is 200 episodes long, but that is how long Wano lasted.
Do you know, Sean?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like as someone who does not watch or read One Piece, it feels like Wano has been happening for like five years because it almost has. It has, yes. Well, if you go from when the manga started, yeah. Yeah, it's like... It's to the point where if you said, like, that Wano in One Piece are just kind of interchangeable to me because it's like people have been talking about the Wano Arc for so fucking long.
Entire series have started and ended in the period that the Wano Arc has been fucking, like, this is like the entire lifespan of Kimetsno Yaiba, basically. It's just happened within the span of the fucking Wano Arc.
And it's the longest dark of the manga, too. Here's, I'll throw you this one, Sean. The anime version of Wano is longer than the entirety by 50 episodes of Dragon Ball, the show before Dragon Ball Z. It's not as long as DBZ, but it's longer than Dragon Ball. is only 153 episodes. Wano is like 197. Anyway, and I've seen most of Wano. There was some in the middle I didn't catch, but I did. I basically started, I wanted to see all the big fights at the end.
So I started from when you have Sanji versus Queen and Zoro versus King, saw that stuff. Then I saw Big Mom versus Trafalgar D. Waterlaw, my boy and Eustis Captain Kidd saw that fight. And then of course, Luffy Turning Gear 5 and fighting Kaido and all of that stuff.
And I just, people probably know this if just they are into anime, even if they don't watch One Piece, that One Piece has in anime form had this crazy creative revival where like a lot of Toey series in the mid-2010s, it was in pretty shaky quality in terms of the production. If you've seen Dragon Ball, for instance, think the first half of Dragon Ball Super, you know, some of those problems.
And then same as was super, Tatsya Nagamine, the pinch hitter at Toe came in and him and his team and some other directors cleaned the whole fucking thing up. And there's a bunch of other things that have happened, obviously. Toe has opened up to all sorts of freelancers from all over the world. So One Piece is a very global production at this point. And they've somehow made a weekly anime show that airs 50 fucking weeks a year that looks like a bespoke 12 episode run kind of all the time.
It's really crazy. And particularly this last year of Wano has been... out of this world. You know, they did the thing that the manga does also where they did the final bits of Zorro v. King and Sanji versus Queen in back-to-back episodes. And that is pretty much the craziest back-to-back episodes of One Piece you will ever see in terms of animation quality. The Big Mom fight was amazing. And then when Luffy went Gear 5, they just completely went to another level. And spoiling One Piece a little bit here, but Gear 5...
is Luffy's Awakened Devil Fruit, where he is not just turning himself rubber, but he can turn the whole world around him, basically, into a cartoon.
Yeah, he goes loony tunes is what, like, as I watch some clips of this, yes, it's like it's, it goes loony tunes, basically.
Yeah. And they even expanded on what is in the manga there, which is a great stretch in the manga, but they're able to have like whenever Luffy is on the ground, the world around him becomes like a trampoline and he's bouncing. And so all of that animation is just insane. The music, Kohay Tanaka, did an entire new hour of music just for these like last 20 episodes that is a soundtrack that's out now. Sean, I know you don't watch One Piece.
You should just go listen to the Gear 5 soundtrack that is the end of Wano because it is such a great set of anime music. And Kohei Tanaka, obviously, he's done One Piece from the beginning and he's one of the greats. We love him. He's on one of the upcoming Japan Animation Station shows we get to watch because he did Hioka and I have been loving that. But anyway, so like they went. All out.
The final episode of Wano has a full seven minute like Kabuki performance where someone is singing the plot of Wano in the style of like an old Japanese theater song. And like they did that. It's on the soundtrack and it's a full seven minutes. It's amazing. Like they went so all out for all of this. And then we're now into the next arc egghead island, future island egghead. There's been four episodes so far of that, and they've completely kept that momentum up. They revised the animation style a little bit.
I really like how it looks. It's got the best opening animation One Piece has ever had. It's a new song by Hiroshi Kitadani who did WeR and several songs over the run of the show, and then the animation for it is insane. So like One Piece is in this insane renaissance right now in anime form. And it's kind of wild to me. There's part of me that just wants to abandon my dissertation and instead write a book about how One Piece got its groove back. Because I don't really know any good, like, counter examples.
Like, it's something wild. If you just take a random episode from Whole Cake Island. the arc before Wano, and then take a random episode from Wano and put them next to each other. It's like, there's a story here that needs to be told because it's insane. And even just from the beginning of Wano to the end, like that anime experienced the craziest glow up I've ever seen. Because there's action in Wano, particularly this last year of episodes, that like rivals anything in like the last season of Demon Slayer. It's insane.
Yeah, it's pretty wild. Even someone who's not watching it, just kind of seeing some of the clips and stuff from some of those big episodes when they come out. Just because there's almost nothing that does this, right? There's almost nothing that does this anymore of doing the, we're just running an episode a week forever. Obviously, you have some of your mainstays like a Duraimon or Sazai-San, but that's obviously a very different kind of anime than a one piece. But a, like, heavily serialized, dramatic story with action and that kind of stuff.
Like, just there's almost nothing that does it. Like, it has just become untenable. um to do those kinds of shows with modern production with the kind of like level of quality that is expected and all that kind of stuff um and yeah like one piece finding a way to turn that production where you're getting still the kind of level of production value you would expect out of, you know, Akimsa Yaiba or My Hero Academia or Jus Kaizen and doing better than lots of those shows at various points, clearly.
Like, that's pretty wild when those other shows, they make 12 to 26 episodes a year, if even that. And, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's some kind of black magic shit is going on at Toe. I don't really understand it.
Yeah. And, you know, it would probably be even more preferable for everyone if they cut this in half and just did 26 a year and gave the team half a year off or to work on things because One Piece doesn't need to do one a week. Although I will say some people make too much of the length of the One Piece anime. The manga, if you've ever read a chapter of One Piece, Acheirooda has the most insanely compressed style of his artwork. So like if One Piece does half a chapter a week, in some weeks that can be plenty.
Because there's like big scenes that Oda will do in one splash page that like in anime form, there's no other way to do it than taking five to ten minutes. And it's a very unique thing. Like if you were doing Dragon Ball at the pace One Piece goes, it would be a disaster. One Piece at the pace, One Piece goes, is actually pretty doable. And they've actually made a smart set of changes for the current arc, Egghead, where they now, for the first time in, I think, 18 years, One Piece has separate openings and closings.
For 18 years, One Piece just had a long opening animation.
where they did the opening and ending credits and they had one song because they didn't want to do a new ending every 12 weeks I think because I was too hard to like we're going to do one big sexy fancy opening a year and it'll be our opening and closing and it ran about two and a half minutes now they have separate 90 second openings and closing so that's three minutes they have a new 90 second segment at the end where chopper and robin tell you about various pieces of one piece lore which i actually really like because chopper and robin are awesome and also there's a lot of one piece lore that even i've
forgotten. So like there's a recent episode where, you know, there's a certain character who shows up and then they're going to tell you about like, here's where this character is from in the story. I'm like, they're from that far back. Oh my God. And I had to like remember that. So I'm glad that I'm forgetting that actress who plays Robin, but she's awesome, are telling me this. And then you have the next episode preview. So they've bought themselves about five minutes of time. They don't need to animate each week.
So the show, actually in pacing terms, I think is going to be on even better footing now because they only have to make about 17 to 18 minutes of one piece a week, which helps a lot.
Next, they just need to get like a good 30 seconds on either side with eye catches and get that. So you can shave another, you can easily get another minute off if you get some pre-elaborate eye catches there.
The eye catches are outstanding for Egghead, I will say. They're normal length eye catches. They're not 30 seconds, but the ones they have are very good. Anyway, One Piece is cool. I've been having fun with that. I've meaning now to add a little bit more on some of this One Piece stuff into my dissertation because there was already some stuff there. But with how Wana wound up wrapping up, I'm going to have to go back and revise that. So it's cool.
I'm looking forward to, you know, 10 years from now when One Piece is done and we finally start Two Piece. I'm very excited to get there because that's when I can watch. Once we're on to Two Piece, then I can watch One Piece and catch up and wait for two piece to finish. And then when three piece starts, I can watch Two Piece. That's my plan.
I am very curious. Like, we are nearer the closing than ever. Well, yeah, I mean, that's always true. That's true. But, well, with One Piece, there were times where that was not true. Or we weren't nearer the closing than the beginning, I guess. But anyway, so, like, One Piece will end within the next five to ten years, probably. And I am very curious if Toe does the Boruto route or something. Or if they just kind of say, we got a good 30 years out of this. Maybe we're good.
Well, I mean, well, no, because they're already, it's not done and they're already doing the remake. So it's like, you know, they're already, like, we got to get that gravy train flowing because if, if, if one piece ever ends. And I do think it's an if. Like, I'm not saying when, I'm saying if. Um, if one piece ever ends, they're not going to stop. Like, they're still making Naruto. They're still making Dragon Ball. Hell, they're still making bleach now. Um, bleach was gone for a while. And now they're doing the last arc of bleach. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's, they're not, they're not stopping this shit. So, yeah.
Either it's two-piece or it's one-piece remake or it's both.
I mean, we haven't talked about that yet, because this is pretty crazy, kind of an, I don't know of an situation like this. Anime remakes happen, not usually while the original anime is still an active ongoing thing, but they have announced that Witt Studio, who made Spy Family with CloverWorks, obviously they did the first three seasons of Attack on Titan, all of that stuff. They are producing a remake of One Piece called The One Piece, which is the funniest thing about it. That's just such a great. I fucking love it. And starting from the beginning, I mean, we don't know a ton of details.
Like this could very well wind up being a kind of greatest hits collection, who knows. But they are apparently starting from the beginning. It's going to air on Netflix. Netflix has gone all the way in on One Piece because their live action show was a big hit by whatever standards Netflix uses to call things a hit. They have a lot of the anime. They are now simulcasting Egghead with Crunchyroll. So you can watch it on Netflix as well as Crunchyroll. That's pretty crazy. So they have a bunch of the movies and specials.
So Netflix very much likes One Piece and they are now funding this remake by Witt Studio. And like, I do see the logic of it on some level because it is going to be a lot easier, I think, for people to enter the One Piece ground floor there than at the beginning of the Toe anime where there is a thousand episode ladder to climb. Like I'm curious, would you watch?
The entire production style of anime has changed multiple times. The course of the rent of One Piece, you know.
Yes. So, like, I'm curious, like, Sean, you as someone who hasn't watched any One Piece yet, would you, like, watch the Witt Studio anime when it comes out? Maybe, yeah, I don't know.
I'm not against the idea. It's, yeah. I'm just curious because... There's not enough known about it for me to... Yeah. ...to know whether or not something I'd want to watch.
I'm skeptical of the idea that it will truly be a long-term thing, because even if you adapted the manga fast, let's say you did three chapters an episode, you're still talking about, like, an amount of episodes no anime produces anymore, right? And that Witt Studio, who has other projects and priorities is not probably going to be doing 26 episodes of One Piece every year for the rest of time. So, like... I'm very curious.
My guess is that it's actually probably going to be more of kind of a greatest hitsy kind of thing, but we'll see.
Yeah, I'm curious about it. It is hilarious, though, that they're already doing the remake when they're not done with the original. But yes.
Yep. One other piece of stuff I wanted to say, Sean, I didn't know where else to put this in, but we finished our anime segment here. I started on my drive back through the snow and rain to Colorado. I was listening to some audiobooks, and I started listening to... Andy Circus has done readings of all of the J.R. Tolkien books. He's done The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and this year he put out the, or last year he put out the Silmarillion.
And the Silmarillion is the J.R. Tolkien book I've never been able to get through because it's dense. Yeah, so it's a book that nobody's ever read, not even Andy Circus. I don't believe it. Well, I know he has now because I've been listening to the audiobook. If you like me have ever had trouble getting through the Silmarillion but wants to get through the Silmarillion, Get this audiobook. It is, and I'm going to go back and listen to Andy Circus's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as well, and I've listened to clips of them. It is one of the best audiobooks I've ever heard.
Like, not all actors make good audiobook readers. Those are different skill sets, but Andy Circus is a true Renaissance man, you know, man of a thousand hats. And he is a great audiobook reader. And he puts the Silmarillion. in the absolute perfect context, which is that he truly reads it like myth. He reads it like, or almost like a preacher, like it's a religious text.
Because the Silmarillion, like, the closest thing you could probably compare it to is like the Bible or a collection of Norse mythology or something like that. But like, because the Silmarillion is not a normal fiction book. The Silmarillion would never be adaptable as a movie. It traces, like you can't even say how much time it traces because parts of it trace...
existence outside of time when years don't exist yet because Iluvatar has not created vision and he and the elves are singing the world into existence and that's 30 pages you know so it's it's crazy but I have been really loving it because the Silmarillion has so much good stuff in it I think there's so many cool individual stories. There's so many ideas that are really illuminating. It, I think, puts a lot of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit into a different context.
And a lot of the writing when you get into it is very beautiful. But I think just reading it plain on the page can be challenging because, one, it is somewhat fragmentary. because of the way it was put together. And two, it is extraordinarily dense with information and names and places and dates and all this stuff. And I think having Andy Circus read it to you, he is unbelievably good at pronouncing Tolkien's fake languages, like better than anyone I've ever heard.
He has clearly practiced it and he just can make it sound like poetry every single name. And it just really comes alive in a way that makes it genuinely fun. It's not an audiobook I can listen to as casually as some other audiobooks. You do, I find I need to focus because the Silberlian is still very dense, even in this form. But I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I'm excited to hear Andy Circus's take on the other books as well, because I've heard The Lord of the Rings on audiobook before.
It's Rob Inglis had done unabridged productions in the 90s, and I've had those, and they're very good, but Andy Circus is on just a whole other plane of existence with these, and it's really cool.
Cool. Yeah. Because, yeah, the Silmarillion to me is a book that's like, it's not, it's never felt to me, because I have my joke about like nobody's ever, like, read the whole thing. But that's more because it doesn't feel like a book that's actually designed to be read cover to cover. It's in the way of like, you know, for a Tolkien point of view, would be something like the prose edda, which is one of our main collections of, um, existing myths for Norse mythology from Snorri Storluson.
Um, and so it's a, the prozetta is a collection of myths. It's not a, it's not a novel, you know, and the silver alien is not a novel. Um, it is a book, you know, uh, that is a collection of different kind of things that is presented from, you know, a kind of timeline point of view. It's organized in a specific way, but it's not a cover to cover kind of thing. Um,
So, yeah, so like having Amby Circus deliver it in that kind of way sounds important because it's just a book that you can't approach it with the mindset. You'd approach the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings because it's just a fundamentally different genre of text.
It is. But like, I really, if you like Tolkien's stuff, I really encourage you to get into it somehow because it's, I feel like bad that I haven't engaged with it more in the past now reading it because there really is some incredible storytelling in there. There's so much imagination. Some of the events that happen... I just don't know what else to say, except they're so fucking heavy metal.
It's like, if you like the moment in Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf stares down the ballrog and announces that he is a servant of the sacred fire and all of that stuff, there's a million moments like that in the Silmarillion that are cool as shit. There's some, like, really interesting kind of emotional moments once you get into like the heart of the actual story, which is the stealing of the Silmarils and the elves. It's basically a fall of man story, but for the elves who fall back to Middle Earth in their attempt to get the Silmarils from Morgoth. And all this stuff. And I sound like such a nerd just fucking saying all of that.
But it's really interesting. And like there's also, I think Tolkien's whole view on this, it is this interesting connection where he is clearly kind of consolidating and thinking about and building on both mythology and religion in interesting ways. And like there's a lot of Christianity in there. There's a lot of Norse mythology. There's a lot of Greek. But the synthesis of them is fascinating. And one of my favorite parts of the whole book is him describing the creation of man versus the creation of elves.
And the idea that the elves are what Iluvatar, the god of Middle Earth, basically, or of creation of Arda. His first creation is the elves, and the elves are in his image. And because they are immortal, they don't die, they see time through to the end of time, all of that stuff. But he looks at his creation and he thinks for three ages or something, it describes, you know, where Iluvatar goes back to his, like, time out of time and spends three ages of the earth.
you know, thinking, and he eventually comes to the conclusion that there needs to be other races, and he gives them, and Tolkien describes it as he gives them the gift of mortality, that Iluvatar sees death as this gift, because the elves have a gift of immortality, but it is also a curse in that all of their creations and all the things they love they have to see wither over the course of time, and that they also, you know, become spread thin as beings over time.
but he will create men as having very short times on the earth, but that they will cherish in a different way. And there's just things like that where Tolkien will put existence into context through his mythology in a way that is very interesting and revelatory and thoughtful. And that's what I enjoy hearing in the Silmarillion. Yeah, it's very cool. Yeah. There's also parts where he just goes on for pages and pages listing names.
And I did put a clip of that on Twitter yesterday because it's the part that made me laugh the hardest where it is a solid 90 seconds of Andy Circus saying, and this was the son of Boromir. And he was the son of Houdin. And Houdin was engaged to blah, blah, blah. And it just goes on for like 90 seconds. And it's like an amazing self-parody. And I love it. But you know, you come for those moments too, frankly, because they're amazing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a lot of the stuff that he's pulling from, you know, that's like Beowulf, where when Beowulf arrives and meets like Krohgar and the Danes and all that, it's just like, here's a couple of pages of here's this guy, and he's the son of this dude who fought in this battle, who killed this guy, that guy was the father of this other person. Yeah, like the sort of, you know, and obviously like lots of mythology does that. Homer does that in like the Illy and the Odyssey as well, where you're like... At some point, you're like, what the fuck were you talking about?
You've traced some weird genealogical tree and connected it to like 10 other myths. And about actual mythology, one of the things that's fun about that is a lot of those things are the only ways we even know about certain heroes and stories and gods is that we don't even have that story about that.
person or character or whatever it's just it's been vaguely referenced to in five other texts and you sort of sort of have to figure out and how you glom it all together um obviously you know Tolkien was way into that shit too so he wanted to inject that same sensibility into his own um you know mythology in his own sense of this sort of mythologized history yeah all right you want to talk about some news Sean yeah what's going on the news Jonathan
The first item on my docket here, I wrote, the video game industry is collapsing. I don't know how else to describe it. This month, well, we're in February now, but January had... Like a historic level of layoffs in the video game industry, the biggest headline was at Activision, which is now part of Microsoft.
There were 1900, almost 2,000 layoffs, but also major, major layoffs at Riot Games, Idaho's Montreal, at Unity, at Twitch, all over the industry, from game developers to engine developers to Twitch, which is a streaming platform. Um... The most sobering stat I've seen is that in 2023, there were counted about 10,000 or more video game workers laid off, and that was historic. By the end of just January, 2024, we're already above 6,000.
So this is going to be a historic year for video game layoffs. And I just, I look at all this, and my mind kind of boggles, and I don't quite understand how, at least, because this is all, you know, the Western games industry, mostly we're talking about. I don't understand where this is going. I, this is disastrous.
Yeah, I mean, it is, it's basically in January, a fact, like literally, we have gone almost every single day in January, that is a weekday, has had some news of some layoffs at some company that is either a video game development company or a company connected to video game development like Unity or, And then obviously, if you extend this also to the media, where the media, not just in video games, but all kind of, you know, Sports Illustrated is fucking dead.
So it's like that, that side of it, though, also is getting all these layoffs. And so that kind of conflates in, and those are obviously happening for different reasons, but it's one of those things where it just feels like it's every single day you look at the news and some place has shuttered or some, you know, ungodly number of people have been laid off by some company. And obviously, lots of these companies like Riot and Microsoft are...
like some of like the highest revenue producing i mean well Microsoft specifically is like the highest revenue producing company in the entire world right within the video game development sphere with league of legends um is you know just one of the most successful companies out there um but still like but still and in some ways because of this um you're getting all the like hundreds of people being laid off
This is what is, I think, so mind-boggling to so many people, including me. This is not in any way related to any kind of economic downturn. The economy is fine. Unemployment in other sectors of the economy. I mean, overall is historically low. And in other sectors of the economy is not going through this. And the video game industry is not experiencing any kind of like major financial meltdown. It's doing better than ever. These companies are doing better than ever. Microsoft spent 69 billion. I did the math.
Those 2,000 people they laid off, you could give them all $100,000 a year for over 300 years and you would only hit about $50 billion. They spent $70 billion. Like, it's insane. Like it just... There need to be very different legal guardrails on all of this, obviously, because this is untenable.
Yeah, I mean, it's... We talked about this on the Game of the Year podcast, because obviously, like, this was, like, 2023 was marked by this stuff. I mean, Microsoft had... It was something ridiculous. What is it? Like, the 10,000, over 10,000 people or something that they laid off. This is across the whole company of Microsoft, not just Xbox, but it hit, like, Xbox. Like, that's when, like, three-for-three industries got hit really hard, and this is early 2023, is when that round of layoffs happened. Um, and...
Yeah, like, I think for my perspective, what I've read, and what to me, like, makes sense of it. Obviously, it's awful, and it's not something that should happen. Like, it doesn't actually make sense by any sort of proper logic, but by the logic that they use. It's still, I think, that a lot of the consequences of the explosive growth of the video game industry experienced during the pandemic. And so there's this weird once-in-a-generation short-term...
thing that occurred that caused a huge explosion in revenue for these companies. And so they took that opportunity to say, well, let's grow. Let's invest in things. And let's hire people up to start new projects. And then as soon as that faucet of like, insane growth gets turned off and you go back to something that is recognizably normal pre-pandemic. Well, now we've hired all these people.
We've invested in all this stuff, but we're no longer getting the revenue stream that we had that created the impetus to do this in the first place. And so, you know, these companies are not experiencing the same level of growth that they thought they would be experiencing because their projections were all based on something that was... not possible in a world where the pandemic's not creating this artificial interest in the products.
And so now they're scaling back and they're shuddering studios and they're canceling projects and they're laying off hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people because they hired hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people during the pandemic also in a way that was wildly irresponsible because it was based on something that they didn't have. an ability to maintain from a long-term perspective. And so you just see this weird sort of like inflating and deflating of the game industry because these people are fucking morons, basically.
I just, yeah, I mean, it, as you say, it makes sense within the weird corporate logic that doesn't make sense to begin with. So it makes sense and it doesn't make sense.
It's a logic that is self-defeating. You know, it's like it's this thing where none of these people are making good, like actual good business decisions, which would be making business decisions that are sustainable and that protect people. And they're not doing that, right? They're chasing this like phantom metric of growth, which they have no ability to actually like really attain. They have no control over it. And so they're just.
flung about by the whims of factors that they have no power over and they're just destroying people's lives in the process. This is why there need to be guardrails.
I mean, I've long felt very powerfully. I would love to see some kind of law in this country that if you're going to do layoffs at a certain scale, maybe it can be percentage of the workforce, maybe any amount of layoffs over a couple hundred, whatever you would market at. Whoever is in charge of that company also has to go and take no compensation package. Like there has to be some kind of guardrail to that, right? Because that would stop a lot of this. Like Microsoft would be thinking very differently about layoffs of this size.
If as part of that, one of the people laid off had to be like Steve Balmer or whoever is in charge these days. Right? Like, and that should just be part of it. Like if you have, if you have fucked up to the degree that you have to put 2,000 people out of work, you should be one of those people out of work. And if it's really necessary, then okay, you take that hit and someone else comes in to take over. That to me seems like that would be if I had a fucking magic wand as president and could make a law, that would be one of them.
Yeah, or at the very least, like, whether it's that, like there are lots, I say lots, most countries have more guardrails than the U.S. does. Yes. You know, this is one of the reasons why you don't see these kinds of layoffs in Japan is Japan has laws that make it more difficult to lay people off. And you need to, like, prove that it's something that needs to happen. Yes. Or there are penalties, right? So, like, you... companies shouldn't be allowed to do this.
And it would be to their best interest if those guardrails existed because it would force them to make more intelligent decisions and how they run their business. You know, because you just end up in this weird scenario where there's going to be a kind of like... you know, black spot in the release of video game titles for a lot of these companies over the next couple of years because they're canceling all these projects and all these studios are getting shuttered.
And like the poster child of this is the fucking, you know, the Embracer Group, which, you know, the big one that we had was Idas Montreal got huge... layoffs and the Embracer Group bought them from Squirt Enix like last year, maybe two years ago. And we know that they were working on a Deus X game.
And it's just, you know, when you look at the Embracer group, it's just like staring into the ma of utter stupidity because it's this group of people who have bought all this stuff and spent all this money and invested in all these companies. without any clear sense of how do you turn this into like a business that can create a product that we sell for money that then allows us to make more stuff that we then sell for money.
And so they have this, they have this thing of like, we just want to buy all this stuff up without a plan of how to use all the stuff that they buy. And so then when the. fucking chickens come home to roost, well, you're left with, you know, a paper bag of shit in your hands because you haven't made anything. And you just have all these random projects all over the place. You don't have a clear sense as a company of how to prioritize or build up this portfolio or actually release and support all these things. And so now they're all getting fucking canceled.
And so these studios just are getting jerked around all over the place. because the Embracer Group is slowly melting down. And because they bought all these places up over the past couple of years, all of those historic development studios are caught in the crossfire and are slowly getting destroyed, right? And we already lost volition with the St. Roe, St. Row and Red Faction people who go all the way back to making fucking dissent in the 90s on PC, like a whole...
historic developer that has made some hugely important games in the history of video games gone because the Embracer Group thought it would be cool to own Saints Row, but didn't know how to support those projects.
Yeah, I don't know what else to say. It's horrible. I just, with this plus the consolidation we're seeing and Microsoft just buying up everything they can, the future of this industry looks very bleak to me. And it also is just proof that like with them laying off 2,000 people from Activision and canceling, because also a bunch of projects were canceled with that. Yes. This is very akin to Disney buying Fox.
Disney did not buy Fox so they could make more great Fox movies and put them out on the market. They bought Fox to get Fox off the playing field, so there would be more screens for their Marvel movies open at the multiplexes. And we have seen there are just fewer movies released to theaters with Disney having bought Fox than when they were separate companies. There are still some Fox movies that come out, but many fewer. And, like, Microsoft did not buy Activision so it could empower Activision to make a shit ton of games.
They bought them to take a competitor off the field, and that is what they are doing. Activision will make some stuff. There are going to be fewer games, fewer projects, fewer jobs than there were when they were separate companies.
Yeah. And, like, one of the things that's just, like, so frustrating is having seen a lot of, you know, public figures in the gaming... press and stuff like that, that some of whom were like really behind the Microsoft Activision purchase, you know, and that were like, oh, this, you know, should happen or it's good for this to happen for X, Y, and Z reasons than turning around and being really upset about the layoffs. And it's like, well, this is the most predictable fucking outcome. I mean, yes, it's worse than I think anyone thought. Like, 1900 is fucking crazy. And to be clear.
Activism Blizzard King was not the only part of the Xbox family of developers that was hit by these layoffs. There were developers at Bethesda that were hit. There were developers within Xbox's sort of like Xbox Game Studios or whatever they called their like original set of studios. They were hit as well. Actives and Blizzard King was just the biggest chunk of that pie. So it's like it's bigger than I think people really anticipate at the time. Although also there I'm.
sure, there are going to be another big round of layoffs either this year or next to January at a lot of these studios as well as Xbox slowly sort of rips pieces out of Activision. And, you know, some of it is understandable to a certain degree of that some of it is the like, well, there's there's legitimately overlap in certain areas or there's things that Activision had to do as a publisher in interfacing with Microsoft. That would have been people's entire jobs at my, at Activision would have been.
their job was to deal with Microsoft as like a partner. Obviously, those people, I mean, they shouldn't have to lose a job. You should be able to find somewhere else in the company to move them or at least give them that option. But there's a certain number of it that you can at least kind of justify. But they use this as a shield to then cut out way, way, way, way, way more people than just like the relatively small number of positions that really has been made actually redundant. Because, you know, you still,
If you've bought this many people, like, you need the broader infrastructure just to support it. So when you see, like, the community support people for, like, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty and Overwatch and all of the sort of, like, long-running Diablo, all these big long-running games that Activision Blizzard King publishes and manages, and the community support people are all, like, they all got laid off. And it's like, well... Who's going to do that job then?
Like, you can't just have someone do that for Call of Duty and Overwatch and World of Warcraft and Halo Infinite at the same time. Like, you can't just take the guy who runs the Halo Infinite Twitter account and deals with the community and all that stuff for one of your other live service games. And they're just having them do it for four other live service games. It doesn't fucking work that way. Um, you know, so it's like those positions aren't actually redundant. You need the manpower to manage the huge number of new projects in studios that you have.
Um, and so yeah, it's like when I see some people online justified as like, oh, well, it's just redundancies. You know, this is something that always happens. It's like there are some redundancies. Yes, this is something that does always happen, but it doesn't have to happen this way. Like if you do end up in the situation where we have a giant company by another giant company, which shouldn't have happened in the first place, there still should be ways for the people who are being bought up to be supported by the new company. Right.
And so we do hear all these stories about. people who just got, you know, Activision employees who just got their like Microsoft employee ID and went through the new employee training and all that kind of stuff. And they're like, they finished that a couple weeks ago, holiday break and now we're back on the job. And it's like, let's, you know, I feel supported by Phil Spencer and Xbox and all this stuff. And here we go. A new family. Hopefully this works better than when Bobby Kodick was running things.
And then it's like, then you get shit canned because you just realize that, oh, no, you can't sign into the fucking job Slack account anymore. And then now your fucking card key doesn't work. And you can't log into your email. Oh, I guess I was fired. Time to go home. It's like, fuck that shit. And fuck all the people who make that choice. It does not have to be like this.
No, it absolutely does not. And I just, you know, every time we've talked about the Xbox merger on this podcast, we've gotten at least, or I've tweeted about it or whatever, we've gotten comments from weird, pathetic, angry fanboys who have some, who believe they have some kind of stake that they want Microsoft to get bigger and bigger so it can finally beat PlayStation. And I just, it's so, it's such a pathetic way of viewing the world. And I hope they learn some kind of empathy from stories like these.
Yeah. Because also this is, it's the, the cost is like at the bare minimum of the livelihoods of 1,900 people. And if we're in this huge phase of layoffs. They're not hiring up right now. So it's like these people are who, many of whom are people who have been in this business for decades who have worked at places like Blizzard that worked on the original Diablo are gone. And they're not going to get another job in this industry, at least for the next few years. And it's like, so they're going to have to go somewhere else.
It's like you're just bleeding talent and you're bleeding the history of this whole industry. out because of the way that these layoffs work.
I mean, this is a point that Jason Schreier from Bloomberg has been making, and he would be the one to make it because his last book, Press Reset, which you should read if you haven't, was all about people trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of layoffs or other disasters in the video game industry. These are issues that the industry might not actually recover from. And like, take finances out of it. When you have this kind of brain drain,
and you have this kind of turnover and you're not giving people somewhere else to go, they leave the industry, and institutional knowledge goes with them. And, you know, like, if you want to know why, like, a Nintendo can make great games so consistently over time, it's because they don't have this churn culture of kicking people out and not letting anyone in the doors over and over again, right? Right.
And that kind of culture cannot be built in America with this kind of churn because you're having people with experience taken off of the field and never coming back in. And that is what is so tragic. And that is if you care about video games as an art form, even if you cannot be bothered to care about individual people's livelihoods, if you care about this as an art form, it will be a net negative. It just will be.
Yeah. And I think it's one of the things that has driven this shift we have seen for a while now where Japanese developers are on such a huge upswing. And a lot of the games are going to talk about today, like the new Like a Dragon games in the Persever 3 remake. are doing like historically well, like they're breaking records for their respective franchises. And this has been happening with the past few releases with a lot of these Japanese franchises that used to be relatively niche and obscure.
I think what's the reasons why this is happening with Nintendo being so successful with firm software being so successful is in part because Japan has better safe like lifeguard or like supports for employees that prevent these kinds of layoffs. And so you just have people, who are working at the same place and with the same teams for long periods of time. And it's not the thing in the Western game industry.
It's been for a while where a team puts out one game and then by the time they put out a new game, it's a different team, right? The team at Rocksteady that made Arkham Knight is not the same team that just put out Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. Like those are two different fucking developers because it's, you know, it's a ship of Theseus thing and it's probably happened multiple times given how long Suicide Squad is over the course of that game's development.
Whereas, you know, Yakuza or Yuga Gotaku Studios is able to put out a new Yakuza game every year or like one in that broad franchise. If you put like judgment in those games in there as well at a really high level of quality that satisfies their fans and makes people excited so that the next one is the best selling one and sells better than the previous one.
because they are smart, they make smart decisions to how they design their games, and there is this sense of institutional continuity that the people who are designing these games are there in improving on what they did last time and making it better every time they go around, rather than it feeling like every time a new game comes out, it's a different studio has made it.
Yeah. No, it's so, so crucial. And, you know, we saw that in some of the best games last year. They came like, you know, a Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. That's a game that could not exist if you did not have a team that was together, that had continuity, that had experience with each other, and could grow on what they had made before. And there were a lot of great games like that last year. And there have been consistently out of Japan. And it's becoming, you know, rarer and thinner in the United States.
Yeah, and it's notable that a lot of the Western games that did really well last year are not American studios that also are not getting hit by these layoffs. So, like, Larian Studios is not doing this, right? They put out Baldr's Gate 3. Are they Canadian? Or are they? I think they're European. I'm pretty sure. Okay. And then Alan Wake 2, obviously, Remedy, who's very protective of their people, and they're from Finland. And you don't get big stories of huge layoffs out of Remedy.
And you get, obviously, like, those games have such a clear sense of how style that goes back to fucking Max Payne 1 and 2, you know, because it's like a lot of those are still the same people working there. Or when they bring new people on, those people stay. And you just don't get that from your random churn in a lot of the big AAA American... based studios.
Yeah. Larian is from Belgium. I apologize mixing up Belgium and Canada. You're both very polite peoples. So maybe that's where I got that from. But yeah, on Larian, Larian has had this amazing run of their internal continuity with, you know, doing all the divinity stuff over the 2000s into Baldersgate 3. And it's absolutely a object lesson in this idea.
But it's another thing that this affects, it just occurred to me is like, this has got to also be like one of the main reasons we are now seeing every studio under the sun running to ue5 or unreal engine 5 and we're like losing a lot of the sort of like in-house tech is becoming less common in terms of like in-house engines partially because well if you're hiring you you know you're turning people out you need to hire new people we're going to hire new people
Obviously, you can't hire someone who has experience with your in-house tools because they're in-house tools. They will never have used them. So it's like moving to Unreal Engine 5 makes it easier to hire people because they will have experience with Unreal Engine 5. And so that's another place in which it really affects the video game industry is that, you know, if you're kind of frustrated by everything is sort of starting to be built on the same tiny handful of engines, particularly UE5. This is one of the things that causes that to happen.
And, you know, we spent so much time last year talking about how, what a miracle Capcom's recent line of development is with their internal RE engine and what miracles they've worked on that in all these different genres. And that's a great counter example because Capcom is this Japanese studio that has had this revival in part because they have an internal, you know, group of people working on these things. It's, yeah, it matters.
It matters a lot. And it's, it's very tragic to see all this shit going on. Yeah.
Can I give you one piece of good news before we move on, Sean? Sure.
Did you see Fate Stay Night is getting a localization? Yes. Yeah, it's crazy to me. It's like, it's just absolutely wild that we did our whole, when we started doing our Japan Nation Station season, the Utable, Moonworks, looking at Garden of Sinners and Fate Day Night and all that stuff. that when that started, there was not a single type moon visual novel that had been localized in English.
And now we've got, obviously, which of the Holy Night was in production at that point, but had not yet released in English. So we have that now. They're doing the Tsukihime remake part one in English, and then now for the 20th anniversary of the original Fates Day Night, they're putting out Fates Day Night Rialta Nuua, a remake, or it's really a remaster of the Vita version of the game, which has they're going to obviously... probably like up the resolution on the art again, but it already had higher resolution art.
It had a redone soundtrack that you could pick between the original and the new one, and the new one was very good as well. And so they're putting that out, and they're putting it in English and in Chinese, and it will be on Steam and on Switch. And so that is... As someone who had to go way back in the day and use fan translations and deal with all that shit on the high seas of the internet, it is wild that now people will actually be able to fucking just, just go buy and play Fates Day Night.
That's crazy.
Oh, I know. It's, I am so happy. So, yeah, we're getting the Sukihime remake, the piece of blue glass moon. That is coming this summer. And then they're planning for Fates Day Night this fall. And, yeah, Switch and PC for Fates Day Night, which does tell me, I wonder if they have data. I wonder if which on the Holy Night did not sell well on PlayStation. And I wonder if the Switch and PC is where that is. Because I can understand why those two platforms, because PC is where these historically are.
And Switch is obviously just the perfect visual novel platform because you can put it on your TV or pick it up and read it in bed or whatever, you know. But it's going to be on those. And it's, boy, it's a long time coming. And it's, it's not like the. The audience for it wasn't there. Fates D. Night has been popular here as a TV show for over a decade because of the Ufa Table adaptations. But finally getting it, and it is the best version of that game, the Rialta Nua. It's going to have all the voice acting.
it's going to have the music and then we're also going to be able to play Tsukihime remake with it and if you haven't done which on the Holy Night you can get that oh man I am I am fucking psyched Sean I'm going to get to do both of those this year this rocks yeah it's pretty amazing yeah one
one thing to know though if you want the sex scenes that is this the version that doesn't have the sex scenes not that you particularly want them other than heaven's field is the only one where it kind of works but you have the movies that can cover that um and the movies deal with that side of it honestly better than the original game did because nasu's a very good writer in a lot of ways he's not an erotic writer so he's i think he's a little bit clumsy around some of that stuff um even if narratively it was very important for that route
Well, Sean, this is going to be on PC so people can patch that in.
Oh, yeah. Oh, that'll be day one. They're going to pass that shit in. Absolutely. One thing that was very funny, as I watched, they did this whole, like, hour-long broadcast on the Anaplex YouTube channel.
um with the voice actors for shito saber tosake and so like the main four voice actors from the game and just them like kind of chatting about like the history of the series and all this and this is when this was announced was on this thing and it was very funny watching them watch the trailer for the visual novel which obviously just uses the voice lines that they recorded in 2007 or they would have recorded it in 2006 for that game and it's very funny like seeing them react to it like just you know
When you think about that of how long ago that was for them, and all those actors were in such a different place in their career. I mean, Cosami Ayako at that point, the actress who played Sabre was completely known for just playing like the heroine in romantic comedy kind of shows. And so then playing this like warrior type, like super kind of stoic character is just so different for her.
And it is it's funny to like go back and the flavor for all those performances is just slightly different not in a good or bad way. It's just kind of a different take on those characters because obviously it's it's you know their first kind of interpretation of all that stuff. But yes, it's also funny if you watch that stream and I'm pretty sure someone did English subs for it.
Sugiyama, the voice actor who plays, Shido, talks about the process of recording that game in the absolute, like the literal cardboard boxes full of script that he had because that game is full voiced. And that's like incredibly rare for visual novels. And obviously Shito being the main character, because he's got dialogue in every single route across that entire game is a very long visual novel.
It's like he's like, yeah, like they had to go send me like, you know, they had to tell me before I showed at the studio, we're going to be covering page this to page this because you can't bring the whole script. Because they bring the whole script, you'd have to load it up the fucking car and go drive it over and haul it over. But then he would come into the booth where the director was and the director just had like a wall posted up with like all of the shit like all over the place. And he realized like, okay, well, you know, it's hard for me, but...
At least I don't have to try to manage the entire thing the way the voice director does. It was a very funny stream, and it just makes me very happy that... that people will be able to finally just play Fates Day Night without having to jump through hoops because it's one of the most important visual novels ever. It's so good. It should not be a thing that has to sort of be this weird kind of back alley, figure out how to get it in English kind of thing. It should have been translated fucking forever ago. I'm very glad that it's out or it will be out soon.
And I hope they release alongside it a printed book version of the script. So I, too, can just fill an entire bookshelf with Fates Day Night scripts part one through 20 or whatever it would be.
Oh, my God. I can't even imagine how insane that would have been. Is that like you're like, oh, are they sending the script over? Yeah. And then like a UPS truck pocket pulls up and the guy comes out with like a crate of is basically what it would have been.
That's fantastic. All right. Let's talk about some video games. Sean, we've got Persona 3 reload, Prince of Persia of the Lost Crown, like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. Anything else?
I got a couple of the things. I want to piggyback off of our fate conversation because I have an amendment to make from our last podcast. Last podcast we did the top 10 games of 2023. And my number 10, I had Hi-Fi Rush. Hypha Rush is a very good game. I'm sorry, hi-fi rush, though. I got to pop you off, though. You're no longer there. You're number 11. Because my new number 10 game of 2023 is Fate Samurai Remnant.
This is the Fate franchise game that came out last year in Japan and over here. Like, we don't have to wait for that kind of stuff anymore. And it is if you are into the Fate franchise and you do need to at least have some exposure to fate, like seeing the Face Day Night anime... obviously read the visual novel, played Fate Grand Order, whatever. Like, whatever your entry point is, you need to have to think have a basic exposure and know what a Holy Grail War is and the servants and all that kind of stuff.
As long as you know that stuff and you like Fate, I think this is a great game that is very much well worth playing, especially if you're in from the Fate Grand Order side, because there are a lot of little connections there that are very fun. Um, basically what Fate Samurai Remnant is, it's a game on PlayStation 4 slash 5 Switch and PC. And it is a Holy Grail War style fate story.
So like the set of in Fate Stay Night, where you have seven masters, they each summon a servant of a different class, and then they all fight each other over, um, quote unquote holy grail they call it something different here but it's effectively the holy grail that will grant their wish whoever wins it's that basic setup the huge twist with this one being that it is set during eddo period japan so about 1650 something japan so it's like samurai times basically obviously from the the title of the samurai remnant
One of the things that's incredibly fun about it is just getting a full Holy Grail war style story. You kind of, weirdly enough, you don't get as many of those in the franchise as you would think, partially because Fate Day Night never had, like, a normal sequel. You know, so you don't have a lot of, like, the pleasures of the Fate Day Night story, which is that sense of...
who are these servants, like the intrigue of the Holy Grail War and like forming alliances and betrayals and trying to unravel the mystery of who all your kind of opponents are. There's a kind of procedural quality to the Holy Grail War format that is incredibly fun and just cool and on like an action and mystery story level. Even like putting aside the specific thematics of Faceda Night, like that stuff is so fun and so interesting.
And it's really nice whenever you get something every once in a while that goes back and does something with that format. And so Fate Samurai Remnant absolutely does that. And there are lots of great moments of you encountering a servant and trying to piece together, like, who is this person? Like what is kind of the features of them? How can I kind of try to piece together in my head? Which historical or mythological figure might this be? And so if you like that stuff, Fate Samurai Remnant has that and it's awesome. But then also it's just got a very unique flavor to it because of the samurai era setting.
So you play as Miyamoto Iodi, who is an actual historical figure. He was the adopted son and disciple of Miyamoto Musashi, who is like the most famous samurai ever, right? He's the guy who wrote the book of the Five Rings. He did the whole duel with Sasaki Kojido on the Ganru Island, where he used the two oars and showed up late to set the dude off and all this stuff. Like, you know, there's a whole trilogy of movies with Tischer Mufune playing him, just like the samurai of samurai, Miamod and Musashi.
who is also, if you know, fake grand order, is a servant in fake grand order. And I'll talk about that in a second. But so Miyamoto Iori is who you're playing. It is set where he is sort of like a young adult at this point, very much at the point in Japanese history, where for a person like Miyamoto Iori, who is a warrior, right, he grew up training.
how they use the sword and like military strategy and all that under musashi musashi has passed away by old age at this point um and there's really nothing for eody to do because he's just sort of like lounging around wasting away um his days in this kind of peaceful era of eddo and then he gets sort of wrapped up into this whole crazy conflict of this sort of pseudo-holy Grail War.
He ends up summoning a servant, which is a saber-class servant that's different character than the Fates Day Night one, but is of the same sort of general mold, and then gets embroiled into this whole conflict. And it's a very interesting story about this guy who arm the surface seems very kind of comfortable with his sort of relatively placid life. But as you slowly peel away the surface, you realize that there is this...
much more kind of violent person that is underneath that that he is sort of contending with because he is fundamentally a warrior and he's a warrior who's never had a war to fight before because of the era in which he has lived his life and he is thrust into the most insane conflict ever and what that brings out in him as a character is kind of what a lot of the story is about and it's very interesting and then how that parallels with his servant saber who is a
Hero from Japanese mythology, I don't want to spoil it, but for people who are interested in that stuff, but there is like an interesting kind of paralleling of those two characters similar to how Shido and Sabre in the original Faith Day Night, it's the same kind of structure just with very different specifics in terms of how those characters actually work. So, yeah, like all that stuff is really awesome. And then all the other servants are rad.
And there's a lot of fun, if you come from Fake Grand Order in particular, a lot of fun little things where they pull in bits and pieces from that. So Miyamoto Musashi as a servant who is one of the kind of fan favorite servants from FGO, a character voiced by Sakura INA. And it is one of the few times outside of the original saber where they actually do kind of justify why you have done a gender flop. for the character. So it's a woman version of Musashi. But there's a whole complicated reasoning for that because Musashi is a very different kind of servant.
She's not a normal servant. But she is in this game. She gets summoned as a berserker class, which is incredibly fun because she's just like a little weird. She's just a little bit off. So she's just kind of like... a little bit extra and Asakana as an actress has a lot of fun with that but a lot of the story is about IOT kind of encountering his former master in this new form of this woman version of him from another world basically and kind of coming to terms with
who he is and who he has become and how his life was shaped by this person. And you just get a lot of Musashi in this game, which is great. Because if you come from FGO, FGO doesn't have a lot of voice acting. So I love that character, but you never really got to hear a lot of her actual voice as Sokda INA. So getting this full voiced game where like every last piece of text in this game basically is voiced. It's a very... They go above and beyond to really make sure that they do voice acting across the whole thing.
Getting that is a real treat if you come from that world. So yeah. So the story stuff, amazing, awesome. It is also a game where you do at least two play-throughs because it's got a pretty major thing. point at which it splits where the last third of the game is basically completely different based on a choice you make. And then in the new game plus, they insert a lot of scenes and new sequences that allow you to see things from other characters' perspectives.
So if you're going into it, do know that I would highly recommend doing a new game plus play through because it kind of feels essential to understand and get the whole experience of the story. And the new game plus is very easy because you're so powerful, you kind of just like blast through the game. In terms of the gameplay, the gameplay is like is good but not amazing. It's not really the focus. Um, it's definitely built in the broad vein of a Dynasty Warrior style game.
So the combat at its core is your, you know, square, square, square triangle style. Um, here's a Nerita with a bunch of enemies and you chop them all up kind of thing. But, yeah. Sort of like Persona Five Strikers, it puts that core combat in an extremely different package. So you're not going through Dynasty Warrior style missions.
It's much more of a big action RPG where you're going about these hub worlds and exploring and good things, narrative events and talking to characters and stuff, and then occasionally running into monsters or enemies and then fighting them or obviously getting boss fights with the different servants and using that kind of framework of combat.
And there's also a layer you get that has a slight kind of strategic component where you have a kind of map of Edo and you're say start at one end and you're like, okay, the enemy forces or the enemy we're going to go fight is at the other end of Edo. Here is this kind of grid and you move your unit on the grid to go and like kind of get to the other side of the map. And it's almost kind of. Go-esque in that you're capturing territory.
And if you capture territory around this section, they become part of your territory. It's very simple. Like it's not a super deep strategy element, but it has a little bit more to it. And I enjoyed those sequences because it had a bit more going on there. And then the other part of the gameplay is that they introduce a whole conceit with this game where there's an additional set of servants that have been summoned that do not have a master. So they call them rogue servants or Hogaday servants. And they're basically summoned to different points in Edo that are kind of spiritual locations.
Some of these are servants that you will definitely recognize, like Lancer is there because Lancer's from Fatsunite. He's in everything. He's always going to be there. Gilgamesh is there because he's always got to be there. There are some new servants and some more obscure ones. My favorite is they pull Kierke from FGO from The Odyssey, and she is a great character that you just don't get a lot of. She's not like... She's not necessarily like a fan favorite or anything. She's not in that game a bunch. So it's fun for them to pull someone who's a bit more obscure, but is a very good version of that mythological figure.
So you basically have this whole other set of characters and you can form an alliance with them. And they kind of become involved in the story in that way. And you have side quests associated with them. And then when you create a relationship with them, you can then equip them as like a quote unquote secondary servant. So you're normally playing as EOD in the combat, and then you build up a meter that allows you to switch to your servant.
So you can either switch to Sabre, who's always with you, or you can swap to Coo-Huland-Lancer from Fate Day Night and use him and use his moveset and stuff. So there's that whole component is there as well. If you like the servants, there are a lot of good servants in this game, and they do them all incredibly well. So... I enjoyed this game tremendously. Again, I would only really recommend it to someone already bought into the Fate franchise. It does not spend a lot of time setting up the particulars of the universe. You're meant to kind of know what a servant is going in.
But if you like that stuff and if you're into this kind of game, I enjoyed it tremendously. That's awesome. That sounds like a cool game.
I don't really have time at the moment, but it sounds like something I would enjoy.
Yeah, I was glad I was able to squeeze it in at the beginning of the year before the deluge of giant 100-hour RPG, J-R-PGs hit us one after the other. I was like, I really wanted to get this game in, and I just squeeze it in in time.
Well, let me talk about the game I've been trying to squeeze in before Persona that ultimately I will never be able to finish. And that is Prince of Persia, the Lost Crown, which is one of the first, like, well-received new Ubisoft games in a while. And it is, I've never actually played a Prince of Persia game before. I don't think there's been a new one in quite some time. But this is from the same team that did the Rayman Legends game. I think it's Ubisoft Montpellier, did this one.
And it is a side-scrolling Metroidvania-style Prince of Persia. You do not play as the Prince in this one. You are playing as a character Sargon who is trying to save the Prince of Persia, who has been kidnapped. And it is very much a Metroidvania in the sense that you are in this big area called Mount Koff that is suspended in time. And you go through environments and you explore... And you come back and double back and all of that kind of stuff. And then there's a pretty heavy action component as well.
And I would love to tell you about all the things I like about this game because it is overall a really, really good game. Not perfect, but very good. But ultimately, none of that matters. And I have to tell you to steer clear of this game because it is broken as fuck. And it's broken in a way I've never seen from a game before personally. Where the first, so I'm 25 hours in, and I'm near the end.
And I will never be able to get further because the game is crashing and broken on the next boss, which is the thing I have to do to progress the story, to progress my powers, to play any more of it. It's the next thing I have to do. 75% of this game was smooth as butter. I am playing this on the Nintendo Switch. The Nintendo Switch version is maybe the single most impressive conversion I've seen from a game that was made for current gen consoles.
You know, this is a PS5 series X game. It is not the most demanding game ever. It is a side-scroller, but it is like a really visually active, beautiful one that is a 60 FPS game, all of that. And it's all kept in the Switch version. The Switch version is native 1080p or 720P, depending on you're playing handheld or docked. It is solid 60 FPS. It is absolutely gorgeous. It's just one of the best-looking Switch games.
I think if you put it on the TV and showed it to someone who had not seen the PS5 version and said this is the PlayStation version, I don't think they'd bat an eye until they saw the PlayStation version. It looks very good and plays very well. until you get about 20 hours into the game. And then I can only describe this as a game that like, collapses in on itself like a black hole. Like it's a star and it's shining bright and then gravity catches up with it and it just crumples.
You start having pretty heavy performance issues. I think this is probably more notable on Switch, but my understanding is you see it elsewhere as well where you start getting some frame dips. And then you get, and this is by no means exclusive to Switch. I've researched this, this is on PlayStation Xbox, PC, it's everywhere. You start getting game-breaking bugs, like truly game-breaking bugs. The first one I got that like really fucked with me was I got to a side quest and there's not a ton of side quests in the game. So you're very much incentivized to do all of them. They're core parts of the game.
And you start by, you're down in this sort of C area of the game and you go up to this guy and talk to him and you go through the whole conversation and then you get out of it and suddenly your controller isn't working. And the game is still going. The audio is there. Everything's moving except your character and none of the control inputs work except like the home button to get back to the OS. and it's completely frozen. And there's nothing you can do about it. I read several people had tried different things. I tried everything. This side quest just, I could not do it.
So I had to abandon that. And I know they'd already done one patch because there was a different bug returning the quest when you finished it that broke the game and made it unplayable. That apparently has been fixed, but this one, I don't know if it was created when they fixed it or whatnot, but that's completely broken. Okay, that sucks, but that's not the end of the world. I could go do other things in the game. I started experiencing some other weird issues. There were a couple of crashes. There were some performance hiccups.
One thing that happened is I used just the normal powers they gave me. I wasn't phasing through anything. I wasn't glitching. And I got to an area that was clearly supposed to be inaccessible to me because when I got there, it started giving me the tutorial for a power I did not yet have and therefore could not go further in the game. So when that happened, I turned the game off and back down. I'm like, do not make a save here. I do not want this to break my game. Because I couldn't get back out of the room once I had gotten in there.
All right, but the worst is one of the major bosses of the game. This is the Varum fight for those who are playing along at home, which is, again, this is a core part of the story. This is, you have to do this to progress. When you beat him, you get a power that I was very excited for because it's the last power in the game. And I have a bunch of spots on my map marked of things I want to go pick up once I've got this power. The boss is pretty tough. This game has a lot of big difficulty spikes.
And when you die in a boss fight, it tells you either retry the battle or you can respawn at one of the trees that are like the little save points. They're kind of like Dark Souls Bonfires, what have you. And you can change up your gear. You have to go to one of those trees to change up your gear. So I was like, okay, I'm having trouble with this fight. I back out to that tree to change up my gear and improve a couple of things. Do all that. Ready to go. Go back in.
When you trigger the fight, a cutscene starts, and the game, you basically press the button to start the sequence, and the game fades to white to start the cutscene. It freezes on the white screen, and then I get the switch system message of the game has crashed. It's done, you know. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, fuck. Go back in, try it again. The game has crashed. Go back in, try it again. The game has crashed. All right. This seems bad. I look it up online. This is not a switch issue. This is on the PC version. This is on PlayStation.
It's everywhere. People have different theories of like switch up Sargon's costume. And that switched it. I tried that. Didn't work. People tried recommending several different things. None of it worked. I restarted my switch. I copied the save data into a different file to see if that would fix it. It didn't. From what I can tell, and I've tried it about 10 times, I'm just fucked and cannot progress the game.
And I honestly cannot remember the last time I had this kind of problem in a video game. Like this kind of truly the game is broken. You cannot play more of it. It's done. The last like truly calamitous problem like this I had with a game, and I have to go back a ways for this, this is over a decade ago, was in Arkham Asylum, the first time I played it on Xbox 360, my save got fucked up and reverted me to the beginning of the game about seven hours in.
But Arkham Asylum was fun, and I was a teenager, so I had plenty of time. So I just did it again, and who cares? Um, yeah, Prince of Persia of the Lost Crown, there's a bunch of things I could tell you about it, but it kind of doesn't matter. The game is broken. And like, even if they patch it at this point, like, I'm not going to be allowing this for inclusion on my top 10. The game is busted. This should not be released. I don't know if game critics just didn't finish it when they reviewed it, because these are widespread issues. This is not like a, this is everywhere.
And like I know specifically, it's kind of funny, Digital Foundry, who I love, I trust, they're very transparent. This is not me criticizing them. But like in their video, I played it because of their video because they sang the praises of the Switchport. But they're also always very transparent. They said we played about up to this point in the switchport. Yeah. And it was good all the way through there. And they were correct. And it was literally like the next area from where Digital Foundry left off is where the problems started. Not their fault, but it is kind of funny to me that that's where it happened.
But yeah, like this should probably be getting a little more coverage than it's getting too. I have not seen mainstream game press pick up on this. But when you Google these problems, these are not like isolated incidents. The game is broken.
Yeah. Because I saw some, because you tweeted about it yesterday from us recording this podcast. And I was curious because I had not heard anything about that. Now, to be fair, like, I think one of the things this happened is that this Prince of Persia game, it got some buzz because it got good reviews. But as far as we can tell, it, it sold really bad. So it's like, you know, like 300, 400,000 copies. So, I mean, you're not. the worst selling game in the world, but certainly, like, is not a big hit.
Um, so I wonder if that is like one of the reasons why there just has not been a lot of chatter about it online. But I was just curious to like poke around and see. And yes, like even just like very simple cursory searches. bring up a lot of those problems that you were just highlighting. And I went to, you know, I sometimes go to the video game forum, recetera, when I'm curious to see what people think about a project. And so I looked at the thread for this game.
And it's not a very long thread, again, because I just think the game just really didn't sell much. But it is mostly people talking about these kinds of issues, including one of someone talking about the thing you said, if they got into an area... somehow that they were not supposed to get into and they can't get out without the new power. But they were not as quick on the draw on closing the game. So they were just stuck and they had a screenshot. It's like, and I'm just in this little, it was so funny because it's like, I'm in this little tube. And it's like this little door. And it's like, but I can't get out because I can't.
I don't have the thing that breaks the door, and it's just this whole... It's very funny. You know, as someone who doesn't have to deal with it, it's very far as outside, because it's just the most ridiculous. Like, oh, you're just fucked. Like, there's just nothing you can do. This is, like, the thing you're talking about crashes, the side quest not ending. Yeah. And so I'm curious, you know... I mean, obviously, these kinds of bugs, it doesn't happen to everyone most of the time, right? Sometimes there are bugs that will happen to 100% of the players. But typically is a thing where it's like you just...
got the shit draw. And so it's entirely possible that the vast majority of reviewers didn't get much in terms of very severe bugs. It just got maybe some of like the lighter ones or they never really did that side quest. That's glitched. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that they didn't finish the game. But I think because there's not been a lot of broader chatter about it, it's not come up. It's not like when Starfield comes out, there's a vast volume of people playing that game. So the talk about...
Oh, this high quest is totally broken or this thing is broken or here's this weird glitch. Like that stuff gets spread very quickly. This game, I just think it kind of totally slipped under the radar. And it is, yeah, it sucks. I mean, it reminds me of... Um, you know, because it's a Ubisoft game, it makes me think about Assassin Screwed Revelations for me where, you know, this is a very old podcast story where that game I was going into the area that was basically the last thing in the game.
Um, that was like the last two hours or whatever, the point where it said, hey, go do other stuff and wrap up the side missions because if you do this, it's going to finish the game. I was at that, did some side missions. Then at the end of one of them, it loaded up the opening cutscene of the game. and overrode by save. And so I had a save that was like 25 hours played 0% complete because it was just restarted the game at the beginning and overrode the only save I could make because Ubisoft is weird and does like make save slots. And that's why I always use save slots in games.
That's why I've got like 15 saves in like a dragon infinite wealth.
And Prince and First of the Lost Crown, guess what? No save slots, all auto save. Should be fucking illegal. Should be an act of Congress. Autosaves are a tool on the side. They should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be the only form of saves. It is a bad idea 100% of the time. Yeah, and Ubisoft does it.
basically for all of their games, they have forever. And yes, it's just this thing of where for most games, it wouldn't be a problem. But if it becomes a problem, you want to have the ability to go, well, if I go back to this point, maybe this would fix it. Or, you know, certainly for the, like, I ended up in an area where I can't get out of, like having multiple save slots will save your ass on that kind of issue. But yeah, it really sucks, you know, because I was curious about this game.
um i ended up not pulling the trigger because i was wrapping up fate samurai remnant and there was not enough time for me between that and infinite wealth coming out for me to start another game but i did seriously consider it um and you know maybe if i did get it i wouldn't have had any problems but i do feel like i dodged to pull it so thank you john yeah don't do do not buy this game and it's it sucks because i really do like this game it's not perfect um
But the things that it does well, it does very, very well. Like it is a really well-built Metroid-style game. The basic exploration and platforming is immaculate. I love the movement set. I love the movement puzzles and challenges that are there. I think the sense of exploration and our areas wrap back on each other and how, like, it works in backtracking and all of that stuff. If you like this genre at all, it's a really, really good version of that. I think the combat is more problematic.
I think the combat is not as good as the game thinks it is, and so the game leans on it in ways that it shouldn't because the combat just is not as developed as they want it to be. And I think it also leads to some weird issues where... While it is fun to explore the world, the rewards are pretty piddly because they all wind up being currencies for various upgrade trees. And that should be the biggest no-no in the world for any kind of Metroidvania. It should be like, go back to Metroid, it's energy tanks.
And it's missile tanks and it's like things that you immediately have and use. That's what it should be in these. It should never be a coin that if you get three of these, you can do this, this, and no, never ever do that in this kind of game. Bad idea. And I think this game does that and it's a problem where like I'm usually doing the challenges because I'm enjoying the challenge, not because I need want or care about the thing that I am getting. So, like, that's a problem, and it ties into some of the combat stuff where I think they reach a little too close to the sun.
Because it's definitely inspired by some stuff like Hollow Knight and even Metroid Dread, where Metroid Dred brought in a much heavier focus on combat than Metroid had before and has a whole Perry mechanic. And this game tries to do that. And it's, I would say it's like a...
It's a B-minus peri mechanic where it is like not to the level of where it's an active, like, knock on the game, like some peri-mechanics are, but it's also not Metroid Dred or, you know, fucking Sekiro, which is the greatest peri mechanic of all time, where it's like a really, once you get into it, you're really loving the pari mechanic. It's a B-minus. But anyway, so that side of it is a little more problematic. But like, this glitch I had, at least when that happened to you on Assassin's Creed, Sean, you could just go watch the ending on YouTube.
One, I don't give a shit about the story in this game. That's the other thing. It's just, you can skip all the cutscenes. They don't matter. It's, it's, who cares? But, like, also, I'm at the point in the Metroidvania where I have the whole map unlocked. I have the world mapped. And my last thing I wanted to do was have all the powers and go on every Metroid fan's favorite part of the game, which is the big backtracking quest to get all the things you missed. And that's what I was about to go do when I beat this boss. And I can never do it because the game is busted. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, at least there was with like the, the one silver lining with the Assassin's Creed one is the nature of that glitch was it was very easy to just wash my hands of it and go like, well, fuck, like, I'm done because there's nothing you can do. With the like, oh, it glitches at the end of this boss fight, that sucks. Because now you have to try it over and over and over again. Just in the offhand case, it's like, oh, yeah, if I take the shoes off my character, now it will, you know, like that, that's the worst.
The last game I played, that was like that. was the Tomb Raider reboot where there was a glitch where my save file basically got corrupted. And that was the thing that ultimately led to me buying and playing Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth because I was so frustrated because I was very close to finishing that game also in just like... It just kept on crashing, crashing, crashing. There's nothing I could do. And so then I bought Digimon Story CyberSleeves and the rest was history. So at least that's the last time that happened to me, I had like, there was a golden lining.
But there's no, there's no Digimon Story Cyber Sleaf 2 right now, unfortunately. Sadly, well, there was a two. Your three would be the next one.
The hacker's memory is a side game. It's a guide-in, what I'd say. It's a guidance. All right. So, Principers the Lost Crown steer clear, and I feel bad. Part of me feels bad saying that because it is a good game. But, you know, I shouldn't feel bad. Selling something like this is essentially fraud. So please fix it. You'll be soft. And my worry is that there's not enough chatter for them to feel pressure to fix it. So that was 50 bucks down the drain.
Yeah, that sucks. I want to talk about one more game on my end. I haven't played a lot of, but I just want to chat about briefly before we get into our main stuff. Because, you know, I'm trying to keep up with the kids and stay hip, you know, because I'm a teacher, I need to do this. I'm curious, Jonathan, have you been following any of the PAL world stuff? Only in general disgust? No, I would not play it. It's pretty good. I've played a couple of hours of it.
Powell World, I'm not going to touch on the controversy of is it or is it not plagiarizing Pokemon. I don't know how much of the like did it steal actual assets. It's certainly a rip off of Pokemon. Whether or not it's legally a ripoff, I don't know. It is definitely a, we took Pokemon designs, we filed off the serial numbers.
You know, it is certainly, it is, it is a game that normally nobody would even notice that it did that because it would exist in a sort of stratum of steam that you'd never... go into because there are certainly, this is not the first nor the last Pokemon ripoff that's out there. The thing with Power World, who people have not been following it, is that it is a survival style game in the vein of an arc survival evolved, Rust, you know, that kind of like janky, early access, Steam survival game where you punch a...
a tree with your fist to get some wood to build a grafting pinch to get an axe to hit the tree with the axe to get the wood to build the thing right in that whole chain yeah it's that but with a Pokemon style twist where you have pals um they're not Pokemon they're pals um and they are little adorable cartoon animals that maybe look like if you took about five to six random Pokemon and chopped them up into pieces and glue them together um And then gave them a different name. And they all are existing in this whole world.
And you go out and you can catch them in PAL spheres, not PAL balls. They're PAL spheres. And you can put them to work in your camp. So it's like. You know, it's not the usually my kind of cup of tea, but I was intrigued in this enough. And I, you know, I felt like, hey, it's not very much money. I've got a PC that can run it. Um, I might as well check this thing out. And it's legitimately a pretty good time.
Like compared to the other open world survival games like Rust that I have like attempted to get into, this is so much more accessible. And I think that is.
like honestly probably like the number one thing for its success is that it is a genre that is hugely popular on PC but one that is completely impenetrable um for all the most popular games like arc survival involved you need like a fucking phd to play that fucking game or you or that game has to be your life to play it because it's so obtuse Whereas PAL world, it's got like, as far as I can tell, all the same kinds of complexities and things you can build and stuff as those games.
It's just the interface and the like onboarding and all of that is so much more accessible. And the big thing it does is that it lets you use the PALs to accelerate the like survival open world crafting process. So you basically establish a base. You build the crafting bench. You do all that kind of stuff. And as you're building things, when you get your pals and capture them and make them your buddies and you bring them to your base, you can basically put them in this like slot in your base that has them be there and work.
And all the different pals based on what they are, they will, they can do different kinds of jobs. So some of them will help you craft and you put down like a blueprint and they'll run over there and go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and start building that thing. Or you can load up like, here's a queue of. bake like 500 arrows on this crafting bench. And then one of them is like, okay, I'm going to go to work and start crafting the thing. And it's like, oh, here's a tree monkey looking dude. Here you go and you can chop down trees. Well, here's a lumber area. You go get the lumber.
Here, you go do the stones. Here, you just... be here and produce wool, so I get wool. And like, here's a farm. You're a water type one, so you can water the crops on the farm. And so you build a little kind of basin, put everything to work and create a whole sort of system by using all the different pals you capture. And that creates a very satisfying gameplay loop. But you're going out into the world.
exploring new areas, finding new pals, capturing them, leveling up your pals, bringing them back to base, and then finding ways to expand your base and put them to work because they all have different abilities that can function there. I'm not super far into the game. I want to put more time into it. I just don't have a lot of time to play. But what I have played, I have actually enjoyed quite a bit. And it's interesting. Like, it's just a kind of a game I've never really got into. But it's so much more accessible and kind of easy to approach than any of the other games like this.
And it is very popular amongst a certain group of my students. So that is also nice that I can. I kind of chat to them about, you know, they're shooting penguins out of their rocket launchers and all kinds of madness or riding on the big electric bear dude, and he has a rocket launcher and shooting his rocket launcher. Because there's a whole, because the other side of the game is there's sort of a black humor side to it of where it's playing with the tropes of a Pokemon-style universe, but treating it as if it was serious.
So, like, you can capture people in your pal spheres and put people to work in your camp, not just pals, because, you know. Okay, I like that. I like this. This is fun. And you can butcher your pals for meat, you know, and, um, yeah, it's a whole thing. And, you know, you can, I have not gotten to the part where I'm making firearms. I'm still very much in like the bow and crossbow kind of era of my technology. But I know that eventually you can build like, you know, assembly lines and put your pals into work on the assembly lines building fucking assault rifles.
And you can put up like machine gun turrets in your camp because your camp will occasionally be attacked by poachers and shit. And they will command those turrets to defend your base. So there's like a whole that side of it of the juxtaposition of the cutesy cartoon animals with the sort of like brutal capitalist exploitation that you're engaging in as the player of the game. So yeah, like Powell World. If you're someone who has a PC or it's also on Xbox.
I've heard the Xbox version can be a little more janky and kind of fucked up. So the PC version is the one to go for if you can. But if you're curious, like I would definitely check it out because it is, it's legitimately fun. And if you've never played a game like this or never gotten into one, but you want to try it, this would be the one to try to kind of help see. I feel like I have a much better understanding of why people get into these games than I did before I played this one. That's cool.
Yeah. And you get to, I just like the dynamic of you being able to talk to your students about firing gun penguins or whatever. Yes.
It's a pin, pin gullet, I think is what the penguins call that you can basically all of them have a special ability. And some of them are like, there's a Firefox that's basically like, you know, Volpix with the serial numbers filed off. But you can get like a harness that lets you use the fake Volpix as a fucking flamethrower. So you just like pick it up and carry it around and just make it shoot fire. Like that That's pretty good. This shit is legitimately pretty fucking funny. And is fun. So there's some good stuff in this game. All right.
Okay, why don't I talk about persona and then you can talk about Like a Dragon because I'm guessing you'll have, you've been playing that for longer. Yes, and I technically have two games because I've got the guiding game as well.
So I'll talk about both for those. Okay.
So Persona 3 reload came out Friday. We're recording this Sunday. Obviously, I do not have a ton to say yet. I've been playing it. I think I have six hours in it so far. For those familiar with Persona 3, I'm right at the point where we're going to do the first big full moon event where there's the train and you get deep breath, deep breath, deep breath and all of that stuff. So... That's where I am, but I've had enough to, you know, I've done, started some of the social links. I've played through all of Thebel in Tartarus, the first like block of like 20 some floors, um, all of that good stuff.
And overall, I'm, I'm, I'm impressed, but I'm not, I'm a little on the fence of some parts of it. I think overall it is a very nice remake. It's not.
a revolutionary remake and it is not trying to be a la a Resident Evil 4 or you know the Dead Space remake last year or something like that it is the base the most basic pitch you can give it is that it is the you know script and the bones of persona 3 with the sort of graphical style wrapping of persona 5 which is not to say they've made the game look like persona 5 but it's got you know the way like
Character portraits appear and do dialogue versus the polygonal characters. That's all pulled from Persona 5, that kind of like general presentation style. It's got both anime cutscenes, but also in-engine 3D cutscenes like Persona 5 had, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, it is so far extremely faithful, almost maybe even to a fault. It is essentially, it is, it is obviously the sort of like Fess version of the game with the male protagonist with the Fess changes in there.
I know when you get there, you get the Igus social link. I just saw for the first time I'm going to get the Tonica social link, which I think was added for Fess. All of that kind of stuff is that you can go out at night, all of those sorts of things. It does not have the female social link. It does not have the answer. But every inch of it is new in the sense that none of the assets, music, dialogue, anything is recycled from the original persona three.
So it is actually pretty unique from something like persona three portable or persona four golden or persona five royal, where those were all additive building on to what was already there. So like there wasn't a new version of. reach out to the truth in Persona 4 Golden. It was the version that was there in the original game. And then there was also a new battle track on top of that. Same with Persona 5 Royal. So this is all new. And some of it is a little jarring because of that. So like, for instance, with the music, Yumi Kawamura is not back to do the music on this one.
She was the singer of the original Persona 3. They haven't said a statement on this, but I was looking up online. And, you know, Yumi Kamamura is a bit older than the other persona vocalist. She is in her 60s. I heard from some people saying that in recent concerts where she has done Persona 3 music, her voice has been a bit weaker, and for Burn My Dread specifically, she was not able to hit some of the high notes and had backup vocalists doing that. This is secondhand.
I don't know if it is completely true, but that would explain at least why they have made that replacement. So Lotus juice is still there. And one immediate thing to recommend with Persona 3 reload is there is more Lotus juice than ever. He's all over this fucking thing. One of the tracks they've redone is the Iwatodai Dorm theme. It's the same underlying music. But instead of having kind of the weird samples doing the voices, it is Lotus Juice doing a rap about life in the dorm that includes the line, chilling on my bed. And it's pretty great.
So that is nice to hear. He also, there's a new song for when you are going around out at night. And that song is fucking phenomenal. And that is a Lotus Juice joint. But then the other lead vocalist is Azumi Takahashi. who has taken over for Kawamura. And I think so the music is the place where I'm the most kind of unsettled on the game. It's, this is the first mainline persona that Shogi Megaro has had no role in whatsoever. It is obviously using his underlying compositions.
But this was Atsushi Kitajou, who has handled all of the persona spinoffs. And I think there is a quality to the instrumentation and samples and everything that sounds more like a persona Q game to me than a mainline persona game. And that is the thing that like, there are parts of it I like. There are parts of it I'm not sure on and maybe it'll grow on me.
Like mass destruction in this one, the horns, whatever sample they're using, sound a lot cheaper to me than the sample from the original persona 3 from 20 years ago. And so it sounds a little chintier. But at the same time, he's added this weird, like, frog-ribbit sound effect that is there. It was always there in the victory screen on Persona 3, but is now all the way through mass destruction that I think is kind of hilarious and awesome. And when you get to the guitar riff in mass destruction, it still sounds good.
But then you also have Azumi Takahashi, who is clearly a very good singer, but her vocal quality is very different than Yumi Kawamura. So it's hard for me to even say... If I like it more or less, I'm just so used to mass destruction with I'm having to get used to it. There's also a new battle theme. They did the same thing that happens in Golden and in Royal, where the new battle theme plays when you hit enemies from behind and get a sneak attack. And that theme is very good, although I do get big persona Q vibes from it. It sounds a little bit like... Now, the persona Q music is great.
Nothing wrong with that. It just doesn't necessarily fit persona 3 perfectly. But then there are other tracks like... Want to Be Close, which plays at the school during the day. I think that sounds great in this version. And I think Azumi Takahashi does a great job with that one. There's other songs that I think the sample quality is hurt more like Joy, the song that plays during social links. I just, the horn sounds so cheap on it. I'm having trouble getting over that. But when you get into the vocals, they use the same samples from the original persona 3. So that sounds great.
So the music is something I'm kind of getting used to. The voices, if you're playing in English, it's an entirely new cast, and I can't speak to that because I'm not playing it in English. But in Japanese, it's the same cast that's always had in Japanese. They're fantastic, and it is one thing that is an immediate upgrade from original persona 3 is that the vocal, like, samples, or the recordings were extremely compressed in original persona 3. And it is nice to hear those vocal performances in full quality, and everyone's back, everyone's great.
One element of this, though, is that we finally have a new Igor voice. The actor who played Igor in the original games died in 2010. And they, since then, for Golden, for Persona 5, there's a whole plot thing with that in Persona 5, but for a lot of the spinoffs, they had just been using old recordings of him. But now this was kind of put up or shut up time. If they were going to redo the voices, they had to cast a new Igor. And it has been Shimada now. who is a major Japanese voice actor.
And he's great. I think his Igor, it's a little different, obviously, but he is putting his own spin on it. It is nice to have an Igor who can be autonomously voiced again, and Bin Shimada is doing a fantastic job.
Yeah, that's very good casting. Yeah. Yeah, because, yeah, it's obviously something that needed to happen at some point. So, yeah, but that's, if you got to recast, I mean, it's a good one to get. Yep.
And then in terms of the graphics and everything, it is very akin to Persona 5 in terms of, I think, the basic graphical quality, although some things are newer, because Persona 5 at this point is like a six-year-old game that was sort of at its base developed for PS3. So there are some new technologies. Tartarus has full ray tracing going on, which is kind of hilarious to see, but there are full ray-traced reflections off of like the lights onto the, like, reflective ground and stuff like that that I imagine the higher you get up Tartarus, they're able to do more with that.
But that looks cool. All the environments are very faithfully rendered. And honestly, one of the best things about this game is just getting to see all your favorite places from Persona 3 with more detail than ever before. You know, the school is more fleshed out. The dormitory is more fleshed out. All of that's very fun. In terms of gameplay systems, there are some things that have been added that I'm starting to get my toes into. Like there is a new... They have kept the game set in 2009, where the game was originally set. So you're still using your old-ass cell phone.
but they've added some similar cell phone-esque messages as we're in Persona 5, but presented on an old flip phone. And then you also have an expanded computer system where you can still play the MMO, but you can also use the downstairs computer to play one-off games that essentially replace the DVDs from Persona 5. So there's kind of a system like that to help you with social stats. So there's some little things like that that are added. Tartarus, I'm kind of interested to play more of Tartarus because it's kind of a weird in-between where I think
You and I are both pro Tartarus in original Persona 3. I think Persona 3 Portable made some changes that were there to try to appease the persona 4 fans, but I think kind of break the design of Tartarus. Most of those do carry over into this game, and I think that's a mistake. But some of those have been ameliorated by other changes they've made. So to give you an example, just to remind people Tartarus in the original game is this long procedurally generated dungeon that goes floor by floor.
In original persona 3 and Fess, you do not control your party members. They are controlled by the AI. I did not expect them to keep that feature in this game. And you can use the AI controls, but they're the basic persona 4 ones that you wouldn't use for that long. So there's direct party control. I have made my peace with that. That's fine. The thing they've kept that I don't like is that it does the thing Persona 3 Portable did, where they've essentially like nullified the system by which there were blocks of floors you could access in the original game.
And now you can always access whatever the highest four you left off on was. So you can always kind of get out and go back in. And the thing about how Tartarus was doled out in original persona 3 is that it was blocks of floors and it was a risk-reward thing of how high do you want to get to see if you can get to a stopping point and back out? Or do you want to just kind of stop for now and kind of take what you've got and go back down? And that has been, that is also nullified in this version of the game. But they've done some other things that at least kind of maintain some of the,
kind of like health and and status point systems that I think were limiting factors. So there's the clock that in Persona 3 portable they added that could restore your health. And that would just break the game because you would have plenty of money. You could always restore your health. You could play P3P in Tartarus for as long as you wanted. Now there is a new currency, these things called, I think they're called like...
Twilight fragments or something that you collect in the world, or Elizabeth gives you in the Velvet Room for doing social link events, and you use those, and those are kind of a precious commodity because they unlock treasure chests in Tartarus, so you can either restore your health or do the treasure chests, which now creates more of that risk-reward system. So I think Tartarus, for me, is somewhere in between P3P and the original, like, Fess version of Tartarus. Although it does, you know, it looks nicer. They've made some improvements to the battle system.
They brought in the baton pass thing from Persona 5, where you can hand off during a one more. And that's great. That just plays with the underlying persona combat in a really fun way, and that's cool to see. Shuffle time is here, but does no longer shuffle. You just have the cards and you get to pick them. You don't have to watch them spin around. But they've added some more elements to shuffle time. Like there's this Arcana system.
I mean, there's always been an Arcana in persona, but there are sort of cards outside of those that you can pick that if you get enough in a single Tartarus run, it gives you more experience. It gets you more better cards in your other shuffle times. So they've added other kinds of strategy. That's not, I think, a bad change. Yeah, so all of that is there. I don't think any of it is like a revelatory shift to persona 3, but it is a nice modern presentation of the game.
You know, there's some things that I find a little disappointing in comparison to persona 3 fess. There are new anime cutscenes here, and they look very nice, but they do not have... I think the weirdness and like the stylistic extremity of the original Persona 3 cutscenes or the persona 3 movies. They also do the same thing Persona 3 Portable did where the first persona summoning is an in-engine cutscene. And like, it's fine. It's better in this one than it is in Persona 3 portable for sure.
But it is not anywhere near on the level of the anime cutscene from the original persona 3. And I think that's a little disappointing. But overall, yeah, I'm curious as I go through further if some of the additions and like quality of life changes make this feel more significantly its own thing. Right now, I'm really enjoying it. I'm very into it. I'm enjoying what I'm playing. I don't know if I feel like this is an immediate, oh, this is the definitive version of the game and it replaces Fess.
There have definitely been places where I've kind of been playing and gone. I kind of just want to go play Fest because, like, I want to hear the original music and I want to see this place and this place. None of this does a disservice to persona three, certainly, but I don't know if it's quite on that level. One thing I do want to say it does that is very impressive is this is the first persona game where the social links are completely voice active. Every single event, all of them. Um, and that I think actually really helps with some of the social links. I think Kenji, for instance, the magician, the boy who is hot for his teacher.
I think that is a more interesting social link when he is talking to you and somebody is making performance choices in the booth as that character. And I think it puts a slightly different spin on that social link that from what I can tell the script is basically the same. Um, But that is fun. Overall, I am just very much enjoying going through the original social links because they are all so fun and silly. And I've already started the Innocent Sin online one with Maya. And it is, I will happily say, they have kept the original English localization of all of that, which was phenomenal.
All the crazy internet lingo writing that they do, that's all in there. And there's even now, there's more detail where you can see what's on the computer screen when Makato is playing that. And there's a little bit, and it's very clearly pulled from Persona 2, Innocent Sin. And that is funny. But you also, whenever you go to respond to Maya, Makoto leans over and is typing on the keyboard. And there's something about that that I just love, that little extra level of detail. So that is definitely something that would be a big way to recommend this game.
Overall, like my definite impression is that if you have never played persona three and you just went away to easily get into it, I can easily recommend this. It doesn't look like it's done any kind of disservice to it. And it is very playable. And it is modernized, but without, I think, sacrificing what was great about persona three in the first place. At the same time, there's parts of it that make me wonder if they could have gone further. Like with Tartarus...
I think Tartarus probably needed a more heavy redesign if you weren't going to do the original Fess version where the design, I think, makes the most sense. This still feels a little bit akin to P3P where it's kind of a half measure to try to make Tartarus more user-friendly, which wasn't necessarily the point of Tartarus. But I am still having, I think it's better than the P3P version of it, to be clear. Yeah. So that's my overall opening salvo of thoughts on persona 3 reload. I don't know if you have any things you're curious about.
No, I mean, I think like what you said is kind of like, I think what I sort of expect from it, which is it's more of a like, you know, if you've played persona 5 and that is your baseline, I think it would be hard for someone, it could be hard for someone to go back to the original Persona 3 fest and play it. If your expectation is, what persona is is Persona 5 or Persona 5, the Royal. And so Persona 3 reload being something where it's like going from Persona 5 to that.
should be a very smooth transition, but at the same time, that is, by definition, going to shave the edges off of the original game that are some of the things that made the original game very interesting. So I see where you're saying with, like, with Tartarus, like, I don't think it would have been particularly realistic from a production point of view for them to say, let's design Tartarus the way that designed the Dungeons of Pursona 5, because that is such a huge amount of work to make bespoke dungeons with unique puzzles and stuff.
But at the same time, like, if you're not doing that, but you're also not leaning into the, like, it's not an actual rogue-like, but a pseudo-rogelike, right? That kind of, that much harsher risk-reward design of the result tartarus that is meant to be... have a lot of friction with it on the player. And, you know, there's that whole fatigue system and all that stuff that made that, like, kind of a hassle to deal with.
But in a way that I think is interesting, it's just, like, not, you know, it's not interesting in a casual kind of way. You have to be very invested in the game to sort of, like, find the meaning and the purpose in those mechanics. In the same way of, like... I don't know, encumbrance on an RPG where there are some people who are like, ah, just get rid of the encumbrance, let me carry everything. It's like these kind of friction-based design choices have a lot of meaning, even if they seem like they're spoiling the fun in the moment.
So it's like, I think, yeah, it makes sense that persona 3 reload would find some of those areas to cut those corners or shave those edges off a little bit to make it more modern and more approachable to peruna 5-esque audience, but would also not be able to just completely redesigned the entire entire side of the game and build whole new dungeons and all that kind of stuff would have been crazy.
Yeah, and I am, I've seen some hints of this, and maybe there will be more as I go on. My initial thought was, I was hoping they would bring in some of the things they have in Mementos in Pursona 5 Royal into Tartarus, because that's the closest analog in Persona 5. And I think they made Mementos a lot more interesting in royal. There's some of that. Like, there is more treasure to find in Tartarus. There's these breakable objects that gets you treasure that just allows you to swing your sword more when you're running around Tartarus, and that's fun, obviously. Yeah. And I've only done the first block.
So it's entirely possible there will be more mechanics introduced as I go along that will add to that as well. Again, I have not spoiled myself on anything for this game. So if this was all out in the press already and I just didn't learn it, that's why I intentionally have been avoiding all of that. Okay. But yeah, it's, it's definitely good. I am having fun with it. I am enthusiastic about it. I played a good two hours this morning before the podcast and didn't want to stop playing. So it's very fun. It's very addictive. It's all of that stuff.
But, you know, there's just inevitably little things because Prona 3 is a game that's very near and dear to my heart. Yeah. So, for instance... This one, because it does the Persona 5 visual setup, the character portraits are smaller, they're down in the corner, and they're mostly neck up.
And so you're missing things that I kind of loved in the original Persona 3, like how much Ukari was characterized by her fist near her side when she was standing and she would talk, and she would always have her either hand open or kind of closed, clenched fist, and you could always see it in the visual design of the game, and that's just a completely gone thing because that's not where the character design is. And obviously all the character portraits... are different now and have been updated.
And they're good, but some of them kind of lack the characterization that I love from the hundreds of hours I've put into original persona three. Are these meaningful criticisms? Not really. These are criticisms from someone who loves the original game and has played it many times. So yeah, it is an interesting remake. I think it's a good one so far. It's not necessarily, as I said, game changing.
And it is kind of interesting to see Atlas doing a classic persona game without any of the persona team there because they've left and gone and made metaphor refontasio. Obviously, some of the people who have worked on persona over the years are still here. But of the original team, I think Shiginori Soajima is the only person whose name is on this having done new work. He did oversee some of the new character designs. But otherwise it is the people left behind at Atlas who have done this one. And yeah, I'm curious.
I'm definitely, I'm going to play it through the end. I want to play more of it. I want to see how it all goes. And I'm curious to see how they do all the big moments and what additions are made. So far, I'm kind of in a, this seems good, but I want to see more before I give a full, you know, review of it.
Yeah, and I obviously will play it when I get to it since there's a lot of stuff going on. But, yes, I'm very interested in playing it. There's a part of me that, like, also is like, but I still, I've been meaning to play through persona three fests in Japanese forever.
and it's like do I it's that thing like how many times can I play percent of three um like when where how does that reset the clock on then when I would go back and play the original game but yes I really want to play reload and I'm very interested in it and there's something that would is obviously playing persona three fast in Japanese is something I really want to do but that's also a slightly more burdensome way to go about it so there's something very nice about the I could just buy this on PS5 and just boot it up and just fucking play this game and not have to worry about it um obviously that has a lot of appeal
Well, absolutely. And if, I mean, gosh, if your main goal is wanting to play it with the Japanese voices, that is one thing I can say right away about this game is it's all the script from the original, but with, it's not necessarily the performances are better or worse or whatever. They are recorded better. That's certainly nice. They're a little more presentable in that way. And there's more of it because of all the social link stuff, which also does make me wish, and maybe it'll be DLC. I do wish the female protagonist's route was in here. I think all the pieces are there for them to do it if they want to get there. And I would love to see them do that.
I mean, they wouldn't, because of how those social links work, they wouldn't have to, like, model or draw that many new characters because it's a lot of the characters that were already in the game, but in social links they weren't in before. So I'm curious to see if they wind up doing that as DLC. There's some hints from data mining that the answer is coming as the episode Iguess thing is coming as DLC. So we shall see. Maybe this will become the complete persona three remake we've all dreamed of at some point. Yeah.
Honestly, episode, I guess, is in some ways the thing I'd be more interested to see in this remake, just because that is obviously a far more flawed thing in the original. Like, I really enjoyed it, but it's, it's not a, it's certainly not a 10 out of 10 experience. You know, it's got a lot of issues of its original form. So, but there's a lot of good, There's a lot of good stuff in there from the original Fest. It just is kind of buried in a much more tedious structure.
So if that's a thing where they could potentially make that significantly better in a remake, and that would be very nice to see. It would be great to see.
Oh, and I also just want to say the opening movie they have made for this is phenomenal. The new song. It is by far the best replacement opening song. A persona remake has had. It is better than Shadow World. It is better than what is the one for Persona Five Royal? I like that one a lot, but it's better than that one. Yes. It's color of the flag or something. It's not raise your flag because that is from Gundam. But you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I'm blinking on the title as well. Obviously, the one with like the diamonds falling from the sky and then hitting the city with the bats and all that. Yes.
Which is a great opening. This one I will say, I think the animation, the song, which is phenomenal. That is one thing that the Azumi Takahashi tracks heard the vocalist. I think she's better on the tracks where she's not covering Yumi Kawamura because Yumi Kamamura is such a specific vocalist. that inevitably you find yourself making those comparisons. But there are a good handful of songs that are Azumi Takahashi doing this for the first time. And in those, she's outstanding. And I love having her in the persona family now.
And again, Lotus Juice, wherever he shows up is outstanding. He's done a new verse on mass destruction that is pure fire. He gets better with age. Lotus Juice is the best. And just as a Lotus Juice delivery vehicle, Persona 3 reload is a 10 out of 10, easy.
They should put that on the back of the box. As a Lotus Juice delivery vehicle, it's a 10 out of 10 easy. The weekly stuff podcast is like, what the fuck is this person? What the hell is a Lotus Juice? And why is it need to be delivered into me?
He's the world's greatest rapper. That's who he is. All right, Sean, I'm really excited to hear you talk about Like a Dragon because I'm definitely going to be playing Infinite Wealth at some point because it's a sequel to one of my favorite games of recent years, Yakuza Like a Dragon, which was really Yakuza 7. And this is Yakuza 8, but it's called Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. But there was also a game called Like a Dragon Guiden that came out in between. I want to hear about all this. I want to learn. Sean, take it away. Yes.
For the sake of my own sanity, I'm just going to call these games Yakuza. I'm just going to call it Yaksa guidance, the man who raised his name, and Yaksa 8. Because, you know, I'm either going to call it that or I'm going to call it Yuga Gotaku. And it's a lot easier just to say Yakuza. Like, I have no problem with them changing it to like a dragon, like whatever. That's fine. It just hurts my brain. And it's so much easier just to say Yakuza than like a dragon. Um, so yeah, so obviously we've got, um, two games here.
So they did a guide and game, Yaksa Gideon, the man who raised his name, um, which is a game starring Kidu in classic Yakuza fashion as a brawler style game that is a smaller scoped game set, um, basically like during the events of Yakuza 7, it ends. Um, it basically, the ending of it intersects with Kiyu's main entry point into the story in Yaku 7, where there's that big fight in Osaka where he shows up in the original game.
Um, like the ending of this game intersects with those events and goes a little bit past those. So that's sort of like the timeline if you're curious where that's set. Um, and it's designed as a way to, it sort of is like building into infinite wealth. Um, it's, it's though not in a way that's like, critically necessary. There's nothing certainly in Kiyu's side of the Vyaksa 8 that I've played that feels like if you did not play the guide in game, you would be like confused or there's something huge missing there. But it is kind of just nice to get...
what really feels like this mini sequel to Yakuza-6. That's maybe like the better way to think of it. Yaxa-6 being the last mainline Kiyu game. So, Guy didn't, um, is very much about what has Kiyu been doing with his life after the end of six where,
spoilers but whatever you know it is what it is um it's okay he fakes his death right like he supposedly is killed at the end of the oxa six which is different than all the other oxa games where he has supposedly was killed at the end of them but this one he actually has like truly committed to faking his death um He is an agent for the Daidoji faction, which is a whole like part of the sort of like secret shadowy organization within the Japanese government that kind of does, you know, spy dirty work behind the scenes.
And that all was stuff from Yakuza 6. So, and there's some stuff that kind of the events of Yakuza 7 touched the Dai Doji stuff to a certain extent. But basically, they helped him after six where he supposedly is killed. Kitiu has kind of some dirt on the die-dodgy people.
And he uses that to say, hey, like, I will not expose all this shit if you help me fake my death because he doesn't want to bring all this bullshit into Hadeca's life, his adoptive daughter, and the other kids at the orphanage that he helped run in three. And that's kind of his big motive has always been to create a safe place for Haudica and those other kids. And he realizes, like, the thing to do is for him to bow out, take this opportunity to, like, leave that all behind so they can start their own family.
Hodika has her son, Hottito. That's the whole plot of six is about that kid. Your grandpa game is Kitu taking care of Hodaka's kid. He kind of leaves that behind. So then Guyden is sort of just picking up what has he been doing in the years where he is kind of doing dirty work for the Dai Doji faction and helping them behind the scenes in Japan. So the subtitled the game, The Man Who Raised His Name, he's going by Jodiu, which is just a great alias. No, you could ever put together.
That'd be like six and a half foot tall Japanese man built like a fucking brick with a giant dragon tattoo on his back and big slicked back black hair and like the strongest jawline you've ever seen in his life named Jodiu might also be key to you. He would never figure it out. It gets figured out pretty fucking quickly. As soon as he interacts with anyone who's from the opposite world, they put it together almost immediately who he is. And it's very funny.
Like it's the game has a very realistic perspective on how effective it is to try to hide or disguise Kidu when he's like the most famous person in the Japanese underworld. But the whole plot of Guyden is, as he's doing this stuff with the Di-Doji faction, he gets wrapped up in the development of the plan that is from 7, where the Omi Alliance Yaksa faction and the Tojo clan faction.
are both deciding that they're going to disband, right? And officially say that we are not going to be a Yakuza organization anymore because the Yakuza organizations are officially recognized entities under the Japanese government, in the real world and in the game. But the Japanese government in the real world and the game, I've cracked down really hard on it, and I've tried to sort of eliminate the existence of these groups.
And so in Yaksa 7, the huge part of the plot of that game is the Toju family, the Omi Alliance, saying, we are done, we're dissolving. And the scene where that happens is where Qiu comes in, in the big brawl and the aftermath of that in the original Yoxa 7 game. So this is about how he gets involved in that whole process. And he's working with this Omi Alliance on family, which is Watase's family, who's a whole, if you played five, you know who that is. And they're setting up this plan.
And so it's sort of this interesting thing of him, of Qidi, kind of grappling with the reality of thinking through the ending of this whole thing and this kind of transition. Um, where his life is sort of a metaphor for what's happening to the yakuza to a certain extent, right? Where it's like on the face of it, they are dying or are dead. Um, and but then have to continue to live on. So Quito has already done this.
He has already died and has tried to find a way to what is it, is it to live a life after you have quote unquote died. And that is what like the yakuza is going to have to go through as well. And so that's kind of like the perspective of the narrative takes. And it's very good. It's an extremely fun game. Just a brawling gameplay is phenomenal. It's very much... You know, they have gotten so good with the Dragon Engine now, where the first Dragon Engine game was six. So they've done six.
They've done Kiwami II, judgment, lost judgment, and then this game in terms of the brawlers. So they've done a lot of these brawler games in the Dragon Engine now. And they've just got very refined at how the controls feel and all that. And it just feels fantastic playing his key to you with all of his classic moveset. And then they give him this very silly, like, silly spy agent move set where he's got these gadgets, like a wire thing that he used to grapple people and throw them around, or he's got rocket boots that he can slide around on and tackle people.
He's got exploding cigarettes. This is the kind of James Bond shit that's very funny to tie into his whole weird super secret agent thing he's got going on. And then the other side of the gameplay is that it is, you know, a scaled down version of a yakuza game. Now, that doesn't mean that it's short if you want to do everything. I did basically everything the game and it was like 30 hours. But that is way shorter than a normal yakuza game where if you do everything, you're talking like, depending on which one it is, 60 to 90 hours, right?
One of the longer ones like five, that's 90 hours plus or seven is 90 hours plus. You're doing everything. all the minigames, all that shit. Um, so this has kind of like, you know, it's fun because it's a yakuza game that every piece of it is scaled down like that. So the main story is shorter, but all the like the, the mini game stuff is shorter, but it's all there. So you still have like this whole big, long involved mini game side story. Um, This one is all about the sort of Coliseum stuff, which is fun.
And so you have a Coliseum where you can do your one-on-one fights, but they also have you recruit a team. And so you have these big team fights where you recruit fighters and level them up. And then you go into these big brawls, and they go and have their super moves and stuff. And so it's a very fun big mini game. You've got all these big side quests with a character named Akame, who helps you kind of find the different side quests to help around the city in Sotun Bodhi, Osaka, which is where this one is set. So it's just a very fun classic style yakuza game scaled down.
And there's something that is cool about playing one of these games that is a kind of a smaller overall runtime in package. And the game does also, in its last couple of hours, it lands incredibly hard. Like it's got a great ending. There's some stuff with Kiti that just...
is so powerful emotionally where they're, you know, they're digging in like really deep with this character and really staring into the face of what is it to be a person who has, who has erased their name, who has thrown away their past, thrown away their identity for the sake of trying to protect these people, these kids. of all of them are basically young adults now, but he's kind of given up everything for them, but he can never see them. And it really, I think, grabs that emotional line and really falls it through all the way through.
And there's some stuff in the game that's very powerful. So that game, phenomenal. It's, you know, just a great key to you story.
So I wanted to ask about this because I am one of those players who came in with Yakuza like a dragon, which was very explicitly designed as a new entry point for new fans. It's a new play style with the Dragon Quest style RPG. It's got a new protagonist. Curiu comes in at the end, but Kyrieu comes in kind of like Han Solo in the Force Awakens or something, where he's the hero from the past, but you don't need to have seen those to understand his relationship with the new character. Right.
I was thinking about playing this one before I play Infinite Wealth because I would like to get to know Kira you a little better, and I thought it would be a fun way to do like a smaller package version of the old Yakuza's. Would it be comprehensible? Would you recommend it? Would it be fun? Or is it like if you haven't played Yakuza 1 through 6, 0 through 6, is it just not for you?
I think you could do it. Like, I think it would still be fun. Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's going to be some stuff you miss, but it does a very good job of recapping the relevant pieces from six that it's picking up from. Because honestly, you know, it had been a while since I played six. So it's like I needed, I didn't remember all the details of the Didoji faction and who they were and how they tied in with that story. They do a good job of bringing you up to speed. And then the main story of Guyden is pretty...
It's self-contained slash ties into seven. So the main events of this, in terms of the plot line, Jonathan, you would have no problem following because it's all about building up to some of these stuff in seven. And they help contextualize all that again. If you have forgotten some of the details from seven, they're giving it to you in a way that's pretty fresh. And I do think it would be a good idea if you're interested in playing it for you or anyone listening to this and you've never played the classic QDU games.
I think this one would be a good one to play in the buildup to Infinite Wealth because QDU is a main character in that game.
Yes.
And this gives you, I think, a little bit of that additional perspective and kind of knowing emotionally where is he coming from and what his past is. And you get enough context in Guyden that... I think you can, you get that without having to have played zero through six and seeing all that in detail. Um, yeah, that I, you know, I don't think it's a thing.
The other thing I've seen in eight tells me that you need to play guide him, but I think it certainly is the thing you could do if you wanted to get a little bit of extra emotional resonance from the key to use characterization and all that in eight.
Yeah, so that's awesome, because I've been excited. I've been wanting to do that because I would like to get to know Kyrieu more. I really liked him in Yakuza Like a Dragon. And just seeing all the, like, Infinite Wealth stuff coming out recently reminded me just how much I fucking loved Like a Dragon or Yakuza 7 and that I want to get back into that world. And so, yeah, the prospect of doing Gaiden and then Infinite Wealth sounds very fun to me. And you're about to talk about Infinite Wealth. So, I mean, take it away. I want to hear about this fucking game. Yeah.
It looks great. I mean, it's fantastic. I mean, I, you know, it's also huge. So I am nowhere near far enough to have a comprehensible. This is, you know, my take or whatever. I'm still in the early stages. I'm maybe like 16, 17 hours in. That's still very much the early stages. This game feels fucking massive. Um, but this is, you know, if you have played Yaxas 7 or Yaxas like a dragon, you know what this game is and it's sort of fundamental bones. It is very much in that style. It is a turn-based GRP.
The main character is, uh, Kasiga Ichban, the main character from the previous game. Um, and it is pulling in all those same basic systems in mechanics and style from that game, um, into this big, crazy, um, fucking bonkers sequel. Um, and it, it's very interesting in a lot of ways. Like, one thing that's just interesting about it is, it's been a very long time for, like, specifically the Yoxa games.
If you're putting judgment as kind of its own thing, because it's sort of a different genre with the whole, like, detective story stuff. But for the Yaxza games, it has not been since two that they have had, like, a normal sequel, right? Because, like, these games have always been very, very standalone. And Qidu very quickly got positioned into a kind of character. who you could put into basically any story, right?
Kitiu is that sort of Sherlock Holmes, the doctor from Doctor Who, you know, those sorts of characters that you could just lift him up and pluck him down into fucking anything. And Kiyu can kind of fit in, and they've sort of modeled the character and molded the character into that kind of style when they made to, so that way he could kind of fit into anything. But Ichibon in the Yaksa 7, right, the plot of that game was about his past and his history, like his whole life. is all over that game, right?
In his relationship with the Adakawa, the Yakuza boss who helped raise him and his sort of like pseudo-brother figure who's the bad guy in that game and all that stuff, right? Like it's his whole life is on display. He went to jail for 18 years, you know, all that shit. So it's like that game is about Ijibon's life. And so the sequel has to find a way, how do we kind of tell another story with this character? And I do think they do it very well, although it does mean it has a very long intro.
And Seven had a pretty long intro, but this one is pretty quick crazy, where there's a pretty long sequence right at the beginning where you're in Yokohama, the map from the original game, and it sort of does this thing where you have a sort of sequence of little time jumps that show... the progress of like Ichibon shortly after the events of seven, sort of what his life like kind of going back to some kind of normal living with his buddies in Yokohama, which is the choice he made.
At the end of seven, he's given this choice by Daigo, the former leader of the Tojo clan, who he says, hey, we're going and we're taking all the legendary yakuza guys. We're going to go build this company to help support the former Yaksa people in Tokyo, like Kaska, you come with us. And he says, no, I'm going to stay here with my friends in Yokohama, where I built this community. And I'm going to try to carry on Adakawa's...
The mission of supporting the people who were from the underworld and find a place for the former Yakuza, but I'm going to do it here with my sort of found family. And that's where he's at at the end of seven. So eight follows on from that and sort of picks up with what is that like? How does he build a life? Like, what is his relationship with the friends from the previous game?
And there's a very long sequence at the beginning that sort of just follows through as things start pretty well, but then things start to deteriorate bit by bit with like the... There's a lot of things that go on that sort of just start to kind of... carve away at his daily life.
Um, and it's a pretty interesting, but very long opening sequence that then builds to what is really the main plot of the game, which is he learns that his mother, who he assumed was probably dead, but they had never found her body. And they recap all the details from seven. If you don't remember like all the stuff of like Atacawa in all the complicated thing of the babies in the coin lockers and all that shit from seven. If you forget some of those details, that's all they recap that in this game.
I remember it being like an extraordinarily powerful sequence when we learned it all, but I don't remember every detail. But as you say it, like images come into my head because that game is so fucking good.
Yes, yeah. Because, you know, these games are very soap opera-ish. So it's like you're, you know, the details are very twisty and tourney. But there's all this stuff. And he has this woman, Akene, who is, you know, presumably his mother. He gets this information that she is actually still alive, is in Hawaii. And, you know, and the reason she went to Hawaii was to, like, sort of escape the people that were out to kill her. People just assumed that she was dead because they could never find her. But she's in Hawaii and Ichabana gets her, is given her address.
And it said, like, go there. She wants to meet you. go find her. And so he goes to Hawaii, which is the big crazy new map is Honolulu. It's fucking crazy. And you get there and then nonsense ensues. And basically like the trying to find his mom becomes much more complicated than you would think. And it involves a group of The gangsters in Hawaii called the Barracudas, which is the guy who's modeled, his face modeled after Danny Trejo.
Danny Trejo doesn't voice him, but it looks like Danny Trejo, who's the leader of the barricudas, and there's like a Yakuza gang there because for people who don't know, right, Hawaii is kind of like, has a lot of Japanese immigrants there, and there's a lot of Japanese business there because it's close to Japan. So, like, it picks up on all those kinds of things.
And in the course of... It's weird Japanese people go if they want to go to America because, like... It's close. It's a quick plane ride rather than going to fucking New York or something.
Yes, exactly. And so there's a lot of sort of like Japanese roots there and stuff. And so there's this whole little yakuza gang there. And in the course of his investigation, he also ends up stumbling into Kidu, who is in Hawaii for reasons that become clear if you play guide and kind of connects a little bit to why does Kidu go to Hawaii. But he is also looking for Akene. He's looking for the same woman. So that's how they end up bumping into each other. And so...
He joins Ichibon's party and you just go on this big wild adventure in Honolulu digging into the criminal underworld of seemingly paradise on earth. It touches on all the main kind of themes you expect in these sorts of games. It touches on like homelessness and stuff like that, which from what I understand, I did not know this, but it's the game says it and it's apparently true that Hawaii has like one of the biggest homeless problems in the world, partially because of the cost of living in Hawaii is incredibly high. And so it touches on all those sorts of things.
It brings in all those themes and ideas. And you meet a whole band of new characters and stuff that come along with you on your adventures. And that stuff is fantastic so far in what I've played. I do think it takes a long time to get there. I mean, I'm like 18-ish hours in. I just...
just got my fourth like proper party member of like the new set like you have a little period where you're with your buddies in yokohama when you go to hawaii it kind of is a little bit of a reset and you get key to you and he joins up and then you get some other people that join up so i finally got my fourth party member I just unlocked the job system where you can change your jobs and all that kind of stuff, just like in seven. But again, it takes a long time to get there. So if there's any qualms I have about what I've played so far, is like, do you think they could have maybe tightened up the opening of the game?
But also, it's hard to tell until I've played the whole thing, whether or not that seems like it's reasonable. Because there's a lot of stuff set up in the opening that has not fully paid off yet. So I don't know how that's going to work. So in the scope of things, I might feel differently about the opening. Um, one of the big hooks, I feel fine saying this because it was in the trailers. Um, and it's, and it's weird for me, the story of the game fully clicks into place. It's pretty early on after you meet key to you and you start going on your adventures. There's a scene where you go back to, um,
And he tells Ichibon and Tommy, who's this other character who's joined your party, that Kidiou has cancer. And he's got about six months to live. Again, this is all revealed in the trailers. This is part of like the fundamental premise of the game. And that scene is so good and so well done. And from what I understand, the director of this game is someone who also survived cancer. So that's part of where the storyline comes from. And there is a like reality to you.
Like, Kiyu in his perspective and how he talks through that. And then the reaction of Ichibon and everyone else, where Kiyu, you know, he is a living legend. Like he is this guy who is the, you know, he is a god of the fucking Yakuza world. He is a dude that Ichibon, like, looks up to so much, especially after the events of seven where Kiti's whole role in that game was kind of setting him straight.
when he shibon was going to kind of stray from the path and qi shows them like this is what it is like if you want to be this person you want to be the dragon in this world like this is what it is to be that and this what is to sort of like carry that with you and carry that tattoo on your back um they ripped their shirts off yes they had their manly fight they grew as men it was beautiful we all cried Yes.
And this whole thing with QDU and what they've done with that part of the story so far, I think so far it has been handled perfectly where it is not being sort of, it's not actually soap opera-ish with it. It sounds like a very soap opera style plot twist because it's kind of a cliche, whether it's cancer or some of the sort of mortal illness. You know, that's a, you know, a soap opera is always going to go to that. particular well.
And while Yoxa games have very soap opera is stories, the way they treat this is very differently. And I just think there's something that's so fascinating about how it changes the way you look at Kitiu, especially because while he is a main character, and I don't know if at some point I have no idea if like later in the story you get a like, here's the story from his perspective. I have absolutely no idea if it ever does that. So far, Ichibon is the main character. He is the POV character.
I have not gotten a scene or anything that's like, here's this from Kidio's POV other than one moment where he narrates to you a certain series of events. But other than that, it's very much you're looking at Qadio through Kasega's eyes. And it's so interesting how, like...
distant kiddie who feels all of a sudden because his whole world you realize his whole outlook is completely different because he knows that he has a limited amount of time um and it is just fascinating the way they start dealing with that that starts wrapping into the story that starts affecting the way that each of on looks at things um and again like i have not seen how all this develops um although i you know that scene that i'm talking about happened like eight to nine hours ago so i've seen some of the fallout from it but like
The point is that that's the starting point of the story. That's like really like the inciting incident of the story is trying to find Akame. You can't find her. You bump into Quito. And very shortly after that, you learn that kiddie has cancer. All that stuff feels like that's the inciting incident and what like the story sort of sets off at the beginning point. And then it's about how does it deal with that and where does it go from there? So narratively so far, I'm very much hooked. Again, that scene in the hotel room where they go through all that stuff is just incredible.
And Kudotakia, the voice actor who plays Kikuyu is just delivering the most incredible performance because you can hear it in his voice, but it's how he's playing the character. Like you can hear that Kikyu's voice is kind of strained and he sounds a little bit off. To be clear, that's not because, like, Kudatakia has gotten older in his actual voice has strained. Obviously, he's gotten older.
But if you compare the performance and guidance to the performance of infinite wealth, you can feel the character's a little bit older and you can feel that there's something wrong with him and that he's pushing himself. And it's so subtle, but it's so effective. that even if you hadn't been in the marketing and you kind of knew that this was part of the plot of the game, I think pretty shortly after Quito's introduction, both because he's got a different hairstyle, but also like the way that the character talks and the way he sounds, you could tell there's something up and there's something going on.
And as you kind of unravel, this is what's happening. So all that stuff is phenomenal. I'm very much enjoying the story, enjoying how this all changes Koska and how he's kind of evolving as a character as well. And then obviously you have all the gameplay stuff, which is great. The combat, they have refined. You know, Seven has a very fun turn-based combat system, but also there were some things around the edges of it that were kind of rough. that felt like, you know, they're sort of putting a very different combat system onto a framework that was not originally designed for it.
And here it feels like those rough edges have all been smoothed over, and it's a great feeling combat. The way that the spacing of the characters has been refined a lot more, so there's a lot more sense of you being able to control... Things like being able to knock characters back into enemies and back into other enemies and do additional damage or knock them into your other party members and they do like a hit back. And there's a lot more moves that deal with like, oh, this move hits in a straight line. This move hits into like a fan and dealing with area effect like that.
All that stuff is just like refined and really well tuned. And so all the combat just feels across the board. It's all the stuff you remember you enjoyed about the turn-based stuff in seven, including the fun of just having a turn-based combat system in a contemporary set crime fiction game, which you just never get. It has all that, but it's even improved from there with a lot of like new kinds of moves and stuff like that on top of it. And then Honolulu is one of the most fun fucking maps to go around in.
You very early on get a segue, which is fantastic. So you just sort of zip around on a segue. It feels much like they learned from lost judgment how rad it was in that game. They gave the main character a skateboard to skate around Yokohama. And so they're like, oh, well, we've got to have a fun locomotion thing. So let's give them a segue. You have an MP3 player thing where you can play music you unlock.
So you can just start to like zip around on your Segway, listening to fucking tunes from a Hatsnameiku game and all the Sega games or like, you know, all this great stuff. There's a whole in-game podcast that isn't translated. So if you don't know Japanese, it will be completely...
pointless for you but they apparently uh partnered with a real radio show called like after junction six i forget what it's called something like that um and they've made like unique episodes of this like radio show that in the world of yakuza almost like it's a gta game um again it's all in japanese so i feel kind of bad there's no there's no at least as i can tell there's no screen that lets you translate that because i don't know how that would quite work
But it is just like crazy how like the experience of just moving around the world and all that kind of stuff feels like it's fleshed out in a way that's kind of different than these other games in the previous games of the series that's fun. And then it just has a tremendous amount of fun with the Hawaii of it all.
um and running into weird people in hawaii and um dealing with like specific kinds of issues or things of just you know weird americanisms like there's a whole side quest chain about you helping a little boy who's running a lemonade stand which is the most american ass thing in the world um and so that's very fun Uh, so yeah, all that stuff is enjoyable.
They definitely, uh, you know, try to have their cake and eat it too with the English stuff, uh, in the language difference of there are just a lot of people who coincidentally can speak Japanese. And so it just tends to mostly not be a problem and Ichibon can just do missions. They don't try to have to write an excuse for people to know Japanese in every single side quest or anything. But every once in a while, they'll kind of. write a scene where they can have their fun with the English language difference and all that kind of stuff. There are lots of native English speakers that do voice roles in the game. That's fun.
I've obviously playing with the Japanese dub, I assume if you play with the English dub, that'll be a kind of different experience. But there's a lot of fun stuff there. And then you've got all of your crazy big side quest stuff, of which I've only seen one of them so far. I know there's two other huge big side quest mini games. The one I've done so far is the Sujiman one, which is a taking from seven.
If you remember, all the enemies in seven were called Sujiman, which is a play on a Japanese thing, Suji Nomono, which is basically like a dirt bag. And you had the Sujiman professor. and he helped you, and you had a CG decks, and every time you fought an enemy, they'd get put in the CG decks. Well, this time around, it's the same kind of Pokemon jokes, but now there's a whole Pokemon-style mini-game where you catch Sigimon, and you level them up, and you can go and get into Sigimon battles, and there's the Elite Four...
which are all named after, you know, it's like Jack, Queen, King, and Ace, and they run the Sujiman League underneath Hawaii, and you go there, and you're training up all these dirtbags, which are all the random enemies you find, which are just, you know, the goofiest shit. Like, here's a guy that's just sort of like...
the worm wiggler and he's just a dude in a fucking sleeping bag or whatever or you know he's a guy who has just like a pizza box as he as a shield and it's all that's like ridiculous bullshit um and now you can train them and fight them and uh you can try to catch them all um and go on your sijumont adventures and i spent like three hours yesterday just doing that That's just been a lot of time catching and training all my Cigmon. And I know that there's like an animal crossing style thing in here. I haven't seen that yet.
I know that Kivu has a whole thing and I haven't seen that yet. So there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot to this game. I have not fucking encountered. But what I have seen so far, this game is very good and people should play it. That's my that's what I will say.
I am very excited to play it. I mean, I'm almost tempted to just like, I love you, persona three. I'm almost tempted to jump off of that ship and just start playing like a dragon because I'm so excited. I, you know, because unlike you, I do not have the like eight games deep. That's more than that now. What is it? I mean, how many of these have you played? Let's count. There's zero through six. That's seven. Yeah. Then there's Guyden. That's eight. There's Yakuza seven. So that's nine. There's this one is ten and the two judgments. And Ishing. Is that 13 total?
Yes, I think that's all of them because they haven't ported Kinzon yet into English. So I haven't played Kinzon. And then there's the weird zombie one that everyone hates called Dead Souls. And I have not played that. But that's a PS3 game. And I don't think they're ever going to bring that one back because everybody hates that one. Is there a PSP one or is that Kenzon? There are, there is two PSP spinoffs. I've not played any of those. Those are only in Japanese, the Black Panther, the Kudonojo games. I've not played those. Yeah. I know some people like those.
I've heard about those. Anyway, yeah, I've only played Yakuza Like a Dragon or Yakuza 7, but I did just love it. Like, you know, that one wound up not being on either of our top 10 lists for the year because they put it out on PS5 in January, but on Xbox in November. Right. So you and I both came to it the year after it came out. So it didn't wind up on our list. But it would have been like one or two online. I mean, it was an outstanding, outstanding game. And so I just, I want more of this in my life.
And yeah, and fucking Kassiga is just, he's the best character. I mean, you know, the whole thing of him being the man with like the biggest heart in the world, that very much carries through here. And it's just so fun to see him sort of interact with this whole other world in Hawaii. I'm just... His whole outfit in this game, once he kind of gets acclimated to Hawaii and he's got his shorts and sandals, his fucking red Hawaiian shirt, and it's a real good look.
I fucking love Kasega going around in his fucking segue, going and helping people out, getting wrapped up in random bullshit, but always trying to kind of trusting and seeing the best in people. And I'm so excited to just see how the story develops. And again, the interactions between Kasekia and Kikidu. is very fun because Quito is very much so far in the story. Like he's letting himself be in the background and he's just letting him like trying to support Kasega. But every once in a while, when Quito kind of comes into the foreground, you just get that like, you just swoon for him.
The dude's just the coolest person in the world. There's this great moment where there's a boss fight relatively early on where you are fighting this corrupt cop, where the cops are all assholes in this game, which feels like the most appropriately American thing. Like, they're just like, yeah, the cops are all just complete pieces of shit. Like, one of the first things that happens is that they try to just, like, frame Casca for a thing he did not do blatantly. And it's just ridiculous. They're like, God, the cops suck. It's like, good. That's a good perspective. But there's this corrupt cop.
You fight him. And there's just this point in the story where the cop... Pulls a gun. He tries to shoot one of your other buddies. And Kosaka jumps and knocks the guy out of the way and sort of prevents him getting shot. And then Qaeda just turns around. He like closes the disc, like this like six foot distance in half a second. Uppercuts the guy. The guy flies like five feet to the air, somersaults over and lands on the ground. And you're just like, oh yeah, there he is. That's Qaeda. Like he just...
The one thing you never want in a Yakuza game is to be the guy who gets punched by Kitiu in a cutscene. You get punched by him in a cutscene. Like, you rethink your life's priorities real quick. And, like, that corrupt cop from that point on, he is your bitch. Like, he does, like, whatever Kiti tells him to do, because Kikido fucking sock that dude and changed his fucking life with that's one punch. And I love it. Like, they still have, like... This guy is a fucking superhero.
And that contrast, if he is a superhero and Kasega is a normal guy with the biggest heart in the world, the most compassionate man you've ever met, but he's a man. Key to you is something else. And it's like that contrast, that obviously the cancer storyline is going to play into how like all that plays out. but there's so much, like, juicy narrative material with that contrast. It's tremendously fun. Also, Kivu and the turn-based combat just destroys people. They've made him so strong.
Like, his default class, the Dragon of Dojima class, is so ridiculously powerful in a way that feels really appropriate. He's got three different stances he can use, one that made his rush style from Yaksa Zero where he can, like, do lots of, he basically make two turns in a row who's on that. his brawler one that just does ridiculous damage. And then he has his beast one, which is a grapple stance where he just picks people up and fucking chucks them for area of effect damage.
And it's just, it's so strong. And he doesn't have to use like magic points or whatever for any of it. Like it's just his normal moves do the kind of shit that other people need special moves to do. And that's really cool. And I think the way they've designed him in the turn base combat is, is incredibly satisfying. So yeah, if you are a Yakuza fan in particular, there's a lot to love here with how they've kind of collided the classic Kidu series with like the new modern Ichibon stuff.
And all of it is fantastic.
That just, it sounds wonderful. Because, you know, I said this at the time, and I can't stress it enough. Like a Dragon, Yakuza Like a Dragon, Yakuza 7, was such a dream come true for me. Because I just spend so much of my time fantasizing about different game types if they were just turned-based RPGs la Dragon Quest. And then someone finally made it and, like, did it. And it's like, you know what? There's absolutely no reason why this kind of combat style has to be contained to fantasy games, usually high fantasy games. We can just do this in fucking Yokohama.
And they did it. And it was beautiful and glorious. And now we get to do it in Hawaii and Curie's on your team. I mean, come on. Come on. They're being too good to us. It's amazing. Yeah.
I'm, I'm, I'm jonesing to play more of it.
Yeah. All right. Well, that's three hours. I think that's a podcast. That counts as a podcast. We talk a lot about a lot of stuff. We talk about a lot of stuff. There will be something next week. I'm not sure what. Or there will be nothing. We'll find out. We do a great job planning. Next week, we're going to be working on Japan Animation Station. So, you know, you'll see what happens. But again, subscribe to jonathanlack.com where we're going to be starting two series this week, my Rocky series, my Yu-Gi-Series. Those things go together like peanut butter and jelly. It's great.
And Japan Animation Station's coming back later this month, starting with our review of Nietzschejo. That episode is a blast. I think you guys are going to love it. And there's just so much good stuff coming, and it won't stop coming. And I'm almost quoting All-Star, and I shouldn't be doing that. Sean, why have you not cut me off yet? Why are you letting me hang myself with this horrible outro? I think we're done here, Jonathan.
I think we're done here, Jonathan.

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