The Besties - Besties 2023 GOTY Spectacular - Part Two

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Once more, our watch has ended. We've put 2023 to bed, deciding on the definitive list of the top four games of the year. Catch y'all in 2024! Have good holidays! LYLAS! Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Any resolutions for the new year? Because I have some notes. No, I want to hear your roast. I know that you've been working on your roast kind of material all of 2023. Oh, my notes are for me. My notes are entirely self-imposed. Oh, okay. Oh, okay.

I thought it was going to be like, Fresh, you cannot keep huffing egg steam. No, because he's so much more than that now, isn't he? I really am. I've got so much more going on inside of me. A lot of people, I don't do the New Year's resolution. You know what I do? I start achieving absolute excellence around December 15th.

And I have a two-week run run up where everybody else is like, I'll let it slide, you know, but I have already started achieving excellence as of December 15th. Which honestly, tortoise in the hair. Yeah. So like Jan one,

everyone's like, all right, I got my energy from the turn of the year, you know, time to start striving. And I'm like, I've already got all the excellence. Like I've been here for two weeks. I scarfed up all the excellence and I still get the New Year's bump.

You know, I still get that propelled. So I'm light years ahead of the competition by, you know, mid-January. Press, do you have any change that you're going to make? No, everything's great. Literally, I can't even think of a single thing I could change. Everything's fucking great. my name is justin mcelroy and i know the best game of the year my name is griffin mcelroy and marine let's finish the fight my name is christopher thomas plant and i know the best video game of 2023 my name is fresh fresh. Oh my god. Did you just call yourself

FreshFreshStick? I fucking blew it on the goal line. FreshBuffStick. I was running to the end zone, and it just fumbled the ball to no one. RussFreshStick, best game of the year. We did it. We not did it. We not did it.

We will do it, but we haven't did it yet. My name is RussFreshStick, and I know the best game of the week. Thank you, Russ. Thank you, Russ. That's much better. How many years have we been doing this? Too many. Chris Plant, this is our game of the year part two, our game of the year extravaganza.

What on earth does that mean, though? That means we finish the fight. We are going to pick the besties bestie of 2023 right now. That's what you're about to listen to. We have four exciting showdowns coming up, spanning eight different games. In the first half of the episode, we're going to narrow all those showdowns down to the individual winners, which will leave us with four prime picks. In the back half of the episode, we will organize those four into our top four.

Top threes, old-fashioned. Top fours, that's the way we do it. Because how many people are on the show? Four. Four. Sorry, I thought that was a quiz kind of deal. Oh, sorry. I know.

Give Justin points. Give Justin points. One point, one point. All right. Do we want to set up uh how things are going to run today or do we want to just hop into it no i mean more specifically i guess uh what our matchups are going to be or should we just leap into the aforementioned matchups and start i think we can start i think let's recap the matchups and we'll go from there. So the matchups that we have coming up are the two sides of the horror shooter starring Alan Wake 2 and Resident Evil 4 remake. We also got word games. That's Baldur's Gate 3 and Connections.

I'm not going to get any notes about that one. After that one, we've got Sea Shanties, which is Dredge and Sea of Stars. And then last up, we've got Pretty Boys versus Automata. I love that. And that is The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom versus Lies of Pi. Yes, there you go. Now, that's a good one. I like that.

I think they're all good. I think you did a very good job. Me too. Thank you. My heart goes out to you, Baldur's Gate. Yeah, it's like they've got vowels. They've got vowels in them. I mean, you know what?

We could start with that one because I think Baldur's Gate 3, whatever it was going to go up against, was probably going to make it to the end in connections. Whatever it went up against was probably going to lose out. So I thought let's just pair them together. Let's be honest with each other about their futures. Okay. So I'm going to go Connections, obviously, but just in the context of this discussion. Because Connections needs a champion, and I am that champion.

What if I also go with Connections just to really tank the whole podcast? Oh, okay. I mean, we already killed Mario for a puppet, so mission accomplished. Connections is a wonderful game, but as people on besties.fan have noted, for us, it is borrowing heavily from Only Connect, a British game show that you can watch on BBC. This is kind of common for the New York Times game section. The difference I will say for them is, yes, they do things that already exist,

like crosswords and all sorts of other puzzles, but they do them very, very, very, very, very well. And I think that is the difference between connection and so many other variants that you can play whether it is like literally watching this tv show or playing board game versions of it that said does a very well done puzzle game compete with one of the most impressive rpgs i think that any of us have ever played no no no it does not no it doesn't i also think this i know we talked about this in the last episode some days are just like fuck you days on connections like they are just being obnoxious and it makes me angry i mean that's every puzzle thing but that is every crossword you're right

every crossword has to have a few gurners yeah that is true i think it's a very fun game i've i've enjoyed playing it since i uh found it and started playing it i wasn't aware of the uh the origins of it that's interesting not surprising um but yeah i i think that more or less uh settles the situation there yeah excellent moving on so baldur's gate we will see you in the final four. Next up, we hit the high seas and get some salt water in our noses with Sea Shanties, two delightful indie games, Dredge and Sea of Stars. Justin, I want to throw to you for this because I know that you are the Sea of Stars mega fan on the show. Uh-huh.

Oh, sorry. I thought you had a question. Sorry. Panel discussion. I had my Q&A face on. Take these two toys and bash them together. How much more Sea of Stars did you all play for this little nightclub?

Check in around. Okay. Well, I will say that Dredge is a very original game. I don't think I've played anything else quite like it. Some of the things I love about Dredge are that it has a very cogent open world that is smaller than a lot of open worlds, but that lets it feel, uh, richer and all completely loaded with meaning the entire world feels, uh, so immersive and like you're of, of a place. And that's true of all like the storytelling, it's all very well, uh, something of that sort of like Gothic, uh, Lovecraftian sort of vibe um and mechanically it's not really like much else i mean

it's got some connections to games like you know ridiculous fishing if you like or some other stuff but um it it is a very solitary very cool game sea of stars is uh i do want to say there i think there's a there's a differentiator here that I think is most interesting about these two games. Uh-huh. Is Dredge, the Dredge is a character-driven story, but the character is the world. So the environments that you're going through,

obviously the people you meet, but you don't remember anyone's name. It's more just like the world at large, whereas Sea of Stars is a much more traditional character driven story where you have these literally characters and you get emotionally involved in their comings and goings is that i mean i think that it's that in that i would say it's not a character like i mean dredge is not a character driven story it is a like an immersive like narrative like it's an environmental narrative maybe is a better way of putting it.

I don't know, but yeah, you're absolutely right. Like Sea of Stars is a lot more traditional. And you know, if you have played a JRPG, especially some of those classics from the SNES era, you understand a lot of what you're getting. It is mechanically a lot more evolved than, than some of those with the layers of like damage types and stuff like that. But other than that, it's a very well executed version of this, but it's not necessarily reinventing the wheel.

And that is a fantastic story, a moving story. And I thought mechanically it just kind of kept getting better, which is I found a lot of JRPGsGs I end up sort of stalling out on combat and just sort of trying to blow through it as quick as possible. And I never really felt that with Sea of Stars. I feel like with these sorts of games, it reminds me of when I tried to play Earthbound off of Chris Plant's recommendation. Chris Plant loves Earthbound. play earthbound off of chris plant's recommendation chris plant loves earthbound and there's a moment where you kind of bridge the gap of like you're getting introduced to this world but at some point a switch flips and you're like very very invested in these characters and i obviously didn't get to that point i did a little bit with sea of stars but not to the point where i was like so motivated

to keep going and i feel like that's the real challenge especially since like obviously not all of us finish the game the real challenge to like make that connection and that's not necessarily a knock of the game it's just like i think these games take longer to develop uh for you to attach to them whereas dredge i think shows its hand very quickly counter counterpoint though i had the opposite experience where i i really bounced off a dredge and and and that one just never really clicked for me um no matter sort of how much time i i put into it and and sea of stars kind of did i was cool on sea of stars when i first started playing it because i i think it is a a pretty slow starter oh yeah no argument but again i think that that point is not uh universal i think it is purely a matter of taste yeah um and i think that sea of stars i don't know so many different indie

developers have tried to do this tried to make the ode to the classic JRPG. And I think it is very honorable that Sea of Stars attempts to do it to Chrono Trigger, possibly the best JRPG ever made, and does a pretty fucking good job of it. So I don't know. For me, it is Sea of Stars, but that is because I didn't really like Dredge all that much. I've thought about this this week, about which way it would go, because I don't have an extreme love for either of these games.

But I think they're both quite good at what they're doing. And I think we go forward with Sea of Stars here. In terms of what is a besties show pick um dredge i i think uh fresh you especially i think liked it the most of all of us but it's it's really rare for a game to come along and have the for me like the 13 sentinels near automata effect where it's like this game just takes over one of us and we go from maybe indifferent to curious to like absolutely in love and watching that happen over the course of the episodes that you kept bringing it justin was one of my favorite things of the show this year

like yeah i agree it's such like a special thing. And I did not get that this year, straight up. There is, while this is one of the most impressive years I can remember doing this show, I did not have a game that like really hit me in an emotional way this year. And I'm so glad that you did. And that's why I would want to, you know, like as a kind of collective exercise, I would want to put it forward.

I love it. That sounds great. I think we're all, as long as it's good by Russ. That's cool with me. I am a generous benefactor. I will say Dredge is fucking good, man. It is exactly good at what it does. And I could definitely see, by the way, a follow-up dredge that where the scale increases and it's

like uh very formidable but well they already released paid dlc i haven't played it yet dredge adventures oh well and they're also doing that so yeah i do think they have uh probably long-term plans for this whether it's a sequel or just adding on to the existing game, which is really cool. Congratulations, Sea of Stars. Congrats. Okay. Next up we have, how about we do horror? Does that sound good? You want to do some spooky scary?

And we're going to throw to the two sides of the horror shooter. Alan Wake 2 versus Resident Evil 4 Remake. And talk about two games that pair. This is some salary and peanut butter we've got going here. So I'm going to throw to you, Fresh, to take it away. Wait, can I ask one classification question to plant just because I think it's interesting? I see you've gone with horror shooter here instead of what I think of as the survival horror genre that Resident Evil is traditionally classified in. Do you feel like these specifically are,

are you drawing sort of a divining line using that terminology? Do you consider this less like a horror type game? Oh, absolutely. I think it was partly a subconscious thing, but yeah, I think Resident Evil 4, for me, when it one just gets more actiony right then the early resident evils but also i just think that there has been

a shifting of the goal post for the horror genre since resident evil came out and now when i think of survival horror i think of survival games that blend horror or i think of really really intense horror experiences and and i would not call resident evil for either of those things that's not a knock against it it's still a great horror game but it is much more interested in combat and action and adventure uh than it is in those other things. Cool. Which I think is a good way to look at the differences between these games.

Because I think Resident Evil 4, mechanically, and in terms of gameplay, like the minute-to-minute, is like fantastic. It feels amazing. It is satisfying combat. It's really tight and well-honed. It doesn't feel like that was the main number one priority is satisfying combat. It's really like tight and well honed. Um, it doesn't feel like that was the main number one priority for Alan Wake too.

I think the combat is fine in Alan Wake too. It's not great. It's fine. But obviously their focus was on narrative and they went very, very hard in the paint on the narrative side, uh, making something that is like pretty truly, uh, remarkable and unlike anything else i've played so that makes this kind of an interesting matchup yeah this this happens i feel like every year

there is at least one time where we are pitting to a game that is really really well made and really really enjoyable uh but not the most sort of groundbreaking versus a game that is like way more ambitious but you know has the occasional stumble in in the uh ambition it is trying to achieve uh which is alan wake 2 in my book um yeah i i i man yeah i don't know man i really i played the shit out of Resident Evil 4. It feels disingenuous for me to go for Alan Wake 2, a game that I could not stomach enough to finish. I loved what I...

I loved a lot of what I played of Alan Wake 2. And I think the story is so cool. And I love that Remedy is out here making all of this wild shit. I love that anybody is out there making wild shit on this scale. But I think Resident Evil 4 is, this remake is the best Resident Evil has been. And that is hard to kind of walk away from. I guess, I didn't do what Griffin did.

I had done that with previous resident evil games but not this one where there's like tons of replays and unlocking everything and stuff like that i guess for me and we've kind of talked about this as a delineator is like alan wake 2 it's going to be 10 years from now i'll still remember parts of alan wake 2 whether it's the musical musical sequence or the like uh lakeside summoning sequence or just like so much in that that i feel like stands out um i don't know that i will really vividly remember as an evil 4 remake even though i loved playing it but let me ask you let me ask you this do you think 10 years from now if you had to replay one of these games,

you would reach for Alan Wake 2? No, I wouldn't. I'd probably reach for Resident Evil 4, but that's only because I am not super motivated to replay narrative games because I think they kind of like show their hand once. Yeah, right. And once you have that experience,

you kind of can't have it again i know other people replay narrative stuff all the time but for me it's just not something i do so i don't that's an unfair unfair question to pit to you but it is i i i definitely i know i will replay resident evil 4 remake because i've replayed resident evil 4 in different iterations yeah uh a lot i think it's I think it's an absolute classic in every sense of the word. I think that's like a tricky path to go down though because in the same way you could be like,

okay, Cookie Clicker or any of these, which one are you more likely to play? I'm like, I don't know, probably Cookie Clicker. Hell yeah, man. I think your ability to return to a game is not necessarily like a statement of its quality, especially a game like Alan Wake 2 that is like pretty intentionally frustrating and challenging at times. That's fair. I – yeah, this is tough because I feel like Alan Wake 2 did so many things that like – as somebody who loves the blend of like narrative and and and game and like

where those overlap and like cinema and where games and cinema overlap they're just doing so many like smart ways of like moving things forward um that i think that you're going to see a lot of like narrative developers uh ate from in the in the following years and i do think that like people for a while were just like giving david cage a pass for just trying even though like his writing yes whoever was writing it was pretty weak whereas here i think it is doing narrative very interesting narrative things successfully granted the gameplay is a little weaker than that but i think it is to justin's point like really pushing the needle ahead of what is possible within a video game narratively speaking that i would love to see more can i ask a question that is i think

relevant but how relevant is kind of what i want to talk about um resident evil 4 was already regarded as like a high watermark of like the franchise and for a lot of people like gaming at that period um is there is there i mean not to detract from resident evil 4 but is there something we said for like do you dock it for the fact that it's already like building on one of like the all time greats? Sure. I think it's like 80%. My,

my Griffin might disagree with this, but I think Resident Evil four is like 80% of the remake was in for in the original. Sure. Like it's not a mathematical assessment, but I just mean like the core gameplay, obviously they tweaked, was in 4, in the original. Sure. Like, it's not a mathematical assessment, but I just mean, like, the core gameplay, obviously they tweaked,

but they didn't tweak it more than, like, 20%, in my opinion. I think that's, I mean, I don't know. I'm not comfortable putting a number to it, but I think that it is very clearly Resident Evil 4. Yeah. And the stuff that was fucking great about Resident Evil 4 is even better here, but there's not maybe a ton of new great stuff.

And I think that that sort of comparison is particularly stark because of the game that it is standing up against. Which truly cannot be imitated. Man, yeah. Yeah, man. Woo, man. I didn't finish Resident Evil 4, for whatever that's worth. I got it. And that's only because I played and the other stuff came out.

There's nothing against it. I enjoyed my time with it. But not to an extent where I was like, I got to see how the rest of this goes. Can I make a suggestion? Yeah. suggestion yeah as much as i appreciate um the the uh gracefully letting the excellent game sea of stars have a symbolic win in its category what if uh we moved uh resident evil 4 remake and alan wake 2 into our like final four uh because i feel like that's probably going to end up being more representative

of, of how we feel. I like that idea. I love the idea of breaking our own rule that we established 30 minutes ago. Yes. I would suggest we maybe do the next round first before we decide whether or not we should go around. Cause there's a couple of,

there's a couple of boys up in the next mix. And I want to make sure that we consider them with the same level of grace. Okay, that's fair. Okay, but I think Alan Wake 2, we step up Alan Wake 2. I agree. I think it moves up regardless.

Next up, we have Pretty Boys versus Automata, and that is The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. A category created by Chris Plant that somehow stunningly does not include Nier. No. Well, this is automata, not automata. Yeah, it's different. It's a different way you said it.

Wait, wait, wait. If you look at here. It's automata, not automata or monomata. Are you looking at the document? Ready? Yeah. Pretty Boys vs. Automata. And then automata. You see? You see the difference? Oh, he just put a capital versus a automata and then automata you see it's in the

difference oh he just put a capital a on automata yeah and now we have pretty boys versus automata versus manana it is versus automaton this is the Legend of Zelda Tears of the King vs. Liza P. Yeah. And look, listen. Are you going to do it? Are you going to do it? What do you want me to do? I want you to stand up for our friend Pinocchio. No, I'm not going to stand up for our friend Pinocchio. I think Liza P whips ass.

No, I'm not going to stand up for our friend Pinocchio. I think Liza P whips ass. I don't think there is a snowball's chance in hell that any of us would put it above Tears of the Kingdom, unless I have dramatically misread the room. Oh, man. Did anyone play more Liza P, by the way, in between it advancing forward? I did not, which is maybe telling.

I mean, I don't think it would have changed this matchup in particular. I did. It's exactly the same as when I left it. It still is really cool, but it's too frustrating for me to, like, continue to put the time in. But it's, like, it's really neat. It's such a weird idea. It's such a weird game.

I don't know why they did it, but it's like a wild concept that when you describe it sounds stupid, then you describe it excitedly sounds rad. It all depends on your tone. Have I openly talked about how this game ends? No, I'm not sure I want you to. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'm not going to give specifics, but let me just say they set up a sequel for a fair use IP that has the potential to be like even better than this i'll i'll include a link to it in besties.fan and i'll just label the link the liza p spoiler ending so you can click it if you want and you can go right to it it is it's wonderful and and and ironically you could watch this and it wouldn't spoil Liza P at all. That's true.

It's an entirely different thing. Yeah, I have actually seen some cut scenes from late in the game that like pop up on TikTok or whatever, like wild boss intro from Liza P. And I'm like, what the fuck? Where the fuck are they? Why is this man full of goo? What is this? What happened to this i played

i thought a pretty good chunk of this game but it looks like a different game do y'all think that like this will be a game we get every two years or like every five years i think they probably were not expecting the wild success or at least the critical i don't know how well it sold but certainly the critical support for this game because they it launched on game pass so they like kind of wanted to like launch a new ip i think they realize how much demand there is and we're gonna we're probably three or four years away from a sequel yeah but there will be dlc they've already said that here's what i'm going to suggest we still have not talked about tears of the kingdom but and i think that is because the four of us understand that in the final deliberation,

we are going to be talking about at least a couple of these games, a whole fucking lot. So I'm okay with continuing to sort of put that off because, you know, that confrontation is about to happen. For me, the question is, we got Baldur's Gate 3. We got Alan Wake 2. We got Tears of the Kingdom. We have Sea of Stars as the other winner, but do we like Sea of Stars better

than Resident Evil 4 Remake and Lies of P? I don't, for me, I don't think. I love Sea of Stars. I don't think I like it better than one of those games at least yeah yeah i would i would move forward remake i think i would move forward remake also i think i like remake better than than than lies of p um tragically i wish my heart felt differently because i think it'd be more fun maybe we put lies of p in fifth place um i i would put it in fifth place i i think lies of p the sequel

whatever it's going to end up being will be genuinely a very very top tier game of the year contender when it comes out because so much of this game feels to me like they spent a lot of time a lot of energy but because they had to design a game not from scratch because obviously they were using the souls baseline right but had to design a lot of new stuff it feels like a sequel will refine this in a really really amazing cool ways that will put it up against uh genuine gaming now hold on wait i've just realized our terrible mistake here because we're basically if we're considering the rest of these games now the four winners we're basically going to be pitting Alan Wake 2 and Resident Evil 4 Remake up against each other again.

No, no, no. I mean, we are. No, it's not against each other. It's not head to head. It's a group exercise, right? We're going to talk about all of these games after our break, and we're going to put them in a one through four,

and it's going to be beautiful. And here's the great thing. Whatever order they're in, these are still four abs fucking lootly fantastic games that any other year would have been a number one for us yeah for sure some years have really good games you know like some really good game i don't want to just blind just uh just blanket statement some years they would win you Okay, I think we have the four figured out. Baldur's Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake,

and Legends of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. We will order them after the break. Okay, we are back. It occurs to me I said that we should put Liza P. in fifth place. We should probably give that to Sea of Stars just because it did technically win its round. Yeah, that's a good idea. But we are not, there's no fifth place. I really can't emphasize this enough.

Whoever said that was having a bit of fun, at my expense, there's no fifth place. All right. I feel like the first two are very easy considering we just kind of did them yeah you mean like what number one and number two let's start at the bottom and go up yes no i'm sorry the last two number four last three are pretty okay yeah so we we know that a resident evil 4 remake and alan wake 2 will be three and four so we don't know the order of them but they'll be they'll be the bottom two considering alan wake 2 defeated resident evil 4 remake triumphantly held resident evil 4 remake skull in the air just to to uh sure present it to the king i do think

it would be wild if resident evil 4 remake had had a surprise underdog victory here in the Final Four. And also, it's Resident Evil 4. It just kind of makes sense. Sure. I mean, by that logic, Bollywood's Gate 3 is actually in the room. Third place, element two is second. Let's do it.

Let's do it. Let's do it and get some lunch, guys. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it and get some lunch, guys. Let's do it and have a sandwich. The final sin of Vesties. We had to shut it down. No, I swear to God. They just put them by the numbers in the title. Yeah, I know Tears of a Kingdom is technically a sequel.

Yeah, they gave first place to Army of One, which came out on Xbox 360 like fucking 17 years ago. My Spotify rap said I dedicated hundreds of hours to this show and they couldn't be bothered to give me 10 minutes. Someone has inserted a O-N-E at the end

of Kingdom. I'm sorry. Is there anybody that would make a case for alan wake 2 above balder's gate 3 or tears of the kingdom no no okay yeah as you say it would have been fresh yeah it's great like it's it may be my personal number one but mainly from like a sort of uh political standpoint where i want to see gaming in my image. Like, I want to see the kinds of games I want. I don't want my specific needs and whims to be catered to.

I mean, when was the last time a, like, AAA major release like this leaned into FMV in the way that Alan Wake 2 leaned into FMV? Yeah, sure. I mean, I couldn't even... Right into the heart of Justin. So, Resident Evil 4 Remake, fourth place.

Yes. Okay. Alan Wake 2, third place finish. Yes. Great. How does... I have not really been dialed in to the Game of the Year deliberations of our contemporaries. I have to imagine a lot of different outlets have had the conversation we are about to have.

And I don't know the best way to even hop into pitting these two fucking titans against one another. I mean, I, these are both games. So with Zelda, I played 150 hours, loved every minute of it. Total fucking delight. Baldur's Gate 3, I have not finished. I'm at like 130 hours. I'm in the last throes of Act 3. Who has finished Baldur's Gate 3?

Am I the only one? You might be the only one. Oh, fuck, guys. But come on. It's so much. Are they going to come out as anti-vax in the last? Like, what's going to happen? No, okay.

Here's. No, no, no, no, no. As much as I'd love to plow through, I need to settle on the image of a starry and like, oh, the only sharp thing I let people put me with is fangs. Of all of them, I think Lae'zel would probably be the anti-vaxxer just because just from a sort of oh 100 she may say that actually she might say yeah she would think you'd get injected by a cake

or something the thing that sucks is that if you want a romancer you have to go along with it so you have there's like a button there's a l4 i don't know if you found out every controller and it's it's the button that in every game makes you sort of like nod while looking away like you have plausible liability. Yeah. The L4, the L stands for Libertarian 4. Honest to God, this is a concern of mine, my fellas, is my distinction between these two games

and which one I think should get it is determined by the ending. Whoa. Dang it. Yeah, because I think that... Do we want to talk about these games before we try to even put them against each other? I was going to say, yeah, before we do that,

we haven't really had a chance to talk about Zeldaelda a whole lot um you know okay let's go around zelda tears the kingdom obviously uh built on the framework of breath of the wild but introduced basically the idea of like physics and being able to like jam shit together and build a fucking auto firing tank that can roll through the streets of hyrule um and manage to scale that up into a enormous very uh explorable very satisfying open world game filled with puzzles that like aren't a pain in the ass but are like really rewarding to figure out um and just looking at it like a a like living puzzle box that i was constantly like finding every nook and cranny and having a satisfying reaction every time i found something um it's spectacular it's like an amazing i love that game so much and really improved on every single aspect in Breath of the Wild.

That's the wildest part to me. I think it stands on its own as one of the best games I've ever played. But just the fact that it was able to take a lot of things from Breath of the Wild, which is probably a game that I also would have said back in 2017 is one of my favorite games ever. No, it's still one of my favorite games ever. The fact that this game was able to improve on so much of that is an achievement in game design on a scale that is almost incomprehensible to me. And I think you could say the same thing

about how Baldur's Gate 3 handles narrative and story. But I found myself constantly surprised and delighted by how much freedom I had to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do in Tears of the Kingdom and how it almost always just kind of worked. That is what blows my mind about how comfortable we get with the new normal in video games and really just any entertainment. I remember when I first played Tears of the Kingdom thinking,

I just can't believe this. I can't believe it's running on Switch. I can't believe the ambition of the physics. I can't believe just how rich the world is that you have the sky area and the underground area. The scale was incredible. And eventually I got to a point, I don't know, a month or two after it, where I was like, okay, yeah, this is now what I expect from this game. And then I put it away. And just this past week, I was like, I really should go back and play more of this game

before we do the vote and loading it up fresh after a few months apart from it it was it happened all over again where I just was completely stunned by by the the scale I mean the enormity of this game is other otherworldly um the only thing that i can kind of compare it to is elden ring but again it's doing something so different with how it allows you to engage with the world and bring your creativity into this space that i i'm just like flabbergasted by and that's like a whole different genre like it's it's not like they grafted a bunch of other action RPG adventure stuff on top of it. It's like they grafted a Lego Mindstorms kit like onto this video game. But it all like it all makes sense and it all addresses like so many like the I did not have as much of a I maybe i should go back and re-listen to the episodes when

this game first came out because maybe this is revisionist history i felt like the fuse mechanic like made weapon degradation not as big of a pain in the ass because you can just for sure if a weapon breaks it's like okay well now i'm gonna make a tony hawk skateboard uh blade or whatever uh that that shit rules i think it has the best story of any Zelda game by a pretty big margin. And the best, I mean, the last hour of this game is one of my favorite endings to a game ever. It's so good.

And, you know, I was really, really hesitant about this because I don't like building things i don't like having to be creative in video games and i know that may sound weird but like i do that professionally like i don't really enjoy it and this game is so relentless about making it like fun and accessible and not a pain in the butt that like i kept waiting for the moment where i'd be like oh never mind i'm just gonna create some dumb shortcut and and always do that and i just didn't get there it works so well at making it like feel good to do like the the fact that you can like things you take a plank and you just jam a sail on it yep and it's a fucking boat

instantly and you're like riding around in the ocean Yep. And it's a fucking boat instantly. And you're like riding around in the ocean on this dumb ass boat that you made in two seconds. That is like unbelievable. And that's not even making anything complex with wheels and rockets and whatever the fuck else you're jamming on it. The creation aspect has also made it a very fun game to like watch. like watch like there's a community and a type of content creation around this game that i have found myself incredibly compelled by even now like even still i will get like youtube recommendations of like look at this uh fucking beyblade that somebody made that they are uh beating this boss with uh i i think is uh really wonderful fresh i i think you did it right, though,

and you avoided everything until you had seen the ending. And I really wish I could have even done that, I think because just the difference of our jobs, that was unavoidable. And that is what pushed me off the game at a certain point because to your point, Justin, I had this FOMO of like, wow, why am I playing it this way when I could be building all these awesome things? I'm never going to be this good.

And it created, I don't know, like an anxiety of playing it. Similar to what I had with Animal Crossing. It's becoming kind of a trend with Nintendo games. And that was the other thing that was so wonderful this week about going back and playing it is i'm now away from that that my feeds are not showing me that stuff anymore and it was i was able to like recapture that sense of okay this game is just for me there's no wrong way of playing it i have no other pressure or ambition to do something too spectacular and yeah it's fresh all over again it's funny that you said that this is like becoming a thing with nintendo games because nintendo is not designing games with

this mindset it's being put upon these games nintendo designed this game specifically i can attest to be able to not only beat it but 100 it without looking anything up without seeing any videos without anything animal crossing same thing you can find all this stuff it just takes a while and you have to be patient you have to like but but what you get out of it you can like find all the stuff in any game if you work at it long enough no i don't think that's true i think there are games that it is such it becomes such a chore and such a pain in the ass that it is not a fun experience to find every little nook and cranny and stuff like that.

I don't think that's the case here. They don't have the internal environmental logic of Zelda, where it's just like, yeah, it makes sense. I'll give you an example. Breath of the Wild is a perfect example of that. Finding every shrine in Breath of the Wild without a guide is a colossal pain in the ass because you don't know the three that you're missing.

Right. But they wisely, in this game, introduced mechanics in the game that will guide you to the last few, let's say, caves or whatever you're talking about in really subtle, cool ways that makes it even more like I actually discovered this stuff on my own. It's just so smart. I also, I want to give a shout out because we don't talk about music a whole lot in our discussions.

This is one of the best game soundtracks in history. And I would recommend doing this if you care at all about game music theory stuff. I've watched a few video essays on the Colgara boss fight theme incorporates elements from other Zelda games, like the Dragon Roost Island theme from Wind Waker. The whole final catch theme genuinely gets me choked up every time that I every time that I hear it. I know also friend of the show, Kirk Hamilton made an episode of strong songs dedicated to the soundtrack of this game. Yes. So please listen to that. Yeah, this game rules. I bet the ads on that YouTube video are all carburetors and muscle cars, huh, Griffin? That's a lot of muscle cars.

It's a lot of... Guns. Babe vitamins. So I spent a very long time talking about, just now, how great Tears of the Kingdom is. It is not my number one game of the year. Oh, wow. Congrats to Dredge. What?

The only lie P told is that he wasn't the number one game. Whoa, Russ, I can hear your pee organ swelling. I think Baldur's Gate 3 is an accomplishment that is not even close to any game I've ever played. It is so impressive and fun and satisfying and emotionally moving and it is just like such a fucking feat that they pulled this off and pulled it off in such a spectacular way um as i mentioned i'm not i haven't't finished it. I know Griffin feels like the ending will be impactful to that, but 120 some odd hours in,

I am like constantly at every turn filled with moments that will stick with me, filled with like really memorable choices that I was making 80 hours ago that have payoff and feel like fantastic when they come back around. Baldur's Gate 3 is just like such a special game. And yeah, I'm excited to talk more about it. It almost feels like both of these games,

I like that they're paired together because there are moments in each of them where sometimes you feel what we talk on i think about it a lot like the hand of the creator right where you're playing a game and you're and you think like oh they they knew i'd be here you know what i mean like i they know that i would be in this predicament they know what i'm thinking they know the the you know that if i'm in the pit i I'm looking for the ladder, right? Yeah.

feels like kind of magical the amount of different paths different ways that things can shake out and the way that it always ends up you know at least entertaining if not like 100 satisfying or heart-wrenching or funny and it's just like happening i had that sense several times playing this game where it's like how is this possible how did like how do people do this and i felt the exact same way playing zelda felt the exact like how did, how do people do this? And I felt the exact same way playing Zelda. So the exact, like, how did you, how did you do that? Like, it doesn't make sense. Like, and I've seen people who are a lot smarter than me having that same take. Like, it doesn't seem possible, especially given some of the power constraints they're working with, the way that you're able to rearrange the geometry of the world.

They're both astounding games. I honestly don't, I mean, I honestly, y'all could, I'm a swing vote. I could go either way. For real. I feel like I sort of set this up. So I will describe my feelings about Baldur's Gate 3. I agree with everything that's been said. I think it is a narrative accomplishment

that is truly unimaginable. The fact that it has so much writing in it, the fact that so much writing was done is wild. The fact that it is, for the most part, all really great

is another cherry on top of that. I feel, and based on sort of a public poll, I do not believe I'm alone in this assessment, assessment that the ending of the game does not live up to the many, many successes that it has throughout the course of its storytelling. I think for me, it starts in Act 3, which I think all of you at least made it to. made it to um is that is that is kind of where i started to feel the funnel of the game sort of trying to get me towards the the uh finish line um and there are a handful of finishes finish lines that it can take you towards but like considering an act one and act two i felt like this is my world i am determining everything that happens within it and everybody that i talk to is doing different shit and has seen shit that i haven't seen and

i've seen things they haven't seen and i think that that but that bottlenecks in a way that is uh disappointing um i think there are some technical issues that feed into that for example one of my like uh uh companions uh shadow heart that i rolled with for basically the whole game uh i was not able to finish her storyline because there was a character uh who just kind of disappeared at the end of act two and was integral to her storyline. And I didn't realize this until I was halfway through Act 3. And so the thought of quick loading a game and figuring out what had happened would have meant losing 20 hours of progress or something like that, which was a bummer. And then the ending just did not tie just did not, uh, tie up the, the loose ends

that I was hoping for it to tie up. I am struggling with this because I also know that like the game has to have an ending, right? Yeah. And it can't have 500 million endings. Brand like the branches don't just go outward forever right that's not how that's not how storytelling works that's not how game development works it's not how anything works um but it it felt uh and the other issue is that you know you spend 150 hours playing a game

if the ending is it takes you know if the ending is a an eight minute long cut scene then like chances are that it's not gonna necessarily hit every beat that you want it to hit. I just felt like it was a narrative shortcoming in a game without them in other places. And that really kind of bummed me out and it it sort of uh slightly took away from a lot of the magic that this game kind of cast cast over me in the you know month of my life that i played it so i a quick question are you aware that they've released they've since released i haven't played this so i i don't know but they've since released an epilogue that takes place after the end of the game no maybe when did it come out like a month or two ago okay no i didn't i didn't i finished the game before that uh came out that's not i'm not knocking

you but i think it is worth considering because i think you're right i have heard a similar uh sense from a lot of people that the end could have used some more i guess closure or even just like more of a sense that you had more of an impact i don't again i don't know yes that's that is the it's not even a sense of impact it is and i'm not going to spoil anything because i would never do that for this game but it when you finish it it or when i finish it i should say it sort of resolved the plot lines of some of not all of the characters that i've been rolling with the whole time and then it showed some sort of you know it showed some bigger cut scenes of like this and this is the ending and then it gave me a maybe two to three minute long scene with Shadowheart, who was my romance interest in the game.

And that scene was not, it was a, well, what do we do next? Like kind of cliffhanger-y sort of thing. That felt like, well, shit, man. I spent a lot of time as this character in this world and the send-off that my character got was very, very, very little. And that is not a quality of writing thing. quality of writing thing that is a just confusing like why did you why did you give me so much agency and and uh make me feel so much ownership over this this character and shape them with the thousands the tens of thousands the hundreds of thousands of choices that i made throughout my playthrough and then really really condense it all down into uh something that does not have much uh you know dramatic

or emotional or narrative payoff uh at all it kind of sounds to me like what happened when mass effect 3 came out yes and everyone's like pretty seen a lot of yes and again i haven't played it but there is an epilogue that's like fully interactive and like has like 10 000 new dialogue lines it's like so like i i do wonder whether that would change your mind i am also sure that the character that disappeared that full dead ass disappeared from my game yeah probably doesn't do that anymore right but like it's probably not it is i i will i know i'll go back i i will go back and play this game again someday. Like it's too good not to, and there's too much stuff I didn't see.

And I am genuinely looking forward. You could probably play it today and see the epilogue, quite honestly. I probably could do that. I, I, I, it has been several months since I played the game. So I don't know that it would have the kind of emotional resonance that it would have if I had finished playing it. But to put that like ending bit aside, because I think most of the people listening probably haven't seen the ending either, if I had finished playing it. But to put the ending bit aside, because I think most of the people listening probably haven't seen the ending either,

if I had to guess, I didn't have the experience that you're talking about, specifically with Act 3, regarding the funneling thing, even though I realized loose ends needed to be tied up, I still felt at basically every turn of act three, that my choices, whether they were in act one or act two, were given respect and acknowledged in like really cool narrative ways, where characters were popping up in the middle of battles that I hadn't seen in

forever. And they're like, don't you remember me? I you're the one that killed me earlier. And now you're I'm back and I'm going to help you you out and like those sorts of moments uh i think are fully consistent with the ambition that they were trying to land and um consistent with like larian's pedigree which has always been really strong but this one in particular i think uh kind of lands that plane i want to add that everything uh nicely said about tears of the kingdom could almost one for one be said about balder's gate too in terms of uh creativity that allows and affords the player in terms of its scope i i in terms of that that moment where you're like is this really happening i remember when i was what like six or seven hours into the game and had not really gotten past the the crash that is the beginning

of the game and it hitting me of oh wow that this what was kind of a demo could have been the whole game and i would have been pretty pleased with it act one could have just been the game and i sure it would probably still be something we're talking about um here at this exact same tier um which i would also add that like i agree that tears of the kingdom is one of the best if not the best zelda story that's ever been told i think it's extremely compelling and i was really invested in it i think balder's gate 3 has about 10 of those. Well, here's... Just like... Okay, okay, but hold on. I want to push back on that, though.

Okay. And say that might be true, but the ending of Tears of the Kingdom is the best shit at... Like, it's the best shit. It's really good. It's extremely good. And so I understand that it doesn't have

the kind of scope that Baldur's Gate 3 has, but I also think that it does a lot. Can I make a recommendation? And feel free to say no here. We've never been afraid of breaking rules. And if there was ever a year... No? I hate it.

No way. No, I hate it. No, we've done this before. You were going to suggest sharing the title? No, I was going to say it should be Dredge. Or no, Liza P. Isn't that the one that we're all gravitating towards?

Yeah, if we can't figure out a winner here, I think we go next one up. Should we go around the horn? I mean, I know who's going to win. And Fresh is going to be disappointed. Tears of the Kingdom is unquestionably going to get this vote. Do you feel that way?

Of course. It's ridiculous that you would even say that I'm going to be disappointed because I honestly think both of these games are fucking fantastic. And the fact that I feel like one of them edges one out is moot. But I guess we should... Let's do a formal thing. Yeah, let's hear the vote. Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah, let's hear the vote. Tears of the Kingdom.

Yeah, Tears of the Kingdom. Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 3. All right, cool. Not as clear cut as we thought. Here's my argument. And I really, I don't know. I don't know.

This is really hard right so this is all I think we're all a little bit in that sort of tiny little like semantic ways you can see yourself to thinking one is better than the other which you know is wild to begin with

but I would say that for me here's the distinction I think I've already spoken about how much I love Tears of the Kingdom I like it so much more than I thought I would say that for me, here's the distinction. I think I've already spoken about how much I love cheers of the kingdom. I like it so much more than I thought it would for me. Baldur's gate three stands apart and will continue to as the best one of these. And it's not just, I mean,

this is a genre that has a lot of different entries in it. And I think that someone came along and made the best one in a way that feels like when you're looking at a newly erected skyscraper or something, you're like, God, that's going to be there for a while. I feel that way about Baldur's Gate 3. I feel like it is the pinnacle of a very long-held genre um and a long long-running genre and i think that that is like a it's one of our oldest ones too right and i feel like baldur's gate 3 is is just perfects it i mean as close as you can correct me if i'm unpacking what you're getting at the wrong way but it sounds like you're saying similar to what breath of the wild was to the next 10 years of games, I guess five, whatever, seven.

Baldur's Gate 3 is for video games too. And then that everybody is going to be trying to borrow or crib from this, and it is going to be at the center of video game. I'm actually saying the inverse plant i'm actually saying that like i think zelda is bringing ideas that people will crib from a lot more so i think balder's gate is uh it dares people to try that is what i that is what i'm saying it's like i mean you think do you think that you could like go for i mean try it seriously like try it because it's i don't see this as as being a feat that can be like trumped anytime soon there is so much that a business person would look at baldur's gate 3 and say

this is wasteful yes six percent of people are ever going to hear this less than that two percent of people are ever going to hear this voice line yeah this storyline this quest line because you buried it in a corner of a map that most people would never ever see what the fuck are you thinking and larian was like no we're gonna do it anyway and so much of that game that makes it so special and why it has those like constant moments it's because you do feel whether you're being guided there or not you do feel like you earned those discoveries and i do not think that people will attempt what baldur's gate 3 is attempting because it's too fucking hard and too fucking expensive i think larian will continue to do it and crush it but most people cannot do

the scale of what they were pulling off the quality of the writing that they pulled off. Like, this is video games. We do not look to video games for, like, the extreme narrative strength that they have accomplished within Baldur's Gate 3. It's a huge rarity. And I would be shocked if it was not another five years before we saw anything that comes close to the narrative scope that Baldur's Gate 3 does. Even five years seems conservative. I feel like it's going to be a lot longer. Yeah.

Like I, I honestly cannot think of a more, look, I haven't beaten it. I've said that a number of times, but from a narrative, like satisfaction and quality standpoint, nothing comes close to any other game

i've ever ever played and that's not even like we haven't even talked about like the like uh immersive simmy ways you can like mess with the gameplay yes that's the thing that we are for me the only thing that could ever sort of sway my decision is the fact that i have wanted a dungeons and dragons video game that felt like playing Dungeons and Dragons, complete with all the dumb improvisation that you could ever want from that system. And this game does that so well. Multiplayer, I think, really makes that shine, especially. I'll describe a moment.

This was not in multiplayer, but there's a moment where you're basically trying to save a bunch of people from an like an exploding building let's say and you have like a limited number of turns and i kind of like sent all my party members to different like cells to save people and it was down to the final turn and every single person was back except for gail and this essentially unnamed npc that was like running but not going to make it and in that final turn using uh there's a spell called dimension door that allows you and another person to teleport use dimension door on gail and the person and the npc to teleport them close enough to the ladder such that they would be able to make it and climb up the ladder and escape.

And that was all shit that I made happen because of my decisions. And the fact that this game is filled with those moments where you're doing crazy shit, where you're like throwing invisibility potions to people across the way so they can sneak past the guard to break into whatever, like that is unreal and it all kind of just works. And you have the narrative thing that i already talked about i i think it's an astonishing game um and i really i could talk about it for days and days i i still feel like tears in the queues but the reason that i i think to sort of summarize my feelings and i i don't actually like being in this position because I love Baldrige Gate 3 a whole lot, but it is a game of narrative achievements that is incredibly ambitious that I feel like dropped the ball in a pretty big way in the conclusion of that ambition, of the narrative of of the narrative sort of um goalposts that

the game sets i feel like tears of the kingdom is ambitious in a lot of different ways and it doesn't miss it it it kind of sticks the landing on all of the all of the big, wild sort of ideas that it has. I think if I had not felt this way about the ending of Baldur's Gate 3, I think I would agree that it is the game of the year. But it left such a heartbreakingly sort of sour taste in my mouth that I just don't think it clinches it.

I also know that I think I'm in the minority in this. I'm going to change my vote. I think I hear what you're saying, Griffin, and I get it. I don't know if I can hold the ending issues against Baldur's Gate 3 because, like Frush said, we don't expect narrative excellence from video games. And I think video games especially have this immense challenge that the novel or film or other traditional storytelling models, they don't have to worry about. they don't have to worry about which is it does give you all this freedom but at a certain point they do need to funnel you from whatever the very beginning is to whatever the very end is and unless we get into like a procedurally generated ai content i don't know what that looks like to give a truly one-to-one satisfying ending that follows through on the promise of everything in the middle and i think that it gets the rest of that so right that when you're

in the world the openness that i i don't know i have i have not seen the end of this game so i i'm i i'm maybe the worst person to say this but whatever i still have my vote um any of you have seen the end of the game right you guys didn't spoil right correct the worst person to say this, but whatever. I still have my vote. I don't think any of you have seen the end of the game, right? You guys didn't spoil the end. Right. The thing I will say about Tears of the Kingdom, and I agree, I mostly agree with you of it delivers on what it set out to do. It is still a little weird to me that we have a game that is Legos, that you can use all

these different tools, right? And that there's still no mode where you are free to be creative without having to worry about managing resources. And I remember that time, Justin, I think it was you and I were both like spamming to collect diamonds using the jump trick, right? And that was my favorite period. And I still have so much money now in the game and having that and going back to it actually has been now a delight

because the risk of gambling on all of those things, on spending resources just to be creative is gone. And I think that is, again, we're getting very nitpicky here but i i that is my kind of one disappointment with with zelda is that it offered so much creativity um but always kept it at a certain arm's length um that i i i'm not as big of a fan of. But these are like, I mean, we're comparing like the paint job on like two beautiful cars, right? Can I suggest something?

Yeah. I don't know how Griffin's going to feel about this, but I know in my heart that if I, which I will do over the next probably week, if I finish Baldur's Gate 3 and have the same reaction that Griffin I, which I will do over the next probably week, if I finish Baldur's Gate 3 and have the same reaction that Griffin did where it kind of undercut the entire experience, I will gladly change my vote.

After the episode is up? I just feel very weird. You have 24 hours. It's just very weird. How about this? You have 24 hours. It's just very weird because- Everybody get on Steam right now, and I'll watch the three of you finish this. It is wild. After 100 hours, tell me that wasn't dog shit.

I know I am not going to be able to convince you all to change your minds about the quality of a story based on an ending that you haven't that you have not seen yet. And it may be different. That's the thing that's fucked up, Russ, is that you may do it and maybe it's good now. Like maybe it's fucking great now. I think it would not take much to improve what was there when I when i finished it back in you know whatever september october um uh but yeah i i i just can't kind of look past like a story-based game having an ending that i really didn't like and saying like and now let's now that's my that's my goatee for sure

but i also know that i don't i don't think that uh that's going to change either of y'all's, any of y'all's minds. So let's fucking do it, baby. All right. Well, congratulations to Baldur's Gate 3. Larian, your trophy is in the mail. How the fuck did I beat this game before we record? Like, what? I should have just stayed up.

I should have just stayed up. It would have been so much easier. The trophy is not in the mail. There's a very real chance that we come back in the new year and Frostchick and Fury is overturning tables. This is a win with an asterisk? Is that what we're saying? I think it is.

I will reaffirm. I will reaffirm or deny the win. How long? Is it until the next recording recording it will be the next recording which will be january the first week of january when we do our um preview predictions on 2024 preview of 2024 wow um so we will know for sure then um but i'm feeling i love i'm feeling pretty confident that i will not change my feeling about it go A Goatee elect is Baldur's Gate 3. The presumptive Goatee.

Yeah, we will make the final announcement on January 6th, and it'll be great. Yeah, I guess there's not as much lag for our audience. Right, because when are they hearing this? They won't have to wait too long, right? Yeah, it's two weeks. You wait two weeks, and I'll have beaten Baldur's Gate, and I can tell you how fucking great it is or how it destroyed my soul. So be patient.

It'll be fine. All right. Any other things y'all been playing that you want to mention? We're going for 100 years now, so I hope the answer's no. I mean, yeah. I've been playing that new Pokemon, Scarlet Pokemon Violet DLC. It's real good.

Indigo Disc. it's got a bunch of great stuff going on in there having a great time with it playing with him how was the ending of that game uh better than fucking boulders game no i'm just kidding um no yeah it's good it's good i've been playing a little gator game which is fantastic and i don't want to talk any more about it because i think we're going to do an episode in January and no joke had I played it earlier it probably would be in my top four like no joke

yeah so look forward to that discussion in coming in January and so much more I've been playing the North Apolog and please tell me I played that too it was yeah I played that too it's ridiculous yeah the norf apolog is a idle clicker game uh with visuals that are like they look like the

mac 2 visuals at my school's computer lab of just these little dudes who uh collect i don't know materials from a giant rock that they light on fire with rockets and arrows it is a delight i am so bummed it didn't come out during me being at an office because it feels like the perfect sort of game to have on in the background unlike um some idle games that really ask a lot of you this is it's almost like a screensaver more than it is a game at times. Yeah, it's a delight. Hoops, anything else you've been playing? None of this brings to mind.

No. Let's finish, Ben. Let's finish. Let's do it. Yeah, I'm done. Oh, yeah. I mean, Avatar, but we're probably going to do an episode on that. We are also doing an episode on Avatar. Save it. Yeah, I'm saving it.

Still can't get the executable to boot up on that one on my rig. So I'll probably have to make a run to the old babbages and pick it up. All right. That's going to do it for us. Make sure to join us again next week for the besties. That's going to do it for us. Make sure to join us again next week for

the besties because shouldn't the world next week. We're going to be off next. OK. Well be sure to join us again next

time. Wait wait wait wait wait. I just want to say I love y'all and it's been so fun recording with y'all this year.

This is I feel like it's always fun but I don't know. It's getting better with age. You know this is one of our least nasty Goaties, I think. Well, I think we were all

a little bit torn this year. I don't know how you all felt. But it was a thrilling year of gaming. So congrats to Liza P. In general. Can't believe it did it. That's going to do it for us, folks. Be sure to join us again next time for the Besties. Because shouldn't the world's

best friends pick the world's best games Besties!