The Besties - Dredge and Octopath Traveler 2 rule! [Resties]

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Dredge is one of 2023's best surprises, a fishing adventure mixed with Lovecraftian horror. Don't worry though: it's not too scary. In fact, Dredge's much more interested in the fishing aspect than you might expect from a game marketed around cosmic terror. Plus, Plante has become obsessed with Octopath Traveler 2. How does someone who dislikes turn-based combat fall in love with this sort of game? And is it recommended for everyone or just people who love RPGs? All that and more on this week's Resties! 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!

Hello everybody, my name is Christopher Thomas Plante. My name is Ross Froschdick. And welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we've got two fantastic games to tell you about. We've got Dredge, and we've got Octopath Traveler 2. But before we dig into that, you apparently have something to tell me. Well, it's not me, actually.

It's you. This is all about you, Chris Plant. Oh, no. You are the proud owner, I guess, writer, of what might be the greatest Kirby interview I've ever read. Oh, okay. I think this is good.

Yeah, it's good. I'm being genuine. Chris Plant visited GDC this past week. The Game Developers Conference. Yes, thank you. The Game Developers Conference. And had the privilege of speaking to kirby from two of the minds behind our lovable pink character kirby yeah the two lead

directors of like basically all the racing games and so if anyone would know some of these questions that it would be them and you went right at them with some pretty hard-hitting shit um i believe one of them involved cutting kirby in half and what would be on the inside is that fair to say yeah the answer is dreams dreams was a dreams um and i also uh really enjoyed and i realized this is credited to megan frocknamesh um the question of what would happen if Kirby, what was it? Swallowed a very attractive man. A hot man.

Well, it's, if Kirby swallowed a hot man, would he turn into, or take the shape of a hot man? And it seems like the answer was that he would, his body would basically be more muscular, but he would still retain the Kirby face. Yeah, he would still be round, and then he would be very strong, and he would have a hot man hat.

Honestly, this is bad journalism. I should have asked a follow-up question of what exactly is a hot man hat. Right, exactly right. I think a barbell bent over his head like Steve Martin's arrow would be my guess. Yeah, I also wasn't quite sure how well Hotman translated. Because it did sound like the translation was like an English to Japanese version of Macho Man. Oh. And I was like, well, that's interesting, but I don't know if a Macho Man is...

Not exclusively hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, though. But maybe like, you know, in their world, macho man, Randy Savage is like the pinnacle of, you know, masculinity. I do want to say the last aspect of the interview that I really appreciated was asking the existential question of where do the creatures go after Kirby swallows them? That was my favorite answer. Yeah. Because I did not expect it to be. It seems like they had had this pretty clearly established on like a lore Bible somewhere. Yeah. Right. So tell the people what exactly

happens so the answer is that kirby swallows a creature right and then you he absorbs their powers and then like spits out like a little poof for a star right and it disappears and you would think like oh they died they did not die they effectively teleported to somewhere else in the world randomly yeah and i this is not included in the interview because it's kind of like hard to transcribe because you know like you're communicating brain pantomime but i was like kind of did like a pantomime of like oh like being very confused and then it was just everyone like me and both directors pretending as if we had been transported somewhere we were unfamiliar with and being very disoriented and it went on for like a good minute and then uh the translator kind of got us back on track well done

thank you that's extremely funny uh thank you for filling us in on that incredible interview please read it it's on polygon.com but uh yeah i think we should hop into it yeah let's go talk about dredge okay so first up um we have dredge which we both played i i think i was the only person who played octopath yes which is fine. I understand hesitation there. I watched video of Octopath. Yeah, and Griffin has been playing it too. So we'll probably talk about it a few times over the coming weeks. It has eight different start points.

So, you know, we could talk about it forever. But Dredge is one of those games that I don't know about you, but when I saw the pitch for it, I thought this is the most Resties-ass game maybe ever. Yeah, pretty much. The pitch is, what if you had a fishing game that I guess would kind of like a UK Isles area or off the coast of like Boston? I don't know how those two things feel the same to me but for some reason they do yeah it's like a new england vibe too yeah i guess more new england

which ties to it's a fishing game but on the periphery is lovecraftian horror yeah and the deeper you go into the game the more you upgrade your ship the more you get a sense that something is a little bit off yeah i i want to take a step back for a second and say you know there's a lot of talk about e3 going on right now and whether it's like fully dead but when i think back to e3 weirdly it although there have had been some pretty fantastic memories from e3 it tends to be kind of a depressing time as someone who loves video games because the hit to miss ratio of like stuff i'm super interested in versus not tends to be very low i'm contrarian that to what we're experiencing now which is the my high point of video games which now is here's this game i didn't even know existed as of a week ago and i hear a little

bit of people starting to talk about it and we get code we try it out and instantly this game has leapt to like one of my favorite games of the year without a doubt i am like so pumped to talk about this game and i think everyone's gonna really really love it this makes me so happy because some reviews of this aren't universally positive that's true but that that is something that we love we're a big fan of the 7.5 out of 10 it's not saying that i gotta be real i haven't read i haven't read the other reviews i think they are on crack i'm sorry but like i don't know what they're complaining about but i think this game is i think it's i think it's very easy to guess what people do not like about this game. Is it too woke?

Too woke, yeah, that's what it is. Our buddy Tucker has been writing all these reviews. No, it's a fishing game. I think if you had just seen the trailer or just seen the screenshots, you might think like, oh, I bet there's a lot of time spent early on that we're digging right into that cthulhu nightmare right cosmic horror and this game is very comfortable

being like actually no we really like fishing and honestly like that's what i liked about it yeah the only thing that like like lands from an intro standpoint for me is a how little setup setup there is like you're in the boat fishing within five minutes fantastic and b how they are like very smart about weaving in the uh cosmic horror stuff insofar as like it's not specifically shoved into your face it like just starts to be like little, little whispers of it, little edges of it. And slowly you understand that like the whole game has this like baked in, but it's,

it's very subtle and smart. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's playing by the rules of good cosmic horror, right? Not that everything needs to follow its structure and rules, but it's doing it very well,

which is to say i have two critical parts of cosmic horror lovecraftian horror whatever you want to call it are the sense of gradually going mad that you're gradually losing your slip on reality right and for that to happen you have to have a very mundane reality to slip away from right you need a contrast yeah and you need to establish it and that that that change needs to be very slow the other thing that you need is the idea of the unknowable right like that's what's special about this type of horror is that you can't look directly at it that you can't really entirely conceptualize it and so what i really really like about this game is you go out during the day and you go fishing, right?

And there's a clock, you know, you're on a 24-hour cycle. And as the day goes on, the sun sets and the night comes. And at first, you have like, what, a candle on your ship? Yeah, like a little light, a tiny little light. And it can easily go out. And once that happens, you can only see, I don't know, maybe like a couple meters in front of you. And by see, I mean both it's like literally hard to see,

but also things like rocks that you could crash on, they quite literally don't materialize until the very last second. And you can see them kind of materializing in front of you it's very eerie and then they're also on like pillars of light in the distance like a really blood red kind of almost plasma like light or there are these like whirlwinds of evil i don't know they're like they're non um they don't take on human shape or any creature shape they kind of take almost on like a fog yeah and and i thought i just thought that was so again clever and them really knowing and loving the the the genre that they're playing with

yeah so there's a whole system as it, as, as night sort of descends, there's a whole, I guess, terror system of, you know, like your fear level where the higher it is indicated sort of by an icon at the top of their screen, the more fucked up incidents will happen.

So maybe you'll start seeing rocks that you didn't, that aren't normally there. They just like exist because you're like losing your mind and you could like actually crash into them um so you can't necessarily like follow the normal paths they're used to following um there's some crazy shit i don't even want to spoil but here's a little one is you'll see another boat. You'll like, like see another boat cruising around and, and you don't see any other boats. So it's very weird.

And I genuinely, without even thinking about it, started to be like, I'm going to go after that boat. Like it didn't even occur to me that there might be something else going on. And I went after the boat and there was a huge fucking fish that fucked me up so quickly that it wasn't even funny and it was like one of those angler fish that have like the lure on it yeah and it was just like messing with me and the world is full of like crazy twists surprises

little surprises that don't again i don't even want to spoil. So freaking cool. There's a horn on your boat that I don't even know what it does. Like it makes a horn noise, like whatever. But I don't, from a gameplay standpoint, I don't know what it accomplishes. Yeah. But I just like messed around with it once. And in the fog, I heard the horn pattern that I had just played, played back at me no as like an echo yeah it was freaky so on top of all of this i there's a reason it's a fresh stick game

i think yeah and that is it has along with all of this other stuff, it has two things. It has the Resident Evil 4, what is it, like inventory management? Yeah, grid-based inventory management where you're like rotating various like tetrominoes to fit inside a very limited amount of space. Yes, and I think it is an improvement upon the Resident Evil 4 one, which I can't talk about because I've played that game.

So it's not a traditional box or rectangle shape. It's a little bit of an unusual shape, and all the different things that you catch, they have increasingly unique shapes to them. So yeah, Tetromino is much closer in that they really want you to kind of scratch your head and think about how you can fit everything in. Yeah, like a cod is like an L shape, but you might find an eel that's like a crazy S shape.

And to, like, get everything in there, in addition to, like, you need to carry a rod and the rod takes up space in your inventory. And it's like, it is really interesting and thoughtful. and it's like it is really interesting and thoughtful and then there's also the kind of i guess metroidvania or really just i guess gear gating uh throughout the world of oh you need to go into this area but you need to have this type of rod to be able to catch fish or you need to find a way to blow up rocks to get into this little uh canal and that i i feel like that is your ideal type of progress in a video game well actually it's even more vague than that because so there is an intended way to play through the game you sort of start in like an opening area and it does gently guide you towards another set of islands which are kind of nearby but do require crossing like a big ocean expanse and i

totally missed that gentle nudge like i didn't even see it and i was like i'll just go here and i went to a totally different spot of the map which i later learned was like one of the last areas you're supposed to go to and it was extremely hard like much harder than anything i experienced thus far which makes sense and yet i was still able to quote complete that area like each area has its mysteries and little mini quests and stuff like that yeah i was able to complete that area so it's not gear gated per se there are plan is right there are rods that you need to like catch certain kinds of fish but you could really go in any order you want like there's really not a lot that's

limiting you and the whole map is like no loading like giant open world wind waker-esque in that way um well in one of the clever things with the map is at first it seems like oh you have this central island so it's archipelago archipelago yeah sure let's say it one of those yeah you you it feels like oh i have my central island and this is my home base and these are the people who gave me this ship to use because my original one broke when i say gave me i mean like put you into like servitude to pay off a debt yeah it's very tom nook yes uh and it feels like oh i go out i maybe go to another island i come back and then after i don't know probably like an hour or two it really struck me of oh no if i if i want to accomplish these things i need to start basically island hopping where i travel

from maybe between two islands over the course of a day and then go to sleep like actually rest up at another island. And not all the islands are the same. So like there's some where, hey, this is a great spot to trade, or this is a great spot to upgrade your ship. Or this is, you know, where you go when you want to turn in a certain type of item. They're like special artifacts that I guess you can collect. And once that got going for me, when I got further and further away from home, there's something really unsettling about that when you have that first two hours to establish, oh, this is my home face. This is a kind of a scary game a little, but like,

this is really comforting. And then to just be like, well, now I'm docking in a harbor that this is my first time here and everybody here seems super creepy yeah i don't know what this is gonna do to my ship or my character um yeah it has a real sense of adventure in that way yeah it's very exciting and and mysterious and and even outside of the like main four other like island areas that there are there's like many islands in between and you'll find like shipwrecks or like mini quests or i found a i guess it was like a little idol thing and it just like was like had a picture of a bunch of fish on it and a bunch of slots that were there and the fish kind of looked like the cod the like l-shaped cod that i had found and the point of it was to find like five or six cod and like carefully slot them into this puzzle of cod whatever and it and it ended up like rewarding me like a bonus um rod that i could then

use so the game is filled with these like little moments that are just really clever and i think it's like paced extremely well and it's also from a scale standpoint like it's just very smart like it doesn't uh overstay its welcome i think it's just structured in a really smart way yeah let's let's dig into that because we were texting about like scope and what this game does well and i'm curious if you'd kind of talk about that yeah i you know when when we say scope or game when you hear the word scope and game development um a lot of it has to do with like realistic uh levels numbers of features and levels and whatever weapons stuff like that uh we talked about the double fine documentary

recently uh scope was like a huge part of that project and part of the reason why it ended up being a six-year project when originally it was whatever three or four years um is because it's very difficult to say like no we can't do this because of the scope because of the budget we need to move on and maybe we'll do it as a dlc or sequel or whatever and in this game has an incredible sense of scope i think yeah i think so too so i mean the examples here you know when you meet characters you're not meeting 3d models it just cuts to kind of the um i guess like hades is a good comparison yeah it's it's like hand-drawn, but in a very unique art style. Yeah, and the actual art itself, it's not quite low poly or like low polygon, but it's not hyper detailed. Yeah.

Like the geometry of the ship and the islands that you're going to are very, very, very simple. Yeah, and I don't know if that's a scope thing necessarily. very, very simple. Yeah. And I don't know if that's a scope thing necessarily. I think that might just be an art design thing, but it totally works for both, honestly, because it is something that you can with a small team. I think this team was four people, somewhere around there. Yeah. You can with a small team, like scale that in such a way that like you aren't spending five years or however long making just assets for a game. Yeah. Well, I think that's what's interesting about the idea of a scope, right? Is you can do it very intentionally.

Like who knows, maybe when they started the game, they said, you know, this is about as high detail as we want to get, you know? Yeah. Or you can stumble onto it where they're like, well, this is a cool art design. And along the way you realize, well, this also benefits us

because we don't have to spend nearly as much time, you know, building every little detail of every ship. I think it's especially important that you have a really simple art design for this because, like you said, you are upgrading your ship, which I haven't gotten super far. I don't know how much it visualizes. It doesn't really, the ship itself doesn't dramatically change. I mean, the light obviously

will be a bigger light and stuff like that but there's not really like a huge visual difference on the boat itself which honestly is fine because the feel of it you know if you as you get later you get like better engines and stuff like going like three times faster than you did at the beginning of the game is like a huge difference from a feel standpoint yeah so it didn't necessarily bother me that it wasn't like diablo in terms of customizable visuals yeah this is one of those games that i would be very into maybe a b segment of orestes you know a few months from now doing a full spoiler thing and talking about where it goes and i encourage everybody who's listening to like give it a try before we wrap up on this though can you talk a little bit about like the early signs of the weirdness like the type of

fish that you're catching and stuff and how oh yeah the game reacts to that yeah it's so you when you're fishing and and this tends to happen at night you'll um you'll go and you'll like go to fish like cod let's say and sometimes there's like a little like haze above where you normally fish cod a little like creepy otherworldly thing and as you're fishing occasionally you'll get just like a mutant cod like a cod that has three eyes or a cod that's glowing or something like that and the game will be like oh that's weird and then you'll like take it back to the the fishmonger and the fishmonger will be like oh huh i'm kind of into this okay yeah bring me more of these and you get paid more for those like weird fish and it just like furthers this idea that you are the only quasi sane, although you're slowly losing that person in this environment because everyone else is like kind of super into the fucked up stuff that's happening in this world. Just really, really smart and cool.

And yeah. Yeah, I like it a lot. lot um i i think we should probably hold there because i i yeah i think anything else we say would get into spoiler territory and not that you know spoilers are always inherently bad but with a game like this that's like a big chunk of the magic yeah um so i will uh you know not to bang the drum but it runs perfectly on steam deck it is a perfect steam deck game like i can't think it's on switch too right i'm not sure that is a good question let me just pull that up find out right now and then we can talk about octopath i see a physical boxed copy of this game for sale on switch wow so yes it is on switch both in download and physical yeah it's also coming

basically everything ps4 ps5 xbox yeah though i mean i i agree with you that portable i think is by far the way to go with this game yeah i hope it runs well on switch it can be a little hit or miss switch games but um yeah keep an eye out if you're interested in playing it on switch just just make sure you read reviews of that version to make sure it's kosher. Cool. Do you want to take a break and we can talk about some Octopath? Let's do it.

Okay, we're back. And we're going to talk about Octopath Traveler 2. I cannot believe this. I really thought this was going to be the big game that I avoided, not because I thought thought this was going to be the big game that I avoided. Not because I thought it was necessarily going to be bad, but I don't like, in general, turn-based RPGs. And there's just a lot. There's so many good video games out.

Yeah. And making time for really anything that you think like, eh, I don't really know, let alone something that, what, is like 50 to 60 hours it is a big ask but everybody i know and love and trust in video games has been pushing me towards this at first it was people like jason schreier from triple click and brendan bigley uh sorry not brendan bigley steven hilger from into the ether but they're both like rpg people yeah now like mike maharty who we work with our reviews editor um has been like pushing it really hard like it's starting to i don't know get get some momentum away from just the uh the rpg people so i tried it and the short is this game rules like it's it's exceptional um and even though it is still turn-based combat everything that i find annoying

about um this sort of game in the past i just don't feel it i think it's a lot of quality of life things so long preamble here's the the the short of it it's a sequel to octopath traveler a game that i think we very briefly talked about and weren't super wild about yeah um there are uh it's a big uh open world effectively two well 2.5 drpg it's that that new style that square enix is doing where they do pixel worlds but um it it has like real time lighting and things like that yeah the worlds are 3d basically but the characters are 2d but the worlds have yeah like the worlds are like gorgeous and then the contrast of that is with the 2d pixel characters is just very cool looking yeah and and there are eight main characters thus octopath and at the beginning of the game you can pick whoever you want to

start the game and you have like about you want to start the game. And you have like about, I don't know, an hour long adventure with any of these characters. That's the first chapter that establishes their story. And then you're just kicked out into the world. And you can go and try to take care of whatever that story demands on your own. Or you can start traveling from city to city city finding the other main characters and bringing them into your parties that you can all work together to solve your problems effectively it's a game about teamwork um what was a trip for me is each of these characters has kind of their own rpg gimm. And purely out of luck,

the first one I picked was basically Pokemon as their gimmick. And what luck. It was so awesome. There's this character named, I think it's pronounced Oshet, who is like a wildling, a young wildling girl who's living on an island. And it has this like ancient curse uh where i don't know she doesn't collect the yada yada yadas from around the world then the island and maybe the

entire world will be destroyed um she can capture any creature that she comes into combat with and then use them as like an item where they get like unleashed so one of the first creatures that you meet is this giant iguana creature and it teaches you like oh hey remember you can catch anything so you catch this like screen filling creature and then on the next fight immediately unleash it and it's absolutely devastating because that would break the game they're like hey you know what with this first creature you should harvest them for resources which teaches you the second part which is every creature that you don't want to keep you can like gut for various food items and parts and those parts are useful because one they keep you alive, but two, you can also meet other people in various towns

and get them to join your party. So by harvesting Critterbits, you can get, say, like a certain type of emblem that one random character in one random town will be like, hey, that's exactly what I want, and they'll join your party, which can be helpful for solving puzzles it's this like overwhelming sense of everything being interconnected i know you didn't play much of the first one but i feel like in the first one and this might be wrong but this

is just off memory in the first one you basically played through the individual stories i want to say on their own at the beginning i think that's yeah and then like after you did like four of them or something there was like an interlude and then you like did the other four but but they were very sort of isolated where you would just start from scratch at the end of one of them again i didn't i'm sorry i didn't play much of the first one which i'll discuss why in a second yeah but uh yeah that feels like a departure that you like are in control of the first character that you recruit yes to recruit the other ones i honestly can barely remember that first game and i think that is because i remember the structure being much more um yeah rigid rigid and the characters were not nearly as likable that the stories were

thin which is weird because i just said you know like you have to go collect the yada yada yadas but i'll kind of get to why i think that works in this game versus you know other games like it in a bit yeah i mean the big thing for me. What made me bounce off the first one. And again I'm not necessarily a fan of these games either. It's just the writing was like. There was a lot of it. Like a lot of it.

And it was the most like dry. Dragon Warrior 1 level writing of like very simple direct stories that were taking hours to get through like glacially conveyed stories yeah the point where like when i would get to combat i was excited because the combat was pretty, but there was so much cruft to get there that I just could not power through it. Yeah. So I think that's the big change here is you, one, you don't have to immediately go to any of the other characters. You know, it's optional for when. What would you do if not that?

You can just start exploring the world. What would you do if not that? You can just start exploring the world. The world is massive and you can go in any direction. And maybe I'm reading the map wrong, but it seems very, very vague on where it wants you to go. I think it really does want you to create that sense of adventure of, hey, just see what you can go find. And there are some clever gating systems to make sure that you don't go to places you shouldn't be at like you your player has you know a level that increases as you go through the game and anytime you're about to enter an area it lets you know the level for that area so if you're you

know five and you come to a level that's 16 you don't want to go there you're going to get destroyed so that that it's it is steering you a little bit more than it necessarily pretends to be um but i never found it like controlling the the other thing with your stuff about the story is for starters when you do meet a new character you have the option to play their chapter and their chapter is just an hour long so it's very short and while the stories are like a bit familiar it kind of works because they don't have to spend a lot of time you know really setting up who these characters are so an example of the second character i met is this character named throne a who she's like a teen or 20 something member of a thieves guild of some sort in a really big

industrialized town and she's been sent on this doomed mission by mother and father who are the leaders of this guild and what you realize and i'm i'm going to provide like a little little spoiler here is something that happens literally in a very early part of the game um but her kind of chosen brothers and sisters of this guild they and her have all been misled to believe that the other ones are traitors who must be killed because mother and father want the strongest one to survive and then like be the next leader of the guild yeah so they've all been set against each other and throne a in again this very very very short first chapter is the victor and instead of taking the guild wants to go travel the world to find and kill mother and father sure and like that's you know like that's really easy to follow it's really you know good old It's really, you know, good old-fashioned melodrama.

You know, like, stories like that have been written since, I mean, it's almost Dickensian. Like, it is, it's old-fashioned. And going with Dickensian, her ability, I mentioned, you know, the other one can catch critters. Her ability is to pick pockets. So she can go up to, like, tons of characters during that chapter and take pretty much anything from them. And there are these percentages of like risk reward where that will have an impact on how she's perceived and all that stuff. So, yeah, I think it's very – I don't know if you could have like too deep or too, you know, like bold of stories. deep or too you know like bold of stories because you are collecting eight different characters each with different kind of genres each with different needs and you have to carry them all

in your head at the same time and by having it be like really really tropey but still well written like the dialogue and the characters are still really fun to be around um i think that's kind of the only way that this could work um otherwise you would just be at a loss how what happens like does the story of the individual characters change if you've like let's say gotten a few people before getting them i so that first chapter doesn't change the first chapter chapter, when I'm playing as a jet, and I get to the city, and I meet Throne for the first time, and the game's like, hey, do you want to play Throne's introductory chapter?

Oh, I see. So it just kind of jumps back to their origin story, basically. Exactly. And then they join your party once you've completed that chapter, and then, again, you're just into like exploring the world yeah um the other thing here is the part that i i'm the most shocked by is i just do not have any love for turn-based combat and this has gotten me to do a 180 on it and i think i think there are a few reasons one the speed the speed is just very, very, very fast. It has this clever thing, both I believe in fighting and in dialogue,

where it has like a pause button, a play button, and a fast forward button. And if it's fast forward, the game runs at double speed. If it's play, it automatically goes from one line of dialogue or one fight to the next. And if it's pause, it stops between things to give you time. And it's like a very simple ui thing but it works so well at allowing me to kind of create my own pace um and then in terms of combat you it has a break system which i believe is in the

first game where each enemy has various weaknesses and you try different attacks on them to figure out what that weakness is. And once you've struck gold, like say arrows are a weakness, every time you come in contact with that enemy, it'll have like a little arrow box underneath it to let you know, hey, you can try that. It also has empty boxes, so if it has like one arrow box filled and then three empty boxes, you know there are still three weaknesses that you haven't found.

Oh, sure. Yeah. And once you find that weakness and you cause a break, it basically like stammers them and then they or stuns them. They can't attack you. And that's when you just unleash like all holy hell from all of your enemies or from your characters. I could like I could go even deeper into it but i know we don't usually go like too hardcore into the mechanics but needless to say it feels like you feel like a badass whenever you go hard on characters yeah the system sounds similar to the break system in fire emblem where you could like basically once you counter them directly

you have like a huge advantage in the fight and it makes you feel like very smart every turn you also get uh like basically a point or a check that you can collect up to i think like five um and then when you decide to spend those you are basically doubling or tripling or quadrupling your attack. Yeah. So you build them up and then wait for the break and then get the break and then deliver like a 5x attack, plus it's a special, plus it's on their weakness, and suddenly you go from dealing 30 damage to like 800. Yeah.

It just feels so good. I cannot believe it. Do I think I will finish it? No. Almost certainly not because I have so much trouble finishing games and there's so much stuff coming out over the next few months. But what I'll say is I keep going back to it each evening, even if it's just for a little bit, because I really, really, really like spending time in the world.

And I really want to meet spending time in the world. And I really want to meet the rest of the characters. Like my kind of goal is to at minimum, you know, meet most of, if not all the characters before I put it down. It's great. I don't know if you will like it. Like I said, I can't believe that I like it this much um but if you if you're a listener and you like these types of games if you like a really talky rpgs you like turn-based combat you should absolutely give it a try um if you're curious about it i think there's a demo there is a demo on switch and steam and i would recommend giving that a shot um because yeah it it's really really neat and i would it would be a shame for it to get lost on people's general to-do list this year

um because so far it rivals anything else i've played i actually didn't realize it was on steam i remember the first one was exclusive to switch for a while yeah so i i didn't realize it was on steam i remember the first one was exclusive to split us to switch for a while yeah so i i didn't realize it was on steam that's cool yeah i think it's on all i think it's on xbox and playstation 2 i think um yeah but yeah it it is absolutely great um and it will definitely be a game i talk about more throughout the year. Cool. Anything else? Should we talk about GDC? Is that something people care about? Did you learn anything exciting apart from the Kirby news?

I mean, I learned a lot about AI. People are like freaking out about it. I did see one of the coolest demos I've ever seen. Did I tell you, separate from the show, about the Square Enix AI demo I saw? No. Dude, it was wild. Okay, so there is a panel that was like

one person from Square Enix, and they were going to do a talk about how they use neural learning and generated text to write rpg dialogue and content i was like that tracks yeah i was like i gotta go here like this is going to be the most controversial thing in the planet you know we're going to have clicks for days at old polygon.com and i go in and it's like a pretty small lecture hall and it's only like a third full. And I'm really feeling I'm like, great, no competition, I'm going to get a scoop. So then lights go down or whatever panel starts. And this really young guy walks on stage. And he's like,

Hey, I'm really sorry, you know, English is not my first language. I'm going to do my best to communicate, you know, how this stuff works. And, of course, then proceeds to explain it to anybody I know who speaks English has ever done. He's like, yeah, I'm very young. I graduated with a PhD in 2021. I've been at Square Enix for like a year. I have like a very small team of like i don't know seven or something um and uh here's a game and then just turns on a game i thought this was going to be like a theoretical talk he turns on a detective like visual novel and the detective's

talking to another detective and like you you know you see the little 2d version of the character on the screen he's like hey you know like what's up you know where where do you think this murder is and the detective's like oh i think it's near the water and then your character's like oh do you think it's near the the docks and the other one's like oh it probably near the docks or but i don't know if it'd be near the water. There's only like one factory there that anybody actually works at. It's like stuff like that, right? Sure. And then your character's like, oh yeah, hey, by the way, detective,

do you like video games? And he's like, oh yeah, I like these types of games. And it's like, well, that was weird. And then he's like, the guy giving this presentation pauses it. He's like, yeah, all of that was me typing in a keyboard directly to him. None of those were like prompts that I was selecting. And also that wasn't a video that was live. Yeah.

And I was like, oh, whoa, that's nuts. And what he goes on to explain, and I'm going to do my best here to keep it as simple as possible, is he's like, Square Enix writes the the best stories we don't want to get rid of excellent storytelling and excellent writing that's not what i'm here to do i am here to solve one problem that has driven me bonkers forever which is i never want to hear the same thing twice in rpg oh sure you know when you prompt somebody that you're not just going to keep getting them being like oh sure it's nice to be at the tea shop over and over and over again.

So he's like, so here's how. What are you buying? Yes. What are you selling? Thank you. Even though I actually love that one. Not that that's Square Enix, but. You nailed it, too.

Thank you. It sounded just like it. So he's like, okay, here's how it works. We write a story. You know, we create a scenario for this game. You could maybe even create specific dialogue that you want or character bios or anything. But you create all of this information of what the story is with human writing. And in the game, you could be talking to, say, this detective character, and you can give him your prompt.

And if that prompt relates in any way to the story, it will say, great, perfect, loop it back. We have all the stuff, perfect. We can feed you into the story, or we can guide you back into it. guide you back into it um but if you say you ask the game like hey you know detective what's your favorite um video game it says well yeah what's your favorite pizza it says well here's the character bio and here's what we know of the game so far and here's what we know of the character's consistency so far in mushroom pineapple sure and then it feeds you original dialogue and ideally stores that and starts building a revised character sheet so the the intention is not to get rid of video game writers at all in fact the way it was like presented it sounds like you would need more writers

because you'll need so much more scenario and character bible writing effectively but the world will be more fleshed out so in a sense it's almost like i'm taking the idea of like open world spontaneity and moving it into the text part in the dialogue part of video games it's interesting because the game that you're describing basically doesn't really exist anymore which is to say like games where you actually type a prompt in like this was in the early days of like text-based adventure games like uh the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and stuff like that you could type in whatever you wanted and if the game knew you know if it was hard programmed to know what you were saying it would have a response that was contextually appropriate but here i mean these those games

don't like you're picking from even in you know much loved games like fall at new vegas you're picking from four different choice like options so that i love that you mentioned that because that was how he ended the panel was showing those old games those old boss games and he And he basically said, these were great ideas. Like this is some of the best type of gaming that we could have. It's so open-ended and so imaginative and truly creates a sense of role-playing. But the technology wasn't there for it.

And it didn't fade because it was a bad type of game. It faded because you kept getting the same answers. Well, and it didn't fade because it was a bad type of game it faded because you you kept getting the same answers or you felt like well and it didn't scale right like you couldn't do the infinite number of responses so the second that you get like a bad response from one of your questions it breaks or it breaks and and you're like oh okay i realize i can see the magic trick now but obviously if there's infinite number of responses that gets more interesting i still don't think especially as we see chat gpt struggling to like say what date it is or what one plus one equals i don't i don't think it's ready now but it certainly has some interesting impacts in the

future i also think it has interesting impacts in you know as you were describing it about like hearing the same thing over and over again it wasn't so much like being able to type in whatever i wanted and get a response it was more like you know i made a joke about the resident evil 4 vendor but all vendors like invariably like if you're running through and it's like a generic npc they're you know you're gonna talk to them and they're gonna say one thing and they're gonna keep saying it every time you hit a but the game knows more or less the the idea of what they're trying to say and theoretically an ai could like come up with a hundred varieties of that thing without a human being doing it now obviously there are

cultural implications to an ai doing that that you know potentially take work away from uh narrative designers uh doing that stuff uh but it's you know stuff that as we're seeing like all game developers are exploring this stuff because it allows for scale in ways that weren't previously possible it also allows for like a million different errors to come up that weren't previously possible yeah It also allows for like a million different errors to come up that weren't previously possible. So it is very interesting. What surprised me was how many narrative designers like working people in this industry were not as freaked out about it.

Like in that way of like job stealing, right? That a number of people that i spoke with um that that ubisoft um has a you know a ai tool effectively for its narrative team like no a tool is the perfect word it's really helpful with ideation you're right it is not good at doing what i do well yeah it is good at doing this like really basic thing, like helping me get some prompts that would take me days of just bashing my head against the wall. I can just look through all these prompts

that it comes up with of like, hey, what type of character? Give me a hundred different characters to think about. And then I find one that I like and then I turn it into something like, you know, beautiful and rich and artistic. Sure.

Well, I think the concern is not so much that it would replace all human jobs, but a job that would previously require, let's say, 20 narrative designers could theoretically be done with maybe five narrative designers because the productivity dramatically increases, if not the quality. So I think that's the concern which is legitimate like obviously there are issues there um and but yeah again i don't think we can totally turn a blind eye to it because unlike crypto there's like direct you know we're already actually seeing the impact on society it's not just a money- scheme so yeah it is a very weird

interesting scary exciting I don't know thing you kind of have to carry like two very different feelings at the same time when talking about it or thinking about it right like a mix of like oh this could be really good and oh this could end the world

and take all of our jobs yeah anyway GDC was good that yeah anyway gdc was good that was probably the thing that was most interesting um do do you have any other recommendations before we wrap up you should watch succession it's a great show it's back for its final season if you haven't watched it even though you've probably heard people talking about it uh it's a delight it's it's incredibly well written incredibly sharp uh amazingly well acted um it's it's the show that i get most excited about when it's on uh and i haven't really had this feeling since probably breaking or i guess better call saul um so it's it's filled a nice void in my life and it's great nice um my recommendation is a movie called

the tarnished angels which is like a 1950s i think late 50s movie um starring rock hudson and robert stack and dorothy malone um but here's why you should check it out. It's about competitive plane racing. Like it's set in the 30s, back when people would just straight up race planes, you know, very, very, very close to the ground and around three pylons. And it sure looks like they filmed this using real planes and they raced planes, which is wildly dangerous.

The result is some of the most bonkers stunts I have ever seen in a movie. And it's deeply weird to watch a movie from the 50s that is based on a William Faulkner story and to kind of go into it unsure of what it is and then see stunts where you, they would be illegal if they tried to film them today. They look utterly terrifying. It's awesome.

It's not an action movie. It is very much kind of a soapy drama, but it's fun. It's like an hour and a half and yeah the action is just absolutely incredible uh it's funny you mentioned william faulkner because i just last week watched the long hot summer which came out around the same time based on a william faulkner uh series of short stories and that was also like very soapy but like fucking bonkers weird and that is like a wild cast too right it's like yeah paul newman's like breakout role orson wells is

in it angela lansbury is in it joanne woodward it's a very uh but it's also very much of its time like it's hammy and ridiculous and but all that said holy shit paul newman has it going on in that movie i get why it was his breakout role those baby blues do not stop for days oh yeah i i just looked up and the it's just him in a a white tank top yeah they put him in some real outfits. And it is a hot summer, let me tell you. Well, that's been our reviews of movies from 1957 to 1958. If you want more of these, we're here every other week. Anything else before we wrap?

No, I think we did it. Cool. Well, this has been another episode of The Resties. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. Your name is... Russ Frustig. And we're The Resties. We're the rest of the best.

Discuss the best of the rest. We'll see you next time. Resties!