The Besties - Gotta Exorcise 'Em All with Shin Megami Tensei V

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Today, we're cracking into the oftentimes impenetrable Shin Megami Tensei series' fifth major installment, and share some thoughts on the masterful GTA Trilogy remasters, which are terrible. Other media discussed: Halo Infinite Multiplayer, Resident Evil 4 VR, Cape Fear 1962 and Moonlighter. 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!

I think we can all agree that the Tooth Fairy is real. I'm sorry. I think we can all agree that the Tooth Fairy is fake, correct? Wait, what? What? What just happened? Stop! I don't know what bit you're going to do, but I'm canceling it to talk about the fact

that you just boned that the worst anybody could possibly bone it. Did you take debate class in high school? They told me to take both sides of the argument so right it's hello it's just a sucker punch hello my name is rush fush stick mussolini was a good dude no wait fuck i already blew it this is like a genuine i had a genuine question even though i did blow it i really wanted to ask this question sometimes you only get one dunk dunk dunk dunk what if you only get one shot to start your podcast one opportunity would you take it or would you just mob spaghetti all over your

fucking microphone okay what wait so the tooth fairy is fake okay we can agree that that i'm not going to even uh set that up as a premise to say yes and to the tooth fairy is fake why in a million years if you're gonna make up a fake tooth fairy would you require that kids put the tooth under under the pillow the hardest thing to access in a million years that's an easy question are you real it's the easiest question on the planet don't go ahead then enlighten us because by that point in your life like presumably maybe you're married you have you have at least one kid who's like you know getting getting a little older life is you know getting a little stale so you need to start setting up mission impossible style scenarios to keep that spark of life alive that's a really good point i love that chris thank you and you

know this is this discussion's over uh plant nailed it one i just want to point out russ it wasn't i it must be a real struggle you know if you know russ personally like i do the hard thing about russ is he is a genuinely smart and funny person but russ just being russ is also funnier than than Russ when he is on his game. Yeah, right. So it's this constant struggle of which Russ are you going to get and which Russ do you want? Because they're both very choice. I got to be me.

I've already decided once my kids start losing teeth, I'm not going to say it's a tooth fairy. I'm going to say that their bed ate it. And the bed gave them a dollar in exchange because the mattress is full of money and teeth. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know a game. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I'm here to hear about the best game of the week. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the week my name is russ froschek and i know the best game of the week welcome to the best

seats where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it is a book club and for video games and just by listening you my friend are a member you've joined look in your pocket you'll find your membership card um and uh we're gonna be talking about a new game called shin megami tensei five v go uh this should be fun to hear chris try to summarize what shin megami tensei five i actually put in the rundown that you should probably take it griffin but yeah oh yeah uh shin megami tensei is a long long long, long running role-playing game series that started, Jesus, I think back in the NES, there was a Megami Tensei game. It is all about capturing or negotiating with demons to join your side. And then if you have played the Persona series,

and I'm sure we'll get into those comparisons a lot this episode, you're going to be familiar with that sort of core gameplay loop. Each enemy has weaknesses, elemental weaknesses that you have to try and cover with your team of yourself and three demons that you work with at a time. And the story is full of literally any kind of religious symbolism that you could imagine. And yeah, there's more to it. It's like we'll get pokemon persona did i do it uh yeah i mean it's like no one's gonna have any feelings about that

on the internet right yeah probably not no they definitely will so let's just move on i'm so scared of this episode i'm so the the shimogami tensei fan base is so so intense hey Hey, Griff. Yeah? Stand behind me. Okay, I'm going to get behind you. You're going to be just fine. So, Griffin, I don't want to speak for anyone else on the podcast,

but I think it's pretty apparent how I feel specifically on JRPGs. Right. And so, so I don't necessarily want to paint this with a, my JRPG dislike brush, but I do want to know from your perspective, what it is that like draws you in about this game. Because for me,

it is, it is very, very tough for me to get into. Yeah. It is a jrpg ass jrpg yeah and there is there's no getting around that like if you are not a fan of of this genre this is not going to be the game for you uh to be frank this is the first shimogami tensei game that i have like been able to crack into uh i gave for the old college try uh there were there have been games on ds and 3ds that uh i i gave a shot to um and it it it never clicked with me um and the reason for that i i am

i'm a huge fan of the persona series uh for golden is maybe my one of my top three favorite games ever um and if you have played those games, Shin Megami Tensei basically ditches all of the day-to-day activities, the social links. The normal world stuff. The normal world stuff. Now, you do sort of pop between real-life Tokyo

and this sort of apocalyptic version of Tokyo, which is another sort of returning feature from the series. Like that is usually a thing that happens in the Shin Megami Tensei games. So it loses all of that real life, making friends and, you know, everybody has these stories and cut scenes. There is a story in Shin Megami Tensei V

and the rest of the series. In my opinion, it's the weakest part. Like it is negligible at best. However, the actual gameplay of it, the actual, you know, customizing your party and customizing each, you know, sort of demon that you recruit so they have the exact skills that you need

to succeed in like a single, you know, boss fight or just to have a good general strategy when you're running around the open world and fighting demons and stuff. That stuff is, in my opinion, way better in Shin Megami Tensei V than it ever has been in any Persona game. And that is what has won me over.

The amount of customization that you have is, like, outrageous. You can still merge demons together to make, like, stronger demons. That comes right back. You can collect things things called essences which basically has all of the powers that any particular demon has and then you can just drop it on yourself or another person or another demon to just like make this super super specific party that you need and you have to do that stuff because um another thing that sort of sets it apart i think for persona

is that this game is fucking hard as hell it is like unapologetically very difficult and if you screw up a single turn that that could be it like your enemies could could you know take you down and in the next turn and that's it does your experience with persona like because i i was like drowning trying to like wrap my head around the system yeah sure yeah no it helps it's definitely different here um the fact that like you are you can consume the power of these of these demons to like upgrade yourself right that's not how it works really in persona games and persona you like equip a demon and then you're you have that those skills and those affinities right because those are a major part of the game you have to hit enemy weaknesses

i'll try really quick to explain the press turn system which is uh a returning thing basically you have four actions that you can take before it turns over to the enemy's turn but if you hit an enemy's weakness you basically get an extra move out of that so you could if you you know if everybody in your party if all four members are hitting weaknesses, then you have eight turns to take the enemy down. So that stuff is really, really important. You cannot neglect it. So much so that I had to, during a couple boss fights,

I lost them pretty quickly and then had to go back to the drawing board and absorb different affinities because this one has a lot of fire and dark attacks. So let me pick up something that maybe can defend against one of those. It's so engaging. I found myself just running around the open world collecting demons to blend them and do all that stuff. I really like that and it is what has propelled me through I think about maybe a dozen hours into the game.

But the story just isn't clicking with me really at all. Because I feel like there is no real life social link stuff to think about. And maybe that's not everybody's thing. But I feel zero connection with any of the characters in this game. And if that's the case, there is no story that's going to grab me at that point. So Justin, you like this game too? Oh man, I don't know. if that's the case like there there is no story that's gonna grab me at that point so justin you like this game too oh man i don't know it's like i i very i'm i'm trying to be careful because i very much understand that this is like not i'd have like i've enjoyed i mean again to just

introduce this comparison that i know frustrates people deeply i've enjoyed some of the persona games um but if people get pissy about that comparison you're you're being you're being a little extra because like the games are pretty fucking similar like we had so many people ask us hey i really like persona should i get into this game so it's a very legitimate question people want to know absolutely yep it's just like so off-putting i mean i guess guess the best way I can describe it's like so many different like tropes that are like

stay away stay away like it's bizarre to me that we open up like I really had to go and check to make sure I hadn't played this before like when you start in a classroom and you look like the most generic ass anime hero on the planet like you're not a human being you're just like a

sketchbook made real and it's like it's so generic and it's like walking around and talking to other students and then you're sucked into this like bizarre like different dimension with like monsters and stuff it has zero connection to what you're doing before and just like none of it is engaging or interesting like the battles just this stuff and again like i don't understand the systems that well maybe this would all be made clear but there's just stuff that's like not pleasant like when you like the fact that like uh getting attacked is passive there's like no sort of you know interaction or like a block or something you can do you know to like make that part engaging and then it kills it this is very annoying to me that like when you run out of magic power you don't get it back there like even when you level up it doesn't refill

which to me like sucks a lot of the fun out of like experimentation and and and figuring out like what works best with what because it all feels so limited to where like right now like nobody has magic power and i don't have any items to refill it so it's just like rather than some deep system it's just like a bunch of people attacking and then they attack. And it's just like, and all the monster designs are like, who cares? Like they have no connection to the world that I'm in.

Like they're, and I feel like I've seen all of them before. I don't know. I find basically nothing. And all the writing is like like drab like the sort of like highfalutin like gods and demons are among us and you don't really care about any of that we know it's all made up but we need you to try to care okay just please please try to care uh because it's not really a story but there's gods gods and demons and stuff. I will say this. The one part that I thought started getting me more interested,

and I don't know if this continues, is the demons that you can walk up and talk to and some of them have actual personalities that aren't just like... Yeah, I kind of dug that, yeah. The demons are the best part of the game. I did want to say that you did see all these demons before. If you have played any game in

the series persona or shimogami tensei like you're going to recognize most of these most of these guys and i think that's one of the cooler things about this series about both series persona and shimogami tensei 5 and how it explores virtually every world religion or like cultural folklore to create these things uh and what's great is during loading scenes uh which don't happen too terribly often mostly if you die and have to reload it'll show you like a little tip about you know this is who mokai actually is and where they came from and what it means in the real world that shit's really cool i did want to say on the subject of running out of magic power you can refill that for a price at save points and stuff but there's also like little pickups all around the world that you can grab uh to to refill that stuff

and and also there's a really cool system in this game that is one of the main things that grabbed me uh called miracles which are just passive upgrades that you know help out your character or um you there actually is a miracle that you can spend this like really rare currency on that does actually refill your health and and magic when you level up so like that's that's i feel like there are a lot of sort of annoying things like that when you start that uh are are mitigated by this this system that yeah it does take a while to to flesh out a little bit it feels like this is the game that you should play like six games in to your like level of like loving jrpgs like if you really want to go down the rabbit hole this is where like you would never in a million years start here yeah i don't think i would have been able to

break into it if i hadn't played you know every persona again yeah yeah i i think uh i would so when i was younger i don't know if y'all remember this but there was this like period where it felt like once a year every video game magazine would give like 10 out of 10s to one fighting game they'd be like this is it this is the fighting game it rules everybody should go play it or they would do it to a racing game they do it to something very like at the time i would say kind of niche genre and then i would be like wow 10 out of 10 i gotta go get it and then i would go uh and actually try it and be completely out of my depth uh with whatever the fighting game was discovering it was extremely hardcore and like not for me right and i think

that is how i feel about this game and that it seems like as someone who's not good at this sort of stuff a great game for people who love this very well not maybe not very but somewhat niche type of jrpg something used to be more popular uh you know i don't know a decade ago but the weird thing that's happening is the expectations have changed where people are like, this is the big Switch game right now. You gotta love it. If you like Persona, you're not, you know, like true

if you don't also love this. And I think that like shift in expectations is, I just imagine a lot of people getting this game and then being quite off put by it because it is so not for them. No, yeah, it's hardcore in virtually every way that a game of a specific genre can be pretty hardcore. What does the title mean? It's like, I don't know. It's a, the original Megami tensei i think was like a

book or maybe a manga or something like that uh and then they added shin onto it when they sure making video games in it yeah you're right chris like i i don't think that this is just a oh a new switch game i'll pick it up like i think you have to be you have to be pretty into jrpgs with like complex systems in order to in order to swing this that said it is the most i have enjoyed a shimogami tensei game so if you are looking to crack it like if you like persona and you specifically like the systems of persona and and you know the the vibe of courting demons to join your side and stuff um i think this is this is the easiest shimogami tensei game to to break into yeah um or at least the first one that has for me keeps building out their own kind of universe as like messy as it is between stuff like this and then you know the persona uh spinoffs

and katherine which again i'll be very clear, problematic game. But I think it's interesting that they shift between puzzle games to very hardcore RPGs to fighting games, which I know they technically don't make. It's just, I can't really think of a brand like it other than like Mario that is doing the kind of breadth of stuff that they do yeah it's a it's a it is a for the people who like this series like it is a very consistent series to dive into i also just wanted to add that while the character the main character is kind of boring in the earth side uh once he gets to you know the uh the apocalypse world he fuses with like a robot guy

and then turns into this like beautiful androgynous cyborg with a lightsaber arm which is pretty fucking cool i think i guess straight up like just stop there like we should have just cut out the last 30 seconds of what griffin said and that should have been the entire episode and you would know i think with you now know listener this went with 150 certainty the extent to the the exact pleasure you would derive from this game yeah i enjoy it i'm gonna keep i'm gonna keep diving into it it's a bit of a busy time right now but i feel like i've invested enough time into like my super team of demons that i you know want to keep want to keep pounding through it um those cut scenes though whenever i play whenever i play this game i'm reminded of the you know the snl skit uh wells for boys yeah uh with emma stone

and the kids are making fun of as well and then the mom says it's not for you everything else is for you I feel that way I feel like Emma Stone is yelling at me when I play this game like you know no Justin this isn't for you there's other people that this is for

go play Madden Justin go play Madden Justin I'm sure there's another Uncharted game. Speaking of, I think we're going to take a break and talk about Grand Theft Auto. Oh, boy. It sucks shit. So I've been in the air for a little bit traveling, and I feel like the zeitgeist. I missed it.

What's going on with GTA? Okay, so a few weeks ago rockstar released the trailer and they said hey y'all we're remaking you know rockstar's always saying y'all totally we are remaking the first i'm sorry the the like ps2 trilogy of gta games for modern consoles and not only are we remaking it it's not just like a re-release we are redoing all the art in the game changing the character models adding modern lighting all sorts of stuff like that and it's coming out in like three weeks so get pumped and man were people pumped and then it happened it came out and things didn't go great. This is actually on us, because we assumed that they had actually been making Grand Theft Auto Remaster before those three weeks, when in reality, they started that day.

Yeah. So, some background. some background um these this trilogy uh which includes gta3 gta vice city and gta san andreas games that we talked about a few months ago when we were talking about best gta games uh the trilogy remasters were made by a studio called grove street games who has basically for the last several years been making the various ports for gta games including the mobile ports of these specific games and so they were which perplexingly yeah which strangely are a lot better than these than these these remastered versions yeah well the the mobile ports keep in mind are like not visual upgrades they more or less use the exact same graphics as the originals. And maybe that would have been the way to go.

Yeah, because the word upgrade is super generous. Super duper generous. Yeah, so there's a lot of layers. But we'll start with the funniest layer, which is... So they used algorithms to sort of upscale and increase the, quote, quality of a lot of these models. And for the main characters, they are okay. I think you, they're fine. Unfortunately, there are so many characters.

No, I'm sorry. No, CJ looks like, CJ looks like a fucking monster. He looks like a monster where all of his joints shrink into oblivion. He looks like fucking. He doesn't look great. He looks like he's in Balls 3D, the fighting game game he doesn't look great but but i would say the main characters they like tried to at least be a little more hands-on in fixing some of the weirdness like

claude in gta 3 the main character of gta 3 looks pretty good um yeah big big smoke looks like a muppet yeah he looks he looks like a bowling pin with a shirt on. Yeah. So the side characters, unfortunately, I guess there were so many characters that just couldn't get to them all. And there were people, I mean, you know, there's a character that looks like Grimace. Like exactly like Grimace. And they just, it's hilarious. It's really really really bad for a studio you know Rockstar's reputation is

one where they pay a lot of attention to the like cinematic nature of their games and put a high level of quality on the like importance of the experience and holy shit it was so clearly like a situation where they

knew I mean who could play this and not think it was so clearly like a situation where they knew, I mean, who could play this and not think it was rough? And they knew that and they still put it out anyway, because I guess, I don't know, money, more or less. Some of the visual things that are bad in these games are genuinely like, if you tried to make a bad version of these games i don't think you would land you would even land on them like they are they are the creation of a of a of a wild mind like the rain the rain effect is it obfuscates everything you can't see it the rain are these long bright white drops

that also center on your character. So as you move, the rain is like the exact same. Like it follows you everywhere you go, which is wild. Some of the remaster stuff of the textures like makes no sense at all. There's a restaurant in San Andreas called Tough Nut Donuts. And there's like a big billboard above it

that has like a hexagonal nut shaped donut. And they just went ahead and smoothed that right out into just a regular circular donut. This is the circle. Shit, look at this fucked up texture. Smooth that out, Rick. Okay, click, boop. It's like, that's a very, very minor complaint.

No, my favorite bug that I've seen is in gta3 i tried to recreate this and i couldn't but i watched a video of it yesterday so it's worth calling out in gta3 if you wiggle while driving a car if you wiggle the controller back and forth enough times the car gets wider and wider and wider like a pancake until it's driving around the street and it's taking like all the road up it's not and it's not just stuff that is like oh that's funny that's a funny like weird aesthetic thing it's like in the very first mission or maybe second mission in san andreas you're like running away from the ballers on bikes with your three buddies, only in my version, my special game that I played,

they went super duper slow, like almost to the point of stopping sometimes, so that the car with people trying to kill us with guns was just sort of sidling right up along. It made it like, yeah, it didn't happen again. I tried it a second time and they, you know, picked up the pace. But it's wild. I wanted to, like, just express a...

For people that might be considering remaking games like this in the future, here's what I would ask. If you can get it running stable at 30 frames a second or 60 on next-gen consoles, change nothing. Just release it. It would have been fine even with the visual goofiness of the game i would still be having an okay time if it just ran stable and woo boy it does not it runs it lags out it gta san andreas it lags out really bad whenever you are on grove street which is only a problem because you spend fucking half the game like getting missions there and building your your your gang up there and all this they named their fucking studio after that y'all have some pride yeah i mean i don't i don't

fully agree with you fresh on the the remaster thing because like we saw the demon soul remake remaster like we know what a good version of yeah but that runs great if it ran like shit but was really pretty i'd say make it run great first yeah that's that did run well i'm just saying like i i think there was like a huge opportunity here to remake these games and like really remake them you know like cut out some of the like just truly awful scene work like really do it but i think the i don't know it's hard not to feel like the calculus here was well we know people will buy it no matter what people always buy gta games no matter what so let's just ship it but

again that that is so weird because i mean fresh and i used to work very close to rockstar new york and we would hear stories about that office all the time. And one of the ones that I will never forget is that the Hauser brothers would literally go over every press image, every single one, through like hundreds of options and try to find like exactly the perfect thing. They were obsessive. And to think that this got through which is a game like it's not oppressive it's a game i i i truly don't get it like yeah it just seems like it doesn't seem like the company i i i would love to know what happens and i have a feeling we'll we will get that story somewhere hopefully on polygon.com

in the next year because it is the story right now it seems less likely that it's a cash grab because like gta online is still like generating so much money from i mean they could have two cash grabs like right no i mean it's fair it It's just like, it seems so weird. I don't know. Yeah, it is profoundly bizarre. It's also frustrating because if they're going to do something like this, I really wish they'd remake the first two that you can't legally play right now. Like, that would be, we really struggled. Can't legally play?

The first, like, one and two, no. Yeah, they're very difficult to. You can't find one and two anymore they're not on steam don't you remember when we were doing the you know what you were out i was out yeah you were out for that like you can't get one and two anymore like you can't play them like if you you can you know illegally do it and you know work it out that way but like find a kludgy solution but like you can't yeah get those you're gonna do something like at least have a little you know respect for the franchise jeez let's talk about a game that is a great remaster effectively that halo infinite multiplayer dropped early yeah oh really it's good it's very good download it to play it why it's just yeah it's out yeah

it's just out oh that's cool i might do that check that out all right well we provide a important service here on the besties i've i told you i've been i've been out of the loop that's excellent that's great news is it good they're like fun different stunts and stuff did you get time to play yeah i i i gotta play a fair amount of it and i would say if anybody played halo 4 halo 5 those are the last two i always get these numbers mixed up but it felt like they were trying to do the transition from halo feel to call of duty feel they were incorporating different types of sprint and all these uh i don't know what to describe the moves yeah right it just felt like you know you can you could actually

scope looked on the site and it felt like it was not a good version of either like it felt like it wasn't quite good halo and it wasn't quite good Call of Duty. Well, listener, they figured it out because somehow it feels like what I want Halo to feel like in 2021. people jumping up and down uh pouring bullets into them um and throwing grenades and on a hope and a prayer if you're as bad as i am but it also all the things that i expect from a first person shooter now are in there um i don't know if anybody went back and played halo one through three on the master chief collection but it can be pretty jarring. And this doesn't feel like that at all to the point where I'm genuinely excited for the campaign now. This kind of feels like

if they were to remaster one with an actual gameplay overhaul to modernize it, that's what it feels like because it does still have that aesthetic it's like that return to the blockier aesthetic of one and the like simpler environments of one but it uh the gameplay does feel like a simple example is like if you're jumping and you miss your jump slightly you'll actually like mantle up and like grab the ledge that might have been in

five again it's been many years since I played a multiplayer Halo game, but it just feels a lot smoother. They also like, they removed most of the like weird mobility stuff, but you do like still like slide when you crouch while running and stuff like that. So it feels more modern,

but not like full on, oh, this feels like Call of duty layered on top of uh halo which works yeah that that remaster point is spot on because it feels so simple as someone who has i kind of been um skilled out of most uh multiplayer shooters being thrown in these like smaller maps that are the geometry is like very readable, you can learn the maps pretty quickly. I just felt in control in a way that I haven't felt in multiplayer games in a very long time. There are modes with way bigger maps. And I'm excited to get some time into that. But I kind got thrown into uh and to just some capture the flag

matches and just kept playing because i was having so much fun yeah it looks nice it's pretty not like jaw-dropping but it looks good yeah i was playing some 4v4 which i think feels really good insofar as like i didn't feel like i was constantly getting swarmed by other people which helped a lot to just like learn the mechanics and slowly understand how like what guns I like and stuff like that. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's I don't know if it's the sort of game that I would get like totally overwhelmingly obsessed by. I will say like I wasn't there's like a battle. It's free to play, but there is like a battle pass system for unlocking cosmetics and stuff like that i know a lot of people myself included have issues with like like the only way you can earn

experience to level up is by completing these three challenges that you have and if you're playing a map that doesn't have any of those challenge options sorry you're just not going to earn any experience at all for this round which seems like a weird choice uh seems like something they'll fix but overall i i think the minute to minute feels very very true to combat evolved like the original halo game but just like modernized to being like 60 fps on series x and uh just very sharp but like it feels very uh responsive and tight so i'm it, but I want to see more of it, and I'm very curious about the campaign. And also it's on Steam, which is fucked up.

It's on Steam, it's on probably Windows Store as well, and all the Xboxes. It's very weird. I'm glad it's on Steam, but seeing Halo on Steam, like launching in this way is just kind of very unusual. It's what Bill Gates always wanted. Yeah way it's just kind of is uh is very unusual but it's what bill gates always wanted yeah it's true is this the like is this now the big free-to-play first-person shooter is there like a competitor to it fortnight uh but that's not a that's a third-person shooter oh oh okay uh i don't know people People still seem to like the Call of Duty.

Oh, yeah, Warzone. Right, Warzone's the other big one. Warzone. Yeah. We have just a little bit of time left. Should we do honorable mentions? Yeah, that sounds good. Russ, I want to hear about your RE4 experience.

Oh, man. So people might recall Griffin talked about the Resident Evil 4 VR game several weeks back. I didn't have a Quest 2 at the time. I now do. And wow, it is, for me, probably the second best VR gaming experience I've had behind Half-Life Alyx and maybe Superhot VR. So maybe third. But it's extremely, extremely good, as Griffin said.

I have a huge passion for resident evil 4 i know we still need to go back and re-litigate the best resident evil game ever because i still think it's four um but man it's just super easy to jump into and and obviously very made with vr in mind like updated with vr in mind um looks great uh and the fact that it's fully wireless like really really helps immersion and and just fucking around i will say there was a moment where i picked up i was on the farm which is very early area in resident evil 4 and i picked up an egg and i was like i pretty sure you can eat these to like heal yourself and so i tried to like vr eat the egg eat it yeah that did not work uh it should be noted which i was bummed about but uh other other than that uh i had a blast it feels feels great to play you can like flip your

guns in the air and like throw your knife and stuff like that it's it's it's wicked i'm i'm like over the moon about it well i've been playing moonlighter again on the switch oh great game they've done some uh expansions and stuff and i played it a lot i think on steam initially but like switch is so perfect for this game it's i i'm a real sucker for disparate genres brought into one. And if you missed Moonlighter the first time, I, and increasingly, you know, difficult dungeons delving deeper and deeper into a dungeon to collect treasures that you then take back to your shop and sell the, the next morning. And it's so cool because the, you know, the adventure part is its own thing. You're, you're, uh, collecting items and you can upgrade your items and that makes it so

you can get deeper, the dungeon and et cetera, et cetera. But the shop part is about like setting the right, finding the right prices for different items or like figuring out what items you can sell and what items you need to keep for upgrading your gear and like finding the right balance of, and you can use the money you earn to upgrade your equipment,

but also to upgrade the town and upgrade your shop and build out that aspect of the game. So it's very cool the way these two systems sort of overlap and are distinct from each other. So it's very worthwhile, very cool. If you've never played Moonlighter, I would highly recommend it. It's great. It's perfect for Switch. I know we're technically out of spoopy season,

but I'm going to recommend Cape Fear, the 1962 version. You've probably heard of Cape Fear, either because Martin Scorsese remade it in the 90s, or if you watch The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob has an entire Cape Fear episode. I'm recommending it because on Resties last week, I talked about, like, for half a second, Night of the Hunter, one of my 10 favorite films. And the villain in that movie is Robert Mitchum. Robert Mitchum is in the original Cape Fear.

I had never seen this because I thought, you know, 1962 can't be that scary. I was wrong dude is a human embodiment of a snake uh it is really really upsetting uh the politics in the movie also kind of upsetting especially in the first half uh but if you can stomach that uh and you want like a hitchcock style thriller this is it i I really recommend the back half of this movie. All right. I had never played What Remains of Edith Finch, but I got the new iPad mini

and I've been playing a little bit of stuff on it. And I also had a flight that I wanted something to play on. So I downloaded it and played it, finished it in one flight. And that game's extremely extremely good extremely uh sad because it's basically you play through a bunch of ironic deaths over and over again but it's it is uh it's in that sort of walking around a house

genre uh like you're like you're gone homes or your disappearance of ethan carter uh vanishing of ethan carter but it's really good i do think that the esrb should have a like baby endangerment yeah rating or something like that yes i completely agree with this there should be yes there's a there's a there's a horrifying it's an ironic death simulator and one of them is about a uh like a two-year-old uh so yeah it's not that's not great i had to like tuck the ipad like face down uh because rachel was sitting right next to me and was like looking over my shoulder from time to time and i sort of saw the writing on the wall and i was like oh i'm just gonna pop the airpods out real quick let the scene finish up but it looks great on on ios and uh yeah so it's a beautiful little game uh one more thing before

we get to the uh the thank yous a lot of folks are asking us to talk more about inscription especially the back half of the game i promise we will be talking more about the game we'll be talking about it on the game of the year episode and maybe more at another time. So don't worry. We will do it. Okay. I just wanted to real quick thank the people that wrote reviews in Apple Podcasts. Boz Lerman, Ian776, Zanyberg, OnePunchFan, and G Suite. Thank you very much for writing reviews in Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to everyone else who wrote reviews in Apple Podcasts. We really, really appreciate it. We are just rocketing up those reviews, and I love to see them. So it's great. Thank you to everyone else who wrote reviews in Apple Podcasts. We really, really appreciate it. We are just rocketing up those reviews, and I love to see them. So it's great. Thank you. Thank you. Very quickly, the stuff that we played this week. We played Shin Megami Tensei V.

We played the GTA 3 Trilogy Remaster. We played Halo Infinite's multiplayer, which is available now and is free. We also talked about Resident Evil 4 VR, Moonlighter, Cape Fear 1962, which is on the Criterion channel, and What Remains of Edith Finch. Next week, the crucifixion of Justin McElroy continues

with Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Remake. What a thrilling few weeks it's been for me personally, as just a human being with a finite number of minutes on this planet. Looking forward to it. Can't wait. 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? Pokemon! Besties!