The Besties - Let's Spoil the Hell Out of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom!

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Consider this your official warning: If you haven't finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom yet, you might wanna just give this one a skiperoo until later -- unless you don't care about that kind of stuff, of course. Today's discussion is a no holds barred, spoiler-filled look at the year's best game so far!Also discussed: Paranormasight, Trust, Marie Antoinette 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!

How come we as a species have yet to really crack the code on teeth whitening? Or maybe we've cracked the code too many different ways. When I go online and I say, what's the best toaster oven? There's 19 different websites that all pretty much say the same thing. I only trust America's Test Kitchen, but yeah, I know what you're saying. Air purifiers, everyone's pretty much agreed. Everyone's pretty much on the same page on that one. Tooth whitening?

People are like, well, I don't know. You want to drag a gooey pin all over your teeth? You want to put a nasty strip in there? Do you want to shoot lasers into your fucking mouth, into your gourd? Do you want to apply some sort of resin to the inside of your body? I like the pin one that sounds the pin one you do like but the problem is that uh one place says teeth direct.biz says this is the best one and then every other one is like don't do this it makes your teeth brown oh no that's the opposite of what you want and then there's one that's like you gotta use these 3d white strips you're gonna

love how they make your teeth look i guarantee it it. And then the other websites are like, it actually will make your teeth fucking dissolve right out of your head. And then you'll be a soup boy for the rest of your life. Griff, as you're listing all these and you start like crying. Yeah. I'm going to like put my hand under your chin

and gently tilt your head up so it's looking directly into my eyes. Yeah. And you are beautiful. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on, hold on, hold on. But wait, wait, wait. Words can't bring me down. Yeah,'t bring yeah yeah sure sure my son told

me my teeth were a little yellow yesterday don't let your son bully you no it's not bullying it's he's mirroring me was that your two-year-old was that the first sentence he ever said um no yeah that that maw fix your grill dad this is you respond by being like yeah you're a little small you could afford to grow up a bit i don't have time to brush my teeth anymore because i'm busy taking care of you he made the point of like i'm pretty intense about him brushing his teeth oh yeah my stuff could use a little bit of work he thinks you've been skipping right i brush my teeth i just drink a lot of hot brown fluid that makes my teeth turn a different color than his teeth. But just if we could just all kind of come together on one.

So I'm anti monopoly. Right. I'm you know, me fierce opponent of capitalism in all of its nefarious forms, except for this one thing. I do wish there was just one sort of tooth blaster, just one tooth blaster. We can all kind of agree on counterpoint i don't i don't need this for me because i went to the dentist and i said hey can i do a little bit of tooth whitening like what would that look like and they were like we can do it you can only go maybe one or two shades lighter than what you have and i was like what what do you mean like that guy what happens white his teeth is and they're like yeah but you have. And I was like, what do you mean? Like that guy over there looking bright and white, his teeth is. And they're like,

yeah, but you have a fake tooth. So you are forever locked into your yellowness from when you were like 23. I was like, you can't change the fake tooth. That's what I'm saying. Why can't we change the color? Just like put white out on it

or something. Yeah, something. I know, right? And I tried. And they said, stop doing that, sir. And I said, let my hands go. Stop holding my hands. I know, right? And I tried, and they said, stop doing that, sir. And I said, let my hands go.

Stop holding my hands. I'm just putting liquid paper in my mouth. I'm looking at fucking Crest 3D white strips, professional effects. This shit will get your teeth 20 levels whiter. And I don't know what that means. Yeah, how do you define a level of whiter? It's, I don't know, but 20 seems like a lot of them. It does. So next time you guys

see me i'm gonna look like a fucking you're gonna glee middle-aged real estate agent just like shining shining from the grill i can't wait it's gonna hurt so bad and lips and chin probably so don't you bring me down today. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the year. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and we're back, baby. My name is Russ Froschek and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.

It is a video game club, which is by listening to my friend. You have joined our illustrious ranks. Today, we're going to talk about the little boy with a big sword and a bigger dragon and a big dream and an even bigger world and a little pocket that he can't carry lots of different shields in and it's Zelda Tears of the King. Have you tried carrying ten shields at once? Have you tried? ten shields at once? Have you tried? It ain't easy.

I mean, no. I didn't have any interest in finding that dummy seeds. Yeah, this week's episode is Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. It is the long-awaited sequel to the last Zelda, and we've already talked about it a lot on this show, but now it's a spoiler episode. You have been warned. Do not go further.

If you don't want to know the ending of this game, you've been warned Chris plant that you will be spoiled. Yeah. I'm going to, I, I, I'm going to have it ruined for me. Oh man.

Yeah. Cause the twist in this one, you're not going to fucking believe. I've never been less worried in my life. Man, that's okay. All right, man, if you're sure, let's go. Yeah, so that's your warning. This isn't like a, there's a gap you can skip. This is going to be the whole episode.

But hey, come back after you finish. Mario dies. there it is can i start by saying this is i think unequivocally unequivocably my favorite ending like of a zelda game the, I would say the last 30 minutes of this Zelda game are fucking next level, extremely super good. I think that the whole final boss sequence,

I think everything leading up to it and after it is so shit, so shit hot in a way that these games usually aren't like usually it's like oh i've got all the triforce pieces i did a hard boss fight with ganon and i stab him and i win this one goes a lot harder than that in a way that i was not expecting and was uh i i finished this game at midnight uh because i just couldn't put it down i knew i was in the sort of final final run not last midnight a midnight a midnight no yeah uh a midnight about 10 days after the game launched because i went pretty pretty hard in the paint on this one um it's it

it kicks ass uh and i know we're gonna get more granular about it but uh i just that that in the emotional experience i had of finishing this game at midnight downstairs literally emoting to no one like yeah fuck yeah like i was there was there's some good laughs in there there's some some thrills in there i was just ah i was just blown away this is a spoiler episode you could say say what it is and why it affected you. Okay. Honestly, Chris, I feel a little guilty. Sort of spoiling this for you. I promise you, I am not worried.

He didn't beat Breath of the Wild. He had 10 years to beat Breath of the Wild, and he didn't beat it. Yeah, that's fair. Well, we can talk about my stuff later. I want to hear the ending and why you liked it. Well, we can talk about my stuff later. I want to hear the ending and why you liked it. So the ending is, you know, you finish the four temples.

Although, surprise, there's actually five sort of these little side quest temple things. And one of them has a fucking mech robot in it. That you ride around and can customize, which is pretty fucking sick. I was very glad to not have that spoiled. Yeah, me too. For me. It was interesting because I was like trying to track where everybody was because I finished the game first and wanted to talk about it so badly with everyone else. But didn't want to spoil.

People were like, oh, I just finished the fourth one, man. I'm ready to go. Good to go. And it's like, actually, there's some more little business that you got going on. You go and you have, you know, the confrontation with Ganondorf. You have the, all of your buddies are helping you, you know, defeat this boss rush sort of thing coming your way.

Sorry, I think there's a step that I think we should clarify. Because you learned something before this big fight, or maybe I did because I found all the tears in the world. Yeah, yeah. You basically uh here we go chris plant we're just diving right in so that light dragon do you know any of this plant go ahead stop worrying about me fine okay the light dragon that's been flying around this whole

time like it's way up in the sky and it's hard to reach and then whatever eventually you pull the sorcerer out of its head yeah that's that's Zelda because she swallowed her Power Stone and turned into a fucking dragon and the way she jumped through time was just living for 10,000 years as a dragon. Yeah, so she's been driven insane. Pretty hardcore. That's not explicitly

said, but you just have to assume she's been driven insane by being a dragon for thousands of years. It's like a dragon coma is how i interpreted it yeah yeah sure uh it's not quite it yeah it's quite not quite as nightmarish she she might have been a little pissed about the fact that i kept chipping off her horn every two hours yeah thanks thanks babe hey babe can i get some of your horn babe i need to upgrade my thanks babe yeah i'm just gonna sit on your back thanks for this ride i love it if i can get one tooth

i'm just gonna sneak around here and grab one thank you hey babe i listen biggest disappointment of me so far for this game is that they explained to zelda that she's gonna have to eat the stone yeah and then everybody kind of looks at her like well and then she's like fuck okay i guess and i guess i'll just eat it and i was really hoping that they would have some great animation for her eating a stone but they really kind of fake it

it's just kind of like she holds it up to her mouth and it's gone I want to see her like somebody get water this is a stone a few false starts of she just like

puts it in her mouth and immediately spits it out like oh fuck no way I don't know what I thought it would taste like it's terrible it's big

it's too big it takes a time they just needed one sound effect of a really loud gulp yeah that's all i need um i'm asking that one all all of this all of the shit that they established in those flashbacks i thought was was fantastic very cool really really cool really cool story really cool sort of world building it was a little samey especially after you beat every boss the like four guardians from the past come out and basically say the exact same shit i'm just like yeah man ganondorf came fuck shit up killed a bunch of people but we gave my power to rawroo i think that's a a side effect

of the fact that there's many different ways yeah that you can get to that point right like you can get to that point and not have any of the sages yeah um i haven't investigated like speed yeah there should have been like a speedier version of those after you did one of them it's like yeah okay we got it have you done this before yeah yeah we're good yeah yeah i know the whole i know the whole bit i i have a question for you guys did you um how did you know when you were done like how did you know like okay i'm ready i'm ready i'm ready to oh ready to i don't think any of us like we're gonna have wildly different answers percented this right so i'm well i'm curious the wildly different answers is good yeah i want to

know um yeah i finished all the shrines and i did like a most of the big side quest stuff I did most of the big side quest stuff. I was reaching a point where, well, for one thing, there were other big games about to come out, and I knew I could prolong the magic if I wanted to. But I was just really enjoying the game so much, and I was starting to feel the creep of it kind of overstaying its welcome a little bit um and so i decided to just go go ahead and finish it and i feel good about that decision i uh as we all know because i've

said it a thousand times i played it without guides so i basically told myself and a lot of this was driven by my experiences playing breath of the wild. When I played Breath of the Wild, I beat the final boss pretty early. Like I was definitely still missing probably like 30 shrines or something like that when I beat Breath of the Wild. And I remember regretting it because I felt like, well, that was like definitely a climax.

It was an exciting final boss fight. But then it kind of like sapped my enthusiasm to like go after the other shrines. And so this time I told myself, okay, I'm gonna find all the shrines for sure, which I did. And then I was like, but also I'm gonna find all these fucking bubble frogs,

which was way harder than finding all the shrines. Definitely a big pain in the butt, but still satisfying. I was getting constant texts from Russ with just pictures of that ugly mask man. Just like 15 more frogs to go, baby. And Russ like, I haven't slept in two days. He stops telling you where they are at a certain point.

Like you can't just go to him and be like, hey, I'm missing one. Where the fuck is it? It took me a while to find that last one. Anyway, I did that. I tried to finish the compendium but i realized that there's some i found this out after i realized that you're a mortal being that but also there's some bullshit with the the equipment uh part of the compendium regarding like the purified weapons that are in the depths that i never ever ever would have figured out without looking it up so i did that

after i beat the game and everything like that um and then i beat it it was great i'm really happy i did that what about you juice um i just kind of i did some shrines i got the master sword and that's usually where i lose interest in this hell of a game give me this sick ass sword and it's like i actually this one's just kind of battery powered and after a while it just kind of stops working so i wasn't so excited about the master swords so i went around to some other people and sort of um asked them if they had any armor or anything for me i went to the village where they were doing the the mayoral election oh yeah good mainly because i wanted to i did that whole quest line so I could get some pumpkins and make some cool gloom potions. And I was getting, I got some of the like mobility type armor.

I wanted to get like, I know the climbing armor and stuff like that. I was a little bit stymied by, there's probably other things I would have enjoyed doing. It was, I just got to a point where like i couldn't really separate the wheat from the chaff very well there's a lot of quests um and a lot of them the reward is is just like an opal or some shit so i don't i don't really care about it and they're not that interesting to begin with some of the quests are really good and interesting and neat right so i kind of wished it was easier for me to figure out like oh this is fun i'll do some more of these uh because i don't have that like collecting itch where i want to get 100 anything i don't

care about that um so yeah i think i just sort of got some i think the last thing i did was that mayoral election got the sun pumpkins and then once i got those and i saw how much i could extend my like gloom protection i i decided to just go ahead and and finish it so i could move on to to other stuff i didn't know you could extend your gloom protection like yeah like with food i knew you could heal yourself so that right so the. The gloom meat. The little, you know the pose that you get? Yes. The little, yeah. Yeah, the ghost, yeah. The pose, you can trade those in.

I knew that part. Okay, so one of the things you can get there is, I think it's called a dark clump. Yeah, yeah, you can also get that by killing the hands. The gloom hands. The hands, yeah. So the dark clump in recipes will give you gloom resistance oh neat yeah it's cool can we go back to talking about the ending yes wait wait oh can i talk about you didn't finish it oh

yeah yeah i think that's a valid story i think there were plenty of other people who had that it's not just absolutely yeah for sure it could have been me honestly i i cut a wild hair and just decided to finish it i'm i'm still playing it. I have not like bounced off of it. In fact, it's probably like my favorite game of the year and maybe in years. But I found the story, like the main story. Again, I haven't gotten to the ending to be the thing that like threw me off along with just all the obligations to do i i did not like even i think beat one of the like four or five main quests um for i don't know maybe the first 20 hours and that was when i was loving the game most and once well i mean we've already talked about my sky thing of having to do the sky thing

twice i ended up having a similar thing with another one of these quests and it began to feel like just the worst kind of work doing the main dungeons um and then the other thing and this is where i feel like my brain is stuck somewhere between y'all i have no obligation to a hundred percent like anything but if something is there i will do it so i avoided getting the camera in this game as long as possible but then i was worried i was missing out on other stuff because the camera is my absolute enemy for whatever specific brain thing i have where i have no desire to complete that compendium but i can't help taking photos of everything i come across right fuck yeah and that to me is like the death like there are many

things in this game where i was like i actively do not like doing this it is making my experience worse but buying it being here i like could like literally cannot help myself you don't like taking photos of things in the game no i love that not at all like it's just work it's just there's so much work versus exploring and again like let me be super clear love the game i can I love that. to say it because it's what i love about the game the openness really punished me like i just burned so many hours doing things that i shouldn't have been doing yet like i said with the with the dungeons that it was like i don't know if i can keep seeing the end of dungeons and then not being able to actually do them and you did the same i feel like i tried to advise that on our first episode where we were like we're only going to talk up to the beginning

of the first dungeon like i don't think you should do this game that way where you just play it for 80 hours before you even start making any headway into it because you're going to have a very uneven what was the what was the dragon age game that was like that wherever uh inquisition maybe where everybody's like you have to leave i know it seems like you shouldn't leave you have to leave the starting area i mean witcher was the same way same thing uh just to address plants thing plant if you recall that's not dissimilar from what happened with breath of the wild where you oh yeah i know but this i think this is much better than that game yeah no i just it's funny to me that for both times you kind of fought the

game in in a lot of ways in both instances you like you made it intentionally a little bit harder on yourself i don't think i did anything i think the game did yeah like i don't think i don't think me playing through entire quest without knowing that I was in a quest. Yeah, that's fair. That's a good point. That is, by the way, I've talked to so many people who have had that experience at different points in the game. For the fifth temple, you have to go up to this island that is shrouded in storm. And there's a way that you can, like, clear that storm.

But a lot of people I talked to, like, didn't do it. Me. Didn't know what the fuck that was. Managed to fly up there with some cockamamie contraption yeah getting there was not the hard part it's just you can't see shit and it's all in rain and thunder yes i i think i did this already okay the the can we talk about the final sort of boss fight experience uh you fight ganondorf right and that's you know it is what it is wait now hold on you don't forget you jump into a big fucking hole you jump in a big fucking hole a big fucking hole and it's the hole underneath the castle ganondorf's big plan is like they'll

never find me here i'm trying to do my best matt merson impression they'll never find me here where is he he's under the castle he's like directly on the castle not just under the castle he's like 20 feet away from link's house go to go to go to the mountains man i don't think he's hiding he's waiting underneath hyrule you found him at the beginning of the game he's not hiding he's exactly where he was at the very beginning of the game yeah he didn't even leave. Yeah. He's just been there. You kick his ass, and then he's like, this isn't even my final form. And then he turns really big and red.

And there's a great moment. The first laugh, I think, that this ending sequence got for me is he turns into Demon King Ganondorf, and his health bar starts to appear. But then it just keeps going, and it stretches all the way to the right side of the screen. And it's so stupid.

It's such a stupid thing that is so effective on me where I was like, uh-oh, this is a big health bar and it's off center. This is going to be a tough one. Mentioning Plant's thing about the camera, what's extremely funny about that fight is that you need to,

if you want to finish the compendium all of his forms have different uh camera entries so i was like so funny just one second gannon just hang on i know you're turning into demon king gannon i just need a nice little photo right now okay good okay we can fight now cool uh you whip his it's a pretty pretty straightforward fight there's some great like parry back and forth, like parry volleys where like he attacks you and you parry him. But then when you try to counterattack, he'll parry you and you just kind of go back and forth like that. Pretty,

pretty cool. Then he, he's like, I never did a parry the entire time. I played the end. Never parried. Would watch videos. We're like,

all right guys, here's the strategy to begin and you got to get really good at peri rush like i flurry rush like i have no idea what that is i would have no idea it's way too late for me to learn now how about this how about i eat 10 pumpkins and i'll hit him with a stick maybe i'll try that uh then he's like well stop me if you've heard this one before he rips off his power secret stone and eats it yeah and every and then i saw that like oh fuck because i really didn't and he took it like a champ he took that he down that bad boy like he was at no hesitation not like zelda he really just jumped it right down slammed it like he was at a bachelor party like he was at coyote ugly just like

power stone uh and then he turns into a big big big dragon uh and then you have and then he bites you and flies off and you're like well that's in the game i guess link dies but then zelda dragon flies in kicks ass that part kicks ass and then you have a fucking dragon dog fight in the sky yeah and it's the coolest shit you're like he's like throwing you off like like you're like jumping off of zelda and skydiving at ganon like trying to land on him to whack him with a sword and while he is like shooting fireballs at you i've never seen anything it is it's the best downing best best final sort of fight in it so you take him down uh he explodes in a thermonuclear detonation that just completely

just fills the horizon and then right as he finishes exploding one of those little quest objective oh yeah appears that just says destroy ganondorf complete that was a full-blown belly laugh so fucking funny it's really good and then and then you have this like dream sequence where raru and uh one of the other sort of sages uh turns zelda back into zelda from her dragon form and you're like oh fuck yeah cool she's saved but then like you come back from the dream sequence and both of you are just falling like free falling and she's like a hundred feet like below you yeah it's like when a werewolf like turns back into a human and they're naked same yeah uh yeah you're shirtless like uh and she's plummeting you're plummeting and there's this just

breathtaking sequence where you are skydiving downward like hand outstretched and you're in control diving downward to catch zelda it's a fucking mission impossible with the music is like swelling playing like zelda's theme and this like just pulsing like orchestral version it is so so like i'm getting i'm genuinely getting chills talking about it thinking about it it's so so good this motivates me to like want to finish the game i know people like hate spoilers sometimes but sometimes this sort of stuff is like great now now i know it's gonna pay off it also is like how the fuck there was a moment before this game came out i was like man i'm like drag i'm bummed that it's coming out on hardware that is now came out what is it 2017 and now it's 2023 yeah i glorify the android there's no and and

it was a dinosaur piece of hardware to begin with it's two it's four game cubes together right and like at no point i mean granted there's like an occasional like whatever frame hitch or whatever but this game let's not go let's not give two you know it's fucking insanely it's like one of the prettiest games i've ever played in my life yeah it's it's why and on this hardware it is like i've seen several videos where like it's not just like wow this looks great like people genuinely baffle people who should know yeah like genuinely baffle about like why it worked like why is this working like how did they visually and mechanic like physically mechanically like i yeah it's it's fun to see other game developers be like i have no fucking clue man i do not know why i think this like how impressionistic it is where while it's moving it looks very very very good and i always

think about this when when you're um skydiving when you shoot up into the sky and then you like zip back down with your little um what is it camera thing to map the area oh yeah and like i think wow that is gorgeous hit screenshot and then'd go and look at the screenshot, and Link doesn't even have a face. There's barely anything going on in terms of detail. But when you're in it, when the music's swelling and the whole universe is out in front of you, you would never notice any of those things. They're also just so smart about how they do,

I think it's called LOD, which is, what is it? Something of distance? Legend of Delta. Legend of Delta. And it basically has to do with like what you see when you're scanning the horizon where it's really if you were to like magically fly over there very quickly you would just see very low poly like a tree and a square or whatever yeah but they're so smart about knowing what the landmarks are in this world that everything is visually represented in some way so that when you actually do get to that point, it's, you know, and it's full model loads in, it feels totally consistent. It doesn't feel like something just popped into existence. And so you feel like you have access to this entire fucking world. Can I say something that is, I feel like might be unpopular, but I do want to say it anyway.

I think I would play, have played more of this game. Like I would have stuck with it longer if there had been more, less like deterioration. Like if they had removed the element of deteriorating items or let you find some items that like would not deteriorate something like that or ever like never deteriorate like yeah because i what happened would would be i would get into a position where i felt pretty good about the stuff that i had on me yeah and i would start feeling like i should save this yeah for the final thing i should be holding on to this and it started to feel like god you know i'm pretty full up on stuff that i like i don't necessarily want to go do other quests where i'm gonna have to just like not pick stuff up yeah exactly not pick stuff up or use the

things that i have right now that i like right there's one legendary weapon that's like a i think it's the scimitar of the seven is that what they call it it's like you get it at the uh the Gerudo village and they make it for you and it's it's great and I really like that weapon and I fused something to it and I really liked it and then I was like oh man I don't really want to use I really do want to save this for the final boss fight and I feel like I kept getting into those areas where like I'd make a device right and then I'd use I'd have used a lot of uh my zonite to make it and like I kept getting into those areas where like I'd make a device, right? And then I'd use – I'd have used a lot of my zonite to make it. And I'm like, I'm going to go farm some more zonite because I'll probably need it.

And then it's like – that's the thing. Every adventure kept like depleting resources and kind of forcing me to get – go out and get more things. And I feel like if I had been able to collect a few things that are just permanent that I know I could take into the final confrontation, then I would feel more comfortable just sort of like exploring. They did add a couple. Obviously, this is a common critique of the last one as well. They added a couple of mechanics that like make it a little more tolerable. Like they added in the house, for example, when you if you build a house, you could store weapons in the house so you don't have to carry them around. So if you were like, oh, I'm going to leave this for the final fight, you wouldn't't have to carry them around so if you were like oh

i'm gonna leave this for the final fight you wouldn't actually have to take up inventory space for that um there's also like if you want to get into and this is pretty buried i think most people don't even know this unless they look it up online the idea of like repairing weapons using the guys that the octoroks etc yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah so i mean there are methods but i understand the logic i also understand the game design logic of not providing things that don't break yeah because the idea is it didn't bother me like it didn't that is the only sense in which it bothered me i kind of liked how it forced your hand through most of the game to experiment with like whatever right yeah just like it feels like a thing that should unlock

after a very late game certain point yeah because i i agree that like when i'm very you know deep into the game i put however many dozens of hours into it and it's like okay well now if you want to keep that weapon you better be careful not to break it and then you should make time to go see the octo goblin or whatever yeah to suck it up as then you should make time to go see the Octogoblin or whatever. Yeah. To suck it up as like, are you kidding? Well, you're actually not even supposed to be able to repair those. Yeah, I think that that's sort of a weird sideways hack.

For me, I think an easier repair function would have made sense, like something that you could unlock eventually. For me, I always had tons of like super powerful like lionel horn that's 50 or whatever attack for me it was like i never really knew where to go to get um the weapon bases like obviously you can go down below into the to the depths which but i fucking hated really exploring the depths for unless i was going to like one of the very obvious waypoints where I kind of knew where to go,

just wandering around looking for a mole hill with a shadow on it, holding a, you know, shitty spear was never really anything I was. Yeah. So really get like legendary weapons that this, I got the sword of the seven, the Simtar,

the seven, whatever that I described. And it's like, you'd go through a quest line and they're like, okay, I can make it for the bow. I think the, those birds have a cool bow bow the free shot bows they'll let you have and if those break you can just go get like i think in the case of the the scimitar the seven it's like

you got to get a gerudo scimitar and a diamond and some flint something like that and they'll make you a new one if it breaks okay yeah they're that's cool that's also that's a lot of business yeah i mean it is expensive as a resource but it's what i'm saying i i understand justin's critique and i will also say by the way that i did not end up needing half the stuff no yeah you never need right of course final fight right but uh i you know so again this is like brain stuff but i feel like a video game especially when operating at this level is in concert with your psyche like it should be everything is that balance of like how do we get this person's brain to engage with this thing that we're doing and i feel like marshalling that for for people who you know approach these things differently again this is

like a minor it's a minor thing right yeah my and at this point when a game is this good my minor things are probably somebody else's like pluses that they really like and i do want to say like the one thing they do handle well that's related to that like resource thing is they give you so many like monster parts attachables whatever that i didn't feel bad using them. Like I didn't feel like, oh, I shouldn't use a key's eye to get a homing shot because I've got fucking 60 of them lying around. You know what unlocked all this for me?

Because I'm realizing like I did have a problem with this the first game and it really didn't bug me that much this time. I think it's because of all of these shrines that would strip you of all of your shit and then say like, here's all the things that you have in this room that you have to use to kill all these enemies. And doing that is almost like a,

a, a tutorial on how to use sort of the, these systems with lateral thinking to do whatever it is that you need to do. And once you kind of get comfortable with that and realize sort of what options are available to you, like all of a sudden the resource preservation didn't feel all that important because i knew that if i rolled up somewhere usually it would have just some junk on the ground that i could use to you know one of those scrabble together a solution one of those shrines uh is a bunch of robots you're

stripped naked and there's a bunch of robots on a river that's going in a big circle and they're all on like rafts yeah i remember that one that one was pretty tough because they don't give you a lot of uh arrows or whatever it is but it turns out you can just use ultra hand and just take the rafts out from under them and they all instantly die and that is so fucking amazing that you could just constantly like people are constantly coming up with really innovative smart ways to like use the systems within. Can we do this real quick? Because I think all four of us could probably do this.

Favorite shrine. Do you have one shrine that's... For me, it is the fucking... And I've heard so many people hate this shrine. But the baseball game where there's a little spinning wheel. Oh, yeah. I love that crap. It rotates real fast.

That crap is great. You stick a thing to it. You have to hit a big, heavy ball into a target. That. Oh, yeah. You flip a switch, it like rotates real fast. That crap was great. You stick a thing to it, you have to hit a big heavy ball into a target. That shit took me forever. But when it finally worked, I felt so good about myself. And that or the Jenga one, which I was so heartbroken there was only one Jenga shrine.

There was a cool ball momentum one where you have to like roll a ball down like a curvy track. Yeah, that was figure out the angle of how to best do it and then i found out later on you could just attach a cannon to like a shield and shoot the cannonball at the target and it does the same exact thing but that's great again everything in this game for the most part works within its rule set so that you when you figure out fun ways to like work around the systems in the game you feel like a fucking badass and that's like so rare in video games

because they have to be programmed with like really strict rule sets otherwise like they crash or break or whatever and this game like leans into that in amazing amazing ways story we have not talked about how did you all feel when you found out there were actually two icons of fire? All right. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Wait, wait. Can I say something embarrassing?

It's that I cannot stop playing Final Fantasy XVI. And I know it is not as good as this game. And I know I should be playing this game, but while I love this game, it sometimes, it made my brain hurt. It took a lot out of me.

You want a dummy game. Sometimes I just want a zen experience where people tell me about Icons of Fire, and I do the same thing over and over and over again. Okay, I have a closing thought for this segment. Yes. I think it's pretty clear that there's going to be DLC for this game, as Breath of the Wild had DLC. What would you like to see from DLC in Tears of the Kingdom?

I mean, obviously more sort of shrines. uh i mean more obviously more sort of shrines i think more i honestly what i would want expanded from this game is just more zonai devices yeah more dumb sort of things that i and more importantly be like fucking just lunatics on on on zelda youtube uh that are building you know uh evo one uh like mix out of all this shit uh can can goof around with like that is that is that is what i would love uh out of this um i i don't need it huh i don't need any deals you don't you don't nothing more i don't want any i mean i i think there's lots of games i pretend. I can just go back in and be like, oh, they've unlocked. I think I have an idea. Dozens of hours of content.

I have a thing that I think you would like. I think this game should have keys to the city mode, like in Crackdown, which is basically a dev mode where you can make any weapon or zonite thing appear. And then you're free to build as much as you want no punishment no need for creative mode materials yeah yeah that would be fucking sick like it just like you could start the beginning of the game and you just have infinite resources and nothing breaks and you just fuck around basically it'd be so fun that would be very cool plant what do you want was that it that's it yeah i just told you yeah uh for me i think i want more wacky ass uh armor effects i was a little bit disappointed that like most of the armor effects don't don't get super wacky it's a lot

of just like defense and cold defense and hot blah blah but in the dlc for breath of the wild they added like more wacky shit and a lot of those i think actually all of those dlc pieces of costume are in tears of the kingdom but i want to see them go further down that road uh the other minor this is not a minor thing but the other thing that i would like to see more mining some way to find more mining some way to find all of the koroks without using an online map yeah you can get a rock tracker yeah something like that you can get a mask that like jingle jangles when you get close to a korok but there's no fucking what there's a thousand of them in this game there's a thousand and i just want excuses to like, it's been a few months.

I'm going to go back and find a few Koroks. That'd be fun. But it is totally impossible. They made it a little bit better because it does mark the Koroks that you've already found. So that's a small improvement over Breath of the Wild. But it still would be impossible to find all 1,000 without some sort of additional mechanism.

Just let me track them in the fucking compendium tracker and stop fixing the glitches put the glitches back in please or just let me do it on a slide there's always gonna be another glitch justin don't worry i know i know i listen i'm on airplane mode i'm not gonna fall in the same traps i did before but like no i it's like no you're right i feel i'm not if i'm like i'm not using glitches to make this fucking game easier. You know what I mean? Like, I was using glitches like, I can't go back in the depths

and look for a bunch of these green rocks. I got two kids. I'm just gonna go ahead and shoot arrows into the sky and they'll glitch and they'll make more resources for me. And even that's a bigger pain in the ass than I really needed to deal with. Just, Miyamoto-san, just let me, just let me, please. I mean, creative mode solves that for you, right?

Please, arugashimasu, please, please, just let me, just let me have as many of the rocks that I want, please. Keep your master sword, bury it in the dragon's head, I don't care, just let me have some of the stupid rocks and some pumpkins, as many as I want. Do y'all think this is gonna be, I mean, obviously this is gonna be up in the goatee discussion do y'all think this is going to be i mean obviously this is going to be up in the goatee discussion do you think that it is going to be the kind of

like like elden ring elden ring right like the shoe in like everything else versus this i think right now that is where it's at yeah um it has a few big games coming up there are definitely big games of course yeah no no i think you can make enough counter arguments to it based on the fact that it is built so much on the last this is not me i'm saying if i'm the if i'm the editorial lead of a site i could see like i think i'd rather go against the grain a little bit and reward something that's a little bit like completely new completely like resident evil 4 remake right like what else are you gonna pull up final fantasy 16 like what yeah well i mean there's starfield you know there it is keep hope alive keep up alive never know i i i mean i can say as an editorial lead of a site i think this will be sorry good i was just gonna say i think i think it's like kind of guaranteed win, I can say, as somebody who is an editorial lead of a site,

I think it's pretty much on lock that this game will be a game of the year. I would assume for us, can't guarantee. But it just has the benefit that everybody played it. Everybody at least likes it. And sometimes that's what ends up making a winner, is just so many people played it, so many people enjoyed it, and it's going to be hard for any other game to get that reach.

But it's also not one of those games where people like put it at number two, like everyone puts it at number two. I think a lot of people are going to put it at number one. Yeah. I think Starfield will be the 2023 game of the year by August of 2024. Sure.

Look, they got to stretch their limbs a little bit. It'll get good eventually. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about more video game related content. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. It's just more video games. Okay, so as people know, and this is the last time i'm going to say this i beat the game without looking anything up it was great it's really more of a this is this is a humblebrag it's more of a it's more of a parade a celebration yeah victory lap yeah exactly for russ and his i don't know if

you guys knew about this but he didn't look anything up um i guess i wanted to speak a little bit about why I did that. And it wasn't just like a pride thing. But I also know that a lot of people feel very differently for a lot of very totally valid reasons. And so I wanted to just like dive into that real quick. My rationale for playing this completely blind was mostly a matter of trust. I think there are very few developers on the planet that I can trust to design a game such that it is possible to, let's say, find every shrine or the equivalent of a shrine without looking anything up.

And Nintendo is one of them, like primary Nintendo. They know what the fuck they're doing. And so by handing that trust over I was saying okay let me explore this world in the way that like you intended for me to experience it um and it was just like a really special experience there are not many games like maybe one a year I did it with tunic the year before maybe one a year but they did it with Tunic the year before, maybe one a year, but they're extremely rare, you know, Valve games I can do it with. And it gave me the experience of playing this

like I was playing Outer Wilds. Because I know, Justin, you were talking about like how some of the quests, the rewards are like, eh, whatever. I got an opal, whatever it was. But the joy that I got from those quests was more like hey i got like a vague hint from some dude walking around that maybe i should check out a lake

just northeast of here that's shaped like a heart and that journey of like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna go and i'm gonna find that maybe i'll turn off my hud elements and just like absorb myself in that was just a delight for me and it and it made when i found like really big things like armor pieces or like finding the climbing like all sets of the climbing armor it made those moments even more exciting and impactful because i didn't just like find it in the first hour because i knew it would be useful for the entire playthrough um so that was my rationale for doing it and i i don't regret it one bit but i also realize people don't do that for very good reasons i i get it actually and and fully fully respect it

um i i am too um uh i think there's too many other things that i want to be doing at a certain point and i did want to see the whole thing like I wanted to see the completion of it yeah the ending of it and there's just I would love to play a game like that like if I did but you know it's partially because besties um I and partially because my own attention span I I just know myself well enough to know that I've walked away from lots of things that I loved people pets games you name it um and I and I didn't want that to be the case here because I knew it would be like something that irritated me for the rest of my life so I'd rather just do it and yeah you know get it get it over with yeah I for what it's worth let me just say it took me a month and a half to do that to play it that way it was a full month and a half of not

obviously constant playing but i needed to accept the fact that like basically everyone that was serious about video games had beaten it long before i did what kind of toll did this take on you personally rust you're not so much me personally as much as my family i mean they just didn't really yeah but you're it's your but you're i'm i think i'm asking seriously now how many how how hard was it for you to like stay the course what did you were you ever tempted at a certain point to just like fuck it man i'm just gonna blow through the rest of this shit well the i mean there were moments trying my wife's so angry at me like i gotta get back to earth there were moments

with i mean i i pulled off like i told myself no fuck the compendium like i don't think this is going to happen i'm still missing 30 weapons and i have no idea where they are so i i did like kind of move the goalposts a little bit for myself but again i mentioned earlier the hardest part was the frogs which i got down to like the last three and even using there's a mechanism to like find caves in the game and even using that mechanism it was like really fucking hard to find the last three frogs i'm glad i pushed through and i did it but like that was the hardest part do you think if you didn't do this podcast that you would have approached this the same the approach at the same arguably i would do this more often if we

didn't have this podcast yeah because i would have more time god for the besties thank god for the best we keep doing this to keep you from your work that's right you know what this is not what i should say also because we are having fun and we're all dear friends none of this is like judgmental towards russ i know russ is like a great person and a great dad and all this we're joking but like i have my own weird blind alleys that i'll wander down this is not i'm just curious about russ's approach here like that is what it interests me there is there is no judgment coming from me um yeah no i and i'm not nicotine gum for two years like what the fuck do i know i'm not

taking offense i i think I've done over, this has been many years since I've done something this dumb, but back in my like achievement hunting days, there'd be moments where I was like, I have 37 of 40 achievements, but one of these achievements is hit an enemy 10,000 times with a fucking hammer.

And I've done that. and i've been down that road and this didn't feel like that because this all the things that i was chasing were like meaningful and fun like i wanted to find a cave i hadn't found yet right it was all like built into the game and didn't feel grindy at all when i have really lost myself in a game i i tend to have a rebound yeah where uh this happened with destiny um two at one point or maybe destiny one i don't know where i was playing destiny like a lot where it became all consuming i get a moment and i just and i think the switch is even harder because it's so easy just like pick up and play 10 minutes then set it down while you're waiting for you know the kids put their shoes on or whatever i i have always had a sort of, like, rebound

when I've really lost myself in a game where I feel like shit afterwards about, like, the amount of time that I spend. It's not like I can drive past the skyscraper I built, you know what I mean, wearing a shake. There it is, kids, you know? Right? This is the statue they made to me for getting all the seeds like i there's none of

that there and i'm curious if you had any of that like after after this uh zelda honestly i didn't and i've had that same experience where i like was dumb about again chasing a trophy trust right that's the trust that it's going to be a satisfying yeah that that it didn't feel unfair or grindy uh and and yeah it was just really delightful. I know Plant has a different perspective on this. I'm curious. Well, no, I'm not even going to get into that. Something different came into mind.

I watched, I didn't watch, I listened to the Ezra Klein show. Have you ever listened to this? The podcast? It's on New York Times, like group? No. Anyway, Ezra Klein, great interviewer. Traitor. Great interviewer, super traitor.

He interviewed the head of AI over at Google. And the head of AI actually used to work on games like Black and White a long time ago. Oh, my God. Lionhead. Yeah. And is, like, very, very, very interested in games. Yeah, and is like very, very, very interested in games. Like before Google did all of its current work,

it worked on AlphaGo, which was the program that beat like the world's top Go master, the game Go. And it was really interesting listening to it because he talks about like two types of kind of learning in games and in life in general. And one is like very traditional and rewards-based where you like set like very,

very, very clear rules. And you use all the examples of how people have beaten games in the past. And then you like give them a cookie, uh, for rewards. And I think that's like the majority of video games, but I think fresh,

the games that you like, and I think myself too is like this in spelunky where you like not even knowing what the rules necessarily are where you're dropped into the thing and then you just try lots and lots and lots of stuff and it like gives you room to be creative and to figure everything out on on your own in its entirety and the rewards aren't like oh congratulations you found all the the cave frogs you get blank i get a sense like you don't really care what blank is at the end i'll tell you what i got i got a glider skin for finding all the cave frogs and i was prepared for it to not be i'm not gonna fucking

get a super horse for finding all the cave i knew it was gonna be a shitty reward. I use that glider skin. It's great. Of course. Yeah, no, it wasn't the reason. I use the newspaper glider skin. It's a good one. I was kind of butthurt about the fucking amiibo thing. How many quests are like, oh, if you want some of the sickest shit in the game, you can spend $8 on this plastic amiibo that you maybe have lying around the house,

or you can spend several hours doing this quest. That's really weird to me. What was the amiibo that was, what locked? I mean, most of it was just like chests in the depths, no? Well, no. I mean, there's an amiibo that had Epona. There are amiibos that had like the hero armor from like original.

Yeah, but all those armors can be found in the depths. Yes, but they can also be found at KB Toys. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. And it'll take five seconds and $8. Like, it's crazy. Which is it? Miyamoto-san, do you want me to experience

this incredible adventure? Or do you want me to get on eBay and get some RFID chips some guy in his basement made? Breath of the Wild, they forced you to get the Amiibos. so at least they put them in a game this time um do we want to talk about other stuff yeah what else you guys been into i went to a concert uh which was extremely awesome uh tom york and johnny greenwood of radiohead have a side project called the smile um which

quite honestly i'm like not super i wasn't super familiar with when i went to the concert um but i listened to them a little bit on on you know apple music whatever and it was a delight we it was at uh forest hill stadium which is close to my house and um it was just like a very it's weird going to a concert with like ultra huge megastars like you know the guys from radiohead but it's a side project so like basically no one knows the songs for the most part and so what you end up with is um no one is holding their phones up the whole time like whenever they play a single like no there are really no singles and no one really knows the words so there are moments within the concert when like tom york is singing and it's like really quiet and you could hear a fucking pin drop there's

no like guy behind you trying to like harmonize with fucking tom york that's my favorite shit though i love when people do that it was honestly it was a great show uh i'd strongly recommend it i know they're on tour right now you could check out their tour website the smile but um yeah it's fucking wicked i rested did it occur to you while you were there at this concert that if you were ever going to fist fight an entire room of people and win that was probably your best shot that was my those are my people justin i would never fight with the skinny but if you're saying that saying that if if someone needed to physically dominate the room yeah it's probably that was probably your radio head side project concert yeah lord of the lord of the rust situation going where you could take over with your brute strength

yeah i i do want to add that if you're in New York and get a chance to go to Forest Hill Stadium, that place fucking rocks. It's one of my favorite venues that I've ever been to, and it's really awesome. Justin and Griffin, you brought things I love, and I want to hear about both of them. Justin, how about you go first? I read a book.

It's not exactly like an underground recommendation. It won the Pulitzer Prize last year. It's called Trust by Hernan Diaz. It's really hard to sell it without talking about what is cool about it. legacy set in the the mainly in the 1920s uh teens and 20s um and sort of centered around the stock market crash but it is the story of sort of like a wealthy industrialist that is told uh in in a in different sort of four different i i think you can say what the first thing is because the first thing about because any writing about it – autobiography of the man that that novella is loosely based on who is explaining his life story because that novella became so popular within the fiction of the book he decides that he wants to do his autobiography and then there are layers beyond that there's layers beyond that right and each of these different sections informs the ones before it so you don't really get

you don't know what has happened in this book until literally like the last five pages of the book like it is you know the onion peeling away is like a pretty belabored overused metaphor at this point but it very much is as you get deeper

and deeper in you understand the stuff that came before better. The reason, I think the only reason it works is. Did you read this too, Plant? Oh, yeah. I read this last summer and it's amazing. The reason I think it works, because each of those things is fine on its own. Like the novella, if that was just a standalone book, is great.

The autobiography, if that was a standalone kind of is great the autobiography if that was a standalone like kind of like writing thing there's cool stuff in the autobiography too where it's like you'll see his outline there and it's like why is this not thin like why isn't this done like and there's and it's explaining later on but it's it's yeah it yeah it's just fantastic i i think it's it's a surprisingly um breezy read. Like don't let the words scare you away from it. Especially for the novella part, if you like like Scott Fitzgerald type of things, it's wild how well he channels that and then completely changes editorial voice in the other stories. Yeah.

It's also a good audio book. Yeah, I listened to it and they had four amazing narrators for each section, so that was great. I played through all of Paranormous. Wow. The Seven Mysteries of Honjo on my phone. I had it downloaded on my iPad Mini, which has turned into my son's ipad mini uh because the fucking kindle fire tablet we got him sucks and doesn't work on airplanes um and so i had to delete it off there because one time those kindle fires are so bad for little kids so shitty even the ones that are designed for

kids are miserable for them they're really really very bad there's so many ways to break it so that you can't like use it this game has a lot of shit that is very targeted for for me it's a and plant has talked about it a lot and has been trying to get me to play it a whole lot and i'm glad i finally did it is you know a visual novel it is spooky uh it's about sort of like japanese folklore uh by way of like a almost like killing game uh which is i guess its own sort of subgenre at this point it's got a story chart that you can sort of hop around in and you have to kind of interact with uh in in some clever ways uh a little bit it has a sort of meta layer that i'm really you know i do enjoy in video games almost like a um uh there is no game level sort of metal air that

uh is very cool the art style is very very neat um just the premise is cool the premise is basically uh in one night in this uh city in japan in believe, the 80s, a group of people are bestowed with these curse stones that they can use to kill each other and gain this power that they need to – that they can use to resurrect someone from the dead, right? So there's lots of people who want to use this for very important reasons to resurrect these people that they've lost. And so it's kind of a killing game. But each stone has its own conditions that have to be fulfilled before you can use it to kill someone. So like the first one you get is you can't use it until somebody turns around and tries to leave. And so you are like in some situations where you're trying to get them to walk away and leave before you accidentally fulfill their stone's condition so it's like

about finding out sort of what what those conditions are so you can avoid fulfilling them and dying um that's very very cool it's a very very cool premise for a game the the scares are great the the presentation is great i will say that it abandons that pretty quickly um and then turns into a sort of more straightforward like detective style story and that is the majority of the game which is kind of a shame i feel like because i was very very into this concept of like there's this one night where everything is just going completely wrong. There's all this scary shit happening. You are in this game where you are trying to, you know, kill and not be killed.

And there's all these different sort of perspectives that come at it from. And then it kind of just becomes a, I don't know, just a sort of detective story that was a bit disappointing. Just a sort of detective story that was a bit disappointing. I was really hoping for it to lean more into hopping around the story flowchart style thing that Virtue's Last Reward, the Zero Escape games did so well. So it fell short of that, but I don't know. I beat it in like six hours or so. It's pretty breezy. The phone is a good way of experiencing this. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Great. It's great. It's sure. Great. Definitely. Definitely touchscreen. And you can play it on console and PC, but I think it works better on a touchscreen. I started to play Master Detective Archive's Raincode, which kind of got me interested in playing Paranorma Sight because it is

a... That game is basically Danganronpa like full stop. Like there's almost no difference. There's like a layer of fantasy on it. But that game is only out on Switch right now, and the load times are pretty bad. And so I was enjoying the game. The vibe was very cool, but I have stopped playing it because it was genuinely the load times were so frequent and so bad that I decided I just kind of want to wait until it's like on Steam Deck or some other platform where you know that is not

getting in my way all the time but uh I played all Paranorm site it was very cool um not exactly what I wanted it to be but I'm I am glad that I checked it out I'm glad you tried it I I watched Marie Antoinette for the first time the other day. Have you ever seen it? Is that the Sofia Coppola one? Yeah. Nope. I haven't seen it. I don't know how I missed this because I've seen, like, I think all of her other movies.

And it seems like my jam. And it turns out, yeah, it was my jam. It was really good. Everything about it is great. Jason Schwartzman is in it. And he just plays real cuck and i love him you know right as opposed to his usual sort of powerful virile yeah that's true that's that's true he's what a talented guy you know anything he does i like he was you know i was here i heard

him in spider-verse and i was thinking like ah j Jason Schwartzman. Every time I see Jason Schwartzman, it feels like a comeback. It feels like, oh, he's back! It's like, yeah, he's in fucking eight movies a year. He's constantly working. And always good. I'm always happy to see him. That's all I have. Russ, you want to thank anybody for the reviews?

I do want to thank people for reviews. Thank you to Houston D. I guess it could be Houston, depending on if you're in New York. But it might not be. Phil SB and The Last Swear Bearer, thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts,

and thank you to everyone else for talking about the show. Oh, we have something else to mention. Plant. Yeah. Plant. We have to mention that thing.

Recap the games. Oh, I'll do that and then the other thing that's a record scratch here that here are the games that we talked about the legend of zelda tears of the kingdom paranormal site we also talked about the film marie antoinette and the book slash audio book trust by hernan diaz and uh fresh went and saw a show by tom york and and Johnny Greenwood they're in a band called The Smile and also Radiohead maybe you've heard of it to bully some kids out of a bunch money I mean I can't think of a better place to start just wait outside the gate you'll come out a millionaire that's so true the other thing is we have a newsletter now and it's the easiest way

to stay up to date on all of our stuff. Being on social media, it turns out generally miserable. But having cool stuff sent to your email where you can reply via email or leave comments. Great. So go to thebesties.substack.com and you can subscribe. And there are any number of reasons that you should do that we will have the full list of games that we discuss along with our honorable mentions and links to where to play them we will be sharing new merch drops there in the coming weeks and months as those come to be and lots of other surprises, including photos of Eggsteam

and maybe the occasional giraffe from a certain borough of a certain city on the East Coast. Awful. You can't actually take photos of Eggsteam, let it be known. It is ineffable. You clearly have not looked at the newsletter because it's already there.

I subscribed. I didn't see it. Great pitch, guys. Great pitch. I think that's exactly what we were all hoping for. Also, it's free. It should be noted that it's free. Yeah, it's free.

Thank you so much for joining us. Next week, we're going to talk about Viewfinder and maybe Exoprimal. Hmm. Yeah, so Viewfinder is a cool, like, portal-style first-person puzzle game. And Exoprimal is a,

I don't know how into this we all are, but maybe we'll try it out. It's a team-based action game from Capcom featuring dinosaurs. It looks like Earth Defense Force with dinosaurs. It looks like Earth's Defense Force with dinosaurs. It does kind of look like that, but more multiplayer-centric.

Okay. Maybe we'll actually play a game together this time. Who knows? Strange things will happen. That's going to do it for us. Be sure to join us again

next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!