The Besties - Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is Kinda the Pits

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Maybe this won't come as the biggest shock in the world to you, but Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is not a very good video game. How did we get here? Genuinely: We do not know. But we're not having, like, the best time.Also discussed: Enshrouded, The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, Casey Neistat's Apple Vision Pro commercial, Lysfanga, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Orion and the Dark 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!

Are we the Suicide Squad of video games journalism? Okay. Mm-hmm. Speak on that. Because as soon as you said that very evocative phrase, and I think there's enough old men in here, I started forming one in my head, and none of us made the list, fellas.

I gotta tell ya. Yeah. You know, I like think myself as a stinker on the outskirts, beyond the border of what is acceptable in video games journalism, as evidenced by the fact that I effectively left it six years ago. What's your alias? My alias? Yeah.

Weirdly, Captain Boomerang. Oh. Okay. Yeah. But that's just because, like, you know how I used to be, I was, like, reviews editor at Joystick for, like, a minute, and, like, if I didn't like a game, I'd throw a big boomerang at it and show a video of me hitting it with a boomerang, make it shatter? That's where that came from.

Obviously, King Shark. Ruz. Yep. That's what they call me. Justin is just Dr. Chococola, right? Oh, wow. No, why not? Yeah, I think.

Yeah, that's Dr. Chococola. It's in there. I mean, the most subversive thing I ever did was pop amoebas into my glob for a long time. A facet of my history that my children are now becoming aware of. I think that means we have Dr. Chococola and Professor Vore. Okay, I'd rather have any other name. Hey guys, please remember

after this call to have a legitimate conversation about who this is, because it is going to be a real treat. Gotta shut these mics down, but boy howdy. I'm looking forward to that conversation. When these mics are ice cold. Yeah, ice cold yeah we'll unpack this uh do we have one for fresh who's fresh fresh stick is i mean he's i don't

know i mean they both love egg steam who's both you know what i mean captain make me barf You know what I mean? Captain Make-Me-Barth? Russ and Harley Quinn. Russ is just the Joker. Yeah. Yeah. I do have the build, the Joker build.

Yeah, you do. And it's really just one more dig at me, and that might be enough for me to send me off the edge. And you make me laugh. Yeah. You make me laugh all the time, Russ, like the Joker does. Yeah, but are they laughing at me or with me damn dude you sound like a joker right now we live in a society bro i would paint your face on a van chris you can be the joker too if you want cool thanks i appreciate that

other joker that's a real generous status joker jokers two jokers and professor chococola and me and i'm still workshopping my mouth man mouth man mouth man matter eater lad My name is Justin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the game we're talking about this week. My name is Christopher Thomas Planton, and I actually do know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Frushing, and I have the best game of the week. Welcome to the Besties, where we discuss the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a club, and just by listening to more than 30 seconds of a single episode, you have become a member.

This week, we're discussing Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. Chris Plant, what's up? Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League is the much-anticipated, awaited video game follow-up to the Batman Arkham trilogy by Rocksteady Games.

They took quite a long time to get this one out into the world, but it is finally here. You get to play as all four members of this version of the Justice League. Unfortunately, it has... Suicide Squad. Oh, sorry.

You killed the Justice League. Justice League Kill the Suicide Squad is the sequel that's coming. Is that the good one? Is that when the game stoked out of our minds? It's kind of a messy, a moose, it's just a mess. Let's get into it. I can't talk about it.

Yeah. Let's make, yeah. Quick break. There was a cognitive dissonance I had when the reactions to this game started coming in. And I just couldn't make my brain accept, like, I couldn't understand how it could be that bad. You know what I mean? Like, even watching it and hearing people talk about it, I couldn't quite believe it. Like, I had to still play it.

And it's funny because, Russ, I feel like you were in a similar position. It wasn't like feel like you were in a similar position it wasn't like that with starfield so we remember when starfield came out we all played it before it came out and we dropped our impressions and it didn't match up at all seemingly with a lot of what the reviews were saying yeah this is not that this is not. This is, I think it was just like pure fascination. Like I knew having seen gameplay, going into it, I was like, this doesn't look very appealing, but they've been working on this game for nine years

or whatever it is. And so I'm like, from an academic standpoint, I need to know what the end result was. And it should be worth noted, two of us on this podcast did not have that same urge yeah did not want to suffer through no the no dog no i don't care what they have to say because i earned this and russ earned this and they didn't and this is our time darn it that's right it's our time now what is what what is this game russ you're great at describing games

okay um so it is a open world third person shooter the closest analog being crackdown but without the um fun fun how dare you no well so that the differentiator here unlike Crackdown, where you're playing as one character that you're constantly advancing, here you can play as four pretty distinct characters. You know, King Shark and Harley Quinn and the gang. Visually distinct. One of them's a shark. One's a clown, one's a shark. Yes, they look really super distinct.

Very distinct. And they actually do play pretty distinctly as well. They move very differently. Harley Quinn, for example, has a swing mechanic. Captain Boomerang, for reasons that are part of the story, gets the ability to, like, teleport. Deadshot has a jet pack. And, I don't know if you can, King Shark forget king shark just jumps he jumps really high and they

each control differently too in a in a fun choice yeah so i mean that's kind of the loop is like you'll you'll do these missions in the open world in this case metropolis playing as one of these four characters it obviously supports multiplayer for up to four people so you could do this in all in multiplayer for what it's worth. I didn't, I just played in solo, which actually I think might've been better, um,

as a way to experience it. Um, because there are also like cut scenes and like story that kind of ties these various missions together, featuring, uh, a bunch of brainwashed justice league characters like, uh,

the flash and Batman and various other known Justice League characters who appear in it. I mean, you are leaving out a pretty significant part of this, which is that it has the trappings and structure also of a games-as-a-service game. It does.

That's true. There is like a looter-shooter element to this. I think that the nearest, I mean, the most obvious and nearest sort of um like uh comparison i i would make is to the avengers uh game that came out uh what a few years ago now uh from who did that crystal dynamics yeah crystal dynamics i would agree that was much better but that was a much better game that game was all right that game had some neat stuff going on yeah um i think here um for what it's worth the live service stuff exists insofar as you're finding loot and i know after launch there's gonna

like they'll be dropping like the joker will be playable and stuff like that um but mostly as you're going through the story it seems like a lot of that stuff has like not as much of an impact on the actual gameplay which is a weird thing you kind of there's a question of how much did they remove after yes after it was panned yeah when they started to reveal uh the game yeah from what i understand there is like end game loops in the style of a games, games, a service game. Right. I did not get nearly that far,

but yeah, it really does seem like, I mean, it seems like many pivots I take in with this one. I want to, I feel like there are many, many problems with this game, but it is sort of a house of cards because i want to know justin specifically to you

when was the first time you're like oh that's a problem oh i mean it isn't what i was gonna say but instantly um yeah the the okay there we talked about the four different mobility options right if you are dead shot you have a jet pack your jet pack goes forward with r1 it goes fast with r1 right uh and just point and shoot uh you can press l1 to do like an afterburner move that cools it off and gets you some more boost while you're boosting with r1 you can press x to do like a boosted super fast thing and then you can also press l1 to do like a mid-air dash and also your x button jumps and can do a double jump okay that's getting around right each character that you play has a completely different set of those moves and this is the tutorial of the game is rather

than slowly introduce you to these they make you learn and just like barely start to maybe get the hang of one of the mobility sets and then instantly switches you to a different character and makes you go through the other paces and almost kind of learn but it's even harder to learn uh because you are still trying to remember the thing from before and it does that four times and that's like the opening of like literally the opening yeah the game the crazy thing about that tutorial the crazy thing about that is at the end of that so you've played as all four characters they're like okay who would you like to play as yeah and i stared at that screen for like five minutes because none of them felt great to me yes the best that i in my opinion is harley but just because harley has batman's grapple right and it's pretty similar to Batman's Grapple, except, oh man, it all has to be on L1 and R1, all the mobility stuff, because R2 is always shooting, right?

Or melee, depending. But it always has to be reserved for those. So it just always feels a little icky. Yeah, I ended up with King Shark, but I don't think I've ever— I thought I was choosing who I was going to play through the campaign as, right? So I took a little time really thinking about it. Once you're in the game, you could just press the D-pad and like switch at any time. In fact, it encourages you to switch characters between levels by making one character like boosted. So they get more XP and better damage and stuff like that.

Yeah, I think it's one of the worst tutorial experiences I've ever had in my life. Yeah, I'm very turned off by that. And what's baffling, and this is, you know, we were kind of talking about like, who is to blame for what happened with Suicide Squad? And this is where I think a lot of people

have pointed the blame at WB as the like owner of Rocksteady who like forced the live service stuff down their throats but when i play the tutorial of this game to me this says this game has been problematic from day one yeah when they greenlit the like white box demo of the mobility stuff and it didn't feel good someone needed to be like pump the brakes we need to figure this out and no one did and they kept making it around that i think it's worth noting if you don't because the arkham trilogy came out a while ago now yeah yeah arkham 2009

arkham city in 2011 then arkham knight in 2015 so nine years ago so there's probably quite a few people who didn't play those games and don't may not be able to truly appreciate the outrageous departure that suicide squad justice league is from from those games where those were i mean revolutionary sort of genre defining uh action exploration games Yeah. Not quite search action games, but I mean, they certainly had elements of that. And this is a open world, sort of frenetic third person shooter that is really, really all about the guns,

none of which are particularly i mean they're all continue to lecture me about suicide squad you didn't play it i played some suicide squad oh you did yeah okay you said okay oh i didn't know that you 100 said you weren't gonna play it i've been so offended by your participation in this conversation oh no no okay good i the second time that i knew like uh-oh this is really bad the the sort of main thing about the shoot like the main point of the shooting yeah i i think the crux it all kind of hangs on is you have a shield and it doesn't recharge automatically because amanda waller hates your freaking guts yeah there's actually a narrative beat there's a narrative explain why it doesn't recharge

uh and so because she hates you dead recharge so you have to do like shield bashes basically on enemies and the way you prepare them for that is you shoot them in the leg. You know, that fun video game thing. Everybody always talks about shooting people in the leg. So the Suicide Squad, you shoot people in the leg, and that feels, like, bad. It doesn't feel good. You know, I have a chain gun, and I'm aiming for the leg, and then they get down enough that you press R2,

and it goes into kind of a not fluid melee animation uh that really pulls you out of it and it doesn't flow into the next thing it doesn't it really stops you every single time you do it and there's such an emphasis on like calm combo like keeping your combo yeah yeah and that is not aided by the fact that the momentum kind of keeps coming to a dead stop how is this story because that that was the thing that i i was holding out hope for that the writing would work but i i also think making a funny video game is a you know extreme degree of difficulty increase really fucking hard yeah and making funny suicide squad thing is tough i'll give you an example

from a writing standpoint this is not the story but this is just like a writing sample in the first 15 minutes there are literally two gentrification jokes in the first 15 minutes of the game. I will say this, and it's very indicative of something that has been in development a long time. And I don't know anything about making video games, but I have written scripts before, and it feels like every 10th line is a punch up,

and that is actually a good gag that works. Every once in a while, there is every 10th line is a punch up. And that is actually a good gag that works like every, every once in a while, there's one moment where, uh, they're, they're restraining. Um, I think it's captain boomerang.

Uh, and, uh, uh, who's a green wonder woman is, is, has impended the ground with her boot. And Harley Quinn says from off camera,

step on me next. And it's like a good, it's a decent gag. it's a decent gag. It's a good gag. But most of it is so rough. It does a lot of jokes. In terms of quantity, it is delivering a lot of jokes. I think that King Shark played by Samoa Joe is a revelation.

I enjoyed a lot of stuff. For me, that role belongs to ron i mean yeah i can't see anybody else in that i'm sensitive to like ron's like very uh you know erudite king shark doesn't necessarily match most of the king sharks that in are there in the dc universe so i get why they didn't go that way but it does make me a little bummed. I think the storytelling stuff is, and this is not saying a whole lot, is the strong point of the game. Like, I think this is a cool concept for a game.

Basically, Brainiac has descended on Metropolis and has taken over the Justice League. And so, like, hunting them down and seeing them be bad guys is at the very least like kind of interesting maybe not the best use of uh specifically batman and kevin conroy in his final role it wasn't actually they found out this week he's in like one more animated series oh really thank god i know yeah uh yeah because this one i will say does not send him off with a particularly... He's having fun, though.

Evil Batman. He's enjoyed himself. I'm glad he got to do it. The problem that I was having is that there is no establishment of these four characters as villains. And we know, like, canonically, right right that they're technically villains but like captain boomerang deadshot king sharks harley quinn none of them are like they're all basically anti-heroes at this point so it doesn't feel that interesting to have these quote-unquote villains when most of them are like c-tier villains that nobody you know recognizes so

they're not established as villains they're just kind of like anti-heroes basically yeah and then the way you are the way you are treated throughout the entirety of the game i talked to my wife about this sometimes where she's telling me about a heated exchange that she had right and eventually i'm like hey i'm picking up on, I know you're not mad at me, but like, I feel like, I feel like you're getting mad at me. This game,

every line, everyone says to you is so mean. Everyone hates your guts. And even when you do a good job, they're like, I guess I won't explode your fucking brain today. Stupid. And it's like,

okay, that's cool. This is the second time I've had to escort people to a bus in a row. Can we all, can you please help me out here? Like, give me anything. It's like, there's another bus to stuff with people, jerkwad. It feels so bad all the time. What do they do with the Justice League stuff?

Because, yeah, I get that Brainiac, like, takes over their brains and makes them bad and stuff. But did they get chances to, like, be here? Are they, like, kind of fighting against that? First introduction of them is, like, the first time you see Green Lantern, Batman, and I think Superman, they're already evil. Like, there's no real establishment of them as as not i guess the yeah the flash you sort of like see more of a progression but the i i think the like stark moment and this happens very early is like you see evil batman and evil batman is basically like um chasing you throughout like a darkened warehouse. That's actually the museum for Batman, ironically enough.

And Batman fucking throws a Batarang into the like carotid artery of a guard. And the guard is just dead. And that's like pretty fucking grim. Here's my concern. And hopefully this is not true but why i really did not want to play this game is because it's called suicide squad kill the justice league but every time i watch the trailer it looked like it was suicide squad kills a bunch of characters who look like the justice league but we have no reason to believe they're the justice league oh no no no

let me let me be clear i'm not saying they're the Justice League. Oh, no. No, it's the Justice League. Let me be clear. I'm not saying they're literally not Superman and Batman. I am saying that we spend so much time with them as just pure bad guys that they're like inhuman. They're just like, they're bizarro versions of the characters. I mean, but you know

you have a history with Superman. You have a history with Batman. You know these characters. To their credit, though, I will say one of the first missions you go through is in the Hall of Justice. And you're actually going through, like, it's a museum that's open to the public now. And that's the gimmick, why there's, like, all these exhibits. But you do see a lot of, like, audio clips and video and pictures of them, like, being heroic. Got it. They give you sort of the tour on all of them.

By the way, Justice League, if you're looking for a place to invite a bunch of civilians to, one place I recommend is not the place where you guys all hang out all the time in the big white building. That is like, I feel like it's not the safest thing

to have your base at the same place as you have like kids get in for free on Sundays. Have you ever gone to a tour at the white house? Okay. I mean, that's fair. Yeah.

I got it. That's fair. No, I think. Wait, no way. No way. Yeah.

Boring. Probably. To Chris plan's point about who you're fighting and who you may be killing. I do want to highlight that like 99% of who you're fighting are blue guys. Oh, I forgot your colorblind. There's some color of dudes.

Okay, are they not blue? Mostly purple. Okay, purple. They're purple guys in like various forms of crystals and you fight those guys 10,000 times. 100 million billion bajillion times. million billion I mean legitimately you won't believe it's just barely a game and my heart goes out to him because this is a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of love it's so depressing to think of how many people spent

their years working on this project so depressing to me just. It is just barely, like, I'm, I, I am failing to come up with an example of a, like, this level of release that was this level of like, barely,

barely a game. I mean, barely. I feel bad, especially for people who were there the whole time and then,

like, the heads of the studio left, you know, like a year or so ago. That'd be really tough. We followed your thing this whole time. You get a piece and we're still here?

That's hard. I think there's an impression amongst folks who maybe possess a certain amount of disdain for games journalists that we like to like gleefully shit all over and bear bait these types of games that are a mess. It bums me so, so deeply out how there are parts of this game. I mean, this game required so much work that that that went into it and there are certain elements of it that are like i think it looks great it looks great not when you're fighting and there's a billion trillion things happening on screen at the same time it gets very very close that's the other thing it might as well be a single player game you

can almost never parse the other anything that's happening but like from a from a performance perspective both on the technical side and the like you know character performance side like it's great and there are lots of parts of this game that had a lot of love when that went into it and then also the structure of it is so fundamentally fucked up by this desire to make it be uh a a third person action shooter games as service game, which like you can say they peeled away a lot of those trappings, but like when you've picked up your fourth boring ass rifle

with like 0.01% like extra headshot damage, and it's like, it falls prey to every single thing that I do not like about that whole genre in a way that the thought of playing it at length to grind out and and get access to more of this game is just unthinkable and it really is a bummer to be really clear those studio heads that left like a year or two ago like to what plant was sort of implying there which is right is like they led this charge to make this game.

There's no way the game was that dramatically changed over the course of a year or two, given how big and how, uh, expansive was. So like, this was their idea. And the fact that like people had to like finish out their idea,

even if they were a grumpy, if the studio heads were grumpy with WB or whatever it was, they agreed to do this and move forward with it um and it's just a bummer like it is i think one of the best things one of the things i enjoy the most about games having played them my my whole life and having like a pretty deep understanding of just games in general is like feeling the intent behind the game feeling the like desire this is the game that they wanted to make and this is how they did it cool this game is like it's impossible to do that too because

it's it it doesn't feel like as you're playing it doesn't feel like ah this is a game that a lot of people really wanted to make it feels like it feels like eight games that nobody really wanted to make all of. I cannot, there is no comparison to it, as far as I can tell in the whole of games of just completely inscrutable designs. It's really, like, can you all think of

because there's like a lot of stuff that is of a lower scale, right, budget-wise where you know, it's not supposed to look great that is of a lower scale, right? Budget wise, where, you know, it's not gonna, it's not supposed to look great.

Maybe they'll nail some stuff, but like a game that has this level of like production value, but with almost no like game underneath of it. Yeah. Because the production value is nuts. I mean, I agree. There is a mission where you have uh uh you can only attack enemies with a car and it's like a car that has a big rifle on it this and boy howdy

it is a blast yeah and there's some genuinely great cut scenes the cut scene after you uh i don't want to spoil it on the off chance, but the cutscene after you defeat Green Lantern is genuinely really delightful. King Shark gets a very good beat after that battle. And that brought me an amount of joy that I was not expecting from this game. But Jesus Christ, when my fingers were on the buttons,

I was not having a great time. Yeah, man. Do you want to talk about a game where it's fun to have the fingers on the buttons? I would love to talk about a fun finger button game. Let's do that on the other side. Okay, y'all. We're back. It's time to talk about Granblue Fantasy Reelink. For the first time ever,

you are looking to me and saying, maybe I should have played that RPG. Maybe this time I you are looking to me and saying maybe i should have played that rpg maybe maybe this time i should have listened to plant maybe maybe i made some i did i do want to say just to take people behind the curtain i did play a rpg this week but it was the wrong one that we are going to be talking about we're going to talk about that one next it's not my fault there's a hundred fucking rpgs coming out in the first two months of this year so do any of you know anything about grand blue fantasy i know don't even know i know grand blue is a franchise right yeah it's a mobile franchise you could tell me literally a plant you can make my mind is a

blank slate that's what i was saying get your palette and paint whatever if you said harley coon was in this one too i would not be shocked i mean kind of so yeah it is it's a uh long-running rpg franchise mostly known for a mobile game in japan it has um the pedigree of former final fantasy people so a score by a final fantasy composer uh no nobuo uematsu and some other artists from the series. And this is like the big RPG to get people excited about it. Wasn't there a fighting game too? There was. There have been a few different spin-offs. BlazBlue.

No. Good guess. No. Unrelated. But I really appreciate you trying to get a hand on the boss. Yeah. He's great. I got this one.

Play's blue. Got blue in it. And he hit the rim. Here's the problem for this game. And this is more of like a PSA for everybody listening. I did not fully appreciate that this is a sequel. And I assumed, hey, this game is pretty difficult to play, the previous ones, so it'll try to pull in newcomers. When I say difficult to play, I mean, the game that this is a sequel to is a mobile game that was released

over a decade ago and effectively not released in the U.S. You can play it on a browser here, but, like, come on. I don't even think you can play it. I feel like it's been delisted. Like, the original Granblue is not accessible. Like, you can't play it. And yet, when you start this game, they're like, hey, everybody's here. You know Gran or Jita, either of the two characters you can play as, and how they're tied cosmically to Lyria, the small, quiet, magical, and perpetually hungry anime girl character.

You know them, right? Oh, and you know the band of buddies of which you are a sky captain for, and you've been going around for years just kind of hanging out, right? So this would be like jumping you're so this is be like all jumping in and this be like playing final fantasy 7 rebirth not having played final fantasy 7 remake much worse because rebirth if you're going off of the demo that is now available would suggest that that is an easier jumping on point this is like playing a 60-hour RPG and coming in at the 50-hour mark. Oh, my God. And just being like, everybody's here.

We're all friends. We've all kind of gone through our character arcs. I hope you're ready to go. The other comparison is, have you ever gone to, like, a New Year's party with a bunch of people who are not your friends? Like, one person invited you, and they all, like, know each other, and they don't really need to introduce themselves to you because that's not what they're there for. It feels a little bit like that. So you might be wondering, Plant, why did you say this is a good game? Didn't you say this was good?

Why good? It is good. It's good for two reasons. One, it's short. He did it again. It's so short. The master of war. It's so short.

The Master of Warration. It's like 20 hours, and it's just like 10 really straightforward quests, and you can fight bosses and you beat it. But more importantly, the combat in this game is so good. It is so, so good, and they know it is so, so good. And they largely get the story out of the way to just let you have these battles and kind of like grind and increase your RPG character into oblivion. So the way the combat works is you kind of do the spamming, it's a it is controllable action, it's not turn based,

you spam these kind of generic attacks. And as you do that, you build up specials. And then there's a risk reward system of if you hold off on using a special, it gets more and more and more powerful. And you have yourself plus kind of three AI controlled characters, but you can switch out the characters. So you could play as the main character who's kind of like a sword based character that hops around and stabs. There's a ranger type of character, there's all sorts of variants. In the like, just moment to moment of feel of it feels great. And when I said like you they get out of the way of you being able to actually spend more time in combat. There's a like moment very, very early on where you go into a village and they're like, hey, you know what, the story is probably confusing you this person over here they'll just give you a list of cool quests you can pick

anything you want and we will just transport you directly into battle we won't even make you do any of like the bullshit like wandering around the world we'll just let you go have a cool fight and then you come back and we'll give you all the rewards um so it kind of like it shows its mobile gaming influence almost and that it's super bite-sized it's a great steam deck rpg because you could really just kind of pick it up choose a cool quest play for 10 or 15 minutes and then call it a session um which which i like is this like the world's most ringing endorsement? No. But if you finished like a dragon, which some of us have, and you're waiting for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth,

which all of us are, and you don't want to play Persona. And you're not playing Persona 3 Reload. Yep. Then, then have I got the RPG for you. It's called Grimblew Fantasy Relink. Wow. I think, can I say,

I was watching some trailers for this game yesterday, and it does have some vibes that remind me a lot of Phantasy Star Online with the multiplayer. Maybe that is a wildly not accurate comparison, but that is really all. All I needed to see was a bunch of multiplayer action RPG shit happening.

I tried to do multiplayer. I had trouble getting it started, but I will say this as a make good. I found the area where they try to catch up on the story, which is the same vendor as the quest. The way it works is you click. It's like for each of your characters, there are 10

story beats, and you click it. You're like, oh, this must be like a mission where I learn more about them. No, you click it, like for each of your characters there are 10 story beats and you click it you're like oh this must be like a mission where i learn more about them no you click it and it just loads up a still image and then text scrolls over it and tries to just catch you up on their story and it's like who can forget when lyria merged souls uh and it does that for about two minutes and at the end you're none the wiser but it gives you a big xp boost as if to say we're sorry but this will make the game better yeah i don't know i don't know man no uh it looks great it genuinely does look fun to play i don't really understand how the combat like is there like one identifier of the combat that makes it stand out apart from being good well it's of this kind of trend of action rpg

combat so you are like moving around and like feel it feels more active in that way yeah i i wouldn't say that it it feels like what we've gotten from um the tale series lately and final fantasy 7 um the remake not rebirth it feels like that but it feels i'd say more polished and coherent i don't know those i i feel like um game developers have been kind of trying to figure out what that type of action rpg style how that works best and this feels like a noticeable step forward in terms of the feel of everything that's cool yeah i don't think i'm ever gonna play this game no definitely not i mean yeah i feel terrible for it because there's so much stuff out right now um but i don't feel terrible for it because i think it's doing very well um so good for all

the people who are enjoying it i i have a lot of people who whose opinions on this stuff i trust including yourself chris plant that that are speak very highly of this game and so i i have a lot of people who whose opinions on this stuff i trust including yourself chris plant that that are speak very highly of this game and so i i will probably check it out at some point but it's it boy it's tough out there i mean it's great out there it's just it's bad out there for time if you have if that is a concern but just to put a pin on it there's no relation to blaz blue at all no no there's not and I will watch a story explainer on YouTube and then probably find out that I love this game. But I haven't hit that point yet, so.

Wild. Okay, well, thank you, Chris Plant. We have some reader mail to go over, which is exciting. Yeah, do you want me to open this up? Yeah, crack the loop. This one is from Dirtch. From Dirtch. I thought that was the sound effect of the bag opening.

Dirtch! Made me so happy to hear Plant is loving Tekken 8. I finally took the plunge into fighting games for real during the pandemic and it's since become my favorite genre by far. For anyone that's been vaguely interested and are curious about the genre, but have been, understandably, intimidated to do so,

I highly recommend checking out the YouTube video, How to Get Started with Fighting Games and Have a Nice Time, by Polygon's very own Pat Gill. Yeah, that's a great video. It is. He really did an amazing job on that video. Yeah. Frush, do you see anything else in the mailbag?

Indeed, there are more letters in the mailbag this one comes from serious michael loving and shrouded but i must say the multiplayer right now stinks all quest progress is tied to the server so if you're not online when others are doing a quest you can be locked out of it i think they're working on it being player-based instead that being said it's one of the most fun and interesting survival games i've played in a long time and the building system is really well done i i pulled this uh letter out specifically because i started playing and shrouded first i started playing it on griffin's server griffin set up a server and i arrived and there was a fucking las vegas waiting for me and j Jess filled with like magical gems.

And everyone was level nine. And I was level one. And I didn't have any powers. And I didn't have a glider or anything. And I was very overwhelmed. And I did what I would recommend everyone do. If you're interested in this game. Is leave that populated server with all your buddies.

And start a totally blank solo server on your own. And just like play through the arc of the game. The really cool thing about Entrouted. Is that your player progress carries over. As does your inventory. So if you hit level 9 in your private server. You will be level 9 when you bring that character over to any other server. And so all your skills.

Like if you unlock the double jump and stuff like that. You'll still have that which i've actually made a a private offline game um because every time that i played it on steam deck i would have to log into the server which was kind of a pain in the ass uh that you couldn't basically put this steam deck into sleep mode and then turn it back on and get back on because it's you know an online game so i have a private one for like you know when i'm leveling and exploring the stuff it there is some structural issues within shrouded and this is one of them they are working on it i think they actually just released an update that is trying to address some of this stuff but like that is the issue of having a game where your character is not bound to the server which i think is

ultimately the right decision right because it makes it feel more inviting and less like you're wasting your time if you're not playing in the right place. But the fact that there are quests and stories and unlockables, that gets very confusing. There's a whole element to this game of rescuing the NPCs

and then you can place them down in your world and then they can craft new shit for you your world and then they can like craft new shit for you but like when you start on a new server are those characters also unlocked there like that stuff is is not particularly streamlined but I was going to talk about and shrouded in the honorable mentions because I played a fuck ton of it and I think that game kicks ass yeah I I'm I'm really enjoying it we can we can wait until then because we, and I think that game kicks ass. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it. We can wait until then, because we have, I think, one or two more letters from the mailbag.

This letter comes from Randall Williams. Every time I hear these grab bag episodes, this is referencing last week's episode of all the indies we talked about, various games we talked about. I hope you guys would talk about The Void Reigns Upon Her Heart. Whoa.

Dope-ass game. It's a bullet hell, roguelike, boss rush, side-scrolling shmup, hundreds of unlockables, and bosses with multiple variations developed by one person, released in 2018, but constantly updated. Might have missed because it has a nudity tag on steam which is entirely non-sexual and can be censored smartly in the game options check it out uh i've not heard of this game that is a dope ass title the game is again called the void reigns upon her heart sick title um yeah i've never heard of it but uh that's that's really cool to hear looks very very

cool i am definitely downloading this immediately also yes team maybe should have like a divider between like whoopee whoopee nudity and like art i guess i guess there's no way to do that saying that out loud there's there's yeah say that yeah i yeah yeah i don't want Gabe Newell with his mallet deciding what is it. It's pornography. He's juggling some knives and just seeing where they fall. I will say Steam is usually pretty upfront about what you can expect when it comes to genuinely purient stuff in there.

Hey, have y'all been enjoying enjoying outside of uh the stuff that we talked about on this episode since we just talked about we should talk about enshrouded because yeah i know it's please yeah champing at the bit um yeah i mean we talked about it last week uh the the the you know it is a survival crafting game with a sort of soulsy aesthetic and action rpg mechanics uh and yeah i will say this just on the basics of it i've never played a survival game that feels as good to play as in shrouded does yes all of them have this like jank where you're punching trees and you feel like you're sliding across the ground rather than actually walking through it yeah and then shrouded feels like an actual like it feels not far off.

It's not as good, granted, but it doesn't feel that far off from like an Elden Ring, quite honestly. It's amazing. I think that the combat is great and I think it is what sets it apart. But I also think just the building is amazing. You have like this suite of tools that is like largely sort of shape based. So it's like, you know, you drop a foundation block down here and then I mean, the flexibility is almost like like Minecraft like where you can just create basically any kind of building that you want. And it looks great. Like it looks very cool. Does not take very long for you to make a base of operations that like feels custom and looks great and provides all of these like very tangible benefits for your character. And like, I love that shit in this genre of games. The exploration

is where I think it really shines because just getting around also feels really good. You have a glider that lets you zip around. I have built like an elevated base on top of a mountain. And now whenever I like set off to go on an expedition or complete a mission or something like that, I have like almost an Assassin's Creed style like diving board that I go off of and then

I glide for like a couple of minutes to get to wherever it is that I'm trying to go uh which is very very cool you have a grappling hook all that all that stuff but there's so much stuff to find and unlock and uncover and there's just constant quests that you're getting from the the NPCs that you can unlock and put in your base, and those unlock more recipes and more things for you to include. So that Vegas that Russ described now has a functioning farming area, and it has a guild hall where all of the NPCs do their shit. And I also know that people were a little bit grumpy before launch when they found out that the world the map itself

is like a set map so it's not randomly generated when you create everyone basically has the same map but i think the reason that it all feels so good for exploration is because of that because it is handcrafted so you have these like pacing beats that a randomly generated map will generally not have um and it is cool to like is valheim randomly generated or is it cds valheim is randomly generated yeah and like has that has okay moments but you'll never have the like oh this cave is like perfectly into the mountain and it's just this amazing like deep delving experience and there's also like i it is very very possible to go somewhere you're not supposed to go yeah which is i very much enjoy in any any type of game and so like this base that

i built is on top of this mountain called the pillars of creation where the enemies are like five levels higher than i was supposed to be at uh But I, damn it, I was like, I'm not quitting until I get to the top of this mountain and build a base on top of it because it'd be a cool place to. And so I spent like, you know, one entire play session just like trekking across the map and like mining into a mountain to make a tunnel that I could climb up and then building a staircase and then like just doing all of this shit and sneaking away from like big mean dragons uh to get to where i wanted to go and it was just like a really uh satisfying very like uh like improvisational sort of like world-based storytelling thing that happened uh yeah i i can't put this game down i am i am wild about it and it and it runs great on steam deck uh i got like two hours of battle riff on the steam deck and i was like

wow that's impressive um yeah i think a lot of it has to do with the art style kind of scales really well even on a smaller screen with the settings dialed down but i i think it is uh it's still in early access i think there's a lot that can and should be done to the game to improve it um and i also russ and i were talking about this earlier i would be shocked if this game does not get copied like verbatim by a much bigger and more like canny publisher or developer it's surprising just because the genre obviously the genre is not new. And the genre has made a fuckload of money through various survival games. So it's surprising to me that there hasn't been quite the one-to-one.

I guess Tears of the Kingdom gets a little bit close to some extent. I mean, yeah, Tears of the Kingdom does something pretty wildly different. It also is not multiplayer. And it doesn't have the base building. Well, it kind of does. But I do see like a company like ubisoft like they already have the open world tech just adding like layers of survivability in i could see that happening yeah um but yeah i guess fallout tried to do it fallout

four and it was a mess so this is a this is a weird recommendation because like i think also if you hold off on enshrouded and play it six months from now, it's going to be even much, much better. Agreed. And maybe they will have worked out a lot of this structural stuff. But I don't know, man. There's a time of year where there's lots of shit that is sort of competing for my time. But Unshrouded kind of continues to be the thing that I want to go back to and spend my time playing. Agreed.

Okay. So, Justin, you want to talk about something that isn't Unshrouded, so please do. Sure. Well, I mean, I'll talk about anything. I'm happy to keep talking about Unshrouded. It sounds great. I'm still, I'm almost done with Infinite Wealth.

I'm in like the last sort of room around the world. I keep getting dispatches from Hawaii from Justin and they are delightful to get. I've left Hawaii for them. Griffin, you finished it. Hey, listen, here's what I'm going to say. Yeah, I finished it. Here's what I'm going to say.

If this isn't the best game of the year, it's going to be a real good year for games. Yeah. Hey! Because it's February and it is good. I'm currently, like my most anticipated game currently is whatever the next one of these is

cause I keep them coming baby it'll be a while all this day what? it'll be a while? they make like four games a year it seems like I guess until you start

paying attention and then they stop I don't think you would like the other ones quite honestly I disagree I might go back to this well again you gotta give another shot to that first like a dragon game man if not only just to find out more about ichiban yeah uh kasuga who is i will say probably the best video game

character of like the last 10 years like easily it's not even close you guys i will just say this go ahead and submit to um playing a lot more of this game now both of you too because you will have to both talk and hear about it relentlessly especially towards the end of the year this is great i really want to do a spoiler episode for this yeah man i'll do all the episodes you want yeah there's a lot to talk about i just wanted to quickly recommend a movie uh called orion and the dark uh which i had never heard of before we're just kind of cruising around netflix looking for something to to watch and uh it is a kids well not kids you know it's a family animated comedy uh written by charlie kaufman about anxiety.

It is basically about a boy played by Jacob Tremblay, Ryan, who is afraid of the dark and he is the most afraid of the dark, basically of any kid on earth. And the embodiment of dark, basically a personified version of dark takes him away to show him what he does in the world and why it's important. And it becomes about like trying to – it's not a simple story about like he learns Dark isn't such a bad guy and then he's no longer afraid of the Dark. It's a lot more complex and a lot more satisfying than that.

And I really, really liked it. It's not lot more complex and a lot more satisfying than that. And I really, really liked it. It's not a perfect thing. I mean, what is? But you can definitely feel where, knowing what I know about Charlie Kaufman's career, it definitely feels like there are some studio additions to this film. There is embodiments of some other nighttime things. Like there's quiet and strange noises and sleep. And they're all like characters a lot inside out insomnia, that kind of thing.

And it feels a little tacked on. But overall, it's really it's really good. It's it's fairly dark. I will say if you have little little kids, it's probably not a good fit for them. But I just thought it was great. Cool. kids it's it's probably not a good fit for them but uh i i just thought it was great cool um i wanted to talk about casey nice stats apple vision pro video which is on youtube you can watch it uh i good um tried the apple vision pro just at like a demo event thing and i thought it was interesting it's certainly like when they showed like footage of like, IMAX esque footage, it was like the best IMAX experience I've ever had. It's also $3,500, which is kind of batshit from a pricing standpoint. But Casey's video has him wearing the headset for basically a full day in Manhattan. And I just found it fascinating. This is not a reason to buy it i'm not saying like oh this

video convinces you or anything like that but just seeing like how it really does feel in some ways like a glimpse into the future because i do believe this like kind of ar element will exist in the future where it's kind of just like implanted on your glasses and i think he does a very good job showing how that technology will like slowly seep into your normal day-to-day life. Dude, there's a shot in this thing where he's waiting on the subway

and he's watching a video and the world around him is darkened as he enjoys this video and this train starts barely into the station. And I'm like, wow, we are absolutely boned. Yeah. The whole enterprise is suspect yeah i think it rules man i if this thing were two thousand if this thing were twenty five hundred dollars cheaper i would definitely buy one i like if it was three thousand dollars me too i love dumb new tech and this is like i love seeing apple make some genuinely

wild shit for the first time in forever. The price point is just banana cake. To be clear, I think the thing's cool as hell. If I could get one for an affordable price, I would. I just think walking around in public with it really scares the shit out of me. Yeah, he looked like Doc Brown from Back to the Future, like walking down the streets. It was like genuinely impressive that he i would like to recommend in a similar vein rocco from mega 64 did an unboxing uh of the apple vision pro uh while he was at a sushi restaurant uh and so it's

just him unboxing it while like knocking food over and like things down on top of just like a bowl of rice like oh shit oh fuck and all of the comments are people who just like don't get it like don't know about mega 64 and rock conservative history just like what the fuck are you do why did you do this here why did you unbox this here it's hysterically funny um with the casey video i i will say i was really skeptical of that that it was going to be a like another casey prank um yeah but i was i was really skeptical of that, that it was going to be another Casey prank. But I was really happy with how much it is not that. It kind of takes what Apple is promising at face value, which is like this is a mobile, portable, augmented reality thing, which is cool.

And also, yeah, I agree that I think this is the future. But now I feel like this is the future in 20 years. And it really hasn't come up. When we've had enough time to save up $3,700. Yeah, like we're so far away from whatever future this is promising. But it's a cool video. It's very cool. Hey, I got one thing that I want to share.

I want to pitch you all on a game that we can talk about next week. It's called, I think, pronounced Lysfonga. It is not a great – Not a lot of dialogue in this one. Going to need a spelling title. Lysfonga. What if I told you it was Lysfonga the Time Shift Warrior? Does that make it worse?

That makes it better. Better? Okay. Well, not my favorite title, but here's the pitch. You remember that Lara Croft isometric game where it was co-op and you kind of like solve puzzles while fighting baddies? Tomb Raider Go? Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, I think is what it was called. Oh, right.

Yeah. You had your buddy with you. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a great game. What if you could play... It's on YouTube. You can watch it. What if you could play that co-op game with 10 people except for you are all 10 people? That is the pitch of this game.

It is an isometric puzzle-solving action game where you play as clones of yourself. And basically every time you enter a combat arena there is a like finite amount of time like i don't know 15 seconds and as that time runs out you are you're not going to be able to kill all the enemies in the arena during that time so uh you get as far as you can boop it resets and now you've created a ghost that is going to go do everything that you just did. And the goal is to clear these arenas with the number of clones that you have on hand. And at first, that's as simple as like, yeah, just go kill the enemies. But as you go on,

there are puzzles that you need to be able to solve in that specific time. So maybe there's an enemy that can only be killed if you kill two of it at the exact same time so you need two clones killing it and it needs to happen at that nearly the exact same moment so you know okay halfway through this run i need to be at this spot so i can kill the other half of that enemy so that it actually dies um it is so clever and so fun i really wish it had a different title is it like super time super time force was that the i think yeah well i i think the best bet is we should all play it and then we can try to break it down in next week's episode but i wanted to give i wanted to give people a taste of it because i think i think a lot of people should give this a try but especially like our little squad cool i think that does it um plant you want to recap

the games we talked about yes i do um we talked about suicide squad kill the justice league we talked about ground blue fantasy reeling we uh had recommendations for games like The Void Reigns Upon Her Heart. We also talked about Infinite Wealth, the new game in the Like a Dragon series, and Shrouded, Lysfonga, and we recommended you check out Orion in the Dark on Netflix, the new Casey Neistat Apple Vision Pro video, and we had a recommendation of Pat Gill's, uh, video at polygon about how to get into fighting games.

And you can find all of that and more at besties.fan with helpful links. Cool. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple podcast. We have Jables 48. We have this app is stupid fair. And we have Perker48 we have this app is stupid fair and we have perker909 thank you for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast and thank you to everyone else who has subscribed to the newsletter which is great and and uh we'd love to see it and everyone else who supports the

show in a variety of ways we greatly greatly appreciate it next week week, Griffin gets to talk about the RPG that he played this week. Yay! Which is Persona 3. The remake of Persona 3. And I guess we're also talking about Lysfanga, the Time Bandit or something. Yeah. Lysfanga the Time Bandit.

Lysfanga the Time Bandit. That's what it says on the box. Cool. Thank you so much for listening to the Besties, and be sure to join us again next It's fun with a dime banner. That's what it says on the box. Cool. Thank you so much for listening to the besties and be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends take the world's best games. Besties!