The Besties - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Roundtable, Part Two

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Welcome back! We're diving a little deeper into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom this week, chatting about our first dungeon experience, our spooky time in the depths and our general feelings about the game before we move on to the next big title. Also discussed: A Matter of Life and Death, Sisu, Barry Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I've been reading a lot about the origins of John Cena, how he sort of became the phenomenon that he is today, and I feel like I should get better at freestyle rapping. Okay. Was that a big part of his thing? That was his breakout performance, was he was able to really incredibly successfully freestyle rap in the ring. His persona has changed over the years,

but he had kind of like an M&M but like Target approved. Target approved M&M. Precisely right. So Russ, if you were, so you were gonna I can't believe I was talking about other stuff when the possibility of you dropping some bars here. And I know it's

I really would love anything I'm gonna go up to the Russ intro vending machine i'm gonna press i'm gonna i'm gonna press b11 i'm pressing b11 just see what comes out it's also freestyle rapping oh man it's all and let me just say i know you you might have concerns that i would have like pre-written something. So just to allay those concerns, if you want to pick a topic, I could support that topic.

Okay, you guys, it's got to be debt ceiling. Yeah, I think debt ceiling is pretty good. That's on everybody's lips right now. Okay, it's debt ceiling. Got it. Do you need a beat? No, I'll handle the beat. Don't worry. You're going to handle the beat too? I'm going to do both.. Do you need a beat? No, I'll handle the beat, don't worry.

You're gonna handle the beat too? I'm gonna do both. Wait, no, you can't beat and. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The problem is the audio. Hey, hey, but for the grace of God, let him do this. Yeah, fine. I've got it. Oh shit, it's gonna be nerdcore.

Dead ceiling, I'm worried I was born in Hyrule With.8 years Slept in a cave For a hundred years Then I came out To a world of shit Thank God I had my tunic

My mama knit But forget all that It's about this girl Her golden hair Made my heart pieces twirl I was here to save The world with her arrows inherit the wind feature clarence darrow after the shit things settled down me and zelda in

hateno town but out of nowhere comes a guy called ganon a gerudo god with a dick like a cannon it was there and then my girl agreed that there was only one way to seal the deed a thruple was ruled for the peace of the land, of wisdom, of power, of courage. Hell yeah. Now we're all fucking about three times daily. Karox in the bed? Oh yeah, it's crazy. So remember, folks, when you're in trouble, there's only one thing

better than a double. That's three kinds of spoons, one big as a horse, and then you'll form the perfect triforce. It's hard. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. you forgot the final line that ceiling yeah I said that ceiling at the beginning yeah and then his mind

just like spun off of that into yeah a lot of bars about man rice I can't wait for Russ's reboot of Wild N' Out that he's got cooking up. Mild N' Out. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know that it's still raining. Best game of the week.

Yeah, my name is Griffin McElroy, and the game from last week is still very good. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I'm back, baby! My name is Russ Freshman, and i have the best game of the week welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest home interactive entertainment it is a video game club pals and just by listening you have become a member and uh this week we're continuing our freewheeling, fun-loving discussion of The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Russ, Plant. Now, let's ask Plant.

Plant, what specifically, what are the boundaries of this discussion today? You don't even try to put that on me. Put that on Frush. He's the no-spoiler guy. Okay, we're specifically focused on the first dungeon, which i think we all did the rito dungeon which is the bird people dungeon yes and we're going to be also talking about our um

emerging adventures within the depths of hyrule so down in the chasm we've also discussed making sort of broader and yeah without without getting into specifics past those points. Yeah. We're not going to talk story, story spoilers or anything like that, but we will certainly, this is the last like dedicated full episode on Zelda for a while. So we're going to be,

um, kind of leaving it, uh, with the last, maybe we'll do a, like a spoiler, like in a couple months. Yeah.

Like a big spoiler, everyone, but that won't be this one. Yes. I'm excited. Okay. Well, we're going to talk about all that, and we're going to do it right after this. I just want to say, I was a stickler about that last point because I've played so far past where the spoiler cutoff is that I do not know that i could revert my brain to that

primordial i have ascended to true gamer god and it's tough to kind of like right how many dungeons have you have you finished i'm on the last oh i'm on the fourth dungeon i've done over a hundred shrines at this point i've we were on tour last weekend. I thought you had two kids, right? How are you doing this? We were on tour last weekend. Me too. And I did not have, I didn't have my kids with me.

Oh, you didn't have kids. Yeah, so for a few days I didn't have kids. And me and Lake spent a lot of quality time together. He's just feeding them light of blessings. Yeah, just every day I come home,

give him four. Give him four, that keeps the doctor away. I was really interested to see, I think when we talked about how sort of open and flexible the mechanics were, I was really interested to see how that would play in a dungeon, which Zelda dungeons are almost, I mean, defined by the rigidity of the structure, right? If there's a way that you find a secret path in there, and not only is it like it's intended for you to find it, and there is one prescribed place where that opening is, and there's a small hint to it, and it is, I mean,

this is the game that drew pictures with its map so so concrete was it was you know able to make skulls and what have you um so i was interested to see how those mechanics would would carry over and they don't they just don't really worry so much about that um that i it's funny that we're talking about the rito dungeon because that is probably the one to me that feels the most traditional. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't feel that way. Me neither.

I don't know. You only played the one, so. Yeah, I mean, compared to the others, I guess. You are really able to crack these motherfuckers wide open. Like, if you go into one of these temples with the right Zonai machine that you have built a lot of the stuff becomes completely trivialized right like i'm assuming there's a way to get underneath this big fucking bird dungeon on a you know airship or something just ascend up through the floor to where you need to go uh so yeah so flexible is it that kind of reminds me so plant when you started playing

i want to hear more about this because the lead up to the rito dungeon which we'll talk about just to start with is incredible it's like this amazing series of you start in the you start the quest in rito town wherever it's called and uh you're basically given hey you have to go up and check this stormy cloud and you're like how the fuck am i gonna get up there and you find this string of platforms and the only way to in theory go from platform to platform with your current setup which presumably would be early in the game is by using your pal the like rito prince or whoever he is who will give you this ability to like burst forward while you're hang gliding yes and plant you managed to like not use him and get there yeah so i apparently i was not alone we had a

number of people tweet at us that they had had similar experiences yeah sure and my take is i don't think that the rito wind burst is that powerful at all um you're out of here i was able to make these jumps like without it i i mean it was close and i often like kind of i had to like climb up the last bit or so yeah so basically what we're talking about is there's like huge gaps between these islands um and then later on there are these giant viking ships that you you bounce off of uh you bounce off like the the lowered mast i guess and and yeah it was always close but it it worked had you played a lot of the game before you did that dungeon like did you have a lot of stamina i have a lot of stamina i had no extra stamina um huh yeah at least I don't think I did. I've almost exclusively invested in hearts.

Yeah, I mean, there are ways, jumping to my mind, of using pine cones to heat up a fire, and then you use the windburst from that. Yeah, so I think the part where I do feel like I must have broken things, they're getting to these islands, because I never even went up the the the traditional way to start the whole thing i kind of like joined the top of the mountain and i and i did that somehow by um creating flying machines and like seeing an island in the distance while

i was already up in the sky and like hey i bet i could get over there oh got it um so how did it resolve did it just say it was there like yeah i got all the way up into the so you you climb and you climb and you climb and there's a giant vortex like tornado in the sky and you then um use those bouncing viking machines or viking boats to uh to jump in from the top into that vortex and there's one giant viking boat uh in the middle and that's where like the the theoretical dungeon is once i got in there it was like um it was like showing up to a party like an hour early and everybody being like wait why why are you here like you're you're we would prefer that you uh come when when we would like you um there you need that zonai or not zonai you need the the birds uh windburst to turn on

these different engines across the show and you can't do that without it there's no guidepost there like go to rito village yeah there's not that i came across and then even more frustrating was i um i had put a zonai fan on the end of a stick so i could create wind yeah and i was trying that and that didn't work um yeah that's a drag yeah but so i mean let me be clear you know champagne problems it was all super duper fun and then i went back to the i guess the problem where where it became a headache for me was i went to the beginning of this quest line i met with like all the birds i got sent with like a little kid bird to go up to the top and i was like great now that i have kid bird i can just skip to the shrine i unlocked right

near the very end of this thing right before you go into the the actual dungeon and when i did that the game like got very confused he did not come with me oh no stay where i had been before that and i had to kind of find him like oh that Oh, that's a bummer....inside of the thing. Yeah, that was a pretty big bummer. Yeah. That is very unfortunate. It is a less fun thing than I assumed what would happen, which is you just land there, and there would be some sort of, you know...

Like a note saying, hey, wow. ...spirit of the bird gods, who's like, hey, you are... Whoa, I'm impressed. Me, spirit of the bird gods? I love it. I think it's fucking cool you got up here, man me spirit of the bird gods i love it i think it's up here man i've always been down on you guys but i'm starting to rethink i mean um but the dungeon itself is once you if you go up there as god intended is uh is fun i i i was impressed by uh that that mechanic you're talking about where you have to have the bird kid flap his wings at the generators.

That took me a little bit to piece together. Yeah, me too. And I'll say it was like, it didn't feel great when I did. You know what I mean? It was kind of like, oh, okay, sure. Yeah, no problem. After setting up fans in front of them and everything like that, it was a little little bit uh i don't know that wasn't signposted really at all which i like walked right up to one and messed with it for a while yeah uh and before i realized what was going on that was

uh that was irritating i've only done uh i've done one other dungeon which is the fire dungeon and my impression and griffin you can confirm this is that for all the dungeons you basically have to use the like your buddy's ability yeah you you think about them like traditional items right like there's not items in breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom but you do get these companions who then will just fucking party alongside you from once once once you finish they are so they are the treasure you take out of the dungeon so once you figure that out that that each of the dungeons requires that obviously it no longer becomes an issue because you know you're going

to have to use them but obviously for the first one yeah i was stuck like there was a big wind tunnel in the middle of the wind dungeon and i was like there's got to be a way to like redirect this like put a wall here to like push the wind in this direction or whatever was it took me a little while but i want to say there are puzzles in that dungeon that i was like fully blown away by and maybe it's because i did the dungeon pretty early like within the first five hours of landing i like like the idea that you find a broken switch and there's a bunch of icicles on the ground and you glue a fucking icicle to act as a lever to be able to like have the leverage to, to pull the broken switch was like such a mind blowing.

I didn't, I didn't like that. You didn't like that. Why would that, why would that work? I don't know. I mean, it would work in reality.

No, I mean, I mean in a world where you have magic powers you can glue an icicle to a rock guys have you ever fucked with icicles before like you're not gonna get leverage with it it's wild depends how frozen it is

if it's super frozen you will it can't be more frozen Russ there's only frozen and not but no super frozen no super frozen is not something, Russ. Stop it. Perfect zero. I actually, and this is fucking great.

I dropped a spear and glued the spear to the thing. Oh yeah, that works too. That makes more sense. There's no collision on the spear, but you can ultra hand it and then it knows to give it like physical leverage, which is fucking crazy. Yeah.

I was blown away by that i do i and i felt this way about breath of the wild i i also think breath of the wild's dungeons were way more rigid than this right like i remember the bird one where you had to like tilt the wing you had to use the machine to tilt the wings in a certain direction so you could access certain parts like those took me a long time to figure out. One of the dungeons I did, I beat in like 10 minutes. And that was a little bit like disappointed, no matter how like satisfying and rewarding the experience of exploring the dungeon is,

like it was bing, bang, boom, done. And is that you using like crazy zone eye shit? That one was not even that wild, no. That one was just really quite short it's it's so interesting right because these if you think of the dungeons as huge fucking shrines they're great yeah when you compare them to the more sort of curated uh more you know for lack of a better term like designed experience i'm replaying ocarina of time right now for this street for trial by fieri and it and it really is night and day.

And it's not to say that the improvised stuff of just using the tools in Tears of the Kingdom doesn't work. It does, and it's great and very clever and very cool, but it's an inherently different thing. I don't know how they could get that experience unless they shut off certain parts of the thing for you which some of the shrines do some of the shrines you go in naked and it's like okay you got to use this to do and get in here but that does kind of betray the spirit of the thing i don't know it's it's a it's a mixed bag yeah i don't know i prefer i i've most traditional zelda dungeons i'm not a huge fan of, which I know is blasphemy.

There's some really bad ones. Yeah, for sure. They do the, the designed thing very poorly. These dungeons reminded me of there's one dungeon. Again, this is a deep cut.

And I remember talking about it when we talked about it. Uh, it's re-release on switch. There's a skyward sword dungeon. That's like a sand ship. Yeah. And it has like some really out of the box thinking mechanics where you're traveling back and forth through time yeah and that is what these dungeons feel

like to me because i feel like i'm coming up with solves that they didn't necessarily intend in an order that they didn't necessarily intend and i like that freedom even if it does mean for shorter dungeons yeah breath of the wild yeah i felt like i had to do them in a very precise order and it wasn't as satisfying to me um so i'm fine if they're short that doesn't really bother me i do like i do like these dungeons actually better than the breath of the wild dungeons because i feel like the breath of the wild dungeons tried to have it both ways and it it was it was really i found those those dungeons quite hard to navigate some of them because it was like

if you don't get the one clue or do you want me to do what you want me to do right exactly juice a plant what do you guys think oh can we talk about the boss fight sure yeah that's a good amazing boss fight it's a really good boss fight uh you're you're flying you're flying through the air, and there is a big sort of, what would you say? Hula hoop worm. Hula hoop worm. Who's got hoops in him, and the hoops are protected by some sort of crystalline structure. And once it's exposed and shoots little spikes at you, you can shoot it. Now, this is a very, I found this divisive for myself because the first thing I discovered that you could do

is dive bomb your body through him. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I did it accidentally and I was like, that's so funny. Can I tell you guys something? it accidentally and i was like that's so funny can i tell you guys something i thought that that is how your i did it i did that first and that's the only thing i knew about so for me you forgot that link could you had other weapons available to him that slowed down time no no no i think i'm gonna point break this one and just repeatedly like fly through

the air wait till i get a good angle on him dive through the spikes as they're shooting me right because i have to have the angle above it so i'm like veering out of the way of spikes and then dive bombing my way right through him because that's the way you hurt him and that and it just gets harder and harder to do this was i should note the boss fight where i told you guys that i did not and last time when i was somewhat disillusioned with the game and i mentioned i was kind of stuck oh my god because i didn't have cool proof items and i was out of things that warm me up so i did this boss fight with my heart's constantly draining oh my god just point breaking through this dude

over and over again it took me probably 30 that's so first of all congratulations for sticking to your guns and getting it done in the face it was so fun to do yeah i thought wow i did not wow what a concept i am using yourself as the weapon. I'm so willing to accept Chris's honest mistake of getting to the temple without realizing that there was something missing. Yours is some next level shit, Juice. Yeah. Yours is some, to forget that the bow,

that the right trigger button does exist, is some next level sort of dissociation. To be fair, if I can say also, the scale makes it feel like there's nothing a bow would do. It's dude-shaped. Yeah, sure. Yeah, and you're being generous to the designers. You know, you're assuming the best of them.

They have really innovated. It's more fun to do it my way, I will say. Same arrows. And once I got good at it, it probably looked cool. Yeah, sure. not to the fucking Rito on the ground who were like

what is he what is he what is he what is the bum Austin you just come down covered in guts yeah just covered in goo it's done

he was showing me you're just killing me before he left that little elf showed me this bag he had of 24 bat eyeballs and he told me that little elf showed me this bag he had of 24 bat eyeballs. And he told me that if he glues them to an arrow, it makes it magically find its target.

And that seemed like nonsense to me, but he's not even trying it. Do we have any pimple popper people here? Any scab pulling off for people? Because, man, that really plays. If you're one of those weirdos. Does it? Not that I am. When you smash through the worm?

Yeah, just popping like this little giant skin pimple. Kind of gross. It's a really fun way to do it if you're looking for a different way of doing it later. I just still don't really have a lot of interest in the dungeons because i'm i'm still just enjoying the rest of the exploration and i know we're going to talk about the deaths in just a moment in the second half but yeah i i just don't feel motivated to do the dungeons at all and i i feel like why am i i don't know if i'm blanking on this or

misremembering but in others all the games motivated, one, because you just didn't have anything else to do. But two, you wanted to continue to collect powers or abilities. Yeah, that's correct. You get a tool in every one, usually. And here, I understand that there are abilities that I'm going to get from completing this. But I feel already like I have the coolest abilities in any video game in a very very very long time um so just kind of like tooling around is so much more enjoyable um and there and there are all these like just very small things like you find a dude in the middle of nowhere who

is looking for honey and he's a drummer and then you find out that you need a drummer at one of the camps and then by doing that that helps you unlock a thing that i'm not going to spoil and that that kind of like falling down the wikipedia rabbit hole of a video game is just so much more enjoyable than so the dungeon format i want i want to talk about the drum thing real quick, and I'm not going to spoil where it goes, but I found someone else who was in their house saying, I'm not going to come out unless I hear drums. And I didn't have any other context. And I sat outside of that quote house,

hitting everything I had, trying to get them to come out of that. Fucking Russina. Where they're like, there like okay boom choo-choo well her name was zelda and she uh which honestly like didn't bother me at all like i and eventually like i found the guy that plants talking about and did that quest i was like oh that makes sense but like i like trying that shit and i'm i'm still not looking anything up for this game and it's been like still so rewarding to me um just to come back to the one of the other things that plant talked about with the the powers and you're right plant and the other

zelda games like the motivator is like oh i get a boomerang and with that boomerang i could now hit things from far away or whatever it is in this one i think they were even smarter than the powers you unlocked in breath of the wild which were like essentially one time you on cool down or yeah they were like powers but they would be like five minutes on cool down after you use one of them and these all seem to be very much integrated into what you do while you're exploring yes so the retail one obviously extends your glide distance. The other one that I've gotten, which I won't spoil, does other things that are, like,

tremendously useful from an exploration standpoint. I mean, I'll just say, do the Fire Temple second. Yeah, so that was the one I did second, and it was also really very, very good. You think the Gerudo Village one? No, it's in the volcano. But I'm at the gerudo village one pretty sure it's gerudo but that's that i mean that power frame you're thinking they're rudo

yes the rudo okay it's with the logs yeah the powers are just convenience i think yes like they are there to make exploration and you know combat and all that go you know just a little bit smoother but mostly they are there to keep you they give you a lot of the effects that a lot of like items do in the game only you don't have to spend your items and you can do them yeah they don't have durability you have to worry about griffin would you recommend without telling people about the temples themselves would you recommend an order um so the order i have done them is when uh the wind one which we can say and then the fire temple we've more or less said uh then there's the zora have one i did that one third and then i went to the gerudo which is the fourth one and is that the order you would recommend i don't know i don't

know about i don't know about three and four i feel pretty good about one and two i use that wind burst power pretty much all the time. My main means of traversal, well, these days is outrageous flying machines that I have constructed. Yeah. But before that, it was shooting up a Skyview tower and then using that Rito wind burst thing

to just fly across the map. So I would definitely say wind then fire maybe even fire than wind is what i would do my next playthrough but um then the other two i don't know fascinating uh we'll uh we're we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll come back and we're gonna dig a little deeper um i did not have context for like how big it is down there right yeah um i i kind of didn't realize the first time you go down there it seems so gigantic and cavernous it's like wow this is a really big cavern and then as you start like walking it's like man you could really get lost in here it's like oh my god it's as big as above this and it's

literally the same size it's the seo for a river it's the seo for a river well moment of uh of tears of the kingdom where you go down and you're like i know how big elden ring is and then it's like there's another sky downstairs yeah it's unbelievable i thought i had been hearing like ripplings of like people talking about oh yeah there's like underground and i remember early on i was playing and i like found a cave and i was like oh yeah this is this is what they're talking about these like little caves are like a fun offshoot to like the main dungeon and then you're like about. These little caves are like a fun offshoot to the main dungeon. There's a lot of fucking caves, though. And then you're like, the caves are great.

And then you're actually in the depths, and you're like, holy shit. This is otherworldly. How long did it take you guys to actually go down there? I resisted for quite a while. I was pretty intimidated. It seemed really scary. It is scary. And I didn't get the camera for a very long time because of

that yeah that's why i would recommend people do it early just because you can unlock the camera that way yeah also i mean just general tip for anybody who still has not started playing this game you really should clear out as much as possible in the uh that first town like camp that you're in where like all the early missions are because i i did not even know that that quest in the dirt or in the depths existed um until we had all been talking about it and then i went back there and again i i kind of like broke the order which i was doing things and was trying to find the camera and couldn't get it because I hadn't actually triggered that mission. Oh, okay.

Can we talk about the last sort of upgrade thing that you get after the sort of Yeah, I very much want to. It's so cool. It's also on the way to if you're doing the camera quest, you in theory should come really close.

It's the second step, basically. After you get the camera, if you're doing the camera quest you in theory should come yeah really it's the second step basically after you get the camera if you go back down there it's like the next thing you get yeah uh so auto build is the last thing that happens and i feel like it is the the piece of of the zonai machine building puzzle that this game kind of gives you the keys keys to the tiers of the kingdom with, and makes it something that you can actually integrate into basically every other pillar of the game, whether it's like making a hover bike that you can use to tool around the depths in or making a fire shooting drone

that you can just kind of plop down on the ground whenever you're facing enemies with a certain type of elemental weakness uh or just three fucking springs stacked on top of each other that you can just drop at any time you need to go up uh you know 60 feet in the air uh you can save those you can favorite them you also find templates for other machines that are like sort of pre-built in the game and then you can either utilize nearby pieces to just instantly build that schematic or you can spend one of the resources in the game called zonite uh to if you don't have those specific like tech technology pieces around you you can sort of spin that zonite and it'll make it from thin air yeah i i was i didn't use it for a very very long time because i'd be like oh i'll just build a raft it's a piece of wood and a fan on the back of it and that's fine and then i started getting more

of the schematics just from exploring the cat at the depths and now i'm doing a lot more because i have like 600 zonite and i could like afford to like make some ball rash shit out of nothing right and it's been totally game changing for me but it does sort of you have to wrap your head around like being willing to spend that resource you can also just plop down the machinery from your inventory which is what i usually do like i have so many fans and so if i want to build my little hover bike, I'll just drop a couple of fans in the control stick and then use the auto build to just instantly zip it together. It sounds like you didn't,

you weren't, you did not care for this system. It's not that I didn't care for the system and it, and it kind of hinges on my, the, the problem that I'm running into with this game, um, which I have now spent probably God,

maybe 30, 30, 30 hours, 30 showers the past couple weeks um i am really plagued a lot of for a lot of the time with this game that there's a better way that i could be doing things um and that that sense of boy it's taking a long time to climb up this hill. It'd be easier if I did this a different way. And I know there's an easier way. Sometimes I don't know what the easier way is because I haven't encountered it yet. Sometimes I do know what the easier way is, but a lot of times it's just like a lot more basic or annoying. To put a point on what I'm saying, there's a lot of times where I have – you have a hill that you need to climb and I didn't have one of those on hand i felt like i was kind of wasting my time once you get the auto build the only sort of limit

to that having that available to you is how much of the zonalite that you have mined so i that sense of like, it's really the Zonai machines that are, I know how cool they are and I love so many aspects about them. But the constant idea or the constant thought that like any, almost any problem that I have in the open world could be solved a lot more easily with a specific kind of zonai machine and you know just getting taking the time i guess so i'm spent i've found myself spending a lot of time and it's not wholly unenjoyable but i will get to the end of like playing for an hour and realize that everything i've done in that hour is in service of making the next hour I play easier or a little bit more comfortable or a little bit less annoying. And that sense is something

that I'm really struggling with right now with Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah, it's interesting. And I've sometimes felt like, oh, I'm gonna go back to this cavern that I've been to before because I know a lot of bomb flowers grow in it. So I'll do like a run there. But broadly speaking, I find that if I mix up what I'm doing. don't run across i will end up with a shitload of the bright flowers so that after i'm done with

the caves i know i can go in the depths and like go really far in the depths because i have all these bright flowers and then when i run out of those i can go up to the sky and maybe the sky will i'll find a map in the sky that brings me back to the depths i think it's if you get too tied into this is the only thing that I could do at this very time. And the only way I can do it is if I have a bunch of bombs, then I can see that being frustrating because you're constantly giving yourself fetch quests. But I think if you kind of like go with the flow a little bit,

you will run into the resources that you need to do the other stuff. Just like as happenstance. I also know what you're talking about because that is i feel like the the kindling of it is the fuel of this game this feeling of like well if i go and i get this armor and then i upgrade it twice then it'll give me you know uh more more zone i energy when i'm using my machines so i'll do that so that when i fly around i can do it for longer and it'll be a little bit easier to tool around the map and etc etc or just expand the scope to add on to that to add an example of that like it's annoying to have to go farm a bunch of uh watermelons that help you stay cool in the desert, I should go try to find armor that will keep me cool in the desert

instead. And then I switch back and forth between the armor that I have that keeps me cool and then the ones that keep me warm. And all I'm doing is like going into a menu over and over again. And you haven't really made anything new. You're just eliminating annoyances that you yourself have created, which I think the machines do a lot. the armor does a lot and i know some of that is like video games at the capital v it's just it's a little frustrating to see it here i i will say on the armor front i totally agree with you i this is the one area of breath of the wild that i feel like they didn't spend a lot of time thinking how i can rework this system because the amount of time that i feel like i'm hot swapping armor because i'm in a fight and i

needed attack up armor or i'm in a cold so i need warm armor is a no it's just you do it so much in this game and the menus are a little easier to dive into but it just doesn't feel that fluid and you compare that to something like um elden or even like Hollow Knight, which I think has like a really smart build system where you're like spending points depending on the situation could have really served here where you weren't spending so much time in menus. I just want to say that I find that element of I'm going to play this thing so that it's easier for me to play it next time. I think this is a taste thing more than anything. Yeah, I like that too. That's what I like. No, okay, you guys are actually kind of hitting on it. It works on me too, but when I zoom out on the time i'm spending with this game yeah it's not that

satisfying right it's very it feels very popcorn-y and then i realize like man i tell you i'm it's it's addictive right because it's a very good loop but i don't feel like i i don't feel like i'm getting a lot out of it i guess would be for be what I'm putting a point on. So for me, and maybe just different approaches or different parts of the game, I haven't had a lot or any of that. Mostly because if I'm getting bored, I just go to a different part of the world. So if I'm getting bored with something in the depths, I go to the sky. Or if I'm getting bored with something on the ground i go to the sky or if i'm getting bored with something on the ground i go somewhere else and if and if you're right like i start thinking about well i could be solving blank with all these different zonai machines i don't know i i think there's like

a sense of FOMO that has happened with this game and it weirdly reminds me of something that happened with animal crossing where nintendo has made a game that is so considerably viral and it's so easy to share these cool little visual moments of how you play the game. Yeah, with the online power of the Switch, it's never been the same. To copy your friend code. It does have a

Wi-Fi connection. Mastodon. But no, but being able to see the way that all these people are playing, it's very easy for it to create a sense of you're not playing it right. I don't know if that's quite what you're talking about here. Very much so. And not right or wrong, but like – There's an easier way to do it.

How many times during this conversation have we talked about like, wow, you really wasted a lot of time. If you had just had this, then that thing wouldn't have been i will push back and say that though in this conversation and i would if you think about it like i think in a lot of those experiences like it's still fun like it is still fun to i yeah this is why it's a taste thing is like if if that knowledge that what you're doing is not optimized detracts from the enjoyment that you have playing it that way like then you know that's that is a uh you know valid valid complaint i just it's i have enjoyed my time with the game so much that that does not bother me just as an example

justin was talking about a there's a hill in front of you or a cliff let's say that you need to climb and if you don't have a blimp it's a pain in the ass the like tension of or not even tension but me standing back in front of the cliff looking up and being like okay i have this much stamina there's a ledge here there's a ledge here i could rest on this maybe and i actually get a shitload of thrill like actually making it up a cliffside like that in like a really tense fun way using no gear whatsoever so it i mean again you're right like whether that's appealing to you or not is sort of up in the air but i think there's a lot in this game if you just take it at face value you can find something engaging with it without tapping into i'm gonna make a fucking calculator out of zonai machines that's again whether that clicks in or not is is person to person but that's how it feels

for me it's again it's it's like it's not like i want to put it down it's it's more like i i i i wish the um the the the slightly meatier chunks that are a bit less mechanical I wish they were maybe more condensed is not maybe the right word I just I don't dislike what you're talking about but what it is going to lead to

is me spending 30 hours doing one dungeon and harvesting building a bunch of kick-ass sky copters or whatever and then probably moving on to something else um and and i i i don't know what the solve is for that but it it does here's what it is if i had the ability to flip a switch and say okay now you always have this zonalight plane that has full batteries and fans and a stick you can fly around with. I feel like that's not without the realm of, like, if I could do that, I would just do it, right? So I could go have fun and explore and do stuff that interested me rather than having to, like, scream at a horse to please God Christ climb over the rocks.

I would do it. i and i find that like but but don't you think like if you activated cheats in gta you would play for five hours and then stop let me let me poke at this because i i understand where justin is coming from here i think you are getting at something that is like very spot on that people that they've given a lot of people a minecraft like game but not with minecraft like resourcing and i think it's telling how popular um item duplication already is in the game that it's it's everywhere like if you go on any tiktok or anything like that it is it is the thing and everybody's trying to find the easiest way to do it. I have definitely done it because literally the thing that you're talking about where I'm like, you know what? I just want to have a gajillion Zonite baubles that I can carry around whenever I want because that will make the game better for me, and I'm not losing anything.

It's not breaking the game's economy for me in any way imaginable it's just making it so i can create things whenever i want to and i think i do agree with you on that part of i wish that the economy was more generous with those sorts of things when it's so central to the game and when you have limited resources it discourages experimentation which is what the game seems most interested in that said it's very easy I found it so easy to dupe things that like I kind

of have even forgotten about the kind of anxiety that you're feeling because I did this early and then I never thought about it again some of those armor upgrades are like bonkers expensive yeah like some of them require a simply outrageous amount of farming. What's, like, a ton of money?

What's a lot of money to you? I'm just asking because, like, the fucking Warren's off it over here. The diamond duping is so, so easy in this game. It's not even diamond shit. Like, you gotta go get five fire breath Lozalfos horns. And it's like, I don't know what that is. I've actually been doing a lot of that stuff. I find it, like, a lot of my time is spent

going after resources to upgrade armor because I want to surprise myself with what the set bonuses are. And so I'll go around the map. I'll, like, check my compendium. I'll be like, okay, froxes live in this area of the depths and then i'll ride around on like a skeleton horse i find down there i'll find froxes i'll mark them on the map and then kill them all collect their shit and then do other stuff until a red moon shows up and then go back to the frox locations and farm them again and i find that like supremely rewarding

but i realize that my brain works well no i think but that's what's cool right it sounds like a description of the game of the year if i ever heard i i think it's great that i i have not played this game like that at all like at all at all i'm truly just wandering in the wasteland doing dumb shit and maybe who knows when i'll ever get around to finishing the actual game game in the game is seems just as happy for me to be doing that um i i'm i'm sure i'm wildly underpowered compared to everyone else um i'm just linked tooling around having the time of his life i do what i want to say this about the depths as well the format of the depths the idea of like being in a pitch black space and then like really like looking in the

distance to see if you can find a light route and then lighting that up and suddenly the area you've been like stumbling through you have like all visibility is so fucking rewarding and i just want them to do more stuff with this where like add like 50 levels that are like increasing in difficulty and I have to light them up again and I will play the shit out of that. Guys, I found mining pants. Oh yeah, I found those pants too.

They're awesome. They were just lying around, right? It's wild for something so valuable. Well, you can actually find... No, I get to say it. Come on. There's the Sky Islands give you a lot of the chests that you can find up there give you maps to armor pieces i have found a lot of maps but i'm still missing

one piece of the mining clothes and it's driving me a little nuts um i i should mention also part of what makes this more uh of a more more habitual parts or addictive parts more lucrative for me is I am somebody who gets super fixated on like locomotion like that is like my number one upgrade if I'm playing Spider-Man or whatever getting places as fast

and as easy as possible that's like huge to me in almost every game so I am especially susceptible and it's like you know you can have a kick-ass plane if you just did this this and this uh is i'm i'm especially vulnerable to that yeah i mean me too you know i i had like eight hearts and max stamina yeah i was like what i did to trudging my way through it. And so I get that, like totally. And that's why I liked having the bird upgrade as well.

Yeah, I don't know. I keep thinking of this game in the context of Elden Ring because they are similar insofar as they're as, you know, I think comparably large in terms of like scale, but obviously very different in terms of where their focuses lie. I think elden rings like combat is like worlds better than of course elden ring than zelda's combat but i think from like a puzzle solving standpoint zelda is like way more interesting and allows for way more bonkers shit but honestly like these two games are head and shoulders above any other open world games i've played in the last 10 years

because they are breath of the wild like breath of the wild i guess is in the same category as that but this one even more so than breath of the wild because uh unlike what justin's saying i don't feel you know that it doesn't feel as much of a chore to me as i tend to feel when i'm doing open world games and maybe that's because it's gorgeous and i like running through the world and climbing shit and building shit like the like the meta of this game like the nitty-gritty is what keeps me coming back i don't feel like running through a field is boring because it's very satisfying you know it's gorgeous and everything but i can understand why it might not necessarily click for someone.

But fuck, man, like all I can think about, and the game's been out for, I guess, a week and a half, for maybe two weeks. And all I can think about whenever I have free time is, when can I play more Zelda? Because it's that fucking top of mind for me. I think you may be a Nintendo addict. I've seen this.

It's called Video Game Brain. Me and my partner's been working on a cure. My teacher's warned me about this. And it's this serum. But the serum is like a Jekyll and Hyde thing for Russ. So when he takes it, he's normally himself, but then he just rips out into Dr. Games. And he's like an absolute game monster.

You can also only speak in rap. Yeah, he's a rap star. That is how I beat Sponky, actually. I was Dr. Games at the time, so it makes sense. Yeah, it's a good game and I will probably keep playing it. Use plants, cheats. That seems like a good way for you.

Now that we are done with these episodes, I may do that because like, I, if it was up to this, if it was just me living my life, I could just play the, I mean, I'm good.

Right. Like that is part of my, a very sort of like privileged frustration is like, I, we got to do this show and I got to play other stuff. And I, I, that is 10,

how I tend to fall off of games. So, but I, maybe it's like a blast. Yeah, I mean, trust me, when my kid wakes up from a nap after an hour instead of two hours, I'm like, fuck. Yeah, because you don't like it. I get it. I just don't like spending time with him

is really what it comes down to. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I actually like your, I like your son real quick how about just like one or two questions yeah um this one from a little charred uh how do you talk about this game with your friends who are also playing it my friend group are they're playing this game but since we're all experiencing things in different orders and dying to talk about it it's very difficult to hold a spoiler- free conversation that's a good question here's what i've done oh yeah tell me fresh i i can't uh yeah so another friend of mine who is playing the same way i'm playing which is not looking anything up like a maniac like a maniac is uh here's what

we've landed on is we can refer to things in breath the wild like for example have you been to hateno town we know that there's a tenno town in uh in both games and use that as reference for like figuring out where each other have been without having spoiled anything i don't think the temple spoil anything i think you can pretty easily say wind temple yeah the person's not gonna be like what did you just what the fuck? Wind Temple? Yeah. I typically, like, suggest things without spoiling what they are. When we were on tour, first of all, fucking everybody was playing. We were on a buzz at one point where five of us were playing Zelda. And it was just me staring at them like, please engage with me.

Yeah, right. On every airplane and airport i was in i saw more switches out than i probably ever have um and everybody was just playing cello which is very very cool but like we talked about the auto build power which was not something that you or travis had yet and when you said that i was surprised and was like okay you have to go do the depths quest like right now because man you find something very cool down there um little did i know that it would psychologically ruin the game for justin and i am sorry about that i wish i just kept my big stupid mouth shut uh i i do want to say before we move on i love the yiga clan like so much so

fucking funny it's really funny it's great that every you know every single human you speak to in the depths is gonna be a yiga but there's that moment of like hey what's going on bro you want to chill by this fire of death yeah so fucking great and the and the leader of them is great and it's oh i love it it's like team rocket all over again so good i'm at least one of them up on the surface yeah they're all yeah sure they pop up but but all the ones in the depths i gotcha yeah so funny i just like talking about spoilers i i i don't care at all i know you do no i know not just a normal spoilery uh stuff because i know that you hold that against me but i i like when there's an exciting conversation around the game and

everybody's excited you get that schoolyard feeling of like, I did this, can you believe it? I can't even imagine sometimes what people are describing. Or I see it on TikTok and I'm like, I don't even know how I'll ever get to that. I don't know, it doesn't really bother me because so far I haven't had any stories spoiled.

Yeah, I don't care about the story so much as like just gameplay stuff or armor sets. I also think, Fresh, you said your kind of problem with this is if you see a new pair of pants in a TikTok video or something, you immediately will be like, oh shit, now I know those pants exist. I need to go find that. And then you like one track mind or just not over that looking stuff up though like yeah no i wouldn't be able to find the pants it's not like you can go around to all the different ritos like have you seen any sick ass red pants can i get some sick red pants with snowflakes on them it's more that it uh dulls the

thrill of finding them when i do find them that's what that's what the drawback is for me and why i why so you are saying that you an adult man could be spoiled by pictures of pants yep 100 can i can i just say you can take a bad feel your emotional state could be ebbed or flowed one way or the other by seeing some kick-ass fans. Yep. Never ever change. Yeah, you're perfect the way you are. Can I just say,

we're not going to have another Zelda episode for a while. I just want to say I really like the story. The story in this game does some pretty cool stuff. And that's all I'll say about it. We haven't said anything about the story of the game. But I am enjoying it and I look forward to a time where we can all sort of talk about it yeah i've really just scratched the surface on the story but i have been intrigued by it um i it's

not that i don't care but it's it's less of a they're not pants yeah i get it the pants i'm gonna i'm gonna combine two questions really quick because i want to talk about a theory i have um jim reading asked there's been interviews where they say that Breath of the Wild here's the kingdom style. Zelda is the new standard moving forward. What do you think about that? And another one from EGStan account asking about, you know, how does it feel that they're reusing the map?

You know, will we see more people do this? I have a theory of what I think the third game in this trilogy is. Oh, yeah, me too. You do yours. My theory is that I think the third game in this trilogy is. Oh, yeah, me too. You do yours. My theory is that it is the first Zelda game. That we, right now, we are learning how to use, like, what's left over of Zonite. And that we're going to get the very, very origin story of all of this that we've been dancing around for the past two games. Like, get a Triforce cooking. And, yeah, yeah. origin story of all of this that we've been dancing around for the past two games like

get a triforce cooking and yeah yeah and that when we go back in time we're going to get to do the the original fight and there will be way way way more machine zonite options because it's like peak of this this kind of culture and its technology that's gotta be stuff that comes out of the body so like breath of this we call legend of zelda piss in the city piss of the city i think where it's going is i think they're gonna do it one more game with the same style in with the same map but it's gonna be like another 20 years in the future and way more developed. So like, legit cities

and technology and crazy shit like that would be, I'd be so fucking into that. I mean, it'll be eight years down the road. Switch 2.

Switch 2. Switch 2, fucking Tears of the Kingdom 2 with online multiplayer. Is it been zooming around? Okay, no, it's not good.

That sounds good. Hey, on the map thing, if I could just say my own piece for myself, fucking reuse a map every single day, I would have no way of knowing. I have absolutely no idea. You fucking reuse character names. I have somebody, it's the same guy that I hired to come into my brain after I

finished a season of reality TV on Netflix. He just comes and gives a big broom, so he's in all of the trash. Okay? Fucking reuse these maps all day long. I will never know. I would never know. There's always a Hatino village. How the fuck could you know that?

There's no way. Do you know how many things I've read that are like, go to where you remember this being from the, fuck off. There's no way. Luckily, the village hasn't changed location. Yeah, I've moved twice. Like, I have no idea. In my human life, right? I don't remember where anything is.

We use it all day long. It is cool seeing, like, you know, Tarrytown. And it's like, oh, Tarrytown's doing great. It is fun. Or the other cities who have fared not as well. I went to my old house in Hateno and I was like, okay, Zelda lives here, but do I live here? There's some- Interesting.

I do this with characters too. Every single one I walk up to and there's's like if there's a swell of music and they turn around slowly i start racking my brain like uh do i know this person or or not or what what and then they're like ah it's you it's good to see you again and i have to start thinking like ah yes it is totally really yeah absolutely it's been wow how long have you been man how you been how you been good dude so what happened did we get into some action or what happened? Y'all ready for some honorable mentions? Do you have any crystals?

Anything for me to whack or a bow? Okay, I gotta go. Honorable mentions. Let's kick them off. Justin, what else have you been enjoying in the world? You know what? I watched a great... Did I talk about Sisu last time?

I don't think so. Oh, yeah. Sisu is a movie, and it is in English. There are some other languages in it. I don't know if that matters or not, but it's just this kick ass flick

about right in Nazi occupied Europe where this gold miner this old gold miner cat he finds this huge deposit of gold and he's set upon by

a bunch of Nazis that realize that the war is basically over for them, but if they take his gold, then they'll be set after the war. And what they didn't know is that this old man is the meanest old man that's ever lived in his life. And they literally would send this guy into forests to hunt down Nazis, like in,

in the trees. Like this guy is the one guy you don't want to do this to. And it's just like hyper violent. The lead dude doesn't speak. He's just like beset by these Nazis. And it's huge, explosive, really wild action

sequences and just watching Nazis get owned is almost always fun and this has some unique ways of spinning it that are really cool. It's violent, it's pretty bloody, but it really

kicks ass. Sounds dope. And it's on, I watched it on Apple TV, but I don't know. And Sisu, by the way, S-I-S-U is the name. That is not the character. It is a reference to a Finnish word that has no direct translation,

but it's basically the determination and fury that you receive when you've lost everything. And that is what this character is all about. They call that John Wick in America. Yeah. It is from the same studio that brought you John Wick. Oh, there you go. So the same production team too, I think.

Fresh, how about you? No, it's mostly just Zelda whenever I can. Sad, isn't it? It's sad. sad uh is it sad sad there's a great big i mean i look in my son's eyes occasionally but largely zelda um yeah i can't think i mean i'm still still grooving on barry uh it's it it is said it says something up in the most recent episode that i'm very excited to see where it goes. Are you liking this final? We're not going to go into spoilers, but are you enjoying the final season? I'm a little suspect of it.

Wow. It hit a grim point, but this most recent episode really pulled it back from the brink for me. And now I could not be more. I mean, it's still incredible TV. It has just been a bit bleaker than I prefer. Yeah. be more i mean it's still incredible tv it is yeah it is incredibly weaker than uh i i prefer yeah it's really i'm not that but i texted griff i think yesterday and i was like hey man i'm struggling it's uh it's rough it's rough over here and this are you also the latest season uh yeah so uh i'm maybe one or two behind Griffin, but it is bleak.

Yeah, it's bleak. But the performances, I gotta say, I don't know the actress's name that plays Sally. Holy shit. So fucking good. I mean, everybody does great, but I think hers in particular is probably one of the more grounded characters,

and just the idea of having to do that in and around some of the most over-the-top but also like fucked up yeah it's really they also do like even though it is really dark they still bring in some like really hard laughs um that hit even harder because they the director of coda sean heater is so in it as um she has been brought on to direct a sort of Marvel stand-in called Mega Girls. And she says this is – she's talking to Sally. She said this movie is going to be really good. I think after people watch it, they're going to say, yeah, the same person definitely made Coda.

Sarah Goldberg is the actress's name, by the way uh secession's great too still bow yeah man anyway uh episode left i know if you like twilight zone episodes i watched an old movie called a matter of life and death that is absolutely bizarre it's by the archers uh production which made like black narcissus and a bunch of other famous stuff but here's where you should watch this even if you don't like fancy uh old movies it's the premise is that a british soldier is uh basically barreling to his death on a flaming plane uh his entire crew has died his best friend is in his arms his parachute is is punctured. And he's like, should I just burn alive or should I jump to my death into the waters below? And he finally gets his radio through to a woman who's the radio operator. She's an American.

And he's like, hey, I'm going to die. But I love you because I just need something to love. Okay, I'm going to jump now. And then he jumps. But he survives. Whoa. How did he do that? Well, cut to heaven.

And heaven's like, there's an accounting error. Say it up, Los Angeles. No. It is one of the more bonkers like Twilight Zone-y things. I think people will like it. Cool. I think we did it. Chris Point, you want to recap the games we talked about? Talked about Zelda.

That's the only game that we talked about. And then we talked about some movies like Sisu and A Matter of Life and Death, and we talked about a TV show called Barry on HBO Max. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Costell, Jim Beast 2009, and Zach Schaub. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties, and thank you for everyone else sharing the show. Writing reviews are doing your thing. Justin, what are we doing next week?

Well, buddy, yoga, fire. We're going to be talking about Street Fighter VI. yoga fire we're gonna be talking about Street Fighter 6 the war for what is the subtitle the battle for the crystals of the Cammy's in it Andy's in it? Cammy

oh I thought Andy from Toy Store I was getting pretty we'll talk about all the great guest characters next week but until then be sure to tune in next week for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!