The Besties - The Witcher Special

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Because the world has been captured by the magic of Geralt of Rivia, The Besties are diving into Netflix's The Witcher and also The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (newly released on Switch). Toss a coin to them! 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 want to get in the ground floor of a Russ Frushtick character, a co-creation. So like when the movie rights come in, like it'll be kind of a co-branded Justin McElroy's Russ Frushtick's character. I want a witcher, but it's just you. So what I'm suggesting is Russ Frushtick goes through the mutation. His eyes are yellowed and now Russ Frushtick goes through the mutation, his eyes are yellowed, and now Russ Frushtick is the Witcher. So it's not, we wouldn't come up with a fun name like Gerald Riviera or something like that. It's just like-

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's Rush, Rush, the Witcher. But he is a mutant Witcher, man. What are my powers? The Butcher of Brooklyn, Russ Frushtick. Right. What are my powers? He lives in Queens.

And I live in Queens. Well, I know, but butcher of Blaviken, butcher of Brooklyn. It's a lot better. The alliteration. And also, why would you butcher people where you live, Plant? Use your noggin. Your powers are the usual stuff, man. You look, your hog looks good in a bathtub.

You can jump 20 feet into the air. Werewolves are very afraid of you. I should mention that when I try to grow my hair long, it really just poofs out like giant. Perfect. I'm imagining it. I'm in the moment. Okay, and here we go.

Witcher, Witcher, you must help. The ghouls, they've taken over the village. Please, Witcher, we've taken a collection amongst the village and raised a bit the village. Please, Witcher, we've taken a collection amongst the village and raised a bit of coin. Please, Witcher, can you help? A little more. A little more money. What do you got? Whoa. That's really playing into some troubling stereotypes,

Witcher. Here's a few more crowns that we've collected from the village. Here you go, Witcher, can you help the terrible ghouls? Yeah, maybe, like, is there someone around that could, like, I don't know. I could probably find this out. There's only you. It's only me? Okay. There's just you, Witcher.

Where are your swords? Your famous two swords. No, it's heavy. I like the pack light. I've got, like, the camelback and that's really all I need. I just need hydration, really. You can actually see him popping allergy pills. Yeah, I should should mention is this are we in hay fever right a hay season right now is it is it ragweed floating around an allegra yeah

i've brewed you an allegra potion sire please take it with my compliments oh yeah no i i can't take this i already took a claritin, you're looking pretty good for a poke. Come into me bed, Witcher. Oh, okay. I fancy a poke with you, Witcher. Okay, that sounds good. No, would you take me to bed, Witcher? Witcher, now bed me in your famous bathtub.

Wow, this is so much pressure. Show me that mutant hog! My name is Justin McElroy, and I've got a bloody nose. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I've got two bloody swords. My name is Griffin McElroy and I've got two bloody swords. My name is Chris Plant and I know which witch is the best witch. My name is Russ Vrushnik and you should toss a coin to me. Welcome to the Besties where we celebrate video games in a all year round book club for video games. They should come up with a catchier way of saying it. Every week here on the besties,

we talk about a new game and explore the pros and cons. And we come up with lists of what's, and then we give it a fun factor rating at the end. And sometimes we have to do that with a Netflix show because it's fucking January y'all January. It's fine's fine but this the wit listen the witcher's hot right now i mean the witcher always yeah i don't know which are which are one which is pretty busted pretty pretty polygonal pretty like i think it's hard to get like horny for that like daikatana level sort of was he in a tub in that one he i think he's contractually obligated to get that to splash that hog at least once per

game uh so the witcher is what we're going to be talking about this week both the uh i guess are we going to limit it to the switch version of the witcher 3 is that the idea that it's newer no we should not do that because that's not what I played. Any bit of The Witcher 3, which is honestly like, I want to say, what? That came out like a week ago, right? It's a new release.

Yes, we have been removed from the timeline by Chrono Wizards. So yes, it came out last week. No, it's a, you know, there really is, it's kind of a slow period of the year and the thing, but like weirdly,

like my friends who are not uh capital t true capital g gamers are like talking about the witcher and it's like this is a because it's on netflix and it's it's a very strange season of all the crossover like franchises to to find mainstream appeal the witcher was uh approximately last on the fucking list it was definitely like i was very prepared for full-on disaster for the show like i thought there was no way they were going to be able to do it kind of similar to like the success of witcher 3 the wild hunt which was a game that came out after two okay rpgs but very dorky RPGs. And it turned into the biggest franchise that basically built an entire studio off of The Witcher 3.

So like, it does feel like there's something about this franchise that has like a little bit of magic in it. And I'm not just talking about Geralt's powers. To catch new listeners up to some besties lore in Witcher 3 lore, Freshdick's right. When Witcher 3 came out, I think a lot of people were surprised. Obviously there were hardcore fans new listeners up uh to some besties lore and witcher 3 lore fresh sticks right when witcher

3 came out i think a lot of people were surprised obviously there were hardcore fans of witcher 1 and witcher 2 but nobody really expected the kind of gta level of fandom that surrounded witcher 3 and four very otherwise intelligent guys really missed out on that moment i would say i don't think any of us were huge fans of witcher 3 when it came out i have a feeling that has to do with none of us being huge fantasy people is that am i misremembering no that's not it because i like i got very much into skyrim and like elder scrolls games so it's not that i think and we could talk about this as we like dive into like the game itself but i think witcher 3 does not start well and also does not introduce people to the game well like it's bad at tutorial it's bad at um balance in the early hours to the point where

i was getting like smoked and i didn't know why it is it is the it is ultimately the third game in a franchise that I think most people, you know, didn't play the first and second who got very into it. Wild Hunt completely blew away the first two entries in the franchise. So I think it's easy to forget that it is the third game in a franchise, but I think that a lot of those sort of growing pains are because of that. You think they were assuming people would play the other two and were like, we can make this hard? A lot of my problems with The Witcher 3, because i think i'm probably among the people in this call like the one who is the least into it are can probably be explained by the fact that it is still the third game in

the franchise and so like for me the characters don't necessarily resonate especially well but i'm missing two games worth of context uh for for all that stuff and that's honestly like why i've been kind of into the TV show is that it's not The Witcher 3, the TV show. It really takes its time to like, this almost this entire episode is about Unifer. Like, okay, hell yeah. I played a lot of The Witcher 3

and I think I just got to a point where there was a lot left of it. And I want to mainly celebrate this game. So I'm not, this is not digging it necessarily but it is sort of my explanation my excuse perhaps why i fell off of it about probably about midway through the game um there is so much to do in this game um like main quests and secondary quests and also witcher contracts and treasure hunts that and treasure hunts yes uh that and there's so many things to do in the game it's very easy to like get too deep into you know

chasing down certain quests that maybe don't like interest you but if your completion is like me you're like you know go ahead and pounding through the ones that are at your level and i think i just kind of got lost in the weeds a little bit um yeah i i i definitely had that vibe especially when you look at the map and it's like the map is just fill the things to do i i think for people maybe there are some people that are listening to this that like just saw the show and don't really understand like how you could necessarily make a game from based on what they saw on the show i don't know it could be sort of hard to grok i guess so maybe it makes sense for us to just like sort of describe the like main flow

of like how this game i think it's the most video game ass show i've ever seen it's worth it is every episode is a level like yeah i don't know what you're talking about three is not a level-based game that's what you know what I mean? No, you're exactly right. Yeah, it's a third-person action adventure game that is just Geralt and sometimes Ciri, his daughter. And Roach, the horse. Roach. Okay, here's a Witcher fucking,

here's a Witcher for you, okay? The Witcher 3 that encapsulates our problem. You have a horse named Roach. Okay, here's a Witcher fucking, here's a Witcher for you. Okay, The Witcher 3, that encapsulates our problem. You have a horse named Roach and there is a fairly decently sized character named Roche. Really? Guys, really?

This is how many different things are in this game? Anyway. Okay, I'm gonna take a swing at this. The Witcher 3 is fantasy, except for it's not set on Earth. It's set on a kind of lost planet and maybe a different dimension. And a long time ago, there was a dimensional catastrophe in which a whole bunch of dimensions pushed up against each other. What?

I didn't know people got things people humans uh beast from different dimensions got rattled off of their dimensions and they fell onto this shared dimension planet and that is where the game is set yes no i'm so much less interested in that now that's really that's the coolest about this game for me i mean okay i didn't realize they came from other dimensions i thought they were just elves and stuff walking around did you have you read like literally any of the lore books I am a nerd I've gisted them there's a lot of reading in that game there's a lot so much reading I just think it's cool for what it's worth that the game I think mimics the vibe of like Geralt bebopping and scatting around the map, taking quests and like just doing his thing

in like a very authentic way that is also represented in the show really cool, which is just like, hey, I'm gonna haggle for more money for this deal because all I wanna do is just like get some more money so I can like be a depressing Witcher guy. So yeah, it's an adventure game. You're going around helping people.

You have, it's interesting. He's not going around helping people uh you have it's interesting he's not the most one of i think the tough things for me about the witcher is that as you may have seen in the show like he doesn't have um emotions or at least they're very tamped down by the witcher mutation oh witchers let me say real quick witchers who doesn't know about okay witchers are mutants basically basically, that are made to fight monsters for money. The demons from the other dimensions, specifically. What? Right.

Yes. No, they were little boys, and they gave them, like, poison, and they turned the little boys into, like, monster killers. Yes. To fight the demons from the other dimension. Sorry, I thought you called them the demons. I was very confused. Oh, boy, they're not witches. Did you get that part, Fresh? They're not witches. Yeah, I thought you called them the demons. I was very confused. Oh, boy, they're not witches. Did you get that part, Fresh?

They're not witches. Yeah, I got that they're not witches. They hunt witches. They don't do witch, right? You're on board with this so far, Russ. Yeah, I'm down. Okay, I'm down. So we follow Geralt. In The Witcher 3,

you're following Geralt as he tries to track down Ciri because she's taken off and he senses that she's in danger. And for all the scope of the game, it does tie back to that idea of he's trying to track her down. Sorry, Russ, you look confused. Did you miss that part? No, no, I got that part.

It's good. Okay, good. Maybe I should turn off video. Maybe. But you're following uh you're following gerald as he searches for siri now when i decided for the second place you're like i'm gonna really focus on the main story i'm gonna really just focus on that and try to push through that you end up in a lot of like where did siri go and somebody's like i'll

tell you if you do five hours of things for me. Like, okay, fine. Yeah, okay. And then that person wants you to do something. And then the person that they told you to kill has another thing that they want you to do first. And then you can take care of that and then work your way back up to like finding out like, she's over there. Yeah, it's the mousetrap of main quests. Like it just keeps going.

Yeah, I agree. I don't think that's the way to play it. I think when Witcher 3 like exceeds its expectations it's when the other night i was i like i was like oh i need some money i'm gonna take on a witcher contract which i just pick off off the board and apparently some guy has gone missing and i'm gonna go find the guy which seems like a very straightforward like side quest that you would see in any rpg so I go and I go to find the guy and there's a dude that's basically been crushed by a rock. And then suddenly another rock comes flying out of the sky.

And then I'm, and I go and chase down like, who threw this rock? So I'm like tracking the, whatever. I'm tracking things through the ground and I eventually get to a lair. And in the lair is a hand-drawn crayon of Geralt with a large rock falling on him like you would see in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Apparently someone had this grand plot to drop a rock on me. Who was it?

It turns out there was this band of, like, monsters. There was a werewolf. There was a godling, a little, like, alien boy. There was an elf like this whole band of monsters came together and they were like we're gonna get that gerald and they had this whole back and forth of like are you a bad guy or aren't you and and gerald has to be like no no i've i've helped this person and that person that person and it just turned into something that was like turned into like a trial of a gerald which was

like way more than you would have expected from just like to find this guy that's the the best the best time that i have with this game is when it leans into the stuff that is cool about the concept of this world which is to say like this idea of you, the witchers in general, these mutated monster hunting guild members, and the way that they do what they do. The witcher contracts are my favorite part of the game where it's like, yeah, this woman just got murdered over by this well. Go check that out. And you go check that out and you have to kick on your witcher vision, which is like the Batman detective vision, and you look for clues. And then you follow those around until you say, oh, well, this is obviously done by this type of ghoul because it came out at this time of day.

And here's what I know in my glossary about what they're weak against. So I have to brew this type of potion and cast this spell to like bind them because that's what this monster is weak against. Like that, that is, that's cool. Like that makes me feel that is some role playing for me that I really enjoy it. For me, it is like I could not care less about like the main story and the characters as much as I maybe I just like Monster Hunter and that's why that's what I love so much about both the TV show and the video game is I feel like both in TV and video games for the past I don't know decade there was this obsession with like the main narrative

and every episode leads into the next and uh games have to be these very serious, big dramas that are just I don't know, I'm just like, I'm bored of the search for prestige and for like things being of a certain value. the Mandalorian where it's monster of the week. It's like Xena or Hercules. And you show up and you watch it. It's like oddly funny or oddly violent or horrific. And then you're done with it. And if you want to watch another one, sure. And if you want to save it for another day, great. And the video game is the first video game I played in, I don't know, forever,

where the side quests are effectively that. I could play the main quest. I've largely have avoided them because i enjoy that like okay i have 30 to 45 minutes at the end of the day especially when i'm like on the bike i can hop into one quest i can have that experience like fresh said and sometimes they're really funny there was one that i had where it's like I met a sorcerer who was holding ceremonies to revive the dead so that it can be purged from the world, but then his father comes back and accuses him of patricide. And decisions that I make in that end up affecting things that I make on later, none of which has to do with the main quest. And that's so fantastic. I wish more games i i just spent like a hundred or so hours

playing assassin's creed last year and while those side quests are fine i i don't remember any of them they're not yeah but i would say especially consequential gerald's great solution to that is i'll go burn your dad dead dad's body in the forest i've got this don't worry i'm a witcher i'm gonna go incinerate your dad okay i'll be back in a bit that's almost i got a fast travel point right next to your dead dad's body so i'll just go burn him real quick that's a solution for everything man like we've got mice in the grain bins i'm gonna go burn your dad i'm gonna go burn him i i would push back against and and i know this isn't exactly, the game for me has,

the Witcher senses I think are like so boring as a way of like getting you from, like literally y'all, a third of the quest is like, they drink a bunch of things, I'm going to follow their stink. And then there's like visible stink waves that you just like follow a stink trail to them and then kill them there. And it's like, there's a lot of like, I'm trail to them and then kill them there and it's like there's a lot of like i'm going to activate a witcher's inches and then like walk around and find a little glowing three glowing red things and that'll move me on to the next thing or follow this trail of stink uh from a to b i find that that stuff i want a charlie brown witcher crossover where it just

ends up being pig pen at the end of it damn it or a family or a family circus uh crossover where you follow just sort of the lines of the monsters they go all across the city and play baseball with their friends and then go to the hot dog store just i have a question for you how do you feel about the loot in this game and i'm not talking about the good loot i'm talking about finding like the cow milk goat milk or whatever or a ladle or a broken rake. I'm going to complain about this too. I go into the village because I get weighed down. Okay.

Imagine Geralt of Rivia, hero of the Butcher of Blaviken shows up. He's like, what's up, Geralt? Why are you hobbling? I'm carrying 12 maces. What? I'm carrying 12 rotten maces. I want to sell you for $10. I only have enough money to buy eight maces. i'm carrying 12 rotten maces i'm gonna sell you for ten dollars i only have enough money to buy eight maces okay fuck i guess i'll carry four maces with me in my pockets to the next

village the next guy could buy the rest of it also i have this huge bag of trash that i could break down into like like he's rooting through it Like here's some candlesticks. I stole from some lady. Here's a plate I found on the ground. Here's some raw meat that I eat. It's like a wild amount of trash that I have to go through to find if any of it can break down into like good materials. So I'm just like looking through trash. Like what could I make out of a ladle?

Gross doll, a broken ax. No, this is trash. What could I make out of a ladle? Gross doll. Broken axe. No, this is trash. I got 15 donkey spines. Anybody need these donkey spines? Yeah, it is very silly. But I think it is the side quests that make it such a special thing. It could be smoother.

I wish you could mark things as junk in your inventory and then just sell them when you got back to town. Because it's very boring. I just wish I knew what was junk. Even better. What if they just didn't have so much fucking shit in this game? This is like my number one pet peeve now. And I feel like I talked about it.

I've talked about it so many times on this show. This idea of just like, this game's going to have some dope ass, huge long tail RPG mechanics that we are going to sort of just like this game's gonna have some dope ass huge long tail rpg mechanics that we are going to sort of introduce in the game in these like wildly narrow increments of just like this sword gives you plus one percent versus ghouls and it's like is that good how much is that is that good do i want plus one percent versus ghouls do you need me to go into the menu and press five buttons so that my sword can be one percent better on ghouls one thing that

this uh that is kind of neat about the witcher once you understand it is the alchemy system so you can um get ingredients for potions that are just like lying around the ground or you collect from monsters and then you brew those potions this is not well explained in the game because i thought that you had to have those ingredients every time that you wanted to make those potions and it's really more like you brew it once and then automatically it is refilled with alcohol he just pours alcohol into all the bottles is like well that's like, well, that's it. He was a kid and he snuck into his parents' liquor cabinet and just refilled all the bottles while they were sleeping.

I didn't engage with that system at all because it seems so annoying to have to find all these ingredients constantly. But it's really like, once you brew it once, you've got it. And that's cool. I'm sorry, but what if the entire game, we're just experiencing it from the Witcher's point of view, but to the rest of the world, he's just a drunk, normal guy wandering around being like, blammo, hell potion. Like, oh my gosh, you drink eight dwarven spirits. That's just dwarven spirits, Garrett.

You're pouring them into potion bottles, but it's just pure grain alcohol. Can I say one more thing about the loot before we move on yes i love in the witcher 3 that monsters just have like their blood and brains and trash and you fight them a lot but men they're loaded to bear with all kinds of good sellable stuff so the witcher who in the narrative probably prefers to hunt monsters when jayman's behind those white locks i'm just looking for dudes like i gotta attack my bandits it's like fuck yeah look pinatas i'm gonna burn you guys to ash and take all your shit excellent this is way better than hunting monsters i make kids

convince me like does the monster have anything good i mean does he own like possessions or whatever because i prefer to kill men if I could. I want to tell you guys about the... Everybody's talking about the Switch version of this game. I want to tell you about the Griffin special actually good edition of The Witcher 3, which is to say, I just built this new PC and I was like, I'm going to play

Witcher 3 on PC because I bet it's going to look amazing. And it looks alright. But I've installed mods into it that fixes some of the terrible shit that this game does it has a fast travel system where you can bounce between these different waypoint signs right that you find in the world but you have to travel from the waypoint sign you can't just like open up your map and go to any fast travel point you have to go from fast travel point to fast travel point uh right, it's realistic. Right. It's so annoying. It sucks so bad. And you also have to open your

map to find where the sign is. Go to it. So you can go to the sign. So I installed a mod where you can just fast travel to any waypoint whenever you want. That's awesome. I got rid of weight restrictions. I got rid of weapon durability. Your weapons can, like, get broken and that's just a mechanic.

Games, stop. Nobody likes that. Nobody's nobody's like oops i played too much of the game and now my sword doesn't work anymore uh i made it so that oh all of your quest objectives show up on the map all at once not just the single one that you're tracking and it's when i started installing all these mods like i made a version of the game that was like way better for me to play and enjoy it and it also made me realize like wow there's a lot of really little annoying things about this game which is hard for me to like really hold that against it because it when was this game released like 2015

2016 so like I don't know maybe in the last four years we've sort of uh ironed out a lot of those a lot of those wrinkles but it is the best version of the game I've played the the Griffin special edition yeah I do want to mention though Griffin you haven't had the experience of following stink lines while pooping which you can't really do on pc so it's fair um i i uh i think the switch version is kind of a marvel that it runs and looks as good as it does i will say that i have had multiple like technical issues like several crashes just like crack the game crashing out uh getting stuck and stuff falling through the world um which like you kind of get it with something this expansive and they're shoving it on a platform or where it

is not a perfect fit but i did want to mention it's like it's very impressive but it it can be annoying yeah it's a little annoying i think for for as much time as i put in yeah i've probably had like five crashes in total yeah it's okay it's fine here's the deal the witcher 3 it turns out it's a great game people should give it a try on whatever especially if you saw the show and liked it and we should talk about that show wait i want to talk about the show but I want to say one more thing about The Witcher 3. The wildest thing about The Witcher 3, and I literally can't think of a game that's had a story like this.

It came out in 20... What did I just say? 2016? 2015 or 2016. And it has sold more in the first half of 2019 than it did in the first half of 2018. Like this old game is selling like more than it was before. Like the tail on this game is absolutely wild. Like there just aren't games like this. Yeah.

It's pretty bizarre. I can't think of a single time where this has ever happened because obviously whenever a movie or a TV show comes out that's based on a video game, it's terrible. So no one wants to play that game in previous times. But like in this case, yeah, wow, it's crazy. Let's talk about, let's take a break and then get into a discussion about the television show.

Yeah, yeah. The Witcher on Netflix is its, I guess i guess official name maybe not on netflix but the witcher now they call it the witcher on netflix that's what i call that's how he introduces himself in every scene on netflix on the witcher on netflix um where's these where's these mummies that's been causing such a problem around here so uh for people that don't know the first season the witcher is based primarily on the first, which is really a book of short stories written by an author's name who I am not going to attempt to pronounce. He's from Poland. But he wrote these short stories about this guy, Geralt, who walks around as a witcher and doing things.

And many of the episodes are directly pulled from short stories. So the story about the genie, the story about the Striga, the transformed princess in the castle that they have that huge, awesome fight. The Butcher of Blaviken, that whole situation is all pulled directly from this initial book, which takes place far before the events of the game that we just talked about i've never played witcher one or two so it did provide like actually some valuable context for me like introducing introducing first of all like huge important characters throughout the witcher game franchise like uh tris marigold and uh univer univer of vingerberg and siri and the eponymous witcher so like i found it valuable you know from

a coming at it from just having played the games you know what's actually interesting the first two games are not based on those stories either they actually take place after those stories as well the the way they justify it is they just gave gerald amnesia. And he was like, wait, you say I'm a witcher, but what is a witcher? Those are the first two games. Yeah, so it's all like trying to teach the audience what this world is. And there's some references, obviously,

to those previous events, but they are not retellings of the episodes in the show or what was in the books. So I have never engaged with the story of the games i played a good amount of two and a good amount of three a little bit of one it was those the early one the first one was rough um but the but i didn't really gauge the story i think it's probably the first time i heard someone say jennifer out loud because it it is just jennifer with a y and that's rough that's a challenge actually to

hear repeatedly and engage with the story i think my brain was just like no thanks i'll take a pass what's cool about the show is it actually won't make me want to play the game i got more background and like a better understanding of who this character was the emotion thing the previous times i played the game never clicked for me like it was never hit on nearly as much as it was in the show so i always thought he was just kind of like a stoic boring guy and maybe you can make the argument that he that he is but when you see it reflected in the lens of the show like you can really feel who the character is a bit better and it actually made like the game more interesting as a result because i feel like i had a better idea of who this guy was like how he would like handle

himself in different situations. I think the thing that disappoints me most about the show is that it still doesn't get into Yennefer's siblings Yash, Jeremy, and Justin. Boy that was a long way to walk

for that goof. Jacob. I do want to mention... I love that bit in Heavy Rain where he's like, Yay, son! Yay, son! Henry Cavill is a real fucking gamer. And I'm not going to listen to the three of you talk about how

he's not a real fucking gamer. He's just like you and me. He's a real gamer. You know what? I gotta give it to him. I think he's miserable as Superman. me he's a real gamer uh i you know what i gotta give it to him i think i think he's miserable as superman uh and i think he's i'm not gonna give anybody on that flick a pass miserable as superman uh but i think excellent in this show like he brings a level of like uh he has to be subdued right but he's bringing some like really interesting stuff like just below the surface of that that you can that you can pick up on that i think really makes him a lot more um a lot more compelling so charming um yeah

charming even and i actually found myself having watched the show being able to role play not as myself which i normally when i play uh games i role play as whatever myself, what I would do in that situation. But because I watched the show, I know like I feel like I have way more of a sense of his motivations. So I'll role play in the game, which is authentic to how he would act. Absolutely. to how he would act absolutely that is pretty funny because in the game you actually get to choose your romantic relationship but in the show it is very clear that there is one correct answer to that question and it is 100% Yennefer I really no doubt I think uh Geralt in the tv show beats the ever-loving shit out of Geralt in the game and it's because like oh well I think that and maybe I

just haven't played enough of The Witcher 3 because I I I've never wanted to like a game more and like bounced off it so like repeatedly and consistently as I do with with The Witcher 3 but I find the character of Geralt in in Witcher 3 to be sort of this like featureless so he says funny shit from time to time and cut scenes like he has a very wry like sense of humor but like he doesn't seem especially vulnerable ever and Witcher in the tv show like in the second episode he gets captured and essentially like is about to be killed and in that moment like Henry Cavill like kind of crushes it in in being this essentially still mutant superhero who is still like talking to this

bard who idolizes him like hey we're about to die like i i am not some demigod who cannot be hurt like this is fucking bad and this is this is it and in that moment i realized like oh wait like that's not something that's not a version of him that i ever ever saw in the video game in the video game it was just like you got werewolves okay I can kill those no problem I think the thing with the game too is it's kind of luck of the draw in terms of the dialogue options you choose and it's not always obvious and you can definitely fall into a series of scenarios that are that like i don't know like classic video game hero tough guy shtick but i was caught off guard how regularly it went the other direction where he was like such a weird goofball or just would say really bizarre things he's kind of just a weird dude you get this sense

that he uh didn't have the opportunity to be around normal people too often as a child. And now he's really struggling. Do you mean in the show or the game? Oh, I think that's in the game. I think it's definitely in the show. But I think in the game, it's a matter of whether or not you happen to choose the dialogue that leads you down that path. I think you could just as well choose the dialogue that goes in the power fantasy direction. And that's why the show has the advantages.

I think there's more authorial intent. I think that the reason that the humor in the game doesn't always register with me especially well is that it only contributes to this invulnerable, untouchable superhero, right? He's only able to joke in the face of like all of these extenuating circumstances because he knows there's no chance that it poses like any threat at least that's the way it hits for me have you seen him perform theater no okay so there's there is a

a scenario maybe like 15 20 hours in the game where you need to win back over the trust of a friend and it feels pretty life and death for that friend whether or not they decide to trust you so you decide to perform a show including co-writing it as either a comedy or a drama and then deciding if you perform in it as the lead and then if you do perform in it and as the lead trying to actually hit your lines and if you want to see a vulnerable witcher put him in front of a lively audience novigrad um that sounds great i'm just saying in the first episode of the tv show like this entire town turns against him and like reveals this extremely uh he's this emotionless like you know monster slayer but he is still like obviously like kind of scared of being alone and isolated and like the whole season is kind of about that and

that is just like i never got anything like that from the game and i wish i did if i did like i'd probably still be playing the game the the thing that i think the TV show also has a huge advantage of is with a character like this where it is a lot of subtlety, having a real human face to express emotion versus a video game character face goes a long way, especially when that human face is Henry Cavill's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful face. I really, really was blown away by the, I think the action on the show is super well handled. There's not a ton of it, but when it happens, the Witcher beats ass in a way that is so convincing and brutal and savage that like, there are fights that are just over in moments because he's such a brutal dude. And it's interesting because it's used so sparingly

that it gives this subtext to a lot of the scenes of like man i really hope that i don't have to be ass because if i do it will be so savage and complete that like i can't walk it back because i'm an absolute savage monster twice in the first three episodes he is faced with a fight one against a huge band of mercenaries and one against the striga where they just like kind of rear their heads and like inter you know initiative and he just looks at them and goes fuck and it works it's the best cuss it's the best cuss henry cavill's ever delivered both times yeah he's terrific at it it does create a little bit of dissonance in the game when you're like having to have meaningful conversations

and you're like, well, I don't want to fight these people. But then you run into a gang of like 30 bandits and you fucking flamethrower the lot of them. I'll murder all of them. Like, they're dead. Yeah. They've all got clubs. Give me all those vases.

Come here, boys. Let me eat your vases and your legs of chicken. There's no laws in the woods. I'll murder anybody in the woods. How do you guys still have raw meat? I barbecued you. I set you aflame with my hands. Hey, can we talk about spells real quick in the game?

Because we didn't. Do you guys use anything other than Igni, the fire spell? Because it's insane to do that. I only use shield. Yeah, I don't love the... We didn't get into... That's why you don't like the game. Yeah, maybe.

You just need to set everybody on fire. You know what I actually did for this playthrough that I would highly recommend? I set the difficulty down to the easiest level, which actually makes it feel a lot more like the TV show, for starters. I never lose. I'm the Witcher.

If I decide to fight you, I'm going to win. Another mod I got in Griffin's great version of the game is I turned off fall damage, because I can't tell you how many times I would just be running through the woods like, I smell a monster stink. I'm gonna, oops,

I fell 10 feet. Oops, now I'm a ragdoll on the ground. Yeah, you cannot fall very far, huh? You cannot fall very far except in my dope version

of the game. He has a sick spell. It's called Air Jordans and he can't be fucking hurt by fall damage. It's amazing. His kryptonite is ground. Yeah.

We should wrap up. It's weird. Before we had this conversation, I did not think that like my takeaway would be that I actually like the TV show. It's weird. Before we had this conversation, I did not think that my takeaway would be that I actually like the TV show. It's not a perfect TV show. It has a lot of the same problems that I had with the same kind of pulp, gritty fantasy

that I think Game of Thrones tried to pull off. That tone is actually not especially appealing to me, but despite that, weirdly, the characters are what made me enjoy the show, which is the opposite of the game. See, I actually disagree with you there because I don't think, I think this is pulp

where Game of Thrones isn't. Where like Game of Thrones, and this is not to take anything away from Game of Thrones, obviously it was hugely successful, but for me, what was nice as a sort of counterpoint to that is rather than get you to care,

and where I think a lot of fantasy shows have failed in the wake of Game of Thrones, is rather than trying to get you to care and where i think a lot of fantasy shows have failed in the wake of game of thrones is rather than trying to get you to care about an entire world and all the different warring factions in this world although that's definitely happening in the background of the witcher it says like what if we got you to care about three people like these are three people in this world that we want you to care about i think that's more much more manageable for this scale of a show it doesn't ask so much and i think they're also much more aware of how ridiculous it is like there's a man with a goat face and there's something very funny about that and they sort of

lean into that idea um rather than moving away from it actually reminds me of buffy in terms of tone than it does game of thrones but where's that dong it's just it's the tv show it's just like it's just where's that where's the where's the henry camper is naked in half of the episodes and the mostly we got some henry cavill most of the women are naked in each episode and we don't even get one henry henry cavill dong it's uh it's a it's cruel. Season 2. Season 2. Let's go for it. Hashtag drop the dong. Season 2. It's coming. Drop the dong. Drop the dong, Superman. Do we have tweets

or mail or what's up? From Will Fulton, the ending of Wild Hunt and how series actions are informed by a few key decisions he made throughout the game really stuck with me as one of the most successful RPG endings of the last decade for giving a sense of meaningful agency and investment within a linear narrative i agree with

that i i mean as somebody who had trouble getting into a lot of bioware games i'm really impressed how often it feels like decisions i'm making in one quest inform the next and i don't know if that's a side of hand but it feels very true from liz lambert the witcher netflix series was what made me want to restart the witcher 3 henry cavill was also not even a blip on my radar until that show came out leave it to a female showrunner to make everything about this property appealing to people like me i can't imagine why she uh included a gift of Henry Cavill in a bathtub. It's good. Drop the dong.

Sean said, talking about the Witcher three, which Sean dove into after the Netflix show, I found the soundscape most impressive walking through Novigrad. Each area only has maybe a dozen people standing around, but the soundscape of the crowd murmuring and talking sounds like there's hundreds of people around it really makes the place you're exploring feel real and lived in and filled with all kinds of people it's trying to make me uh regret uh playing the game muted on the toilet listening to blank check

i feel like i might have missed a little bit of the soundscape doing that i mean i got some of it for sure but like see my my modded version of the game is all like arena rock uh soundtrack there's fucking like chemical brothers on there every time gerald goes downstairs it plays rock and roll part two um witcher haiku from chance really like the books want to get into the games, there is also Gwent. That haiku talks more about Gwent than we did in our 15-minute segment. It's okay. I have this from, I believe the name is pronounced

Dandan Stephanidis. I love that since new folks have decided to play the games for the first time, it's like a mini version of when everyone fell in love with Lord of the Rings. I get to geek out with a whole new branch of people also i haven't read the book so i get to

be that person for someone else too oh cool this is from aiden the only way i could successfully kill anyone without dying in the witcher 3 was swinging wildly as i flew past on the horse at 90 miles an hour most fights took me 20 minutes or more i think i would have to start over and redo the combat tutorial if i ever wanted to finish the game so instead i'm just waiting for cyberpunk hopefully it also has horses a little bit longer yeah it actually says in witcher's glossary it says like the werewolf is weak to silver this uh wolf's bane potion or if you ride past it at 90 miles an hour on your horse and you swing wildly at it 50 times,

that will also get you there most of the time. Should we jump into Honorable Mentions? Yes. Yes, for sure. I just played through all of, because they have patched it once again on Switch, bloodstained, subtitle, subtitle, subtitle. It's almost like Symphony of the Night,

but it's not exactly that. I have wanted to play this game for a long time, but I've been kind of waiting. I bought it day one on Switch, and it had terrible performance issues, and I didn't feel like buying it on another platform because the developers said that they were working on a patch to get it going. They've patched it like four or five times, and finally last week they put out a patch for Switch that eliminates a lot of the input lag and sort of just general lag that made it such an unpleasant thing to play now it's really good to play and holy shit i like this game uh it is

essentially symphony of the night but like uh you know with a with a scale that is truly staggering like and i'm talking about in terms of like a mechanics scale like there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these different powers to find and weapons to find uh and that is like always my favorite part of the like Castlevania post Symphony of the Night games is just all of the wild loadouts that you can build uh having shards which are essentially spells that you can like uh level up in all of these different ways. There's a cooking system that is actually meaningful where you go out and you're like, fuck yeah, that cow monster just dropped some beast milk. Now I can go and make some flan to

increase my health permanently. It is so mechanics rich and each of them is actually meaningful in a way that I just devoured that game over the course of like a weekend. I think it's absolutely great. Yeah. I'm definitely jumping into that next after I finished Witcher. And also like, it is great that they finally like fulfilled the promise of making, obviously it should have worked a day one, but I think that's a problem that a lot of switch ports have of just like they come out and they just do not run nearly as well as they do on other platforms. and other developers are just like well that's too bad anyway next game uh and they have put in the work to make it work

and that's rad i have been getting back into a game called cribbage with grandpa and i can't imagine this was a big hit at the time sorry we should clarify it's a video game okay yeah sorry yeah not a cribbage with my grandpa this is like a couple years old it's on the app store i think it's on most mobile platforms um and uh so basically uh it's a game where you play cribbage with your grandpa get to make your own grandpa customize it i customize it to look like my great-grandpa Wabi, who was very into card games. There's a nice soundscape in the back, and it very gradually and gently,

with a really nice aesthetic, teaches you the rules of cribbage, which is interesting because it wasn't a game I had any awareness of. I think a lot of people will enter into the game like that, and they've built the most welcoming, friendly, kindly like in the game to the point where like there's um it's a it's a game where scoring plays a factor in different hands

so you have to count your own score right and sometimes if you miss something that you could have counted your grandpa will be like i'm not sure you got everything did you get all your points in that round and you can set the difficulty of the grandpas so they will like help you or not help you but I had no awareness of this game and like it is one of those games that I love

where like you can play a game and actually like learn a skill and I know this skill is just another game but still like it was a really cool way to learn and um i i really dig it uh the game i have i i haven't played i'll just be honest with you but i want to mention it because i think a lot of listeners will enjoy it i played it you played it uh yeah tem tem uh it is effectively pokemon the mmo it's not effectively pokemon chris it's fucking pokemon like they just were like what if we made pokemon and pokemon was like is effectively Pokemon the MMO? It's not effectively Pokemon, Chris.

It's fucking Pokemon. Like they just were like, what if we made Pokemon? And Pokemon was like, hey, don't do that. We make Pokemon. But they're like, yeah, but what if we also made Pokemon? But it's an MMO. It sounds really good. And I think people will enjoy it.

Honestly, I'm just- I downloaded it yesterday and turned it on and it put me in a queue where I was number 9900, and I was like, I'll come back. I played some this morning, though, and it's neat. Nice. I didn't really play with much or any games this week, but I do know someone who did, if you guys don't mind. Oh, my gosh.

Who's here? Hey, man. It's me, the Mitcher. Okay. What's up, dogs? Hey, Mitcher. What up? Mitcher, what is that you're wearing?

You can call me the Mitcher. Hey, the Mitcher. You guys need any fool's parsley or green mold up in here? So you're just sort of a party version of the Witcher than the Mitcher? Well, look, the Witcher, you know, people talk about him. They say he travels the world fighting monsters. But sometimes you just want to chill with the Mitcher. Am I right?

Yeah, the Mitcher. How long did it take you to grow that rat tail that seems to be tucked into the back of your pants? Yeah, it just keeps going, man. Sometimes I loop it around my head like a little headband. People like it. I heard a rumor, the mentor, that the rat tail is the source of your powers. Don't tell people that, man. That's how I get it.

That's how I get my powers. Now, granted, my powers are just snacking, mostly. Yeah. Can't do much else. We have a rundown where we list all the things that will happen in the episode, and we list our honorable mentions. And Russ wrote PS4 back button attachment. Oh, I used it.

I used the PS4 back button. Oh, okay, so it's delivered through. Yeah, tell us about the back button attachment. Oh, man, so check it. use the ps4 back button oh okay so it's delivered through oh man so check it here the witcher has you know he has his normal ps4 controller

but the mitcher man he can't always hold the controller and hit the triggers at the same time so he's all about using this back button attachment thing it's like really groovy man let me just tell you what is it so this is it adds these buttons to the normal ps4 control and you could just like tap them on the back rather than having to use the top buttons you could keep

your hands on the analog sticks and just like be like snacking away and not have to worry about those top triggers. This is so weird. When I rub this apple bong like a genie lamp, the Witcher seems to be dissipating into smoke. The Witcher? Are you talking about the Witcher? Or are you talking about the Witcher?

Chris, you confused the Witcher and the Mitcher again. Oh, there. I got the Mitcher back in my apple balling bag, guys. If you need any ergot seeds or allspice fruit, you know who to come to. It's the Mitcher. Thanks, the Mitcher. Thank you for, against all odds, listening to the besties.

Next week, we'll be discussing Kentucky Route Zero. So if you want to share any thoughts about that long-running franchise, how many times you've had to restart it from the beginning to remind yourself what's happening. Act 5 is out now or does it come out next week? What's the actual launch date for it? Coming out very soon.

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besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. the besties is a spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!