The Besties - You'll Never See Persona 5 Tactica Comin'

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Persona 5 has been reborn! For like the millionth time. For this iteration, we've got the XCOM-meets-JRPG fusion of Persona 5 Tactica. Let's find out how great these two great flavors taste together!Also discussed: Final Fantasy XIV, Pokeclicker, Good Omens Season 2, Halls of Torment, Our Flag Means Death Season 2, GUBBINS, A Haunting in Venice, NapoleonSubscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! 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!

You know, recently I was watching a video of when pizza was introduced to Canada. You know. We have video of that. Well, there was an advertisement apparently that ran in Canada to introduce the idea of pizza in the mid-1950s. And I couldn't help but notice that the woman pitching this, I don't know if this is still the case, but the woman that was like explaining what pizza is called it a pizzeria. Pizzeria, called it a pizzeria. Pizzeria? Instead of a pizzeria.

And it made me think that maybe pizzeria is the preferred pronunciation and we should all adopt that. Wow. This is one of your wilder intro schemes. Yeah. The idea that you thought this was... And can I tell you something?

It's sending me and Justin because this is a Travis McElroy intro. This is, I thought I could trust you, Russ. I thought that if you started launching into a cold open, you had, I mean, anything, man. Anything at all. And here you have broken my heart, Russ. Usually you bring the heat where it's like I ate a big egg sandwich on the subway and it made me fart so hard that everyone passed out. Something like that. That's a good one.

Let me try this. So I've noticed my song is stronger than me. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good shit. But this was, in Canada, they say pizzeria wrong in the 1950s. And coming from you too,

with no self-awareness whatsoever about mispronouncing Italian words. Yeah. None of it. I'm just saying, pizzeria is half diarrhea and maybe like that's not the way to go pizzeria is half diarrhea right the second half is just diarrhea that's good i can take it back you're playing 4d holo chess over here the way he just rubbed that back around man dang layers upon layers onions inside onions

that was a goading strike you you stepped back to give me and justin room to come into your fucking kill box. It's half tired. My name is Justin McElroy and I did the best game of the week. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and you'll never see it coming. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Froschig and I know the best game of the week. Hello and welcome to The Besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game club, and just by listening, my friend, you have become a member.

Congratulations and welcome to our illustrious ranks. This week, we're going to talk about Persona 5 Tactica. But what's that? Persona 5 Tactica is a little bit of Persona with a little bit of, let's say, XCOM for people who've been listening to this show. And I think this might be the end of Persona 5. I think it might be time for it to end. And I think we should talk more about it after the break. First off, I do want to say,

I think they are making a mobile game. I think it's Persona X, and it's a mobile game based on persona five so i do think we still have i do think those wizards at atlas are still cranking away on this one i i like persona five are we are we are we in the front of the show or the end of the show where where are we do you want it to be the end are Are you saying that this is the beginning of the show? You said something so challenging as part of your introduction that I think that we're all a little bit stymied. I do want to find out what you mean by this should be the end of Persona 5.

But if I am not aware of Persona 5. Just imagine that universe. What am I bringing to this game? What do I have here? Well, who finished Persona 5? I think that's Griffin. Me twice. Regular and royal.

How would you summarize Persona 5? Sure, okay, yeah. Let's just take a deep cleansing breath and start over. Okay, okay. Persona, y'all probably know it. RPG series running a long time. Half sort of life dating sim, half dungeon divey RPG. You collect personas and you can combine them to create new ones.

And you go through a calendar year and it fucking rules. It's my favorite shit ever. Persona 5 came out, Jesus Christ, what? Like 10 years ago now seven i think it was seven years ago yeah okay that's still pretty outrageous uh it was 2016 is when the original one came out um so yeah seven years persona 5 yeah um jeez i know that is that shit is wild uh it is the latest sort of core entry into the franchise. Smash hit success. They made a sort of, as they do with this franchise,

a upgraded version called Persona 5 Royal. That was much better in my opinion. And I adore that game. And they do this thing with this franchise where they do just shit tons of spinoffs instead of releasing more core entries into the series with any amount of regularity. We've had— Let me be clear. I enjoy.

I think that's a great thing. It's just at a certain point, as we experienced with Persona 4, you get to, I need something new. And what we've had so far is we've had Dancing in Starlight, which is a dancing game. We've had Strikers, which is a beat-em-up type of actual game. Dynasty Warriors, yeah. We've had Royal, of course, which is the, here's the true version of the game.

And we've also had, if you count it persona q2 new cinema labyrinth which is a dungeon crawler role-playing game but the main character of persona 5 is the star of the box art so i think we should count that uh we also do have persona 5 the phantom x which is the upcoming mobile game so Yes. So, like, this is, Joker was also in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. This is what they do. They fucking release a core entry into the games. They release an upgraded version of it, and then they do a million spinoffs. Some of them are great.

I actually love the rhythm games. I think they're fantastic. Oh, it's also worth mentioning that next year, I believe in January, we're getting the Persona 3 remake, which looks fantastic. That does look like it's going to scratch the itch for a big entry into the core series that I've wanted for so long. This is a new sort of form for these spinoffs to take. It is a strategy game very much inspired by x-com i would say a cover based uh uh you know troop placement based affair um i think oh you know uh um what was the mario mario and rabbits definitely has a lot of dna here as a lot of that dna here which is good

because i played 45 minutes of persona 5 so like so I didn't really know any of these characters. That's wild. But I was able to, like, I mean, thankfully a lot of them get kidnapped in the first five minutes. So it was like, oh, whatever. It was just the cat and the main guy. So I'm cool.

We have to drill down on that because this game takes place between, I believe, like the second and third semesters of the story of persona 5 they do not they they very notably don't introduce the characters of this game yeah yeah you know here's the gang you know them you love them you know it's like the little rascals you kind of get the gist based on like their initial like lines what their deal is more or less. There's some of the persona DNA here specifically. I think what they do with the,

you know, collectible personas is very cool. That system is still in the game. You can combine them and there's like skill inheritance. And then you can also equip them to every party member. Usually that is just reserved for the protagonist of the series. You have like one who you can kind of customize that. Well, you can really do that with any any character in this game.

And that's very, very cool. And I think it lends itself to the sort of strategy formula that that this game goes for. Yeah, I look, I can't really speak to the narrative part of this because again, I don't have any frame of reference. Uh, I didn't find it super engaging, but I'm sure fans of persona might be excited to like rescue. I don't know. And someone, one of the characters on, on, thank you. Um, but I did actually find the combat to be like very fucking fun, like a lot of fun.

And I was not expecting that. They really, I think they took a lot of lessons from games like XCOM, from games like Mario Rabbids and made something that was, um, not super stat heavy and more focused on just like maneuvering and like knocking people out of cover and then knocking them down and and so on and so forth which is well still feeling like persona 5 which is i think like the

impressive bit they it's like a really good board game adaptation almost where it's like what are the core components that we like from persona oh well the like the plus one the extra action that you get here in the traditional game, you get here where you knock characters down, you can get an extra attack in. And I put in a few hours, I'm curious how this goes for people who made it, you know, much deeper into the game. But there is this cool rhythm of moving around the battlefield, knocking, like going behind cover, pushing people with melee attacks out of their own cover,

then you're getting a plus one attack on them. And then with them exposed suddenly out in the open, you know, swarming them with all the other characters that you have kind of waiting for the attack. Do you know what this game kind of reminded me of? The tactics of this game reminded me a lot of croquet. Croquet is all about hitting your balls

into other balls to get extra shots to like sort of leapfrog down the course. That is sort of what you do. You have three, you only have three characters you play as at a time, which really, really I enjoy. Love that. Because it does make it a lot more, you know, you can look at the battlefield

and kind of start formulating a battle plan much easier than you can in like a fire emblem. This is obviously going for a much different thing, but it is all about how can I find weaknesses in the enemy's like placement on the board, get them out in the open, get a critical attack. If you get an attack, any attack against an enemy who is not in cover is a critical attack. It'll knock their ass down and then that character gets an extra move. So now all of a sudden it's like, I can do that. And then this character can get to this other enemy, knock them out of cover so that the next guy can run up and get an extra attack.

And then all of that culminates in what is called a triple threat attack, which is my favorite shit in this whole game, which is if you can knock an enemy down and then get them between your three characters in a sort of triangle you will execute uh one of the like super stylish super strong all-out attacks from persona 5 on every character uh in between your three characters that's maybe hard to understand but just on paper you just have this imaginary triangle between your three characters at all times and if you can get an enemy who's been knocked down in it you can just fuck up the whole map and that is like sick i think that is a fantastic explanation of this game i do want to say with the croquet comparison as someone who has played a a significant amount of croquet really with me

yeah with griffin this is a this comparison makes a lot of sense because when Griffin, the second the croquet game starts, he puts on his persona mask. He is not Griffin anymore. And those tactics that he's talking about, there's no space for friends. Everybody is just a thing that can be knocked down, bloodied in pursuit of greatness. It is a fierce, fierce game playing croquet with griffin there it is it is i would say the the campaign of this game maybe like eight eight or nine hours into it um it's not that difficult like it is not that hard to knock an enemy down and then wipe out the entire board by putting them inside of your triangle of death there are however these side missions that you can go on where you can earn the like upgrade

currency for each of the individual characters which is like pretty important uh that have like super tight uh like uh rules in them like get across this whole map without taking any damage or get across this whole map in a single turn so So now it is all about, okay, well, okay, if I knock that enemy down with this guy, I can leapfrog off with this guy. And that stuff becomes like, it then switches into like puzzle mode of like, okay, how can I use the rules of this game and these, you know, a handful of characters specific abilities to achieve the like specific requirements of of these levels those are i really either it loved them found them very enjoyable or like super super super punishing there were a few that i just bailed on because i could not wrap my mind around

how to like find the specific solution that they wanted but i i enjoyed having that sort of alternate mode of uh of of playing the game. I'm curious how you guys felt about the like meta hub game, you know, because you think about comparisons to like Fire Emblem where there's a hub area and you're like talking to everyone, stuff like that. Obviously there is some more of a menu-based hub area in this where you can, you know, organize your team

and talk to people and stuff like that but it is definitely lighter i felt like i was kind of missing that i'm building up a hub element in this it felt a little light to me i don't know how you guys i mean it it it doesn't hit for me at all like the the highs of of like what persona achieves in its other half it's like life sim half is like you know the characters are there and they sound the same as they did in the core game but like the story is is not good for me um and it is i mean there's a lot of thought that went into like the persona system that i described right and there is virtually zero thought that goes into most other sort of elements of building out your characters uh like you get skill points that you invest into a tree and that is how you like unlock new attacks and passive boosts and that's all well and good but then there's also like a weapon shop

that's just like spend money to get the one that has a higher number and there's not there's like nothing else to it than that there's a way that there this game has the wildest bit of like unnecessary mythology building where they way over explain why they have guns there's like a whole thing about well there wouldn't be guns here but maybe if we dream the guns into possibility yeah i can i can remanufacture some of the raw material just raw material it's a gun store you get it and then right after this they're like

how do you make a persona I don't know you just kind of make it you have one too and she's like can I try now and it's very embarrassing for her it seems like there should be a lot more to it than that some sort of ritual

you know kids used to shoot themselves to get their persona but they don't bring that up now they certainly don't in the one the teaching about them uh the thing that i noticed and again this is coming from someone who's like played a little bit of persona games but i do feel like contrast is very important in the way that like contrast is important in alan wake where you have the like real world slash yeah you do lose that a little bit this is all a lot more fantasy yeah lose that like the being able to go to the real world and do stuff as mundane as like have ramen or whatever and not even like i understand why they like trimmed back all the dating stuff like

i get it sure from a whatever scope of the development standpoint but even having just levels that existed more in the real world would have been or like missions would have been yeah interesting it is a huge piece of what makes persona special that not a not a joke pretty much none of the spin-off games have ever been able to accomplish which is which is super frustrating like this is a good strategy game i think a lot i played it on switch by the way which it's it's on everything uh it is great on switch it's perfect on switch yeah i put it on steam deck and it worked very well to the point where i was like oh this would definitely run really well on switch i remember mario rabbids the second one did not run super great on switch it kind of

struggled but this is actually even more simple from a visual standpoint than that was yeah i it to a degree where i was surprised it was on other platforms it seems like a switch game because it like the presentation is very sort of like uh you know stylized chibi kind of art uh which is not you know the most um demanding i would say uh or good uh the music's fucking fantastic it's it's it's a lot like all the other spinoffs where the presentation's great it has a lot of the same vibes as persona and it is like very thoughtful in how it uh how it kind of like uses the persona world for this new genre of a video game. Right.

But it doesn't get at the beating heart of what makes the core game special, which is like care, like caring a lot, a lot, a lot about these characters and getting very into the day to day, you know, life stuff. So that by the time you do get into a dungeon,

you are not only invested in the character sort of narratively you are deeply invested in them mechanically too of like wow i hope i spent my time right in the real world so that i can be strong enough to face this now um i was just i was just remembering uh there's a moment earlier in this where like a blue door shows up and i was like what the fuck is that blue door and you go in and and there's like a blue door shows up and I was like, what the fuck is that blue door? And you go in and there's like a girl in there and I was like, I don't know who this is. It is wild that you didn't play more than 45 minutes of Persona.

Do you not? I spent a lot of that lost in the subway. Wait, you played the other Personas though, right? No, like maybe two hours of Persona 4. Yeah, freshest in a Persona guy. Wow, man. That's a lot of reading. I get it. A lot of reading. No. Yeah, freshest in a Persona guy. Wow, man. That's a lot of reading. I get it.

A lot of reading. No, listen, I'm with you. I have a really weird relationship with this series where I think I don't know if I've ever actually finished one. I enjoy my time with them, and then I don't have it in me to pull in the hours to beat it, to see it through. So I like it more in theory than I do,

I guess, in practice. I will say this, though. Of the combat that I have played in Persona games, I actually prefer this combat more just because I like tactics games more than I do turn-based RPGs. Man, you should give Persona 5 Royal a try. It is the most fun JRPG combat I've ever played in a game.

Yeah. I will go. I like Persona 4 as a game better, but I think that just playing Persona 5 is super duper fun. And playing this game is super duper fun too. But I also don't know if I'm going to... This has been such a good and special year for video games. I feel like a game really needs to

hit on all fronts for me in order for me to like really stick with it uh just in the current landscape of what could be taking up my time and you know this one is very fun to play but you know i feel like i have reached the end of my time with it because i don't really the story is not pulling me along the characters are not pulling me along. The characters are not pulling me along. There's really not much else pulling me along aside from the fact that like it is fun to knock dudes down and make triangles of fire around them. Can I ask, and I know this is a little bit of an unfair comparison because Griffin's in a different situation having to talk about games here. And I don't mean, I mean this not as like a challenge but as like a place to discuss. not as like a challenge but as like a a place to discuss like if this griffin beat persona 5 twice if this game is not for griffin you know what i mean like and i don't mean that like is it is it like a mistimed like is this is this as somebody who's kind of on the outside of this is

it like a is it like plant said where it's like maybe one of these too many i mean what do you think i i mean you know what i'm saying like i don't know i know hostile it's like if griffin doesn't want to play it who does well i think there's a lot of people who are so fucking into this world that they love any opportunity they get to spend with these these characters right like there's a there is a i'm not that type of fan with any media franchise really but that and that's not a judgment on folks who who are but like sure right be uh i i i it needs to be more than just like you already love these guys so here's an here's another one with them it's like i need to fall more in love with these guys i need there to be more stuff about these guys or or new guys there's new characters in this game too who are

pretty great but that you don't get a whole lot of uh time with them compared to what you get in a persona game uh but i do think that there is a a big group of people in the in the fandom like myself who are just like this is it's neat that we get all these chances to play these different games but like persona 6 would also be pretty fucking cool like that is what i am chomping at the bit for is the the next one of of the the things that i adore have we heard anything about when if that when does that happen i mean there's like leaks and shit. I would not be surprised if like, you know, within the next year we get some sort of thing, some sort of announcement. There's also metaphor re-fantasio, which I'm serious. This is actually the real game.

You made that one up, though. You made that one up. No. So it's called metaphor re-fantas, and it's Pizzeria. And it is... Zeria. Pizzeria. It's Atlas' new game.

They made a new studio that is a branch off of the P studio, not to be confused with the P organ. And it is, yeah, it's something entirely new. But a lot of the Persona people are involved in that. So I don't know. It looks good. It looks cool. It looks sick, yeah.

The Persona 3 remake looks like that is going to be what I want. I like Persona 3 a lot, and I'm excited for the opportunity to go back and do it. back and do it but it's like it is it is hard to play a game like this that is good not you know game changingly great and not feel like well there isn't that you guys do know how to make that game though you guys do know how to make that that that experience it's like the breath of the wild uh muzu game whatever those were called hyrule warriors or whatever it is like because it has the characters it has the like world that you love from breath of the wild but obviously it's not on the level of breath of the wild yeah um i here i would add a caveat by saying two things one i was kind of enjoying myself like once i was like i don't give a fuck about this story i don't know any of these

characters i was kind of enjoying myself just like skipping through dialogue and just doing missions i was like legit digging that and thing too it's coming to game pass and like i feel like that is a pretty decent approach if you happen to be subscribed to game pass to just like try it out without it being like a huge investment for you yeah i think it's actually encouraging that the person who clicked the most with this is the person who's played the least persona yeah okay and that's and that's what makes me think like if this was not a persona game right if this was like an original ip yeah that had this kind of like tactical battle but with new characters that it actually like gave a shit about introducing and making you care about and not just assuming like you already love

these guys i think it'd be a better game like i think that maybe this game suffers for the assumption that this game suffers for like spin-off syndrome yeah and and uh that is that that's a weird thing to to be true because there's a lot about the persona dna that is here that is cool um but but like storytelling and character development is not one of them and you know i've i've heard it's like a 30-hour game or something like that. That's a long time to ask people to just kind of ride with folks that they don't, you know. I mean, they've never had trouble asking people to give a lot of time. That hasn't been a problem for the series.

Excellent. Well, that is Persona 5 Tactica. But that is not the only game that we're going to be discussing today. Don't fool yourself. We got a lot more, and it's coming up for you right after the break. Hey, welcome back, everybody. I want to talk about Call of Duty. And I don't, let me be clear,

I don't want to talk about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, the new game that is out. I don't even know if any of us have played that game. I didn't even to talk about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, the new game that is out. I don't even know if any of us have played that game. I didn't even know it was happening. I have watched a fair amount of it because it's wild. The strap a bomb to your chest on the middle of a transcontinental flight and then have you commit a terrorist act against Will. That happens in the game? That's in the game oh my god it's uh and don't worry you have a choice so you can try to hide behind civilians in their seats they well they don't get shot because for whatever reason

they didn't add in the ability for people to get shot as machine guns are don't again i'm getting sucked into the vortex here the point is it's it's not good from all accounts it's um it's metacritic when fresh and i checked i think was 51 yeah it's the lowest rated call of duty game in the history of the franchise not counting like the spin-offs and stuff but like of the core main games. Yeah. So it's bad. At the same time, a bunch of things are happening. Call of Duty Warzone is still dominant. It's making a lot of money. They seem to have realized they needed to transition in some way.

Call of Duty has a long history of trying other experiments like that, usually to lesser effect. And there's also the fact that Microsoft just acquired Activision. So I wanted to throw to you all to see where do you think Call of Duty can go from here or where it should go from here? Because this feels like a real inflection point. I don't fucking know, man. Yeah, I don't know, man.

I mean, you know it's not gonna die because obviously war zone is still successful they'll continue doing that right yeah it's i i don't know how one continues to make campaigns yeah that's the larger question yeah so yeah like yeah my my theory about campaigns is after this, it feels very bleak. And it feels like an albatross of them having to develop these campaigns, knowing that they're going to end up rushing them at the end, knowing it will bring down their scores, quite frankly. Like, would this game have a better score if they just hadn't attached a campaign to it at all? But, hey, Game Pass means Microsoft just needs a bunch of new games every month that they can promote. And being able to promote two Call of Duty releases every year or does become a multiplayer game with really larded up with DLC and other expenses. And then Call of Duty single player becomes something that is

yeah, standalone, four to six hour game that we largely get through Game Pass. Also, Microsoft has quite a few developers, you know, they've been buying them up for a while. And they could start spreading this across other teams who could try slightly different things versus the same, you know, three to four teams have been really just, you know, stuck on this game for so long. I have to imagine people on this team would Call of Duty people would probably love to make a Halo game and Halo people would probably love to make a Halo game, and Halo people would probably love to make a Call of Duty game at this point.

What you just described, though, is more or less what they've been doing, which is like a four to six hour campaign is actually kind of long these days for Call of Duty campaigns. I think they are going to scale way back to the point where, first of all, I don't think they'll be to scale way back to the point where first of all i don't think

they'll be separate games because i think the campaigns are in some way just exist as a gateway to what makes them the real dollars which are which is warzone and monetization there but if they do exist i think they will exist in like here's two very action-packed, splashy levels that act as like a prologue to whatever the new map is in Warzone. And that is like the advertisement to get people in the door, but it is very clearly not something

that would be long enough to even think about reviewing because it is so light in terms of actual content. I agree with you, but for a different purpose. I think warzone sells itself you don't need this at all so i in that case like just they wouldn't need to make it

yeah but i do agree that the campaign for call of duty is a good marketing system and that is why i think yes having these on game pass and every now and then is that going to like move a lot of units to sell no but but it's call of duty the sort of thing that gets people to subscribe to game pass yeah i do think it is and i i think that that's the get the hook it is marketing for a new thing um but yeah i don't know but justin what do you think i'm sorry that you used to play all the campaigns and then I would dabble with the multiplayer, but I like the Jerry Bruckheimer-ness of dashing through a four-hour campaign

with all the- It's actually Jeremy Bruckheimer. A lot of people get that wrong. All the special effects, everything, I dig. I will say, I think there's two separate issues here. First, for me personally, and I wonder if there are more people fitting into this. Like, I just don't have a big – the chase towards, like, hyper-realism just makes – and the current state of the world just makes it feel gross, man.

And that's, like, me getting older, too. Like, it's just harder for me to engage with, like, hyper-realistic military violence. for me to engage with like hyper realistic military violence so I think for me to care personally and I'm not like a puritanical about violence in video games obviously like I don't it's just like the taste

of wanting to be in like a hyper realistic world and the narratives of the campaigns like especially with the modern warfare series trying to go as quote grounded as possible with like police raids on apartments and blah, blah, blah, stuff like that. It's rough.

It's rough. Yeah, I just personally, I would, you know, it would need to be a big departure for me to care like on a level of like, I don't know, like Battlefield Heroes cartoons. Like, I don't know. You know what's really funny? Warzone, and i only know that

i haven't really played war zone but i have kept up on it just because i've been looking at some of the wild fucking cosmetics that have come out for that game the game's been out for a while they need to get money somehow and it seems like what started as oh you play as ghost or some random soldier guy and you could spend 15 for that skin is is now you can be the most realistic cat you've ever seen, but the cat is in body armor. I need to pull this up so you guys can see. It's the best fucking game skin I've ever seen. It's called Sergeant Pss Pss Pss.

And it's... It's all right. So, like, that's the kind of thing that I would love to see, pspsps and it was alright so like that's the kind of thing that I would love to see like just make the

campaign like buck wild that is very appetizing to me I do also have to wonder if maybe the move for Microsoft is to

move away from the annual release model altogether and just reunite Call of Duty in the way that Fortnite is reunited, where it becomes a permanent year-round,

this is Call of Duty. This is what everybody's playing. Because I think also as a passive observer, I think that I am less inclined to, the new release, the pace of the release they keep up is actually a deterrent for me because like,

I'll miss one entirely. And then just assume, well, I must not care about this or I can't keep up with which one this is. Right. This is the third one called modern warfare three. Like, I don't know.

It's, it's tough to keep up with that. If there was one thing, like, but when someone says you want to play Fortnite, like I, that that's the one Fortnite that there is, I think I'd be much more likely to dip it back in on something like that where it's not a completely uh separate

game every time where you lose all of your institutional learning or at least a lot of it and it certainly helps now that you know obviously before activision was extremely reliant on that annual income coming in at the same exact time every single year and microsoft you know i'm sure still very focused on it was a huge part of the lawsuit of over whether the merger would even happen but they have the luxury i think to be a little more divested in terms of what games they're putting out so they're not as reliant on that success every year so yeah it'll be interesting i i i agree with justin insofar as like i'm i don't have the motivation that i once did and i'd much rather play something lighter uh but you know if someone came in uh with like a really good idea i think plant mentioned machine games to me at one point

talking about how they might approach the franchise that'd be pretty fucking cool to see what they could do in the way something with like style yeah like wolfenstein is like a really good representation of how to like revive a franchise that previously didn't really have any tone and now has like a very very much its own thing so and i think that's been the challenge for this series so far is they've been trying to do that almost on a level to level basis in previous campaigns yeah but at the end of the day you still have the same talent making the game and and so far is they've been trying to do that almost on a level to level basis in previous campaigns yeah but at the end of the day you still have the same talent making the game and they're very good at the thing that they do they're not good at for you know one hour of each game trying to recreate a arcane game you know that's that's a really tough ask of anybody well what you all think i

think part of the problem with with call of duty is that its popularity is a kind of its curse in that when you're making something that has to like appeal to the broadest number of people it just gets more and more sort of generic what if there was a bifurcation of the franchise uh similar to what we see with like forza where you have a there's the like the main hyper realistic call of Duty. But I mean, isn't that what has already happened with Warzone and core Call of Duty? Yeah, I guess that's, but like a fun campaign.

Yeah, you want something fun. Yeah, like something like a fun one that's goofy. Like Battlefield Bad Company, that series was like a really good approach to how you do Battlefield in a way that isn't like the stoic, like bleh. Yeah, exactly. That people have have been doing and then they killed that franchise dead so who knows there was a game that almost came out called call of duty devil's brigade that i wrote about like i don't know over a decade ago and it was set in italy during world war ii and was going to be

like a third person game about the um the soldiers who were like fighting on the mountains and in the cities. And it sounded not fun in that sense, but just like something very different that would have been cool. But yeah, I think you're right, Justin, that the like the need to be Call of Duty is probably what gotten the way of that game ever fully existing and many other some of the rumors i've heard of where call of duty could have gone over the years are bonkers um but they of course they never go those directions they kind of play it close to the vest okay i think we have some reader mail we can jump into uh this letter comes from shano lynn i'm curious if griffin has anything to say about the new final fantasy 14 expansion and classes coming i just got into it and finished endwalker and i'm wondering how this will feel after

everything we just did you know i just started i just dipped back into endwalker i i for context i've played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV. I was pretty late to the game. I started playing it when everybody was talking about how good Shadowbringers was, and they were right. It's like some of the best Final Fantasy shit ever. I played a bit of Endwalker when it dropped, I think, last year, and it did not light my world on fire as much as Shadowbringers did,

so I kind of fell off. But I am getting back into it because I've heard some of the post-launch stuff has been pretty good. And this new DLC, the new expansion adds, I think, like three new classes, which is cool. But it's like a vacation. Like the whole vibe of the expansion is a vacation,

which like after the last two expansions, which are all about like averting the apocalypse, uh, sounds like really, really good. I mean, that's what call of duty needs is that tone shift. Yeah.

Um, so yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm still diving into end Walker. It is not as, I just straight up don't think it's as good as, uh,

shadow bringers, which was like really, really, really phenomenal. Um, but I, i you know it's still a really fun game to play i really like final fantasy 14 a lot uh cool the next question comes from tony francis uh this is about switch games by the way quick question i have limited funds for gaming and i don't typically have the ability to buy the latest and greatest games at their 50

to 70 price tag do you all have suggestions on how to game on a budget but still have a good time maybe some good options or resources on how to wade through the miasma of the great deals category on the nintendo e-shop um actually people in the comments of the newsletter all these questions come from the newsletter and people in the comments suggested what i would suggest which is um yeah the browsing on the e-shop is terrible if you go to the great deals thing it's like a total shit show of like one dollar garbage games but decodeals uh which is spelled d-e-k-u deals.com i think something like that uh is like a really great way to surface uh great games that have sales going on.

It highlights the Metacritic score and generally bubbles up like only the best of the best. And it kind of makes me wish that Nintendo had something comparable. They do not. But that would be my recommendation. You can get some pretty incredible deals on great stuff. You know, excellent games for $10 or whatever it is that normally maybe go for like $30. Apparently the new Mario and Rabbids game

is 20 bucks on Amazon right now. Oh my God, that's a steal. That game is awesome. I love that game. This website now. Yeah, it's tough because I mean, famously Nintendo does not ever reduce the price of their first party games.

So that's what you're looking for. I mean, your best hope is, you know,'s what you're looking for i mean your best hope is you know buying them used or looking for wild sales like this um on decu deals we got a question from big five uh we were talking about clickers on a previous episode and uh this is a recommendation i want to throw out poke clicker as an idle game recommendation it's browser-based but works on the iphone safari browser or probably any android device and it's got some hard walls but it benefits from being the pokemon brand but unofficial so they literally can't ask you for money uh because i absolutely would have dropped the money on it yeah i booted this up and i was

like it's like extremely not cool from a, you know, they're using like straight up Pokemon sprites in this game. But it was fun. It's a clicker game with Pokemon, like full on Pokemon branding. It's just not necessarily the most legal situation. So hopefully they stick around. But yeah, it was a good, good rec. Justin, I don't remember.

Were you around when we answered the poke the new clickers recommendations thing i feel like you weren't uh no you have a recent clicker i don't think i was around for that no this this is a rest season we wanted to follow up we wanted to follow up with justin specifically right yes honestly it's been it's been tough out there recently um there haven't been a lot of like i've been back on uh i'll tell you what a hard recommendation go back and check out cookie clicker if you haven't in a while they have done that game continues to get wild amounts of support there is the the the levels of depth that that game has continued to expand to are honestly staggering.

There are so many mini-games and side things to pursue and weird, hidden. It's wild. It's a wild experience. If you haven't done Cookie Clicker, Universal People Clips always hits. But I feel like it's been a little bit slower on this front. It's been a while since there's been a really great one. It kind of feels like the, I don't know what the genre is called,

but the vampire survivor genre has kind of taken up the reins of low impact. Oh, isn't that interesting, yeah. Progressive games. Yeah, it kind of fills in the same ballpark. It is a little bit scratching the same itch with the lowest amount of interactivity. Yeah, right. Which is like a little bit of a game uh last question comes from steven uh this is just a nice notice about the newsletter i'm so glad the newsletter exists i

i remember justin speaking on a fun roguelike mobile game last week and it being listed right here in the newsletter made it faster and easier than scrubbing through the episode. The quality of life as a Besties listener has never been better. Man, couldn't have said it better myself. You can subscribe to besties.fan if you haven't yet. And I mean, I feel like we've put you people through hell, honestly, so it's good. I'm glad to be able to improve your lives

because it's been a rough ride as a Besties listener. Real hot and cold. That's right. Okay, I think we've made it to honorable mentions anything anyone got anything you want to shout out oh my gosh you know what i can finally do again sag racks yes i can finally talk about uh tv and film but i haven't seen anything good lately so uh i'm trying to think if i have watched anything i will i will call out good omens 2 which i finished last night oh yeah sid just re-watched that she loves that pretty terrific job uh neil gaiman you know kind of reviving this

uh series obviously season one was focused on the book that he wrote with terry pratchett and season two is kind of like its own story but obviously still focused on the book that he wrote with terry pratchett and season two is kind of like its own story but obviously still focusing on the two main characters um but very very true to the tone and spirit i think of the series and kind of get the sense that it's not going to be the end of it uh at least if the show keeps getting picked up but i yeah i thought they did a really good job and it was really um sweet and interesting and um i think right now it's difficult to find those like i wouldn't call it low intensity because i think that undersells it but at least it has a sweeter message i think than a lot of shows do these days and uh it's nice to have that opportunity um the other thing that i want to

recommend relevant to the vampire survivors thing is a game that justin has i think repeatedly recommended and i never got around to playing but just recently did and it's halls of torment this is a uh vampire survivors-esque game where you're just like controlling one guy in the center of the screen. I think the big difference is that you actually do dictate where you're aiming and like can control that. Whereas in Vampire Survivors, it kind of just does its own thing. I think Brotato is the same way where it kind of just like auto fires. of knowing and having control of where you're aiming just made it feel a little bit grippier to me it's also not as esoteric as um vampire survivors is at the jump like vampire survivors gets fucking weird very early on where you're trying to like unlock new features and blah blah blah and this feels at least the start i don't know how it kind of progresses but at least at the start much more digestible and like easy to jump in without having tons of guides open at the same time. But it also, the goals that it has, it has some specific goals that you use to get new unlocks.

And the goals are specific enough that like there, it does invite more strategy to the vampire survivors because you're having to think about like if it's a, if it's a goal about like say critical hits or something, like you, first of all, have an equipment loadout that you take out with you that can help with that. But also you're like trying to do the math while you're playing of like, what is the best way to get critical hits? What upgrades make sense for this like one specific goal I'm pursuing, which is neat.

Yeah, I also really liked the aesthetic, which is like very Diablo 2. And I feel like there aren't a ton of games that call back to that specific aesthetic. Yeah. You mentioned the ramp up is better than in Vampire Survivors 2, right? Yeah, like I thought, like my first run ever,

I think I lasted probably like 20 minutes. And in Vampire Survivors, it was like maybe three minutes until you like start unlocking upgrades and stuff. So having a satisfying run the first time you play is i think really important for people and uh that definitely helped it's also like fucking five dollars like total steal um so highly recommended it runs great and they are doing stuff to it big changes a lot like it is constantly evolving yeah it's still in early access um i was playing it on a Steam Deck, which obviously easily handles it,

but I'd imagine they're going to continue just dropping new content. I'm going to give a shout-out to, now that the strike is over, we can talk about TV again. We just finished Star Flag of Meanest Death Season 2. Fucking good shit. It's great.

I did not know how they were going to sort of follow up the first season and then they did a bunch of really incredible unexpected stuff uh that i uh was just bewildered by i feel like that has happened a lot this year we're like with the bear i was like well how could they follow this up and then they do a season maybe the best season of television i've ever seen in my life. And this was no different. Also wanna give a shout out to Gubbins. Lot of people talking about Gubbins out there. I don't know what Gubbins is.

What's Gubbins? What is Gubbins? Oh, boys, download Gubbins. Just go ahead and download that. It is a word game with a fucking incredible aesthetic that, man, I don't know how, somebody google gubbins and help me try and describe i'm gonna drop a trailer in in the news under for it because yes it has kind of like a 60s it looks like yellow submarine children's thing yellow submarine is a great great yeah

that that is exactly what i was looking for uh it is sort of like, it is like a Scrabble crossword puzzle. You start with this empty grid and you have a tray of either single letters or like, you know, fragments. So like two letters or three letters on one tile. And you drop them onto this grid to spell words. And then you activate those words to, you you know clear them from the board and you get points for them uh but occasionally throughout the game you will also get gubbins and gubbins are little creatures that have different abilities some of them are good gubbins some are bad gubbins some gubbins will like lock down letters on the board and they can't be cleared until you've taken

a certain number of moves some gubbins are like here's an empty here's a a you know a wild tile that can be any letter to like complete a word for you what is great is like when you finish your game you get your your score and whatever and then there is a sort of instagram story style system for making a postcard of the words that you spelled and stickers and backgrounds that are hysterically funny and then you can just share those with people and the postcards the gubbins postcards i've seen uh people share are fucking hysterical um i made one last night that was just like a big sort of ape looking man just just shouting out the word sprung, which was one of the words I had spelled that time. I sent that to my wife. She got it.

So that's Gubbins. It's great. It's real good. It's on your phone. It lives on your phone. It's on Android, too, by the way, for people who are curious about things like that. Right. That is fun.

um right that is fun uh i i had a chance to see uh napoleon the new movie uh rudley scott and let me tell you what i didn't expect about it pretty funny a pretty funny movie i saw it in the theater and people were were giggling the whole time joaquin Phoenix is having himself a kind of like an Anthony Hopkins I am going to as this movie goes on have an increasing appetite for scenery and I will chew it into a delicious fine pulp um is it funny when he goes and gets a ziggy piggy is that funny when he goes and gets his ziggi piggy and he goes on the water slide is that funny um it's it's great it's also um it's very cool just to watch an old-fashioned like uh historical drama that's like super violent in the way that they were in the 90s and early 2000s um and uh not sexy in the least compared to game ofs and not sexy in the least compared to Game of Thrones. Very interested in, in fact, being the opposite

of sexy. I think Joaquin Phoenix has a real interest in some sort of cock kink. I don't know what's going on, but it is... A wild thing to say. Cock kink?

About a real human.? That's just. About a real human. Maybe that's just like Napoleon. No, I'm saying like, the roles he has taken, there's a lot of cut kink going on in these roles.

That's all. I'm not saying anything about his personal interest. Plants like, let me clarify. I'll say it slower. Exactly what I mean to say. Plants like,

let me back up. Let me say it more specifically and more concretely more litigiously um i've uh watched ziggy biggie no i watched bill and ted's excellent though uh i watched um you know what really surprised me? Sid and I have been trying to watch more movies, and we watched, just on kind of a lark, A Haunting in Venice. I'm a big Poro guy. I really thought the Branagh's Orient Express was just, like, okay.

It was just fine. And I skipped Death on the Nileile because i heard it was so bad from the only other poro person i trust my brother travis wait is that another brano one that i just didn't realize existed exactly yeah i mean it's got gal gadot i think it's it's it's uh yeah so um i i was not expecting a lot from this, and I was really pleasantly surprised by how it shook out. It's just an old-fashioned, charming kind of mystery where Poirot is basically retired. Agatha Christie, the famous Belgian detective Poirot detective pro has basically retired and he is invited to a seance where things happen there that he can't explain but before long there's a murder and it

is sort of like mixing spiritualism with science and uh it is a lot more restrained than the first one i feel like orient express had this weird compulsion to try to be a blockbuster and insert big action scenes where there are none at all. Yeah, there was like Mission Impossible almost moments in that movie. This is not that. This is much more the cozy mystery that Christie is known for. And it's classy and well-acted and is nice to look. And just as like a pure entertainment, I found it delightful. I still don't love Branagh as Poirot. I find it hard to get past that, but he's trying.

Has anyone ever made one of these like murder mysteries where they like kind of hint at like, oh, there's something mystical going on, but it actually ends up ends up being a murderer like a normal person but have it just end up being oh it was a ghost they had to have done that on a scooby-doo episode right had to have yeah had to have no did they ever disprove or prove the existence of the soul on scooby-doo i don't know i don't remember seems like a missed opportunity uh okay i think we did it uh plant you want to recap what we discussed oh we talked about a lot we talked about persona 5 tactica the call of duty series final fantasy 14 and walker cookie clicker poke clicker halls of torment gubbins and then a whole bunch of other stuff that's not even video games all of which will be in the newsletter at besties dot fan what a plug uh next week we're going to be talking about super mario rpg the remake coming to switch i'm very excited i love that game me too

okay Okay I won't be here Justin won't be here So it's going to be light hearted and fun I thought I did a really good job Of cloaking my Disinterest this week And I will continue to uphold that high standard Thank you so much for listening Besties be sure to join us again next week

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