06: The i Stands for 'I'm the Gamer?'

What's good, internet? It is June 10th, 2025, and this is not a magical island where time works in strange ways. a thing that could maybe apply to two of the games we're talking about today. It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the Table.

and supported by our patrons at friendsatthetable.cash, which could be you. It could be you right now. You can go to friendsatthetable.cash. You can get access to our ongoing Outward Let's Play. You can support all of the other shows that we do like. Media Club Plus hosted by our very own Keith Carberry, who is here today. Hi. Hi. You can also get access for free simply by going to Patreon.com and simply by becoming a...

A follower? What's the free level? A follower on Patreon, on Friends of the Table by Cash, of the newsletters that Janine Hawkins, who's also here, puts together for us every week. Yeah, I'm realizing I didn't tell you that I moved to an island where it's currently 1980-70. 1980-70?

1980-70, that's the year that the game Mixtape takes place in, based on the soundtrack, is my understanding. It's all of your favorite music from 1980-70. No, that's from 1980-90. 1970-80. All right, that's from 1980-90. I'm sorry. Yes, of course.

Welcome back, Janina and Keith. You've both been here before. We don't have to do a whole big intro, but hi. It's true. I have to start with a thing. Before we get into our two big games of the week, which I think are probably going to be Fantasy Life Eye, The Girl Who Steals Time. Which I still don't know what the fourth I stands for. I was just going to say.

say i don't know what the fourth eye is yet and elden ring night rain i do want to you know someone actually messaged me on blue sky the other day was like or did you were you on any streams for the summer game fest stuff did you talk about it i was like no i wasn't i don't even know for sure we're gonna cover any of it on the show on side story. Um, but you know, I, I, I was so annoyed by a thing that I just want to talk it really quick.

Which is, did y'all see the Green Games showcase? I've seen zero seconds of any of this. I love this for you, Keith. Yeah. Living pure. I heard about it. I heard people were watching it. Not having a good time. And I was like, I don't need to bring that into my life. I think a good thing.

about it this is the good thing that i'll say about it is it happened at the same time as the future games thing and i think the future games thing probably had more people watching it because it's an established thing so the good thing is it was scheduled alongside some something that was better that other people that people were probably watching instead unless they were weirdos like us like austin and i who were like oh what's this new thing let's watch it yeah uh you know which one

had the split gate thing on it oh that was just the summer game fest thing that was even before that was jet that was on keely's stage um which i mean we had a much longer conversation about like the way those shows go, both Summer Games Fest and the Game of the Year awards stuff, the Game Awards. Sorry. In fact, we once did... He's on both ends of the year. He's capping the year. That's right. He takes the summer, he takes the winter.

or it's unfair for everybody else. We're all just sitting here trying to sneak out whatever we can do in between the rising and lowering of Keeley's sun. Keeley's world. We're all just living in it. That's right. Yes. My friend went, abandon all hope, ye who clearly hear, which is nothing.

You know, the Splitgate thing is actually a pretty good, the guy from the company that makes Splitgate 2, which is a, Keith, you played the first Splitgate? It feels like a Keith game to me. I did, I played the second one too. Okay, well, yeah, the guy who runs that. company, I believe it was the CEO, but maybe it was the designer, came on stage and was like...

Aren't you sick of, I'm so sick of playing every Call of Duty and they're all the same. And also I love Titanfall 3. Titanfall 3 should have come out. We all want to play Titanfall 3. And his hat was like, make FPS great again. Yes, it sure was. And by the way, just a quick recap on the Splitgate thing. Splitgate was a game that came out before or around the time that the most recent Halo game came out.

I think there hadn't been a Halo game in a really long time. And this game that was sort of like Halo and sort of like Call of Duty and also sort of like Portal came out. And it was so popular that they had to delist the game because they couldn't make it work. That is true. Five years later or something, they put out Splitgate 2, a game that seems very similar but worse in every way. Yeah, that does seem to be the case.

Anyway, my big beef with that, besides the fucking MAGA hat or the whatever, you know, besides that. It's the Mufuga hat. Right, yeah, the Mufuga hat. It's a classic Mufuga. He gave me the Mufuga is... There are so many. Games that are not Call of Duty to play, even inside of just the first person shooter genre. We were just talking about Echo Point Nova. These showcases year after year have been filled. Not the Summer Games Fest main stage where all the side ones.

the future one pc gamer show all of them have had like wild interesting fps games for the last five years it's been like a huge resurgence This year in particular, a huge boom of specifically first person shooters where you also got to mop up a thing sometimes. That's right. Yeah, those lots of, you know, boomer shooter style doom things, but you're a cartoon.

mouse or some other sort of you know cartoon creature um there's all sorts of stuff in this race that isn't call of duty and i i think it's like disingenuous to be like we're here i mean it's not disingenuous it's it's an appeal to a certain sort of

of a grieved uh uh imagined player uh and i shouldn't say imagine because this is the same people who are like they took tits out of video games and so now every fifth game in the in the sgf is a gooner game where it's like we're not actually We're not gonna like show people like

It's fucking. We're not going to have people have sex in the game, but you're going to be in a sort of lurid daze the whole time because ass is going to be in your face the whole time you're doing action combos. That's what we want. That's the thing. That's what everyone wants, I guess. Apparently everyone wants that because it's all over the Summer Games Fest. Truly, I would be happier if Jeff was like, we're going to let porn games in here now. That's crazy. Is that true?

What? That sounds like it couldn't possibly be true, but why would you lie? Why would you make that up? It's nonstop. I guess it's every fifth thing, which is not everything, but one in five. It's kind of a lot. You know what I mean? If you're like, okay, well, is this going to be one where if I was 16, I'd be embarrassed if one of my parents walked in the room? And it's like, it's one in five, I would say. And that's on top of there being a sort of similar.

There is, like, a real embrace of, like, hyperviolence that is... Again, I'm not, like... get get the gore and get the tits out of my games in any way but i do think that it's indulgent and it's like uh and and the attitudes around some of it are so defensive and entitled in a way that's like really off-putting when it then kind of like funnels down into a guy being like, they're taking our good FPS games away. It's the same mindset as they try to censor Scarlet Blade or whatever.

It's just about FPS games. And in both cases, it's like... Stellar Blade. Scarlet Blade's different. Okay, you're right. Scarlet Blade is different. They did not try to censor Scarlet Blade, an MMO from 2013 or whatever. Which was one of these games. They were never not here. Do you know what I mean? So I don't get the aggrieved position is what I'm saying. In order to have the aggrieved position, you have to like...

stake out like a social thing of like, we're doing this against the games industry. That's right. And then that means that you have to make the aesthetic of that part of your genre, which means going beyond the thing that they say is gone but never was gone, which is like... tits and blood right tits and blood have been in games and then also you're showing it at at not not e3

Right, at the biggest stage that there kind of is. The game industry doesn't want us to make these games, so they gave us this huge stage to show our games. And we're making it with a lot of money. Right.

right you know i guess game it was but like i i do want to illustrate this point for keith there was a game i forget what game was i'm not calling it is maybe a fun game i don't know um there was like a like a armored up person figure shooting out guts and stuff and they turned around and like they looked extremely just like armored up whatever and they turned around they just had like An amazing, lovingly detailed, shaded, rendered ass. Mm-hmm. Yeah. In a way that just really...

You know, you thought you were hit in the face a little bit when someone ripped someone else's throat out and then like tied it around like a macrame knot. Well. Here's the most beautiful ass you've ever seen. Do you both remember my really old front of the table story about the Catwoman statue at Six Flags? I don't. Please remind us. What? At Six Flags New England.

In the kids ride area, there's a small kid-friendly roller coaster called the Catwoman's Whip. And in the line to that is a giant... Catwoman statue. Which era of Catwoman? The really hot era. Whatever. I don't know. This is like the hottest Catwoman statue of all time. What the fuck kind of answer is that? Which really hot era? I think I'm finding it. I don't know enough about Catwoman besides that I can tell this is Catwoman. Comic, cartoon.

Live action, start there. Is it this one? This is sort of semi... It's between cartoon and realistic. Oh, okay. That's a comic. I think that's a comic. There we go. Yeah, that's the Catwoman. That's like classic. The ass on this statue is unbelievable. how detailed it is. Oh my god, I found it, I got you. Wait, show me, show me. I'm gonna show you the cat over the ass.

Wow. So I've been like I haven't been to Six Flags New England in 15 years, but I remember from like the ages of 10 to 15 being like. Okay, I'm pro this statue, but it doesn't belong here. Like, I like this technically, like on paper, like I like this, but it shouldn't be here in line for this kid's roller coaster.

This checks all the boxes, but there's a child here. I could, uh, can I take this off your hands? And hide the child. I guess we were the child at this point. Yes. Uh, but yeah, again, like, that's the thing is for me that the. My beef with this stuff is not that it exists or there's obviously people who really want it. And it's not even that it's in the show in any way. It's that there doesn't, it rarely actually feels genuine in these games. I think Atomic Heart 2.

is maybe the biggest offender where it's like, oh yeah. But even the first game, that game had these like, you know, sexy faceless Android nurses or whatever. And the trailer for the second one, of course, leans even further into that. It doesn't...

Do you remember that game? What was the actual name of the game? The one with the faceless woman and a huge ass first person shooter that came out. Haiti? Haiti. Yeah. Haiti. H-A-Y-D-E-E. There's like three of those now. Yeah. There are. And I went on the Forbes for those games. recently and found out that people miss the faceless model.

Because the person who makes those games, or one of the people who makes those games, gave the character in, for people who don't know, Haydee, H-A-Y-D-E-E, was a third-person shooter that came out in 2016, right when Steam started to let ass in.

on their platform uh and uh you know it was this thing of like the camera is at like hip height and she's constantly crawling through sore you know over sore grates or whatever or vents and so it's just like ass ass ass and her head was a big android robot head no facial features at all just kind of a flat white port almost like a portal turret head um and more of those games have come out and they have like

Apparently, I've just read these. This is not I've not played these games, so I can't speak from experience in this case, but I have read the forms. And in games two and three, they're like backstory to how things got to this point. And there are characters who are. who have the same big ass, but a human face. And there is a subset of the players, at least some very loud subset, that is like, give us back faceless Haiti. This lady's ugly. Give us back the faceless one, which is...

Like, you know, real classic dehumanization shit. Like it's like remove the head is like all if you do like any sort of photography studies or women's studies or studies about race, like the way in which the desired body is framed. without the head is like a classic maneuver and you know

And regardless, underneath all that, there's someone who's like, no, the lore about the ass is important to me. And I don't get that energy from Stellar Blade or from any of these other things that are like, we know there's an agree.

an aggrieved demographic that we want to appeal to again i can't actually read anyone's mind but when i see the work the work doesn't scream interest in in the ass outside of the artist's interest in in designing it it doesn't feel like that's part of anything in any any important way you know i just want lore consistent ass that's all i'm asking for

You know, I see a cat woman statue. And a genuine feeling of appreciation for it. That's right. I wonder also if part of it is like we're hitting the video game nostalgia wave of... There's a lot of games in this that have evoked PS2 in a really strong way. So we've moved past the SNES and Genesis, and I think still we've got a toe in the PlayStation. era of nostalgia but things are moving into into sort of like slightly higher fidelity slightly like

And part of that, I think... We really went both ways. We were in Nintendo 64 for so long, and then we went back to PS1 and forward into PS2. Yeah, but I think...

With that, there also is, like, when you look back at those games, you're getting a lot of... God, X-Blades was PS3, right? No, I think that you have this right. I think it was an Xbox One game. Oh, no. you're you're actually right it's ps3 xbox 360 you had it right i was confusing with some other thing so but that i remember at the time that x blades felt a little bit dated in what it was doing i remember like seeing it and being kind of like really it's it's

2012 or whatever. What are we doing? Never even heard of this. This looks terrible. I can't speak to the... It's got mixed Steam reviews, but that could be the port. I don't know.

but yeah this is 2009 um sure yeah i so there's part of it that i i look at i'm like how much of this is just like there is a nostalgia for when a game looked like this and it wasn't like a thing but also it is a thing and it's a marketing thing and it's really hard to separate the like are you doing this for like nostalgia reasons are you doing this because stellar blades sold a fuck ton and It was apparently pretty mid. Like, you know.

I don't think anyone's... I agree that, like, I'm not sure how many people are doing it because they really love that ass. Are they in it for the love of the game, you know? I don't know. And again, my...

My actual read on this is that there is a loud, it's the same thing that we went through in the 2010s, which is the sudden arrival of games that, for instance, treat women as full people and not just objects to be ogled, are like... uh feel make a certain subset of players feel like uh under attack right like but wait why should i have to care it's just a game let it just be a thing

And that is a line of thought that I think we all see all over the entire culture we live in. And so when I see that ported even away from these kind of cultural war issues like. Boobs in games or even ultra violence in games to simply I'm going to make the real FPS game. It's like. You're trying to ride a gross, corrupt wave in actually a way that's somehow even more cynical.

You know, cause like you're just trying to move product. You're just trying to sell your stupid game. And to do it, you have to ignore that there are other things like the thing you want all over the place. You could go click on the FPA. You go listen to what's talking about.

Three episodes ago, that game fucking rips. There are tons of games that people who want things like Titanfall can go play, or people who want things that are just not Call of Duty can go play that still are about getting sick headshots. And some of them are like... are wildly aggressive and ultra-violent. Some of them really are wildly throwback to an era of Halo-style shooting.

It drives me crazy when that maneuver happens because it's so naked and it's so, you know. And it's, again, on top of the fake MAGA hat.

I also can't help but wonder how much of that is a pitch targeted towards investors who are not interested in something like Echo Point Nova, but... because of their demographic where they're at they can you know someone can say to them hey remember those games that you thought were really cool there's a big hole in that market now for a really high budget visible one of those we can do that if you give us you know 30 million dollars

Janine, the years of working on games is really showing. It's hard. It is really hard not to just imagine meetings sometimes. To look at a video game and be like, who was in that room? What was going on there? Who was making that pitch? And often that pitch and what the creatives actually...

believe in in the project do not align but yeah totally but then when you get on stage and you deliver that as part of the pitch to like the public yeah uh the weird thing is like it it makes the It makes the way you understand games seem extremely myopic, like taking you at your word. you must not know anything about video games. Luckily, neither do the people who play video games. Well, also, they're counting on someone watching the main stage events and not the side.

things which a lot of people will do a lot of people will like watch the big one if they're watching anything at all they'll watch the big one and the little the like side stuff that's showing like cool interesting whatever stuff like they're you know not really going to key into that until something you know strikes gold on steam in you know 12 months and just becomes the hot new thing that everyone pretends they were always excited about

I'm sorry for detracting against the actual thing, Austin, that you want to talk about. I do just want to quickly say there were some other things that were worth... talking about that were, I do think those other showcases, I do think things like the day of the devs was like pretty solid. I think on June 7th, there was the wholesome direct, which we could, I think I've already talked at length about the words wholesome.

all of that but there were some things in there that i think were interesting woman-led games latin american game showcase the problem with the wholesome thing yes is that it is where a lot of games i'm really interested in yes i'm in the same position and also to you know to their credit They are, I think, starting to move away a little bit from just like the like...

Oh, you have a big armchair and you got your cozy socks and kitty. Totally. That's way more patronizing than I meant it to, because most of the games I'm interested in also show up there. But there's games, they're showing horror games now. you know they're showing games that that involve like shooting and fighting and stuff but because they're acknowledging that like

In my head, the phrase that plays over and over again a lot is comfy, not cozy. Where it's like games that are comfortable to you in some way, but it's not purely about just like feeling... like safe and and like babied i guess like it's it's not it's not about games that are like unchallenging or you know won't won't like rile something up a little bit in you um it's about games that for you are a comfortable place and for a lot of people that is horror so why not put horror games in there um

you know it's so they're trying i do think the phrase wholesome is is kind of a uh albatross i i think it's it definitely holds them back at some point yeah It's something that got tainted from a long time of people's, the way people were pushing games and talking about games in that area, which could also happen with the word comfortable. Yeah.

Right, right. Comfortable for who? Cozy? Yeah, exactly. You know, I think there was something wrong with Wholesome until the people started talking about it and, like, making it a way to market games. Until the genre got deeper, right? Like, until... more enough was going on that you could afford to have more nuance well i think like yeah instantly you have this sort of like what counts as wholesome wholesome for who conversation that you can have and again we've had

That conversation has been going on for five years now because that show is five years old, and I don't want to just rehash it. But for people who are curious, you can find a lot of great conversations and criticism about it. And speaking of criticism, I do just want to also shout out. the excellent Liz Ryerson.

who put out another showcase that is not part of the Summer Games Fest list, but I think was really good. It was a 45-minute showcase called The Unearthed Treasure Room, an alternative showcase of overlooked games. It was put on by Liz and Mila. Melis Hantani who is an independent game developer that has

put out games like Anodyne or who's co-developed games like Anodyne, which I think is an all-timer. That is a showcase put together with a bunch of independent developers and like... some some critics and stuff just like talked about a game that they thought was really interesting for a few minutes and then like there showed there was some gameplay and it's kind of like let's put a flashlight on some stuff that's come out over the last few years that would never show up even on a

Wholesome Games Direct or on any of these other showcases. And so people like Bennett Foddy and Laura Mache and Blake Andrews came on and talked about something that they really loved. Really cool. collection of games very cool event I hope that it continues I hope that people go watch it because I think if you're looking for stuff that's like You know, the range of stuff here is, you know, weird arcadey retro things through visual novels, through kind of...

you know bright uh psychedelic platformers and stuff like that really a cool event so i wanted to shout that out and we haven't even talked about the main thing that made me want to talk about this to begin with yeah yeah we started watching the green game showcase thinking I came into it skeptically. Oh, nature. Ah, nature, I guess. Yeah, I was curious, right? I will say I'm skeptical in general of any time there's a sort of like...

Games for Change-ish movement. I'm skeptical of that entire project. I have been of the official Games for Change thing. And I say to someone who wants to talk about Twine on stage or panel about Twine on stage. at the Games for Change festival, an experience that helped me kind of hone in on being like, I don't know about all this. It opens with people talking. I'm not going to like, I'm not here to like say the hosts were.

I don't know enough of the behind the scenes as to like who got in, what they expected. I suspect there's some people at this show, like showcase on this show who had no idea. Who else is being showcased on the show? I think maybe a good example for trying to always get that sort of information if you can. But sometimes a show will say, hey, we're going to be part of the Summer Games Fest. We'd love to have you be part of it. We can't tell you who else we have because of NDAs.

So either you're in or you're out. And I know I understand a developer saying, yes, we want to be in. And also you can be in if you donate some money to this charity thing that we're doing. Yeah, well, yeah. In fact, that's maybe the most interesting thing, right? They were like, there's three categories of games that we're going to cover today, which is not normally how one of these showcases works.

I would argue it's not really how this one worked either, but... I guess you're right. They were like, the first one is about games. This isn't how they... The subject is... That's right. They said it a little weirder than that. They made it sound like...

It was going to be games that actually did something for the environment, but that's later. So, yes, subject is environment. And they showed, like... uh like a anno style the first one was like an anno style city builder where like you have to be aware of nature and i went okay i get what this is there's it's worth saying like when

What I was expecting from this is the fact that there's like a half dozen games about solar punk stuff coming out. And I was like, yeah, I guess you could put those all in a showcase together. There's also like a bunch of games that are coming out that are, you know. top-down, high-level resource management things that are specifically about unfucking up a place. So, again, there's, like, a lot of stuff going on, obviously, because it's a conversation a lot of people are having.

Like, yeah, sure, you could put together something for this. And like, oh, some of the stuff that's come out in the last few years. Yeah, some of the stuff that's come out in the last few years. Terranil did really well. Like, oh, maybe it's getting DLC. Maybe it's right. Exactly. Exactly that.

So the first one I was like, okay, yeah, this is kind of what I expected. A game where you have to, like, figure out where you're going to get the energy on the new space colony without fucking up the planet. Okay, cool. And then the second game. They were like, it's kind of like a deck builder. I was like, okay, cool. I like those, actually. I like deck builders quite a bit. And it has lots of themes about... That's right. Is that what they said?

It was like about surviving a world, you know, in crisis or something like that. And I was like, okay. And then instantly, I think you and I were both like, wait a second. This looks like AI art. To me. Yeah. And then it started moving. And that was definitely AI. Keith, I'll drop you a timestamp on this so that you can see what we're talking about. Oh, great. Yeah. There is something really special about when you look at something and immediately know that it's AI. And this is like...

Yeah, oh my god. It is the A-I-est looking thing I've ever seen. Yeah. The music too, oh my god. It's A-I singing. The music is fucking Anna Indiana 2, basically. yeah it was it was it was described as a game like thriving with the planet or something and then instantly it is AI art uh of you know the most empty

meaningless, archetypical characters. You know, noir guy holding money. I paused on noir guy holding money. There's no character to any of this art. No, no. You know, a woman walking with lion in front of the pyramid. all of the ui is this kind of chintzy sci-fi fantasy stuff all the characters are there it's like it's not just gene you pointed this out it's not just like empty it's sloppy

Yeah. There are mistakes all throughout the art and everything else. And it's the classic AI art mistakes where it's like... It's stuff that if you wanted to, you could take a few minutes with a clone tool and clean it up. It's lapels that just sort of mysteriously fade out of existence. It's like buttons that kind of don't make sense. They're just kind of smeary and have lines in a way that doesn't make any sense.

sense either like lots of like little things where it's like as soon as you you don't need to be an expert to spot this stuff all you need to do is follow lines yep um and like and look at shapes and be like does this shape make sense as a 3d object If you can take the time to sit down and do that, you can figure out that this stuff is not on the level. With the AI art stuff, like...

okay, this lapel doesn't go anywhere that sloppy. I can tell that like, oh, this piece of clothing, it comes out of nowhere and goes into nothing. The real problem, like I could play a great game where that's true about the art. And I think that one of the defenses of people who don't care about AI art is that they can look over those things. It's not important to them. And really, it's not important to me either.

But the problem is that the people who are drawn to AI art as like a tool for making their game don't have the artistic qualifications to be like thumbs upping a piece of artwork. This art.

sucks ass it's so bad it has no personality it's like why do i want a card of like a cg looking owl sitting there like it does nothing yeah austin i found the i say i found the how they frame it oh yeah elo in quest of time by earthwise games is a web-based card game about thriving with nature thriving with nature great i've actually read some of the lore of this game uh-huh um

Is it about thriving with nature? Well, there's like two sides, right? There's the side that is using Moloch, the evil AI, in order to get ahead. Um, and then there's the side that is rejecting Moloch and something, something, they have like a good AI. Uh-huh. Yeah. or from metropolis the movie metropolis famously re-reconfigured moloch uh as a big mouth a big the big factory mouth you know they're just kind of lifting that whole cloth here's the other thing what this

What this trailer... Sorry, I'm looking at this picture and also this lady's holding a lantern that also makes no fucking sense. It's just like a handle and then like a... thinks it's a candle for a second, but then it's like, no, wait, it's a lantern. It's a lantern. It's embarrassing. The thing they're not saying about this is that this game is based on a series of books.

A series of fantasy books that were bestsellers in the self-help category. Okay. And they are a collaboration between someone who's like a... like a business person and a lawyer i think was their background and then like a famous like self-help self-actualization person um my guess is that like the the former is using the latter's work as sort of an underpinning for the fantasy thing um

And if you go to the website for this, you can read a little exchange between, it was like a witch or something, and a gamer. Gamer is, I think, you, the reader. I'm the gamer? Yeah, and the witch is telling you about how you can improve your life and the dangers of Moloch. But you have to use Moloch to get ahead. But how do you use Moloch in a way that's responsible and that doesn't have other knock-on effects? Oh, I see.

Interesting. I see. Well, one way might be that you just take your money and you give it to someone else and you say that that means that what you've made is green now. You know? You buy your Moloch coin to prove that you're good. Okay, Sam Bankman freed. Let me just really quick find the list of things that they said are their goals. Things that they're trying to do.

before release uh they are exploring renewable powered cloud services to host our game and ai models more i love exploring um it's a web-based game that's designed to reduce reliance on energy intensive gaming consoles and high power PCs. They're also PC somewhere else. Yeah, that's right. Yes. Okay. They are also evaluating blockchain networks with strong sustainability commitments for our web.

three features so you know we don't have any of these things we're not sure we can get these things but we're gonna we're investigating yeah what is a web three feature Because we don't... So there's crypto. There's crypto. Everything you do gives you a coin, gives you a special token, and the token is associated with a DAO and there's a whole bunch of shit there.

Anyway, the last one, hardware optimization. We're committed to optimizing Eloin to run efficiently on lower energy devices to reduce unnecessary power consumption. I like these four things because they are at best two things.

sure all of this stuff and like i think that there is someone could show up and be like yeah but they're going to be on ethereum ethereum is proof of stake now all ai's costs are dropping blah blah blah which i think all of that is is fundamentally bullshit we know that people who for instance get back processing power from not needing to be proof of work for ethereum mining anymore just use that processing power for other crypto coins that are still proof of work like that's like a thing

people have looked into. There's not a way out of the entire process of what this stuff is. We know that when AI gets more energy efficient, people just make more calls. They make more dramatic calls that boost all of that. But even let's bracket that. This is not a game. It's not even a product. It's like a thing looking for investment money. It's a lore. It's a piece of bait for VC.

You're the product. You're the product. You're right. The player is the product. Yeah, 100%. And you're being sold to VC because they're being promised that this is going to be the next big thing. And it's not. This game is not going to go anywhere. This game is going to like...

I don't want to make a legal, particularly a legal allegation. Some people are going to get excited about this and they're going to put their money into it as individuals and investors, and I suspect they will not see a return. This is not legal advice. but as a parasocial friend of yours, don't put money into something like this. And the thing that then happened is...

This event continued, and I don't think there was anything as egregious as this, but the fact that this was the second thing they showed was ominous, and it turned out to be pretty indicative. It's worth saying... Of the sections that, you know, there's the games where the theme is about helping the planet. This was in that section. It was not in the section that was...

basically all mobile games that have a little microtransaction pack that in some way benefits some sort of green charity. And it was not in the portion of games. Normally this green charity, by the way, the one that's associated with this particular showcase. Well, there were some that were like... oh they're donated like this thing with trees and with trees yeah there were a lot of those um and then the third section was just games that the team had donated

an amount of money to the charity that was running the stream and they got a placement for their thing. I think if this game had been in that back portion I wouldn't be half as mad at it. Yeah, I'd roll my eyes at it, and I'd say, look, this is the limit of this style of greenwashing. That's what this is, right? In the same way that buying carbon offsets...

tends to be mostly a publicity move and does not actually offset the harm done. Like, here we are, here they're doing it, but okay, I get it. They quarantined it in the back half, but instead it was the second thing. Yeah, it takes two minutes to... go onto the website and find their graphs about their tokenomics like it's it's right there they're not hiding it like it's right there so i can only assume at that point that either

you're just closing your eyes completely or you know and you think like like they gave enough of a pitch of like well here's how we're doing it responsibly that someone was like yeah it sounds okay yeah come on in exactly but then you have to look at the game And go like, and this meets our quality standards. Right. Which is then like a second, like it's your second thing. It looks like shit and it's sketchy. Well. Yeah, well. Maybe the trailer wasn't ready.

card art stills just being like oh it's like hearthstone but for People who who kind of what's that thing that that Keith Raniere and NXIVM and stuff started out doing neuro linguistic programming. It kind of I don't know that it's the same that it's the same underpinning, but all the self help stuff. kind of gives me the the neuro linguistic linguistic programming vibe yeah um over and over again at the back end of this when they were just getting to like the they gave us money portion of this

One of the hosts kept with this chorus of any game can be green. Any game can be green. Yeah. It just goes to show you that any type of game can be green. Any game can be green. Because you can just make a donation and then you've made a green game. And like that is maybe like if I had to come up with.

a bad faith version of like eco games or any of this shit, it would be that statement. You know, if I needed a straw man, it would be the argument that any game can be green no matter what it's actually doing environmentally. no matter what its actual messaging is, no matter who made it, no matter where it was made, no matter under what conditions it was made. Any game can be green if you give these people, if you give a charity, any charity that is vaguely ecologically minded.

some money that just makes the game green and we just like you know one of the first things they showed was an amazon uh you know uh game studios game yeah what are we doing what are we doing and again i don't For me, this is a one instance of a larger ongoing sort of like failure to engage industrially with the truth of an industry. It's not just they did a bad event. I mean, I think the event was bad, but I.

But also this event was like platformed on the Summer Games Fest page. It was like, you know, part of the main, you know, Keeley didn't show up for this thing, obviously, but it was right. And it was in the same block with women led games, Latin American games. It would just... Go into it. Any game can be a woman-led game. Just make a donation. We wouldn't and shouldn't accept the idea that if I was the only executive on a game and the only lead on a game, that it would be a woman-led game.

game you know it would be if you donated to their charity donated it would be right yeah and so it's just like and it also just brings down the the entire series instead of the rest of it and again imagine being someone who had a game in the middle of the showcase that you were

really excited to show and what you thought was we're going to be in front of people who care about this issue we couldn't this couldn't show up on the main stage people wouldn't get what we were going for or they would poo-poo it or they would say it was too political or blah blah blah but now you're

in the middle of a bunch of people saying, and I don't know, maybe the people who are still part of it were excited to get the exposure. I can't speak for anybody. This is not me, you know, kind of reporting an actual feeling from somebody and just kind of like. covering who it is or anything like that i'm just saying if it was me i would be fucking pissed so imagine if you're if your game that you made in the desert using like uh You know, on your water farm with only wind power.

And you went on after the AI game with the cryptocurrency. You're like, what the fuck? I thought this was green games. Yeah, what the fuck? I was like, I took this seriously. I thought we were taking this sort of seriously. And it's end.

It is a serious issue. It's maybe the most important issue in the world with the biggest disparity between how serious it is and how much work is being done on the planet, arguably. Again, there are a lot of games that are... doing this that weren't there and like you can only show whoever wants to be shown but like

There were other games literally in this string of press conferences that like, you know, there was a, I want to say in like the wholesome or something in one of those, there was a trailer for spilled, which is already out, but it's a game about like cleaning up oil spills.

And like cleaning up water in a little, you got a little tugboat and you're sucking oil up. That came out in March. I think they're doing like a... update or something um but like there's that there's a bunch of like those solar punk things in early access some of those were were um out there you know part of steam next best if you want to check them out like

people are doing actual stuff i don't like i don't i'm looking at this i'm looking at this fucking card game and it's just like i you're just telling me it's about earth and showing me a druid and a tiger It's true. I guess. Well, they did pick a winner to show at the very end of the stream. Keith, can you guess without looking what the final game was? Now, remember, this is the section of you just have to make a donation.

Okay. You want me to guess, like fabricate a game that's coming out? No, it's a real game. It's a real game. I'll tell you this. It already came out. It already won Game of the Year awards. Oh. Oh, what game would have won a Game of the Year award? I don't even know. I believe that the trailer said it won 80 Game of the Year awards. Oh, my God. Did it win? keely's game of the year award i don't know if the current edition of the keely's was out was happening yet when i may have just started um

I don't know. It'd be really funny if it was a first person shooter. It would be very funny. It would be very funny. Because of how first person shooters aren't coming out. Yeah, right. No, no, it's, it's, it's, I think before the terrible. A dry spell of first-person shooters. Yeah. I don't know. I would say... So you're telling me this is an older game? I'm telling you it's an older game. All right. Is it Stardew Valley? It's from before Stardew Valley.

Wait, they had a green game showcase in 2025 from a game that's older than a game from 2013? I believe that that's right. I'm double checking my dates. Keith, can I give you a hint? Can I give you a hint? Yeah. Always save the last one for yourself. Oh, no. I don't know. This hint doesn't mean anything to me. Keep your hair short or whatever. Oh, yeah. Keep your hair short. That was another one. Yeah, for sure.

Hair shirt or hair short? I don't want to keep my hair shirt. You remember the game of the year about the hair shirt? The hair shirt game. The hair short. hair hair or whatever it was. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh, um,

Well, if it's older, if it's on a Green Games thing and it's older than Stardew Valley, I'm going to stick in the same thing. I'm going to say like a Harvest Moon game. That's a great thought. No, it was The Walking Dead, the adventure series from Telltale. From Telltale, which doesn't exist really. That's right. So from a studio that doesn't really exist, a game from 2011 or something. 2012, yeah. I believe Skybound is putting them back out again.

I think that's the thing is that they're available for sale now, I guess. Oh, well, this makes actually perfect sense because this game is recycled. This is a reused game. They're putting it out again. It didn't cost any development resources at all. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Well, it was just... You also didn't talk about the last segment, which was like a 15-minute long interview with Sir Ian Livingston.

I forgot about that. And I couldn't tell you what it was about, honestly. I watched the whole thing and I could not tell you what they talked about. I think it was mostly about how the censors don't understand how games can be powerful for education.

I played Math Blasters. I know about how games can be powerful for education. I played that one with the snow and you... threw snowballs and you skied and also it was math yeah this is also the event remember the name of where the one of the developers of sensible soccer the all-time uh soccer game uh announced that he is a new band

is a new band album of what's it called like sensible songs sensible rock sensible something like that that sounds like a they might be giants album maybe sensible band He's formed a sensible band, a band that's ready to produce electrifying rock anthems. But not too electrifying. That's right. Renewably electrifying rock.

A very sensibly amount of electric. Oh, right. Yeah, because it's sensible. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like taking iconic video game melodies and giving them lyrics and rock guitars. I was like, why is this in here? This guy just gave you 20 bucks. Like, or he's your friend. Like, I don't, I don't know. It's fine. It is, it is, it is not, it is not that serious, but also is, keep the thing you just said of like, this is maybe the most important thing.

Any of us could focus on with our limited time on Earth. And when it's done like this, it just itches. It gets increasingly more limited every day. Every day we're more limited.

Anyway, any other things from Summer Games Fest, Janine, that you saw since you watched the stuff that you want to shout out or that you thought was actually interesting? What was the... I would love to shout out the... frosty games fest yes frosty games i think if if you are overwhelmed by the amount of things that you could watch uh and learn about um

I think if I had to recommend just one for someone with deeply limited time or attention, it would probably be the Frosty Games. Frosty Games... Was it Fest? Was it Stream? Was it... I thought it was Fest, but I'll double check it. If I had a Frosty Games thing, I would call it a Fest because of the alliteration. Yeah, Frosty Games Fest. So it's Australian and Audi A Rowan games, developed games. And there's just like a really wide variety of stuff there.

It's called Frosty because it's winter there right now. Of course. But I mentioned that because one of the things says, one of the game says it's coming out in spring 2025. And I was like, that already happened. And then I had a moment. I was like, they probably mean their spring, which has not happened yet.

Yeah, that makes sense. But there's a lot of stuff there just like across a lot of genres that was neat and cool and not like duplicated in a lot of the other streams. Like there's a lot of... cross-pollination and the other ones but this one was yeah so that's if you want to be pleasantly surprised i would say that's the that's the big one yeah i'm excited for big walk which wasn't from there but was from day of the devs uh by uh

House House. Was that right? House House? Is that the name of the studio? House House, yeah. I'm excited in the more traditional space for the new Resident Evil, Resident Evil 9. I really liked RE7 and 8. um you know there's stuff there i don't i don't i we just spent 30 40 minutes being like i'm so frustrated at this industry and i'm not not frustrated at the industry that is how i feel i do think there's maybe a larger

um ongoing what's the what's the word for like a malaise about about games in many quadrants that i think is probably worth a larger thinking about because I did feel like even inside of very mainstream corridors, there was a general like, all right, is that it from a lot of this? Yeah, I feel like if anything, there's more malaise from mainstream and AAA.

places and players than from other because like if you're tapped into like what is actually coming out you could find anything that you would actually want to play yeah there's so much and there's some people who are like trying to To get 10 million dollar checks from people. And can't. I do think that they're. People are playing huge games.

are seem to be sick of the huge games that are out i think that's not gonna stop them from playing fortnight i mean yes which is of course a big part of this right is like more and more people are playing one or two big things full time a lot of kids are just playing roblox

and then a lot of adults are just playing Fortnite, or they're playing one 150-hour RPG or another, and they're not finding the time for a bunch of little stuff, or they're not interested in it. I think that there is something...

So I'm trying to work through a thought, and so I don't think this is a real thesis. Go ahead, Keith, while I try to work through this. To tie it back to the first thing that we talked about, one of the reasons why the – mfuga hat shit is so frustrating and the like they don't make games for guys who love boobs anymore is so frustrating it's like there is real agreement to be had if you're someone who wants to be playing

like new interesting video games that are uh you know expensive to make and interesting to play uh and it's that's not where the agreement is Like that's not the right direction. The direction should be from like everybody's making live service games. They're all terrible. Everything is like downstream of Destiny and WoW in a way that is like really obnoxious and boring. Like everything is.

trying to be Roblox or Minecraft or Fortnite or, uh, you know, Overwatch. It's not that they're making fewer of them. It's that they're making the same ones for longer. Uh-huh. Right. Yeah. Which is part of why I think something like Claire Obscura hit for so many people. Right. Was like, oh, there's a novelty here for me. I don't normally play these games. Games like Final Fantasy have become, you know, less turn based. Now that there aren't other.

turn-based RPGs built Japanese and otherwise out there but like oh wow this looks big and expensive this hits that scratches that part of my brain and also it's doing something that I'm not getting from the other big AAA-looking games that are out there right now. I think that there is a... It's crossed my minimum threshold for me to consider it a real game. 100%. Visually. I think that's a real thing. You know, like, I...

One of the big conversations we had when I was making the game I was making that I'm no longer making over and over again was like, what do we have to hit in terms of visual fidelity? What sort of style can we pursue that will open us up to cross that limited threshold, right? from game I don't have to take seriously to game I do take seriously. And I think when you're in development...

A lot of that stuff that's theoretical, that like from my critical position, which is like, I don't care if it's lines on a paper, it can be a game. You know, like we fucking, we run a tabletop game podcast. None of that stuff got graphics. That's all up here, baby. Like, I'm fine with that.

But as a developer who is trying to make something that is going to hit an audience, you then have to get kind of real politic about it and be like, well, there is a meaningful audience that will not spend more than seven or $15 on something unless it crosses some threshold and looks like, quote unquote.

a real game which is bullshit and we should try to change that all the ways that we can uh but also it's the realist it's the realistic part of being in this in this situation you know it's also totally irrational from like a market perspective like because There are so many gamers who feel that way about graphics, about how it has to look a certain way for it to be real to them. But then also, all of the biggest games look like shit. Fortnite looks like shit.

Minecraft is a very specific style. Roblox looks like shit. You can have those standards. I would say standards born from like... you know a shallow like limited experiences um right until something like hits like your friend is playing something and drags you in and you get really into it like a thing i always think about

is my mom who after she retired sort of got into games um and she you know i would show her things like minecraft occasionally is like you could try something like this um And she would say stuff like... Why would anyone play that? Because it looks that way. Why would you play something that looks like squares now? Video games don't have to look like squares, so why would you choose to play something that looks like squares now? And it's hard to answer that question to someone who...

has that perspective and hasn't played the thing in question to know that it feels really good. It doesn't matter what it looks like. If you haven't had the experience of something feeling really good and looking bad, quote unquote, like looking older or looking whatever.

I don't agree with any of those statements about Minecraft, but you know what I mean? It's hard to just talk someone into changing their mind on that. But that's the weird thing is that the same people who won't play a game unless it looks like GTA 6... also are playing Fortnite every day. True. And I don't know how you make a game...

With that kind of person in mind where they like they technically will play something that doesn't look very good endlessly for hundreds and hundreds of hours. But we'll see a game that is like slightly weird graphically.

And go like, ew, it looks like shit. It looks like a PS2. I mean, I think Fortnite is still fundamentally legible, though, right? It's very legible. And I think when you think about when people first got into it also, I'm not saying it looked... outstanding at the time but it was not it was on par with third person shooters that were multiplayer focused and also there are other ways to communicate

technical success, like scale, which it had, right, compared to a Call of Duty map. There's this whole big area you can explore. You know, changeability, you could build stuff in this game. Well, okay, well, if you can build stuff in this game, then of course it's going to...

It looks better than Minecraft. Minecraft you can build some, but it doesn't look as good as this. But it's all squares in Minecraft. Why would you play a game with squares? That's right. It's all squares. It's all squares. And then also just like, it's a big...

It's a big multiplayer game. Oh, there's all of these players in every match. That means that you make it that little bit of, you know, that is impressive. It's not a tradeoff. I don't think people are doing calculus in their heads, but they're being impressive. They're like, whoa, we've been fighting.

like all these different people over the course of a whole game like cool and i think that that cool factor is the kind of technical cool factor can come in even through stuff that isn't what we think of as like technically good quote-unquote graphics um uh And instead through these other things that are still, which is actually getting to the thing that I actually think, which is I think that there is an audience for whom what was lacking from these showcases was something like novelty, which.

absolutely exists if you scratch the surface of these things and you find it inside, they are all doing slightly different things. But I think for a certain type of consumer and a certain type of... player, they see a game like Mixtape, a game about being in your high school years, a coming-of-age story, and they go, oh yeah, like Life is Strange, which I've been playing for a decade, right? And I think that's a hard hill to climb over, and I think that's also true for...

all of the, everything from smaller, you know, more independent things than that, up to gotcha games, which all just look like a Hoyoverse thing, but realigned in some way. And a ton of stuff, you know, in between those two. things i i think a lot about the the move and i've talked about this before but from like the original xbox to the xbox 360 the move to hd gaming right that was such a

Oh, my God, I feel it. I feel the new box I bought and put under my TV can do a thing my old box can't do, right? And not just visually, but also in terms of the types of worlds that they can produce for me. at which games are running, the connectivity, all of these things. And I think that there was a follow-up to that, which is not as clean as the box produces better graphics, but is like, oh, we're exploring new types of interactivity. We're figuring out new.

genres oh we're telling adventure game we're using parts of the adventure game or the visual novel but in 3d spaces that allow us to tell stories about people who aren't just john marine you know but we've had a decade of that now we've had most of the 2010s and all the 2025s having battle royales and the return of the immersive shooter and intimate stories about grief. And I...

There's a sort of lingering low-level buzz that I can sense. This is not... My best critical hat isn't on. I'm kind of like an empath. And I can kind of feel... This ought to be good. I can kind of... feel like, like, you know. Keith, like the exile from KOTOR 2. I kind of have a sense of how other people are leaning. And I can kind of feel that part of the malaise is that people want something that they haven't had before. And they don't...

feel like it's coming. You go to a show like this and you want to feel buzzed about a thing. You want to feel like, oh my God, I hadn't had that idea before. And that thing can glow in a way. That other things gain that, you know, I think of people going to see Horizon Zero Dawn, whenever that first showed up at E3. And I remember people coming out of that being like,

you could knock the pieces off of the robot dinosaurs. And that made them excited all day. And they go and see other games and they're already buzzing. They might not even like that other game, but they're already buzzing from that previous demo.

Shout out to Jeff Bacalar. I'm talking about Jeff Bacalar, my good friend. Shout out to Giant Bomb. But like he was glowing after seeing that demo, you know? And I think that there is, and again, that's a technical thing, but I don't just mean that. I also mean, oh my God, I hadn't.

thought that there could be games that talk to me in this way and i think we're in a little bit of a moment where right now a lot of because of maybe because of what's being shown or because of the format of the way a game is being shown because of all that stuff It's hard to get money to make any video game. Of course. Right. You know, Janine, I think part of the reason you and I both were like, whoa, it's a big walk. Big walk feels cool. It's because it's like.

oh, it's not quite, it's kind of doing something different than even what, we get this right now through games like Repo and Phasmophobia and other sorts of multiplayer things. But like, this feels like a different thing than those.

I think if there were more of those things on a big stage, or if things got the space to show the way that they were novel, you might end up with some of those people who have malaise being a little more, just having a little more interest. So I also think this might be... an ongoing situation that's real in the space of games. Partly, Keith, for what you said, which is the conservative tenor of it all. I think that was you. It might have been Janine.

And people not knowing, I think that in a lot of cultural stuff right now, there's people who don't know how to talk about what they like and don't like about something. Yeah. Absolutely. It's hard to know what you like and don't. There's a whole job around it. You know, that's part of what being a critic is, is like unfolding your feelings. Janine. So part of it is also... I feel like I should clarify because I've only said that I work...

on stuff with IO Interactive. So I'm not going to comment on any of that stuff. But I also... recently was working with a company that unfortunately shuttered and was working on an unreleased game um that was a cool multiplayer thing that that you know r.i.p was was neat um so When I'm commenting on like, I wonder what the funding situation was like here. It's coming from that background. It's coming from my experiences there. And my experiences there also sort of tell me a little bit of like...

I think a big reason that people aren't getting that. Wow. That's something new is because it's really hard to get money for video games and has been for the past, like three years. And on top of that, the way to get money is often to say it is like X plus Y. And that is where the niche is. You pick successful thing X, successful thing Y. Whether or not your game actually is that.

that's the two things you're going to try and use to pitch it to someone is like it is this peanut butter it is this jelly right um and you put it together and that's why we should like i said before that's why we should get 30 million dollars um And sometimes you can do that and like be a sneaky Pete and release something that.

is its own thing or that feels unique when you play it but if that's a strategy that got you money that's the strategy you're probably going to market with and that's the strategy you're probably going to lean into in terms of what you're showing and so people are going to be like

Oh, right. It's like peanut butter plus jelly. Yeah. And like, I have peanut butter and I have jelly. Yeah. So it's not that exciting to me right now. And to your, I mean... when i started making uh the game for possibility space when i was on that team we started that project when uh as as the finance guys like to say money was cheap um which is to say interest rates were low and so it was very easy to borrow and also

So not just low, but it was flowing. It was easy to get a loan of a high amount of money for a relatively low interest rate, which means that people who want to start a business or who want to invest. in a game project or a studio. We're looking at pandemic numbers and saying, I want a taste of that. Exactly right.

um uh they are going to be a little more lowercase l liberal with it's kind of also uppercase l liberal with their investments right they're going to say oh yeah i'm gonna i'm willing to take this risk because the money's cheap right now I'm not losing a bunch of money on interest.

Uh, to, to make, when I make this investment, if it doesn't pay back, yeah, of course it'll be a loss, but that's the job. That's the, that's the part of the, of the, the thing that I like doing. I like to, to be a little risky with this. And most of the time I know, I know a good thing when I see it, but sometimes I'm.

surprises me so let me let me put my money into something uh that that doesn't that isn't just peanut butter and jelly but when the economy gets more more shaky When interest rates are higher, when there is market instability, not simply because of tariffs or because of the bouncing back and forth because of tariffs, the general sense that nothing is.

stable, a lot of that investment gets way more conservative. And it's not just investment, because even inside of something that's like fully owned and operated, fully funded internally. People who are holding the purse strings often lean towards more conservative decision making. And so you start asking, like, could we make this a live service game?

could how do we extend the life on this thing how do we make sure that people don't just play it for a weekend how do we make sure they get the battle pass how do we how do we make a game that has a battle pass in the first place how do we make something that no one will see and think oh this is for someone else it's not for me how do we make sure that we

build the biggest tent possible. And all of that stuff, I think, sands down what could be, you know, really idiosyncratic or interesting games. And instead, we end up with stuff that does feel samey, you know? You know, part of why I'm like... when I roll my eyes, when I see something like the last descendants or whatever that, that game is, isn't just the TNA in it. Right. But what is kind of like eye rolly about it for me is like, Oh, this is just, what if we put it in destiny?

Or what if we put it in, what was that sci-fi original TV show that was also an MMO? Defiance. Defiance, right? And I think when I look at that and contrast it to something like Warframe. Which is tons. Absolutely has ass. A thousand percent does. You end up with something where you're like, oh, this is this is a project that.

so reflects the interests and the creative direction of its developers, the sort of broader ideas they want to explore, both narratively and mechanically and aesthetically. Like all that stuff feels like something. um that is that is uh unique and in and of itself like something that was being pursued for its own ends and not because we know we can find an audience and

I think that you can play that conservative development game for a little while, but eventually it has diminishing returns. You know, there's a moment when like, once there are enough of those similar things out, once there are seven different...

Genshin-inspired third-person gotchas, you know, you're too late to the party, buddy. You know, you're not going to be Genshin number two, you know? And really, how many... truly successful live service games are there this is i mean you were saying earlier people chasing wow and fortnite right and like right yeah that's you know i think final fantasy 14 probably is the one that hit the most in in the post wow uh world

It's interesting. No one's pitching. No one's being like, we're going to be the next Final Fantasy XIV. They're so expensive. Despite that game is... Yeah, that game's expensive. It was really successful. There are people who are making MMO pitches, but the MMO pitch they're making isn't Final Fantasy XIV.

There's also a sickness at the heart of the live service game, which is that companies with a lot of money... I thought you were going to say there's a sickness at the heart of Final Fantasy XIV. No, I haven't played it, and I won't. But you should play as Final Fantasy XI. Let's get back. I got into the Final Fantasy...

11 last year. I played Final Fantasy 11. Alright, it was good. Anyway, continue. Yeah, I played it on the Xbox 360. We talked about this on the screen. You're right, we did. Which is that, okay, so the number one thing that... that big publishers with lots of money are trying to do is put out a game that makes tons of money and keeps making tons of money so they don't have to make another game, but they're also trying not to pay anyone any money.

which is a fundamentally contradictory thing with live service games. It's the kind of game that needs the most stable employment, the most labor, people actually constantly working on a game. And so you have this thing where you want to make a life-of-service game because you want a game that keeps making money for a really long time, but you don't want to pay for it to be good.

You just want it to work. You just want people to like it and to keep playing it. And so these games fail because they say that they're going to be a live service game and really what they are is a game with a battle pass or a game that has like... Some really unimpressive updates every few months. Yes. I don't know. A lot to consider. A lot to think about.

I thought we were talking about this for no time at all, but here we are. I turned this into an episode of Run Button. It's my fault. It's not your fault. You don't have to take the blame. How often do I say we have 20 minutes left and then we have an hour left, you know? But we should take a break when we come back. we can talk about Elden Ring and Fantasy Life Eye. Fantasy Life Eye. I'm the gamer. That's what the eye stands for.

That's the fourth eye. The eye stands for eye. That's groundbreaking. That's groundbreaking. Actually, that's one of the other eyes is eye. I have a thought, but we'll come to it after the break. E-Y-E. Eye. Like the big eyes all around ginormousia. Oh. Could that be? Where does it say that there's four eyes? This is not the first time I've heard this. Janine, do you remember where this is? Is it from an interview? Is it from some marketing thing? It's from a year ago.

There was an interview where someone was like, ah, but there's a fourth eye. Give me a second. I'll try to find it. Fantasy Life Eye came out. You have to know there's three eyes to know that there's a fourth eye. Well, that was the thing is they said what the other eyes were. It wasn't just like.

They weren't just... Again, this is from extra game material. This is trailers. It's not even trailers. It was literally just an interview. Yeah, exactly. All right, I found it. It is... I for islands, I for internet, and I for individual. because of how you can play your lives out in your own way. And I did also just find someone suggesting that the fourth I was Inafune, as for Keiji Inafune. who was originally at level five during most of this game's production, but now was gone.

Who could say if that's true? That seems tenuous. It does seem like a coincidence to me. But that's a case. I'm sure there were a lot of people whose name started with I. Almost certainly. But... Someone says that someone said the fourth one was Inafune, but now I'm not so sure.

Regardless. If someone said that someone said it, then someone probably said it. Probably someone said it. Fantasy Life I, The Girl Who Steals Time, the follow-up to the original Fantasy Life on the 3DS, and Fantasy Life Online, the game I didn't play, but Janine, I know you... tried to play some of it right yeah the when they released it um i like started it but the immediate beginning felt just like the beginning of the the 3ds game and i was like i don't need to play this for a third time

uh and then i bounced off of it i'm sure there's some different stuff in there but right uh yeah the initial impression was a little bit like i've already done this well we've met some of those characters now because they show up in this uh uh it is a kind of top-down unless you download the mod for the PC build. RPG life sim make work game by level five who I love using make work

It is a term that I think you first deployed in my reading about these games. I love it as a descriptor. Do you want to talk about what that means or why you use that term?

in relation to these games? I feel like it's kind of lost some of the meaning in the, like, post-pressure wash simulator world. Oh, sure. But a make-work game is... essentially originally intended as like the point of what you're doing in the game is... work is is like you are you have to clean a thing up you have to build this you have to you know it was about like restoration construction self-guided tasks but also things that in a less pleasant framing are very chore like right um

And let me tell you, there are some chores. I would say Fantasy Life Eye is a game about numbers going up. and checking boxes off of a list. You are playing an adventurer who is the kind of aid of an archaeologist. You're drawn to a mysterious island. And on that island, you find a strange hole in the ground that leads to a weird dungeon. And also you're intercepted on your way there by a weird magic. dragon, in fact, multiple dragons.

The long story short is you get knocked back in time and you find a version of this island from a thousand years ago and you end up meeting people there, developing skills across a number of kind of... job or class types what this game calls lives and trying to unravel the mystery not just of the past and the present but also of a strange other world called ginormousia. And along the way, you cut down a lot of trees and mine a lot of ore and make some clothes or armor. You farm some, you fish.

you fight with swords and bows and staves magic spells it is like a bright colorful uh, isometric RPG with a lot of, um, player driven goals. You can say to yourself, I want to try to rank up my blacksmith skill today. So I'm just going to focus on getting the ore I need. and nailing these recipes um the the uh combat is like top down

action RPG stuff. Not with, not like Diablo style with hundreds of enemies or anything, but you know, you go into a room and there are six weird wolves and you fight the six weird wolves. And maybe there's a seventh one who's like a mini boss who has more HP and some special. attacks um the the mining and stuff is about finding kind of weak points on the ore or the trees if you're cutting down trees they're circling around and then like

kind of managing your stamina and trying to break the stuff that you can break given your current skill level. And then the blacksmithing, alchemy, tailoring, et cetera, artists, the new artist life is all kind of like... This one particular style of minigame where you're bouncing between kind of workstations with the left and right buttons and then tapping or rapid tapping or holding or spinning a thumbstick, kind of almost like a warrior.

a warish minigame or main warrior is not like the right the right comparison but a little minigame to make stuff um that's what this game is that's kind of what it was on the ds also uh but i do think the constant removal of another layer of how much more there is.

is, I think, is incredibly different than the original game. In the original game, it was like, oh, I'm in a town. Okay, I'm going to do this stuff in the town, and then I'm going to do this stuff in the outskirts of the town, and I'm going to go to a new town, new part of the world, new island, and then do everything there. This is like...

Oh, there's the current time, which has its own dungeon, and there's the past. There's the past, but then there's also ginormousia, this big open world to explore. And that has its own little villages with its own little challenges. Oh, and then there's the multiplayer, you know, roguelike dungeon mode where you plant a tree and the tree grows and you go into the tree. And they're just like, it keeps doing that. And then there's the town.

building mode that's kind of animal crossing ish uh on on top of everything else and then there's the the art gallery that you can put your stuff into and then there's the coliseum and it's like the whole game keeps giving you a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more um not to the point that it's over

but I do think that it feels like a much bigger scale game in some ways than the original Fantasy Life. That's what Fantasy Life is. How are the two of you finding it? With a couple things that I hate about this game. I basically love it. Where do you want to start on that? I'll start with the hate. I'll start with the hate. Did you play the original Fantasy Life?

I did. I loved the original Fantasy Life. And before I even knew about Fantasy Life, I found my 3DS games in a box and played some Fantasy Life last year. Although not enough to like really remember how it was. So I can't really do any comparison between. Old fantasy life in this fantasy life, although I do think that the old combat was more fun. Interesting. This combat I find to be a little bit rough, although I don't dislike the combat. It's just like a little bit weird.

What was different about the old one? I don't remember. Attacks and the new one come in really fast, and because of the, like, because it's... The arenas are bigger. You have to get closer to be attacking things. It's just kind of tough to like...

See an enemy attack coming and like block it with a shield in time for it to actually work. So I find that I do a lot of dodging, but like dodging before an attack has even started because there's like a perfect dodge mechanic. Right. But attacks happen so fast, I find it very difficult. to get those perfect dodges. That makes sense. That's a minor thing. The crowd, the gathering is so...

like find the weak spot and just hit it. And they really want you to be hitting things with axes and pick axes for 20 hours. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's fundamentally it's not interesting. The crafting has a timing skill based thing to it.

that like or i think of something like stardew valley's fishing mechanic which is like keep the thing in the thing and like this is you know the fishing is like find the right spot and hit you know and you can either do it or you can't based on your stamina there's no

It's just sort of like, did you gauge wrong? Sorry, you're out of stamina. Try again when you have more stamina. It's very weird because it's very binary and it's also... kind of flavorless and there's so much of it right it's not like you get ore and if you're hitting a rock and you don't have enough stamina to finish the rock's health bar it's basically a fight right

And if you don't have enough, you know, skill list fight, there's no skill. That's right. Yeah, you're okay. Tell me why you disagree. Okay, so I disagree for a lot of reasons. I will say, like, I think a lot of what you're saying is more true of the original game than of this one. I think a big difference is that they have sanded down a lot of stuff. The original game, it didn't feel like they wanted you to take on every job.

would say it feels like they want you to take on every job and they have done a lot to make that as frictionless as possible. But there is still a degree of planning. Sometimes I find gathering resources a little too easy. But there's a lot of it is like if you are spending your points in the tree.

to sort of account for your weaknesses and things like that. You can focus on building out your stamina, or you can focus on building up your just material skill, or you can focus on using energy more efficiently for your super attacks or whatever, or getting more super attacks. getting more drops from a hit. I totally agree with that.

If your mining is a little bit lower, you can bring a miner in your party and then they'll help you out. Or you can just tell them to do it while you're doing something else. My thing is, it's really like once you've started on a rock... you either have what it takes to beat that rock or you don't there's no like once you're in the mining instance right

Like, there's not a lot of wiggle room. Like, okay, maybe you'll get an extra critical hit. Or two, I found that that is not enough to make up for, like, being one level shy of being able to beat The Rock. Yeah, there was a real, like, part of the... meta game so to speak is you want to be getting the best you want to be you want to be mining for instance the hardest possible rock you could potentially mine

at all times in order to get the best XP out. And you don't want to be doing the one more than that because then you'll get nothing because you'll hit a brick wall, right? There is no partial. What I was trying to say before was there's no partial.

rewards you don't get like some i mean i guess there's kind of one way to think about it if you finish the health bar you get kind of normal amounts of rewards if you crush the health bar you get it down to very low and then get a bit give it an extra big hit if you have the

or the super move available to do that, then you get an excellent, which gives you extra rewards. Those are the kind of, that's the thing that makes it not. And it gives you a lot of stamina back, which is important. Right. It lets you get in that flow. Losing stamina.

really sucks but but there's not you're not getting an ore for every time you hit it i'm not i don't i don't feel as strongly about this as you do progress that's but there isn't right exactly i do find it pretty easy mostly because once you get support it's just like you're blowing through once you

Oh, it's definitely easy. It just takes a lot of time. I wish it was harder. I would also disagree that they want you to be... mining the hardest possible rock that you can um i think the fact that it's encouraging you to do multiple jobs um it feels a lot like because the way that this game of the previous game worked is that If you have one job that's a higher level than other jobs, you get an experience gaining boost to your lower level jobs.

So it's really fast to level things up experience-wise. Not maybe necessarily doing your quests to actually get the next rank, but in terms of just getting points in that tree, you can go really fast. But... Because of that, I think there is a real advantage to doing stuff that is a bit lower. Like your main class shouldn't be a gathering class. It should be a combat class or a crafting class. But if you are going for stuff that is lower than your level.

You might not get a lot of experience from it. The people that are your party members, if they're lower level, will still get a ton of experience from it. They level up so fast. They level up so fucking fast. But you'll be able to very easily get excellence. You'll be able to very easily maximize what you're pulling out of that resource. And then when you are crafting, there is also the thing of like...

The ideal I think there is the material you're converting. You should be relatively like a fairly higher level than that. Never quit crafting materials. Always do it.

you know do a batch but always do them like yourself because you will get a huge bonus you'll get a huge bonus you can go from you can craft four things and end up getting ten um for your materials and then you use that and then the thing you're doing is crafting the highest possible thing you can craft like that's the stage where you really want to push it because you will get hundreds of thousands of tons of xp from that yeah yeah yeah i would i say that it's what they

want you to do what i really mean is that's the sort of for me that's the thing that feet you can really feel the game mechanic um like functioning because it's like, ooh, do I have enough? The only point of friction while I'm in gathering mode is Do I have the stamina to pull this off? And for me, like, whereas there are definitely times when I'm fighting, it's actually, it feels the same in combat, right? Which is like...

you know, ooh, I'm level 40. Can I beat the level 60 boss if I try really hard? The answer is yes. Combat is where you can stretch it for sure. And that's fun. Right, that's the thing, right, is there's the flexibility in the combat where I'm like, I'm level 40. If I really get my dodges down, I can beat this level 60 dragon and then I'll get a huge XP boost and it'll feel cool. And I might even get a new companion or some loot that's like ahead of the curve in a way. Whereas in my-

or in blacksmithing or in any of this other stuff, sometimes you just don't have it. You don't have the stamina you need. You don't have the turns you need. You cannot skillfully push past it. And so the only way I could get... this that feeling of i've actually achieved something here is by chasing the edge of what my skill cap is if that makes sense yeah um which is not you know that's not the end of the world in in any way uh one way or the other and again here's what i'll say is if all

of this sounds like what the fuck are they talking about I really think it's important to understand this game is driven on the joy of every time you get an excellent every time you get the kind of like overkill effect on a tree you're knocking down because you've uh you've done enough damage that you've not just emptied the bar but you've like gone past the empty point by a bunch uh or you you crush crafting a new

because you had 10 turns to do it, but you actually got it done in only five turns, all of your companions clap and applaud for you. And that's what this game feels like. This game is 100% big, numbers go up. I did the thing. I needed to make four iron bars to level up my blacksmithing, but I only had enough iron to make three iron bars. But I did...

so good that I, even though I only had enough materials to make three, I made seven and that was enough to get me through that challenge. Oh, it feels great. And that is like. If we talk in ways that feel like that, it's because that is the logic of the game, I think. Can we talk about stuff that we do? Actually, I want to come back around, Janine. You said something, which is like one of the big differences between this game and the previous one is how much this...

feels built for you to constantly be swapping between lives and having every life. Uh, when I played that first one, I think I did, I think I did mining blacksmith paladin. And that was kind of it. And I did Mage because I was really curious about the Mage story and the Mage characters, and Magic is cool. But I went back basically late in the game to level that up separately. And in that game...

you had to go to the, tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe you had to go to the guild counter in order to change lives. And so if you were in mining life, you were in mining life. And that meant fighting. If you got into a fight, you had to deal with it with your pickaxe. And that was fine. It wasn't like...

You know, you weren't going to go try to fight the dragon with the pickaxe, and there was no reason to do that. You weren't going to get special rewards, and there were no special quests or challenges to go do that necessarily. But that was the kind of, you know, you were going to go out. Oh, okay. My mining trainer, the person who's training me in this location for mining says, go get three rubies and 10 pieces of gold and some other objective. Awesome. I'm going to go out and do that.

Here, you can hit a button to quickly change to any of the jobs that you have from the lowest level onward. Once you have the job, you can switch to it at any time. And so before, you would be walking around going, Oh, shit, that's a special tree. I have to remember the special trees here. I'm not, you know, I'm in fishing mode right now. I think there was a little bit of wiggle room with that. I think the thing that was the most annoying, though, was the combat lives, where it was...

Like you have to kill X enemy in this mode. So if you kill that enemy when you're in the other mode, it doesn't work. I think you could still be like... Wood cutting, but also be maging. I don't fully, I don't remember. Keith, do you remember? You just played the original a little bit. No, I don't remember.

I do know that one of the big things about this game is that there is no swapping. The game auto swaps, which means that the last game didn't. But I don't remember the extent to which there was. Well, you can also go in the menu and like swap. to your uh yes you know you can which i did all the time to your combat life or whatever um but for for like skill for crafting and for gathering it will just auto swap you i think you know what i can do is there's three different tiers there's like

There's crafting, gathering, and combat. Maybe you could have one of those at a time. Does that make sense? I mean, that's what I would do. I believe you know I I'm I'm just opening my I did so for witching our season five I played the original fantasy life I'm just gonna open one of these videos I'm just gonna look Oh, it's automatically

Made chapters? That's very funny. Oh, wow. Story, house, hair salon, spooky time, what? Status points, bounty hunting, Elderwood, butterfly requests. It even named them. That's crazy. Ball monster. oh okay great okay so that's yeah that's witch stuff happening oh my god I totally forgot the bounty thing where you would have you would

You'd kill a big guy and he'd be put in a little box and you had to drag the box to the bounty clerk and turn him in. Yeah. Wow. So, while you look this up, I do think the thing you were saying is... one of the most major changes. The streamlining too, I think I will do all the time now is I'm a hunter is my main combat class. But if I'm in a place where I've seen that the mage or the paladin or the mercenary has enemies they need to kill to rank up, I'll just switch over to them real quick.

and just knock them out. If I am in mining mode, but I see a tree that I know I need for my... So woodcutting, woodcutter life, I'll just switch over and go do it. In fact, like you said, you don't even need to. You just walk over and hit the button and it auto switches you to woodcutter.

Yeah, I there is something so different about that feeling that is more like a traditional RPG where you just happen to have a fishing skill and a woodcut. Yes, that's totally the thing. Fantasy life has always been they've split things that you can normally do. all the time in an RPG to these different avenues.

And having to swap was the thing that made it not feel like it's all just one thing. But now it just kind of all just feels like one thing. Right. And like that to me is I think one of the biggest strangest changes. It really does.

make me feel better about the number going up, because I get to make the number go up all the time in this kind of condensed way. But it makes me feel... Right, you see a big tree, you see a big rock, you see a big guy, you can just get all three. I get all three, one, two, three. But it diminishes for me sort of... the feeling of the ways in which the original fantasy life felt like a sim, both in the sense of like a life sim, but also just like the sort of simulated world.

Almost the way a game like Final Fantasy XI can feel like, okay, I'm committed. I am being the Blue Mage now. It's a big deal if I want to go switch off and do something else. There is a sort of like, okay, this is my role.

It's almost like The Sims actually, right? Where you're like, okay, I'm part of the society. My role is... criminal capital C criminal that's the job I have and so I'm committed to that right now there was like a real like that's I can I can imagine who my character is and what their specialty is and you still get that over the course of a long period of time because obviously

You know, you're you're not you literally are only crafting one thing at a time. You're not literally the same button presses or the same, you know, 30 second thing isn't going to give you both a blacksmithing and a tailoring thing. You're searching between those at the same workbench very quickly. There's no going back to the guild. It's the same workbench. It doesn't even matter which workbench. The other thing is you don't even have to go.

to any workbench you go to, you can make any recipe from. You don't have to go to the alchemy place. You don't have to go to the... Yeah, it'll just change it. When you switch in the menu to a crafting job, it goes. You want to be teleported to the nearest workbench?

because we'll just do that for you. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Take me there. That's why I switched to this. But it is that smoothness, that frictionlessness does, I think, take something away. It's kind of an argument against the game itself. And yet...

When I booted it up again an hour ago, let me just play a little bit more to remind myself. I beat it about a week ago. I was like, I just want to keep playing. What if we push the podcast back? I just want to play a little more. I'm so close to getting Hero on. on my hunter, oh I can get the, oh I just have enough to cut down this tree and get through this different part of the dungeon now. It doesn't not hit.

I only think maybe, and I really like it. Like you said at the beginning, there are a few things you really hate about it, and then lots that you love. Playing it puts me in the damn machine zone. I am in it. I am like... Yeah, the goal, I think the goal is... I think the goal of the first game was very much like, this is a level five RPG. And a big part of it is you're making stuff. You have a little trade that you're working on. Yeah. But when you finish the story...

You finished the story. Congrats. You can keep grinding if you want, but you finished the story in this. it feels like there is much more intention for you to keep building your little place, keep exploring ginormousia, keep leveling stuff up. And because it's less of a grind, there is a lot more incentive to just like... poke around. I have a friend who's playing it who said that even though it is nothing like Genshin Impact, it fulfilled the niche for them.

I think, Austin, you might have also said something similar to me. I said the same thing about Rune Factory is what I said. Oh, about Rune Factory, yes. I'm excited to say Rune Factory. I only just learned about it the other day. They said it about Fantasy Life Eye because it was just like, sometimes...

the thing you want to do is you want to run around and find stuff sometimes you just want to mash a button and kill a guy sometimes you just want to like make little things and watch the levels go up like it is a it is a little it is a little smorgasbord for you to you know pick at and like

So it's, you know, it's familiar, but it is also kind of, it feels like there is a slightly different goal in this one. And like, I think whichever, which one resonates with you is probably going to be like... what you know what you're looking for what kind of you know are you motivated by the numbers going up or do you want something more behind that like

Well, I think this is the other thing that I, it sounds like we're really down on this game. I think all three of us have put a lot of time that we're very positive. Okay. Well, I really like this game. I just want to say, I'm not saying we're not. I'm not saying we're, sorry, I'm not saying we're down on it. I'm saying it sounds like we might be. I mean that I was the one pushing back on that. Okay, yes. But actually, I think it doesn't do that. Right.

I think we all really like it, including me and Keith, who are not as verbose in saying what we like about it in this moment. But I do think my actual biggest thing that I wish was the same from the previous game. is that and it's a thing that you wrote about at length in your original review for the game janine for paste uh for the first game

was how charming the story was and how much time was spent on the people and places there. The first game takes you from a kind of central traditional European fantasy, you know, kingdom to these other kind of... Traditional JRPG takes on world villages. There's the sort of like a world, like kind of Epcot center style. Ah, yes, we're in the vaguely, you know, Middle Eastern place. Okay, we're in the Mediterranean seaside village.

And some of those villages, that village type stuff is still happening here. And they're still evoking it. And like in a lot of the crafting recipes and stuff, they're still being like, hey, you remember that place?

A hundred percent. In fact, those characters show up as Strangelings, which are the companions you can recruit, who are very cute and who have, some of them have very fun lines, some of them have very annoying lines that they'll say repeatedly, which I even kind of like. Find any good wood or whatever the fuck? Exactly.

I don't even I don't even I don't I don't want her in my party saying the same thing 30 times in a row. But there's something fun about that being here for me still and me being in the same way that Dostoevsky says that the. person complaining about the toothache takes some joy in the complaint. I think I like complaining about the verbose NPC companion. But what I miss is...

Each of the jobs used to have a different trainer in each of the locations who had their own little micro story that was being told. And each of the locations had some sense of... place in the world and some connection to a larger mystery um that was uh that you know swerved in different ways that was a game very hard to see where they put their time instead of that that's right because here we have the huge sprawl

in ginormousia a place that would be even harder to explore that would be even longer to explore if not for the mod that we that uh keith you linked us to uh that lets you move the camera that something similar is coming for the console releases of this game

my understanding there's a patch they've announced they will be changing how the camera works so hopefully that does come soon for people because it's life-changing um yeah uh but like i think that shift and then in general the shift from what the kind of very traditional level five, you know, charming RPG with a little more heart and a little more depth than you might think, given the very kind of simple, positive art direction.

I'm really missing that from here. Like it became the numbers go up game. Because its charm is in the loop of leveling up. You said there's not much grinding, but it's kind of like, there's either no grinding or it's all grinding, depending on how you look at it. The game is the grind. But it's pleasurable the whole time. It's, you know, you have two pies. And one of those pies is blueberry. And one of those pies... Why am I doing all this food stuff today? I don't know.

And one of those pies is apple, cherry, and blueberry. It's like, well, the pie that has the three things in it isn't three pies. It's still one pie. That's right. But it has less blueberry. You have... You know, you have your action RPG, but you also want to have this like...

Breath of the Wild evoking open world. Down to the shrines. Yeah, down to the shrines. All this really on the nose kind of funny... you know i don't want to say it's like it's not copying it's like it's like parrot it's not parody is the wrong word um yeah i don't know uh but you know it's evoking it in sort of a wink wink nudge nudge way where it's like we know what this is

This is fun. We're having fun. I mean, we were getting so long in the tooth on the last segment, I didn't do a defense of... you know peanut butter plus jelly games um but this is a peanut butter plus jelly game and a lot of my favorite games are peanut butter plus jelly games yeah yes it's not that's not bad it's just you know it's if you're looking for something that is like

If you're looking for peanut butter banana or Nutella banana. The jelly of this game, I like more than the jelly that it's referencing. Right, yeah, you are not a... I hate the original jelly. Yeah, yeah. Which is Animal Crossing. Yes, I was just going to say this. There are a lot of people who don't like Animal Crossing. I haven't met them. Because it's not directed enough. Right. They kind of get...

I think it's like an intimidation where it's just like, okay, you just put me in this world. I don't care about what carpet I'm using. I don't know what to do. And like... You know, if you give that player a little bit more direction and guidance and like, well, you don't just have to craft the things you like. You can craft the things that will advance your level. And once you advance your level, you can craft this other stuff. And then you can come here and do that, you know.

you know so it's but you don't you don't get that plus also the fully fleshed out rpg stuff plus also the fully fleshed out open world stuff like something has to give somewhere especially level five who's like They've been in trouble. They've been in some business economic troubles in recent years. There was definitely a period where it felt like they were just dead.

so yeah for a long time i didn't know that this game was gonna come out frankly yeah i thought they were i thought they were just fucking toast which i was very sad about i was very very sad about that totally and i'm glad yeah i i i think that that stuff kind of reflects a little bit on what um we were already talking a lot about like player expectations and how do you reach an audience and all that stuff and i do think like so much of this game is

I wouldn't say it's a miracle, but it's like there's so much of it that feels like it's driven from, okay, people like Animal Crossing, people like Breath of the Wild. How do we make something that like... captures some of that while still retaining what made the original special. And it is shocking that it does fit together without ever feeling too, you know, it doesn't feel phony. It doesn't feel like it's arrived at any of those things cynically. It doesn't feel...

It doesn't usually feel like not enough of itself. Right. Yes. I think that's true, too. It still feels mostly like fantasy life the whole time. Yeah, absolutely. I am curious. You know, what is your are both of you focusing on everything kind of give or take the same amount? Do you find that you're spending as much time building stuff in your little Animal Crossing town as you are doing adventuring? Is there a particular life that you're zeroing in on mostly?

uh yeah yeah i've not done a lot of crafting yet i got like started on crafting late so i'm still working on leveling up before i can make anything that i actually like sure um and that's the part of the game I'm least interested in anyway. I really want to get houses for all my guys, but it seems like I maybe hit the cap on houses for guys, which is weird because there's so many more guys. guys so yeah i don't know i don't know if that's a uh

If that's a memory concern. You have so much space, though. They give you so much space. They give you so much space. I don't know what to do with it. I could easily double my houses. Well, and I built, like, um... The way that I laid things out was so much more cramped because I assumed that we'd get a ton of space. I kind of took that initial starting zone and turned it into a little plaza where, like, there's a little extra, like...

kind of like ground tiling stuff. And then on the left and the right hand sides, I put like two or three houses each. So there's like a little row. I did two houses on the left and then the gallery that you can build eventually in the middle. And then I have one, I have the house for my farm. Yeah, yeah.

I just assumed we'd get 10 houses, you know? I guess not. And that stuff is also like a little light, but I never, I'm still charmed by it every time I go back to town. Every time I go back to town and someone runs up to me to be like, ooh, here, I have a little gift for you. Or, oh, can you give me 10, you know, pumpkins? I'm like, yeah, absolutely, Doc. I'm on it. But so I started with a combat. Well, I started with actually Angler. And then I took a combat life after.

And I focused on those two for a while. And then just like as I wanted more things, I would just take the life that would get me that. stuff so like I wanted to build better weapons so I started with the miners so that I could get the ore and then my first crafting life was blacksmith so I could build swords and I'm like just at the point You know, 30 hours in where I'm just focusing a little bit on every level 30 in almost everything. Right.

I'm missing three lives, but everything that I have, I have at level 30, except the crafting stuff, which is a little lower. And I'm just now starting to be able to build weapons that I can use that are better than what I'm running with. I've hit the point now where I finished the main story and there's still post-game stuff. There's a lot of post-game stuff to do. But I'm like, I think I could do most of it.

I'm wishing there was still narrative hooks for some of this stuff is really where it's at for me. Jeanine, you were going to say something, though. I was just going to say that, like, I... I mastered Carpenter basically by accident. Yeah. So I think if anyone's like... If people are like having trouble leveling stuff, I really think like the best advice I could offer is if you focus on carpentry or if you pick up some other strangelings that have crafting abilities and you can level them up.

working with them really makes it easy to just tear through those levels. Because the first strange thing you get is carpentry, right? Yeah. And the way it works is that your skill level and their skill level combine. So if you both have decent tools, you can really swing above your weight class. Because the first game...

You couldn't use tools that were higher than your tier in the guild, basically. You couldn't... do recipes and stuff that were higher than your tier in the guild um i had to like be adept or be a master or whatever to do certain things in this it is full they have like separated the love the guild tiers from

skill level um and like equipment and stuff uh you can use any equipment so if you luck out and find a really good tool in a treasure chest uh you can just use that from the jump which really again really helps um you you know recipes are dictated like recipe success is dictated by like your your skill level and you know there's you can they've made it like you still have to go back to your master to turn in the quests to level up

in the guild but that doesn't really matter as much because there is also a skill tree and like you get the points to put into the skill tree no matter what just based on leveling that skill up um

So you can kind of just go for quite a while. Just like on your own. Just like getting those levels. To the point that I've found a lot of my... A lot of my lives, I've kind of like... sort of petered at adept or expert because i'm not actively pursuing the quest but i am still just making all the stuff i want i'm still like i'm still doing fine i just like right i'm a little bit outside of the traditional progression structure i'm not you know not part of the

job rat race the corporate oh okay you're doing it i'm doing a little bit different i'm my own boss that's nice that's good Make your own schedule. Oh, I've tried that. I'm terrible at it. So I got to learn. I got to figure it out. Yeah, I ended up mastering alchemist like without even. realizing I was doing it, basically. I was at the set before Master.

being like, wait, how did I get here? That's not where I should be. I should be way lower. And similarly, I'm there with Blacksmith now. There's just very few recipes. That's what it is. And you blow through those requirements very quickly. There's, yeah, it's also one of the... the classes that's less dependent on a gathering class that every now and then it dips in. But, you know, like for if you're a blacksmith, you.

really should be mining. If you are a carpenter, you really should be cutting wood. You can buy those things, but... It's expensive and easier. And it feels bad. It feels bad to be like, I need to craft this vest, but I need to buy a bunch of fleece. I'm the one getting fleeced, it turns out. Alchemy and Taylor mostly rely on things that drop from fights and plants you can just pick. Yeah, for free. No stats involved. With the occasional other thing, but it's pretty...

Uh, pretty easy to just kind of blast through those two. For sure. I, um, you know, I, we were joking before about not knowing what the fourth eye is, and so I've beaten the game at this point, and... Not only do I not know what the fourth eye is, but I think there's something that happens at the end of the game that's very confusing.

Neither of you have made it there yet, but I need you both to message me when you beat the game so I can ask you if you also interpreted something someone said in a way that made it seem like there was way more game to go and then there wasn't.

The people listening who've beaten this game probably know what I'm talking about. I bet the present day island thingy that you do makes me feel like there is... meant to be some sort of dlc or something there is an intention for it to be i don't know i don't know if that'll ever happen but it just feels like there is a it feels like gamescom or something it'd be like a little thing um but is the eye infinite whoa maybe but is it i guess there's the roguelike mode that's kind of infinite

Right? The tree sprout? We didn't even talk about the roguelike tree sprout shit. Or the multiplayer in general, right? I forgot about those until you mentioned it today. I got my tree. I planted it. It was like, okay, this is a treasure grove. And I was like, okay, cool. And then I never went back there. It's one of the only places to get a... I think it might be the only place to get a certain resource.

Or a certain currency, I guess. It's the currency that, you know, the guy in your guild hall who sells... uh, materials. You can like upgrade a shop. Mateo. He has a, he has part of it. Part of his shop runs on these sort of, um, special fruit. There's some sort of weird fruit thing. It can't be goddess melons. No, that's Rue Factory, Janine.

Yeah, he has stuff that's like 10 of those. And I think I did one of those dungeons by myself, and then Janine, you and I did one. And I have three of those melons. total at this point yeah you can go like hundreds of years back in time or something But it gets harder and harder as you go. Yeah, I think each run is 100 years or something like that. Or it takes you back another 100 years.

I'm not exactly sure and am curious about it, but this is the first time in a long time that I've been like, I wish I had waited to play a game until the DLC is there because I am not done with this game, but I really want more narrative. I want to be strung along more narratively. And part of that could have come from, to be clear, part of that could have come from there being more.

teachers, more masters to teach you each of the things, because that would at least give me a little bit of a hook. But I've met all those people now, because I've already started all those lives. And never is this more, I think... clear to me than in the thing that happens when you master a life, which I don't mind talking about because they actually released all of these songs in the lead up.

And also they did this in the first game, I will say. It's the same thing. It's shot for shot the same. It did. Do you want to explain the thing I'm talking about? So when you master a life, first of all, it's worth knowing that's not the end. Right. You can go beyond that. That's a touch that I think is cute. I think it's cute that you can master and then you can go on to be like a super good, you know. That's fun. That makes it feel like, yeah, that's what it is to be a legendary hero.

in a job in this sort of fabled fantasy world where it's like, yeah, you can be a master swordsmith, but you're not the swordsmith who made the... sort of blazing dreams or whatever until you're heroic anyway what happens when you hit master when you're when you're equal to your the person who's leading the guild you get They teleport you to a little bar or cutscene. And they sing you a little song. And the song is always very specific to the job.

and like the stuff that you do on the job and you get a lot of like shots of like everyone celebrating with you and you get like fake credits where it's like Chief little guy. Not in my experience, buddy. like chief little guy mr mr bobo or whatever uh-huh yeah it'll be like all the all the characters you've met and stuff like that and they'll have little roles it's all how cute um i

The only one I've seen, the Carpenter song, is a song that I hadn't seen in the first game, so I don't know. I believe they're all the same. Okay, well, it was not a good song. Well, do you know what's changed about them?

They're in English now. Updated MIDI files. Oh my god, right. There's lyrics. They're singing it in English now. Right, because before they were singing it, but it was just subtitled in English. Exactly, but it was in Japanese. Okay, because the lyrics are so forced. It sounds... Very weird. Well, what's weird is the subtitles are different, too. So they relocalize these songs. But it's the same songs. And they're just not as good, unfortunately.

And for me, the more important thing is, fucking no one's there. In the original game, all of your little masters from the whole thing were there. Yeah. Even ones who lived in different areas. They all came to your place. They all came to hang out. To your master party. That's right. Exactly. And so that to me is the thing where I'm like, oh, that was actually what I loved about it.

this sense of wow everyone from around the whole place like came to hang out with me and celebrate this one they all live in the same town they didn't even show up i mean the other masters of great well that's what you think right it's like whoa what my my My woodcutting master isn't going to come hang out even though I'm getting my mage doctorate or whatever. Are you mad that I... Yeah, the woodcutter lives right next door. I know.

I know. I know. Well, I think that we live in a more atomized world. I guess you're right. That's it. It's a commentary, actually. So true. The I doesn't stand for individual. It stands for individualism. It's what's... broken us as a society um but yeah i think that that's part of the thing where i'm like

Ah, isolation. Oh, isolation. You nailed it. There it is. The I stands for isolation. I mean, the thing is, of course, that's not true because there is more of a sense of community. That's why it was showed up. It would be so sick if all of you do the. The Strangelings showed up. The Strangelings of that class that you'd recruited had showed up. You know, like, oh, you're finishing your Paladin one in like...

Odin is here and Odin's the one who I rock with the most. So, uh, yeah. Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, the pirate paladin is here. You know, weird to me that she's a paladin, but okay. Oh, it's like D&D. You can be a paladin of any god. Her god is money. She's a pirate. Anyway, yeah, I think that to me is like... It's actually really funny because I'm watching the... I'm watching the mastery scene from when I did this for Witching Hour. And the...

The characters who are strangelings in the new one are in this one. There's Colin, there's Hazel. That's them. They're here jamming out.

And it's funny to hear you say that and be like, well, yeah, they used to go to these parties. They used to just go to the party. They used to hang out with you. Why aren't they hanging out with me? I mean, they hang out with you. It's a different kind of world. They do hang out with you at work. If you're like in the dungeon, they'll come with you, but they're not going to come.

party with you. You know, COVID, it really changed everything. Really changed everything. But I do think that there's like... That feeling of, the first time I hit one of those in Fantasy Life on the DS or the 3DS, I got a little emotional about it. I was like, wow, I really did. Me too. commit and i think that comes from the sense of i spent all this time as a minor i really did it i was a minor and i'm reaching the pinnacle 18 years 18 years as a minor and and i get the part

You have a big party. And everyone's like, wow, you made it, you know? And now it's like, oh yeah, that's just a thing I do when I'm not shooting my bow. And I think that that shipped. And again, I love this game. Playing it again for 40 minutes today made me go, I'm not done with it. I thought I was done with it. I'm actually not done with it.

I'm desperate for DLC to hit, so I have an excuse to go back through. I still have to do the... Jenny, you were doing the Colosseum the other day. I have to go back and do the Colosseum. You know, there's stuff for me to do still in the game. I mean, look, some of my favorite games I cannot stop complaining about, so this is not... It comes from love, doesn't it? It comes from love. It's because you care. Exactly.

Exactly. I love getting a new Strangeling. I love the art stuff in this. They added one of the lives, the creative lives, is just building decor for your Animal Crossing village and stuff. And then there's the gallery. You could put stuff in the gallery in your village.

Villagers will go in and like appraise it and like even make you a money offer. Offer you a shit ton of money for it. That rules. It's so good. It's so flavorful. So I'm not dissing this game. I like it a lot. I wish I had more. It is interesting though that you're wishing for more narrative hooks because.

one of the reasons why i'm not deeper into this game is because i find the story of it so difficult to get through that i'm having way more fun just hitting rocks in the mines yeah you're not uh yeah i mean yeah the story is such a thing of the The problem with the story is there is this conflict that you're not really in the loop on. And the way that you progress is you are in the main world.

And you do some talking and run in a cave. And then something stops you and you have to go back in the past. to find a thing to help you unblock the cave and then you open up a little more of the cave and then something else stops you so you have to go back in the past and like that's not a great flow thing especially because like the first game

The first game was much more traditional. It was much more like, here's the stuff that's happening. Here's the problems we have to solve. Here's the conflicts in the world. It carried a little more. It carried you forward. And there's like a... The first fantasy, I'm not saying this is a fantasy, or this is a dragon...

Quest Builders thing because the first Fantasy Life also is kind of written this way. This is also very Dragon Quest Builders. It's very Dragon Quest Builders in its art and in its writing style. The difference though is that Dragon Quest Builders is full of like funny and interesting. characters i find that all of the dialogue in fantasy life i overstays its welcome like the talking to people and getting through the story takes so much time

And none of the writing is worth that time, it feels like to me. When you get to the fourth island, I think, Swoleon, the one with the Colosseum, I was like, oh. This is the first thing that's really... There was some stuff in the Art Island that was, like, kind of funny to me. But the Solian Island is about, like, a kind of pro-gladiator, pro-wrestler type guy. And there's some really funny, like...

gags in that and i was like oh sick like i finally okay we're out of the tutorial we've unlocked the we've unlocked farmer we've unlocked artist now we're going to get a few islands of just the more traditional fantasy life stuff that's going to be able to deliver the kind of charming level funny bit that's kind of honed down to a few cut scenes. And that was The Last Island. And I was like, oh. Yeah. Okay. I see.

um and so that's you know it is it is a complaint of wanting more uh but it's more of the good stuff keith i get what you're saying about like it's funny that i'm saying that but it's really what it is is like it's it's it's probably fantasy life one remembered very fondly

with 10 years removed. I will say this game, of course, was really, there was a really rocky... uh development process you know like i said earlier keiji infune left this game or left this company in the middle of the development uh after uh they released a blog post saying fantasy life

uh, received a lot of negative. I in 2024 had received a lot of negative feedback, harsh feedback. Um, and Inafune left. And I don't know how close those two things were in terms of causation, but they were very close. Uh, in in timing it was like back to back exactly um and so they needed to like make quote unquote major revisions major revisions were necessary to improve it it got delayed by a year um and so I do think that there's a degree to like...

I'm so curious what this game was supposed to be at its initial conception. And I'm really happy we got it at all because I'm really happy people can play this game without needing to go buy a 3DS. And it's doing really well. Like that makes me happy that... people have been really high on it. There's been a lot of buzz around it. It's always nice to see that happen to the sequel.

Of a game that you know. You love a lot. It's really fun to go and do the stuff. It's really fun to go and do the stuff. It's full of stuff. And it's all fun to go and do. Despite my complaints. And that the camera is. I mean they designed a game.

that cannot be played properly with the camera that they put in there. I'm glad that's getting fixed. I think that camera is designed to kind of make the world feel bigger because the thing I noticed when I installed that mod was that I immediately saw the limits of stuff in a way that was like, oh, okay. And it's a way that like, I don't care.

But I think if I was developing that game, I could very easily imagine feeling self-conscious about it. Especially if it was bigger once and you had such ambitions and now you can see the ends of it and it's like, oh, people are going to think it's so small. Gina had the same thought. is that there's a giant island where the core is finding

these breath of the wild towers to give you more map segments and you can't see them because the camera can't look up high enough. Well, that's the thing. I think Janine's point is like, yeah, they were trying to make that harder so that that place would feel.

It feels like, oh, by not being able to see them, you'll spend more time looking for them. Because the second you see them, I just put on a podcast or whatever and just ran around and got them. Once you can look up, you can see basically, you can see like... Half of them from any given point on the map. That's right. And I find that to be a way better experience. Yeah, that is what I wanted for sure. But if you are a developer who has seen every...

every bump in the development process of a game, it's really easy to be like, this game's too small. This game's too small. People are going to be disappointed. People are going to be disappointed. We have to make it feel bigger. How do we make it feel bigger? Oh my God. The thing that I... Heard was that this was a consideration for the Switch so that it could run properly. Yeah, that also makes sense. I would believe it. I will say the Switch 2 trailer has what looks like the camera that...

They must be adding. If you take a peek at it, I think around like 30 seconds, they go to ginormousia and you can straight up see like, oh yeah, this is... I don't believe this was the baseline viewpoint. I think if this was it, you would have been fine with it. The other thing that's interesting about the mod is that it lets you see how close you have to be to something for it to start animating. It's so funny. Yeah.

That is, I think, a performance thing for sure. Totally. So I'm curious. I'm curious how that will hit. I'm curious if that patch does hit the original Switch or if it's only Switch 2 and the other consoles or what. Yeah, Fantasy Life I. i stands for eyeball in stores now can't wait for there to be more of it yeah i stands for in stores oh yeah of course uh the the i'll talk more about rune factory guardians of azuma maybe on the next podcast because i'm

really enjoying it. I should buy that and play it so you have someone to bounce that on. Thank you. It's been in my cart for a few days now. I'm really liking it. I will say it's so funny to go from Fantasy Life to this because the focus is so much more on talking to a bunch of characters and going through their stories, because that's just, like, the type of game it is, obviously. But also, the farming is...

You know, Dre said before, Dre is at work, so Dre couldn't come to talk about fantasy life right now. But Dre said that they... My thoughts on Fantasy Life Eye, now that I'm in the post-story content, are what a cute game. How awful the farming life is betrays how much fun everything else is. I basically like the farming life just fine, but I do think that it's interesting.

how both Fantasy Life, I, and Rune Factory are doing farming slightly differently than like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley are. With Rune Factory being mostly about automation, you have a village of NPCs, both the named ones, but also, I mean, they all have names, both the main datable or rank-uppable, bondable.

written NPCs and then also some proctor ones and you keep recruiting those and like it's a village simulator more than it's just a farming simulator you're like giving villagers job you're saying go work at the at the flower cart go work at the the spa go mine for materials. And that is scratching, that is still numbers go up, but it is scratching a different sub part of my brain than fantasy life is. So we'll talk more about that, I think, next time.

yep you should be like sakuna rice and ruin you should just like get a taste i should just get a taste you're right i should get a taste of sakuna it's a very different thing but i think it would it would my brain would benefit sakuna rice and ruin is uh super influential to this new the new rune factory um

to the point that there is sakuna dlc there is that's great you can have a little sakuna in the thing i need to yeah it's it's a very different thing you should play some i'm very curious what you think especially given our conversations around um mysteria and farm sims and dating and all that stuff sorry what did i say mysteria mysteria that's isn't that the dnd that's isn't that the place in uh that's the the

Or the or type or type in fantasy life, isn't it? Oh, I think you're right. It is. I was thinking it was also the D&D arcade game. Shadows over... That's Mystara. That's different. Shadow over Mystara. Is that the woman? The wife? Is that a four-player game? Oh, no. Is that Gale's wife in Baldur's Gate? Yeah. Fuck. What is her name? What is the God of Magic called?

That's Mystra. Mystra. Very different than Mystara. Different entirely. Anyway. Fake. Fake war. Keith, do you want to save our Elden Ring Night Reign talk for the next podcast since we've gone so long already? I'm happy either way. I think that I could do 30-40 minutes on... night rain or we could do it next time let's save it for next time we've gone for two plus hours already um uh quick quick thoughts though because i think the one thing i will say

From you that I'm interested in, just in case our scheduling works out so that you can't be on the next one. You are not an Elden Ring guy, especially. You like Sekiro a whole bunch. A whole bunch, yeah. But you've been enjoying Night Ring. I've been loving Night Rain. Yeah, I really think that it's... I don't like it more than Sekiro, but I went into Elden Ring being like... Pretty excited to try it, like wanting one of the Soulsborne style FromSoft games to hit for me.

I don't dislike any of them. I appreciate what Dark Souls is doing. I've never played Bloodborne because I don't use my PS4. I wanted it to work and I got in and I was like, okay, it feels like Dark Souls. It's kind of interesting. But I really just had this feeling of not wanting to do the stuff it wanted me to do. Like, climb this thing, go into the mine. There's creepy little guys who throw knives at you. I just thought it was like...

I was just kind of annoyed by it. I played about 25 or 30 hours of it and just didn't go back. It's a game that I... Oh, I played 20 hours of it, so even less than I thought. It's a game that almost worked for me and then didn't, and I don't feel negatively about it. I just feel like I don't care about it.

But now, but Night Rain hits for some reason. Running around. Running around. Is it the Friends part, or do you think it's something in Night Rain? Friends is a huge part of it, but I think that the main thing is like... I want to be doing the bosses. I don't want to be doing the little guys all the time. If I could just go from boss to boss to boss. The parts of Elden Ring that bugged me. The little guys who throw knives at you. The little guys who throw knives at me. Sekiro, it felt so fun.

To fight like a group of seven guys. Because of like. It's hard. It's kind of a boss fight. It's dynamic. It's kind of his own version of a boss fight. In Dark Souls. It feels annoying. And it was also true in Elden Ring. Whenever I would go into a room and the thing to do in the room was figure out how to not die from Five Guys, I was like, ugh, oh, fine.

And Night Rain is like, you know, playing with Austin who watched a bunch of streams already. And first of all, it's so much easier. It's like way easier. It is like for any – for the – decade plus of give Dark Souls an easy mode, um, uh, discourse, uh, Night Rain is Dark Souls easy mode. Um, I think, um, like.

Guys barely notice you. You can kill them in a hit or two before they even stand up. You aren't going to get ganged up on and murdered. It's just so much easier. If you do, your friend can resurrect you by beating you up on the ground. Right, and the bosses feel easier, but not even as much easier. The minute-to-minute running around gameplay is so much easier that it basically doesn't exist as part of the game.

You know, it exists for the first minute when you want to level up twice. And then every other second, nobody matters but bosses. And the bosses can still get you, but there's... I laughed earlier when you were talking about you wish you could only fight bosses because I've been watching Christine Love play through... some of Elden Ring here and there on her streams, and she is 100% A, I wish this was just a boss rush game.

person and this is kind of boss rush except that there's you know 30 to 40 minutes i mean one of those is like every 15 minutes you fight a boss and then you fight the big The big boss of your run at the end, almost like a roguelike style thing. But the time in between is running to the next boss. It's not fighting your way through a group of guys. And like, you know, playing with you, you're like, you know.

Don't fight them. Ignore them. We're going this way. I'm like, okay, let's go. Yeah, I get to be the bossiest person I've ever been while running this, and I have been bossy before, I know. So we did a stream of that. People should go watch that stream. The Twitch archive should still be up. It'll eventually be up on our YouTube also. I am really enjoying it. I had a run of that game last night with some friends that was like maybe an all-time gaming moment in every possible way in terms of...

Stuff happening in the middle of the game, weird bugs we encountered, the big final boss fight, everything. I'll talk about that next time, though, because I want to be able to do... Did you beat the mouth guy? No, we fought a different boss. We fought a big ice dragon, is what we fought. That was... I have to tell you... Maybe the most majestic fight I've ever seen in a video game. Wow. Truly in the middle of it, my friend and I were just going like, this is...

Look how beautiful it is. At one point I said, I think we might die, but that's okay. If I had to die in real life, I could only dream that it would be in such a beautiful way. So, you know, like dying. Anime ass statement. Like if I say a hunter hunter character. Yeah. That is like the, that is the sort of sense that, um, the. FromSoft games give you is like, there is nothing to do here but die beautifully. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

That's how it feels. All right. On that note, thank you for joining us for another episode of Side Story. Please let people know about the show. We're still a very young show. This is, I think, only our seventh episode or something. like that um uh and so we're still trying to get six six six you're right five was the blue the blueprint spoiler cast yeah which was a joy editing this tonight i will i have another podcast to record first keith so oh my god that's fine

It's fine. It might go up in the afternoon tomorrow instead of first thing, but we'll see. So yeah, it's been a joy to get all the positive responses from folks. Please leave us reviews over on iTunes or on... probably whatever your pocket cast, wherever you are doing your listening to us. It means a lot. I think iTunes probably still is where most of our listeners are.

And thank you so much for everybody. I'm looking at them now. I'm looking for funny reviews to read. Here we go. Great discussion about games and I. This one comes in from Sari J. Zargo, who says... I think that the I might stand for immortality or inversion. I don't know, I don't play those games, but I love this show. So thank you. How did they know about this? I don't know. How did they know about the eye? Well, they listen to the show. They like the show. They just don't play the games.

Oh, well, oh, did the, has the eye come up? Did the eye come up recently? Oh, the eye has come up in every consecutive episode now since the first, since, what does the eye stand for? I haven't, that's the, that's the, I haven't listened to episodes three and four yet. I see. Well, that was it. Those are the two. I was on five. So I'm two in and then there's the two with the I. I dropped the ball by not asking you what the I might stand for in the last episode. So, you know, that's on me.

Again, people you can find are Patreon at friendsofthetable.cash. That is the number one best way you can support us. The bulk of that money does come to us. It's a big group. You know, I think we live in a world of more atomized relationships these days.

There's one of the nice things about this show is it's all of us. It's the whole crew. The way the money is cut up is it just goes into the bucket and it gets cut up the same way that our regular monthly Patreon stuff does. We thought about doing a different side story Patreon.

or whatever we're like no like this should be this is friends at the table this is friends at the table just like media club plus is friends at the table um just like our streams are it's all it's all us so uh friends of the table.cash is the best way to support us you can go watch uh all of our streams youtube.com slash friends at the table or twitch.tv slash friends at the table uh keith you're now in the final arc of hunter hunter on media club oh yeah yeah it's only if we're recording our uh

I can't remember the name for the thing that comes before penultimate. The anti-penultimate. The anti-penultimate episode recorded on Thursday. I am currently, I have 39 minutes left in the episode 44 of Media Club Plus called Dog Cheadle. Dog Cheadle, my favorite actor. Your favorite actor. It's a great show. Please go listen to Media Club Plus.

Please go leave us reviews. And I think that's going to do it. I was going to say send us questions. I'm still fighting with the email currently. The way that Libsyn interacts with the Hover.com email stuff is bad. So I guess the only place to send...

questions right now is friends at the table at gmail.com i'm working on getting our more side story focused email up and running hopefully i'll have that going by next time we'll see how it goes and you said it wasn't me at the end of the last segment about uh

going long, I am proud to be on the two longest episodes of Side Story. I have the top slots. Five-star run times, as they say. Just wait until the fucking story of Seasons Grand Bazaar comes out. Oh, we're going to go long on that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. We'll see you soon. To be continued.