0083 malfurious

Episode Transcript
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(00:09):
Channel 3. Is the future
welcome, crew to one of your 3A Channel 3 podcast that took a

(00:31):
week off last week. OK, Get off our backs.
We're allowed to take a week off.
It's summer. I blame Dan.
It happened. Yeah, I blame me, too.
It's all good anyway. Well, here we are.
We're here to talk to a member of the Channel 3 community about
three games of their choosing. Go through some honorable
mentions, some other odds and ends, have a nice little video
game discussion. I still got through it even with
my own disruption and not writing it out, no matter how

(00:54):
many how many times Ray tells meI need to write it down.
But I'm Dan, and with me as always, the aforementioned Ray
all. Right, Let me tell you.
Hey, go buddy. I think it's a welcome back for
me because have we? Oh no, we.
Were we we there? We had one in between, Yeah.
You mean? Yeah, that's right.
Since since Bryant took over there.
But we are here. We're back.

(01:14):
I thought Dan was going to introduce the guest himself
there for a second. I was getting nervous.
I knew what I was doing, I. Was I was worried, I was a
little worried, but we're here with somebody who is much more
professional about this than we are.
It is Malfurious himself. How are you doing tonight?
I'm doing good gentlemen. How are y'all?
I'm I'm doing good. I I just got home from a

(01:35):
baseball game. It was pretty exciting stuff.
Minor League Baseball. Love it, love it.
Best stadiums. They're better.
They're better than mostly baseball games.
Baseball's on my topics. Ray, back off.
For Oh, stop it, Jake, because you play the show doesn't mean
that baseball is your. Topic.
It's on. It's on.
The it's on my. Don't you cross on my list,
right? Just you.

(01:56):
Know just cause the Phillies, you know, went to a World Series
recently and the Yankees can't, you know, close a freaking game
no matter how many runs are up, doesn't mean you own baseball,
Dan. No, this is where you plug the
Baseball League with Mal Furious.
That's and his 75 runs will score against anybody on a given
night. Listen, I'd love to plug Super
Mega Baseball, but it was Malfi versus brother that wrecked me

(02:19):
and I couldn't close. Just like the Yankees, I too
could not close a game in the last inning and then completely
melted down in game three. So they they the the games were
closer than the scores would suggest, but there was there
were a lot of runs. Super Mega Baseball play it
people, play it join the season started, but get ready for the
next season after this season's gonna be big now let's talk

(02:43):
about some games here my furioushe put games on the list we're
going to talk about them first one legends of lagaia
PlayStation two early. PlayStation One.
PlayStation One, sorry PlayStation, but early, late 90s
the turn the turn based community is going to be happy
to hear about this because thereis a group of people that love

(03:06):
their turn based RPGs, but this one's a little different.
So I kind of wanted to start at that point because it's not it's
turn based, but there's combos based on your button inputs.
Let's let's start there before we even get into like the actual
game. Yeah, So it's the the battle

(03:29):
mechanic is inputting up, down, left and right in certain orders
to make your move. And it's pretty Dang fun.
And there's some moves that, youknow, take more power, some that
don't, Some can link, some can't.
It's a it's a lot so. Leche Lagaya, why is this the

(03:54):
first game we're talking about tonight?
So let's see, I'm going to go back and date myself.
I was in, let's see, the summer before 7th grade.
I got a demo disc for this game and it had like four or five
other games on it, but demo discfor this game on the PlayStation
one. And if you guys remember back to

(04:16):
demo discs, those were the thosewere the bee's knees.
Oh man, I love those. So that game, I played the demo
on that probably 8 * 9 times andit would only let you play like
the first little level and that's it.
Like you couldn't even get to the first boss.
Like it was like the intro town and that's all.
And so, you know, I think they maxed you out at like level 10

(04:40):
and I would get there and I would play it over and over
again. I had to save up my money doing
chores and everything and I ended up getting the game I
believe right after school started.
And it was one of those like if you remember the old PlayStation
games, they came, some of the ones came in like that big like
4 disc box where it was like theextra wide.

(05:02):
Well, this one came in that box,but it was only one disc.
And it was always weird to me that that happened.
But I got that game and I playedthat game so much.
I I loved it, played it straightthrough.
It was, you know, one of those games that just it made me fall
in love with the world, the story, how everything rolled.

(05:24):
And, you know, the graphics backthen weren't good, but they were
so great for the time. And while all my friends were
playing Final Fantasy 7, I was completely immersed in that
world. Beat it the first time had a
cheat book, I guess you would call it a, a little mini guide.
It was like 4 pages of a mini guide that had most of the moves

(05:49):
mapped out. I went and bought that because
this was pre Internet days. I couldn't go look up a
walkthrough and and so some of the moves were wrong and I
actually had to rewrite into that little cheat book what
moves were wrong and what was you know, how to fix them.
Ended up, you know, having a blast playing it.

(06:10):
But that game became kind of like my my world as how I would
call it for gaming. Every year after school from 8th
grade on the day school ended, Iwould go and I would fire up the
PlayStation one. No way, no way through.
Fire up the PlayStation one and go and play that game from start

(06:32):
to finish and try to get as close to level 99 as I could.
You can beat the game around level 5055 but get close to
level 99, which takes way too much time and I've never done it
in my life, but get there because you can unlock one kind
of magic at the end of it. It's the only item in the game I
have never gotten or unlocked Juggernaut magic.

(06:53):
And that's the only thing I've never gotten from it because I
refuse to play it with, you know, like cheats and and that
kind of stuff. But yeah, it was my pilgrimage.
Every summer play it. That's the only game I would
play till I beat it all summer long and it would take me, I
mean truthfully I could probablybeat it in about 5 days now, but
it would take me, you know, three weeks of summer to beat
that game. Ray B Polite to our guest.

(07:15):
Don't. Don't do the thing you're going
to do. Dan, stop it.
I would never, I would never do something like that to our
guest. I only do that to you, Dan, when
when you say such things, our guest can address consoles in
whatever way they want to address the consoles.
Correct or incorrect, They are allowed to say it on this show.
What? So when I'm, when I'm reading

(07:36):
the description of the game, it,it seems like a smaller RPG than
others just from the fact that your party size seems pretty
small. It's kind of you're with Vaughn,
you're with Vaughn and you kind of just you end up finding,
what, two more characters, really.
Yep, that's it, 3 characters only.
It's 3 characters. How does that how does that

(07:56):
compare to you? Like with other RPGs that they
were used to having these kind of giant parties at the end.
This was, this was the thing youwould, you'd find all these
people and have this gigantic group and now you've you've got
three people only to to do thesemissions.
So I personally prefer it that way because the storyline was
written really, really well where each of those 3 characters

(08:18):
inside your party has a very good arc to all of them.
Rather than hey, you're this seven person party that only
three can play at a time. So you end up having two or
three or you know, four maybe that you you play with most.
You don't have to have split levels where three of them go
over here and then the three younever play go over here and all

(08:40):
of that. They get to have full-fledged
arcs and storylines to them. They get to have all of that.
One of my favorite details. And again, I didn't learn this
till probably five years after Ifirst got the game, but the
because I looked into it after getting the God awful sequel
that came with Legend of Lagaia.But I still love that game too.

(09:03):
So sorry, the game itself was written as a story for a game,
but written by a writer in Japan, and he he essentially
partnered with Sony to create the game.
So he wrote the storyline for the entire game, then they made
the game to match the storyline.He wrote a sequel to it, but

(09:26):
apparently pissed Sony off so bad that they fired him halfway
through production of the sequel.
So then Sony said, well, the first game was kind of
successful, we'll still release the sequel.
So they redid the sequel becausehe owned the intellectual
property of the actual storyline, so they couldn't use
it. And then it became this
horrible, you know, mishmash of a game that didn't really flow

(09:50):
well and didn't feel anything like the first because there was
no story to it or any of that. And so the second one was pretty
truthfully pretty poor, but it, it was much it, it was one of
those games that had far better of a story than any other RPG
I've played probably since, or probably until about the
Xenoblade series. It's, it's funny because I, I

(10:13):
looked to see, oh, hey, is therea sequel to this?
That's all there was. And you'd say how, you know,
it's kind of convoluted. They had to kind of throw it
together. I mean, even the Wikipedia page,
it, the, the page says this is asequel to Legend of Lagaya.
And that's, that's the end of the page.
It doesn't even give a description of of what the game
is on the second one because I guess no nobody wants to even

(10:35):
mention that that game exists. Essentially, I had to.
Go to like it's. Deeper wiki to figure out what
the. Game, yeah, the the the closest
thing I can say is it's they took the battle style of it and
made the game, but there's no connecting storyline, there's no
connecting characters, there's no connecting world.
It's just we made another game with a similar battle style, you

(10:59):
know, but like Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy has a good story
to most of their games, or at least a compelling story.
There's no compelling story to the second game.
There's no anything to it. It is, hey, we got to make a
game that's got AX number of dungeons or X number of worlds
and we're just going to go do it.
The first game had overworld exploring and finding little

(11:21):
like hidden items here and thereand all these little details.
The second game doesn't have that.
It turned into, Hey, we've got this little, you know, pre built
map that you can run around in and find little treasure boxes
and everything's marked. And then you can go and open
dressers in, you know, in rooms.OK, great.

(11:42):
You can do that in in all Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games
and that kind of stuff. But the first game you could
explore the world around and go see different places.
You could, you could almost not,not entirely, but almost non
linearly play parts of the game.You could go to other parts if
you were willing to over level yourself and get to them, you

(12:04):
know, whereas the new game or the second game, it was just
like, hey, here's your little dot on the map and you can move
your character to these different little zones and
that's it, you know? So I, I want to talk about the
story the way you're talking a little more because the
descriptions that you read of it, I think they probably just

(12:25):
don't do a great job. When I'm reading the story, the
story is like, hey, you know, they're spirits.
Oh, no, they went bad. Thank goodness the main
character wasn't around when they went bad.
Thank goodness the main character found some spirits
that happened to not go bad. And then, oh, look, he went to
another island. Thank goodness there was someone
there who also had some that didn't go bad.

(12:47):
And so that the description seems very repetitive, like
you're just kind of doing the same thing a bunch of time.
It's over. But you're, the way you're
talking about it, you're, you'remaking it seem like there's like
there's this extra level to it. That these things are not.
Giving us. OK, so the you call them
spirits. I think that's what they
probably call them in the Wikipedia.
The game calls them Seru, or that's how I pronounce it.

(13:10):
Yeah, yeah, Seru. They're essentially a it's not a
spirit, it's a kind of a physical item that you can
attach to a human to make the human more powerful.
So in the game, there are kind of couple of elements to it.
So you start off in this little town called Rim Elm and it is an

(13:33):
entirely walled in town that everybody kind of like lives in
fear. There is a kind of a day glow
green tree called a Genesis treein the middle of town.
And one of the first things thatyou see happen is you've got a
girlfriend in there called May Ibelieve I always called her May

(13:54):
I because I don't know how to read Japanese.
And it was Mei, and I'm an idiot, but her dad comes back
after hunting outside of the town and he's dead.
And so that night, you know, she's crying, she's sad.
And this giant monster comes andblows a giant hole in your in
the wall of your town. And your town now has this what

(14:16):
is called the mist. The mist is what makes these
Seru go crazy. And so you got to go fight these
Seru without any powers or any of this kind of stuff.
And you're going through and fighting.
OK. So you're you're kind of getting
the feel for the game. You're, you're going a little
bit here and there as you play. There's two types of of kind of

(14:39):
bads or or Sarah that you fight.There are the ones without an
icon that are just kind of regular base monsters.
And then there are some with an icon that have generally an
element like fire, water, wind, that kind of stuff.
And those are monsters that you can actually absorb their magic
powers from to then use them later on in the game.

(15:00):
So you're fighting around the town, there's one in there
called a gimmard that's got the fire icon on it.
And see, you know something special about that monster you
fight around in there, that kindof stuff.
You go down to the Genesis tree,you start praying at the Genesis
tree and you touch it as your character and you get what is
called a raw Saroo. So these are a kind of a, a

(15:23):
heightened level of Saroo as I would call them.
They are to a point resistant tothis mist that you're going
through and they will give you powers, but not turn you into
this mindless drone that just wants to kill things.
And so you you you get your power.

(15:45):
His name is Meta is the first one you get that is for for
Vaughn. I always named him Rusty because
he gets an item later on in likethe first kind of big dungeon
called the Von Fist or in my case the Rusty Fist, which was
just a lot more fun to name it that way.
And so you you kind of you get him then, you know, as you're

(16:09):
playing through, you can absorb some of these magics.
You know, he's a fire type Rosseru.
So he uses fire weapon fire magic better than others.
And so, like the magic system isa you have to absorb the certain
ones, which is a chance type absorb it doesn't you know, it's
not like, Hey, I I fight it and I do X move at it to kill it and

(16:32):
I get it. It's a complete chance.
Some of them are really rare. Some of them are a lot easier to
get. Truthfully, it's not entirely
hard to get all of them. You just have to fight them a
lot. But so you so you get that
Rosteroo and as you progress through the storyline, each
character has their own kind of like redemption arc and and arc

(16:54):
to their character, but your Rossaroo that each paired with
each of them have their own arc as well.
So there's there's these storylines within storylines
that go with it. There's a world that kind of
you're trying to save. The second character you get is
a girl named Noah who is wildly infuriating at the beginning

(17:17):
because she's really, really weak, but she has a lot of move
ability or move points so you can do longer combos even though
they don't do as much damage. And then the third one you get
is this character who is whole upbringing.
Is that like the he's a almost like a a monk that refuses to

(17:37):
use Saru. Their whole order is like, no,
we don't use Saru because we arehumans.
We are strong enough without them.
We don't need them. And he ends up taking the Rasaru
because his best friend and and you know, person that he was,
you know, growing up with and you know, his nemesis to a point

(17:58):
was a guy named Sanghi. And Sanghi takes a Rasaru.
You don't know what's a Rosseru until way later, but he takes
one that since his heart is bad,he makes that Rosseru evil.
And so it's the three of you good characters with three good
Rosseru fighting Songi. And then you learn that Songi is
being controlled by even more powerful people who actually

(18:21):
turn out to be Noah, the girl, her family.
There's a, you know, ancient warfrom, you know, 50 years ago
between a couple of giant towns in the north that actually one
of them created the mist, which turned all the Saru bad because
they were trying to make their army stronger.

(18:41):
And all of these things that roll into it and and there's
just yeah, it's a lot of fun. If you have a chance to play it,
you're pretty much going to haveto buy a PlayStation one and do
it because every ROM I've been able to find, once you get to
one of the one of the last actual towns called Concrum,

(19:02):
you, you, you're supposed to go back in time.
I get it. But you go back in time to kind
of see what was happening and itglitches and it freezes and you
can't actually go to the past and do anything.
And there you go. You're done.
So. I only I only had one more
comment on it is that we have the game called Legend of the
Gaia and then we call them Genesis trees.

(19:23):
Why, why why are they not? Why are they not Gaia's?
I don't. That's never really explained.
The Genesis Trees, the idea is that they were in the world from
the beginning and that they werethe connection to the world of
Serukai. So the the Seru inhabit a world
called Serukai. You end up having to go there

(19:44):
later on and fight the big fightagainst Songhi because his job,
his goal is to go take over Serukai and be kind of ahead of
all the Seru. I mentioned juggernaut magic
earlier by the way, sorry that was that's actually a man made
Ceru made by you know, Noah's brother court, who's the big
final boss of everything. If you guys want a really easy

(20:05):
way to beat him, just go find the point card.
If you need directions on how to, there's a million
walkthroughs, but find the pointcard, Max it out and then just
go use that because you can do 10,000 damage a hit and melt him
in about six turns because beat.You can beat him around like
level 45 doing that. It's not easy, but you can but
you know he's. Essentially merges himself with

(20:25):
the man made Saru at the end of the game to kind of like last
ditch effort to try to finish taking over the world.
So let's let's wrap up this gamethis way, because obviously the
sequel not. Not garbage.
Right. Garbage didn't.
Work. I am replaying it right now but
yeah it's garbage. So a spoiler for anyone that
hasn't played this game from 1998.

(20:48):
We know the game ends and the point is that the the Seru are
gone right at the end of the game and humanity is now kind of
left to its own accord essentially.
Kind of. So what would have what would
have a correct sequel looked like for you?
So I didn't need it to be a direct correlation to it.

(21:09):
I didn't need it to connect the world because again, I've played
the second one and I really enjoyed the second one as a
stand alone game. It's not a good game, but I
enjoyed it just because that's the kind of game I like.
If I were to make a sequel to itagain, we'll never get it
because the the the writer of the game wrote it, kept it, was

(21:31):
pissed off at Sony, so it will never get produced.
But apparently he went to his grave.
He died 10 years ago or 15 yearssomewhere in there and he kept
all of that information. It's never going to be made
public, apparently, which reallysucks because he was so mad at
Sony. I don't know.
I don't, I don't, I don't need anything directly at the very,
very, very end of the game they have Noah, she got pregnant, she

(21:56):
has a baby, she names the baby after her brother.
And you could have easily made something of him going and
trying to do this. What I would have loved would
would have been a a prequel gamerather than a a follow up was a
prequel game that covers the thewar between there's two towns,
Seoul, Sol and Concrem, where Court was from.

(22:18):
Conquer ended up pretty much winning.
Soul is this giant kind of towerof a country that you end up
having to fight through. I would have loved to see the
soul and conquer them war and kind of how that played out and
the the early years of the mist and how, you know, it simply
plays the villains go go take over the world that way.
You know, I would have loved that.

(22:39):
I also like games that invert the storyline and make you the
bad guy. Talking about talking about
prequels and here's Dan, here's a game that I'd take a prequel
of of a series I don't really care much of and I probably
still wouldn't play this the prequel, but I'd be happy to be
made. When?
When are we getting the Pokémon prequel and you get the
Lieutenant Surge Wars? I want the wars that occurred

(23:02):
before Red goes out to the worldand you have a bunch of children
running stuff. I want the Pokémon.
Wars. How is he?
Getting just I want the Pokémon wars.
I I want it to be this. You know you can make AT you can
make a war game like AT rated war game.
You know it. Yeah, it's not going to be a

(23:23):
shooter because you have Pokémon, but I want is.
Ray promoting child soldiers and.
Animals like, you know, all the adults that went to war before
these the now the kids walk through town.
That game, no, no, that game would be awful because that does
that. That that isn't yes, it's in the

(23:46):
Pokémon universe, but it's not aPokémon game.
And what makes Pokémon fun is catching Pokémon and evolving
them. That's all it is.
It's why Digimon never made a good dent in Pokémon.
Because Digimon was a it it it had a convoluted evolution line,

(24:06):
and that's what made Digimon notas fun.
Plus they couldn't settle on howa game should be played and
every single entry of the game series went in an entirely
different direction the previousone and you could never get
continuity and that's what killed them all.
No, yeah, and the Digi, the Digievolutions are are like peak
plot bomber. They like they own think it's

(24:29):
like, oh, we know what we reallyneed something to go wrong here.
What if there's just? What if there's this like
corrupted evolution because you did it wrong?
Now don't get me wrong here guys, I love Digimon games.
I love them, I've played. So many of them, but I watched
that. Show Oh no, no, the the games
are so much better. Truthfully, the the DS had a

(24:51):
couple of really, really good ones, but again, it's so
convoluted and like one poke, one Digimon can digivolve into
like eight different things. OK, no.
The Pokémon wars, all right now game #2 Monster Hunter like,
like original Monster Hunter or so I no, you've written about

(25:12):
generations. I broke in in Monster Hunter try
on the Wii and look I got hookedfor that game off of ATV
commercial. I hate to admit it I really did
though It was a Viking who showsup to a gas station.
It was a like a Ford Ranger pickup truck and in the bed of
the pickup truck is a giant monster head and, and it's, it's

(25:38):
one of the best commercials ever.
And so I had my own money. I was just recently becoming an
adult. I had adult money at that point.
And I went and I went and boughtthe game.
And I'm not going to lie, that game, there's, there's very few
games that have like made me fall in love with a genre of

(26:00):
game. I was never really an action
game guy before that game and I have spent way way way way way
too many hours playing Monster Hunter games.
And by that I mean like I remember playing Monster Hunter.
Try Ultimate on the Wii UI. Think I played it as the only
game I played every day for about four straight months.

(26:20):
So I mean Monster Hunter again. So you have you went legend
Lagaia, which is it's it's the off pick of RPGs of the time,
But you know, it was it was playing Final Fantasy.
You're playing legend of the eye, right.
It's kind of the off pick here. Monster Hunter if like the way I
see it it's almost the off pick because you have all these RPGs

(26:41):
one now or even some of these actually ones where it's about
levelling up character and and Monster Hunter is no find better
stuff. Yeah, right.
So. That's that's it's, it's
different again, right? It's like, that's the thing.
My selling point for Monster Hunter is that it is the anti

(27:02):
RPG. There is no storyline to Monster
Hunter. I'm sorry.
You can talk about having lore and storylines.
There is no storyline to MonsterHunter try at all.
You are and and yes there is loosely 1 but like you don't
have to read a single ounce of storyline or conversation or
anything to play that game. You go to the quest counter, you

(27:27):
pick a monster to go fight and you kill said monster.
That is it. You get you get items, you make
better swords, better armor, better, whatever.
You go kill next monster. That's all you do, and it is
just stupid fun. Dan, Dan, I know it's too late
right now. Andrew Phoenix is probably
asleep. But you, you check on him in the

(27:48):
morning and you let me know how he feels about that because I
know he loves. He loves.
Andrew and I play Monster Huntera good bit.
No, Andrew and I play monster a good bit or Monster Hunter a
good bit. He's he's a Hunting Horn man and
I love playing with him because if anybody is good at Hunting
horn, I will gladly go fight with them.

(28:08):
I generally stick to the dual blades in the hammer because I'm
just the I don't care about defense.
I'm going to hit you and dodge and hit you and dodge and hit
you and dodge and that's all I do.
So you wrote about in one of your reviews that you just
played one single character for like, this giant stretch of
time. I don't remember what.

(28:29):
I pulled up does when you're playing one character, does the
character choice matter? Or is it more that you're just
using the same weapons all the time?
So it doesn't, no, the characterdoesn't really matter.
It's all about the weapons. So in Monster Hunter there's
about what, eight or ten different weapons?
Something like that, Maybe more now, maybe it's fourteen, I
think. But you essentially are a single

(28:53):
character who goes through a very loose storyline of like,
hey, you got to save the village, you got to save the
town, whatever, by killing a bunch of these monsters.
And you know, there's a big bad monster that's essentially the
threat to the town kind of thing.
You don't level up. It's all on, OK, this monster

(29:13):
generally fights this way. So you learn his moves, so you
know how to dodge, when to dodge, what moves coming, that
kind of stuff. Then you go fight the next
monster. OK, you got to learn his moves,
when to dodge, what to dodge, how to do it, that kind of bit.
And again, it's repetitive to a point, but at the same bit each,

(29:34):
there's three levels of difficulty that kind of scale up
through the story of the game. You start with regular level,
which is like, hey, just start fighting, just start killing.
Then you get to high rank, whichis like, hey, we're going to
send you out there now without any help.
Go fight and kill and then online levels you get kind of
you get the online world, which was a lot harder to do back in

(29:57):
the day. It's a lot easier now with world
and with with Ryze because all of it's online pretty much you
get master rank or G rank way back in the day, which was like,
hey, man, these things can one hit kill you.
So get prepared, you know, And it's at that point it's more
based on like, hey, you know howto kill stuff, you know how to

(30:19):
dodge. We're going to add in a couple
of extra moves that you have to learn.
But now you need to come prepared of like how to build
your character, what abilities to have built into it, what
weapons to have, what element tohave on it so that you can do
damage fast enough. I'm embarrassed to say it.
Ender will probably laugh at me greatly when he hears this.

(30:41):
But when I first started playingMonster Hunter, the first
monster that gave me trouble wasthe bear off.
He is essentially a armored T Rex that likes to roll in the
mud and is just unbelievably easy.
Now in my life that I look at itand I go, wow, I used to like I
used to take all 50 minutes of the quest to try to kill this

(31:02):
thing and I still couldn't do it.
Whereas now I go back and I playthat same game and I'm like
entry level weapons. I'm beating it in 12 minutes, 13
minutes because I know what I'm doing a lot better and I've it,
it. It's less about leveling your
character up and more about leveling how you play the game
up because you learn the skills in the game to be able to to

(31:24):
play better. All right, we talked about muddy
dinosaur what what's your favorite monster?
Or at least maybe whether? It's.
Or one that you loved meeting and how it happened.
Favorite monster of all, and it's going to sound similar, I
apologize to the Berry off. It is the Saber toothed ice
dragon. It is the coolest looking

(31:44):
monster. It is wildly frustrating.
People who play world will know the pain of how unbelievably
difficult the Frost Fang Berry off is and his move set and how
he's just on crack. But Berry off, it has been my
favorite monster since the very beginning.
He was the, I don't know, he just, he was the coolest thing

(32:07):
for me. They, they made him.
They've made him better. They've made him easier.
They've made him harder. They've made him worse in a lot
of different games. Every game kind of takes a
slight different variation on some monsters.
He's one of a family of three types of kind of monster builds.
There's the Nagakuga, which is the ninja dragon.

(32:29):
There's the Tigrex or Tigrex or however you pronounce it.
I don't know, I call the Tigrex.That is the most frustrating and
I hate that monster so much. I will never I, I never try to
fight him. And then there's the Berry off
the three of them. They are a kind of a, a side
jumping, you know, dragon. They do fly a little bit, but
they're just fantastic. All right, Well, let's go back

(32:50):
in time. We're going back the furthest I
think we are through the course of these conversations to Sid
Meier's civilization, but now I'm concerned you're trying to
smuggle in an entire series. Oh he was playing it the other
day while watch me while watching the mega baseball.
OK, this is so. I was playing sieve last.
Week smuggle the whole series in.
I apologize on that one. I'm going to smuggle two games

(33:12):
in one though. Sieve 2 and Sieve 6.
Those are the two I've played the most of all of them.
I I love them beyond belief. Those are are those are my
favorite games. How did you end up?
I'm guessing Civilization two isfirst.
Not that you played six and thenwandered back to two, but how

(33:32):
did you wander into two? Things Sieve way back in the day
on the 1st sieve ever the I, I, I played way back to
Civilization one when I was like7 and eight years old, ten years
old, whatever it was on our Windows 3.1 computer where you
had to launch it with a floppy disk.

(33:53):
And I, I love that game more than anything.
Sieve two came out and those two, I mean those games were so
different graphically compared to each other.
Like if you go back and look at Sieve 1 compared to Sieve 2,
like in sieve one, you are literally a square unit that has
like a chariot symbol on it or a, you know, a, a warrior

(34:17):
symbol. Whereas when you go to sieve 2,
it's like 3 dimensional renders and, and all of that kind of
stuff. So it was a huge jump.
The gameplay felt very similar. I don't know, there's just
something about taking four daysto complete it.
It's essentially A1 player boardgame against eight computers,
and it's just massively fun. And you give Gandhi nukes.

(34:40):
That's the that's the wild card.Look, I I killed Gandhi long
before nukes. Though actually the game does
penalize you more for going to war with Gandhi.
That's the quote. No, that's the quote of the
podcast right there. That's fine.
I killed Gandhi way before nukesthat is.

(35:00):
I somehow think you know Joel. Joel just like banged out when
he got back from vacation. The I'm not old on retro
T-shirt. I have the feeling I killed
Gandhi before. Nukes isn't going to make the
T-shirt cut. So good though.
But like, that's what it like. Here's the thing, Gandhi, you
get more negative in that game from attacking Gandhi and going

(35:21):
to war with him. But here's the thing, you just
have to piss him off and make him go to war with you and then
you can obliterate him. As long as you're not the one
initiating the war, you can killhim.
It's what it is. So Sims 6 especially allows you
to, you know, hey, I'm going to go attack his city States and

(35:43):
then he's going to go to war with me.
Now he's already declared war, Ican go kill him.
You know, those kind of things work out.
Sims 6 is a lot of fun because Ihave figured out ways to get
into modding the game a little bit to get more different maps
and different things like that. Plus I can talk trash to my
brother because he plays it on like Prince and I played on

(36:05):
emperor and so as a as a just a bit of personal power, I get to
talk trash and say I'm better than him.
So did was he the one who started with civilization or was
this something that just like came when you guys had that
family computer? So I've got three older
brothers. All four of us played

(36:25):
Civilization One. My two oldest brothers, they're
what, 10 and eight years older than me.
So they're in their mid to upper40s now.
They, they were the ones who played it the most.
Sieve two was really where my brother Mark and I, he's five
years older than me, really kindof got into sieve 2 a little bit
more than sieve 1. And by that point they, the

(36:49):
older two had kind of fallen offand, and kind of gone into their
own things. You know, Adam got really into
Mario Kart on the 64. Aaron was into college football
games and Madden and that kind of stuff.
But you know, that's, that's kind of where we got into.
One whooped Ray in Super Mega Baseball 4.
That was that was Mark. Now I, I will say Mark and I

(37:13):
have played super mega baseball so much as much as I've played
it, Mark May have actually played it more than I and I, I
did Ray, I think I did warn you he's probably better than I am
to the point where if he's in the majors next season, he's
probably going to beat me. But we play two to three nights
a week together and we have a franchise on each of our

(37:34):
Nintendo's that we play. We shuffle drafted it.
We've created Astro players and put them in and and we have a
lot of fun. Shout out to the PP Bears right
now. They're halfway through their
first season and they're having fun.
So so you still you still haven't mentioned where it came
from? Was it like an ancient Gaelic
curse that suddenly just placed this game into your home to?
Oh, no, no, no. My, my oldest brother, my oldest

(37:57):
brother Aaron bought it. My oldest brother Aaron bought
the game and, and then we all had it and played.
He was the one who got it. He got really into like SIM City
and, and those kind of games. And so Civilization became one
of those that he tried out. My dad was always one who would

(38:18):
allow us to get some of those games every now and then to, to
play stuff. My dad was a big Tetris guy back
in the day. And, and so we, you know, kind
of rolled into it that way. But yeah, he, he picked it up
for that old computer back then.And and then I have since loaded
it up onto way too many computers since then.

(38:38):
So what's your approach when youstart one of these is, is it
always kind of the same like you're playing on on emperor
mode, you're ready to go, you kind of get the insurance and
out of the system a little bit here.
So on the easier difficulties, you can do a lot of different
things. As I've gotten more into the
game, I've kind of had to build just a, hey, you know, I'm going
to put my town in and I'm going to start my strategy.

(38:59):
Here we go. It's a scout first, then a
builder and go from there. But it really just depends on,
you know, kind of the difficultyin how you want to play it.
I've gotten to the point where Itry to avoid doing domination or
kind of takeover victories now just because if you get enough
science, it's well, if you get enough science, you're way too

(39:22):
advanced. And it's like, dude, it's 1700
and I can you know, I'm, I'm launching the Mars mission and
satellites and you're still overhere with, you know, Knights
and, you know, crossbowmen. It's not fun.
And so it's much more fun to tryto go in and take over the world

(39:42):
with a religion or try to go in and culturally dominate everyone
in the world. So you got to rush to build all
of the wonders and build theatersquare districts and make all
the great works of art and, and all of that stuff and, and have
fun with it. I'm not by by no means am I good
at that game. Emperor is not the hardest
difficulty. I.

(40:02):
I frequent the sieve 4 or the sieve 6 Reddit to see what other
people are doing and they're like, oh I built one town on the
hardest difficulty and I beat the game in less than 200 turns
and I'm like I I can't even beatthe game with one town on like
Prince. Like I I don't understand how
you guys even do this. Well exactly right.

(40:23):
And I'm like I don't understand how y'all do this.
I don't even know how that's fun.
The one thing I wish for Civilization is that it could be
something that is easier to playmultiplayer online.
It's not an easy game to play online with people.
A because it takes forever. Because you know, like in the
game, turns can take. It'll take me 1520 minutes to

(40:46):
finish a turn sometimes, where online you can't do that.
Your game has to go faster because if there's eight people
playing and each one takes 15 minutes, you're 2 hours into
every turn and you didn't do anything.
And so that's where like, I wishthere was a better way to do
things online. Here's Here's hopes for seven.

(41:08):
No, honestly, I don't want I I look, I yes, I want it, but no,
I don't because I don't need to consume my life with it.
I've I've spent too many hours in Sib 6.
So Civilization 6, Speaking of, I think on sale every six weeks
or so, give or take, you can probably get it for either spend
the full price for it or wait and get it for $2.00 either on.

(41:30):
I got it for free. Yeah, it's it's.
I got it for free on Epic. I didn't even pay for it.
Yeah, that's right. It was one that was a freebie on
there at one point. It's what I said.
It's one of those games I just have everywhere because it's
just populated at one point or the other.
So what's your, what's your tag line for somebody who wants to
to consider getting into it? What's your pitch to get someone
into civilization? Don't God, the game's all

(41:52):
consuming like if you get into the game it is it can it can sit
on your computer for four days and you won't finish it and and
and you won't finish a sieve andyou're just going through and
doing stuff like it's it's a wildly fun game.
I I recommend it to anybody who wants to play a turn based
strategy game. But if you don't want something

(42:14):
that's going to take four days of your life and and haunt your
dreams of like, hey, I should have built this or I didn't do
that or I shouldn't have attacked here.
Don't don't get it. I'm sorry it's it takes too
much. But for anybody else who said
sounds like a good idea, just put it on every wish list you
have. It'll be on sale in a week or
two. Oh, it's on sale all the time
and and the DLCS for it go on sale.

(42:36):
I think I have spent a total of maybe $7.00 on that entire game
to get the Anthology pack with all the DLCS and Julius Caesar
and all of that stuff, and I didn't even buy the game.
So there you go. Yeah.
I don't even know what the quantity is for the series.
Like obviously you're at Civilization 6, but there's side
action, there's DLCS going back to.
So yeah, they they've made some really fun different offshoots

(43:02):
of it. One of the ones I really loved
the idea of it just didn't execute as well as it could
have. Probably.
They made a kind of an offshoot of it called colonization.
And it was essentially built around the idea of you are the
American colonies and you have to either stay loyal to England
and do that, or you rebel and start the American Revolution

(43:25):
and go through the war and fightand do all of the, you know, And
so you had to do that kind of stuff.
It could have been executed better because, you know, you
were fighting against taxes and tariffs and how much money are
you going to keep and how much are you going to take?
And are you going to accept thistariff or are you going to push
back on it and not take it? You know, all of that.

(43:46):
It's not a, you know, so there'ssome really different, you know,
elements to it. I have not played anywhere near
as many of the offshoots as I probably would have liked at one
point, but I'm also glad I haven't played as many of them.
Well, let let's let's jump into your honorable mentions.
We're going to talk about a few games that didn't make the cut
and even some games in there didn't make the cut either.
But we're going to start off with the Tales of Symphonia a a

(44:09):
3.8 rated game on Channel 3, which kind of surprised me funny
about this one. It's the the 5th entry in the
tail series, but kind of took a while until they got to the US
anyway. And this one got remastered last
year in I think February. I want to say it was an early
last year 2023 remaster. But yeah some some weird stuff
as many RPGs through the the 90sgot delayed, got renumbered, got

(44:35):
reordered, got re edited. I think the original Tales of
Fantasia was 2006 on the GameboyAdvance.
It finally hit the US. So after the the first game came
out in the US after the 5th game, three years after the 5th
game. Something to that effect, but.
So Tales of Symphony actually came out in like 04.
I think. In the US.

(44:56):
Oh on the GameCube it was a GameCube only game I believe and
then it got ported to the PS3. On a random note, for that the
GameCube is the is the easily superior version because it is
the only one that natively runs at 60 frames per second.
The Switch version is a ported version of the PS3 version which
only runs at 30 frames per second, which is why the Switch

(45:18):
version is garbage. Plus you can't play hard mode, I
call it or hard path on the Switch version because there's a
glitch in the system that band dynamco won't actually fix.
Essentially, at one point you can go north rather than going
West, and if you go north you gointo a city called Lewin and you

(45:39):
can actually play the harder dungeons first and then go back
and remop up the bottom ones. But if you go north in the
Switch version, it just glitchesand you can't do either of them
and you have to restart the whole game, as I was 30 hours
into it trying to do that and realize the hard way after hours
of Googling and getting mad. So yeah.

(45:59):
And that was one now got his OLED Switch and somehow
something happened to his original CD Switch at that point
and smashed against the wall and.
No, I something like that, yeah.So look, that game is, as much
as I love Legend of Legaia and Italk about how it is a turn
based RPG and everything, this game is the opposite.
It is A at times a four player RPG.

(46:22):
You can actually play it with your buddies.
That's actually how I started. I had a handful of buddies and I
that would play Super Smash Melee, we would play Mario Kart
Double Dash and we would play Tales of Symphonia on the game
Cube. And I was always genius the
magic user because I wasn't skilled enough to block well
enough, but I could run away andI could shoot magic from afar.

(46:44):
And there was four of us and we would sit and play that.
And in over world or kind of like towns, only one person
controls the first player. But in the battle, you can have
up to four people actually control characters and and play
all cooperatively at one time. And it's really, really
difficult, but really, really fun to do it because you can
yell at people. And that's what video games are

(47:05):
for is couch Co-op yelling. But that game has a truthfully
about 120 hours if you wanted 100% it worth of content.
And it's really long and it tooktwo discs to play it on the
GameCube. But it's, it's the opposite of
what Legend of Lagaya is in the sense of it's that single

(47:25):
player. I'm going to immerse myself in
the storyline in, in Tales of Symphony, you've got, you know,
8-9 different characters. You've got to build your team
differently and move people in and out of it and use different
styles and build the relationships and all of those
elements to it. But at the heart it's a I'm
going to go block and dodge and slash type battle style and it's

(47:47):
a lot of fun. Was this one like a friend had
it? Yeah, so my buddy Adam had it.
We would go over to his house all the time to play Smash and
Mario Kart. And he's like, hey guys, let's
do this. And so we started playing it one
night and we pretty much played it, you know, at least couple
nights a week for God, I don't know, probably about a year.

(48:10):
And then I ended up buying it and played it myself and just
beat it myself. And then I ended up loaning it
out to multiple friends and I got them to all play it and beat
it and. Yeah.
Making use of the four of the Gamecube's four ports.
That's the important part here. Does anyone if you can find a
good couch this? Oops, sorry.
Go ahead. Sorry.
If you could find a good couch Co-op, couch co-ops are are

(48:33):
absolutely some of my favorite games.
Yeah. So story wise, so this one has
spawned. Hang on, let me let me read the
list here. There have been 7 manga
collections, 2 novel series, 7 drama CDs and an anime series.
So Needless to say, the narrative is has some, has some

(48:55):
work, you know, has some, has some room, I should say some leg
room, look. The storyline of the game is
really compelling and really good.
You are, I mean, and in there's a lot of similarities, I would
say storyline wise to Tales, to Legend of Lagaya and Tales of
Symphonia. You are a human who gets a power

(49:15):
augmenting item like a Rasaru inLagaya or AX sphere in Tales of
Symphonia that makes you a lot stronger.
In Tales of Symphonia, it's thisthousand year war and undoing,
this cycle of never ending deathand and kind of all of that
stuff that keeps cycling throughit that you can.

(49:37):
You know that that's a pretty common trope now in a lot of
JRPGS, the Xenoblade series being one of them, that that
really kind of kind of recurs with it.
But it's the great thing about that game is the art style was
really compelling for the time, at least for me.

(49:58):
It was almost like a 3D hand drawn art style that felt
different than anything else at the time.
And that's what I loved about it, is it didn't feel like I was
trying to make it a realistic character like you did with the
Final Fantasy series and things like that.
I didn't want it to be a real world, like I can walk out of my

(50:20):
house and see it. I wanted to immerse myself in
this other world that I just dreamt of what it could be and I
could be like those people, you know, never.
Mind, I had something else I wasgoing to ask, but I can't top
that. So I'm just going to move on and
go to the game that wanted to shove your first four games into
a locker. And we're going to talk about
your next honorable mention in MVP Baseball 2005.

(50:42):
We went from games like my son jokes around as he plays all the
same stuff that I do and more and would yell, you know, he'll,
he'll ask me some sciency questions, yelled nerd at me
when I, when I responded with the scientific answers to mess
with me. And that's effectively what
you're this game's doing when itlooks at the 1st 4 here.
As you know, we're, we're dwindling.
We're at the end of I mean, obviously we're looking at a

(51:04):
resurgence of EA baseball and Channel 3 if nothing else.
But MVP Baseball 2005 was probably the peak of the the
aughts baseball for. EA Sports MVP Baseball 2005.
I have said this numerous times to my brother and my brother
agrees, but it is the greatest baseball simulation game ever
created and Major League Baseball's greedy nature of

(51:27):
trying to give exclusivity to certain companies ruined
baseball games And and truthfully is EA has it is what
ruined it's what's ruined sportsgames in general.
Madden has become far worse. So they don't get rid of talking
Yeah, no, correct Madden. Look, EAII said this on the
Internet earlier today. Actually, EA is where good

(51:49):
sports games go to die Ray and Dan.
I know you guys play super mega baseball.
I'm pretty sure that four is going to be the last entry ever
made because EA bought Metalhead.
Metalhead then made it. They didn't make it well because
EA bought them and since the sales didn't do as well as EA
wanted, they're not going to make a sequel.

(52:10):
They've already moved Metalhead on to another studio.
It's going to be a poop show, but the game is still fun.
I enjoy it beyond the point it'sjust.
The little arcade baseball game,Yeah.
Exactly right, but it could havebeen so much more if they would
have kept building off of it. But they don't.
MVP Baseball 2005. Let's get back to the actual
topic of the best game ever made.

(52:31):
The the batting, the the actual like it is baseball.
It is. I've got a time to pitch.
I've got a direct how I'm tryingto hit the pitch up, down, you
know, am I trying to lift the ball?
Am I trying to hit it in the ground?
What am I doing? And it's all about the actual
timing of it and recognizing thepitch in that game.
The pitch comes in. So if it's a slider, it's got a

(52:53):
certain color. I think sliders were purple.
They'd have a certain color thatwould come on the ball for 1/2
of a second. And you've got to recognize it
to know. But only if you do slider, it's
starting inside. Only if you guessed it correctly
would the color show up though, wasn't it?
No, it showed us for it showed up longer.
It showed up longer if you guessed it correctly, but it
would, it would show a flash of that little bit for 1/2 of a

(53:16):
second. You could see it and then, OK,
it's a slider, it's starting andit's going away.
And I mean, you got to make really quick decisions and
pitching was just perfect in that game.
The pitching was perfection. You've got the meter to to try
to try to match it up and go. You've got to you got to
slightly move your stick in the right direction to get it to the

(53:37):
right spot and everything with it.
It was and and always will be the greatest game that I've ever
had the the Home Run Derby and it was absolutely fun to play
the pitching mini games, the hitting mini games to try to
power up your players in the offseason, the franchise mode and
and yes, the trades at times were broken.

(53:57):
I get it, you know, John Dowd being Barry Bonds and and all of
the fun that happened with it. But in that game, you know,
look, I'm an Astros fan. The Astros made the World Series
that year and they were an awfulteam in that game.
You it, it was impossible to getthe Astros with Roger Clemens
and Andy Pettitte and Brad Lynchand all of them to the World

(54:18):
Series as they were. You had to make trades or you
had to just play on a low level to get them there.
It they because they just weren't any good.
Willie Tavares and and Chris Burke and all of the prospects
weren't good enough to get you there.
Sorry, my trash can's 10 feet behind me so I can't clap.
It that's totally fair. I understand it and I I have

(54:39):
named my fantasy baseball team for the last number of years.
The trash Bangin Bros. I try to repress that memory as
as having to play the Astros andAL East.
The Phillies. Lost the.
After that, that's my problem. They lost the World Series so
after that. I I've I've tried to repress
those memories. Ray, if you want, I'll go back

(55:00):
and make my team the Astros again.
I have them on there. I'll I'll make the team the
Astros when we play let. Me tell you the the the, the
mental damage that those like two years did to the Yankees is
is felt today like they they cannot figure themselves out
from those from those games. Getting slightly off topic to go
just baseball here for a second.I as an Astros fan, the Astros

(55:24):
absolutely cheated worse than anybody else.
I'm not denying that fact. But to for for the mainstream
media to consistently say that the Astros were the only ones
who cheated is hilarious to me. It's just, it's hilarious.
Well, that's. Because that's because the
Commission's always staring downat them and.

(55:44):
Well, yeah, they got to have a They got to have a bad guy and
the Astros had to wear it for years.
But it's really funny to see thepeople just still Boo Altube.
And and truthfully, to Boo Astros who weren't on the team
until 2022, you know, like to Boo players who weren't even
there just because they're wearing the Astros colors is
hilarious. Well.

(56:05):
Hey, let's let's upset Ray some more because, you know, one of
the things with this game was the soundtrack.
And I'll tell you also that the game opening up with Tessie and
the the the Sox, the Sox winningthe series over and over and
over again would just be kryptonite for Ray every time
you turn this game on. Another memory.
Why are we bringing all these things up right now in this

(56:26):
moment? I didn't even.
It didn't even occur to me that the 05 game was gonna have the
right thought. Oh God.
Yeah, no, this was name. Ramirez on the front, too.
It was a whole thing, Yeah. Like it was.
It was like, it wasn't even likethis was the first game I played
for baseball where like they made a music video of it.
They had the dropkick Murphy like it was.

(56:47):
It was sponsored by the Red Sox effectively, like there is no
escaping this. Thing and dude the Red Sox were
so good in that game too Manny Ramirez was unhit it was UN
unbelievable David Ortiz couldn't get out Dustin Pedroia
like yeah that's my. Victoria Energy in in, in
Madden. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Pedro couldn't be hit. I, I have to ask and I, and I'm,

(57:12):
I'm not attacking your, but I, I, the things you've said have,
have riled me up because the show is go ahead.
The show is my beloved baseball simulation of just like
everything. I, I love the show.
And you're right about everything you said about MVPO
5. Absolutely.
Like it was the IT was the peak of of it at the time to the

(57:34):
point where like I went into dark ages for work for a few
years and like when O nine O 10 came out, I went to the GameStop
was like, Hey, I want to get letme get MVP baseball and like it
doesn't exist anymore. Like what got PlayStation here,
get the get the show and and my life was changed forever in a
favorable way. But I I have to ask, have you,
have you played the show? Like what are your thoughts

(57:55):
comparing the show to, to this? Because there's so much
everything you said that the show did for me, they went a
little too far with the pitching.
Like I don't play with like the stick pitching.
Like they they got kind of ridiculous with some stuff too,
don't get me wrong, but. But I need to.
Hear your show versus MVP Baseball O Five So the show.

(58:16):
I personally and and look, I play Super Mega Baseball.
It's arcade baseball. The hitting style is more
similar in Super Mega Baseball than it is to The Show, than it
is to MVP baseball. MVP baseball, you didn't have to
pick where in the zone you were hitting, you just swung, and if
it was time to write and you were pointing in the right
directions, you could do stuff with it.

(58:38):
I felt that was a little bit more enjoyable because you could
make terrible contact on a pitchbecause you were trying to pull
the inside, pull inside on a pitch that was outside, and all
of those things. It made baseball.
You had to figure out where the pitch was going that way, Rather
than move your art, move your little pointer at the right

(58:59):
spot. My problem with The Show is the
same problem I have with Madden is that it's not a bad
simulation game. It's glitchy and they have
stopped trying to innovate because they have no real
competition because they are theonly ones really doing it.
And yes, I know there's what? Like what was it RBI baseball

(59:22):
that Major League Baseball triedto produce or, or whatever.
That game was hot garbage. I only bought it because it had
Alex Bregman on the front and itwas so mad.
I, I, I haven't even finished four games on it because it made
me so mad. And so the issue I have with the
show is that it just doesn't tryto actually make its game play
better. The, the, the fielding is

(59:43):
glitchy. You just randomly drop balls in
the outfield. You all of those things that you
you go into the show going, hey,I got a guy who's a great
fielder and the ball just falls or he throws it 10 feet to the
left when he's got a great accuracy arm and all all of
those elements that. Don't they shouldn't show up in

(01:00:05):
a game do in the show and they do in Madden where you know you
throw the ball and it you know it goes to a receiver, but the
receiver doesn't catch. It goes through his helmet on
the screen and it goes through the defensive back.
He catches it, he runs it. You can't tackle and then and
it's a pick six and you're like,so you rip your controller in
half and break it. It's that's my issue with the

(01:00:26):
show and and those kind of things.
I get why people love it. It's got updated rosters.
It's it's got everything that, you know, Super Mega Baseball
doesn't. The thing that Super Mega
Baseball has is that arcade style of just, hey, you know
what? This is baseball Stars from the
NES and it's fun and we're just going to go have fun.
And it's Tecmo Super Bowl for baseball.

(01:00:47):
Yeah, Yeah, it's it's Tecmo Super Bowl for baseball.
All right. So now we've talked about our
one sport entry. We can move.
We can move back here. So.
We can move back to RPG land. Yeah, I really.
Should have reordered this list for me. close with that.
I don't know why I let. That slide because you you're
going to close with the greatestJRPG to have come out in the

(01:01:08):
last 20 years. All right, let's start with this
one then. I didn't realize I was playing
wrong for the first two months. That is a comment you put in
your review. I'd I'd love to know what is the
wrong way to play this game and what made you realize you were
doing that? OK so Xenoblade Chronicles has a

(01:01:29):
very unique battle style. It is not a action battle style
like Tales of Symphonia, but it's not a turn based battle
style either. You move around inside of a
field and and do the attacks andeverything that way.
I was playing it wrong because Iwasn't actually paying attention

(01:01:51):
in any of the tutorials to see how the elements, how the how
the attacks, how the different things stack to make you attack
better and faster and all of that.
I listened to my buddy who I actually borrowed the game from
originally, who's like, Oh yeah,yeah, just move around and they
can't hit you. And he was completely wrong
because that doesn't matter if you move around, they're still

(01:02:11):
going to hit you. And so I wasn't, you know,
using, I wasn't positioning my character right to get a better
attack on the side or on the back for certain moves.
I wasn't stacking this move intothis move to get better attacks
and those kind of things. And I spent way too much time
fighting low level stuff to overlevel myself to make up for it

(01:02:33):
rather than actually just going through the story of the game.
Dan, Dan, you see my third comments.
Do you see my third my third bullet point on this game?
I I I I do, but I I want to justget your like half hour anime
take on every. On.
Every my my Third Point here wasmidpoint between turn based and

(01:02:53):
action RPG 'cause it's not. Look at that man, I'm so good at
this. Have you now here's the
question. Have you guys played these
games? Any of them?
OK, so I'm going to give you a 30,000 foot view.
There's four games in the seriesthat have come out from from
Xenoblade. There's Xenoblade 1, which then

(01:03:14):
got remade for the 3DS and remade for the Switch.
And then there is. You're going to need a.
You're going to. Need a whiteboard to keep up
with this. There's two, there's I know
there's two and three, right? I I.
Thought, yeah, there. Well, no, no, there's a, there's
a, there's a kind of a midpoint entry between 1:00 and 2:00
called Zenoblade X. It's the only one they made for
the Wii U, and it is, in my opinion, the most fun of all of

(01:03:38):
them. It is my favorite of the four of
them. Then in two, when they put it on
the switch, they made two. They made an entirely different
battle style. You still move around in the
area, you still have to positionyourself on the sides or the
back or different things like that.
But the, the way you do your attacks and the way your attacks

(01:03:58):
are are lined up and scheduled is very different.
It's a little bit simpler, a little bit easier in the intro
and more convoluted and complex at the very end of the game
because there's a lot of more elements of kind of, OK, I got
to do this to then make this move faster to make this move
then you know, those kind of things.

(01:04:19):
Three, try to marry a little bitof the the 1st and the 2nd game.
I'm primarily staying with the second game.
I will say this, I have played one.
I've beaten it three times and started it about six times.
I've played X, beaten it twice, played through it about four
times, played two, beaten it three times, played through it

(01:04:43):
about four times. I don't know if I will ever play
three ever again. Not because it's not great, but
simply because it wrapped up thestory and I can't go back to it.
I, I, I put an unbelievable matter.
I maxed out my characters because there is a level cap

(01:05:03):
limit. I maxed out my characters.
I beat every monster I could. I beat everything I could with
it. I cannot go back to that game.
I have downloaded it, I have launched it, and as soon as it
starts, I can't play it. There's something blocking me
from going back to it because the game ended.
Now, for those of you that haven't played it, I'm not
giving anything away. I won't tell you what I think

(01:05:25):
about it left or right, but I can't go back to it because it
wrapped up the storyline. And So what you're is it like
the pain of closing the story? That you No, it's it's the so
the game itself is really, really good.
If I had to rank them, my favorite to play because I love

(01:05:47):
the exploration element of it isin a blade Chronicles X.
It is the only it's the closest to a truly open world you can
get because you can get there. And once you get out of the
first kind of like the first leveling stuff where it, they do
put a a little bit of barriers like, Hey man, you know, you

(01:06:07):
can't run out of this area kind of stuff, but you can get
through that pretty quick. Once you're out of there, you
can go to the final area. You've got to die, but you can
go to the final area. You can go wherever you want in
in one, OK, you've got, you know, hardware limitations,
you've got preset areas you can go to.
And two, you've got preset like maps you can explore inside.

(01:06:30):
You can't climb every mountain, you can't fly over stuff in
three. You've got preset match.
You can get a little bit more exploratory, you can go into a
little bit further areas and things like that in three.
But the way three ended, I can'tgo back and play anymore.
So you brought the exploring as as one of the the big things
here. And I mean, there's there's lots

(01:06:52):
of games that have exploring. What why is why is Xenoblade
talked about like the exploring is is just such a big part of
it? Have you seen the pictures of
have you have you seen pictures of the of the world?
It is one of the most beautiful World games I've ever I've ever
seen. In a time when so many games are

(01:07:14):
afraid of color and green. And yes, and and not even just
color and green, but like every,every element of the world felt
thought out, felt built, felt complete.
But yet entirely different and beautiful day and night interact
differently in all of the different elements of the world.

(01:07:37):
You know, not just in different monsters, but in different
elements of how you're in in God, I I I'm blanking on the
name of it, but in Xenoblade one, after you get out of the
air at sea, you go into essentially the a big snow land
and I'm blanking on the name of the of the area.
I'll have to go look it up rightafter this, but I'm sorry.

(01:07:59):
In the daytime it's a big white snowy mountain area and at night
time it's grayed out. But then there's these giant
crystals that light up yellow and make the whole world glow
yellow in different elements. And it's absolutely gorgeous.
And if you go into the, you know, if you go into the jungle,
there's, you know, different, different weather patterns,

(01:08:24):
different all of every bit of itwas absolutely beautiful and
worth exploring. And if you go into Xenoblade X
and you know, and essentially what would have been the the
sequel, which storyline wise is not connected to any of the
three. But if you go into Xenoblade X,
like your first world is Primordia and there's giant, I

(01:08:46):
mean giant long neck dinosaurs called Millisars.
And then you go into, you know, the next area, which is
Noctilam, which is this, you know, jungle world that has, you
know, crocodiles and acid rain and acid pools and things that
hurt your character and, and caves to explore.
And it's, and then you go into Oblivia, which is my favorite of

(01:09:10):
all of the world's. Oblivia is absolutely gorgeous.
It is a desert world with, you know, giant rings and arcs,
arches and, and everything to explore there.
And then you go to Silvolum. Sorry, I I could talk about this
series. This this may should probably
should have been one of my top three.
But Silvilum is this like foggedout, kind of like, you know,

(01:09:34):
misted world with giant lake in the middle and, and all of these
different elements. And then, you know, of course
you've got to have your fire world.
So you've got calderos at the end with, you know, lava rivers
and you know, that just aggressive feel of the planet in
every area has a totally different aura and feel.

(01:09:54):
And the music to them make you fall in love with them.
Like the the music of Oblivia. I still listen to, I'll pull up
and I'll still listen to the Xenoblade X music on Amazon
because the the music for those worlds is just to die for.
That that's the place. That's the place to leave it
right there. A beautiful game and a beautiful

(01:10:14):
series. Go play those games because they
look amazing and play X. What's the order?
Do you do you play the that's style finish?
What's the order? You can play X whenever you
want. X isn't connected to any of
them. Play it whenever you want.
It's only on the Wii U. So you've got to have a Wii U to
play it or have. Yeah, I think you can play it

(01:10:36):
decently well on the Steam Decks.
I've seen some people do it. I don't recommend it because
truthfully, your map functionality on the Wii U
GamePad is what makes that game.It's why it's never going to get
ported to another system becauseyou've got the map on your game
pad that allows you to fast travel to different locations
while you're wherever you are. They made that game for that

(01:10:59):
system entirely. But if you're going to play
them, play them in whatever order you want.
Truthfully, they're all stand alone games that you don't
really get the connection to theother worlds until the ending of
the games. They're all connected.
They call it the Klaus trilogy but and they're all connected
that way, but you don't notice it until the very endings of the

(01:11:23):
games when they all wrap all thestorylines together at the end
sometime. So play whichever one you want.
If you asked me to rank them, two is the best, one is second,
three is the worst, and three isstill one of my top ten games of
all time, so it's not like they're bad games.
On to a future game you're looking forward to.
We're dipping back. We're going to we're going to
dive back in Monster Hunter World and go with Monster Hunter

(01:11:47):
Wild to the 1st next Gen. entry for I guess current Gen. now for
Monster Hunter. Yeah, and look, Monster Hunter
World was that next Gen. jump. I again, I played, I started
playing on the Wii with Monster Hunter try the Wii U gave you
try Ultimate, which added in a whole nother level to it.

(01:12:07):
I will say, having put a ton of hours into Rise and everything,
I'm really frustrated with how Capcom has made those games
recently. Because they give you the game
that is only 2/3 of the game knowing they're going to sell
you a DLC for 50 bucks 40. You know, whatever whatever it

(01:12:27):
is later on that you're going tobuy because you want to get
master rank or G rank or whatever they call it in that
game series itself. But it's really frustrating like
I played Ryze. I, I mean, I had, I got rise
when it came out day one and I was ecstatic.
I didn't like that it was fasterand all of those, but I knew the

(01:12:49):
game was going to evolve becauseI started on the, the clunky,
you know, slow. Hey, you've got area 1-2 and
three and there's a break and a loading screen in between them.
You can't move while you take a potion, you can't move while you
sharpen any of those things. And in Ryze, you can ride on
your dog and sharpen your weaponand you can move while taking a

(01:13:09):
potion. Those are all elements that came
in with Monster Hunter World andthat that next Gen. jump that
they made with it. And it's fantastic.
It's a great setup. The thing that I didn't like
with it is that in the old games, the storyline was the
village. The village was your storyline
and you could essentially wrap up the game by high-ranking and

(01:13:31):
wrap up everything and feel likeyou completed something in Ryze
and in world. You can wrap up that storyline
of it, but yet you don't feel like the game is complete.
The game doesn't feel like you've done because they're
making it. They've made them so that it
feels, you know, like you're going to be waiting for that

(01:13:53):
DLC. Wilds is going to do the same
thing, but let's be honest, I don't care.
I want to go fight that new Thunder dragon so much.
I'm I'm never going to buy APS 5but I may have to buy an Xbox
just for that game. Is somebody who wants to get
one. Wow, I don't want one.
No, no, no, no. I don't want one, but I want to

(01:14:15):
play wild is. This game not on PC?
Will it only be on console? So Monster Hunter games
generally release on PC about a year afterwards.
World didn't come to PC for about a year and a half.
Rise it took like almost 2 1/2 years now.
Ryze was also what they play. Portable entry.
They have entries and portable entries.

(01:14:37):
That's another fun bit about Monster Hunter.
Portable entries have generally lower graphic style.
Generations is a portable entry because it was made for the 3DS.
Same with four and four Ultimate.
But you'll also have the PS the the Vita and PSP games of, you
know, like Frontier that came out as portable entries.

(01:15:00):
But if you ask me what I really,really want, I just want
underwater combat back. Give me the underwater combat.
Let me go swim around and actually fight a monster on its
own turf rather than, hey, I gotto fight this water monster
while it's on land. It doesn't feel right.
There's no sport in it. Well, look it.
It's what? And look underwater combat was

(01:15:22):
clunky. It was awful in a lot of cases,
but it was supposed to be You'reout of your element.
You're not a water, you're not afish, you're not swimming and
doing these things as easily as that monster is, just like
they're not doing those things as easily on land as you can.
And that's what made it so fun. Monster Hunter Tri is still the

(01:15:47):
only one that's got underwater combat.
I still go back and play it. I, I have my Wii UI can turn the
phone around and show you guys. It's sitting here on my TV.
It is the only game I have bought in that series multiple
times. I think I've bought two
different physical versions of it and I ended up buying the
downloaded version because I kept scratching disks and

(01:16:07):
finally just said I'm going to buy the downloaded version and
that way I don't ever have to waste money on a scratch disk.
Fair enough. Let's take a look at the quest.
A question from the Channel 3 history books for you to
discuss, which actually I'm not.I'm not pulling from the history
books. I'm pulling from 1:00.
That's going to drop the day this is.
Unprecedented what you're doing,Dan.
Yes. So I'm going to ask only because

(01:16:28):
so this is going to drop on the 31st, which is 35 years of the
Game Boy being in the United States.
So we have to we have to ask this question.
So what? What's your favorite Game Boy
game? Pokémon.
Yellow. Why yellow?
OK, so. Yellow because it's better than
red and blue. So Red and Blue were great, but

(01:16:51):
Yellow allowed you to have Pikachu walking behind you and
I'm sorry, but it just felt better.
It's it's why Heart Gold and Sold Silver are peak Pokémon
games. They are the two best Pokémon
games ever made because you can have your Pokémon walk behind
you and have all of the greatness of the regular Pokémon

(01:17:11):
games. Red and Blue and Yellow, they're
all the same game. Gold and Silver were the
pinnacle of what those games were because they added in a
couple of elements, but they hadn't gotten so bad that you
had literally a key chain for a Pokémon or a trash bag for a
Pokémon or any of that. Now they're all weird emo anthro

(01:17:31):
characters so. There's.
Yeah, exactly. If you ask me what my favorite
monster catching games were, I'mgoing to go ahead and tell you
Dragon Quest Monsters. The first one may actually beat
it. That game was amazing.
Or Dragon Warrior Monsters, because I don't think it was
Dragon Quest back then. That game was amazing because
you had to breed and hatch your your monsters and all that kind

(01:17:53):
of stuff. But it was really slow and
really long winded and it wasn'tas straightforward as Pokémon.
Pokémon's much easier to understand and easier to play
and easier to do, so it's easilyPokémon on Yellow.
I don't even. I didn't even have to think
about that one. And the last question we asked,
what has been your favorite feature on Channel 3?
That's hard to tell. That's hard.

(01:18:14):
That's a hard question. You guys are killing me here.
I, I got to say it's probably going to be the clubs is is my
favorite feature, not because I look, I use Channel 3 very
differently than than a lot of people.
I'm not as I don't care about anXP crown.
I don't, I would I, I, I do care.

(01:18:35):
I, I do care a little bit about the crowns for the weekly quest.
Those I I will fight for. But like this season XP crowns,
I'm not going to post a million times.
I'm not going to go one up everybody's post and do that
kind of stuff. But the clubs and being able to
actually talk about a game with other people who are passionate
about that game and those things, you know, truthfully,

(01:18:57):
meeting Ender for Monster Hunterand going and playing with him
and his buddies. And, and before that, before
Channel three, I, I played with Lion and and Mike C, the
insurance guy. That's who I played through Rise
bass rise with and and so, like,you know, meeting other people

(01:19:18):
that I can play with these gameswith because I've never been an
online game guy. If you notice my list, they're
almost all offline games. I don't play a lot of online
video games outside of, you know, a few because it's it's
just who I am. I'm a I'm a loner, you know, but
the clubs and being able to talkabout about games that way has

(01:19:40):
has been fantastic. Perfect.
And with that, we've made it to the end of another.
What are your three podcasts? Thank you, Mafurius for being
with us. You can find a podcast at C3 dot
GG slash podcast dropping every Wednesday morning at 3:33 AM
Eastern on all the major platforms, including Spotify,
YouTube Music and Apple Podcast.I'm Ray Dan puts this all
together. Our theme song is by Caster

(01:20:01):
Garden and for our executive producer Joel Willis.
Have a good day everybody. Channel.
Three. So we're kind of good there.
The thing I try and tell everybody, though, is like, we
designed this the way we did, sopeople are just talking about
video games. It's not that difficult.

(01:20:24):
You pick the game. The hardest part is picking your
games right. Well, and here's the thing.
Like when I was doing that, I picked the first game.
Like is a game I'm wildly passionate about.
I could talk about my love of that game for years, yeah.
Save it, save it, save it, save it.
I will I will, but like getting to the next couple of games.

(01:20:45):
It's like, OK, all right, I really like this game and I, I
mean XY and Z and I'm like, that's why I was like, wait,
scratch this game, put this gamein scratch that one and, and
honorable mentions. And because like, there's about
seven different game franchises that mean a lot to me, and
trying to narrow it down to 3 + 3 is really difficult.

(01:21:06):
I'm upset you scratched Dynasty Warrior.
OK, so I did only because and I'll tell you I can repeat this
in the in there if you want to, but I scratched it because my
brother Mark as you, you played in last last week.
That is, it's a huge connection I have with him, but it's the

(01:21:26):
game that he was much more passionate about than I was.
And so it's one of those like he's the one who who knows that
game. He knows the lores, the
insurance and outs, the all of that kind of stuff.
And while I love playing it, I haven't been into one of those
actual Dynasty Warriors games since Dynasty Warriors 4 with

(01:21:47):
him. He has, I mean he's gone, you
know what was it 7 extreme legends?
He went and got Lubu's weapon and and like all of those
ungodly like difficult tasks himand his buddy didn't.
So him and I can talk about them, but I don't know the game
like he does. I've played a lot of like the
Hyrule Warriors and the and FireEmblem Warriors which let's be

(01:22:11):
honest the newer 2 I hate are garbage.
I hate the I hate it Hyrule Wars.
I couldn't. I couldn't visit it.
I loved. High roll warriors once Jenna,
I'm finished. I feel Jenna's pinging into this
conversation. I I think it's I could like I
had I played like Dynasty Warriors.
I think like 2. Back on the.
On PS2 and I was like, whoa, this game is so cool because if

(01:22:34):
I try to like solo my way to theend, the game's based like no,
like you. Can't you need somebody to help?
But wait, wasn't dynasty warriors one?
See I thought two is still a fighting game before it became
the the melee. Three I jumped into three is the
one the first one I played? I'd have to look it.
Up because it was so long ago, I.
Thought like Dynasty Warriors one and I want to say even two

(01:22:57):
were just like Mortal Kombat fighting games.
They were just like Soul Calibur.
I think so. And at some point early on
three, yeah. And it may have been three where
like I think that's when they switched to that or maybe I'm
thinking there's something else in the.
Series. I'm looking at three.
I think 3 is where I played. Yeah, three was the one I played
the most of. That's where my brother and I

(01:23:20):
would spend countless hours at night in, you know, in that room
upstairs in the the house in Austin playing.
But all right, before we get allthe video game conversation out,
let's actually get on the podcast Problem Channel 3.

(01:23:41):
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