The N64's First RPG | Quest 64 (Ep. 143) - Pixel Project Radio: A Video Game Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio, the video game discussions
podcast where we do deep dives and analyze all of
our favorite games and some of yours too. My name
is Rick, and today we take a tour to a
place many are too afraid to venture to cult Land
in Quest sixty four. The Quest sixty four. That's right,
Claire Obscure release, And I said, you know what, I

(00:44):
think I'd rather play Quest sixty four right now. That's
what I'd like to do. As always up top, I've
got to say thank you to the patrons. The patrons
are a wonderful group of people that keep this train
on the tracks and keep things moving. And if you
would like to support your favorite local independent artist that's me,
you can do so at patreon dot com slash PicTel

(01:06):
Project Radio. You check out all of the cool things there.
Even though I didn't enunciate those words as well as
I wish I could have, it's not like I can
edit this. We'll talk more about this is off to
a great start. We'll talk more about some brief plugs
and where you can find us on the internet in
a little bit, But first let's introduce the guest today.
You've heard them before on the game's criticism episode, We've

(01:29):
got the one, the only who else would be here
for this episode? Quest sixty four Official Internet Celebrity Extraordinary.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Hey, how's it going, Rick? It's every time you introduce
me like that. Now I'm going to be more weirded
out than the previous time, but I accept.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
That's what I aim to do here. You know, since
the show has a rotating panel of guests, I like
to keep everybody on their toes. Some people might say
you should aim to make a comfortable show. Not me, No, No,
I like to keep everybody, like to keep the adrenaline pumping.
Fight or flight is whenever when the most creative performances
come out right. That's how that goes. It is, so

(02:08):
Quest sixty four hardly needs an introduction. It was one
of the first RPGs on the Nintendo sixty four game console.
It beat Ocarina of Time quite notably by a couple
of months, and we're going to talk all about that
in a little bit. Players get to take the role
of Brian, a master apprentice wizard, as he searches for

(02:30):
his father and the fabled el Tail Book. This game
has a reputation and we're going to get into whether
or not it's earned, what the misunderstandings and misconceptions are,
and of course we're going to talk about what it
could have done better, because this game is a bit
of a mixed bag, but it's not the dumpster fire

(02:50):
I think that the Internet would have you believe. But
more on that in a little bit. Let's talk about
personal histories with this game. You have a particular history
with this It's become kind of your calling card, your
brand identity, if we're using corpo speak. From what I understand,
one of your favorite games of all time. But don't
take my word for it. Let's take your word for it.

(03:10):
Why don't you tell us a little bit about how
you've come to this game and why it's so special
to you.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Uh yeah, Young Mike was a big video game renter.
I did not grow up in a wealthy household, so
much like most of the preteens and teens of that generation,
we rented tons of games, and my parents were cool
enough to get my brother and I had Nintendo sixty four,

(03:35):
but it was like a one game a year kind
of situation. They were expensive, and so we rented a
lot of games from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and Captain's Video,
which is a pirate themed video store near me, and
Qus sixty four was a frequent rental, and my mom
is an intelligent and sweet lady, so she watched me

(03:56):
rented over and over and decided eventually that it would
be more cost effective to make that one of the
present games of the year so I could avoid it
being a cousin game. It belonged to me, and then
I had it for a long time and it kind
of dipped in and out. It's always been my favorite game,
or since I could, you know, I had coherent thoughts

(04:18):
of games, media and how I feel about them. I've
always loved this game, and some combination of nostalgia and
actually playing it and loving it has led me to
making it my Internet identity too. So here we are, Rick,
here's the game.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
You know, a lot of folks that are just passingly
familiar with your Internet presence, which is a great presence.
I mean, it's a shit posting extraordinair might think that
it's kind of an irony shtick, right, which is, there's
no shortage of that online, so folks would be forgiven
for thinking that. But that's not the case. I mean,
you grew up with this game and it's very special
to you. How many times if you had to estimate

(04:58):
how many times have you played through this in your life.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Start to finish, I don't know. I would not, like
a crazy man, not like hundreds and hundreds of times.
But it used to be I have friends that own
video game stores, like a couple of different friends in
my area, and the joke was always that Mike is
the only one who likes this game, so every time
they got a copy, it would sit on the shelf
till I bought it. So the way I would christen

(05:23):
it to my collection then would be to beat Mammon.
So I had to save on a memory card that
was close to the end of the game, and I
would beat Mammon. So I've beaten Mammon over a hundred times,
but playing the whole game probably a much more pedestrian
less than a hundred times.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Oh yeah, we wouldn't want to misrepresent your accomplishments here, correct,
and we'll get into who Mammon is and what this
game's all about. My history with this is much shorter.
I played it for the first time for this show.
I had heard of it, of course, but I hadn't
known literally anything about it. It is currently the only
N sixty four game that I own CIB, and I

(06:02):
do own it CIB, and I've got to say the
vox is in almost pristine condition. I keep it in
a little protective container, which is nice. But so I
played it for the first time and I was surprised
in a few different ways that we'll talk about soon.
But first let's hear the personal histories from the community forum.
If you're unfamiliar with the show, the community forum, and

(06:24):
by the way, if you're a new listener, welcome. We're
happy that you're here. The Community forum is a channel
in the Discord server where I post what we are
talking about on the show, and folks can chime in
with their thoughts, feelings, jokes, as long as they're high
quality jokes, and I'll read them on the show. You
write it, I read it with great power, et cetera.

(06:44):
And we've got three responses here. First up, we've got
Matt Storm. Matt Storm again from the Fun and Games podcast.
Matt says this, I love this game as a kid.
It was weird, but so were many other sixty four games.
I worry about how well it's held up since and
I have yet to do a replay of it, but
I'm definitely very nostalgic for it, and I think a
lot of I think playing this game as a kid,

(07:07):
you know, me having played this as a thirty two
year old, I think playing this game as a kid
is like the sweet spot. You know, partly because the
protagonist Brian, he's a kid, Partly because of the color
palette and what's going on in the game, many reasons.
I think this is kind of the perfect summer vacation
kid game.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
I don't know, No, you're spot on, dude, and it
you know, as a teenager or a young lad. It
was also great because it was a story based game
that wasn't you know, dark, It wasn't gloomy. It like
filled me with joy. So yeah, summer game is a
perfect way to talk about it, or to categorize it.

(07:47):
I guess it's a good feeling game.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Speaking of good feelings, Keaton Poppy the Mask. Keaton is
trying to conjure up some good feelings with his community correspondence.
Keaton says this it needs to be on nso collection
feels incomplete without it, And you know I can stand
by that. You would think as infamous as this game is,
as many people know it, you'd think they'd add it.
I'm for it. I hope they do.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
And last, but not least, we've got Mikey Tabletop discord regular,
former host of zero to two Heroes fighting an extraordinary
Mikey sums it up pretty succinctly with this pithy response
quest sixty four more like best sixty four. And my understanding, Mike,
is that you paid him to say that. Is that true?

Speaker 2 (08:32):
How do you know I'm not Mikey Tabletop Ah?

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Fuck, that's right. Shit, shut it down. Shut it down. Boys.
Let's talk about some of the development history of this game,

(08:57):
some facts and figures. First, this was released This is
a rare occurrence. This was released in North America first
rare as in the frequency, not the company, in June
of ninety eight. It came to the EU that following September,
and Japan got it July. After that they got a
different version, which we'll get into soon. The full credits,

(09:18):
as I always say, are on the wiki, the IMDb,
or the credits of the game play the thing. But
of note, the developer. It's a Japanese company, Imagineer published
now this is interesting. It's published in North America by THHQ,
Konami in the EU and Imagineer in Japan. Four directors
on this one. Four of them Ittinoru haanma Atsushi Osuga,

(09:42):
Yasushi kamagay and I Forgot punctuation and Tomokazu Hattori produced
by Osuga and Koichiro Sakarai, writing by Tomokosuzuki and composition
by Masamichi Amano. Got some more s to say about
the ost here in a little bit. The Japanese title

(10:04):
for this is much better and it's l Tail Monsters.
And my understanding too when reading up on how this
game came to be is that the original title was
Holy Magic Century, which I mean both of those are
just such better titles than QUS sixty four. I don't
have any nostalgia for this system. I never had one
growing up, So the naming convention of putting sixty four

(10:26):
after everything, it doesn't have a positive response for me.
You know, I feel those titles are they're cute, but
they're always kind of clunky to me. I don't know
that's I was gonna say that's a personal failing, but
that's not exactly how nostalgia works. But what about you?
I mean, sure, do you agree? Right? You agree that
l Tail Monsters and Holy Magic Century is a little

(10:48):
better title.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
I yeah, I mean it's not as funny, so like
slapping sixty four on a picture makes a pretty good meme.
But you are correct. I prefer both the other titles
because you're obviously Europe still got Holy Magic Century that's
the way Konami published it, and the original title was
Holy Magic Century el Tail, so they were going for

(11:11):
all the words.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Then I think it's also funny too, like you know,
super Mario sixty four that's the character's name. You know,
that's what it is. Quest is just kind of a
generic word, no, no kind what kind of quest? Well,
we don't know A sixty four bit one. That's about
all we can say. El Taal plays into the lore
of the game with the L Tail book. That's sort

(11:32):
of the mcguffin of this game. We'll talk about the
story once we get there, and again for listeners that
are new, we won't spoil the story before we start
talking about the story. We're going to get through some
preliminary discussion. First, there's not much to spoil, at least
in the released North American version of this game, but
in time we shall come to it. This game, from

(11:55):
what I understand, changed a lot over its lifetime, and
you can track the timeline and the evolution of this
by going back through contemporary magazine articles and reviews, event presentations,
things like that. It was a very different game at
different times in its evolution. At one point there were
three different characters. There was Brian, a protagonist who you

(12:17):
could name at one point, There's a character named Nina
who I think was like a white mate archetype.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
She also had a sword.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Oh, she had a sword. Okay, paladin maybe we could say, sure,
And a pirate, a pirate named Cozy. There was also
a fifth element. This game deals with four elements in
Brian's toolkit. There was originally a fifth one that I
think was what was it Ether?

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah? Ether, And then it was changed to Crystal because
the original working title was Crystal Stories, and then it
kind of had a It didn't have the original or
the Mammon that we had. It was a different Baddie
named Larva, and they were like Black Spirit hand Handlers
were the baddies, So you kind of had a like

(13:03):
that yin and yang between the light Ether and Crystal
and the Black Spirits. But you know, things change.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
They do, and that was the thing that I kept
coming back to whenever I was playing this game. I mean,
I didn't start researching this until a little bit in,
like I want to say, six hours in or so.
That's when I started actually researching into it. And what
I kept thinking back to was just this idea of changes.
You know, Bowie sang about it. This game changed so

(13:32):
much in its lifetime and before it got to got
to the market, and when you factor into that different
three different publishers for three different regions. Changes were a
huge part of this game's DNA like all throughout, and
I do I did find myself wondering if this propensity

(13:53):
toward change, this ever evolving nature of it did lead
ultimately to what we got what we ultimately got. And
this is just my takeaway. I'd be curious to hear
your thoughts on this mic. We didn't talk about this
off off mic this game. I feel like you can
feel the scrapped plans all throughout this It feels like

(14:17):
things are missing. It feels like you can feel the
ghost of things that should be there, right the specter
of the horses you could ride, of the planned environments
that had to be scaled down to the bulk of
what this game is, hallways and platforms. You can feel

(14:38):
a lot of what should have been there, what was
planned to be there, what maybe was there at one
point in time but got pulled away. And that's ultimately
that was my biggest takeaway from this game is that
you know, much like the Star Wars prequels, what could
have been is kind of casting a shadow over this
whole thing.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, I'm obviously, and once play the game, or if
listeners decide to play, you'll see that in the last
third of the game, which isn't an uncommon thing that
happened in RPGs. I'm sure a lot of people have
played Zeno Gears and have seen the difference between the
start of the game and the end of the game.
The only place you can rush is the ending, and

(15:17):
Quest sixty four was way worse than the Zeno games were.
But I actually became like casual friends with the Prima
Guide author James Ratkos, and he said that the game
just in the phase where they were trying to write
the strategy guide went through at least twenty plus revisions,
and every time they had to start from scratch because

(15:39):
their previous saves would stop working. And by the end
he was just kind of much like the game. He
was just trying to get something cohesive on paper for
them to sell and make money. But he said it
was maddening, and that's his biggest takeaway from Quest sixty
four was how many different times he had to change
his writing and the logistics of the guide for the

(16:00):
changes of the game.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Here's one thing that I was thinking too, and listeners,
longtime listeners know that, like when it comes to gaming history,
that's not really my strong suit. But I had wondered this,
you know. Okarina of Time came out a few months
after this. This beat it to market by a little bit.
But my understanding was that this game was originally planned
to release earlier by about a year. Then it got

(16:24):
pushed back, and then it got pushed out to market.
Still feeling a little bit rushed in the hands, and
I do wonder if they put it, if they put
it out when they did, rather than holding on to
it a bit longer so they could beat Zelda, which
even at the time, you know, at the time, Okarina
wasn't the legendary game that it's become because it didn't
exist at the time. But Zelda was still a very

(16:45):
well known name. You still had a link to the past,
which was, you know, very successful and Zelda one and
two obviously, so folks knew Zelda. Excuse me, princess, do
you think is there any truth to that?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah, you're at Spaga. It's one hundred percent. What happened.
The game was supposed to come out the year before.
They figured out that they weren't close to done yet
pushed the game back, like a lot of happened, you know,
it happens with a lot of games. But they needed
to get to market before what was then Zelda sixty four,
because that's how you named games on the N sixty
four simply to sell units. They had to get there first,

(17:20):
So that's how you went from a delayed game to
a truncated development to get it out. They needed that time,
They needed those sales before Zelda, you know, dominated the
entire market, and they.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
Got out a little bit ahead of it. They got
out I think five months five months before Okarina released.
But even so, you know that kind of rushed release,
combined with different publishers in each in each region, I imagine
that those changes that it was going through throughout its
lifetime were kind of getting pushed up against the boundaries

(17:57):
of what it physically of what it feasibly can could
be because of all of these variables in that. You know,
I imagine that that wouldn't be extremely comfortable for the
team making this. And I should say too, there's not
like finding dev history on this isn't the easiest thing.
Like you can find a lot of contemporary reviews of this,

(18:19):
but you know, to my knowledge and I guess you know,
I should be asking you, Mike, there's not like developer
interviews where they go into like here's what it was
like making Quest sixty four. I don't know that those exist.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
No, there isn't a lot of it. There are some
that's out there, mostly in Japanese publications, and my friend
Scott and I, who are big into magazines and promotional stuff,
have found like some videos and that are now on
the Internet, but mostly it's just promotional stuff. It's showing
l tail in the Japanese regions, and you get to

(18:53):
see the older UIs, You get to see the playable
characters that were not Brian, that were part of the party,
but not a lot of Hey, this was us working
on it. That's why it was so exciting to talk
to James while he was writing the guide, because that
was my first real insight into how hectic and how
many changes the game went through during the late stages

(19:15):
of its development. Imagine you're being a Japanese company. It's
hard when they don't want to talk about a game
that they're not particularly proud of, because you know, if
they were, they would have stopped me from posting about
it by now, I suppose.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yeah, yeah, they would have been in your dms pretty
quickly with some legal ease. Yeah, that's that's difficult. You
run into that with any Japanese company, Like they just
don't talk to the American press like American companies do,
you know. I mean that's to be expected, but especially
you know, companies and teams that were working back in

(19:50):
the nineties when the Internet wasn't ubiquitous like it is now.
You know, an interview with Square today, that's you know,
nobody bats an eye at that, but this was before
the Internet took over our lives of much more peaceful time.
And you know, imagineer for as well as well as
they've done. And you know that they're not a no name.

(20:12):
It's not like their Nintendo. You know, it's a little
it's a little tricky. Speaking of the Japanese version though,
and changes this The Japanese version released about a year
after the North American version, and my understanding, I feel
so foolish writing this because I know the answer is yes,
I wrote the Japanese version was changed before it released.
It's a different product. Does Mike know about this? And

(20:35):
who am I talking to? I'm talking to Quest sixty
four official. Of course Mike knows about this. I'm a rube.
What do you know about the differences in the Japanese
versus the American versions?

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Mike, Yeah, there's some stuff. You're right, we know about it.
We the Quest sixty four official, which can't just be me,
you know, it has to be a big group of people.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
Oh okay, it's a collective.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Okay, yeah, yes, we yeah, you speak for the tree,
I do. I do. Yeah, there's aesthetic changes, There is
lots of changes, so esthetically, the octagon, the battle octagon
that you operate in, there's a circle instead. I always
thought that that was for because it works in a
three dimensional space to stop clipping. Apparently it was purely aesthetic.

(21:18):
I can't find anything that says it was anything other
than that. Also, the road signs that you encounter are legible,
which would have been great and helpful. When when you
level up, there was a like an aura about you,
is the best way to put it. So if you
leveled up like HP, you would get you know, while

(21:39):
you're in battle, you get like a red like glow
showing that you leveled up. So it was like a
visual indicator that Brian had leveled up. So that was cool.
There's a longer ending cutscene that I guess the slide
show is a better way to put it, but it
was much longer than the ending of the North American
version of Quest sixty four, with a lot of the

(22:00):
characters that had their time in the game cut down
during development, and what was happening after you defeat Mammon
and finished the game. So that was really cool. There's
a translated version of that floating around. Another really big
quality of life thing was you were able to put
a marker on the map like you know Oblivion or

(22:21):
one of those games where you it would then guide
you towards where you were going next.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Oh my gosh, how I wish we could have had that.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, so it would at least show you on the
map with direction you were going when you opened up
the map, which I'm sure a lot of people would
have appreciate it. And then just other like in game things,
the monsters dropped more items, and then there was also
critical hits which were not in the North American version,
so both you and the enemies could hit criticals like
a traditional RPG. And when Brian was hitting with the

(22:51):
club like a physical attack, you could if you timed
it correctly, you could get a double hit kind of
like I don't know, paper Mario, I guess the best
way to describe that, like a timed attack with your
physical attack. So yeah, a lot of stuff, a lot
of different things, obviously all things Imagineer wanted to put
in the game, but to meet up with THHQ and

(23:12):
when they wanted the game out in North America, it
just it didn't happen. So they had the extra year
to finish it. Before it came home to Japan.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
Oh, so it was a THHQ publisher decision.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
That's the idea is that each of the so Konami
had the rights in pal regions and THCHQ in America,
so it was up to them to name the game
and market it. That's why all the three D renders
in North America are the way they are. And it
was a much more like stylized anime looking marketing campaign

(23:43):
in Europe and Japan, you know, but America loved their
late nineties three D renders. I don't know what other
the games you would think about. I guess Mario and
then things like Rampage World Tour just the chunky polygons,
smooth marketing, and that's what they with Quest sixty four
as well. So yeah, it was up to TCHQ how

(24:03):
they wanted to handle it, and that's how we got Quests.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
I do, I mean, I do prefer the anime art style,
of course, but I think for games of this era,
especially games like this that sort of americanized polygon Super
Mario sixty four, Rampage Clay Fighter sixty three and a
third like, I like what that lends to it. It
feels very of the time, and you know, I'm I'm

(24:26):
speaking as an American that lived through that time. You
know this is everybody speaks and experiences through their own ideology, right,
and that's what's happening here. That's why I associate it
like that. But I do think there's something to it.
I think, you know, especially with what the game is,
that chunky, polygonal art style that's a little more high res.

(24:47):
I don't know, there's something special about it. I'm a fan.
I like it a lot. But you had mentioned a
lot of the overhauls to the mechanics that the Japanese
version got, and I think that's a nice segue into
talking about how this game plays. One of the first
things I was surprised at was well, I was surprised
at a few different things in terms of how the

(25:07):
game plays as a jarpg there are some things that
it does that are a little different. There are some
things that are novel, some things that are just straight
up missing. But you had mentioned the battle system, so
let's talk about that for a moment. This is turn
based technically, but when it's Brian's turn, Brian is the
playable character, the player character when it's your turn. You've

(25:30):
got free reiin you can just move around within this
octagonal gait circular gate in the Japanese version. I'm gonna
be honest, I thought it was octagonal just because of
the gates of the N sixty four controller.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
You know that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know shapes, man, Yeah. And you
get to run around like that, and depending on how
far away you are from the enemies, you can either
use your turn to cast magic physically strike your enemies,
or you can just end your turn, which frustratingly happens
a lot. One of the major frustrations I had with

(26:07):
this is whenever I was positioning myself in this game,
in the overworld map or in battle, Brian has a
dash ending animation, you know, whenever he's like stopping from
his run. He doesn't stop on the spot like Super
Mario Land one. He doesn't just freeze. He kind of
does a little halt. And that little dash ending animation

(26:29):
put me out of positions so many times to where
instead of ice pressing a to whack the enemy with
my staff, I would end my turn and do nothing.
And man, did that frustrate me a lot. But that's
your options in battle. You can oh and you can
use an item too, of course, you can use items,
you can use magic, you can bonk them, or you

(26:51):
can you know, do nothing, just try to run away,
run outside of the bounds to escape. And I've got
to be honest, you know that, combined with the turn
based nature, sure, I thought it was quite nice. You know,
there's a lot of potential in this little battle form.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah, and for people who haven't played this game, maybe
they've played Parasite Eve a lot of the same battle mechanics,
with positioning within a confined area before you choose your attack.
They came out pretty close to each other. Parasite ev
is a little bit ahead. But then after that this
style kind of died off. There are games that still

(27:28):
kind of do it. But I you know, with how
novel it was and how much people liked Parasite Eve,
you would think that you would have seen more like
copycats or at least people that borrowed the idea and
worked towards something different. I always say Grandia too, which
I don't know if listeners have played at or if
you've played that rick, but that's one of my favorite

(27:49):
Dreamcast RPGs and that kind of has the same thing,
but it's a lot more dynamic than this is. There's
combining attacks and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Now, the Grandia series is a blind span in my
JRPG life. Currently, I'm filling my blind spot of Lunar.
But the thing is is that I started it before
the remasters came out. But now everybody thinks that I'm
just jumping on the bandwagon. They think I'm a poser
and it pisses me off. But no, I'm gonna get
around to Grandia sometime soon. What would you call that? That

(28:21):
real time aspect to battles like that, It seems to
have gone by the wayside now with more action oriented
turn based games like even I mean, Claire Obscure is
an example, but you know, there are so many, so
many that I can't even think of one otherwise. Yeah, Like,
I'm a little bit shocked that we didn't see more
of this too, especially grow. I mean the progression from

(28:44):
something like a chrono trigger where spacing in battle mattered
but you didn't have control over it, to this where
spacing mattered and you did have control over it. I
am a little surprised that we didn't see more. You know,
maybe spacing mattered and you have control of it and
the enemies can move too.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, it's very cool that people are jumping all over
Claire Obscure now because a lot of that is praising
turn based, which never really has gone away, or at
least I don't think turn based has ever gone away,
but it's nice to see games that take turn based
and do active battle things to them. So in Claire

(29:20):
Obscure there's Perry's and jumps and that's part of the defense,
and much the same for Quast sixty four. That's the
big draw is while the enemy is attacking, whether it
be a physical attack or a magical attack, as soon
as they launch their attack, you, as Brian in your
octagon or circle, can run and evade and dodge the

(29:44):
sprites of the magic or the enemy on the screen.
So there's an element of skill to evasion, which was
cool and I wish more games did it. Awesome that
there's still games today doing things like that to keep
you involved instead of just hitting a in extra time.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Of course you can play it that way. You can
play it just get into position and press A. There
are some fights and areas in the game where it
behooves you not to do that, but you don't. It's
not forcing you to engage with this stuff. It's there.
I mean, it's to be clear. It is the system
like if you choose not to engage with it, you

(30:48):
are choosing to play the game differently than it wants
you to. But you can beat it if you just
play this like chess, where you move into position, launch
an attack, you wait for them to do the same,
and then rinse and repeat. You can. You can. Speaking
of attacking, there are four elements. That fifth one crystal
slash Ether was cut. The four elements are what you

(31:09):
would expect what Avatar taught us, fire, Earth, wind, and Water.
The wisdom that I've seen is to choose Wind on
your first play through. That seems to be the strongest element,
at least that's how it came across to me. Water
is the one that heals you, gives you the healing magic,
and I cannot imagine doing this game without healing magic.

(31:31):
Surprisingly challenging is I think what I'm going to say here,
The leveling system is peculiar. Speaking of absences, things that
are as absent from this game. A traditional exp counter
is gone. That's all done behind the scenes. You will
level up after you beat enough enemies. When you level up,
you get a spirit point. You can also find these

(31:53):
on the world map, but spirit points will let you
put points into your magic elements, whichever one you want.
Your skill level up in a different way. They level
up closer to something like the Elder Scrolls or Final
Fantasy too. I didn't rate this in the notes, but
to level up your defense, for example, you have to
take hits to level up your I forget if it's

(32:14):
agility or evasion. You have to evade enemy attacks. They
don't just level up whenever you get a new spirit point.
I think the combination of the two is very interesting.
I don't remember though, when the game tells you that.
Maybe the instruction manual does, but I don't think the
game itself ever tells.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
You it actually does. Rick it's in the menu. It's
in the start menu, so if you press if you
pause the game, you get you know, your map and
that stuff. But if you flick over a couple screens
through the interface, there is a like there's a circle
kind of looks like a like an orb and that
fills up with your experience that's your overall that's your

(32:54):
combat experience that you get for defeating enemies that leads
to your overall level. But there is also sliders that
will show you your agility and your HP and your
defense and your MP and how close you are to
leveling those up to the next one as well.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Right, but does it? Does the game tell you that
leveling up your defense, for example, is done by taking hits?
Is what I'm curious about.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
No, the game in game it does not. But since
you have a SIB copy of the game, things like that,
and that you need to level the water Magic to
get the healing spell or in the manual, which when
people complain about the game and not knowing that they
need to level up water that I mean, it's a
symptom of the times we were game renters and now

(33:38):
we're game emulators or however you want to phrase that.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
Where we've circled back to renting where we buy digital
licenses and who knows when that rental period is up.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, so you missed out on a lot of the
information that would have come with anybody who rode home
from Blockbuster Video reading the manual in the backseat of
your your parents' Chevrolet on the way to your Nintendo
sixty four where you have digested all this information you know,
so yeah in game, No in the manual.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Sure, yes, yeah, And I don't think that's a fair criticism.
That's just something that you did at the time. It
was a piece of it was part of the price
of the game, and it was part of the experience
of playing it too. I have a lot of fond
memories reading those instruction manuals. I really miss it. You know.
There's something really soulless about opening up a brand new
game and seeing nothing on the insert, or the worst

(34:31):
of all, seeing a download code. Oh how I hate that?
Ah how I hate that. I miss having a little
chunky booklet, especially if that booklet had blank pages for notes,
which I knew I would never use, but I just
liked having them there.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
What's because the manual felt valuable though, Like, even as
a child, I didn't want to write, that's my manual,
that's my book even when I had games like Fallout
two on the PC and they gave you, you know,
a literal notebook area. What if I never got an
the copy of that manual to read in study hall?
I don't want to put my sloppy handwriting all over it.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
It's a travesty. We must move back toward the light.
I don't think it'll happen, though. We're not gonna get
manuals anytime soon. Again, speaking of JRPG things, shops and
money are notably absent from this game. You can't go
to a shop and buy a potion. You don't win
a fight and get money gil money with an m

(35:26):
U n n y Like Kingdom Heart, you don't get
any of that. This society that Brian lives in, some
might say it's a little better than what we have today.
It's free of capital, where if you are in need
of mint leaves, for example, that heal your MP, or
honey loaf, honeyloaf loaf bread, honeybread bread that heals your HP,

(35:47):
you simply talk to an innkeeper and they'll give you some,
not like to excess. If you've already got one, they
won't give you one. They give it as you need it.
A beautiful society, think about it, QUS sixty four ahead
of its time.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Don't we all want to move to Kellen where there's
plenty of empty houses and free bread and no money.
I certainly.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Do Do I have to ride on the pirate ship
with the pirates? Important question?

Speaker 2 (36:12):
No, there'll be other ways to get there.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
Okay, okay, then yes, yes I'll go play pirates. You
can't trust them.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
They're pretty friendly in this game, though, So you know.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
As far as visuals go, I don't really have a
lot to say about it. They look very good For
the N sixty four, like these look terrific. The the
drawbacks and the downsides are with visual design, level design,
things of that nature. But the visuals themselves, this looks
very good. It's very vibrant, It's got a terrific color palette.

(36:42):
It looks as good as anything else on the N
sixty four at the time. No complaints. I mean, this
is a it's a beautiful looking game. I played this
on an emulator. I was gonna play it on my CRT.
I just I don't know, I just didn't feel it.
So I played it on an emulator, threw up some shaders.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
It looks beautiful, I agree, and it's that was what
the original draw was. I The RPG I was playing
before this was Final Fantasy four or Final Fantasy two
over here, I guess, so it was crazy for me
to go from seeing Cecil walking around the countryside being

(37:19):
the same size as his airship or you know, the
towns and places he was going, and then having Brian
who had trees that were taller than him, and you know,
hills and mountains and buildings to enter. And as long
as you think of Quest sixty four like a classic
RPG and not like Ocarina with RPG elements in the game,

(37:41):
makes a lot more sense, I guess to me with
that extra abstraction that you you had to do it
yourself in the Super Nintendo and Genesis era, but when
we got the End sixty four they did it for
you by having stuff big stuff.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy. It feels both bigger than
and smaller, and a game like Chrono Trigger or Final
Fantasy four it feels bigger than it because of exactly
what you said that scale right, Castles are bigger than Brian,
Tree's tower over him. Even the monsters that you're running
into are way bigger than him. A lot of the
time you see these spawning brooks and rivers, but at

(38:19):
the same time you don't get to see that aerial
view of the whole continent, and to be honest, the
game Quest sixty four does feel quite empty, and I
think again, I think that has to do with the
bit of rushing to get it onto the scene. They
didn't have the time to fill it out maybe as
well as they would have liked, so in that way
it feels a little smaller. It's a very perplexing experience

(38:41):
where it feels both vast but also empty. It feels
small but also more lived in than the world map
of an SNSJRPG. It's of the time. I think we
could say.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, that's the abstraction part I was talking about. Like,
if you're playing the Super Nintendo RPG like Final Fantasy,
like we talked about, it's you know, twenty steps to
the next city. Well, when you blow that up into
a Nintendo sixty four three D environment, those twenty steps
become you know, three hundred steps and having nothing but

(39:18):
enemies between you and the next city, and then Super
Nintendo game isn't a big deal. That's what you're accustomed to.
But when a company like Imagineer is trying to develop
the first RPG for the Nintendo sixty four, we don't
have ideas for what comes between cities other than enemies,
and that's what Quest sixty four gives you is a

(39:38):
lot of enemies between cities without extra stuff. So it
was more, I guess, the system trying to figure itself
out in the three D space when the only reference
points were non three D RPGs. We had games like
Final Fantasy seven. But it's the same thing. When you're
in the overworld map, you're just cruising around. The only
time you're actually seeing is when you're in the you

(40:01):
know cities.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, yep, as as you alluded to, just a different
design philosophy. I'm glad that you mentioned the monsters between
the towns. This is something that I forgot to bring up.
In gameplay. This game does have random battles. It doesn't
have a battle transition screen like you would see in
Final Fantasy seven, for example. You just immediately get thrown

(40:23):
into a battle. The battle music starts immediately. You're still
on the overworld kind of. I mean, it's not like
Chrono Trigger exactly, but it's close.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah, it's pretty accurate. It's like, once again, it's as
close as they can get. Like you can't if you
were running right next to a tree, you're not going
to start the battle like in a tree, You're just
gonna be in an environment that looks very similar to
where you were standing, or a spot close to there.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Did you do you feel like the battle frequency is excessive?
I don't know that excessive is what is the word
that I would use, But there are are there are
a lot of random battles.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Huh, No, you're right, it's high. It's a high frequency
of random battles. But once again, like something like Dragon
Quest or one of the older games, and you're met
with opposition all the time. I think it's just more
jarring in a three D environment because, like you said,
you have to stop, make sure you're facing the right way,
figure out what you're fighting against, and then start the

(41:24):
battle instead of just pop and then a transition screen. So,
but it's still the number is high. It's especially if
you don't stay on the roads. If you happen to
run around the grass and stuff, the encounter rate is
even higher there.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Oh does it drop? What if you're on a on
a path?

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yeah, but still not significant, Like it's not gonna be
zero for running around just staying on the roads, You're
still gonna encounter things it's just less. There's hot spots
the further you get from the roads.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
I did notice the hot spots insofar as whenever you
get close to a house, a hut, a castle, a town,
that encounter rate drastically goes down, drastically go down. As
Scott Steiner would say, the numbers don't lie. It is
quite high. But the game is difficult, so it's kind

(42:13):
of to your benefit at least in I would say
the first two thirds of the game to be engaging
with these battles and taking them. There were times when
I would stop to grind, you know, I would throw
on a podcast and I would get into a battle.
I would take down all the enemies but one, and
then I would purposely let the last enemy get me

(42:33):
down to very little health so I could train my
defense stat Then I would then I would you know,
take care of the enemy, heal myself up, and then
rinse and repeat. You know. You throw a podcast on
or listen to the battle music if you'd like, and
that's a pretty pretty efficient way to level up, especially
early in the game. I think that's important. This game
is difficult, you know. I can't imagine doing this without

(42:57):
the water magic with the healing spells, I would be
turning through these healing items like crazy. It is not
an easy, breezy game. You will die, but fortunately game
overs don't really exist. If you get if your HP
gets depleted to zero, if they change that stat of
yours down to zero, if they nerve your HP down,

(43:20):
you just get transported back to the last in you
were at, and you don't lose experience, you don't lose
any of your stats, any of your items. You just
kind of get reset, which is a nice concession. I
don't really feel positively or negatively about it, if I'm
being honest, and also, you know, to be truthful, I

(43:42):
was using safe states so I didn't die, you know.
But it's kind of nice, especially with how frequently the
battles happen and how tough some of these enemies can be.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah. No, I've always appreciated it, especially as a younger,
a younger RPG player, it was nice to know that
when the when the line goes down, like is happening
in America right now, that I wasn't gonna be too
punished by line go down. At least I could pick
myself back up by my bootstraps. And get back out there.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah. Yeah, And I think that's the core message of
this game is it's introducing younger players to really pull
up their bootstraps, you know. And it's and it's not
that kind of game either. It's not trying to be
an extremely challenging JRPG for somebody that thought Final Fantasy
one and two and three were just too easy. It's

(44:32):
it's not trying to be that. You know. It's like,
like we said, this game is best played by a
child on summer vacation. You know. It's introducing you to
all of these concepts and then if you like it,
then sure move into one of a few directions to
another three D RPG like Zelda or another quote unquote

(44:53):
harder JRPG like Final Fantasy six. Well not six, I
guess that would have come out like Final Fantasy seven
or something. And if you view it through that lens,
that is to say, appropriately, I think it succeeds.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
I agree a lot of people like to call it
babies first RPG on the system, but it's not easy,
and it can be a gateway to RPGs. It does
put everything in front of you and allow you to succeed.
But it's not you know, it's not a simple game,
I guess is the best way to put it. It's
just an easier game.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
One thing about the game that surprised me a lot
was the music. I had not heard of this soundtrack before.
I had never listened to it. I had never listened
to Amano's music prior to this. This ost is really
quite nice. And I'll go one step further, this is
a really good ost.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
I agree, especially on a system that gets lambasted for
its sound. In music, I love Quest sixty four music.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
It's really emblematic of the N sixty four's esthetic. There's
something about it that just feels so perfectly sixty four
bit and so perfectly nineties through a CRT sound panel.
It really fits that quite nicely. And Masamichi Amano is
an accomplished composer. He's got a lot of symphonic works,

(46:46):
wind band works, he's got several cancherity. He's got apparently
an out of saxophone con charito that I could not find.
I did find his Concerto Grosso for saxophone quartet. It's
like one of those jazzical pieces that's like, you know,
concerto grosso for saxophone quartet and big band, and it's

(47:08):
just like it's I don't I've never been fond of
that niche genre of jazzical I don't like it. But anyway,
back to Quest sixty four, it's it's more mature than
you would think just by going off of Quest's reputation.
It's good.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, and the mono. So I'm I am less familiar
with concerto's and your expertise in music, but I am
familiar with other media that he's done. So he was
in He did Evangelian, the three point one or three
point zero plus one movie. He also did like twenty
episodes No Kidding, Yeah, that was him, yep, and like
twenty episodes of Berserk. He also did work in the

(47:48):
soundtrack of Only Musha three The Blee does PlayStation two maybe.
He also did the soundtrack for the anime adaptation of
Aratsu Kadagi, which is from nineteen eighty seven. It was
a manga and a TV show which is credited with
popularizing tentacle porn on television. He was he was the

(48:11):
innovator of music for that genre.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
I'm just thankful that we're here to teach children all
about the video game medium and occasionally pornography.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, I just wanted to be the first person to
say that on your show. And now that I've done that,
I can die a happy man.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
I'm gonna get a cease and desist from somebody. I
just don't know how.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
If I haven't, you all't I promise he's Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Amano is a really accomplished composer. I was listening to
his Euphonium Concerto before we got on the call. It's
it's really nice. He's got some other stuff that I'm
not as hot on, but he's very clearly accomplished at
what he does, and his works for non video games

(48:53):
significantly outweigh his works for video games. He's done a
couple of other major things, but Questio is the only
one I'm super familiar with. I know I said this
and I'm repeating myself. There's a maturity to the soundtrack
insofar as it's not like a kind of bubble gum
feeling collection of melodies and feel good music that you

(49:15):
might expect from quote unquote Babies First JRPG, And it
tries to tie into the theme of Irish heritage like this,
this game is based in Celtland. Brian is an Irish name.
Irish nationality is a part of this esthetic, and Amano
really honed into that when he was creating this soundtrack.

(49:38):
There are a lot of reels. There are a couple
of jigs, There are simulated bagpipes, those drones that you'd
hear and the maturity comes in with like there are
some harmonies in voice leadings that you just wouldn't expect
to come out of a video game OST. I'll talk
about them. I think I noted them whenever we get
into the story, so I'll talk about them maybe a

(50:00):
little bit later. But I was really shocked. This OST
is really really good. Do you have a favorite track
from this game.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
I'm a big fan of the Holy Planes, but that's
just based on repetition. It's been burned into my skull
for the last twenty five years. Boil Hole is pretty
good too, some of the Dondran stuff.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
We played the American version.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Holy Plans, Yeah, we do have a Holy Plan here.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
In Big Typo on the world map. Holy Plans. I
think it's hysterical, and I kind of think the Holy
Planes music is hysterical too. It's so funny you know,
it's extremely that's about as lighthearted as this game gets.
It's so it's funny, like I laughed every time I
heard it.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah, it's got a goober vibe to it, definitely. That
goes along with the like monster aesthetics and stuff like that.
It's one of those things where limitation breeded something cool
and quirky. I guess I don't want to compare this
to a game that, like, literally everybody loves, but this
is the same feeling that I get when I listen

(51:04):
to the music of Undertail. It's you knew that Toby
Fox like could have put any music in that game,
but instead he purposely limited it to a specific like
a type of music that a vibe is just a vibe,
you know, And so I like, I've I will always
love this music. I play it in the background. It's

(51:26):
Amano's opus for me.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
The similarities between Undertail and Quest sixty four that jump
out immediately to me are the choice of sound font,
you know, just confining oneself to a quote unquote primitive
sound font, which you know, I know it wasn't primitive
at the time. For Quest sixty four, Yeah, you know
what I mean. And an adherence to and focus on melody.

(51:50):
That's that's kind of you know, Quest sixty four. It's
you know, there are melodies abound. The coolest parts of
the soundtrack though, to me, are listening to the accompaniments,
which are super cool via the shop theme. The shop
slash in theme is my favorite in the game. And
it's not like this bombastic track. It's just very low key.
It's just one melodic flute over top of like a

(52:11):
pulsing string section. But you hear that voice leading that's
in the accompaniment, that nice chromatic voice leading that just
embellishes the whole thing up a notch or two, whereas
they could have just made like a little like a
little chirpy whatever kind of throwaway melody for the shop.

(52:32):
You know, it's really really nice. There's also modality. Weirdly enough,
like modality in music is when you just a super
basic explanation, you take a major scale and you play
it top to bottom, but instead you start on a
different note. So instead of C two see all white keys,
you play D to D all white keys, for example.

(52:54):
And there's some of that in here, where you would
expect it to stay within the key center, but he
chooses to go modal with it. That gives it this
extremely folk music kind of vibe that is like I
was grinning ear to ear whenever I heard it. I
think that one's in Larapon or Lara Poon. I don't,
I don't remember the town name.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Yeah, Larapool, but Laura Pool, Yeah, Laura Pool. Great music
there too. It's incredibly intimidated in talking music with you,
especially when we're talking about a soundtrack that's so like
limited and lighthearted, like we've been talking about. So you
drew all sorts of stuff out of this that I
have not thought about in decades.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Yeah, I'm just some nobody from southwestern Pennsylvania. I don't
know anything. But speaking of not knowing anything, that's a
total non sequitor. I wasn't even going to follow up
on that. Let's why don't we go ahead and get
into the story. If you're familiar with the show, you
know this is about the time where we take a
little brief music break, which we're going to do in

(53:59):
a moment before we do a beat by beat narrative analysis.
We are going to do that here. However, this will
be closer in form I think to the final fantasy
one episode because this story is extremely reduced and pared down,
whittled down, whittled down in the N sixty four version

(54:20):
that was shipped. It is kind of a faint whisper
of what it once was, I think in the dev's minds.
But we'll still talk about it. I've got notes from
tip to toe, the beginning to end, and we're going
to go through all of it and talk about the
gameplay experience and what we liked, what we didn't like.
And I think now I'm going to stop talking so
I can give Mike a chance to talk. You're ready

(54:40):
to talk.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Story always expansive, the story is, and I'm ready to
hit every single beat of it perfect.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Let's take a step out of the monastery and into
the cult land Holy Plans and talk all about Quest
sixty four. So you boot up this game, you are

(55:31):
immediately thrown into a conversation with the Grand Abbot. He's
a man in white with a big, long nose and
huge bushy eyebrows that conceal his eyes. These are the
kind of eyebrows I wish I had, And this is
where you get story. This conversation, this is your reason
for questing. It's also one of the only narrative deliveries

(55:51):
in the game. And here's what Grand Abbot says to you, Brian.
Even though I've begged you not to leave, you still
say you must go after your father. No matter how
wonderful your powers may be, you are still a child.
Your father, Lord Botholomy, left to search for the stolen
el Tale Book and has been missing for a month.
No wonder you are worried about him. Contained in the

(56:14):
words of the book is a power that exceeds human knowledge.
I wonder who could have possibly stolen it from the
crypt of the monastery. If an evil person should use it,
the country and all its cities will be destroyed. The
spirit's blessings will disappear, and cut Land will once again
be visited by a quote day of grief. Ortholemy's disappearance

(56:34):
may mean he has caught in fighting over the book.
If you go, you may find yourself in danger as well.
If you still insist, you can begin begin by going
to Donduron. I'll ask the King of Donduron Castle to
protect you. And that's kind of seventy five percent of
this game's story.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
That's a pretty accurate number. There's a lot of NPCs
will meet along the way that give you flavor text
and sort of point you into the next town or
where you're supposed to be going. But yeah, you're you're
looking for the book, You're looking for your dad. You
don't know why, but you're doing it because that's what
kids do.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
They give you flavor text. But it's the it's the
kind of world building that that doesn't advance the like
Ulti mania plot of the world, but more like what
the townsfolk are up to. You know, they're not gonna
be talking about the history of the Day of Grief
or anything like that, but they do give you a
sense of like what's going on in the in these towns.

(57:32):
You know why the why the wind has stopped and like, ah,
we can't work because the wind has stopped, you know
what I mean. Yeah, So, now that the Abbot has
given us our reason for questing, we can explore the
monastery now Mail Road Monastery shockingly empty. It's a lot
of empty rooms in here.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Shockingly realistic, is the way I put it. Like you
if you were in a huge building, would you expect
every room to have people in it, like laying in
bed or groups of people in every single room. No,
there'd be people out in the common areas, and then
there'd be lots of rooms with nobody in them, because
that's not where you hang out during the day, especially
when there's evil afoot.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
You speak with experience. I take it you spend a
lot of time in monasteries.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's one of my passions, is visiting
monasteries during the time period that they were active.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
A lot of a lot of Irish Catholic monasteries. You know,
Mike is a very Irish name.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Is it? See? I didn't know that either. Perfect I
was built for this guy.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
Apparently I'm not Irish at all. The music is extremely
pleasant here. I put it in the notes, but we
just kind of talked about it, and I put in
the notes that the world map music cracks me up.
Oh did I write this or did you write this?
It's goober music? Was that you?

Speaker 2 (58:49):
No, you wrote it, but I had to make sure
to say it while we were talking about music, because
it just killed me. I do we I did a
whole direction of goobers on the internet with Nintendo six
four characters, and I love that you included That's one
of my favorite words. To describe things in video games,
little dudes in goobers.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Uh you say realistic, I say empty. The reality of
it is that many of these rooms are uninhabited. They
look very similar, and there are a lot of them,
like there really are. There's a horse outside that you
can talk to, Like any red blooded American man, I'm
going to talk to a horse. I think this was
supposed to be this game's version of the Pawna. That

(59:28):
is to say, the horse, not the sorceress. Surely I'm
not wrong about that, right, Mike.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
No, you're right. There was talk of riding horses in
earlier versions to Traverse, but we didn't get there. We
didn't quite get the Akarina Hippona. But you know we
did get a ponent before Akarina. So there, I mean,
another check in the QUES sixty four box.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
Right, So our destination is Don Douran Castle, Don Doren,
Don Doron Dan de Dan don Doran Castle, like the
Grand Abbot said to talk to the king. It looks
like I may have made a mistake. We cross the
Holy Pains, as I've written here, is it holy pains
or Holy plans? In the American version?

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Well, the map says planned, but I mean it's plain obviously.
But yeah, sometimes you can't be bothered to fix things.
When you got to beat Okarana to the shelves.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
Well, hey, some of this battle frequency. That's a holy pain.
Thank you, thank you? Is it hot in here? Is
it just me?

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
So?

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
As we said, there's no currency. If you need a
healing item like bread or like mint leaves, you can
do You can go to these inns. You can also
get wings at these inns to buffalo flavored, and each
one will take you back to the town from which
you purchase, not purchased from which you've received them. So
if you get the red Wings the team from I

(01:00:51):
don't know, don Doran, if you use those at any
time when you're not in a forest, you'll get transported
back there immediately. Once you use them, they're gone. But
you can always get another because this game is a
society without capital, it's a dream, so you can always
get one. Once you've run out, you can't have more
than one, but once you need it, you can go

(01:01:11):
and get it. This saved my butt a lot of times.
You know, I don't like to rely on save states.
I like to save in the game too, so I
used these wings a lot. I kind of think this
is a this is a really nice system.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
Yeah, it didn't have the fast traveling, which I don't
know how frequent that was in N sixty four games.
I don't know that it happened a lot. Well, No,
even things like Final Fantasy seven, they came out before
you had to physically traveled. There wasn't fast traveling.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
And let's put ourselves in the fiction. Brian is only
master apprentice. He's not an apprentice master yet. He hasn't
achieved that rank yet. You really think he's going to
be fast traveling with magic?

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
Yeah? Weird?

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Thank you, thank you. This is a comedy podcast. We
get to meet Shannon, a woman named Shannon at the
Inn for the first time. Here do you want to
introduce Shannon?

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Sure, you don't know a lot about her at the
beginning of the game. It just you're drawn to Shannon.
You Shannon Stork is a very polarizing figure, and obviously
you're going to find her and foreshadowing you're going to
find her a lot. But yeah, you talk to her,
she gives you some destination as to where you're going

(01:02:27):
next and what you're doing. But it's not direct. She
just alludes to watching you and your journey a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
See you say that, you say that obviously you're going
to find her. I have heard from many folks anecdotally
that they went through the whole game without talking to
her once or maybe talking to her like at this
first in and then never again, did you do?

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
They not save the game very often. She's in a
lot of talents.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Well I guess no, I and dude, I'm with you,
like I talked to I exhaust every NPC conversation station
I can because that's what I like. I love world
building in games. That's why I like the Xeno series
so much. That series is full of it. But I mean, like,
you're not required to talk to Shannon or to advance
the plot until you are at the end game, so

(01:03:15):
you could go through theoretically you can, and you know anecdotally.
I was just listening to a podcast today where one
of the hosts said, yeah, I didn't talk to her
at all, And it's like, if you do that, you
are missing out on the little story this game has
to offer. Because Shannon will drip feed that to you.
She drift feeds you hints on where to go and
also on what's going on in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
Yeah, I would more attribute that to people who had
mentally checked out. I am, I am. I'm not like
so detached from reality that I think that people play
this game and don't love it as much as I do,
and when they get, you know, a third or halfway through,
they're like, all right, I'm just be lining it to
the end of the game now, so I you know,
then you skip NPC interactions. You're just trying to get

(01:03:55):
to the next the next mcguffin, like you said, the
next thing, So yeah, missing I heard. Yeah, there's no
gates for talking to her until there's a gate for
talking to her.

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
I do wish they would have just required that, you know,
even if it's as simple as you enter a new town.
And I mean this game doesn't really have cut scenes,
not really, but even if it were as simple as
you enter and you're forced into a conversation, I would
have appreciated that more. I don't like the idea that
folks just play this without knowing the story. You know
that bothers me. I don't like that. But you talk

(01:04:27):
to her here, she'll tell you that there's a robber
blocking the road to lock Kildery, which is I love
that name so much, and everybody's stuck there. They can't
work until that path is cleared. You can talk to
folks and they'll lament not being able to work. Everybody
wants to work all the time, but they can't. The
king here, Scott Furt another a plus name. He's aware

(01:04:50):
that you're searching for your pops, is what I wrote.
I don't know why I behave this way sometimes, but
he insists that you help him take down the thief.
It's like, hey, this thief stole the earth orb from
my person, no treasury. I want you to help me
and then I'll help you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
Yeah, so you're off and into the fray. It's great
to be in the first town because, like you said,
if you die, you return with very little pomp and
circumstance other than waking up and shaking out your ho
gay hair. So yeah, it's a good a good beginning spot.
You'll end up back here a lot, because I guarantee

(01:05:25):
you're gonna if you're not using save states, you're gonna
die a lot on your way to the uh. The
thief in the forest.

Speaker 1 (01:05:33):
I didn't think i'd meet anybody else that would know
what a hogay hair is. But here we are and
Brian does have it straight up literally straight up. Yeah,
that's a ho gay hair.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
This thief's name is Solver Ring. He's deep within this
uh forest Connor Fortress. He looks super rough and tough.
He's wearing like an entire panther skin as like a
decoration on his body. And this is where the name
of the game for like every fight for me comes
into play. Wind Cutter, which I warnt winter Cutter. I

(01:06:07):
need to proof read wind Cutter and large Cutter. Those
are two winds based skills that I pretty much used
exclusively throughout the whole game. And that's on me. Like,
I'm not knocking the battle system saying that it's boring
or anything. I'm saying that I chose to do wind
only and water occasionally. But you know, I didn't really

(01:06:27):
experiment with fire or Earth. You know, Earth gives you
a lot of defensive magic. Fire fire I've seen everywhere.
Folks say that it's kind of the worst one, the
most risky one, we can maybe say, but I largely
just stuck to wind on my playthrough.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
It's mostly important that you just focus on one element offensively,
like water, you get to your healing, you can go
all the way with water, but they like range on
water spells is limited. Wind is fun. I like wind.
Like you said, fire is risky. A lot of the
later baddies that we're going to run into have some

(01:07:04):
fire resistance. So that's why a lot of people say
that it can't carry you to the end of the game.
And Earth is awesome. Besides having the defensive spells, it
also has some some rock throwing abilities which I like
to meme about. And it has the most powerful offensive
spell much later on in the game.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Oh, speaking of spells, here's something that I wanted to
ask you. Is this a Rick problem? Like did I
not level enough? Or is this a universal experience? I
felt like I missed my attacks like six, like forty
percent of the time my attacks were missing. Is that
just how this game goes?

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
It is because you're, like you said, you're an apprentice magician, Rick,
You're not.

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
A magician, of course. Yes, I'm a master apprentice, not
an apprentice master. Of course I haven't earned that assistant
to the Regional manager of title yet.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
Not yet. So yeah, Dan Brian, this is a lot
of attacks. He's just learning. He's just a little guy
doing some stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Yeah, it was annoying for a while with with magic
like wind Cutter, for example, where it's a multi hit attack,
it's kind of less committal because you know you've got
multiple chances to hit, whereas some of the more strong
some of the stronger magic that you have to get
up close and personal to use. It's one big hit

(01:08:19):
and if you miss, well that's that's a turn that
you wasted, and you've wasted some MP, which isn't great.
I've also got a note here that this is where
the camera became my sworn enemy in this game. Understood
the navigation in this game. The navigation, you have a map,
the Holy Plans Map, and it'll tell you where you're going.

(01:08:40):
Like it's not a mini map like you know in
whatever modern game. It's just you have to press the
button to pull up the map. You see where you are. Okay, great,
But once you enter a town, a forest, or a
dungeon or a cave, you no longer have access to it.
It'll just show you as being in that cave on
the world map. So you have to rely just on
your compass. And because these visual The visual design of

(01:09:03):
these dungeons are so wallpapered. Similarly, they all have a
very similar look. Everything starts to feel saney. You can
get turned around extremely easily, and in forest areas like
this and one of the upcoming ones that pissed me
off to no end. Now, thankfully, if you beat a battle,

(01:09:25):
like if you win, the game will automatically put you
facing back the direction you were going, no matter what.
If you run away from a battle, it does not
do that. It'll just keep you whichever direction you're facing
as you try to run away. That's a little like tip.
If you're in an area in a dungeon that's like
tricky to navigate, do your best not to run away.

(01:09:46):
Otherwise you might get turned around and there's no map
and the battle frequency is high, and you'll get frustrated
and angry and you'll say, why am I doing this?
Clare obscure just came out? What's my problem?

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
Valid? It's it's all valid. No, you're not wrong, dude.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
I'm teasing, but I'm not. Like. The navigation system in
this game pisses me off a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
Yeah, I'm glad that you had the little tidbits of
post battle clarity and the direction that you're going. Another
popular thing to do is the hand on the wall method.
So if you're in the forest, pick a wall, put
your hand on it, and then make sure Brian keeps
the hand on the wall, because then you know you're

(01:10:29):
going that direction. So you know, put your left hand
on the left wall of the forest and then you'll
always be traveling the same direction with your left hand
on the wall.

Speaker 1 (01:10:38):
Oh nice. I tried that once at a haunted house
when I was a kid and I got spooked by someone.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
Those jump scares happened in this game too. You might
run up against the big plant that looks like it's
from Honey I Shrunk the Kids or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
Or a wyvern. Yeah yeah, those those beasties are tough.
You take down the thief, you know, you're an apprentice magician,
you're no slouch, and the king lets you keep the
earth orb for your troubles. Everybody throughout this game is
going to do the cliche JRPG thing. They're alluding to
the fact, well cliche fantasy thing that you're a special

(01:11:13):
boy of Destiny. They're kind of alluding to that that
you could make use of this treasure somehow. So you
progress through the Dondurin Flats. You eventually come across another hotel,
Shannon an Inn. Shannon will be there as always, and
she tells you that Larpool is across the lake and
there's a ship conveniently parked outside that looks like a
pirate ship. Pirates did play into this. Into the original

(01:11:36):
inception of this game, the captain Moraigue is wearing a
wizard's hat for some reason. I don't think wizards and
pirates mix, you know. I look, this is a controversial podcast.
We're not afraid to go there, right, Yeah, we're not
your average we're not your dad's podcasting. We're not afraid
to go there. Okay, and hey, let me just say
you can curse on this program. That's fine. And hey,

(01:11:59):
by the way, we're gonna get there. Okay. Wizard and
pirates don't mix. That seems improper and unholy. I don't
appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
I believe you made a note about how this is
an extremely powerful combination though, or did I make that
all up in my head?

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
Yeah? You know, I'm masking my fear here is what's
going on. But this is something that I didn't know
would bug me until I heard another podcast talk about
it on another game, Like it wasn't on this game.
But the way that you travel in this game is
by going into a ship and you exit the ship

(01:12:34):
and you're suddenly in a different location. You don't get
any of that fiction of traveling. You don't get the
fiction of going into a bed to sleep. You just
get a kind of black screen and then it comes
back did you have a nice sleep? Or you go
into the ship cabin and then you exit and boom,
you're in another location. That really robs you of the fiction.
And it's one of those things where now that I
noticed it, I can't not notice it in every other game,

(01:12:58):
you know what I mean. It's it's just another like
it's it's I mean what I said earlier, it's one
of the areas of the aspects of the game that
what could have been right, you know, Star Wars prequel Syndrome.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Nautical travel is just not one of the sixty four
quests that you embark on.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
Rick, Oh, that was DLC. That was the sixty fifth
forbidden quest. And hey, we're a controversial podcast. Wait till
you see the sixty ninth one Whoamrag implies that your father,

(01:13:45):
I mean my dad. I made that joke like five
times in here because we're both retrograde and the Asia
fans shout out to our.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Bodies over there. That's why we're doing it bit by bit, beat.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
Beat, yeah, bit by bit. I thought about doing like
like any time I shout them out, I think about
doing a fake net impression, but that feels like I'm stealing,
and also now the fake net is dead. Rip.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
Yeah. I was also gonna shout them out when you
said you were playing Lunar, because we know it's not
because of the most recent release. It's because that's just
what we do all over at retrograde Amnesias play Lunar forever.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
Yeah, unironically, it actually was. It was them that kind
of gave me the kick in the rear to start it,
and I unironically love it. I love Lunar. But anyways,
Morague implies that your father, I mean my dad was
his last passenger, and you know this is where we
go through the sailing. I also wrote a paragraph about
pirate wizards having strong moral constitutions, but we're already out

(01:14:41):
of control, so I'm going to ignore my SHINERI guess,
And this is where we get to Laura Pool. The
music here, this is the bagpipe music that I was
talking about, the bagpipe drones with a melody over it,
like kind of like a real kind of it's not
a jig. It's kind of like a reel where it
gets into some like crazy modality where you have like
sharp fours that shouldn't be there. The music is so cool.

(01:15:02):
This isn't a town though, so much as it is
like a gazebo slash, like a fountain area with one
in and a singular wing store, you know, like wingstop. Well, no,
not wingstop. I am fairly certain Cultland does not have wingstop.
But that's kind of all that's here.

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):
Well, the funny thing about carrying the fandom for Quast
sixty four is we can make anything we want cannon
because Imagineer just refuses us to stop me. So if
you want to change it to wingstop right here, we
can change the lore on this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
I appreciate how you put the responsibility on Imagineer to
rein you in. It's not their problem. You are their problem.
It's not your fault.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
Yeah, I'm just not given it in direction so this
is the direction we're taking.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
Shannon is here. She'll tell you that the wind and
water have both stopped here due to a quote evil force.
Whether it's here or in nor Moon, the wind city,
our fortune awaits. You meet Layla at the inn. Now
is Leila Hella? Is Leayla the reworked version of your
potential second party member that was going to be in

(01:16:07):
the game, or is that somebody else?

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
That is somebody else but you do not see her
frequently in the game. Is the best way to play it?
Her name is Flora.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
Flora, that's it. Layla is this town sorceress. Her character
model makes her look like a main character. That's why
I asked. She says that the wind has stopped here
and that demons are now roaming free around dor Moon.
She's using all of her power to fight them off.
She also lets us know that here that if any
of the four elemental forces overpower the rest were doomed,

(01:16:39):
you know, it's this delicate balance. If that gets thrown off,
everything goes topsy turvy.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
This is another one of those spots where likely there
was a lot more flavor text from Laila and probably
was just cut due to constraints of the game, or
maybe there was a side quest to add to their
sixty four quests somewhere in here where you had to
retrieve something to bring back to her. But yeah, it
just ends up being a weird short conversation and then

(01:17:07):
you're off again.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
Well that's another thing that's absent from this game. Side quests. Yeah,
if it sounds like we're just kind of going and
then you go here and then you go here, that's
kind of because that's what you do for a lot
of this, Like we're skipping over the traversal and the fighting.
But now you arrive at nor Moon after you do
traversal in fighting, Shannon is here, of course. She points
you toward the Windward forest, where the wind Sorcerer was

(01:17:30):
last seen. This is where I made a note about
the navigation. This wind this forest dungeon really really got
the better of me, really got me frustrated.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Understood. I guess you could have used that Japanese world
map and the pinpoint marker.

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
Yeah, yeah, or I honestly I probably could have just
slowed down a little bit and just taken my time
a bit more. Once you get through here, though, Zelsa
is in these woods. Zelsa is the first boss fight
that was a little tough for me. Zelsa uses winds
as their element, and since I was playing wind, it

(01:18:08):
had reduced damage. So and also Zelsa has your wind
cutter attack as well as a stronger one called wind Horizon.
A bit of a tough fight. I struggled the smallest
amount here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
Do have you played any of the Monster Ancher series?

Speaker 1 (01:18:26):
No, you know, actually I haven't.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
So it's kind of like Pokemon, but it's famously known
for you putting your your random CDs into your PlayStation
and it generates a monster based on the data. Anyway,
the spacing, because we're in the three D environment, and
this is the first time where you might learn that
because you were obviously fighting from a distance, some bosses

(01:18:49):
are much easier to beat up close, like in the
close third to them. And then they all have like
a middle range attack that they would use in the
middle third of their range, and then they all have
an attack that they use in their outer third. So
that was an important part of Monster Rancher was when
you were fighting Pokemon style, there was also like spacing

(01:19:12):
like a tactics game almost, but this is quast sixty four,
so it's in real time where you have to move
yourself to be that distance away. So yeah, if you're
using the same elements as a person and in their
ideal range for hitting you with their most powerful attacks,
this is one of those spots where you could get
walled really early in the game.

Speaker 1 (01:19:34):
Mm hmm. It's definitely tough. Yeah, Spacing is an aspect
to battle that it behooves you to pay attention to,
especially because you can regenerate your MP if you're in
a pinch just by either waiting or bonking them with
your staff right up close. And if you speaking of
bonking with staffs, if you bonk Zelsa with your staff enough,
you win the fight. You get the windjam back. And

(01:19:56):
of course you're going to keep this one because you're
the special boy. Now, Laila will tell you to go
to this sorceress named a Pauna. There is somebody named
a Pawna in this game. I've got to wonder if
that's a coincidence. But to get to her, we have
to go through Blue Cave, which is a hell of
a dungeon. It is my second least favorite dungeon in

(01:20:19):
the game. It's just a lot of long, twisting hallways,
and again, like, I don't want to continually dock points
for the same thing from this game. We're not docking points.
It's not how art works. But you know what I
mean by that, by that phrase, I don't want to
keep harping on this, but this is the first time
I noticed, like this is a lot of hallways and
a lot of just saniness. At least though Blue Cave

(01:20:40):
is pretty, it is a very pleasant, beautiful shade of blue.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
I'm just glad you called it Blue Cave and not
the Ice Cave. Another great part of Coutland is that
there is no snow level, and as a mailman, that
is my absolute gaming and real world nemesis is snow
when I'm traversing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:58):
I just want to go on record and say this
podcast does not endorse that view.

Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
I like snow levels, I just don't like traversing them, Rick,
because I don't like putting my feet in snow.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
Yeah. I know, it's it's rough and coarse and it
gets everywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
You almost made it one whole episode with all the
Star Wars reference. You didn't even do, Leila.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
I understand why you think that you tune me out
whenever I mentioned it a few times before, as you
should have. I don't endure. I don't recommend anybody listened
to me more more than a couple of minutes at
a time. No good comes of it. You get to
upon her house is outside of the cave. She is
kind of the old hag archetype, you know, hunched back,
huge nose, lung, blue hair. She tells you a lot

(01:21:40):
of what we already know. That we're a special boy.
The L Tail Book has been stolen. She also mentions
a war from one thousand years ago over the book's possession.
She says this, but no one knew the truth behind
the book's power. No one must ever open the book.
If its power is released, it will be the ned
of all we know. I'm assuming that means end and
I just wrote that is why the l Tail Book

(01:22:02):
must be rescued and returned to safekeeping. This is interesting, Laura.
It's not followed up on until like a crucial point
in the story though. I really that's like the number
one thing that I am noticing. That's the number one
thing with this game that feels like it could have been,
is that the law is so cool, and that's what
makes me excited to play the game Boy version. You

(01:22:24):
had mentioned that it's much more fleshed out there.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. She's got a fancy
teleporting pad to get to our next area, Isle of
Sky in lack Kildary, there are a couple of teleporting
pads we go to. We just walk into them and
they teleport us. It's functionally the same as the pirate ship.
We talked to Colleen there. What's her deal? Is she
the sorceress of this town? I wrote water Spirit, but

(01:22:49):
that's not right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
You're spot on. She is the sorceress. And that's also
where you meet Killiak, who is one of the three
characters that would have been in your party if not
for the cuts in the party system.

Speaker 1 (01:23:03):
Oh that's the who used to be Cozy.

Speaker 2 (01:23:06):
Yep, it's the same character model, or at least an
approximation of the same character model.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
Yeah, he's He's right up with Colleen in her humble abode.
She is kind of perturbed that he won't leave her alone,
and he's just kind of in there, chilling. She seems
more preoccupied with getting rid of her rid of him
than helping you pirates, I mean, and that's you know,
pirates are known to get weak knees over sorceresses who

(01:23:32):
can blame them. The Water Gem has been stolen, of course,
so that's our cue. We've got to go get it back.
It's been stolen by Nepti, who has been hiding out
in the Crystal Valley. Crystal Valley is that the right name?

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Yeah, spot on again, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
This is basically like an underwater dungeon of sorts. She's
stolen this gem, the water Gem, the Water Jewel, to
try to take over the humans. You know, it's that
kind of villain motivation. This fight. I don't really have
much to say about most of the fights. This one
also became cast wind cutter three and large cutter hell

(01:24:10):
when necessary, and that's kind of it. Nepty.

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
Not super challenging, no, but this might be the first
elongated fight. I guess if you haven't been leveling up
like Rick has. She's pretty bulky. I think she's got
nine hundred or one thousand HP, which when you're doing
you know, twenties and thirties, if you haven't focused on
one single element, or if you are focusing on water,

(01:24:34):
because it's got the cool healing spells. This can be
a tough one, or at the very least, it can
make you waste an entire afternoon and beating her.

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
That's true, that's true. You do though, You do beat
her and you take the water gem. Colleen will give
it to you. That's kind of the pattern here. You
get the gem back and it's given to you as
a gift. She tells us to get the pirate out
of her sight. We do not do that, but she
he does have a teleportation room, so we use it,

(01:25:03):
and we're going back to Upona's house. And if you
talk to her, she'll say the following to you. She says,
I see you've obtained the water Jewel. The truth is
that gem is not all that it seems. Shut inside
of it is the power of the l Taale book.
That means if you are not worthy, overwhelming forces will
be released. But if you use your strength correctly, you
can triumph over all. It is now up to you,

(01:25:26):
Master Brian, you were the spirits chosen one from the
time you picked up the crystal. I would not have
wished such a thing upon one so young. Now you
can return to town from the stone Circle. The town
being larpool again, We're getting whiffs of a cool story here,
but it doesn't really play out outside of dialogue boxes.

(01:25:46):
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
You're right, much like you said about another podcast you
listen to. If you do not go looking for story
and you're just belining through battle after battle, it ends
up being a lot like the in between parts of Pokemon,
where you're you think that the whole game is about
leveling up your Pokemon, but it's there's really a story
behind it, and a lot of kids don't seem to

(01:26:08):
remember that. But yeah, same with Quest. You have to
go looking for what little low is here. Otherwise you're
just fighting dudes, little fucked up dudes between.

Speaker 1 (01:26:19):
Towns, right, and with respect to you, Mike, like, I
don't want to misrepresent myself here. Even if you do
find all the lore from the NPCs, it's not a
complete story. With respect to you, like, the narrative of
this game was sheared away too, next to nothing, and
I think that's a detriment to the experience. Again, it

(01:26:41):
could have been something much cooler. But you are right, like,
if you don't talk to anybody, you are going to
have a markedly worse time. It is not to your
benefit to just be line this game, you know, just
like Pokemon, which, by the way, the story of Pokemon,
the actual story is collecting all one hundred and fifty
one Pokemon. That's what you're supposed to do. Nobody ever does,

(01:27:01):
though you gotta fight. Yeah, cut string, fire blast.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
I think you're doing a good job of miss of
representing the story correctly, though. I don't think you're misrepresenting it,
and I think that maybe I am over selling it
a little bit just because I'm so familiar with it.
But you're hitting. Because we're hitting all the big things
on it, it seems like there's a much more present
story here. But like you said, the average game player,
if you're not hunting for every little bit in every town,

(01:27:28):
you're going to get zero story. And there's a pretty
big gap between the zero story and what little bits
are here.

Speaker 1 (01:27:35):
Speaking of what little bits are here, I don't remember
how we arrive here, but we arrive at Limelan. Do
you remember who tells us to go here as any pana?

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
Yeah, it's after that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
Okay, Shannon is here at Limeland's Inn, and she gives
you a kind of out of left field ponderance about
human nature. She says, this is a grand city, don't
you think, But isn't it strange people build a metropolis
to last one thousand years? But human lifetime is just
a passing thought and that's it. She doesn't elaborate on that.

(01:28:07):
We don't have time to unpack all of that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
We're just a little guy. And once again, this is
another reference to the thousand years, which is going to
be a recurring theme pretty much through the end of
the game.

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
Is that one thousand years war a slash day of grief?
Is that more present in the game Boy Color version?

Speaker 2 (01:28:25):
Well, if you have me back on for that, maybe
we'll talk about it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
Then all right, you drive a hard bargain, but deal.
You heard it here, listeners. Set in Stone, Now, it's
set in Limestone, like in Limeland. There's a jail here
in Limeland that is hysterical. It's just a room with
an attic and that's the jail.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Well, when you don't have capitalism fueling the police state
and no money coming in from keeping people in jails,
this is what jail looks like. Creick.

Speaker 1 (01:28:52):
Now, hold on, you've said a lot of inflammatory things
that offend me as a red blooded American. I think
the problem is is that they're not keeping the illegals
out of Limeland. I think that's the issue here.

Speaker 2 (01:29:04):
It's definitely not that because everybody wants to work. There's
plenty of people who want to work.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
Shit, You're you're you're crushing all of the arguments that
I learned from Facebook. Aboard. We got to get out
of here. The King's castle is vast. Next note, move
on the Limeland castle. It's it's more vast than the
monastery that you started the game in with King Abbot,
Grand Abbot. Excuse me, h, Deanna is here. She's the queen,

(01:29:29):
I wrote the King's Castle. No, No, it's Dianna the Queen.
She's here. She was expecting you visa villa letter from
Princess Flora of Donduran. You said Flora was our would
be party member, right yep?

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
And we didn't see her when we were in Donduran,
did we.

Speaker 2 (01:29:44):
We don't, But you do see her sometime.

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):
I'm worried that I didn't write that down.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):
But you're doing you're doing just fine. You didn't miss her.

Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
Uh. Deanna says that the fire starter Fargo is the
Baddie that we're after this time, and as you might expect,
they've got the fire jewel, so that's our our next task.
He's hiding in the Barrigoon Tunnel. Excellent, excellent name. It's
just a series of brown hallways. It's not one of
the better locations in the game. You don't find him

(01:30:17):
right away, though. You find this red haired woman named Schilf,
and this is where we hear the name Mammon for
the first time. Schilf says, I'm Schilf, servant of Mammon.
I've been waiting a thousand years for him to return.
If I'm correct, I sense but three precious stones and
this is a fight. This was tough for me. I've
read online that this shouldn't be tough, but I don't know.

(01:30:39):
I had a little bit of trouble here. It ate
up a lot of my healing items.

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
It once again, it's much like Pokemon. It depends what
element you were leveling up. If you did more water stuff,
she's not really great against water. If you did more
Earth stuff. She's also pretty susceptible to getting rocks thrown
on her head.

Speaker 1 (01:30:56):
But when it was for you, Rick, that's true win
the attacks all the time, no status de buffs because
I am a champion.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
I'm a man much How many of us played Pokemon
back in the day. If it didn't do damage, why
did you do it?

Speaker 1 (01:31:11):
Yeah? Exactly, cut strength, flamethrower, fire blast, winning strategy. Suck
at Lance, you can't handle me, you beat her, you
exit the tunnel. There's an NPC in a tent here
that looks like Jesus Christ. I don't think that that
has anything to do with anything. I just think it's hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
I'm glad you found it, but that's yeah, that's the
whole thing.

Speaker 1 (01:31:32):
Why I knew to look for him because of you
made a meme about him. This desert, man, I hate
I hated this area this It really frustrated me.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
Ah yeah, the drys is big, big, big, So we
talked about how sparse stuff is, how empty the environments
and stuff are. Once you get into the desert, you
are met with an entirely different level of sparse like
a real desert. Rick.

Speaker 1 (01:31:59):
Of course, that's right. This this game goes for realism.
That's my fault. No, there's a mechanic where if you
go too far, it teleports you back to the middle,
and it's just it's really disorienting, is all. That's that's
what bothered me the most about this. Understood, there's a
there's a marker in the middle. It's not marked on
your map, but you have to get to it, just

(01:32:20):
you know, by sight, and it takes you to your
next location, Shamwood, where you meet LeVar. He says that
he quote once held the l Tale Book, but when
I opened it to unleash its incredible powers, I was
not worthy. The only powers I could control were those
of famine and destruction. I and this dialogue comes out
of nowhere. I was like, this is this is the

(01:32:40):
shit that I wish was in the game. He goes on.
He says, I could hate, but I could not love.
I could terrify but not inspire. Finally, the great magician
Epona came to my rescue and freed me from the
curse of the l Tale Book. But my penance is
that I have been exiled here alone for eternity, or
until the even that we call Mammon is defeated. This

(01:33:01):
is the cool shit, like this is what I wish this.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
Game was, and it's entirely optional. Like you said this
area the best pro Shop pyramid in the bottom right
hand corner of the map. Completely optional. You could just
be lined straight from the when you come out of
Barragoon Tunnel through Granick and straight to boil Hole the

(01:33:24):
next area, and missed this entirely. There is there is
very little reason to go out here because there is
nothing else other than that, and not really anything to
do other than plot, and it's some of the best
plot stuff in the game.

Speaker 1 (01:33:39):
Like you said, it's lore that I wish we heard
more about, even you know, even if we just had
a few more NPCs talking about it, like like Layla,
like any of the Sorceresses, that would be awesome, but
we you know, we really don't. It's again, it's not
it's just a missed opportunity. It could have been. Maybe
they'll remake this one day. That pretty sick. The next stop, well,

(01:34:02):
you had mentioned boil Hole. There's a brief stop in
a town called Greenock, but there's not a whole lot there,
so let's jump to boil Hole. A phenomenal duo of words. Yes,
this is I think this is the worst dungeon in
the game. I think this is worse than Blue Cave, personally.
It's a series again of like red brown hallways with

(01:34:23):
some lava texture lava wallpaper. But it's just it's so
much more vast than Blue Cave. You're not in confined
hallways as much. There are more like openings, and it's
I got turned around in here so much. This This
is where I made a point to note that the
lack of a mini map hurts this game a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:34:46):
Yeah, this is when I was talking about hand on
the Wall. This is the the dungeon that created that necessity,
especially in young me Hand on the Wall Left Hand
on the Wall, because it's actually a really linear it's
a snake. It doesn't have diverging paths or that many
of them. There's a middle part that's kind of wider,
but if you could do a hand on the wall

(01:35:08):
all the way through from west to east, mostly it's
not so bad, but it's still long, and the enemies
are tough.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
They really are. You run into a different kind of
wiburn here, like a brown one. The fire enemies do
a lot of damage. I didn't take as many notes
on the enemies as I probably should have, but this
is one of the few times like playing through this
area where I was not thrilled about picking this game up.

(01:35:36):
I don't know it was. I should have done the
hand on the wall method. That would have saved a
lot of my strife. Here we run into Fargo finally though,
he's here, and he says welcome fool, to which I say, fuck, yeah, man,
he's going to take your jewels or die trying. I didn't.
I actually didn't write anything about this fight. I don't
you know, I don't have anything to say about it.
I didn't struggle too much wind cutter, large cutter, heel

(01:35:58):
when necessary. Maybe that's on me. Maybe I didn't play
very excitingly. No, it's what do you think about Fargo? Now?

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
He's just a He's just a dude, and it is
kind of a So we did a counter Schilf before this,
who was heavy, heavy in the marketing material, especially if
you've watched the commercials for Quest sixty four, much kind
of like Resident Evil featured a certain vampire lady in
all of their marketing. Schilf was heavy in the Quest

(01:36:27):
sixty four late nineties marketing, only to not be the boss.
So Fargo kind of seems like a letdown after you've
fought Schilf and not received another elemental gem slash orb.
He's just a dude.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Yeah, yeah, he does feel kind of redundant in that way.
I don't remember how we get here, but my next
note says that we get to Brannock. So it kind
of looks like it was inspired by Final Fantasy vin like,
kind of straight up, it's got that dingy, sort of
sci fi slum inspired sort of vibe, kind of you know,
Shannon here, Shannon is here, of course, she follows you everywhere.

(01:37:02):
She suggests that your father might have been put in
jail by King Begas. Beagis, I think is probably how
you would say, well, no, I don't know Japanese. That
would probably probably be Vegas, could be Beagus, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:16):
She also alludes to there being a big shadow over
the city itself and the castle, which is a really
cute way of saying that we're getting close to the
end of the game and we've run out of resources
in time, so this is gonna be dark here and
there's not gonna be a lot going on.

Speaker 1 (01:37:32):
There's a you run into a goon named Guilty that
turns into like a mini boss fight. I don't think
Guilty has really much to do with anything. I don't know.
Am I wrong about that? I didn't write much about Guilty.

Speaker 2 (01:37:44):
No other than being actually once again a pretty challenging
fight depending on how you leveled. Guilty is a quite
the wall and does a lot of damage if you
get up close to him.

Speaker 1 (01:37:53):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you want to use that ranged magic
like wind, that'll really get you far. You also run
into here. In addition to Guilty, you run into Leonardo.
He kind of shares your character model a little bit.
He's a small wizard. He doesn't have your a hall
gay hair. I almost said, Ahika, that's something completely different.

(01:38:15):
He is a blonde little kid wearing white, blue and gold.
He's here to rescue who else but your pops? I
mean your dad, Lord bart Lord, Bethollow you, barthollow me?
Or follow you? Is it birth? I wrote both? Is
it birthollow you or birtholow me? It's birth? Follow me right,
it's me, yeah, m y, it's you. It's you. But

(01:38:36):
he didn't make it in time. He this is He
lets you heal. This is kind of the point of
no return. He heals you, he lets you save.

Speaker 2 (01:38:44):
He's kind of your Pokemon rival since we're continuing this
Pokemon theme. If the game was more fleshed out, you
would like to think that you would have met him
as many times as you met Shannon, since you're embarking
on the same quest to catch all of the elements
on the way to finding out who your real dad is.

Speaker 1 (01:39:03):
Yeah, the paternity quest, that's what we're doing. Yeah, there's
no universe where this game gets fleshed out that Leonardo
does not play a bigger role like visually alone. All
of the cues tell us like he was supposed to
be something, but right now he just serves as a
last bash, like a save and a restock your health
before you meet your father, I mean your dad. He's

(01:39:23):
slumped over and who is standing in front of him?
But Shannon, of all people, Pops will tell you that
it's a trap and that Shannon is an evil puppet
and he's not exaggerating. She admits this willingly. Here's what
she says to you. She says, Brian, you've gotten this far.
If you keep going forward, you'll find your quest, which
I hate that line so much, then my job will

(01:39:44):
be over. I am a puppet made only for the
purpose of leading you. I went out among the people
so that I might lead you. I knew nothing of
the real world, and it's foolish people who are doomed
to die. But why are humans so strong with all
of their grief, sorrow, happiness and anger. Why do they
shine so brightly? The warmth of fire, the winds in

(01:40:04):
the fields, the miracle of water, the abundant harvests. For
all these they give their thanks with prayer. Tell me, Brian,
is that what life is about. I'm a puppet and
I just don't understand. I am not of the human spirit.
Sorry to complain, I wrote a parenthetical. Lol, if you
have the book in the magic Stone, this key will

(01:40:24):
open the gale, which is a typo in the game
that should be the goal. I'm pretty sure this comes
out of fucking nowhere, dude, Like she's beginning to muse
on the human condition, not to mention, says sorry to complain,
which actually got to laugh out loud for me. But like,

(01:40:46):
why are they hiding this stuff within? Like, man, this
is the game. I don't care about traveling and beating
Schilf and guilty, Like this is the stuff that I
want in this story and they've taking it away from me, but.

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):
You found it unlike some people. This is the gate
that we talked about, though. You have to talk to
Shannon here, and you'd think you would since your whole
quest was to look for your dad. And then Brian
barely acknowledges his dad. He's like, okay, mister Bart, because
that's how you acknowledge your dad, who's definitely your dad. Yeah, no,
you're right. I wish like this. This kind of thing,

(01:41:22):
the Shannon lore, is why she's one of my favorite
characters and one of my favorites to jam into Internet pictures.
There's good stuff here near the end, but this is
we are really hitting the peak of good stuff, because
not a lot of the good stuff happens after this.

Speaker 1 (01:42:02):
No, this ending is not terrific. She hands you the
l Tail book, which was striking to me. She just
gives it to you and Brian then moves into Mammon's world.
It's a sort of like it's your Nether realm, but again,
it's a series. It's literally a series of paths amidst
a backdrop. It makes it it looks like something somebody

(01:42:22):
drafted in Blender and said like, yeah, well, we'll make
this pretty later It's functional, but not a great final area. Mammon.
We run into Mammon, the person that we learned about
maybe two hours previously is the final boss, a large,
fiendish sort of devil bat some bat dna in there. Mammon.

(01:42:44):
This is interesting. A lot of the times, what I'll
do is I'll just google a name or a word
if I'm unfamiliar with it. And I was like, you know,
I've heard mammon before. Why do I know this? Mammon
is a term that appears in the Christian Bible and
I'm sure other religions, but it's a representation of greed,
particularly the greed that's born of wealth that sort of

(01:43:06):
debates and corrupts one spirit. And from Christ's famous Sermon
on the Mount, he says, no man can serve two masters,
for either he will hate the one and love the other,
or else he will hold to the one and despise
the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. So this
is like, I mean, one, this is jerefy g as.

(01:43:27):
They come right like straight lifting straight out of the
Bible here xeno gears. I mean, this is such a
cool concept. And they they're showing us that they have
the ingredients, they just didn't or couldn't put it together
in a gumbo that would have been amazing, right, Like
they had the sauce, It's just they couldn't implement it.

(01:43:50):
It's a shame.

Speaker 2 (01:43:52):
You're not wrong, and a lot of the themes are here.
So Mammon is the brother of Hell that represents greed,
whereas you've played through an entire game that is a
socialist utopia with no greed and unlimited hand me downs.
Every town you go in and everybody is friendly and welcoming,

(01:44:12):
there's no money, and then your last boss is the
you know, the little brother literal brother of Hell that
epimizes greed and capitalism in this world. So they were
playing with stuff. They had the sauce, they had the fire.
Too many hands in the chili to get it out
before the Zelda sixty four main course.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
I guess yeah, it's you. Hear you hear them putting
in poetic language about the human condition, musing about the
human condition. You have a character that, for all intents
and purposes, lacks a soul and is asking what she'll
do in a moment, what it means to be human.
And then you have this biblical epitome of sort of

(01:44:57):
humanity's downfall, the dredges of humanity, and you are fighting
to vanquish it. There is a good story in here,
there are good themes in here, and there's something to
be said about asking the readers, the players, the viewers
to extract their own meeting out of it. But you
have to set them up for success. And I think

(01:45:17):
the problem is that they whether I don't think it
was because they were inept or couldn't do it. I
think they just weren't able to implement it in time
or for whatever reason, they just didn't get to it.
They didn't set us up for that kind of success.
So we see the trappings of what could have been
and ultimately are left to wonder about this thing that

(01:45:39):
you know could have been fairly compelling, and instead, you know,
it stumbles, it trips and it falls and it gets
blown out of proportion and it now lives in infamy
as this shitty game, when the truth of the matter is,
it's not that it's shitty, it's just it's Star Wars
episode one or two. It's it could have been so

(01:46:02):
much more. It just had a lot working against it,
and you know, it's it's just a shadow of a
whisper of what it could have been. I don't know,
I feel like I'm rambling a lot in this. I
don't think I'm being discharitable with this.

Speaker 2 (01:46:17):
No, you're totally right. And like you said, you're hit
with all of this within a matter of twenty five minutes.
So from the point that Shannon starts extrapolating all over
the what little plot was happening, and then the game
to defeating Mammon, that's it. That's your arc. That's the
beginning to end, and then the North American version it

(01:46:39):
is literally some words in end after that.

Speaker 1 (01:46:43):
Yeah, defeating Mammon is really uncinematic. He just sort of
fades out of existence, like you get the same little
victory music, Da da da da duh. He fades out
just like any other enemy. He gets a dialogue box
where he just says like ooh ah, ooh, he's taking

(01:47:03):
poison damage and he just he says, this cannot be
and he's gone, Shannon, And you know this is I
mean again, talk about the traces of something interesting. Shannon
is allowed to exist even though she was a puppet
tied to him, a husk she is allowed to exist
on her own, and she plans to go off and
find humanity thanks to you. Like, that's like that could

(01:47:26):
have been, that could have been implemented in a way
that choked me up. But it's you know, it's not
and it's a shame. It's really a shame because she
could have been an amazing character. But you know, the
game sort of fizzles out like a like a disappointing
firework rather than the triumph that it could have been.
You know, it's it's a shame, you know, And it's

(01:47:48):
not a bad game. It truly is not. This I
am perhaps getting ahead of myself a little bit. The
game ends here you get an ending scroll that, perhaps
in being a bit reductive, correct me if I'm off
base here, Mike, But you get an ending scroll that
essentially just says you you live halfway ever after all

(01:48:09):
is well?

Speaker 2 (01:48:10):
Correct? And I did send you a link, but I
didn't expect you to open it and indulge yourself. But
in the we talked earlier about that.

Speaker 1 (01:48:19):
Yes, hang me out to dry in front of the listeners, Mike,
I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:48:22):
The Japanese version does no you are does have a
longer ending.

Speaker 1 (01:48:26):
Yeah, you are right. The day that we were recording
this was particularly stressful on my end. I did not
get around to this. By all means. I feel like
I've talked over you quite a bit in this episode.
If you want to talk a little bit about the
Japanese ending, I would love to hear it.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
I won't read all the text boxes, but ends up
being I think it's like eighty or ninety text boxes
more than what you got from Shannon. Here you get
a little bit of leon or Leonardo talking to mister
Bart your dad about man being gone and that everything
is gonna be okay between them, and art Is talking

(01:49:01):
about how you know, thank you he was saved by child.
Then you get to see some of the townsfolk. There's
a lot of boxes of that, just generally what is
happening after the evil was defeated. Then you get you
get to go back to talk to Leela in another
box talking about the spirits and what we talked about
before that her prayers were met by a master spirit

(01:49:24):
tamer which is now you. And then you get a
little e Pona a bit. But then you get Flora,
who we talked about before, talking to your favorite king
Scottfort about the monsters not running around anymore. Obviously, once again,
you're not going to find Flora talking to anybody in
the North American version, after being in early development a

(01:49:45):
really important character. She would be in your party. You
would be controlling her. So there's Flora, there's the Flora
that I promised. And then you get that Mammon or
that Mammon the Shannon cut scene that we talked about
in the North American version. But she's like breaking the
fourth wall almost. She's looking directly at the camera and
saying all the things about humanity and how she was

(01:50:07):
born from Mammon's wicked heart, and then asking if this
was your doing, but what is she going to do?
Somewhere deep within my soul, I knew that you would
defeat Mammon. What I really wanted was for humans, the
genuine beings, to defeat me, the impostor. Mammon envied humans.
He wanted their abundant life force in the world they

(01:50:30):
had built, but it was beyond his grasp, and this
only enraged him. He may have had great strength and
everlasting life, but because of that, he never truly lived. Humans.
You are so big hearted, so full of emotion. You
were able to sense the world around you. But now
I'm leaving Cutland, I wish to learn more about humans. Sheelle.

(01:50:53):
We meet again someday in a faraway land. Farewell. And
in the Japanese version is Jean Jacques is Brian's name.
So that's the end of that. But then you get
to see Killiak and Colleen, and then you get that
scroll that you talked about in North American version. But
you have a solid five ten minutes of other stuff
before you get to that.

Speaker 1 (01:51:12):
That ending is so much more effective, I think, even
you know, even if it could have been more effective
with a better setup, that alone flushes it out more.
This dichotomy between the representation of the goodness of the
human soul, this is something that you see in Japanese
media a lot. The inherent virtue of the soul of humanity,

(01:51:35):
what it means to be human, and that inherent goodness,
that optimism that's within there diametrically opposed here with someone
like Mammon, the shadow of humanity right, the dark half,
the false side that drags that goodness down and corrupts it,
infects it like a virus. You have that dichotomy here.

(01:51:59):
It's not just this big bad that gets introduced at
the very end of the game, almost out of nowhere,
and then that's not even to say anything about Shannon
and how much more effective that dialogue is. It's really
a shame. I would be interested. I don't think my
Japanese is at a level yet where I could play
Quest in Japanese, but I would be interested to try someday.

(01:52:21):
This game doesn't have like a really difficult script, so
actually maybe I could, now that I think of it,
maybe I'm selling myself short. I should give it a try.
Have you played the like, is there a fandomb? I'm
guessing have you played it?

Speaker 2 (01:52:34):
There is not a translation. The community, the speed run
community that does the mods for the game, has been
trying to The translation itself is not the tough part.
It's the way that the text is coded in the
game has been troubling to reinject the translated English back in.
But I would be excited for you to play it

(01:52:55):
because the ultimate jump scare at the end, which I've
been just waiting for this all day, is that Shannon
uh talks about wanting to become human and then she
moves to Detroit at the end of this.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
I can't tell if you're fucking with me.

Speaker 2 (01:53:09):
Oh, this is the precursor that do Detroit become human
your favorite video game?

Speaker 1 (01:53:16):
Fuck off? God damn it. You got me? You got me? Good?
Fuck that was good. That was really good. Oh my god,
I will I will say this, you know. No, I'm not.
I'm not gonna shot on Detroit. It has it didn't
do anything. It's catching strays.

Speaker 2 (01:53:33):
Yeah. I caught the red Wing one earlier in the
episode too, where I was really hoping we weren't going
to allude to the ending that I just jumped dumped
on you at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:53:41):
So it caught several in the bouncer too. I can't
catch a break. It's a bouncer, oh man. But that's
you know, that's quest just similar to the bouncer. Is
it a truly shitty game? No, absolutely not. Of course
you should never listen to internet reviews, including this one.
Quite frank, You should decide for yourself, and as always,

(01:54:02):
the truth is more complex than it seems. This is
not a trash game that's bullshit. This has a lot
of really cool things in it. The soundtrack, the battle system,
the visuals like there's a lot to like here. It's
worth trying. Do you need to complete it and talk
to every MPC? Well, if you want to, but I

(01:54:23):
think avoiding it just because of his reputation is foolish.
You know, there's there's a lot to like here.

Speaker 2 (01:54:29):
And I promise I didn't pay Rick to say any
of this. The precursor to us recording this as I
told him I would come on regardless and that he
didn't have to enjoy the game. I would be more
than happy to talk with him even if you hated it.
But luckily the Bouncer came first in his schedule.

Speaker 1 (01:54:45):
So I, Hey, the Bouncer is a mess of a
video game, but I love it. It's it sucks, and
I think that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:54:53):
The episode, Oh thank you?

Speaker 1 (01:54:57):
You know, like truly though this this is inn I
think I don't want to We're already two hours in.
I don't want to go onto another diatribe. I think
the trend and the disgusting allure of being negative to
fit into this in group, of shitting on something else
to feel powerful, to feel elevated. I reject that when

(01:55:17):
it comes to video games, especially because it's so easy
to do that above all else. It's just it's easy,
and it's it's the lazy route to take. It takes
no effort at all. There's goodness to find in Quest.
Is it, you know, the best game on the N
sixty four? Not not even close. Is it one of
my favorites? No, not at all. Is it an altogether
unenjoyable experience. No, it's more the area is gray. As

(01:55:43):
with everything in life, the area is gray. It's not
this black and white. This game fucking sucks. It's trash.
You know, you're just all your account's good for is
meming about a game nobody cares about. No, that's more
on speak. It's a fine game if you approach it
for what it is, aproach it expecting Okarina of Time,
Legend of Dragoon, Final Fantasy seven, one of those games

(01:56:05):
doesn't belong in there. If you approach it wanting that,
you're going to be disappointed. But that's on you for
trying to put a square peg into a round hole,
you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:56:15):
Yep. And if only Dave Jackson was here to join us,
he would be talking about how some of his favorite
games are those six and seven out of tens definitely not,
unlike Parasite Eve and Legend of Dragoon, where they were
made for some people but not all people. But I
would always play a six or seven out of ten
that was enjoyable and interesting over a ten out of

(01:56:37):
ten cookie col RPG that everybody loves, just because perfection
is perfection. Sad that this game was followed by Akarina,
widely considered one of the greatest games of all time,
and came after Final Fantasy seven, widely considered one of
the greatest games of all time. But it's okay to
be Lil O'Brien. Six point five five out of ten.

(01:57:00):
I'll play you, and I'll basting you forward into twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 1 (01:57:06):
Yeah, there's a lesson in there, you know. Not. The
enjoyment is the story that we experienced along the way.
The story of Ques sixty four is not the plot,
you know. I Dunky of all people said that in
a video about Mario. Now I'm just fucking running with it.
The story is playing through the game and the joy
that you experienced along the way. And for a story
to be meaningful and exciting and worthwhile to you, the player,

(01:57:29):
you don't it doesn't have to be a ten out
of ten. Not The point of an artistic experience and
entertainment isn't chasing perfection. Not everything needs to be Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony, and it never can be. And that's okay.
That's fine. Different moods, different palettes, different days. It's it's okay.
Quest is fine. You know, it's fine. And this was

(01:57:52):
a fun experience. Thanks for coming on and doing this.

Speaker 2 (01:57:55):
The pleasure was entirely mine. Like I have said to
you before, I never really wanted to meet my heroes.
I listened to a ton of podcasts. It's way harder
to come on shows and talk about quests than it
is for me to go on shows and talk about
games that I'm not known for championing this. The anxiety
and now relief I feel from getting through this experience

(01:58:17):
alive is euphoric, Rick, So thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:58:22):
Yeah. I usually when I go on dates, that's how
they end. They say, you know, the anxiety of having
to talk to you was high, and now that it's over,
I'm feeling pretty good. Just kidding, but yeah, man, this
was a lot of fun. As listeners, as you heard,
we will do the game Boy Color d make slash
sequel kind of both next that should be the next

(01:58:45):
episode on the show. Looking forward to playing that and
comparing it. Probably won't be as long of an episode.
I don't know. I'm not I can't tell the future,
but we'll see how that goes until then. If you
want to bask in more of Quest sixty four is goodness,
you can always check out QUS sixty four official on
Oh gosh, is it just blue Sky?

Speaker 2 (01:59:04):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:59:04):
Are you still on Twitter?

Speaker 2 (01:59:05):
I haven't deleted my account on Twitter, but I'm definitely
not interested in engaging in Elon and grums and all
that stuff right now, So I just kind of left
the account in limbo, so there's not imposter accounts. But yeah,
essentially it's just blue Sky right now.

Speaker 1 (01:59:21):
Okay, yeah, you can find links to that in the
show notes. We kind of, I don't know, I feel
like we kind of danced around your account. How do
you describe your online presence?

Speaker 2 (01:59:33):
I guess I'm like a procedurally generated entity that is
also the final boss of System Shock sixty four, and
my main goal is to get imagineer that forced me
to legally stop talking about QUS sixty four.

Speaker 1 (01:59:46):
Mm hmm. That's true. That's true. We were recording this
without cameras, so I have no way to gauge whether
or not you are a procedurally generated string of ones
and zeros. Looks like the jokes on me. Everybody is
good after all that time to time to up my
grind set.

Speaker 2 (02:00:03):
That's what Shannon told you. She's the ultimately AI. I'm
just learning from her.

Speaker 1 (02:00:08):
Oh right. That's the message of Ques sixty four is
that AI should learn to be human. Of course, a
foolish of me, I'm so silly. Yeah. You could check
out Quest sixty four official online. It's a funny account
and it's also a heartfelt account. A lot of genuine
posting over there as well, but also Quest sixty four
official official posting memes that has got me to google

(02:00:30):
a disgusting phrase Quest sixty four come to find a
particular meme that I was able to find.

Speaker 2 (02:00:36):
I would say, how did they go? It went well,
I take it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:39):
Not all the results were related, but you know I
found the image I was looking for.

Speaker 2 (02:00:43):
I understood.

Speaker 1 (02:00:44):
You can find that in the episode description. You could
find link to Mike's a link to Mike's stuff. You
can also find a link to our stuff as well,
the Discord, the Patreon, all of our online offerings like
blue Sky and Instagram and TikTok, which man, I'm just
not active on there any more, but you can find
us there, and you know you can rate and review
the show as well, if you'd be so kind. That

(02:01:06):
always helps us get into Algore's rhythm and helps new
people find the show. If you'd be so kind, that'd
be just swell. But you know, once again, listeners, thank
you for sticking around. Mike, thank you for joining me.
Quest sixty four official on blue Sky on the internets.
Check it out, And for now, I think it's time
to wrap this so once again, as always, I am Rick,

(02:01:28):
I'm your host, Happy Questing everybody. We'll talk to you
next time. Take care,

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The N64's First RPG | Quest 64 (Ep. 143)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The N64's First RPG | Quest 64 (Ep. 143)