Press B 255: So Unapologetically French - Clair Obscur Expedition 33

Sure, Nintendo and Xbox are raising game prices to obnoxious levels; but then comes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A $50 title that stands as one of the greatest JRPGs of the last decade. No hype, no spin. If you're a fan of the genre, it's a must-play; and this week Press B to Cancel will tell you why.

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00:00 --> 00:06 Final Francity. And for those who come after Azure. Adicia.
00:27 --> 00:29 Did you French over the intro?
00:29 --> 00:31 I might have Frenched a little over the intro.
00:31 --> 00:33 You Englished the French or the intro?
00:33 --> 00:35 Yeah, I Quebec.
00:35 --> 00:37 Oh, don't bring my country into this.
00:37 --> 00:38 You. You. Quebec.
00:39 --> 00:39 Quebec.
00:40 --> 00:56 Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Press P to Cancel your our the favorite podcast in France. At least for the moment. Favorite French podcast for a moment. It's probably gone now. It's gone now. It was. It was there for a moment.
00:56 --> 01:01 Listen, if I learned anything living in Europe, it was. The attempt was nice but not necessary.
01:01 --> 01:01 That's right.
01:01 --> 01:06 If you attempted it, they were fine with you speaking English after that because.
01:06 --> 01:09 At least you tried in France. You sure? Yeah. Okay.
01:09 --> 01:12 At least where I was. Good to know Germans.
01:12 --> 01:19 Anyway, for those that couldn't pick it up from the intro, we're talking Clair.
01:20 --> 01:26 Obscura, Expedition Claire Obscure Expedition 33. So French.
01:26 --> 01:27 It's so French.
01:27 --> 01:30 A RPG.
01:32 --> 01:35 You guys, remember I said let's not get canceled by France.
01:37 --> 01:39 We're too American for them anyways.
01:39 --> 01:43 We're now the favorite of French Canada, so we're good.
01:44 --> 01:46 Yeah, Quebec doesn't like any of us. It's okay.
01:46 --> 01:47 Yeah.
01:49 --> 01:50 So there's not much of a difference.
01:50 --> 01:51 Oh, geez.
01:51 --> 01:54 But I'm not alone. I'm never alone.
01:55 --> 01:56 Maybe you wish you were.
01:56 --> 01:57 You wish you were alone.
01:57 --> 02:09 I might wish I'm alone. I'm joined by two of my friends and co hosts of this podcast, the favorite podcast in French Riviera. Chard, how are you today?
02:09 --> 02:27 I'm great. I am so excited to talk about this freaking game. I am obsessed with this game. I'm going to go full on Jake did with Blue Prince with this game, but this will be my my blueprints game because I'm going to absolutely lose my. My s over this. I'm trying to be good today.
02:27 --> 02:40 All right. All right. And our favorite podcast host from French speaking, Louisiana, Jake. How are you today?
02:41 --> 02:43 Ontario. It's okay. That's fine.
02:44 --> 02:45 Same thing.
02:45 --> 03:08 There are French people in Ontario. Actually, no, it's not true. I do know some who are from Ontario that are French. But anyway, I don't think they watched. I don't know if they played this game, but they should because. And I put in the description of this video and episode. This is probably one of the best JRPGs of the decade. And I mean that. And not just because chart says so, but I actually mean that. And I'm looking forward to talking about this a bit more.
03:08 --> 03:10 I mean, we're Spoiling the episode already.
03:11 --> 03:13 Yeah, I'm bad at this. This is my first podcast.
03:18 --> 03:23 And I'm doing well. Guys, I was supposed to go on a trip this week and I didn't for a reason.
03:23 --> 03:25 We're happy to have you. We got lucky. We got lucky.
03:25 --> 04:00 Yes. Yeah, I mean, lucky. Anyway, I am here as active audience. It's a term we use internally for those that are unaware. We sometimes have episodes where one of us is unfamiliar or multiple of us are unfamiliar with the subject at hand. And I honestly feel like I am. We were talking about how many hours people have in this game and I feel like I have negative hours in this game. I know it stars Jake Gyllenhaal. Slash, what's his name? Pattinson.
04:00 --> 04:01 Robert.
04:01 --> 04:01 Robert Pattinson.
04:01 --> 04:02 Yeah.
04:02 --> 04:04 Sparkly vampire guy. Yeah.
04:04 --> 04:13 But for those of us that are unaware of what this game is, Chard, if you were writing a synopsis trying to sell this game, what would you say?
04:14 --> 04:59 I have, I have, I have gone on record maybe with some of you guys, but I've gone on records that I, I would go as far as to say that this game right now with 25 hours into it, is the Chrono Trigger of this generation. It is. It's so good. I, I, it's, it's a turn based JRPG with phenomenal story elements, an absolutely mind blowing soundtrack and everything with it and, and everything that went into this game to make this game what it is. This is a wake up call to triple A games out there, honest to God. It's without question. So that's probably a longer synopsis, but.
04:59 --> 05:12 No, no, no, that's fine. I picked up that it's turn based now, like Chrono Trigger. Is it, I mean, is it like top down or when you're not in battle, is it first person, third person?
05:13 --> 05:27 It is third person. It's a third person behind shot, but at an angle. So most of the time the camera is shooting kind of down and up. Like it's like it's, it's kind of the camera's lower, but it's shooting at the back of the characters and reverse.
05:27 --> 05:28 Isometric.
05:29 --> 05:42 Yes. Well, you're seeing the characters in front of you. There is. There is. I don't know if it'll be isometric because the screen moves, but there is, there are jumping puzzles in this game. There are some crazy Super Mario rpg.
05:43 --> 05:49 Honestly, I was gonna say it is Super Mario RPG in a good way. I know, because you guys don't like that one. That's fine.
05:49 --> 05:55 Things about Super Mario RPG or were added to this. None of the bads, okay? Except for some of the gym.
05:55 --> 06:32 I will say that when you, when you said it's, you know, a game that gives AAA games a run for their money or make them smarter up, that could be more true. Especially lately, right? Because we have talk of Nintendo having bizarre pricing on a few of their games. The $80 Mario Kart, for example. Xbox just announced that at Christmas time their games are going to be $80 as well. So we're talking about an industry right now where the games are being jacked up in price. But here we have. Was it Claire? Obesity 75. Here is $50, which is. Honestly, it's a steal. It's a steal of 50 bucks.
06:32 --> 06:32 Really.
06:32 --> 06:33 It's a pretty awesome, fantastic game.
06:34 --> 06:37 Look, we're canceled by people that are a little extra.
06:38 --> 06:39 It's okay.
06:39 --> 07:15 I'm one of them. And I also travel with Expedia. Go Expedia, get some points. But no, like, really, honestly, for 50 bucks you get a full game. And it couldn't be more AAA in terms of feel. Like you said, Chard, the music, the graphics, everything is stellar. And it's. Yeah, it's not a 90 hour game, like, you know, Final Fantasy Remake or whatever, but I don't need it to be right. I don't need it to be a long, long game. I think I heard 30 hours to beat, but I think realistically for myself it'd be around 50. I'm only like seven hours in, to be fair. But it seems like a good value for the money. Even if it wasn't 50 bucks, I would still say this is pretty good.
07:15 --> 07:30 They've announced that this jrpg, this particular one is a, is one that does not waste your time, which is a lot like what Chrono Sugar was, right? It is very concise. It gets to the point. I mean, there's a fair. It's Chrono Trigger.
07:30 --> 07:33 Am I going to bounce off of it like seven times?
07:33 --> 08:50 You shouldn't, you shouldn't. But no, it's, it's, it's one that. This is a game that was made for people like us in our age group that have wives, families, you know, significant others, children, jobs that cannot sit down at the computer and play for eight hours a day, ten hours a day. And it gets to the, it gets to the point. It gets to the root of the game. You're up and running. Once, once you get, you know, you got to get through the tutorial. You got to get to know the people and I'm not, I'm going to do my absolute best to not spoil anything. But 30 minutes into this game, 30 minutes into the main story of the game, it kicks you in the face, like right out the bat. You would not realize that this game was made by an indie studio outside of, you know, the Ubisofts and the Microsoft and all that stuff out there. You would not look at this game and say this is a square game. You would look at this game, say this is a Square Enix game, hands down, or, or an atlas or something along those lines. The only reason you would say that is because all the inspiration from those games are put into this game. I can go on some more, but I'll go on a tirade. Like I told you, if I hosted this guys, I wouldn't shut the hell up. So. All right, regulate, because I'm, I'm going to go on a tirade here.
08:50 --> 09:00 I'm going to turn, I'm going to turn to Jake for a second. Jake, how did you feel about his selling points? And would you say it differently?
09:01 --> 09:03 Well, I mean, so we want to start with. I guess.
09:04 --> 09:04 Yeah.
09:04 --> 09:37 Who is this for? Definitely for folks who don't have the time for 90 hour drawing out RPG. Right. It's, I've said before I grew up with JRPGs, I, I, I want to say I love JRPGs, Final Fantasy 2 and 6 and, and all those great things. Chrono Trigger, of course, Final Fantasy 7, I love these things. Dragon Warrior. But I, when I go back to play them now, I just don't have the time for the grind. I just, I just don't. And as much as I like say Final Fantasy 6, for me to go back and play it now is a rough time.
09:37 --> 09:37 Yep.
09:37 --> 11:04 So when I started playing Claire Obscura, I actually played on Game Pass, which even better of a value because I didn't buy it outright. Although I kind of think I'm going to. So. But I wanted to try it, but I knew that I figured I wouldn't play it all the way through to beating it because I don't have the time. Little I know is like Chart said is how in face in your face the game gets right off the bat and how dynamic the combat feels and how it just feels like a really good brisk pace the entire way through. There's no downtime. I don't feel like I need to grind battles. I don't feel like there's any grinding at all. To be honest. There is side stuff in the game. If you Want to do it but you don't have to. Nothing feels like it's wasting my time. Like you said, chart is a great way to describe it. This game, everything there makes sense. It matters, is relevant. Very little in the way of fluff or side stuff so far. And I really appreciate that. Right. A game that respects a player's time is very important to me at this age and I think this is all the things I want and everything else looks great. I'm going to compare later on as well to like this game compared to say finally seven remake. You know, I love finally seven remake in terms of like how drawn out that game was for no damn reason. This is the exact opposite. This is what I wanted finally 7 remake to be. I wanted that game to have this kind of content, like this kind of story, this kind of combat, this kind of length and it's none of it. This is so much better than Final Day seven remake. I love this game.
11:05 --> 11:27 Nice. Okay, describe the combat. I know you said turn based. Are we talking single player? Are we talking a party? Are we talking like magic system? Are we talking. I assume that there's being turn based. I assume that there's a block option. I mean, tell me about this.
11:28 --> 11:29 Jake, you got this.
11:29 --> 11:32 How about I start chart and then you flesh it out because you probably know a little bit more the advanced.
11:32 --> 11:34 Stuff, you go for it. Yep, absolutely.
11:34 --> 13:14 Turn based rpg. But when we say it's like Mario rpg, all, all the good reasons anyway, it could be more true in terms of that. The, the combat has the brief quick time events to get extra damage. So. And it's different for every attack or every skill rather. So there's one, her name is Lunae. Whatever. She's basically the mage. Think of this mage. So when she does a spell, a thunder spell, when you cast it, you have two prompts to hit the A button at the right time. And if you line up the the prompt with the right time and hit it by perfect, you do a whole bunch more damage. It's optional, but it definitely makes a difference. It's also dynamic in that you have three ways to dodge attacks. There's a straight up dodge, you hit B button and you with the right timing, you dodge other way. There's a better parry, the timing window is shorter, but if you can pull it off and parry every step of the opponent's attack, you do a massive counterattack which does a crap ton of damage. It's really worth doing. And then there's a third one which I found last night is a Jump. You can actually jump in combat. So certain attacks and they're flagged this way in combat you get a prompt if you jump and then you can counter attack. So there's three ways to dodge the enemy attacks. And you also have to be on top of doing the prompts when you do your skills. Very dynamic feel. It's a lot going on in terms of the dodging and attacking and I wasn't quite expecting it. And the. The windows there are interesting. On top of that, you definitely have skills. You have quite a number of skills you can unlock for each character. Each character you. You recruit into your party of party of three has their own unique skills. On top of that, there is equivalent equippable things called Pictos, which are. Charlie, what do you say though? They're like buffs, I guess, in a way.
13:14 --> 14:18 The best way to describe them in my opinion is we've. Most of us has played Final Fantasy 9 or understand that when you get a weapon In Final Fantasy 9, it has a perk. And you can use the weapon. And as you're using the weapon, that perk levels up with you. And eventually you can take that perk off the weapon and attach it to your character and not have to have the weapon and still get the perk from that. Pictos are the same thing. It's. It's a little stone you pick up that's got some kind of 50% extra damage. On a counterattack, you get more AP points, which are battle points to use if you parry so many times or something like that. And these level up as you go, and they level up in level as well. So they also become more powerful as you had them on the character. But then you can use luminance, which are points you find around the world. That's basically stat money that you pay into your character. And then they can use that to hold for. You know, some things cost 20 lumens, some things cost 2. It just depends on how good the lumen or the good the Pictos is.
14:18 --> 14:18 Yeah.
14:18 --> 14:42 And if you buy those and you could buy them all, you just have to get the money to do it. You can have each character have every single piktos without having it equipped on your character. It's a really extensive feature that comes with not only the skills that each character has that Jake was talking about in a skill tree, you can add these as well and totally max out your character in ridiculous ways.
14:42 --> 16:13 Yeah. So for example, I have. My one character has a. Has an ability called. But basically leaves a mark status on the enemy. So when an enemy that's been marked, the next attack that hits them does extra damage, quite a bit more damage. So what I did then is I added a few more pictos on my other party members where they get bonus damage and AP points when they hit a marked target. So I'm only like seven hours into the game and I already have combos with the builds. Like you can build interesting combinations right from the get go, right? There's ways to add burn damage to your free aim attacks and then other characters can get bonus damage on burning attacks. Right? There's a lot of customization and I'm only seven hours in. There seems to be pictos all over the place, right in. In the world. There's. There's no shortage of them. And they're easy to unlock for the entire party. I think it's four battles with them equipped. And then you can unlock the. The equivalent version of it to the party after that. And it's, it's. They don't explain a whole lot in terms of how to combine skills, but I think if you spend a few minutes to kind of dive into what can be used, where it becomes pretty clear on how you can really go deep into the builds of the characters if you want to. I don't think you have to, but I think it definitely makes a difference in battle. When I sat down last night and I went and read all my characters, I added a bunch of luminum points so I could equip more buffs. And I looked at the buffs and tried to pair them up and then unlocked the skills that would match those. But the bot, the boss battle immediately after that was a piece of cake. So definitely made a difference in the combat. Very tangible benefits of doing that.
16:13 --> 17:05 You can buff and stack your characters in insanely powerful ways just right out the get go. And Jake's right. I mean, there's pictos all over each area on the map. There's an overworld map. Then there's the dungeon. I guess you would consider it a dungeon or an instance that you go into. There's stuff all over there. There's weapons. There's multiple weapons you can find for each character, right? All kinds of stuff. Now you like Luna for, for example. Lun Lunae, for example, is the only mage in the group. Like there's no but. And you can't give Gustaf, who's the main character. You can't give him magic. He has his own skills that he holds on to. Malay has her own skills. You know, each person has their own thing that they do, and there's synergies that work really well with the characters. And you get.
17:05 --> 17:06 You.
17:06 --> 17:13 Eventually you get. You get a fair amount, but you can only have three people on your team at one time in the map, say, to pick and choose who you want to have on your team.
17:13 --> 17:15 Much like Chrono Trigger.
17:15 --> 17:54 Exactly. And. And. And the other team members will get xp, but it's. I think it's like halved or something. Like Chrono Trigger, like, where they don't get as many, but they still level up with you. So if you're like, this is. I like. I like Gustav and Lunae and Monaco, like these guys or Monoco. I. These are my three favorite people. I'm running with them the whole game. And you're like, oh, crap, I should probably change to somebody else. Because they've got a perk that's. That takes out everybody's shields, which is a huge necessary. Later in the game, you'll pour her in and she won't be at super strong like everybody else, but she won't be like, oh, level two, while everybody else is like level 33. You know what I mean? So.
17:54 --> 17:55 Right.
17:56 --> 17:59 There's some really good ways. Go ahead.
17:59 --> 18:20 When you get Malay, she's like. I think she's like level five, where my main guys were 10 by that point. But she leveled up and caught up very quickly with. By halfway through the A dungeon or like an instance area, she was already caught up. Like, it's. They level fairly quickly and they kind of line up very quick. So you're right. You don't. You don't have to worry about a character falling behind if that's what you're worried about. Right?
18:20 --> 18:21 Yep.
18:21 --> 18:28 Do you think it's worth switching characters Chart. Like, do you have a. Do you feel like there's a need to switch characters? Because I only have three, but I like these three.
18:28 --> 19:09 Right. No, I absolutely do. I was running with a group of characters, a core group of characters for a while. And, you know, you get the new one. You want to see what they do. Right. You want to kind of play around with them. And there's a character that gets abilities. It's basically like Blue Magic. I'll just leave it to that. For the people who know what Blue Magic is, it's a similar kind of attribute where you fight something and he can gain an ability and this, that and the other. That's the only downfall of not having that specific character on your team is that he won't get like, his tree won't expand because he's not getting the skills because he's not fighting the things in there. I do wish there was one. There's one negative. I wish you can change characters in the middle of fights. Like, I wish you can be like, hey, I'm gonna put him in the back, and I want to move this person up.
19:09 --> 19:11 And you can't do that in Chrono Trigger.
19:11 --> 19:14 No, you can't. No, no. It's the same thing. It's the same thing.
19:14 --> 19:19 But Final Fantasy. That could do that, though, I think right now. Was it. I think I could do that.
19:19 --> 19:21 Interchange some of the. The characters. Yeah.
19:21 --> 19:25 Now, which character is going to be Robo for Jake? And he's going to hate it.
19:26 --> 19:32 Minoko could probably be. He might be a little Robo. He's. He's a cool character, though. I like the character.
19:32 --> 19:33 See, here's the other thing.
19:34 --> 20:20 Here's the other thing. Each character in this game has such defined personalities that nobody seems wasted. There's not a single Final Fantasy 8 character in. In this game that is useless or stupid and doesn't need to be there. Everybody that talks, everybody that you talk with, you get into a campsite. Like, once you get into the main world, you get into a campsite where you can rest and you can upgrade some stuff and do some of the things. But while you're there, you can talk to each individual character, and instead of it being like, I don't really want to go through their whole thing, they make it so that you're like, yo, I want to talk to this person and see what's going on. And you get more in depth from each character's life because you're starting this thing out just balls to the wall, like Jake said, it just throws you into the fire, essentially.
20:20 --> 20:21 Yeah.
20:21 --> 20:52 Storming the beach and. And, oh, my God, the. The opening cutscene when you get onto the beach, and the whole nine is. Is so cinematic. Jake had said on. On numerous occasions, talking between all of us, that he would like to see this as a movie, and I would love to see this turn into a movie because the writing is spectacular. Everybody did all the characters you care about, and it. That's. That's Chrono Trigger. Right? You care about. Except for Jake, he doesn't like good characters. But all the characters.
20:52 --> 20:53 Robo is all I'm saying.
20:53 --> 21:01 But, you know, what character is Jack Black gonna play? And what character is Chris Pratt gonna play?
21:03 --> 21:09 I mean, Chris Pratt could play anybody. I mean, that's the range of Chris Pratt, Garfield, Mario. What can he do?
21:10 --> 21:16 It's just I could see Jack back being Monoco. I could see him playing that guy. You'd have to wear the costume, though.
21:16 --> 21:35 Yeah, so. So when I say like this game, I feel like it should be a movie. It's basically because, like, the premise of the story, and I've said offline that this story is French as fuck in the best possible way. Right. Not to get hate from France, but just like it's the story and this is just the premise. I'm not spoiling. This is on the box story.
21:35 --> 21:36 Yeah.
21:36 --> 22:07 It's like almost dystopian world, right? Where people are being murdered but left behind. Styles murdered by a creature called the painters. They're being. Thanos snapped. And it's every age, right? And the age counter goes down. So it started at 100. Anybody at 100 this year dies. And then it slowly worked its way down. We're now at Expedition 33. This means people at the age of 33 get killed. That's the purpose of the story. And every year a group goes out to try and stop the painters from doing this. This Thanos snap the year before, but.
22:07 --> 22:19 It'S like the year. Yeah, the year after Double Four goes on. They are. They. They select. Not everybody goes, but it's like a group of people select. Choose themselves to go and they go and try and stop this whole thing.
22:19 --> 22:20 Yeah.
22:20 --> 22:26 And while you're on the map, you can see flags from the other expeditions that have gone through, how far they.
22:26 --> 22:28 Got before you and.
22:28 --> 22:45 And Gustav. One of his lines is for those who come after, which is what I used at the beginning of the thing. Everybody's like, even if you don't win, you have to put these. You need to get something in place. So the people that come after you know what to do and where to go.
22:45 --> 22:45 Yeah.
22:45 --> 22:58 And you find journals about the original. A lot of the expeditioners that you can read about that are collectibles. They tell you what's going on. It's usually small snippets. It's not like pages and pages of stuff. But it's. It's really cool. There's a real good lore dive in this. This game.
22:58 --> 22:58 Yeah.
22:58 --> 23:05 To me it sounds almost more Logan's run than Thanos snapped, kind of.
23:05 --> 23:51 But the age goes down every year, right. And that's the thing. So like, you have this dystopian world, right? You have an evil villain killing people on Mass, and you're trying to figure out a society that's had learned to adapt to the idea that the people above the certain age die every year. Right. So you have orphans as a thing. Right. People adopting kids that are orphaned. There's a thing. And just. But it's so dystopian, yet so beautiful with the graphics and the layout and everything. But you have the ruined Eiffel Tower in the background. You have mimes and baguettes as well. It is like such a bizarre, depressing concept. But the heroes are still cracking jokes as only people in France can. Right. Like, I'm waiting at a moment for me to break out a cigarette and go, end of the world. But it's okay. We keep going like. And smoking a cigarette. Like it's that kind of style. Like it's unapologetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:51 --> 24:45 Well, have then, then launch the mid. You know, it's that. It's the whole. It really is. It's. It is. It is. This is a heavy story. The story is sad right out the gate. I got emotional within the first 30 minutes of the game. Everybody I've watched on Tik Tok that has seen the opening scene, my wife watched it in bed and was like, oh, my God. I was like, this is heavy. Real heavy to start. But there's such unapologetically French things in there. Like Jake said, there are mimes littered throughout the world that you fight that are tough. And when you beat them, you get your standard French outfit of black and white horizontal striped shirts, a black suspender overalls, a red beret and John Lennon glasses. And on your back is a French loaf. It's a baguette sitting in the back.
24:45 --> 24:51 I may have to play this game just to fight. I may have to play this just to fight thing.
24:51 --> 26:26 You get to fight. It's in the first area. You run into a mime. It's so great. I was like, what the hell is this? But also it teaches you how to do. How to dodge and how to parry pretty early on. So I. I spent a lot of time fighting that stupid mime and now I can wipe the floor with them every time I see him because their move set's pretty similar. But I. I want to go into like, some of. Some of the more behind the scenes development stuff on this so we can get a true appreciation of what Sandfall and BRO came up with with this thing. Now I will butcher this guy's name and it's going to be really tough for me to say, so I apologize to all the French speaking people out there, but I think his name is Galma Brioche. Used to be an employee of Ubersoft, Ubisoft, Ubisoft, Ubisoft. He was bored at Ubisoft, he got bored working there basically is how it come came to be. And he thought to himself, you know what? I want to create a game just like my favorite franchise, Final Fantasy Return based JRPG with, with great story. I easily identify like characters. You can get comfortable with all this other stuff, Persona, all these other games. So he goes out, he finds writers on Reddit to help write his story. Reddit. He didn't hire some writer from someplace. He fucking looked on Reddit and got people to write his story for him. He found the guy that did the music. Which BTW's soundtrack of the year easily.
26:26 --> 26:27 It's huge.
26:27 --> 28:10 It's eight hours worth. Eight hours of music from a dude on SoundCloud hired him to write music for his game. Mind you, not one of these people have ever done any of this for a video game before. Never. This is all new territory form. There's about 30 plus programmers that were all junior programmers that had. Some of them had never made a game in their lives before. And you put this thing together and you hire Charlie Cox who is famous for his portrayal of Daredevil in the now Disney Daredevil series. Andy Serkis who is famous for numerous roles including Gollum from Lord of the Rings as well as. This is Klaw from Age of Ultron. Yeah, yeah. And of course voice actor darling Ben Starr from Final Fantasy 16. The main character, Final Fantasy 16, he was thrown into this mix as well as including. I can't remember her name, but the person that played Shadowheart from BG3, Baldur's Gate 3, she plays, I think male. She's on there. There's a ton of like big name voice actors that they got to come in and do this thing all because the dude was bored and he's created a masterpiece from this game. This game has one of the highest download ratings on the PlayStation Store. It is, I'm being told, you can quote me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm being said it's getting one of the highest Metacritic scores that's to date for a game in an indie studio. All from Sandfall from a man who was tired of working at Ubisoft and wanted to create his own rpg.
28:11 --> 28:13 So is this, is this his first property?
28:13 --> 29:28 Yes. This is the first game ever created by this man and his company Sandval. And I can't remember the. The other company that's part of it. It's One word, but it's not a big deal. But I mean, he, he pulls a lot of really cool, really cool tidbits. I mean, you got the kind of the Persona fighting a little bit right, but you have some, some soulsy type stuff in the, in the fighting itself with the dodging mechanics and the parrying mechanics. It's very, it's honestly, it's very Sekiro the way the timing is set up. So it adds a whole new level of, of, you know, my kind of difficulty that I really enjoy into the game. But the fact that this is a. But this is a bunch of. I don't want to be mean about it, but as much nobodies that this guy found on the Internet said, hey, I'm making a game. You want to join me and do this? By the way, we're going to get a, A list voice acting crew to come and portray these characters. And God damn if the voice acting does not nail every single character. This, this game is everything that I could possibly imagine it could be. There's going to be JRPGs now coming out. So now we're going to have CRPGs, JRPGs and JRPGs. Because you're not going to beat out this wonderfully French rpg.
29:28 --> 29:31 It's not going to happen for all the Weebs out there. Right.
29:32 --> 29:35 The wee wee JRPG.
29:37 --> 30:07 This is good though, because I mean, we say JRPGs, Japan, RPGs. Right. But that's not just Japan anymore. Right. That's now a larger genre. Right. Other countries can absolutely make those. Right. We've seen American companies make JRPGs before and now we have a French company that did one so well. And to be the first game from this studio, I mean, this is a hell of an entry into the stage. And again, at the price point of $50, I mean, this is insane. This is a quality, quality game and beautiful. Like it just. Yeah, go ahead.
30:07 --> 30:16 I was going to say. So it's 50 if you want to buy it outright, but am I correct in assuming that it's in the Xbox Live?
30:16 --> 30:17 Yes.
30:17 --> 30:20 You can get monthly subscription thing. Game Pass.
30:20 --> 30:20 Game Pass.
30:20 --> 30:50 It was a day one game pass game as well. So not. Not only did they charge lower than your normal AAA game, but they also put it on day one game Pass for you to play right out the B that. Yeah, my buddy Lord Optic played it on game pass for two hours, went and bought it. He's like, I gotta own this. And he just, he just texted me. He's like, I just got back up to where I was. I mean I. I would buy this for my PlayStation so I could play it downstairs on my big screen. Like I would buy it twice. This is how much I love this game.
30:50 --> 31:17 Yeah, like I'm very close to, to. I'm close to picking it up as well because I don't. I put a lot of progress into it now on Game Pass and I'm wondering if I can transfer my save to a Steam version. If so, I might do that. Like I was hesitant on buying this game because I just bought Oblivion Remastered the other week also for 50 bucks. So I feel like I should have got this instead. To be honest with you, if I had given the chance, I would have gotten this one first. But I'm now wondering if I just can transfer my save progress over or not.
31:17 --> 31:20 Maybe you should listen to your buddy Chard when he's talking about games.
31:20 --> 31:34 I know, but since you give such wrong takes on games, unlike me. Yeah. You know, I pick all these winners. This is a good one for sure. When did we first see this game? Was it Summer Game Fest last year or was it Game Awards last year?
31:34 --> 32:25 I think it was. I might have been Game Awards like two years ago, maybe like towards the end of that year. Because I remember seeing, you know, seeing the clip of it and I was like, oh wow, new rpg. But it's just the video of them like on the, on the pier and the painters and all of that stuff. And then we talked about it incessantly in my Discord for a while. Then we saw some like some actual action stuff I think the following year. Because this, this thing has been in development around I think 2020, maybe a little bit later it was under Project W. So it's, it's been, it's been in the works for a bit. But I mean on top of that, on top of it being $50. 43 because they actually had it on sale for 10 offer. If you pre purchased it, which of course twist my arm, I'm gonna do it. This game has not had any updates to it to fix bugs.
32:26 --> 32:27 Now there is an update coming.
32:27 --> 32:28 One.
32:28 --> 32:29 There's one coming.
32:29 --> 32:31 Yeah, there is one coming. Yeah.
32:31 --> 32:36 But. But nothing that makes the game more.
32:37 --> 32:40 Than there was no date day one patch to fix.
32:40 --> 32:40 Right.
32:40 --> 32:44 Exactly what was broken. Right, right. So there is, there is the.
32:45 --> 33:20 Which to me is. I think we see that more often from indie studios that they have actually playtested the shit out of their games prior to release. It feels to me like a lot of these AAA studios are like, gotta make the deadline, fuck it, we'll fix it live. Right. And I think, I mean, I think it would be damaging to an indie studio to basically pull, you know, that whole like, oh, this is a bad port in the. Is a bad port and this is a bad port.
33:20 --> 33:24 You know, we can tell, blaming the gamers that it's their problem out there.
33:24 --> 33:33 Yeah. Or, you know, we can tell that they developed this on a PlayStation and then gave, you know, PC and Xbox, you know, a secondhand whiff. Right.
33:35 --> 34:01 So I think it's also a money thing. Right. Because the idea is to, to do an update to your game, you have to pass cert with the, with the console manufacturer, Xbox and PlayStation. I don't know what that process is like nowadays, but I think to do that costs money. And for a studio like Square Ubisoft, that's peanuts. But for a smaller studio, like, I think these guys, probably a double a size studio, it probably hits their pocketbook. So they have to be very deliberate with their updates and like you said, make sure they're really pushing out a solid product from the get go.
34:01 --> 34:29 Right? Yeah, I mean they did. They hit this thing out of the park. This game is, is. It's so beautiful. And I've learned a lot reading about it, watching it. From what I'm understanding, actually clear. Clear Obscure is actually, I believe in English, Darkness and light is what I'm understanding it to be. There's actually character, there's actually enemies later that are called Clear Obscure. They have opposing. Okay, fight on them.
34:29 --> 34:43 So that's, that's, that's the thing. That's why I asked, like, when did you first hear about this game? Because I remember the trailer and the graphical impact, like the flash of style. But I kept getting this confused with the other one that's named Horribly Meta. Metaphor Free Fantasia.
34:43 --> 34:57 Oh, afraid Fantasia. Which ironically they're pretty much. I mean, they're not the same. They're nowhere near the same, but they. No, he took inspiration from Persona, which isn't, you know, it was Metaphor. Metaphor Fantasio is an atlas game. Right. It's.
34:58 --> 35:06 Apparently these horribly named games are getting incredible reviews too, because Metaphor Refantasio, you.
35:06 --> 35:07 Know.
35:09 --> 35:12 The energy drink. The energy drink game.
35:14 --> 35:17 Monster Rockstar Fantasio the Third.
35:17 --> 35:22 I mean, it sounds. Honestly Metaphor refantazio sounds like an energy drink.
35:23 --> 35:38 Like, I mean, you know what it is? It's the same knock I have against Kingdom Hearts. Right. The Kingdom Hearts games are named terribly. I can't tell. Kingdom Hearts 3 1/2, 4/4 remix 4 edition from anything else? It's like a weird thing.
35:38 --> 36:35 And it's weird that Kingdom Hearts suffers from a very poorly executed story plan. From 2 to 1, from 1 to 2, then chain of Memories and Sleep by Deadlight, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's. There's so many games that were. Yeah, there was. It was on mobile. It was on some pocket gaming system that, like, four people bought, and then they released three, and they're like, oh, don't forget all the lore from the games that literally nobody else fucking played so that we could just keep going. So when you. So people like me that are like, listen, I played one and two, three should. Three should be there. No, you forgot the other 20 that were on my goddamn phone that I didn't feel like downloading because I don't like playing mobile games. I have no idea what's going on right now. I have no idea. All I know is I'm in Toy Story right now, and I don't know.
36:35 --> 37:01 I have to point out Lord Optics said Kingdom hearts pie 3.1, 3.14, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I just thought that was a great take. I mean, we talked about Pokemon last week. Talk about naming poorly again. Like, where is ruby and gold and yellow and whatever? Like, where do I play these? What fucking.
37:01 --> 37:02 Where do I start?
37:02 --> 37:03 Play these in.
37:03 --> 37:11 Yeah, I think there was a joke going around that said, don't worry, you don't have to play Expeditions clear, obscure Expedition 1 through 32 to get the story.
37:14 --> 37:32 It's a standard. Like, I don't want. I don't want spoilers. I don't. I'm not near anywhere near where you are in the game. But I do wonder, like, is this a game franchise now? Or is this a one and done? Like, is this a game they could do a sequel to? Or is it just like, you save the world and then you move on to something brand new, but maybe in a similar engine, but a different story.
37:32 --> 39:03 I pray that they make some kind of way to expand this universe in some way, shape or form or even. I mean, because they say that they. Everything is. Everything is very French. It's very French. It's in France, assumedly. There's the Eiffel Tower. There's other icons that are all over. I think there's. You stand outside the Arc de Triumph in certain spots. There's. There are. There are historical locations throughout the map that are not in places you would think. You're just like, oh, it's the Ark. Oh, it's the Notre Dame. Like, it's just these things just pop up, right? And it's more background. It's not like somebody's hiding in there and you're like, hey, there's a spoiler there. It's just, they're there. So could it be a clear in Prague? Could this fracture, because that's what they call it, the fracture. Could it be a European fracture? Could it be the entire world? What could we do with this? And I, I have not completed the game yet, so I can't tell you how it ends or what the story goes. I have some theories that I've cooked up in my own head because I'm avoiding spoilers like the plague right now. But I, I, I don't care. Put this team on anything else. This team, this team could write a story in a video game about a man making a sandwich for 35 hours and I will play every last goddamn minute of it because I want to know this, I want to know the lore behind the tomatoes and why, why the cheese is the way it is. Because it's it. They would, they would make it that fucking interesting. Interesting, absolutely.
39:03 --> 39:06 Yeah. So also even lore aside, the game.
39:06 --> 39:24 Fun fact clear obscura is actually a term for French painting and artwork. So Jake, as you're playing this game and see all the splashes of color and the chroma that they talk about, that's another, that's another twist on the name of the game.
39:24 --> 40:28 Well, I mean you literally come across a village of little cute little idiots that, where their heads are shaped like paintbrushes, right? So some of the subtext is not lost. I mean I do get it. I think graphics and story and lore aside, even just the game itself is just fun to play. Right. So even if they took this engine and use it elsewhere, it reminds me of I really liked bravely default on 3ds years ago I played that. It had a really fun unique combat system I love. There's elements of that combat system in Octopath Traveler and that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to like Octopath Traveler because the combat was similar and that really fun feel. Just sadly everything else was bad in it. But like clair Obscura Eclair, Obsidian 55 has one of the most fun turn based combat engines I've played in forever. Like it, it ranks. I, I'm not, I'm not. No hyperbole. Top 10 combat systems in RPG. This is up there like it's up there with Mario RPG and Chron trigger and FF6 like it really is a, a, a well designed combat engine and I love it. So I, I could see this in other genres and I would still dig it.
40:28 --> 41:03 Yep. And there's a lot of really cool charact, like enemy differentiation throughout each world. Right now you get, you'll get like five or six of them that, that kind of, you know, lumber around the area you're at. But when you go into the next dungeon or instance or next area, it's like a whole new set of enemies and things. It's nothing reskinned, nothing. It's, it's the same thing, but it's pink. So it's. So it's harder, you know, it's, it's, there's differences throughout the area. There's, there's a couple, like I said, there's, there's enemies out there that are named Clear and Obscura that are obviously polar opposite colors of one another.
41:03 --> 41:04 Yeah.
41:04 --> 43:24 But you don't see them anywhere else except for this area as you're trudging through. The areas are so well thought out and, and it's, they're fun to explore. The two, the other gripes that I have that, you know, you were talking about, you had, you might have a few gripes this, there's like two gripes for me in this game and one of them is the inability to switch out characters in the middle of fighting, which doesn't happen everywhere. So that's not a huge, not a, it's not a deal breaker for me. But there's no mini map. There's no, there's no map or HUD for you to kind of, when you're exploring. The areas aren't huge, they're big. They look very, you know, kind of the word I'm thinking of is eluding me right now. But they're not. You don't, you don't get lost for easy, but you can find yourself running in circles a bit more often than you'd like. You're like, did I go left here? I don't know. And if you go exploring, as you should in an rpg, you find, you find treasure chests that are locked with certain cool combination things that you have to unlock. You get cool weapons, you get pictos, you get more, more items that are a permanent fixture to your character that you can reset every time you rest, which is another kind of a soulsborne thing. Every time you hit a flag and you rest, you get all your stuff back. But it does respawn the enemies. But as Jake had alluded to earlier today, there's no real need to grind. Like I have yet to discover a reason to grind. And because the parry and the dodge system are in place there, it's almost unnecessary because if you get good enough at parrying and dodging, you don't. You could be level one throughout the rest of the game. And if you are, your timing is on point. You don't take any damage when you parry whatsoever. So people have been talking about a lot of this on TikTok is I really want to see. I'm interested in seeing a no hit parry run for clear obscura. I think that would be really cool to see. Like that'll be the next challenge that we hear about for this game. Somebody did a no hit complete Perry run, parried every single monster, every single creature, every boss out there. That's really it. I can't think of anything else about this game that I would fix. And even those two don't make me want to put my controller down or have I ever gone. I wish I had a map. Like I. I don't so don't care.
43:24 --> 44:38 I will say for that the map thing. I'm with you on the map totally. I got lost a few times. There is a neat level design feature or trick what they do where the path that leads further into the zone is lit by lights of some kind. Whether it's light bulbs, fires, lampposts, fireflies, whatever. So that's how you know there's one way to go that direction. All this optional side stuff is usually in a dark corridor or darkened area which is kind of neat. But even with that I still found myself going in laps. I would just like a basic minimap. You're absolutely right. It is worth exploring the side paths because you do get mid bosses that way. And you're right. They give you some awesome stuff. I don't think you need to do everything. I think this is a game I wouldn't 100% but as I was just casually going through the maps and you're right, they're not huge. I think again it feels like Chrome trigger in terms of scope and size. Right. In terms of the maps. Right. You can see the main path. There's a couple secrets and hidden stuff around. But it's not open world by any stretch and that's totally fine. Yep. With the combat I have I have two gripes. One with the Perry window I'm playing on story mode. I looked it up, I forgot I turned it on to story mode. I found on normal difficulty the the window to parry was Way too tight. Maybe it's because I'm streaming it from my desktop to the Steam deck. That could be a thing.
44:38 --> 44:52 There is a latency there, I've noticed from playing from my PC and then streaming it to the Steam deck. There are things that I normally don't get hit by. And I was getting tossed by and I was like, what the hell? Okay, so I. There has to be some kind of latency with that, which would make sense.
44:53 --> 45:04 There would be at the network level, there's going to be at least a millisecond. And if you're on wireless, we're. I mean, which Steam deck, you're probably talking two to four.
45:04 --> 45:10 And that generally will actually equate badass in my office. And I definitely don't. When I play on my Steam deck.
45:10 --> 45:15 That'Ll equate to probably one frame, right? I mean, yeah. So, yeah.
45:15 --> 47:09 And it is very noticeable when I'm. When I'm playing. But when I switch it to easy difficulty, the parry window is. Is fine. And for the most part, I am nailing the parries when I want to. When I'm familiar with the patterns of the attacks, it's been okay. But it's important because you really want to dodge or, sorry, parry. Because when you parry again, like Chart said, no damage, you also gain an action point, which is how you skills. And you also. If you perfect parry the attack, you get a counter attack, which is crippling. Right. It's. You need. You're meant to parry most things in this game to give yourself an easier time because items are very limited. At least they are right now for me. You only have a handful of healing abilities and like Chart said, you can recover it at the flags, flag poles, but then it resets everything. Right. So it's. I feel like the game wants you to parry and it's. The window is very tight. I almost like in the settings, there's a whole bunch of accessibility options, but there isn't one for parry windows like some other games have. And I feel like that's something I wish they would patch in because I wouldn't mind the monsters to hit for more or take more damage on Easy. It really the only thing that I'm on easy for is for the parry window. That's it. That's the only thing I'm there for. So that. That's one grape that I have. And I have one more grape. Just one more. The game is absolutely beautiful, no question. I'm not disputing that. It looks gorgeous. The issue I have is that I feel like the enemies, especially within a zone, the color palette is very similar, and I find none of the enemies are very memorable. Right. Like, if you guys think back to, like, Crone Trigger especially, yeah, the monster design was pretty iconic for Chrono Trigger, and I can think of many different encounters in that game that are in my brain 20 years later. Whereas this game, 20 years from now, I will not be able to tell you a damn thing about any of the bosses or any of the monsters. I'll have fond memories of this game, but I won't recognize the monsters because they feel too samey. Is is my complaint. They still look good, but the very.
47:09 --> 47:11 Same card has a response.
47:11 --> 50:55 I have a. I have a response. I, I, I, I feel you. I feel that in the first area that I was running around in, in the first couple hours I was playing, I was like, yeah, okay. And then when you get into the world map, which I don't know if you've gotten to the world map, you probably have have. They're. They're still kind of out there running around. You get into the next area, which is kind of that cool little underwater area. They still seem same Z like you said. I think after you leave that and you move forward, things start to really shift. And the store. I mean, it's like the enemies almost shift with the story shifting too. What I, I really dig in the combat itself is the. The ability to target wink points on some of the creatures they have. In the first area, there's these things with basically glowing heads. If you target the glowing head, you get a huge. A huge pickup of damage because your character has the ability to shoot. All of them do right. Either a gun or magic or something. There is. You can. You can tap on the shoulder trigger and it'll go into an aim mode and you can aim your crosshair into something and take out a weak spot which uses ap. And then you can back out and then attack or use a skill if you have enough skills to use ap. Or you can just shoot all your AP points if you want to and then attack. It's really cool how you can stack a lot of the synergies with what the characters can do. You can. There. There's a section where basically you just have to shoot some things because some of the flying monsters are too hard to hit. They dodge all your physical attacks. So you just have to shoot them. Right. So you could feed yourself AP energy drinks, your, your Metaphoria energy drinks, and, and get your AP up and just keep blasting at These things as you go. There's just so much everybody. I'll just premise it with this. Anybody that is like, I don't want to play this because it's turn based. Just because it's turn based doesn't mean it plays like I just press the B button and just hit fight. You have to pay so much attention to what is going on around you. What the, what the enemy is weak to. It's rock, paper, scissors. It's very Mega man in the sense that there are things that things are resistance to and you can nullify the attack altogether or there are things that it is weak to. Like I love burn damage. I think like 90% of the shit I thought is weak to burn damage. So I just catch them on fire and let the fire burn them out while, you know, we're doing all the other stuff. The dodging, the parrying, the shooting. There's so many different aspects that make this so much more than just a turn based RPG that I think even somebody that's, I'll just say Jake, for instance, because, you know, like he says he loved his JRPGs, but every time he pops into one now he just doesn't have the time. Because you get into a fight, you're like, I get to hit X. X, maybe I'll pick a spell, it'll look cool. This one you get to stack. Lunae gets stains that she gets every time she does a magical attack. She's got a basically like an iron cross looking thing that has the pillars that have whatever stain that her magic cast. And if you see that, you can see which of your magics will be more potent with all those stains attached to the enemy. There's some really cool you're paying attention to that isn't just, oh, this hit attack, hit attack, hit attack. Yeah, it's badass. And the timing buttons, just like Mario RPG or Legend of Dragoon for people who played that. That's really cool too because then, because it's not always the same, sometimes it comes up real quick, sometimes it's a little slower. And I'll tell you what, some of these boss parries or some of these, even these enemy parries are like Elden Ring bosses where you're like, oh, he.
50:55 --> 50:56 Hit like the windup.
50:56 --> 51:08 I'm waiting for the wind up to land. There's a guy that takes like 15 minutes later in the game and I'm like, I miss a window every time because I just don't know when it's going to happen.
51:08 --> 51:42 So there's definitely One boss. The one boss I just fought last night, he's one. He's fucking massive, huge. And he has a shield with. With three cans on top. And he just plunks the shield down. And you know he's gonna shoot you and like, just. But. And I know the timing. He hits the entire party, but you can parry it three times or four times, I think it is. But when he puts the shield down, they're not the same rhythm. And it messes me up every damn time. I can parry anything else from him, but that one still messes me up. It's definitely a game where, like, you have to learn the patterns of the basic enemies. And there's not that many attacks for the base enemies. It's like two or three at most.
51:42 --> 51:43 Right.
51:43 --> 52:14 Sometimes I think even maybe just one. So you can learn those. But the bosses, this is a game where if you're doing like a new game plus run or something would be a hell of a fun thing to do because you would know the boss patterns. You'd be ready to parry everything. And that'd be badass because when you get a counterattack, you feel like a fucking master assassin. Like, it's awesome. The camera's dynamic, the damage you do, the numbers go big. It's really cool. And then if you miss a pair, you feel like an idiot. That's why I wish I could play my desktop, because it's just the latency. But yeah.
52:14 --> 52:36 So, okay, so I want to ask a technical question, because you guys keep talking about playing it on your desktop and streaming it via Sunshine, which, for those that are, you know, Steam Deck people, there's a method. If you have a gaming desktop, there's a method. But does this game have any level of Steam Deck playability?
52:36 --> 54:30 Yes, it is. It is yellow on Steam Deck on Steam, but it looks awful. I fired it up, I downloaded it, I played it. The graphics, it doesn't. This game is too beautiful to not play it on the best possible mode you can play it on. It is gorgeous. And when you're playing it, it's like Wukong. It's the same thing. Like, you got. It's so. It's too beautiful to just play this game. Like, just to fire it up and just run it, whatever. It's a little blurry, but it's cool. There is so much going on in the background around you. You're in an underwater area and there are whales swimming over your head. Like, there's so much going on in the background that is so awe inspiring that it's it's almost doing this game. Massive disservice to play this on the best possible level you can play it on. So even on Sunlight Moonlight, I keep telling my wife, I was like, sure, it looks good on 1080 here in the bedroom, but if you watch this in my office, this looks amazing on my curve, my curved monitor. Like, it is just so night and day difference between the two. You can download it, it is playable. It's not terrible to play on. It just. It does. I. Once you see it on there, it's like, you know, your wife makes homemade chocolate chocolate chip cookies in the best in the world and then you go get Chips Ahoy and you're like, yeah, I mean, they're chocolate chip cookies, but they're not homemade. They don't look as good here. I rather, I'd rather do it at that. So, yes, it does have. It does the, you know, the launcher, which. There is no launcher. I don't know why it says launcher may cause interference. And. And the text is too small to read. The text is so goddamn blurry because you can't run it at high res like you can everywhere else. So.
54:30 --> 54:31 Gotcha.
54:32 --> 55:06 I'd hate to see this game on the steam deck at 20fps and try and manage those parries. I just. I just don't see it. I. I didn't even try to install my Steam deck. Not when streaming works good enough. Right, Right. But you know, I, I did try this on because I currently have Game Pass ultimate, so I have cloud streaming, I think. Did I try streaming on this one? It might not have, but if it has cloud streaming, I think that'd be fine. Like it's totally playable, even with latency. But yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't try and play this on a Steam deck or something similar. I'm sure it's fine on console for those who play this on PlayStation, I'm sure, I'm sure it looks and plays great there too.
55:06 --> 55:27 Right. I Playing it through moonlight sunlight on my Steam deck downstairs. Like not on a big screen, just on the Steam deck. Plays great and looks just as good. So when I put it on the big screen and blow it up a little bit, it's still a little. It's a little grainy, just a touch, a little smeared. It doesn't have the definition that it has here in the PC.
55:30 --> 55:47 Nice. Well, gentlemen, we're coming up on an hour and we likely have some long ones coming in the future probably. So do we. Do we want to keep going or should we Kind of call this, put this together rapid.
55:47 --> 57:07 I. I'll. I'll end it with this again. If. If you have any inkling of any desire to try this game, get game pass for a dollar for two weeks. Fire it up. Don't let the turn base thing scare you off. If anything, most of the people that watch or listen or talk to us for the most part all have wanted Final Fantasy to create an old school turn based Final Fantasy 9. Final Fantasy 7. Not the remake like the original. Like a turn based RPG that has a great story with memorable characters and depth to it that just keeps getting deeper. There's mystery in this game. There's some really fun, stupid humorous things that happen between the characters and it is, it's super heavy. It is such a heavy topic for what it is. But God damn, does they. Does it not carry well? It's written super good. Go find, I think his name is Larian something or other on Spotify. Listen to the Expedition 33 soundtrack. If it does not draw a tear out of your eye, you have no soul because it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever written. You can find it on TikTok under every corner. As soon as you get on Claire Talk, you're. It's fucking everywhere. So.
57:08 --> 57:11 Oh, you're in deep now. When you have a hashtag, you know you're screwed.
57:12 --> 58:26 It's. It's big time. Do not let. Do not let turn base scare you off or jrpg. Even the word JRPG scare you off. This is like a motion picture that, that you get to play through with phenomenal voice acting. Like I said, badass characters. Lore to the bones. There's so much lore in this game and they do such a great job. It's not written in the. The descriptions of the weapons or armor. It's. It's right there in the journals that you find throughout the world and in the discussion with the characters to the point where you actually, you can choose to either not speak to the characters or, or you want to speak to the characters like I do. And if you do that, sometimes you get bonuses from doing that. Just give it a try and don't play four hours. Give it a good run. I don't mean finish it, but really give it a good run. I know a lot of people that have said they bounced off of it after two hours or so. That's not enough time to understand the depth and magnitude of this game. I'm an RPG guy. Everybody knows that. This is what I've been waiting to come out for fucking years. This is what I want Final Fantasy 16 to be. So try this. Just try it.
58:27 --> 59:50 Once you have three characters in your party, that's when you realize, oh, this is pretty deep, right? In terms of everybody's unique, all the pictos, all the customization, the comet system really is that fun. And as somebody who tried Sea of Stars and I bounced hard off that game when everything in that game on paper is something I should have loved. But there's just too many waste of time battles. I guess I'll say it for Sea of Stars. There's none of that in this game. Absolutely none of that. It does not feel like a grind fest at all. When I take a side path and there's a mini boss, I want to fight it because it's fun. The combat is very engaging, right? It's more engaging than Sea of Stars, is more engaging than Mario rpg. It just. There's a lot going on and it really does feel like meat to me. In the same vein as combat from Bravely Default, where it's very. Just active and dynamic combat, but it has that, you know, you can see the encounters on them on the screen. Like Chrome Trigger, it has the tight areas that are very well designed. Like Chrono Trigger, it has a very impactful story that definitely hangs with Final Fantasy 6. Like, it has everything that I want in a JRPG and doesn't waste my time. Like, this is. This is something that is very special enough that like I said, I'm playing on game pass and I think I might just pick it up on Steam just so I don't have to rush my free month of game pass to finish it or at least have my save. Because I think there is new game plus. If I'm not wrong in this, there is, but there's.
59:50 --> 01:00:20 The other thing is dungeons that you can do. There's like a whole. There's like a final act cleanup where you can go and do a bunch of extra stuff if you choose to do so you don't have to. But all that stuff is out there for somebody that's like me, that's like, I don't want this to end. I'm loving this game so much. I don't want it to. I. I told my wife it's like, I might start this over. I haven't beaten it yet because I'm having so much fun. I don't want it to stop. This is a game I would like to be 200 hours because it's been so good.
01:00:20 --> 01:01:15 But the other thing I wanted to say real quick is that I think there's a deluxe version for 60 bucks on Steam. I think I saw where you get a couple cosmetics which don't really matter, but for a double. A studio of this size, like, it's not aaa, it's not quite indie. It's kind of like smack dab in the middle. But when somebody makes a game of this level of quality and story and graphics and just music and just everything and just fun. For 50 bucks, vote with your wallet. Like, especially now with the games industry pivoting to higher priced games. I'm not against paying. I'm a little against paying $80 for Mario Kart, but I can see a world where maybe I would spend $80 on a Grand Theft Auto 6 maybe. But I don't want to spend that on every goddamn game that comes out in the next 10 years. I really don't. And I want games that are different price tiers. And this is an amazing experience for $50. Like, this is amazing.
01:01:15 --> 01:01:15 Yeah.
01:01:15 --> 01:01:34 So I want games like this. Vote with your wallet. Buy blueprints, buy this. Buy games that are this price tier if you like them because it doesn't make a difference to studio. So they see there's a market for guys like us who want this for this kind of price. Like, I don't need every game I buy to be open world 100 hours. I really don't want that. So this is. This is awesome.
01:01:35 --> 01:02:11 I want Sandfall to be what Larian Studios was for Baldur's Gate 3 this year in the game awards. That's what I want. I want so much recognition to go to Sandfall for what they've created with. With no ip. I mean, this is their ip. This is their baby. They made this. Now Baldur's Gate. They had stuff to work on. But Balder's absolutely deserved of all the game reward awards that it won't. But I feel like this, this needs to be the game of the year to. To win. I can't think of single and Elden Ring Night Rain hasn't even come out yet, which I don't think will even come close to anything like this.
01:02:11 --> 01:02:12 This we're gonna have a.
01:02:13 --> 01:02:20 Is my game of the year. I don't even have to have a game of the year episode. This is going to be it. I can't think of anything else. I'm gonna beat this game out. I can't.
01:02:20 --> 01:02:22 All right, you heard it here. You heard it here first, folks.
01:02:22 --> 01:02:23 Yeah.
01:02:23 --> 01:02:31 So if December comes, call me out as a liar because I cannot imagine anything being better than this this year. I can't imagine.
01:02:31 --> 01:02:57 There's been a lot of great games this year. And like, if for anybody who's maybe jumped off of Game Pass last year, I know I did. I don't pay for all the time. I only pay for when there's games on there that want to play. And this month alone, you can play south of Midnight, which is. Which is fun. Blueprints is on there. You know, I love blueprints. This is on there. Call of Duty, the new Doom, which came out today or sorry, got announced today or sorry, got reviews today, May.
01:02:57 --> 01:02:59 15, it comes out next Thursday.
01:02:59 --> 01:03:22 All on Game Pass for whatever the price is for Game Pass is insane. If you're somebody like me who plays games and bounces very easily, you couldn't be happier, more happy right now than to play all these games. So it's really interesting time for games. Game of the Year will be very fun this year. There's a lot of. There's more stuff this year than I expected. I thought last year was good and the year before that was even greater, but, man, it's gonna be tough this year.
01:03:22 --> 01:03:36 There's just so much things that Jake is. Is always certain that the next year will never be better, and it always is. And every game he plays is Game of the Year. Sorry, Sorry. Every game he finishes is Game of.
01:03:36 --> 01:03:41 The Year, but every game he plays could be Game of the Year.
01:03:41 --> 01:03:42 Could be.
01:03:42 --> 01:03:54 Yeah. Every game is both Game of the Year and also hot trash. That's kind of my. My two things. And there's stuff of this game that's hot trash. Mostly the Perry Window. But I think it's duality going to be somebody's game of the year. Yeah. The duality of me.
01:03:55 --> 01:04:51 All right, well, I think we're probably at a place we can call this one Done and Dusted. It sounds like I need to try this game. For those that are unaware, we're members of a network called the Superpod Network, created by Superpod Podcast and superpodnetwork.com a bunch of other podcasts. The three do experience Superpod, a bunch of others. Our website, pressbeedocancel.com or pressbee.org come tell us in our discord or comment here, wherever you're listening. Probably. Probably YouTube will see your comments if you comment on Spotify. We probably won't, but you can comment there. I don't. I don't know.
01:04:51 --> 01:04:52 That's probably why we can't see.
01:04:54 --> 01:05:18 I don't fucking know. Okay, but. And if you. If you enjoyed this, please like it on. On wherever you are, subscribe on PR on YouTube. It helps us out. It's free. And we would love your participation in our network as well, chatting with us, etc, and. Yeah. Anything else?
01:05:18 --> 01:05:29 Gentlemen, go play this game. I'm. I'm playing it when we're done with this. Like, I'm done. Let's go kill. Let's go explore. Let's go expedition.
01:05:30 --> 01:05:30 All right.
01:05:30 --> 01:05:33 Clarinet. Oboe. Expedition 45.
01:05:34 --> 01:05:38 Exactly. All right, gentlemen. Appreciate y' all.
01:05:38 --> 01:05:39 And for those who come after.
01:05:59 --> 01:06:15 Sam.