Are 'Marathon' and 'Pokémon Pokopia' What Sony and Nintendo Needed? | Button Mash

on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name is Matt Bellenium, founding partner at Puck,

“and the writer of the "What I'm Hearing" newsletter, and with my show The Town, I bring you”

the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood Insiders, tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show is cancelled overnight, which streamers on the brink of collapse, and which executives

on the hot seat. Disney Netflix, who's up, down, and who'll never eat lunch in this town again.

Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For all things, fandom. I am Ben Lambert, Senior Editor, and Voice of Video Games at the Ringer with that doesn't sound too self-aggrandizing. And today, button mesh becomes a marathon, not a sprint. As we discuss Sony's big new live service bet on Bungie, elongated, and initially, much maligned online shooter, Marathon. We'll share our impressions

of the game. We'll discuss how it fits into the ever-shifting live service landscape. RIP, high-guards, we hardly knew you, and we'll examine whether there's actually a little life left in the console worse. All of which will be a prelude to a Pokémon conversation. As Charles Ply and more from the verge joins me to discuss Pokémon, Pocopia, and the 30th anniversary, and future of the franchise. But before I welcome a second Charles to the

Ringerverse, let's head to Tau City 4, and welcome our runners for this first segment. In Marathon, you spend a lot of time in Trio's, and so we will today. Backing me up, and potentially

“turning on me to take my loot. Are the ringer's deputy artliids met, Jigglypuff James?”

Hello, Matt. I would never turn on you, Ben. And I humbly accept the title of Jigglypuff.

You are cute and cutly. Also, Spawning In is Senior Audio Producer and Midnight Boy's Sativist Steve Archias, Omen, Hello Steve. I'm unfamiliar with that Pokémon, but I will be saying my name constantly throughout this podcast. So, I could be excellent. Fellas, this is a momentous time. Hat on the heels of Resident Evil Requiem, which has deservedly sold 5 million copies in one week. We had Marathon and Pocopia drop on the same day. And that was an all. Move over

new genics. There's a new king of steam roguelikes, and it's slay the spire too. We don't always cover early access releases with Hades 2. For instance, we waited for the full PC and switch release, but more than 400,000 people are playing slay the spire too as we speak. So, we may have to adjust that policy at some point. Anyway, with those three plus smaller games that are quite intriguing, like Esoteric Ed, and Planet of Lana 2, and Scott Pilgrim EX. March is coming in hot, not to mention

all the intriguing trailers and demos out of steam next best, and an enticing Nintendo indie world showcase Matt mini-shooted ventures. The year 2024 game I felt worst about not playing at

the time has finally come to consoles. And I will rectify that oversight fully to leave. So,

I wish we could catch them all, and maybe we will eventually, but we have accepted a different contract for today. We have been waiting quite a while for Marathon. Not the 1994 bungee shooter, but the brand new one, which is a player versus player versus environments, online multiplayer, first person shooter. This one was announced about three years ago, originally if slated to release last year, until the game got flamed in a closed alpha test and delayed indefinitely

for until it turns out this week. So, hundreds of thousands of people played it concurrently in a server slam that wrapped up a few days before the full debut, and now it's here on PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series with full crossplay and cross progression support. Guys, big game, big studio, big stakes for Sony, considering the company's live service struggles, the decline of Destiny 2 since Sony acquired bungee, the general skepticism about live

service shooters in the wake of Concord and High Guard, and the bad buzz about Marathon last year. This is not a free to play shooter, like High Guard, it's 40 bucks for the standard addition 60 for Deluxe, so more of the Helldivers 2 model or the Concord model for that matter. So,

“based on what we've seen and played so far, is Marathon a good game? Will it be the hit Sony needs?”

Or is it destined to end up on the live service scrap heap? What say you Steve? I barely know any of those answers, but it makes me feel comforting to know that even Sony didn't know that even making this game. Is it a good game? Yes, is it gonna last? Lord, I do not know.

probably best measured in the short term, because we only have to go by the short term now.

With the high guards of the world, being less than, like, about a month's worth in its lifespan,

“I think Bungie really needs to be paying the most attention to this game at the beginning,”

and addressing every single thing that it could possibly do moment to moment. And from what I've played and what I've enjoyed, it seems to be doing that. Do I know if this game is for me? Actually, probably not, but I've enjoyed what I've had, and it's mainly just a mental exercise. Matt, am I crazy? Or is this kind of just gonna be something that we that we acts at the end of the year? Yeah, it's hard to say so far, but I think that based on the debut, there was some post going

around about how the current steam users were about dead even first latest fire, too,

and marathon at launch, which is not where you'd want, ideally, marathon to debut, I think, given the budget and the time it's taken to make this. But ultimately, you know, with high guard, which came out the gate as a free to play, so it is not exactly apples to apples here. Big numbers of the start fast drop off. We're gonna have to see in the next few days what those player accounts look like with marathon. Again, if we talked about this on the pod, I feel like

the $40 entry point for an online shooter. If you're dropping $40 to play marathon, you're not gonna give it up the next day, right? You're at least going to put some time into

this purchase you've made. So that should at least help keep the player count going for a good

amount of time. I feel like this game plays very well. My problem with it is that I simply don't like extraction shooters. And everything about this game aside from that, I'm into it feels great to play. I do like the art style quite a lot. I actually really like the world that they've created here in the lore that they sprinkle throughout. And I'm going to keep putting some time into this,

“even though I'm not really into extraction shooters, because I think that the loop of the game”

is quite good the way you're given missions and you complete the missions and you unlock new levels of gear. And I'm finding it definitely something I want to come back to, which is not something I could say at the launch of High Guard. How about you Ben? Yeah, I think we're hedging because it's so hard to predict whether a game will be a success. A game that's built to be a long-term success. It's very difficult to say in the early days whether it will prove to have staying power.

However, you can sometimes predict whether it will be in an enormous flop. At least I think Merathon has appointed that fate thus far. Concord and High Guard are different stories, as you said, one is free to play one. They were not in that marathon. Yes, it's true. I mean, I don't know that you could call Concord a sprint at any point either really. It was sort of shuffling from the starting gate essentially. But the difference there, because of the pricing,

is that really nobody ever played Concord, like the peak concurrent user. It was laughable, right, the count. Whereas plenty of people played High Guards, thanks in part to the blessing and a curse publicity that it got at the game awards. But almost immediately everyone deserved it, right? But one way or another, if no one plays your game, or a lot of people try it out and decide they don't like it. Well, that's going to be a death now for you and it's very tough to come back

from that. And it seemed last year like Merathon might end up in that boat because there was such a

“backlash to the gameplay, the arts to everything really about the closed beta. And I think to Sony's”

credit to bungee's credit, they went back to the drawing board a bit. It's not a completely different game. But I think they took that feedback. Something that High Guard was lacking, right, because High Guard did not do broad public testing in that way, didn't get that kind of feedback. And Merathon did incorporate it while still sort of keeping what makes Merathon distinct. And given the fairly warm reception to the server slim, even though it had to overcome that initial resistance

just based on last year and the taste that was still lingering in a lot of gamers' mouths, that and the initial sales figures and player accounts seem fairly strong. You know, it's tracking behind Arc Raiders, which obviously has been a huge hit and has only picked up Steam no pun intended over time. So no shame in being a bit behind Arc Raiders, which was a ton of hype for that, too, in a long runway leading up to it. But there's enough of a player base here and enough

huge hit that Sony and bungee need, that is very much still up in the air. And you mentioned,

“you're just not an extraction shooter guy, Matt, for anyone who has not played extraction”

shooters before, can you just kind of summarize the core gameplay loop here? What is it like to play around at Merathon? Yeah, you drop in and you're looking around for loot and you're trying to complete missions. And at some point, if you're looking to get to an extraction point, activate that extraction point and wait the amount of time necessary for you to be extracted. And at that point, you get to retain all of the items that you have gathered during that particular run. And if at

any point you die before extraction, you drop absolutely everything that you're carrying. So I don't

love that as someone who was frustrated by merely weapon durability in Breath of the Wild. Yeah,

big boo. Yeah, I'd like to have a thing and keep it. And with extraction shooters for me personally, is there is there any joy really in getting a good weapon knowing that at some point, you're going to lose it, right? Because you're not going to stay alive forever.

“Okay, isn't that what makes all things in life precious that it's time on this Earth is finite?”

Yeah, we must appreciate every moment and every weapon draft. Look, I already have to deal with, you know, my t-shirts slowly fading over time in real life. Let me go into a video game. This has been and keep something. Wow. Yeah, that's that's your. So this is the fun

process of childless men right here. We're worried about our t-shirts. I'm worried about my t-shirts.

Hey, I have a child. I'm worried about my t-shirts too, but sorry of the two of the two childless men on this one right now. It's a good reflection of mortality. You can just track it by how you're t-shirts. Right. So for times, we all look great. We all look as great as we ever did. But our t-shirts would be sure. Yeah, on the screen. Yeah. But I think of extraction shooters had the format where like if you extract once, you get to keep any gear that you've extracted once with,

right? And so let's say you die. You just drop the stuff that you've gathered in that run. That would, that would be enough to get me in. That's, they're still stakes there. I still don't want to die because I want to keep my new loot. But at the same time, I don't have to worry about like dropping all my most prized possessions on the ground. That would work for me. But plenty people really enjoy the extraction shooters as they are. I wouldn't say it's a majority of people.

It's definitely a niche within the shooter genre. And I have long thought it odd for bunch of to be taking their incredibly high profile project into a niche within the shooting community. But, you know, it's working for our creators. Yeah. In that case, at least it can be a big niche. Now, the question I guess is, well, is that niche films? Now, yes, is the need for an extraction shooter that's a little more streamlined than, say, escape from Tarkov. That's a little easier to

adopt. Is that now filled with our creators? Can you convince people to switch? The interesting thing is that from the data I've seen, yes, there's some overlap between players of Marathon and Archgraders. But it's actually a bigger overlap between players of Destiny 2 and our creators, which makes sense. Obviously, if you're a bunch of loyalists and you stuck with Destiny all these years, then you're going to check out the new game from the same studio. But that's a very different kind of

game. And it's a very different kind of gameplay loop and onboarding process. And so to you, if you're expecting more bungee more Destiny, now maybe if you're stuck with Destiny all these years, you might not necessarily want exactly more Destiny. It might be time for something new. But

“will that be a shock to the system? And will it be a good shock? Or will it be a bad shock? I think”

that also remains to be safe. Commend all of that. And I certainly think that this game can have projected success amongst the people that really become loyalists to it. Because this, again, is a big swing for the likes of bungee because if they demand a success, if Sony desperately needs a success after the Concord Blunder and the very, very waning free to pay and public service games space, this needed to be something that is both accessible cheap and coming at a premium

experience. Extractions shooters are very hard to sell that. And in all of this entirety of this podcast, we have not said the word menus yet. And that is a core part of what you are going to be looking at for the majority of this time. The gunplay is wonderful. I really have a hard time with the art style, but the thing that you are going to be learning the most is how to manage and value your

adapt to, not just for this game, but extraction shooters in general. But to its credit, this game

actually taught me how to think properly for an extraction shooter. Because I love rogue likes. I love things that kind of like progress incrementally and sort of like runs and sort of incremental gameplay moments where you're spending 20 minutes at a time on a run or you're spending small parts of your game, just setting things up, going as quickly and efficiently as you can, just to stop and reset and reassess at the end of those things. Instead of thinking about, okay, I'm going to

gather all of this loot, that's very high risk. I am likely to die or be killed by a real-life player or an AI that is no joke and quite hard in this game. But instead getting sort of like three loadouts, prioritizing quests and whatever you get at the end of that finish line is just something that you keep and then start over from zero again and see what else you can like scrap along with it. That loot is good. I think what is going to come down to long-term success for this game is

probably making sure that that is reflected in the end game, making end game objectives and things that can like broaden your actual character loadout optimization is going to be big for keeping people on this and I don't know what a $40 premium package long-term looks like for this and I think that's part of why we have to head here is that we haven't actually seen the end game. We know there's a roadmap. We know there are seasons, et cetera and it's not going to be the destiny to

model of paid expansions but we don't know exactly what that's going to look like and can they keep

“up the cadence and can that keep the people coming back. I was going to joke Matt that you should just”

get good if you don't want to lose your loot but this is a pretty unforgiving game even by the standards of extraction shooters. I mean even compared to our creators which is not for the fate of

heart always but this game I think it's faster pace there's more of an emphasis on PvP because the

Matt's are smaller and so it does funnel you into firefights a bit more and I do think that it's more challenging and there's a little less sort of social cooperation at least so far again we'll see how this all evolves and it plays very differently if you're playing with friends with people you know everyone's on mic you're all cooperating different experience than you're just dropping solo with some strangers obviously but I do think that it is kind of harder core even than our

creators which is another reason why I wonder whether people will be put off by it if they're coming from another Bunchy game because in a lot of respects of course it feels very much like a Bunchy game

just in all the good ways right like the shooting is perfect. I mean Bunchy always nails the

feel of shooting with halo back in the day with destiny and destiny too shooting is always fun. The catch I guess the paradox here is that you actually shouldn't shoot that much right like it's actually

“kind of bad to be shooting a lot which there is a conflict there because that's what I want to do”

because it's just so inherently appealing and feel so familiar as someone who's some however many hours into halo and destiny over the years but you actually shouldn't be running and gunning you should be sneaking right you should be saving your ammo because there's not a lot of it and yeah you're you're not a bullet sponge here you know and there are also some restrictions on movement for instance I think the movement feels fine but it can be finicky by design in some ways where

if you sprint a lot well it is a marathon not a sprint right because you quickly you overheat and then you're just kind of moving sluggishly for a while and if you fly in versus a traditional stamina bar yeah and if instead of drowning it fills up slide at the wrong time then you're just sort of hopelessly exposed there's a lot of fall damage which is weird oh my god you fall like 10 feet and your health bars like a half yeah you are not a super soldier here you are not

master cheap I mean of course there's some fall damage there too but I feel like we've trended away from fall damage mostly and this is like a really punishing kind of fall damage I've just gotten hurt and wondered like what did someone hit me what happens no grabbing it so yeah there's a lot of like it feels superficially like a bungee game and there is that kind of core bungee gameplay shooting appeal and yet it is not at all like the bungee games that you played

“before I think there's a steep learning curve yes well as you both were sort of alluding to in”

different ways I found that most of my deaths in this game early on were like me leaning over some loot trying to make sense of what visually was coming into my eyes yes because it's not at

quickly learn okay they've color coat it stuff in terms of rarity but you also have like a whole

“bunch of slots in your buildout to fill up and it's not super obvious at first what fits where and”

for which classes and what's better than what and which resources am I going to need to level what up and how much of that do I need and my inventory is not super big so I can't just kind of grab everything and meanwhile ammo scarcity as you mentioned really is a thing in this game yeah the onboarding is it's a problem right like the tutorial is entirely just not alternate yeah no so I do worry that like you know marathon could in theory ramp up over time but I also have concerned

that by the time new people jump into this the people who are going to be fully adjusted to this game and understand all the mechanics are going to be in a position to absolutely wipe newcomers at a later point and I worry that it's only going to get harder and harder for people

to jump into as time goes on yes the first match I jumped into after the tutorial which is very brief

as you said Steve one guy was kind of carrying me and another new but was also kind of being a bit mean to us you know he was just like what are you guys doing you're just running around it's like this is my first match you know they didn't tell me what to do I don't know how to equip my games like two days old yeah like give me a break here buddy but yeah that is a bit of an issue at it's hard for me not to just loot everything you know I just want to take it all which I do

in Pokemon Pocopia but it's not as easy in marathon unfortunately now I will give the game this it's

“it's distinctive I think for better and worse probably which was the issue or one of the issues”

with concords it's like this is not a bad game but it doesn't stand out in any way it feels like a

million other hero type shooters that you've seen before people set aside about high card right yeah

and so you want to stand out and marathon does stand out it feels like something that you haven't played before both in terms of the game play but especially the aesthetics the style the menus the fonts the many many fonts so many fonts and I saw people have been referring to this as font Slop which look we're calling everything Slop at this point in fact I saw a commenter on the marathon subreddit wrote someone referred to good games as quality Slop a few weeks back okay

all right I need to have to need to respond yeah but look it's it's wacky you know there's just all kinds of colors and different menus and like the ways that you interact with them is not entirely clear and I have to confess something this is kind of embarrassing but I got stuck on the software license agreement I did do I was like I can't get past the license agreement right like I couldn't scroll and like it didn't populate because I feel like it might need to be like a

“server connection as to see whether or not you actually read it and then it has to remember the”

approved button I know it's skill issue I guess but what you guys were playing this you on PC I was playing on PS5 and the weird thing was that like you couldn't just accept you couldn't just use like the D-pad to go to accept and then press X or whatever like it wouldn't accept you had to move the joystick and like manually put it on put the cursor on the accept and then hold it down it was like I didn't even occur to me to do that I actually I quit the game like I went back to

the home screen thinking that it was some sort of bugger subject I was like oh this isn't in a

suspicious starts to my playing experience I can't get past the license agreement this has never

happened to be before but that was kind of indicative and in my defense I did go to the Reddit just to see if anyone else was having this issue like am I uniquely incapable of preceding past the license agreement and I did see some other threads including one that was like am I the only one who can't accept the limited software license accepted and then you were not a server or man because I'm with you and we're all together so there was some nice bonding in that thread very

supportive but yeah that's kind of indicative of the menu experience when it's just like the basic interactions but also just like knowing what to do and what goes where and how to do my load out and like and the first time I played a mission I hadn't accepted a contract which was another thing that the guy was given me grief force like why are you guys having a contract like I don't what's a contract I don't it didn't tell me about a contract so it's great your

tutorial your full user is a guy just bullying you bet that was actually more helpful than the

a lot of that right and you know maybe that's just an hour or two and then you get your sea legs under you and you know what you're doing but there are a lot of people who if you don't actually use them into the game they're just gonna go elsewhere now maybe not as quickly as they did with high guard because they're invested you know some costs they put 40 bucks in this thing

I'm gonna give it a shot but it isn't obstacle because as we always say crowded marketplace

“people play the same games every year you have to do something special to convince them to try”

something new yeah the contract thing is kind of I know you got bullied for not having a contract which by the way these are just missions that you explore your app will employ you load out better thought I've also found a little bit of an issue where the three people on your team just have entirely different contracts and then it's sort of like a power struggle at the jump of like you know if you're not playing with people you came in with who you can talk things out with

you might just have a snare or we're like all three people want to go and completely different directions at the start and that kind of sucks and then you're completing one mission for someone and then maybe they don't really have any interest in helping you get your contract. It's just very common like you know this is why you play with with friends ideally rather than randos and you don't have to deal with the general yes it falls of randos who even compared to

hell at the rescue and in our theater way from you it feels a little more adversarial or less less cooperative and the thing that our greatest has going for is because it's been such a hit and its community has actually been a rather friendly one and a very like sort of okay we're just killing we're just killing the arcs we're just getting our loot and from my perspective the unlike who he has been more favoring on the cooperation aspect of that game rather than an adversarial

I take your stuff I see you I kill you yeah but the problem to me with marathon is that you

could never trust the community that just came from destiny to be cooperative and you certainly

can't trust randoms that you get on a certain quest that don't even share your same objectives to be cooperative and so if that's if that's the thing that bungee is not going to focus on in the build of this game it has to be with either solo runs or hard requirement you just got to play with people that you know and trust and that was what was so refreshing initially about hell divers is that this is player versus environment we're all in the same boat

we're pulling together we are trying to preserve super earth and the baddies are the robots and bugs and the player character is like at least powerful enough to go off on their own to do something depending on your difficulty which again is selected for you by you in the beginning of that so that's very different and I think that the main thing that I think that this game is going to struggle with is keeping console players versus PC players because again my biggest complaint about

this I played the server slam on PS5 and then I played the retail game on PC the server slam was very interesting on console because I've hated when bungee has done this and that's the

incorporation of cursors in console games it never ever works and in a game where you are navigating

“menus 30% of the time that is horrendous it works in destiny because all you need to do is”

equip gun equip shield equip this you are moving and clicking and dragging things all over the place and that really only works on PC and that to me is probably the biggest thing that this game has going against it for a long term because I will not continue this on console I have to play this on PC Matt I'm assuming you're the same well anytime you have a PC and console cross-play situation I think it is a bad idea because a mouse is inherently easier to target someone with

than a controller on average so yeah the cursor thing is is definitely annoying and there have been other games like quarterlands four recently that have sort of incorporated that cursor thing rather than building it for a console they just kind of adapt the PC interface and that is quite awkward so yeah I'm not gonna play this on PS5 for those two reasons but also I just want to really quickly touch on something you guys mentioned about it being you know more confrontational

“than our creators I think part of the reason for that is that when you drop into marathon I don't”

think it is clear enough to the players which entities are NPCs and which are our actual other players outside of like literally just standing in place waiting for you to shoot them and then

everyone just sort of starts playing the game as I'm gonna shoot anything that's not my guys instances yeah I do think it's it's almost like an inversion of the destiny experience where you

join at first and it does kind of hold your hander there's a lot of loot you know your you're

spoiled with loot early on and then later the higher levels and the end game and the raids it gets more complex and it feels like this game starts that way and then maybe gets a little more

“explicable over time but it is intense and it's anxiety inducing and it's faster and scarier I think”

then our creators which can be underving in its own right so it's exciting like I definitely had moments I mean maybe the highlight of any extraction shooters that moment when you're just desperately trying to survive until the extraction goes through right and you know you're down and you're crawling around and there's not enough time to be revived and you're just watching that clock

tick down and hoping, hoping against hope that you will actually survive long enough to be able

to keep your loot so that that entire time was not wasted right so when that works it's extremely exciting and there's enough here to make me think that the bones are solid there's also there's more lore than in arc Raiders which has kind of a tantalizing setting but very little meat on those bones at this stage or in the early days just very little plot whereas in this game there's actually a surprising amount of plot that's kind of parceled out as you go now as much as I like they put

out at a pretty impressive cinematic trailer that just wedded my appetite for gosh I kind of like to see more about this world in the story granted I immediately just was lost by Destiny 2's lore and of course the more complicated it got in the more expansions there were in the earlier ones were gated so you couldn't play them anymore I had no idea what was happening but this setting and this universe compelling enough to me that I can't help but hope that there would be perhaps

a single player campaign at some point that we might go from a Titanfall to a Titanfall to type things but maybe that's just old single player attached gamer in me just hiding for what we used to have and what we still have but you know this is not that kind of game and that's okay there are many types of games it's fascinating there's actually a pretty good and solid list of voice actors in this game that are doing great work for the amounts of like lore for the different types of

contracts and companies and corporations that you can occupy and the narrative is a wild sort of trippy thing to know that you the player are this uploaded consciousness that can infiltrate and use

different sorts of robots basically to land on your behalf and control with your uploaded brain

“and that's why you can be infinitely disposable and read disposable and the lore to me is”

something that actually helped me kind of divorce myself from the moment to moment I need to collect all loot and kind of worry about every single thing that I'm preserving and I started to play this not like a loot or sugar but like a immersive sim where I'm taking my time I'm kind of being a lot more stealthy I'm being a bit more pragmatic into where I'm going and every room that I'm inside I'm looking at and I'm trying to discern what happened in this room what does this

room mean and what what the loot placed in this in this place means but to the contrary of that I am completely unemerced and unimpressed because it's a very interesting feet of art direction but the world is completely unappealing to me from an artistic standpoint because of the fact that like I just see this place and it looks like it's made of legos it's made of colorful shiny, blocky little spheres and I'm not really comfortable or immersed in something that I'm

“engaged with I think that like a single player or a more in-depth lore drop can make more sense”

with this but again I just kind of feels like a little floppy it feels like a lot is just being thrown at me for the sake of looking unique and I don't want to seem to pessimistic about that because there's a lot of work that went into stealing this art I'm sorry making this art and to know that I was sorry the artist that was like accredited and like threatened to litigation against them is now credited in the game as an art consultant so it's good to know that that's been both

settled and I hope that they got their money but to me this is a wild swing for a game that has to look unique and has to stand out and if it does not grab you people are going to immediately

agree? I actually disagree a little bit in terms of the art style I I think we both agree that it

is distinct I however enjoy it okay I just like looking at the decisions they've made with this artistically a lot of people have trouble with the menus looking a certain way I just really appreciate the entire visual style being presented here but I will say to your point though

“I think some of the upgrades like you can unlock weapon skins which is something that's usually”

I look forward to in a game but in a game where you're kind of overwhelmed by a lot of colors and visuals like you get a new scan and you're like no one's going to notice this there's like right it's like and how often am I going to be holding that gun anyway because I've got to pick up

40 guns and decide which one is the best one yeah so every 20 is around you may pick up this gun

that you got a weapon skin for that no one will notice that the weapon skin is different because the the visual noise around each weapon is extreme so there are definitely drawbacks to this art style again no one's ever going to they have those little charms you can attach to like your gun and they're so tiny and like stickers you can put on and it's just like no one has time to process this information visually like ever and so that does make a lot of the upgrades feel pretty

underwhelming and it's interesting like I get that player skins are still somewhat appealing but anything beyond that is just kind of a mood point for me in this game well at least no one says that wizard came from the moon so that's maybe an improvement but I do think look it's uh there's something here and I hope that this game gets a runway and gets a launch push and gets to evolve

and find its people and that's always the concern really I think that it's divisive enough and

and not for everyone enough that I do have some doubts about it being the enormous hit that everyone is still seemingly banking on when they make a game like this and every now and then that happens if you have the IP and your mouth or rivals or if you're our creators but can you keep doing

“that and we just know I mean these games are dropping like flies and you have to be extremely”

lucky even with all the advantages of Sony marketing and bungee's reputation and built in player base and everything to compel people and it's divisive enough polarizing enough that I think that a lot of people will like it and continue to play it as long as it's supported but will it be enough people to get Sony to keep the lights on to justify the investment that they made in bungee and I wish that we could just talk about the game as a game without talking about it

as a business story that's that's the downside of live service games because you know every game look it's art and commerce and uh everyone who makes any game is trying to make some sort of money and manage to keep making games and stay employed but with live service games because you are banking on and and aiming for that large audience then we end up hyper fixating on steam db and

“everyone is looking in real time as the player counts drop and meanwhile you have”

slay the spire too just handing marathons as to it and everyone is loving pacopia and so there's already a lot of anxiety and there's a lot of doomerism about oh here we go again we just almost assume that a live service game will flop now and we're pleasantly surprised if it doesn't some people are bracing with sort of an eager anticipation because they don't like live service games and they don't want companies to keep pushing them on us and so they're

almost rooting for the failure if not necessarily rooting for the developers to be laid off other people are hoping that the game will be good and successful but either way we're able to sit there on the edges of our seeds ringing our hands hoping that it's not another concord or it's not another high guard and I really feel for high guard developers right the remaining developers the ones who weren't laid off just crunched to push out a big final update

that not many people will play because the game is shutting down next Thursday March 12th fewer than 50 days after launch that that it did at least last a good deal longer than Concord and what's tragic with these games is that when they fail they're just gone they're just wiped away from the internet you know unless you can maybe keep a non-line on a private server or something from a game preservation standpoint it's not great and just from appreciating these

people's work and the labor that went into years of these things a disappointing single player game at least lives on you can continue to purchase it it will just sit on steam not selling many copies but you can find it as long as you'd like to whereas here it feels like the cycle has

and reportedly pulled out when it became clear very quickly that this was not very viable

and Tencent's now being pressured by the government to digest its U.S. assets et cetera so there's no time for a rebound you know there's no time for a real fix or narrative change Allah cyberpunk or nomin sky or even fallout 76 where something launches in a disappointing state but then is it eventually able to write the ship now maybe Sony and Bungie they will actually have that funding and there's been a big enough investment that they will give this game

a very long chance to find its audience and build its audience and I hope that that's the

“case but that's why you know on day one everyone is just looking through their steepled fingers”

at the player counts and I wish that we did not have to greet these games this way it's very clear

that this format of games is wildly over-invested in and I never want to root for the downfall

of any game because that's starting to play with people's livelihoods and it's getting more and more volatile as the years go by that these models are destined to fail and only is it a miracle that it will last and it's definitely something that that I hope that didn't have to be the thing that we need to talk about every time a game comes out like this to know that marathon is kind of be the thing that you bet the farm on with Disney and Bungie because Destiny didn't pan out

that doesn't encourage any confidence in the idea that the future of Bungie could even rest remotely on this game because I'll never have that to level of confidence in any game to come out

“like that yeah I certainly hope that this game is a successful and B can be taken as a lesson to”

know that there's a marginal investment in games like this that can happen as long as you in bet like are not embattled with a community that wants to keep it that way the reason that like the fallout 76 is of the world and even the elder scrolls online is of the world at both Bethesda games are very reliant and engaged enough with their communities because they encourage the modding scene or because they want to make sure that that player based isn't pissed off at

least enough to want to keep coming and they want to put in the work to even at a loss to come back to all of that because that's an both an active business and fate for that community and I hope that while marathon is I hope destined to last for quite a long time that sentiment is going to be trumping the corporate boards and bottom lines for any sort of something on the Dow Exchange market or you know like the numbers are numbering too on this might be a short term

pile up problem because these games aren't going to get greenlit as easily now now that people have seen just the wreckage right and so it's the surveillance cycle. Yes it's actually a full day so long for these things to play out right it's you know Barack Obama's analogy of just like turning the aircraft carrier that's kind of the way that it works with game development and you know

“I think this will find a dedicated audience even if it's not an enormous one I don't think it's”

going to be a dead game or a ghost town anytime soon. The last point to make about this I think is are we reviving the console wars suddenly like we might revive a down teammate in marathon because Sony seems content to keep putting live service games like helldrivers and marathon on all platforms but according to various reports including one at Bloomberg from our buddy Jason Shire,

Sony is pulling back on bringing first party single player games like Ghost of Yote and Saros to PC

partly because PC releases haven't sold super well for them lately maybe because the timelines have been kind of inconsistent the messaging around when and whether these games will be available but also because of some concerns about undercutting exclusivity which we just go from from one extreme to another right where we're not putting anything on any other system and then suddenly it's invoked to put everything everywhere because you want to reach more people and then it turns out

well wait maybe if we put it everywhere then they won't buy our thing who possibly could have seen that coming right so perhaps not coincidentally Xbox just reaffirmed its plans for future Xbox hardware which is codenamed project helix and this is of course before the inevitably incredibly confusing actual names is revealed but it will according to new CEO Ashashama lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games does this and also the steam machine

which will be coming sometime this year does this maybe put a scare into Sony and say well actually we don't want people to play our most prized single player experiences on our rivals and maybe

end of this conflict too soon yeah Sony woke up and realized hey maybe we shouldn't be copying

“what Xbox is doing um in fact do the opposite and this probably a good metric for success yeah”

you know just follow Nintendo's leads and don't let anyone play any of your stuff on any other system effort just about and litigate the absolute life out of be that too yes and it's interesting because Capcom which we hailed for its decisions last week and which was once more identified with console releases just announced added investor Q&A that it's thriving on PC that about half of Capcom sales these days are on PC they project that percentage to grow recommend how to huge series

record steam concurrent player count but of course that's a developer and publisher it's in

their interests to get their software everywhere but if you are still a hardware manufacturer

and Microsoft still insists that it is then you do want to sell those systems and why are people

“gonna purchase those systems it's because they can't get what you're offering anywhere else I think”

Sony's making a good decision here for themselves it's obviously not ideal for gamers but I think that you do need to make sure that the PlayStation brand is continues to be associated with exclusives as PC gaming gets more and more popular you need people to associate PlayStation with like the next insomniac game that's coming out you know that is primarily where people are gonna be playing the next GTA since that's not coming to PC at launch it's a good decision

for them and I also think that Xbox making their next platform essentially a PC with backwards compatibility is also a good choice they are indeed going to commit to another hardware generation rather than taking all that money and just throwing it into various AI footholds which I thought is a possibility but as we've talked about on this platform I just really want to see Xbox what they need to do is just create an operating system for their next Xbox that

somehow makes PC gaming viable on a TV screen without a mouse and keyboard on your lap and that continues to be a huge hurdle that the makers of windows should be capable of but again have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they are unlikely to be able to accomplish. I for one plan on leveraging AI to improve this podcast I don't know about you Matt so don't even say Steve I don't I won't I don't I didn't mean anything that I just said

anyway we will talk about Pokemon Pocopia I want to get to that to segue to that segment I just want to debut a new mini segment that we're calling rage quit because you know that if you think of rage you think of Benlinburg and I'm constantly simmering and smoldering with that rage and today I have a very brief rant for you not that we haven't rented before on butt mesh but now we

have been floking linburg yeah here I come we need to chill out about first stills that are released

about game adaptations is this this is the godfather people need to chill out people need to relax instead of keeping to conclusions about a single steel promotional image fans are freaking out about this one little glimpse that Amazon put out of the god of war adaptation and this is not the first time but it is maybe the most egregious time all this is is a picture of cratos and atrius just like in a forest just standing there while atrius is trying to shoot his bow and cratos is

standing there with his hands on his knees watching his own boy shoot the bow that's that's it you wouldn't think that this would provoke a particularly strong reaction either way but legions of people and I I'm aware that's on the internet the most vocal voices get amplified and it might just be a minority a subset of people who are pissed about things but they're the loudest and then that gets aggregated and we do posts everywhere that are like the internet is

mad about whatever and then you embeds five tweets or something as if that's representative of what everyone thinks but it does seem like people are for some recent upset about the way that this image looked and I don't get it did it look great no I guess I did it change my expectations for this series in any way no because it is a single still image I don't know what people were expecting

“I guess they don't think that Ryan Hurst looks like the cratos they remember which he isn't because”

he's a human being and not an animated character so it's just I guess people have said that the

remember seeing on screen so we get Talon Vincent as atrius and Ryan Hurst is cratos and I guess

“people think it looks like cratos cosplay or something I mean that's that's what a movie adaptation”

is or a TV adaptation is right like it's the thing that we're familiar with from video games except people are dress it up as that character that's the way that it works so I don't think you can tell anything about the production value I mean if you've seen most prime video shows fallout whatever it is like looking low budget is not the issue you know if Lord of the Rings I mean that's that's not the problem right so this is not concerning to me it is not encouraging to me it could

not possibly move the needle in one direction or another because it is a single image of what will become moving images in a television show and I'm sick of this because it keeps happening over and over and over again every time we get a game adaptation right when we see Sophie Turner

as Lara Croft there's this big backlash now there's always a big backlash to whoever's playing

Lara Croft right and I just write that office people are pissed that she doesn't have pointy pixelated boobs and real life for whatever right it's probably some of that I don't know what else you could conclude from this we saw the same thing it's not purely a sexist thing because we saw the same sort of backlash when Henry Cavill showed up as Geralt when Pedro Pascal showed up as Joel initially characters who become beloved actors who are hailed for their portrayals of these

characters the first glimpse we get of them it's like oh this does not look like my Joel or my Geralt or my Lara or whatever it is and people are just beside themselves it's not solely a video game phenomenon remember the backlash to Superman when Superman was like tying his shoes and there were aliens in the background and stuff and everyone was like this movie is going to be garbage because I don't know whatever if doesn't look like Superman's supposed to look

the only time you're I think allowed to do this is when it's sonic the hedgehog and sonic looks me out then I'll allow it because that's the animated character that's an animated movie like Ryanhurst looks like Ryanhurst I don't know what you want him to look like you know like he put out kind of a cryptic statement in response to this backlash where he was just like don't believe everything you see on the internet kids probably just saying don't like jump to

conclusions about what the series is going to be based on a single image but some people interpreted that as like oh they're going to sonic it somehow like they're going to just see GI him to look more like creatos or like this was AI or something and they're going to fix it and you won't

“like like that's what the man looks like I don't know what else he could possibly look like”

sonic I'll allow because sonic was an animated character and just didn't look like sonic and also looked weird and I think the fans were vindicated for revolting in that case because that turned into a very popular movie and franchise so okay got to give it to you on that one half the hand it to you for the sonic backlash but if we're talking live action characters and actors looking like actors instead of animated characters re-lacks everyone plays some poco I disagree what I disagree

you soft disagree here's why Ben the fault here is on the people who are deciding to release these images if you want to get if you don't want people to be joking about how your new show looks like cosplay maybe don't get the actors put them in costumes shoot them in a studio with

even lighting flat lighting and say here's what's going to look like it's not like they don't

know what cosplayers look like it's not like they haven't seen it wait until you have a still from that you've extracted from the motion from the from the actual show or movie yeah that a cinematographer has decided what the look of this is gonna like why give us these studio cosplay shoots this early like and why are people continuing to make this mistake oh there's really a blame to go around right though from emotional image period it could be the

greatest looking image and I couldn't care less but you're right maybe they want the backlash maybe they want the online controversy maybe they want me to be ranting about god of war on but mash because i'm talking about god of work on a podcast and promoting the series even if it's about how people think it looks like crap but yeah maybe it's just you know if there's no such thing as bad PR all news is good news but uh i don't know if that works so well for hike art

“i think it's just out of touch like studio exact being like this looks like the video game”

to me i'm gonna show everyone how it looks like the video game then all this video game people will be way into it and it's like maybe maybe but this is it's James gun it's the people making the last of us like it's people who know of what they speak and and they're still doing this

their mental image of that thing i think you i think you're you're more or less on the nose because

“it doesn't it doesn't prove the product this is a show with dialogue and characters in a story”

that we have to evaluate not a picture that a press release has to come out with and tell your thing looks good before you show it to me okay it turned to a double rant do a way and if you don't definitely the promotional still and also if they put out a promotional still don't get upset because it doesn't actually reflect anything that we're gonna be seeing in the series yeah so down with all of this out with promotions down with the lies down with at all uh just have have this pop up on

Amazon one day that we didn't know about and we never feel know about and then we'll complain about

it all in one fell swoop right plenty of rage to go around you too we'll rejoin me in less than two weeks when we discuss and hopefully don't rage about the tantalizing open worlds wondrous enigma

“that is crimson desert but for now we're ready to extract thank you guys thank you bad no fall damage”

in picopio let's true you too fall soon from some high heights sometimes but uh yeah the stakes are a little lower let's take a quick break and I will be back with Charles Paulian Moore to talk pokemon picopio that's got a world in their health industry yeah a libre imbalsal auf blüht und magie an jeder echo warte diese Welt ist vielen bekannt als groß Britannian von der leinwand in echte le besucher den waren star der geschichte entdecke mea auf trip at wasa.de

schrägstrich groß britannian well we just discussed marathon now it's time to talk about a game that lends itself to marathon play sessions pokemon picopia and wait what's this I see a mysterious rustling in some hydrated tall grass I approach and I press A to inspect and who should appear on the podcast but Charles Paulian Moore who covers film tv and most importantly pokemon for the verge Charles I choose you don't thank you so much I love to be chosen what is your preferred habitat how

can I make you more comfortable on this podcast can I collect anything for you I haven't think about this actually I truly was thinking about this I thought would would my ideal habitat be yeah some hydrated top grass we don't like the dry stuff and some CDs some CDs and a boombox right um really into the physical media so if you want me to like hang out in your area show me that you've got like a nice little library of things for me to consume without having to use a device

like a modern device sound so nice it's not just LPs CDs are coming back because sets coming back

and pokemon well pokemon never left so it can't really come back it's been a constant for 30 years

which we will discuss you wrote for many other outlets splinter and io nine and elsewhere before joining the verge a few years ago but it's kind of like in field of dreams when Terrence tells Ray the one constant throughout the years has been baseball for you the one constant has been pokemon you have had bylines about pokemon where every you've gone most recently your review

“of pokemon for the verge and you're I think maybe more of a pokemon than I am but I've had”

pocopia circled for some time because pokemon plus animal crossing plus minecraft with some viva pinata and started you seasoning on the side this just this seems like cooked up in a lab to take over our lives this is such a potent pitch and mix of gameplay styles and surprise the game is good and has one of the highest metacritic scores in series history which you contributed to at the verge such a trick with sure i'm doing my part and yeah to your point about

it like it was cooked up in a lab yeah i i when when i first heard about pocopia over it was sort

of sort of first teased i wasn't super gung-ho about it life sims have never i've always been a

pokemon person they'll got like the promotional vHS they sent out to teach kids what it was another outmoded physical view format yeah but like life sims have never really been my steaks just because you know isn't it fun to do fake labor in your free time it's like not not particularly it's not yeah but there there is something about when you put a little pokemon chain on certain things right it can open your mind up to the possibility of you being interested in something

from afar and you know like oh this is cute how it's uh it's a ditto um i think one of the funny

things about pocopia is that it seems very much like at some point in the development process before the game necessarily like came into full form there were talks about like hey so we've got this bit in the detective Pikachu movie where a creepy ditto shows up and it reveals that it's been pretending to be humans this whole time we'll turn that into a cute to game which just which sounds wild and like uh like it shouldn't work especially given that it's got it's borrowing so many

elements from other games yeah but when you sit down and play it's like oh no this is this makes perfect sense and feels like something that it's releasing at just the right time yeah i made it sound like well how could this not have hit because you're putting together all these other

successful things but that can go wrong it can end up feeling like some Frankenstein's

vivisected island of doctor mero kind of creature where none of those elements fit together or i could feel something like power world for instance which obviously was a mega success by blending together all these different genres but kind of felt derivative or perhaps an Nintendo might even aren't you infringing on copyrights yeah the dragon and lacking in vision right like i swear i think i guess it's my one of my initial concerns about pocopia was like is this just

going to be animal crossing but with pocaman right just something that i had dreamed about before but the idea had it had the game just been that i can easily imagine myself feeling frustrated at the idea of like i've already sunk so many hours into animal crossing and now i just have to do it all over again you know just to find my favorite pocaman you know a game like this could easily

“veer into tedium territory you know but you have to do you have to find ways to make this kind of”

gameplay interesting and compelling outside of the IP right the the core mechanics do have to have some sort of sticky quality to them that makes you think about them as soon as you wake up and like want to keep coming back to it and what's really impressive about the title is it doesn't try to obfuscate the fact that it is borrowing from dragon quest builders right like this is another game that's developed by co-attack mount and then like what we've done this before like we

know we know what this world look can look and feel like how can we sort of evolve it right take it into a slightly different direction that feels familiar but new at the same time and new enough to really sort of continuously give you that surprise and delight cycle that sort of is key to i think what become like games that become hits you know games ability to perpetually charm you as you get deeper and deeper into it that's the thing that makes you want to talk to other people about it

and like most memes about it one up yeah and i have had that feeling like what am i doing with my life well playing this game and similar games it almost feels like i'm i'm morphing into my parents because when i was a kid they would see me playing video games and they're like what are you accomplishing here what's the purpose of this and it's like well fun fun is the purpose and also exploration and discovery and puzzle solving and all these great things and there are times in

“a life sim and in even maccopia where i'm just endlessly watering dry plots of land i think”

you what am i doing with my life exactly why why maybe i should go out and do this in an actual park and improve the actual environment or maybe i should dedicate myself to self improvement or something and then i look up in three hours of past but i made all this dry grounds you kids now this is great look at all these pokemon who moved in they're so happy i totally understand what you're talking about i have had these thoughts myself yeah but something that i've come to sort of

something that i try to like keep the forefront of my mind is that like completion of the game is not sort of the goal or rather the thing that sort of feels most worthwhile about life sims is like the exercise and patience and taking your time through something one of the downsides of a game becoming like a cultural moment that everybody wants to participate in right is that desire

to sort of like finish first and like tell everybody all the cool things that you found and

like show off how like how complete your thing is but with a game like pacopia that is so

“i say this with love it can be a little not quite circuitous but it's like if you want to get”

to this next like level of progression you do have to take some time and like go wander around and you know cultivate a relationship and i think that in that practice of having to take time it's been good for me just like as an exercise and that's not quite meditation but it is sort of like a hey man you're doing this profound so pace yourself pace yourself is sort of like take some time to smell the flowers and appreciate the fine details and stuff yeah it's like the

the slow food of video games or something yeah it's like yeah there is there's kind of a

tension is is maybe overstating it because the selling point of this game is that there is next

to no tension actually it's a great contrast with marathon or with Resident Evil Requiem for that after which we talked about last week video games contain multitudes and if you need just something that's going to lower your heart rates and bring things down a bit after one of those so more high adrenaline games than pacopia is the game for you and and i was gonna say like pacopia is crack for me kind of because i can't put it down but it's not as if there's a high exactly like

“it it should be some sort of controlled substance i think just because it is like dangerously”

a timewester and yet it's not a moment to moment heart pounding kind of game and in fact it very much encourages you to slow down you know it tells you there's constant messaging that's just like

hey relax no rush like you can pursue the progression and there are some main story quests

but you don't need to worry about that you can just go around and beautify the area and make Pokemon happy they're even some some timegated construction unless you want to trick your switch if you're building a house or something it's going to take a certain amount of time and so you put your your Pokemon on it there's almost a little bit of pigment in this too yeah in there you can kind of control your Pokemon the follow you around you can tell them to do things i kept expecting

a data end and i'd have to go back to my spaceship or something but that doesn't happen i can play all night both in real life and in pacopia world and yet there is actually a hook here and there is a

“plot and there is a story and a lore which i actually appreciate because i think if it lean too much”

into the life sim element and there wasn't something that i was building toward or working towards i think it might not have hooked me as much yeah the story on when it's definitely it's like it is the bait that's sort of what kept me going it's like not just bait but it's really compelling also you mentioned pigment earlier and about like oh the days coming to an end one but i don't have to leave something that i love about the game is that if you're playing at night like once

nine o'clock runs around the Pokemon just aren't going to sleep you can wake them up and be like hey we're doing construction yes oh my god you know we can just rest right now it's not union labor evidently this does just get up whatever hour i have found myself being like oh oops i knocked down your house what if we built someone else's house right now and yeah people here's tomorrow like yeah you're the bat you're the Tom nook of this world you're just sort of the exploiting

free Pokemon labor basically you are very much the Tom nook but part of what you know alleviate the guilt of it all to bring it back to the story is how compelling the story is right like

Pokemon is always sort of not even dabbled in but you know explored heavy topics right heavy topics

that seem like the kind of subject matter you would expect in an RPG aimed at children but Pocopia is very sort of upfront about like hey man humanity has disappeared the world is in ruins most Pokemon have disappeared for reasons that they don't understand which is very much like it's bigger yeah just in terms of it's implications and it's weirdness compared to a lot of the other kind of like heavy stories at the Pokemon franchise is done before and just like it beat

that that that concept being so intriguing is part of what makes me and i feel like a lot of other people want to keep like pushing through it and then sort of like the beauty of the game is like no matter how hard you push because there is just so much involved in that pushing it's like collect these resources find these Pokemon pull them all together you do get I get I get tired and i'm just kind of like all right you guys like i've written down what i want to do and i'm like

30% there i'm gonna pose a game for a little bit come back later that exhaustion just like naturally comes to me and also just like one of the other clever little tricks of the game is if you power your switch down for too long and especially like at the day passes you when you fire back up you won't just be where you were before you're at home and the game is like okay

“you would home and you slept yes you can get back to the work if you want to but”

we're not just gonna drop you back into it because you're not supposed to be mainlining this you supposed to be savoring the adventure and it doesn't encourage you like animal crossing too log in every day there are little bonuses and incentives but again it's not putting too much pressure on you and yeah because the game just came out we won't give away too many stories specifics but without spoiling anything that you won't glean very early in your play

through it's kind of uh it's utopia for Pokemon or at least you're trying to make it into one but it's apparently post-pocket tick for people there aren't people it's kind of Pokemon meets horizon zero dawn essentially and i don't know if this counts as canon obviously canon in the

and and we've seen a lot of experimentation i guess with the timeline and the lore and for

“example Pokemon legends arkeas you know going back in time and Pokemon are really like monsters”

they're you know out there in the wilds they can they can kill ya and then it's like well are are people the baddies are we the baddies uh is this something we should be doing and here it kind of raises similar questions like the Pokemon are pining for people but maybe they're better off without us yeah it's interesting it's interesting that you bring up rc is because it does very much like sort of posit like Pokemon wild animals they don't mess with humans they

will kill you if you get too close proceed with caution and when that game first came out it was

some different than anything else agreed seen from the franchise and it did seem sort of like those thoughts those train of thoughts might just be limited to the uh the legends brand which are again they are they are canon but they are sort of so far flung from the main story lines there's all kinds of like multiple timelines and like the core Pokemon games that use boob as easy to sort of put rc listen to a box but what was really interesting about legends EA was that you saw a lot of

those same ideas being explored in a contemporary setting right but set in the present day and it is bringing sort of like that tension that exists between humans and Pokemon closer to the stories that we recognize from the core games right legends EA picks up on the story from x and y right the city is in a period of rebuilding after you know a cataclysmic event and as the city is being built back together people are having serious conversations like hey man I love living in poke pairs

but but there are these huge monsters that breathe fire and have psychic powers that keep knocking me out thank goodness we have free healthcare but can we do something about all of the violence that we are sort of inviting into our lives uh by tent of living amongst these creatures rcs when EA and pokeopia they're not necessarily of their not a trilogy kind of series of games but they

“are sort of I think encouraging Pokemon fans to think a little bit more deeply about you know”

the relationship between monsters and people in a way that the fandom has always kind of like

joked about you know growing up the mood all joked like you know yeah you teach a best friend but yeah he was in a tiny prison and he does and he does what you want him to do are you truly partners the way that the official branding says or is this something more nefarious and for a while it seemed like Nintendo did necessarily want to get into all of that yeah but it's been really interesting to see the franchise really kind of be like no let's talk about it

what does it mean for what does it mean for Pokemon to live by themselves and to be able to rebuild a society on their own and be really chill yeah yeah it's station eleven all over again to the monsters where the monsters or to the pocket monsters where the monsters maybe in this case but I am I'm impressed just by the the systems in this game because historically crafting is a tough time for me and the more complex the crafting and the more time I have to spend in my inventory

and and browsing through menus the more likely I am to bounce off of something yeah there's just no bouncing off of Pocopia I don't think it's just so low friction everything is intuitive everything is streamlined everything is explained to you you know if you're ever at a loss for what to do which rarely happens you can just go to your kind of guide in this area and he'll just point

you to whatever is up whoever wants to talk to you whatever you can do for them so there's never really

a moment of not knowing what to do next or or how you can just pick up the game for a short play session even and feel like you accomplish something and yeah there are moments where you have to lead a Pokemon around and maybe the Bulbasaur AI is not quite complying with your desire to water some seeds or something and that can occasionally be frustrating but for the most parts this game just it kind of it helps you out it leads you around without feeling like it's playing

the game for you yes it's just a really nice mix and some quality of life stuff you know fast travel and sucking up loot you know you don't have to press up button to pick up every individual thing if you're breaking up and you do the game will be like hey don't do that just like pick it all up at once there is a better way yeah or if you're laying down a lot of items you can do sort of like this strafing maneuver where you can just rapid fire stuff out so I appreciate all of that

that's it's like that all of that stuff is great I have sort of found myself bristling in certain

“friction points like your pocket this is and I think this is just a perennial issue with all”

life sim games it's the same thing that really kind of frustrating about animal crossing your pocket

city and it's going to be so gorgeous and I need I need these bricks and I need this kind of grass and these flowers and you're like great let's go and then you talk it's like uh no no no no no you need to go put some things down and part of the beauty of the game is you can just build storage and leave it anywhere right the danger is you can just lose things and then then it becomes an exercise and like oh wait I do have to right have to slow down a little bit and be a little bit

judicious about how I move through the game I I have personal I have lost a doll that I really

want somewhere in the game yeah it's true you're basically just things it's like you're your

gray sashcraft in Requiem and you have only so many inventory slots except Grace like wherever there's a box you can put stuff in she can retrieve that from wherever but in Pocopia you just have empty boxes scattered across the landscape and there's different stuff in each of heaven so you have

“to do sort of a scavenger hunt to remember where you stored that one thing that you're looking for”

and part of you feels like that's by design like it very much is it is a wait for the game to encourage you to slow down be like uh you want to you're trying to min max this uh yeah be a little bit more measured and thoughtful about how you're spending your time here it's ended up being worth it for me once I sort of like started setting more realistic goals for myself where it's like hey

let's focus on this 40 by 40 chunk of one bio and spend some time like beautifying it a

little bit right I've been building myself little bases on each of the islands uh because you do it initially just so that you have fast travel points but now I'm like all right when I go to an island I actually want like some cool little digs that speak to me on a static level so just like scouting out locations and figure like oh I want to live in this cave where I want to live at the top of this mountain and spending like an hour you know setting the house down,

picturing where it's going to be figuring out what kind of a cool turmoil you want to have around it watching all of that come together is so that's so satisfying I realized that like hitting those like smaller goals gives me more of like a dopamine boost as opposed to plowing through this story and then because when you plough this story you end up being introduced to so many tangents that is easy to lose track of what it is that you might want to be like obviously your

goal is to like get to the end but you know you meet this character and they want to go do this stuff and it takes you into this place and it can be really easy to get sidetracked it's what just gotten comfortable being like small bites small bites the big picture will reveal itself in due time and you don't have a much you'll come out on the other side of the process feeling much better about it isn't gonna be able to look back and there will be you know things that are

actually completed as opposed to there's like there's like one biome that I was not moving through that way and it is a mess there's just holes everywhere stuff all over the ground and I'm dreading going back there yeah to put it all together yeah there's just a lot here canjence can growths everything is here for you in picopea and this is a full price $70 gain but if any game is worth $70 or picopeas worth it because there is a cornicopea of content in picopea a lot of the pushback

“you know outside of just people walking at the price for switch two games and I think there was”

a lot of sort of questioning like hey man like if this is just animal crossing pokemon horizons and you're not giving us a new animal crossing for this switch to ease this worth my money and I think that you know back to the point that we were talking about about it feeling sort of so much like more than the sum of its you know parts I think once you release like get into the game it definitely feels like a full-fledged game right it doesn't necessarily feel like something that

is so far off the beaten path for adventure players that they won't have a good time it doesn't feel like it's trying to downplay the lives and aspects so much so that you know animal crossing lovers won't have fun it is just surprisingly it's just surprising how much it is firing on all cylinders yeah and I think it arrives at a pretty pivotal time for the switch two this is a switch to exclusive and I don't know if it's the system seller everyone's been waiting for but

it's gonna sell a lot of copies that's for sure and it should and this is at a time when the sales momentum of the switch two at least in the west has slowed as there's been a lack of

first party flagship Nintendo releases and sure until we get really Mario until we get the next

“tell the whatever it is there will still be people pining for those things but I think you know and”

yeah there was Zeta A etc but if you've been out here thinking all right well but Anza was great but what else you got for me Nintendo I think this is an answer to that and a pretty compelling answer yeah I've heard about this a couple of months ago back when you know the the conversation is or was like where all this which two games and my pieces basically like they're coming right like I

patients patients has sort of been the virtue here this which two is their new flagship console it is safe to assume that you know the titles were coming and now you know Pocopia is here

“and I think that Nintendo strategy has been like not necessarily we're going to drop one big”

system cell right obviously I think every publisher wants for one any of its titles to be like that game that dominates the cultural conversation and starts moving units for the game itself and for consoles but there's also value in having you know smaller moments that like capture segments of your target audience that get people to jump on to the console I've seen a lot of

people joking right you can never be sure how serious people are people joking like uh I think

I'm going to have to buy this which two for this and I think going for we are going to try to have lots of moments like this where we're going to try to get you know a few tens of thousands people to buy a copy of or rather buy new console just because this new game is coming up as opposed to every game has to be breath of the wild right obviously I'm sure Nintendo wants another breath of the wild but it is hard it is hard don't we all but it's it's hard to conjure those up right

it's an imprecise science and uh they were getting a conversations about you know a video game

“development budgets but it's kind of like look you have to be you have to be careful in smart”

about how you try to achieve those goals and I think that playing it cautious this way and going for lots of small winds as opposed to a handful of like huge ones is a very Nintendo way about going about this kind of process yeah and console generations last longer than ever especially because there's no available ram left anywhere on the planet so settle in this is early days for the switch to so let's pull back a bit briefly here and just talk about the significance for the franchise

and just where we find Pokemon at its 30th anniversary which was last Friday which was celebrated by a Pokemon Day Pokemon Presents livestream in which we got an announcement about the next mainline tenth generation Pokemon games wind and waves which are coming in 2027 and this will have been I think the longest ever gap between Pokemon generations which maybe is not surprising given just how long development cycles are these days but there's just been this steady stream of spin offs

and Pocopia and legends these are not the only ones of course because there's no battling in Pocopia but there will be nothing but battling in the next spin off in the series Pokemon champions yeah comes out next month mobile and switch so our cup run it over here and even 30 years I don't know whether you can say Pokemon is peeking in terms of popularity it was so popular to begin with it's just the most lucrative multimedia franchise ever but yeah you look at the pace at

which they're releasing games the way the most recent releases have been received just the way that's I mean the trading card game is is just that you how much did Logan Paul auction off a card for you know the headline I don't even want to think about it but trading card but it's it's I know

“I'm getting old because I remember I remember the first wave of like Pokemon card craze this was you know”

and then I did it so again when right then the game was and right when the franchise first

would have made a big public debut and you just like could not find product anywhere obviously the there was a different kind of like valence to do everything back then it wasn't quite so rooted in like hustle-bro and best-man culture it was much more sort of like my kids want those really bad they just really wanted I got to get it but it is fascinating to see a lot of that same energy resurfacing now and a slightly new form 30 years out you know to your question about like

is Pokemon peaking no no but they're just new kid the I don't know if you know this there's just new kids people aren't at all the time you know Nintendo also just released firehead leaf grain and it has been you know it's made my air grow gray seeing people talk about like this was my first game it's like wow all right sure yeah that is sort of the the power of the franchise

right there are always new people coming to it for the first time who they're on boarding point

isn't necessarily someone else's right and particularly right now in this moment of younger people being fascinated with video games that you know predate their existence it's been so interesting watching kids play firehead leaf grain and express all the frustrations with like mechanics that have left the franchise like eXp share like once upon a time you've really had to just you had to grind if you wanted to be the only four you were putting hours into this game because

you going to do right but now there are people who who were just accustomed to oh I'll welcome on level up at the same time when you do battles because that makes sense and it helps you

“get through it faster but I think that my point is Nintendo understands that there is a way in which”

it can kind of coast on the brands prominence right and it's legacy and that those two things are

always going to be appealing to new comrades in the franchise because it just gives them so many different

ways to find their ways into it sort of like what lights them up about it yeah and even though the original ash and Pikachu featuring anime wrapped up a few years ago after a 25 year run there's just there's always something new and just every medium and so it's hard to identify what what is the essence of Pokemon what's the core of Pokemon what's the sort of beating heart of this franchise because it has its tentacles in absolutely everything right so Pokemon is his merch and it's anime

and it's movies and it's games but it does and it's trading cards it does still feel like the games which originated it's still kind of drive it in a sense and maybe that's just my bias gamer perspective but you know we're going to be seeing a lot more anniversaries and celebrations the 30th anniversary of the trading card game is later this year the 10th anniversary of Pokemon Go is about right and it just it feels like though that they have maybe kind of turned to corner when

it comes to the games that there was a certain degree of stagnation and maybe this can be follow any franchise at a certain point you know there were complaints about Zelda pre breath of the wild's right yeah it's falling into a red it's just a it's formulaic we love the formula we're fond of the formula but maybe it needs to be a little bit right and so when power world was such a huge success people attributed that not just to the attributes of power

but also to game freak seemingly leaving and opening by not really innovating having just pretty waffle performance on the original switch and so now it seems like and I don't know whether it has anything to do with power worlds you know charm and style lighting a fire under the franchise but you do have Game Freak and Omega Force here combining on Pocopia and trying to do something

“different right and and something that's been pretty well received but I think the key is that they”

are actually trying to do something different and that is welcome after all these years yeah I think with a lot of Nintendo games and I say this as you know someone who's been playing them since I was a child while I was growing up a lot of the appeal of getting you know the new Zelda new Pokemon the new Mario really was tied to jumps and graphics right a new kind of aesthetic that was sort of the novelty that made the familiarity of it all not so much of a downside right

this is especially true Pokemon as a you know moves from the Game Boy up to the 3DS the world is just being presented in a variety of new and sort of like exciting ways and it's kind of like yeah I'm you know choosing between a grass water and fire starter and I'm going to be the gym leaders and an elite for but whatever look at it it's so pretty I think part of what there's

that and also the Pokemon franchise not sure quite when gimmicks first started but that sort of

became one of like the main like there's a new weight of battle yeah they can evolve a little bit more or they can put a sparkly hat on because that's fun but I do think that recently particularly with Scarlett and Violet or yeah with Scarlett and Violet and maybe maybe even Sword and Shield the returns on the the graphical jump investments started to diminish a little bit right the sort of we're going to present this to you in a way that looks different wasn't really enough to keep

the core fan base excited part of that is just a function of people growing up and growing out of the instances right and then newcomers are coming into it at a time when there are other games that are more visually impressive that feature gameplay mechanics that are just more compelling to them right and between let's say from Sword and Shield up until Scarlett and Violet pokons in a bit of

weird space right he love it the things that you've always loved about it are still there in some

shape or form but in terms of what new is being brought to the table it definitely feel like things slow down in a way that was not helped by the technical roadblocks that came into play when it came to

“Scarlett and Violet yeah I think part of what was so exciting about wind and waves was that that”

trailer felt like game freak managed the game the trailer made up a game freak managed to

it strongly right you when you play through Scarlett and Violet you can see that it is meant to be

“an exploreable open world that you want to spend time in you want to climb the mountains and”

see the rivers and stuff but it's just very empty it's very empty and at least when it first launched on the original switch it just ran horribly in a way that was kind of shocking right

and to know as never been a we are the graphics powerhouse company right but they they're they're

strength has always been we work within our technological limitations to make something that is exciting and sort of fun and imaginative Scarlett and Violet just really kind of felt like a lot of things were wrong a lot of things were wrong and that didn't stop people from playing it but internally I'm sure Nintendo took a lot of that feedback to heart we can't fumble our flagship this way right we people cannot like our games for a variety of reasons but we should not be so

clearly at fault for delivering something that doesn't live up to the front like live up to people's

“expectations and I think that's why the wind and waves trailer puts so much emphasis on environments”

it's like look at this water look at this under ground area look at all this foliage such as moving independently yeah people avoids their concerns about how like the Pokemon still look like cartoons but the world is going for kind of realism but it's like hey man Pokemon are inspired by animals they are magical creatures yeah yeah just admire our frame rates check out this really this runs marvel at that yeah and there's something for everyone it feels like Pokemon can kind of

be anything at this point it can be an experiment like this latest spin-off or it can be a back-to-basics hey you want to fight and throw pokeballs it can be more of a real-time battle system the way that CDA was it will be champions which is more of a Pokemon stadium style turn-based strategies getting battling yeah yeah so it can kind of encompass whatever anyone wants in theory and you know trying to be all things to all people that can get you in trouble but if you actually nail each

of those different delivery systems then you have expanded your audience even more if that's even possible with Pokemon at this point and I do think that the Poco fear fits into this

“latest generation of Nintendo games where the trend I think is toward empowering players”

and encouraging experimentation you know with great results sometimes with less great results other times sometimes that's just about opening the world up and having a less prescribed path through the game sometimes though it's about the mechanical experimentation that we see with breath of the wild or especially tears of the kingdom or echoes of wisdom for that matter the interactivity of the anza just reshaping the world that's something that Nintendo is very

into now and you need a certain level of processing power to make that work without just totally slowing the system to a standstill but if you can if you can combine that kind of Nintendo polish and that animal crossing feel with that sense of you can actually reshape the world as you

can see fit and you can play this the way that you want to that's a pretty powerful mix and that's

something that Nintendo has largely nailed lately and it's you know development partners. Yeah part of what's so fascinating about Poco Mia is that it does very much feel like it has been informed by a lot of Nintendo's past or like it has been recent successes with other franchises where they're like then and no so the physics engine that we developed for tears of the kingdom let's get that into our lives in builder game that's also taking those from animal crossing and

dragon quest builders not to not to spoil any details about Poco Mia but there you do get emissions where it's like build this and then connect it to that so that it does this so that you can accomplish that which is just far in a way from anything that you end up doing an animal crossing but it does sort of give you this wild thrill because you don't expect it from a game that looks like this and from a game that is so ostensibly like cute and soft and like relaxing it's like oh you're doing

you're actually doing some civil engineering in this in this town and that's just very unexpected and very cool to see from a Poco Mia game like this. Yeah well this has been largely positive

I do have a brief rant to take us home here my second rant of the episode I guess I'm filled with

rage today this one is about the meaning that has lately intersected with Poco Mia so this is topical the Trump administration has just been a rampant re-cyclist of gaming games gaming

official account the DHS and ISE accounts etc has constantly repurposed gaming imagery gaming tunes

whatever it is in service of its agenda and we've seen this multiple times with halo multiple times with call of duty we've seen it with started valley we have also seen it multiple times with Pokemon and I don't want to annoy Nintendo as some sort of hashtag resistance hero here because I don't think the

“tag quite fits but I think that Nintendo has actually been sort of the only brand to stand up and say”

actually we don't want you to use our IP to further your aims and I've been disappointed though not surprised that almost no one else has publicly objected to that and you know it's been a decade now since you blogged about a new Pokemon in Sun and Moon young goose who kind of looked

like Donald Trump how young we were what a decade it's been since then I don't know if that

was intentional or not but but Trump is still intersecting with this franchise in weird ways or his people you know I doubt that he was personally engineering this latest meme but Donald Trump has no idea what's going on I'm gonna come up with my franchise I think that's right yes but people were meaming with the Pocopia kind of logo and text right and so the Trump administration put out its version which was just kind of make America great again in the imagery

of Pocopia and mostly when this has happened the companies involved have been utterly silent but Nintendo is the one exception or I suppose the Pokemon company and they put out a statement here about this latest post and said we are aware of recent social content that includes imagery associated with our brand we were not involved in its creation or distribution and no permission was granted for the use of our intellectual property our mission is to bring

the world together and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda so again it's this not an explicit endorsement of anything in fact they're going out of their way to say that we don't endorse anything and we don't want the implication that we do I guess bringing the world together could be some some kind of failed criticism but probably actually isn't because we're talking about Nintendo and the Pokemon company here but you know regardless of

“really what your political affiliation is I think a lot of these memes have been just quite”

distasteful and that's they're super distasteful and I think that part of the reason that the Pokemon company felt the need to respond to this is because there's been so much positive sentiment about this game yeah set of time and the franchise when there seems to be a ubiquity in terms of people's excitement for it in a way that the company definitely wants after Scarlett Violin feel like part of the reason that people were down on Z.A. is because they

still had sort of like residual resentment for her for the way that's Scarlett Violin played so for Baccopia to be you know before the game is even out people are excited about it and then for the White House to sort of come in and try to ride that moment's coales the company was very much like oh no no no no no no no no yeah yeah and what I mean by the distastefulness which again is kind of putting it generously but but you know the the use of memes like the latest call of duty

one was basically you know using a kill streak meme from Call of Duty and super imposing it on

on the Ron War and bombings and you know people are dying innocent people are dying right and so even if you say support that intervention just glorifying in the violence and the killing is something that I would hope that most people wouldn't endorse and this happened before when DHS used a video that had got to catch them all right over footage of ice agents just rounding people upright and they were riffing on the opening theme song of Pokemon and at the time

the Pokemon company put out his statement and said the same thing right since our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property right this is that a strong statement right but it's a statement which has been sorely lacking in just about every other case not the strongest thing but all of this you know all all of all of the various pieces of IP that the Trump administration

has sort of tried to co-opt for memes online right the important thing to bear in mind is all of that is entertainment right video games are forms of entertainment and what the Trump administration has gotten into the habit of doing is trying to seemingly

“joke around and make light of what it's doing right in a way that I think that is sort of the”

core of the distastefulness that you're getting at right when we are talking about people being

something to take lightly and not something to make jokes about for lows online right it speaks to

a lack of maturity and just sort of like a fundamental, this is just my own film of like a fundamental ugliness that's coming out of our government right now and it makes all the sense in the world that the companies would want to come out and be like hey man that's you right we have nothing to do with that yes why are more more than doing it there are all kinds of reasons as to why a company doesn't want to put out a full-froated statement right like Deming this kind of stuff but

“I think if we keep seeing more and more of this there is going to be a tipping point where”

you know your activism's your Microsoft you know all of these companies if it keeps if it keeps going and it keeps being ugly like this at a point full-comber it's like hey let's go to court yeah I mean and you know Nintendo will take anyone to court at any time and that's that's the core value of the company right you can't use our stuff only we are allowed to use our stuff so that's the thing that we'll get Nintendo's hackles up and you know

we have seen other companies be silent I think it's not surprising because we've seen all kinds of corporate entities just kind of you know bend the knee or or not resist or couch the things they're doing in different language etc in difference to the administration because they don't want to be the next one to end up as the target right so Nintendo not that it's not in any way subject to Trump administration decisions, tariffs etc but it's it's a Japanese company it's not

“a US-based company though there is obviously Nintendo of America but that's why it doesn't”

surprise me so much that say Microsoft Activision are not really raising their hands and saying excuse me sir could you not actually use our stuff but you know we have seen individual artists

like Sabrina Carpenter did right you know basically put out a statement on social media when a song

of hers was used with an ice video and said this video is evil and disgusting do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda so not really pulling punches they're not missing words that's not what you're going to get out of a corporation or out of Nintendo and that's something where you know Sabrina Carpenter's audience perhaps is pretty receptive to that message right and so perhaps it plays well for her just from a financial perspective as

well as reflecting her actual beliefs but yeah you would like to see just some sort of and you know Nintendo it's an equal opportunity cease and disist sender because to bring it back to

“Animal Crossing I remember when Joe Biden this was in 2020 right when you know mid-pandemic and”

we're all playing Animal Crossing stuck inside I mean some of us are inside most of the time but by that then it was not necessarily by choice that's my natural habitat speaking of of Pokemon habitats but when Joe Biden had an Animal Crossing island where you could go and see signs for Joe Biden and like interact with a virtual digital Joe Biden and everything Nintendo was like actually you can't use this game for political purposes so you know Nintendo both sides in

right but at least they have not gone completely quiet at this moment and yeah I wish that some others would eventually stand up and not even because it represents their beliefs or their scruples or they have some strong moral stance but just because from a brand management perspective you just don't want that yeah a lot of these policies are unpopular and even the ones that have some support just meaning about them in that way you know yes for the audience that is consuming

those things on Twitter sure I'm sure that plenty of people along with Elon Musk are probably just gafalling at that stuff right but it's definitely a turnoff for some and this is why we all have to get off Twitter. The website that we all still refer to as Twitter stop using it. Yes

well that rebrand will will never work you did my mind even if we all quit it we will still

refer to it that way all right so that concludes my second rant and also this whole episode this was a great pleasure Charles thank you for coming on and I wish you were trying to make wish you and DJ Rotom many happy hours and years together. He's living in my house right now and I could not be happy about it. It's a great roommate. All right well DJ Rotom is not in my house but he is living rent free in my head with many of his friends from Pocopia and hey guess what

immediately after Charles and I finished speaking the news broke that Nintendo is suing the United States Treasury Department, Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Protection to recoup the money that the Trump regime collected as part of what the Supreme Court deemed illegal tariffs. If Nintendo succeeds I doubt it will distribute refunds to consumers for the costs that were passed along to them but still some semblance of a backbone. So if you're making an Nintendo fan mod

quick while their lawyers and PR people are distracted by suing Trump this is your chance to

Republicans and Democrats are still trafficking in the violent games caused gun violence narrative

“which is especially rich when the administration is glorifying that video game violence online”

but the attorney general of my very state New York is suing Valve for loot boxes

but also asserted that Valve's promotion of games that glorify violence and guns

“helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence particularly among young gamers who can become”

numbed to grave violence before their brains are fully developed. Show me the science that

supports that. Have we not debunked this for decades? It is 2026 and politicians are still out here

“sounding like Jack Thompson, renting about GTA 3 anyway. Before I work myself up into completing”

a rage quit trilogy and inadvertently make it look like gaming does make people violent. Let us actually quit this episode. Thank you to Devon Ronaldo for producing this podcast and also suggesting the rage quit idea. Thanks to Roger Narangapal for his senior podcast management you can contact but mash and I hope you will by emailing [email protected]. We'll be back a little later this month to discuss Crimson Desert and who knows what else? For now,

team but mash blast off at the speed of light. [BLANK_AUDIO]